Andy Tsege (right) with Yemi Hailemariam and their children

Andargachew Tsege, known to his friends and family as Andy, is a British citizen from Ethiopia. He came to England as a political refugee in 1979. Now he's back in Ethiopia, locked up and possibly enduring torture for being a political dissident, and the UK stands accused of not doing enough to help.

Tsege is the secretary general of Ginbot 7, an opposition group banned by the Ethiopian government. In 2009, he was sentenced to death at a trial held in Ethiopia in his absence for supposedly planning a coup. Then, in June this year he was seized in Yemen, which has a security arrangement with Ethiopia. For two weeks, it seemed as though he had disappeared off the face of the Earth. Then, he emerged on Ethiopian state TV broadcasts, where it was revealed that he was being held in a secret detention facility. While he's unlikely to face a rarely imposed death sentence, he is currently on death row.

In the first video released, he appears for a short time and looks fairly healthy. But in the second, screaming can be heard in the background (just after the one-minute mark) and Tsege, looking thin and exhausted, is presented as if he is making a confession. A narrator says, in a haltingly edited piece of propaganda, that Tsege has been working with neighboring Eritrea—which has a longstanding feud with Ethiopia, that he has been disrupting the “peace and economic growth of Ethiopia,” and that he has been “training various people and sending ammunition through Eritrean borders.” His lawyers are concerned that evidence obtained through torture will be used to justify the sentence imposed on him.

Since his arrest, a UK Foreign Office (FCO) spokesperson told me, Tsege has only seen the British ambassador to Ethiopia once. That was back in August. “We are deeply concerned about his welfare,” the spokesperson said. “We want consular access and are pressing for further access to him.” David Cameron has written to Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn “to request regular consular access and his assurance that the death penalty will not be imposed.”

Despite this diplomatic action, a British citizen is languishing on death row based on evidence that could have been gained through torture, and there has been no public condemnation of Ethiopia's actions. His advocates say it's not good enough. Human rights charity Reprieve has initiated legal proceedings against the Foreign Office (FCO) for its failure to treat Tsege’s abduction as a serious breach of international law.

Andy Tsege is raising three children with Yemi Hailemariam, his girlfriend of ten years. All three children have written to Cameron to ask what he is doing to get their father out of prison. Cameron, though, will be treading carefully. Strategically located in the Horn of Africa, Ethiopia is a key ally to the West in the war on terror and has a close relationship with Britain. It is one of the main actors in the fight against Al-Shabaab in Somalia. Ethiopia’s use of its anti-terrorism legislation to crack down on dissent of any kind is troubling. According to a recent Human Rights Watch report, Ethiopia has become a surveillance state. Press freedom is deteriorating, particularly in the run-up to elections next May.

When I put this to a source in Ethiopia’s ministry of foreign affairs, he insisted that grounds for concern over terrorism in the region were legitimate. “I don’t think it is so much Ethiopia using its strategic importance to do what it wants. The government does genuinely feel it is in the frontline against terrorism—and in terms of terrorist activity it has some cause—Al-Shabaab is in Somalia and trying to make moves into Ethiopia as well as Kenya, Uganda, and so on.”

Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn with US Secretary of State John Kerry. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Ethiopia considers Ginbot 7 a terrorist group, and Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn claims that “Andargachew Tsege is a Trojan horse for the Eritrean government to destabilize this country." Eritrea is where the Ethiopian opposition groups meet, and any connection to Eritrea can be milked by the Ethiopian government. According to a recent report submitted to the UN's Security Council by its Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea, the Diplomatic missions and military officers of Eritrea are involved in the recruitment, training, and operational aspects of Ginbot 7.

But Ginbot 7 does not appear to be anything like Al-Shabaab. Its mission statement says that it is looking to establish a “national political system in which government power and political authority is assumed through peaceful and democratic process based on the free will and choice of citizens of the country.” Tsege’s family and lawyers insist that he is a peaceful man trying to stand up to an authoritarian regime.

My FCO spokesperson told me that more vocal lobbying is a “tool in our diplomatic arsenal,” to be used at the right moment. Old school diplomacy is still the order of the day, she said, and the British government's public line may change depending on how the case goes. My Ethiopian foreign ministry source implies that this might be the right approach, citing the experience of Martin Schibbye and Johann Persson, two Swedish journalists who spent nearly a year in an Ethiopian prison on terror charges from 2011 to 2012. They “would have been released months earlier if the Swedish foreign ministry and Human Rights Watch hadn’t kept making loud public noises about ill treatment and human rights abuse,” he said.

Maybe that's the cut and thrust of realpolitik, and the FCO is playing a savvy game. But a cynic might point out that there are grounds to believe that the British government’s approach is more about not showing up its ally than a desire to protect a British citizen.

Last year, internal documents from the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) showed that millions of pounds of foreign aid money was set to fund the training of Ethiopian security forces in the Ogaden region, which has been accused of numerous human rights abuses and summary executions.

Then there’s a master’s program for Ethiopian security-sector officials, funded by DFID. A DFID document, still available online, reveals that places for Ethiopian officials on the “Executive Masters in Security Sector Management delivered to top and mid level military and civil servants in five cohorts” at Cranfield University, were set to be funded by the department up until 2017. The course has since been closed due to “concerns about risk and value for money.” I’m sure this is totally unrelated to any embarrassment that Tsege’s case might cause DFID. Despite the cancelation, the question remains: Can the British government be expected to stand up for Tsege while it is funding Ethiopia’s oppressive anti-terror operation?

Yemi Hailemariam, Andy’s long-term girlfriend, is worried that the father of her children will continue to suffer. “There needs to be clarity in the message the British government is sending to Ethiopia. They need to tell them, ‘This is our citizen. Please give him back,’” she said. Tsege’s lawyers, from the legal charity Reprieve, are just as concerned. Maya Foa, head of their death penalty team, said, “It beggars belief that the UK Government is not doing more to get him back.”

Tsege’s family are trying to hold themselves together. “I don’t feel at all confident about him coming back. I try not to think about it because when I do, I fall to pieces,” Yemi told me. Whatever happens, he “will be expected to ask for a pardon,” sources close to the case in Ethiopia tell me. If he does this, his death sentence will be replaced with a life sentence in prison, perhaps less. In a country that emphasizes security over human rights, and with the British intent on maintaining an important strategic and economic alliance, it may just be the best he can hope for.

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An anti-immigration campaign ad for New Hampshire Republican Senate candiate Scott Brown. Screenshot via YouTube

When New Hampshire Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown squared off against incumbent Democrat Jeanne Shaheen in their first televised debate last week, he kept coming back to one issue, over and over again: Security at the border. When answering questions about Ebola and the Islamic, he suggested that both the disease and the militant group might travel with people coming into the US without papers. When asked about abortion, after defending his somewhat ambiguous pro-choice record, he said women shouldn't be reduced to a single issue and that they care about other things—like, say, securing the border.

New Hampshire shares a border with Canada, but that's not the one Brown was talking about. The state is about as far away from the Rio Grande as you can get in this country, in terms of both space and demographics. Just 6 percent of New Hampshire residents are foreign-born, according to US Census data, and less than a quarter of those—about 1 percent of the state’s population—come from below the southern border.

Brown, a former Massachusetts senator who lost to Elizabeth Warren in 2012, hadn't really had much to say on immigration until this election (and his detractors have made much of the fact that he missed all six hearings on border security that he was eligible to attend during his two years in Congress). But over the summer, when an unprecedented wave of undocumented migrant children arrived at the border, Brown, like most other Republicans running for office this year, was suddenly obsessed with immigration. He mentions it at nearly every rally, in every talk radio interview, every cable news hit, managing to slip in ominous illusions to “amnesty” and the Islamic State and border fences, no matter how irrelevant; his campaign ads feature shadowy images of desert border crossings and Islamic militants interposed with grainy footage of Shaheen and Barack Obama. And the funny thing is, it seems to be working: Since trailing his opponent by 10 points in July, Brown has pulled even, and is now virtually tied with her in recent polls—a surge that coincides with Brown’s hard right turn toward the border.

Republicans have long used immigration as a dog-whistle to rally the party’s conservative base, and incite vague fear about national security threats often more imagined than real, like the imminent arrival of Guantanamo Bay inmates in Kansas, or more recent reports that the Department of Homeland Security is stocking up on blank green cards and immigrant work permits in what is obviously a plan to enact mass amnesty after the midterms. Perhaps more accurately, conservatives argue that giving undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship would essentially amount to handing 11 million free votes to Democrats.

"It's a way to take over, have a one-party country," said Cameron Carey, a volunteer for the Brown campaign in Nashua. Voters, he added, are worried that immigrants will raise crime rates, suck up government benefits, and overcrowd schools. "It's a very important issue, and they all say 'follow the law: That's the way to begin.'"

The anti-immigration grandstanding isn’t limited to New Hampshire. In states and congressional districts around the country—particularly those with few Latino voters—Republicans have relentlessly campaigned against any kind of comprehensive immigration reform, fearmongering about the the terrifying diseases and terrorists that will seep across the border if the US doesn’t build a giant fence to keep them out. It’s a message that will likely backfire on the GOP when Republicans will have to turn around and convince Hispanic voters that they don’t actually want to deport their families en masse.

But while it’s easy to chalk up harsh immigration chatter to Tea Party xenophobes, in New Hampshire at least, that’s not the whole story. Despite the state’s relative lack of immigrants, concern about the issue is surprisingly pervasive in the Granite State: According to data from Reuters/Ipsos polling, 58 percent of Americans think most or all illegal immigrants should be deported; in New Hampshire, 71 percent do.

Ipsos spokesperson Julia Clark said the survey's sample size for the state isn't huge, but it's big enough to be significant. "That says to me that yeah, there's something systematically different," she said.

At first blush, it seems weird that fears about illegal immigrants would be so pervasive in a state that has virtually no Hispanic immigrants. But here’s the thing about attitudes toward immigration: Research shows over and over again that they don't have much to do with self-interest. A 2013 review of about 100 studies in the US and elsewhere found that a "significant majority" found no link between job competition and opinions on immigration.

"The evidence indicates that immigration attitudes are not clustered by geography, occupation, or industry in ways consistent with labor market competition—or, for that matter, with fiscal threat," the authors wrote.

In other words, people don't develop anti-immigrant attitudes because they have the sort of jobs that are likely to be taken by lower-paid immigrants, or because their kids' schools are struggling to accommodate kids who can’t speak English. Instead, the studies found that people who are worried about the state of the nation's economy and the general direction society is going are much more likely to oppose immigration, making it a sort of proxy issue for other economic and social insecurities.

"I think it's more, really, 'Is this going to change the nature of our community? Is it going to change our way of life?'" said Jack Citrin, a political science professor at the University of California, Berkeley who studies attitudes toward immigration. "It's not often fashionable for people to say these things, but there's a lot of evidence that that's what they think."

All of which suggests that when Republicans in New Hampshire (or Kansas or Iowa or Arkansas) warn about undocumented criminals and Ebola, they’re actually talking about all of the other fears and insecurities brewing in the panicked id of the national electorate. As for Brown, Andrew Smith, director of the University of New Hampshire Survey Center, said voters' general anxiety about a lot of issues does seem to play a role in the Republican candidate's focus on immigration. The center has found that people in New Hampshire rarely mention immigration when they're asked an open-ended question about important issues, but, when they're asked directly about illegal immigration, a majority call it a "very serious" problem.

When Brown talks about immigration, Smith said, he's really talking about a lot of things that matter to voters: economic populism, national security, disease control, race relations, the rule of law—"is the government doing what it's supposed to do?"—and, importantly, opposition to President Obama, who's even less popular in New Hampshire than in the nation as a whole.

"I don't think it's just a one-off issue," Smith said. "I think it works as a political issue because it has all of those multidimensional aspects."

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Photo via Flickr user Elvert Barnes

By any measure, abortion is an extremely common medical procedure. In the US alone, there were over a million abortions in 2011 (the latest year for which figures are available). While the abortion rate is at its lowest level since 1973, it is estimated that three in ten women will terminate a pregnancy before the age of 45, despite opposition in the form of deceptive “crisis pregnancy centers,” legal restrictions that serve no medical purpose, and threats of murder or outright terrorism in some cases.

It’s not surprising that many people who don't want to see all abortion clinics shut down have bought into a few of the assumptions of the pro-life movement. The result is what we have today: a situation where a majority of people believe abortion should be mostly legal but frowned upon.

It is precisely those people that Katha Pollitt, columnist for The Nation, wants to speak to in her new book Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights, which came out just as the Supreme Court intervened to halt a new Texas law that would close all but eight of the state’s abortion clinics. Pollitt not only lays out in extraordinary detail her opposition to a wide array of anti-abortion advocacy, but also takes the additional step of making her case for why abortion is a good thing. I reached out to her to find out more.

VICE: Unlike many other pro-choice advocates, you say abortion is a social good. Can you explain that?
Katha Pollitt: What I try to do in the book is to put abortion into the context of motherhood and society. And I say it is a good thing for society that children are born at a time when a woman—and the man, if there is one—are able to best take care of them. And society also benefits when women who are currently unbelievably hampered in every area of life when they become mothers can express all their talents and gifts and make a good life for themselves and the people in their families. Right now, what [the anti-abortion movement] says is, "Oh, you got accidentally pregnant? You have to have a baby." "Oh, you have a baby? Well, that's not my problem." The anti-choice movement would make women's entire lives dependent on a stray sperm. She gets accidentally pregnant—which is half of all pregnancies in this country—and then we say, "Well, too bad."

Do you think that people have an accurate picture of women who have abortions?
People don't think a lot really about the situations of women. And they have very stereotypical ideas about who has abortions. You know: It's the teenage slut, it's the irresponsible welfare queen, it's the cold-hearted career woman who hates children, and so on. They don't really picture the full situation.

What do you say to those who might dismiss the abortion debate as a “culture war” issue?
"Culture war" is about culture—pornography, or what books should be in the school library, or whether Harry Potter promotes witchcraft. But this is an issue that goes right to heart of whether women can ever be equal to men. Whether they can have the basic autonomies we give to men to decide what goes on in their bodies and what risks they're going to take. What physical, emotional, and social risks they're going to take. Basically it's about making sure that women don’t remain vulnerable to pregnancy from their first period to their last period. 

Photo courtesy of Katha Pollitt

You have a chapter called "Are Women People?" Do you believe the anti-abortion movement denies women their humanity?
To me, that is the central issue. I think that if you say that at any moment in life a woman can be compelled, because of an accident, because of a failed condom, or she got carried away and, my God, had sex without protection—that this should derail her life. You can see how it basically means what she wants to do with her life is really not important. 

On the other hand, it seems that the fetus is afforded the status of "person" by many opponents of abortion. Why is that?
Because I think at bottom, the anti-abortion movement is motivated by those patriarchal religions like the Catholic Church and Evangelical Fundamentalist Christianity that believe that women should pay for having sex. That sex is connected to reproduction and the burden should be borne by women.

Is there a non-religious opposition to abortion that stands out to you?
Since you raise the question: libertarians. Abortion restrictions are the only restriction on people's liberty that some libertarians like. For example, Ron Paul, Rand Paul, Paul Ryan. It's like, "You can do anything you want... except have an abortion." No small government there. And if you think about it, let's say abortion was banned or very severely restricted. Think of the law enforcement apparatus that would be required to actually make it a reality that a woman could not get an abortion. They would have to be arresting people all the time. They would have to build many new prisons for all those women and all those doctors and nurses. And it would have to be illegal to give someone money knowing that that's what they were going to do with it. I can't give you money and say, "Please take this money and go buy me some heroin." You know? And I should mention that a lot of libertarians are pro-choice precisely because they understand that this is a liberty. I went to the March for Life in Washington the last two years and there are libertarians there explaining why women have every right except for that.

What does the pro-choice movement need to do that it's not doing right now?
I think the pro-choice movement needs to talk more about women's lives and how ridiculous it is to expect women to give birth to every fertilized egg that finds its way into their bodies. They need to talk more about the way in which abortion is part of the fabric of American life and the fabric of family life. It's not something that women decide in isolation. One in five pregnancies ends in abortion. When you put it that way, you can't really see it as something that is performed by deviants or confused or selfish women. It's part of reproductive life and I think that we need to say that and stop saying it's the most agonizing decision a woman ever makes. Sometimes it is an agonizing decision and but a lot of times it's not. We've been chasing the framing of the other side. They say that abortion is terrible and women are too confused to make the decision. We say that abortion is terrible but we think women aren't too confused, they've thought about it really hard. It doesn't put you in a good position to support access, availability, government funding, etc. 

It sounds like you don't think compromise has served pro-choice advocates well.
No, I don't think compromise has served the pro-choice movement well. Because the compromises for the anti-choicers are just baby steps on the way to what they really want. 

And you don't see a lot of compromise from the other side.
Well, that's it. They say, "We should have common ground, we should come together." Try asking them how they feel about making all methods of birth control free and available. There's one [abortion] clinic in Mississippi; someone could say that's a compromise. Well, they're trying to get rid of that one clinic. They're not interested in compromise. They're interested in winning. 

Seems like this book is your way of trying to get the pro-choice side more interested in winning as well.
Yeah. I think that we have to recover our mojo and our moxie, and I'm happy to say I'm not the only person who's saying it. What really gives me heart is we're beginning to see a turnaround because things have gone so far in the wrong direction. I think young women are becoming very interested in this issue. We're seeing some very, very creative organizing and a lot is happening online. There are several websites now—One in Three Campaign is one, Not Alone is another—where women tell their abortion stories. The more talk there is, the more it will be de-stigmatized. And I think that really, the opposition to abortion that isn't specifically religious boils down to the stigma that the anti-abortion movement has placed on both the procedure and on women who seek it. 

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This is what a real tiger looks like. Photo via.

“You could tell straight away it wasn’t a real tiger,” says Andrew Holland, describing a video sent to him of a man in a tiger suit having sex with a woman. “Right from the word go, the tiger was talking.”

Unfortunately for Andrew, a 51-year-old bus driver from Wrexham, North Wales, police and prosecutors didn’t pick up on this subtle clue. Instead, they claimed the video was of a woman having sex with a real tiger (again, it was not a real tiger; it was a human man dressed as a tiger) and charged Andrew with possession of extreme pornography.

As he was the first person to fall foul of this offense under the recently amended Criminal Justice and Immigration Act, prosecutors were determined to make an example of him. That, coupled with the fact that “MAN FOUND WITH TIGER PORN” is a very clickable headline, effectively meant Andrew’s life was ruined from the second he was taken into custody.

He pleaded innocence, telling police, “It was a joke; my mate sent it to me. It’s not a real tiger—real tigers don’t say, ‘That was grrrreat.’” But his pleas were ignored. In fact, the case made its way to the Crown Court before anyone actually bothered to listen to the soundtrack and concede that, no, it wasn’t a real tiger. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) then finally dropped the case in December of 2009, after Andrew had already served six months on bail.

Human rights lawyer Myles Jackman

Soon after, he was called to face trial for a second charge—one relating to a clip titled “BME Olympics Final Round” (also sent to him by his banter-loving friend) that featured footage of genitals being pierced. This time, however, he had human rights lawyer Myles Jackman on his side.

Myles spoke to me about Andrew’s first set of charges. “The prosecutor should have listened to the soundtrack,” he says of the tiger video. “It’s like going to court and the prosecutor saying, ‘We found this white powder in a bag. We haven’t sent it to the lab, so we don’t know that it’s cocaine, but we’re just guessing it’s not talcum powder.’”

The second set of charges were dropped nine months after he’d cleared his name in the tiger case, but by now Andrew had lost his job, suffered a heart attack, and, after being branded a pedophile, been physically assaulted several times.

“At first, everybody was on my side,” he says. “But then, because of the wording of the charge—‘obscene pornographic images’—people started distancing themselves from me. My name began appearing on ‘name and shame’ sites. One person suggested it could be to do with child porn, so then child porn was coming into it. I’ve had to live with that; with hate mail being put through the door, people beating me up, people booting me in the back as I walk down the road, not knowing who to trust.”

It’s a tale that’s as sad as it is alarming; sending weird dirty videos to your friends over WhatsApp, or whatever, is—according to detailed scientific research—pretty fucking common.

Enter Andrew, wading back into the realm that ruined his life to try and ensure that other innocent people don’t meet the same fate he did. Working with sexual civil liberties organization Backlash and Jackman, he’s calling on the CPS to review Section 63 of The Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008, i.e. the section that relates to extreme pornography.

Andrew is claiming that:

1) The term "extreme" pornography is not clearly defined in the legislation, and therefore a potential defendant would not be able to understand or anticipate whether being in possession of certain images might be illegal.

2) There is insufficient guidance from the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) as to when these offenses will be prosecuted.

3) The offense is disproportionate to the legislation's intended aims. 

As it stands, definitions of extreme porn are precarious. For an offense to contravene Section 63 of the Act, the prosecution has to prove the image is “extreme namely grossly offensive, disgusting, or otherwise of an obscene character." This includes bestiality, necrophilia, acts which threaten a person's life, and those which could result in serious injury to a person's anus, breasts, or genitals.

At its inception, it was expected that the law would result in around 30 cases a year. The number is now closer to 1,000, and since it came into effect, 5,500 people have been prosecuted. (It’s worth noting here that images of child sex abuse do not fall into this category and are prosecuted under the Protection of Children Act.)

Someone who may or may not be viewing weird porn on a phone. 

So what exactly is all this awful smut British people are looking at?

“We estimate that around 60 percent of the prosecutions have been for bestiality,” says Jackman. “We have no problem with that whatsoever, because animals can’t consent. However, that means 40 percent are probably for consensual adult material that has been misunderstood. It could be that more than 2,000 people have been prosecuted, and possibly gone to prison, for having images that may not even have been illegal.”

Confusingly, acts that are legal in the bedroom may become illegal as soon as you watch them on a screen.

“The presence of a camera can turn a legal act into an illegal representation,” says Jackman. “It’s legal to perform anal and vaginal fisting, but if you film it you’ve probably created extreme pornography, and if you distribute it you’re probably committing an offense under the Obscene Publications Act.”

If you have friends who are fond of sending you the most fucked up pornography they can find, there’s a good chance you’ve seen something that contravenes Section 63 yourself. A few months ago, for instance, my friend Paul sent me a video of a man placing his dick inside the mouth of a fish. I think the fish was a carp.

“A carp? Yes, it could be a criminal offense if you’ve got that on your phone,” says Jackman.

And don’t think that not watching the video makes a bit of difference; just being in possession of the material is enough. What begins as an innocent attempt to gross out your friend could have some serious consequences.

“I have a number of cases of extreme porn that are going through the courts at moment,” warns Jackman, “Three of them are about WhatsApp chat rooms, where one person has sent an image to the group. I could send you an image as a joke, not realizing it’s illegal. You don’t want it, you didn’t ask for it, but you’ve got it on your phone and you don’t know how to get rid of it. Now you’re technically in possession of it.”

For Andrew, the consequences of just two jokes of this nature have been brutal. While his imminent battle with the CPS has thrown his name back into the spotlight, he’s clear that it’s worth the sacrifice: things need to change.

“I’m not doing this just to clear my name,” he says. “I’m doing it for everybody else who’s been arrested for the same offense. The amount I’ve lost I wouldn’t wish on anybody.”

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A group of people protesting New Brunswick's harsh abortion restrictions. Photo via Jaden Fitzherbert.
Because abortions are nearly impossible to access in New Brunswick, people in need of the procedure have begun terminating their pregnancies themselves.

In 1994, the province banned abortions in clinics outside of hospitals. Federal rulings changed that in 1995, but people needing the procedure were forced to pay out of pocket. Since then, the province’s Morgentaler Clinic saved many from unwanted pregnancies. But following its closure in July, the government’s restrictions on abortion are too tight to accommodate people’s needs. Newly sworn-in premier Brian Gallant has pledged to remove barriers to abortion in the province, but has not yet come through with anything in the way of solid action.

Jaden Fitzherbert is with Reproductive Justice New Brunswick, an advocacy group created after the news broke that the clinic was going to close. She says at least one woman that she knows of has taken four misoprostol to induce a miscarriage.

Generally taken in conjunction with methotrexate or mifepristone (or RU-486/the "abortion pill"), misoprostol is not FDA-approved in Canada—but it is available online. Fitzherbert tells me the woman took only the misoprostol, and that the miscarriage was not a complete one. She had to go to the hospital.

“Thankfully, she was fine and she ended up having a miscarriage and not dying, which was fantastic,” Fitzherbert says. 

At this point, there is no way to be sure how many people are resorting to misoprostol or other at-home abortion methods. But Kathleen Pye, the chair of the activists’ group, says she’s sure more people across the province are pursuing DIY abortion techniques.

“I guarantee it’s happening,” Pye says, “and it’s unbelievably frustrating.” 

Pye says as the weather worsens the situation will become even more dire, and she fears more people will feel forced into performing their own abortions. 

“The current government doesn’t get how serious this is… We really need the government to step up,” she says.  

Reproductive Justice NB tried to raise the money to save the clinic, but though they surpassed their first fundraising goal of $100,000, they couldn’t raise enough to keep it going. The group maintains that two harmful regulations need to be repealed immediately. The first is NB Regulation 84-20, Schedule 2 (a.1) of the Medical Services Payment Act, which stipulates that, for the procedure to be funded, two doctors must sign off that an abortion is “medically required.” It also stipulates that the procedure be performed in a hospital by an OB/GYN doctor, even though it could just as well be carried out by a general practitioner or nurse practitioner.

The other regulation, found in Section 2.01, prohibits abortion clinics like the Morgentaler Clinic from receiving government funding. The specific wording reads, “entitled services furnished in a private hospital facility in the Province.” 

Because it’s so tough to have an abortion in New Brunswick, people are forced to visit clinics outside of the province, whether in St. John’s, Montreal, or Maine. Most people the group hears from are heading to Maine for their abortions. Earlier this month, half of the patients to walk through the doors of one Bangor clinic were from New Brunswick. But that option will only work if you have a passport and some extra cash. Otherwise, as Fitzherbert puts it: “Uterus-havers are SOL.”

Those looking to have a medical professional perform their abortion in New Brunswick have just two hospitals to choose from. It’s not the Chalmers in Fredericton, or the Regional in Saint John, as one might expect. The hospitals are in Moncton and Bathurst, which are about two and a half hours away from one another. Only two doctors in the province, apparently, are willing to perform abortions. 

New Brunswick’s newly appointed premier, Brian Gallant, has towed the party line to a degree, making vague references to a woman’s right to choose, and asserting that he, himself, is pro-choice.

But since he was sworn in two weeks ago, both Pye and Fitzherbert say, Gallant has not so much as responded to an email from Reproductive Justice NB. The group created a sassy timer to monitor his days, hours, minutes, and seconds of inaction.

I tried to get Gallant on the phone to see what, exactly, he plans to do about this. I left voicemails and sent emails, and finally I got his press secretary. I was duly informed that Gallant probably wouldn’t get back to me—he was busy showing support for the Energy East pipeline, I was told.

The health of uterus-havers has become an unfortunate political pawn in the province. Justin Trudeau says Liberal MPs elected in 2015 will be expected to be pro-choice, so Gallant doesn’t have much of an option but to nod in agreement.

But New Brunswick is a conservative province, no matter which party is in power. Pye says she wouldn’t be surprised if Gallant was using abortion to pander to an audience that rarely gets enough attention. His lack of clarity appears to be a tactic to both maintain support and keep activists from both sides off his case.

“If he speaks up too loudly, he could lose all of the people who are just mad at the Conservatives,” Pye says.

Fitzherbert is getting worried the premier won’t come through at all. 

“During the election, it seemed like he was saying what everyone wanted to hear, on both the pro-life and pro-choice side, and not committing yes or no.”

“We’re just trying to get him to do something, and he’s not. It’s really frustrating,” she says over the phone.

So far, Gallant is convincing no one. Yet, he has all the power. 

“Brian Gallant is the head of women’s equality, which is very fascinating,” Pye says dryly. It’s not too surprising, given that there are all of two women in his cabinet.

Meanwhile, there is a long waiting list to get in and see the doctors who do perform abortions. Fitzherbert says people are waiting upwards of ten weeks to get in and have the procedure, which creates an additional hurdle unless the person knows about the pregnancy within the first couple of weeks. In January and February, Pye says, there’s generally an increase in the number of people needing an abortion, and that will mean even longer wait times.

For students, single mothers, and others facing financial challenges, the costs are prohibitive. If you live in New Brunswick and don’t have a valid Medicare card, you’re looking at a cost of $2,000, even if you’re a Canadian citizen. Essentially, it’s cheaper to just go to Maine, where it costs about $500. But traveling to Maine is not a long-term solution for the province. Pye says the clinics there are becoming overloaded.

“[The current regulations are] a gross violation of our rights in Canada,” Pye says. She adds that change needs to happen, and fast. 

@sarratch

Casey making 2C-B in 2001 in the back of a school bus he lived in for seven years. All photos courtesy of Casey William Hardison

In the grand scheme of things, Casey William Hardison didn’t have the worst time in prison. “LSD, 2C-B, DMT, pharmahuasca, research chemicals, kratom, cannabis, home-brewed alcohol—I did a whole bunch of shit in there,” he says. “Drugs are more available in prison than they would be for the common man trying to find them on the street. And the British prison system is fairly gentle—it’s pretty damn civilized.”

Casey, a 43-year-old American, was released in May of 2013 after spending nine years in as many British jails. Originally sentenced to 20 years for running a psychedelic drug lab in Ovingdean—an English village near Brighton full of cottages, sheep, and senior citizens—he’s now campaigning for reform of the Misuse of Drugs Act. But it’s been a long process for the man dubbed a “drugs wizard” by the UK press to get to where he is today.

Born in Washington state in the summer of 1971, Casey began wrestling his “psycho-spiritual” demons at an early age—as in the kind of age where your mom’s still deciding what shoes you wear to school. “Alcohol and cannabis were basically the only drugs I could use at that time,” he tells me over the phone from his home in Victor, Idaho. “I first smoked cannabis when I was about five, when my brother got me high by shotgun. I fucking loved it in my early childhood.”

As Casey soon found out, problems can arise when you use weed and booze to battle whatever demons are marauding around your mind—the main issue being that both substances usually end up weaving their way into every other facet of your life. That, of course, is not exactly an ideal situation for anyone to find themselves in, let alone a teenager in the throes of puberty. So in 1985, at the age of 14, Casey declared himself an alcoholic and signed up to both Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous.

After “delving headlong” into AA’s 12-step program, he made what he describes as his "full recovery" during Halloween of 1993 while drinking spiced wine (with the alcohol removed) as part of a ritual ceremony.

“As we journeyed through the ritual, I pondered the rigid way in which I’d insisted on having the alcohol removed from my ‘sacrament,’” he says. “I’d recalled seeing a heart-rate monitor flat-line. Life had pulse—it had cycles—and a flat-line meant only one thing: death. In a flash, I realized the most important insight: Life is transformation. Life is a cycle of death and rebirth, renewing itself each day.”

It was soon after this that Casey took LSD for the first time. His friend John, whom he’d met at an AA meeting in Yosemite Valley, California, came to visit him in Idaho. On a cold night in December, they went to Blockbuster and rented a VHS copy of Stephen Hawking’s The Making of ‘A Brief History of Time.'

Casey at the Crowley Hot Springs, California, with John (seated), circa 1992

As the video began to play, John mentioned he had some liquid LSD on him, made by a “mad, old-school chemist” called “the Lorax."

“I knew the Lorax, and I trusted and respected him,” says Casey. “I’d also heard a few stories of people having spiritual adventures with LSD, not least from the Deadheads I’d met on a Grateful Dead tour. I also knew that Bill Wilson, the co-founder of AA, had consumed LSD with spiritual intent.”

Casey took 250 micrograms of acid and, within the hour, was “losing the plot a little.” Which is understandable, considering 250 micrograms is the equivalent of six to seven hits of the standard street acid you’d get today.

“I covered myself in gravel while I was tripping my brains out and felt one with all there is, and with nature,” he recalls. “My mind just got still, yet exceptionally fast at the same time.”

At around 3 AM, the bells of the local community college began to ring and Casey had a revelation that he should go back to school. “At that point, I’d dropped out of high school and was on another path, but then I went to North Idaho college for nearly three years and got a natural science degree, before going to the University of Idaho to do biochemistry and botany degrees. That’s the great thing about LSD—a lot of people have trips and have these insights, but then attempt to forget or run away from them. But if you translate them into action and do something about it, you can have a greater life.”

Casey in February 2000, at a Mayan temple site between Guatemala and Mexico, holding a magic mushroom picked out of the lawn.

Of course, everything’s better in moderation; in the summer of 2000, Casey ended up taking so many psychedelics that he thought he was God.

“After that summer where I completely blitzed my head, I got some emails from a guy who made [the hallucinogenic drug] 2CT-7,” he says. “He asked if I wanted a lab. I graduated to making 2CB, and then MDMA, and then I was suddenly in a position where I could go out into the world and figure out where my path in life was—and my path wound up in England.”

Moving around a number of towns before settling in Ovingdean, Casey wasn’t worried in the slightest about his income relying on very illegal activity. He openly bought the necessary chemicals from suppliers, purchasing them in his own name, with his own credit card.

“I wasn’t hiding it,” he says. “I just wasn’t telling them what I was doing with the chemicals.”

During his trial, the judge accused Casey of making and supplying drugs for his “own greed." While he acknowledges that he did make money selling drugs—it would be pretty hard to deny, considering he bought his dad a £30,000 [$48,000] boat—he maintains that it was never as much as the prosecution made out, since he reinvested a lot of the profits into lab equipment, and mostly just sold to his friends.

“I wasn’t selling to anybody I didn’t know and didn’t hang out with,” he says. “But I also knew and hung out with a lot of drug dealers.”

In February 2004, Casey was at the Sanctuary Cafe in Hove when a man walked up to him, touched him on the arm, and placed him under arrest. When his case came to trial and he was charged with three counts of drug production, two counts of possession, and one of exportation, Casey decided that he would represent himself.

“I felt there was absolutely nothing wrong with what I was doing,” he says. “I thought: There’s no way that a law can make me guilty by statute for an act that was intrinsically innocent. That said, I certainly wasn’t delusory about the idea that they were going to try to punish me for what they thought I’d done wrong.”

The last photo taken of Casey before he was arrested

Despite his attempts to persuade the court that illegality is in the eye of the beholder, Casey was sentenced to two decades in jail, prompting the Brighton Argus  front-page headline: “Drugs Wizard Gets 20 Years.”

His punishment was one of the most severe sentences ever handed out for drug offenses in Sussex, but then his lab—where he’d produced millions of dollars worth of illegal narcotics—was also reportedly one of the “most complex… found in the country in the past 25 years." And, according to the internet, the most prolific LSD lab in the history of Brighton's drug busts. 

Fortunately for Casey, life in prison was made more bearable by the ready availability of alcohol and drugs, as well as the fact he could study.

“It’s not brutalized like the American correctional system, where the oppression of the officers turns to the oppression of the inmates, who then oppress other vulnerable people,” he says. “I was single cell most of the time, so that was a godsend. I had a toilet with a lid I could put down. I had hot and cold running water. I was living better than two-thirds of the planet.

“There were times when there was emotional and psychological suffering, but not very much. For me, I thought it was an awesome opportunity. Once I accepted the powerlessness of not being able to alter my prison sentence, it turned into this extraordinary opportunity to study and understand myself—to go within and basically find my peace in that environment. I got to study physics, law, and mathematics, watch the BBC, and read the Times, the Economist, and New Scientist every week.”

While he wasn’t studying, Casey kept himself busy sampling the psychedelics that made their way around the various prisons he was held in. “I had some of my finest psychedelic experiences in prison—and I’ve had a lot of psychedelic experiences,” he says. “Even locked in my cell, on psychedelics I felt the freest I’ve ever been, just learning through my experiences, accepting where I was, and just experiencing the extraordinary myth of being alive.”

Casey and his wife, Charlotte Walsh, a lecturer at the University of Leicester, during a road trip around the western United States after his deportation from the UK last year

Despite the fact he was a victim of the UK’s drug laws—and now campaigns for the reform of the Misuse of Drugs Act from his home in the States—Casey believes law in general is actually a “beautiful instrument."

“One of the best things I ever learned is that I have faith in law,” he says. “We are the process. We are the system. The idea that the system is separate from us is total bullshit. My forefathers made the system and said drugs are bad, but if you use law and the system correctly, you can unlock that. The law’s just been poorly run by the [government]—they’re trying a one-size-fits-all prohibition policy.”

Casey’s belief is that the current laws are regulating people, not the drugs themselves. And it’s a fair point, coming back to the old assertion that nobody should be able to decide what we do with our own bodies, as long as whatever that is doesn’t harm anybody else. Ahead of his trial, Casey argued that the UK government was unable to prove that the regulations applied to his particular activities were "necessary in a democratic society," as human rights law requires, pointing out that the same regulations don't apply to other harmful substances, like alcohol and tobacco. 

Before he hangs up the phone, he makes it clear that this is still very much his mentality. “Our rights should go far beyond any moralization of whether alcohol is good for you, or tobacco is good for you, or LSD is good for you," he says. "What right do they have to [dictate how we] alter our mental function?” 

Follow Michael Allen on Twitter.

Minister Blaney announcing the Government of Canada's intention to introduce legislative changes to the CSIS Act, joined by Andy Ellis (left) - Assistant Director of CSIS Operations, and Janice Armstrong - RCMP Deputy Commissioner, in Banff on October 16, 2014. Photo via Public Safety.

Last week, Canada experienced its first taste of modern terror attacks in short succession. A warrant officer, Patrice Vincent, was killed in Quebec after an individual named Martin Couture-Rouleau—who was known to the RCMP—struck him in a hit-and-run. Then, thanks to the generous publication of surveillance footage, we all became intimately familiar with the shocking, second killing of a military member at the hands of Michel Zehaf-Bibeau, who stormed Canadian Parliament with a hunting rifle after shooting and killing Cpl. Nathan Cirillo in front of Canada’s National War Memorial.

These alarming crimes threw the Canadian media into a frenzy. At the very beginning of the coverage arc for the Parliament shooting, it seemed as if these two incidents could be connected. False media reports claimed the two men were in communication, that Zehaf-Bibeau was working with more than one shooter, and that there was a shooting at the Rideau Centre that didn’t happen. Some Redditors even pointed out that bullet holes were reported on by the CBC in the walls of Parliament, which were not bullet holes at all.

Writing for iPolitics, Andrew Mitrovica accused Canadian anchors of overblowing the story to find their “Walter Cronkite moment,” a reference to Cronkite’s infamous reporting of the JFK assassination. Still others praised the CBC’s coverage for being more level-headed than American media’s treatment. While the peak-hysteria of the Parliament shooting has passed, it’s understandable that our nation’s discourse reached a fever pitch—though it certainly didn’t help any kind of balanced, intelligent conversation from happening.

The symbolism of Zehaf-Bibeau’s crime alone is enough to terrify Canadians. A shooting on our most sacred government property in broad daylight is heartbreaking, which is why I disagree with Glenn Greenwald who wrote that the Martin Couture-Rouleau killing (and later implied the same about Zehaf-Bibeau) was not terrorism as it did not fit the definition of as: “deliberate (or wholly reckless) targeting of civilians with violence for political ends.”

Based on the information we have now, it does not appear as if Couture-Rouleau and Zehaf-Bibeau were working within an organized terror cell with a deliberate intent to kill civilians. But the crimes of both men were, at the very least, cheered on by ISIS supporters as being part of their crusade. With violence that fits into the ISIS philosophy of striking westerners at home happening on Canadian soil for the first time, the net result is clearly going to be a terrified population; whether or not that was a conscious goal of Couture-Rouleau and Zehaf-Bibeau is hard to say, as the police have already killed both individuals. Zehaf-Bibeau did, however, produce a personal video before the attacks that is in the possession of the RCMP. They have stated he blames Canada's foreign policy and thanks Allah.

Where Greenwald and I do agree is on how dangerously fast the Harper government has used these attacks to snap into action and push through new laws “in the area of surveillance, detention and arrest.” Writing for the Guardian, VICE contributor Justin Ling reported that the government is looking to take more “pre-emptive measures” to try to prevent crimes like the Ottawa shooting from ever happening again.

Inbetween Couture-Rouleauand Zehaf-Bibeau’s attacks, reports explained how CSIS is currently seeking new legislation to get “more authority and better tools to track potential terrorist threats to Canada’s national security” through Bill C-44, also known as the "Protection of Canada from Terrorists Act." The bill also provides more powerful laws to protect their sources, which sounds like a good thing. But given CSIS’s already strong capabilities, “more authority” does not appear as if it’s going to be the fix Canada needs to stop terrorists.

It’s an all-too-popular narrative in the post-9/11, security-obsessed western world. An attack happens in a first-world country, then police and surveillance agencies scramble to explain away their failure to stop it by pushing for more and more powers. The reality is, with a lone-wolf attack like Zehaf-Bibeau’s or Rouleau’s, unless we intend to round up all individuals who are suspected of having radicalized thought and/or trail any and all suspects with cars and undercover agents 24/7, we are not going to achieve perfect security. In fact in a press conference following last Wednesday’s incident, RCMP commissioner Bob Paulson said himself that ”it's impossible to know when and where these types of attacks happen."

And why, as a country who at one time prided itself on rationality, are we even trying to get there?

The Harper government has long been criticized for pushing through overly harsh legislation to combat a variety of things—namely free speech online, and the environment. Their horrible online spying bill, C-13, is on its way to becoming law. And these attacks provide just the right amount of public support to continue pushing their agenda. While in the wake of the attacks, Trudeau and Mulcair expressed their support for the reigning government, they shouldn’t let a wave of patriotism allow for, say, a Patriot Act style set of laws to get passed through Parliament.

All that said, there is new legislation in the form of Bill C-44 being pushed forth now that has been in the works for months. As Justin Ling reported, on Tuesday in Parliament we learned that 300 cops are being shuffled out of RCMP’s organized and financial crime division and onto anti-terrorism. Paulson called the risk that Canada is facing “serious and present,” and indicated that the RCMP’s partnership with CSIS is very tight. He also called for a lower threshold on police requirements so that the RCMP can get over the small problem of not having adequate evidence to combat terror. Namely, he would like the requirements to obtain a warrant reduced.

CSIS will be be more directly empowered by Bill C-44, which has removed the limits on where they can go in the world to investigate for their operations, “without regard to any other law, including that of any foreign state.” C-44 is also designed to allow CSIS to share information more freely with our Five Eyes partners in the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand. And as I stated earlier, it provides CSIS with the ability to keep their informants secret, while simultaneously strengthening Canada’s ability to strip away an individual’s citizenship.

With powers like this already coming, in such times of confusion and chaos, it’s deeply problematic to allow our government to capitalize on fear and push through new laws to make people feel safe, while simultaneously throwing basic freedoms out the window. If Mackay’s hinting at new preventative detention laws and the rumours about restricted online speech legislation come true, we could be facing undesirable attacks on civil rights from our own government.

As Craig Forcese and Kent Roach wrote recently in the Globe and Mail: “To wish for perfect security is to ask for an all-seeing state. That may soon be within technological reach, but the state secured in that manner is not one that many people would recognize, or choose.”

The unfortunate reality is that if there are people out there who plan on acting alone to hurt others, it is very difficult to stop. Our police and security agencies have already thrwarted two terror attacks (that we know of), which is worth being proud about. And Canada is not unfamiliar with terror attacks altogether. Ask anyone who remembers the Air India bombing or the FLQ crisis. Given our past experience, and having watched America go through the horrors of 9/11, we should be careful to not make similar mistakes when it comes to our already powerful security agencies.

There are many, many things that make Canada a wonderful place to live. Our harsh government is not one of them, and we can’t let a few crazies determine how we run our country. As Trudeau Jr. said, the people who target Canada “will not make the rules about this land we share and they will not get to change us.”

Let’s see if he has the balls to stick up for it.

@patrickmcguire

Sophian Chhayra (left and right) and Zakaria Chentouf (center) posing for photos that helped send them to prison

On Monday, VICE published an article about a West London drugs gang who were convicted after police found photos of them posing with drugs and drug money on their phones. The article pissed me off, as did the ignorance of many of those who left comments on the piece and on Facebook, comments that imply they are somehow superior. I got in touch with VICE because I felt like I needed to address a few things. The reason it touched a nerve with me is that one of the guys who was sentenced is my cousin.

“Stupid cunts! Hahahaha”

That’s what some guy left as a comment on Facebook. Hovering over the commenter's name was enough to find out that he works at [discount supermarket chain] Lidl. Now, on this basis I could easily go ahead and say, "Well, clearly he’s the stupid cunt and lacks the brains to forge a ‘proper career’ for himself." But that would be ignorant. For all I know, things could have happened in his life that have stopped him excelling as an individual.

The point I’m trying to make is that it’s a matter of perspective. Your walk of life and the subsequent expectations of what you hope to achieve in your time on this planet are not universal. Different people have to find different paths for themselves.

Before I get into it, it’s probably best to bat away any accusations of bias. I’m not trying to absolve my kin for his actions; I’m trying to explain them to those whose only experience of Ladbroke Grove came from Kidulthood.

I’m cut from the same cloth as my cousin. I grew up for part of my life on estates that were clearly categorized by ethnicities, where burners, parcels of drugs, and the glamorized vision of "making it" existed. There are a few variables that separate my cousin and me, though. We’re both smart guys; we just apply it in different ways. My man could flip money like he was Houdini. Tell me that's not a trait that’s loved down in Canary Wharf. But it’s his socioeconomic background that stops him from even entertaining the thought of going into the business world.

Ghettos are an actual thing, and they exist in London. I’m sorry to break it to you. West London is filled with Moroccans, Brazilians, and West Indians. In North London, where I was raised, are large communities of Turks, Somalis, and Nigerians. Wherever you have a system for placing families that is based on race and creed, you have the beginnings of a trap, and the hood’s called a trap for a reason. In a way, it’s a trivial life of just surviving; you only get to really enjoy life once you’re out of the trap. This is something I can vouch for.

One big difference between my cousin and me is that I had a father figure. A father figure who was willing to bust his balls getting me out of London to grow up in a white-majority Essex town where I had far more privileges available to me. That’s something I had one-up on over most kids from estates—the amenities and level of schooling in this white majority area far excelled those available to me the last time I was living in a black-majority area. Fuck knows why that should be the case, it could be an essay in itself, but as it stands, it’s a thing.

Fast-forward, and nearly a decade after I moved out of London I now hold a post-grad degree and the belief that I’m talented enough at what I do to actually cement myself at the top of my field. If I had stayed in North London, I can guarantee that I would have continued going further down a very different path. In a way, it never really escaped me; I managed to move out of London, but the family finances didn’t exactly improve. At one point, I shot class-A to keep afloat with the added costs of an education. If my cousin shot A, it was to chase a lifestyle.

And that lifestyle is capitalism. The majority of people want money. They want money so they can have "nice" things, and ultimately a "nice" life. The socially accepted norm of obtaining money is through a job, but what if life dictated to you limits beyond which you felt you had no right to excel? And those limits were imposed not because of ability, but because of what race and finances you were born into? The London Riots are an example of this. Eventually, what transpired was people's desire for nicer kicks and garms—the same desires as the middle-class white kids over at Wavey Garms. Capitalism drives the dreams of most, but it’s more of a harsh reminder to those with less currency. What my cousin did was to earn more money than he could have done working a job that would have only delivered X amount. He clearly felt he was entitled to more. If you really can’t get down with this way of looking at the idea of having to be employed and only being offered a certain amount of growth, I suggest you read Mario Puzo’s Godfather where Don Corleone explains it perfectly.

My life experiences and recognition of the opportunities I’ve been provided has given me a desire to leave behind a legacy of some sort. I want to have an impact. This is coming from a guy who could have easily become the same type of figure as my cousin. Yeah, he fucked up and made a stupid move. I expected better from him. But these photos haven’t been scraped from Facebook, and the dude’s far from stupid, as a lot of people from behind a few screens are claiming. Who’s to say my cousin couldn’t have gone on to do something had he been given the same chances as me? Life is a messy piece of shit, and so many factors are at play in all of our backstories—who are you to say that your expectations of life are the correct measure by which to judge someone else’s?

Before Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution, citizens weren't required to wear the Islamic cover known as the hijab and the country's fashion was almost identical to that of the United States and Europe. After the revolution, though, the hijab became required by law.

Although the standard black hijab is still commonplace—especially in rural areas in the country—Iran has recently seen a fashion renaissance, and cities like Tehran are becoming home to new and innovative designers. The clothing may still have to respect the Islamic dress codes, but the bright colors and designs would never have been seen a decade ago in Iran.

Last summer, VICE went to Tehran to attend the third annual Fajr Fashion Show and speak with some of Iran's new designers. The country's top officials—responsible for granting permission for the show—were all seated in the front row to show show their support. And to make sure the models were adhering to the country's law.

Some "evil clowns" spotted in southern France. Note the shoes. Photo via Facebook

For my entire life, when I've met new people and arrived at the point in the relationship where we find ourselves talking about our fears, I've come away feeling disappointed. Why? Well, here is a list of legitimate fears: attack dogs, STD tests, that heartbeat moment when you Snapchat your junk to someone and their name begins with the same letter as someone in your family, your house burning down in the night.

Nowhere on that list is the word clowns, because for a long time, being scared of clowns has been the most bullshit fear on Earth. It’s a fear adopted by teenagers who don't know any better to make them seem interesting by association. It’s a fear sprung from seeing a picture of Pennywise from Stephen King’s It and thinking, Yeah, that seems like a cool fear.

But now I’m starting to think that the clown fearers might have a point, because gangs of young men have been marauding around France dressed as clowns chasing innocent bystanders with pistols, poles, knives, and bats.

This weekend, 14 teenage attack clowns were arrested outside a high school in Agde, on the south coast of the country. In Montpellier, a man was beaten with a rod by a guy dressed as a clown and his two accomplices. And last week, a butcher’s apprentice was given a six-month suspended sentence after dressing as a clown and terrorizing children in Douvrin, in northern France.

Some people are saying the worst thing to come out of this is that real clowns are losing work. To them, I say: "Why are real clowns still a thing?"

“The best thing that could happen is that people stop talking about them,” says Philippe Herreman, director at Association Ch’tiClown, a social organization that visits hospitals and care homes to alternately cheer and petrify their patients. Going to have to argue with you there, Phil. Going to have to go ahead and say the best thing that could happen with these "evil clown" attacks is that they stop? Because they are the worst? Because getting beaten up by a clown is the worst?

France isn’t even the only place where clowns are getting violent. In London last year, the Met Police were called to 117 "clown-related" incidents, which sounds like an awful lot. Last October, student Alex Powell was unmasked as the infamous Northampton clown, who'd just appear occasionally up to his knees in ponds, waving at people. (I reached out to him for comment but so far he's not responded to my request.) And in December, the Hull Daily Mail ran the immortal headline, "Is there a Spooky Clown scaring people in Hull?"

Was there a spooky clown scaring people in Hull? Many Hull residents say that yes, there was. But do they have an explanation for why there was a spooky clown scaring people in Hull? No, they do not. French police, investigating their own spate of clownings, blame viral videos where someone dresses as a clown and scares whoever has the misfortune to walk alone through a car park late at night. I blame Hull.

Colin the Clown, living that clown life in the 80s

Colin the Clown has been clowning around for more than 20 years, and even performed for the Queen of England. He is not down with the clowns battering people with rods. “Obviously, I don’t agree with violence," he told me over the phone. "Committing violence and trying to blame it on clowns... listen, clowns are about entertaining people and making people happy, and this is the antithesis of what we do.”

Colin was also keen to point out that the clown costume isn’t even that conducive to crime. “I mean, I often wear very big clown shoes, so you can’t run away very quickly,” he actually said. “You could detect a real clown from their proper clown shoes.”

He's right, though ironically perhaps the scariest element of this is knowing that there are people out there right now, not costumed up at all, who occasionally dress as clowns and attack people. Maybe you got the subway into work with an out-of-costume murder clown this morning. Perhaps the person in your work kitchen making coffee is actually a cleaver-wielding assault artist. Do you know anyone hoarding face paint? Anyone who has a series of crazy wigs? Anyone who is especially skilled at getting into and out of a hatchback? Does one of your friends think flowers that squirt water are legitimately funny? Maybe they are a French attack clown. 

If they are, have a word. Until then, ban clowns.

Follow Joel Golby on Twitter

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

I've spent several years working in a sex shop, and have come to realize that there are a few enduring truths to the job. 

First, lesbians are the nicest customers. Without exception. Second, the last people you'd imagine buying a particular item will, without question, always be the first ones to buy that item. Tiny leather thongs bought by hugely overweight men, for example, or adult diapers snapped up by tall, hot, ripped biker men who you really, really wish didn't have a fetish for shitting themselves. Third—and finally—that you must accept that a large portion of your day will be spent fielding prank phone calls and voicemails. 

Of course, there are plenty of other tribes regularly shuffling past my shop, so I thought I'd share some of them with you here.

RUBBER RETIREES
I can now proudly add “expert at freeing old people from rubber suits” to my CV. Jealous? If so, get in touch and cover some of my shifts, because you’re bound to eventually come across one of the many gentlemen who’ve apparently decided that the best way to spend their 70s is writhing around in a rubber diving suit.

Remember that Friends episode where Ross gets himself stuck in those leather trousers? Imagine that, but an entire body, from the loose, gangly neck all the way down to the yellowing toes. I’ve actually cut the same customer out of two different rubber suits, and it doesn’t get any less gross.

FLASHERS
This one’s a real sore point for me, actually. There’s one breed of customer that seems to believe that, because they’ve walked into a fetish store, they suddenly have a license to get their dicks out. The worst are those who come in shopping for cock rings, “forget” what size they need, and flop their chubbies out into their hand for you to judge.

“What do you think, dude?”

I think you need to put that baby mole rat away, dude. I don’t want to see it again. Ever. (Important note: This type isn't to be confused with the guys who start jerking off nonchalantly while browsing the shelves; they’re a whole different— fortunately rarer—genre of creep.)

SAUNA SHOPPERS
These guys are our bread and butter. Popping in for some condoms, lube, and poppers on the way to the sauna of their choice (usually multiple times a week), it seems to be as normal an occurrence to them as, say, buying a pint of milk or stocking up on toilet paper. And good for them: There’s nothing wrong with having sex with multiple partners in a public space.

A sub-genre of the sauna shoppers are the weekend walk-of-shamers—those who turn up on a Sunday morning with the kind of drained, graying face that says, “I’ve spent the past forty-eight hours injecting myself with mephedrone and trying to stay on top of all the cocks waving around my head.”

Those guys make my weekend.

Some gentlemen enjoying their leather dog masks. Photo via Flickr user istolethetv

CITY BOYS
These are the guys going to a fetish-themed fancy dress party—or, in some cases, a Torture Garden–style event—for the first time. They’ll tell you repeatedly that they’re “not gay” and that their friend just invited them at the last minute. They’ll also invariably have a roll of 20s stuffed in their pocket, which they’ll use to pay for the most appalling outfit you could ever wear to a fetish club.

Believe me when I tell you that a dog mask, rubber Superman shorts, and a leather apron aren’t going to make you any friends.

THE WHISPERERS
There’s something about sex shops that makes certain people feel like they have to whisper. Granted, it’s probably because most haven’t seen gargantuan metal dildos before, but that doesn’t mean they have to talk to you like they’re cooing a baby to sleep. Look, you’re here to enquire about the best size of plug to insert into your own anus; grow the fuck up and try to talk to me in a proper adult speaking voice.

THE GIGGLERS
I get it, fetish shops are funny—it's all got something to do with sex, and some of it's even shaped like genitals! But customers who duck into the shop purely to snicker at a pair of leather chaps can fuck themselves while wearing a pair.

This is definitely not something that happens in fetish stores. Photo via Flickr

THE LINGERERS
There are customers who love the store so much that they’ll come in and shop for upwards of two hours, like they're stuck in some kind of leather-lined labyrinth. It’s some of these people who are scarred into my retina forever.

For example, I’ll never be able to unsee the bricklayer in frilly panties who spent an entire afternoon trying on rubber. I’ve also witnessed customers shop for an hour, accidentally leave the stuff they’ve purchased in the shop, and then come back in to re-buy it, like they just can't tear themselves away.

OVER-SHARERS
Just to lay down an immediate disclaimer here: I am far from prudish. Obviously. I work in a fetish store. I'm very happy for everyone to do whatever they like as long as it’s consensual.

But you know what? I really don’t need to hear about the time you ruptured your asshole, or the moment you unplugged your butt and ruined the carpet. None of that is going to help me find you what you’re looking for. Be specific. Make it easier for the both of us.

Mind you, when those specifics are questions like, “I want to get fisted but have my hands free—do you have any harnesses that can accommodate a plastic fist?” you do sometimes have to reconsider the professional choices you’ve made.

Follow Russell Dean Stone on Twitter.

Chef Melissa Parks. All photos via Herb: Mastering the Art of Cooking with Cannabis
When the state of Colorado’s decision to legalize marijuana for recreational use came into effect on January 1st of this year, it launched a powerful (and lucrative) new industry that began immediately attracting bud-seeking tourists from around the world, spawned hundreds of dispensaries, and turned Colorado into an American mecca for marijuana. Companies around the state began offering marijuana-infused products in a multitude of wacky formations: from THC-infused soda to cotton candy, and coffee. But up until recently, no one in post-legalization Colorado had attempted to coalesce the various forms of edibles in one convenient document. Enter Herb: Mastering the Art of Cooking Cannabis. Herb aims to be the first cookbook that presents edibles as “dignified, accessible, and enjoyable,” and comes with heavy cooking chops to back it up. It’s backed by prodigious social media cannabis cooking outfit, the Stoner's Cookbook, and authored by seasoned chef Melissa Parks, who trained at Le Cordon Bleu in Minneapolis and serves as the vice president of product development at THC and CBD product company Nutritional High International. In Herb, Park offers a multitude of versatile ways to infuse your meals with the powers of THC, from dishes as simple-sounding as Medicated Butternut Squash Soup, to the homier Medicated Mexican Hot Chocolate, to meals as savoury as a Seared Bone-In Ribeye topped with garlic-herb cannacompound butter. Herb also features information on the literal science behind cooking with cannabis and a detailed guide for dosing and technique.

With Herb in the opening stages of a crowdfunding effort to help finance the completion of the book, we decided to give Parks a call at her home in Colorado where she was hard at work putting the finishing touches on desserts for a charity event to discuss how she ended up an expert cannabis chef, what her peers at Le Cordon Bleu think of her career path, and her thoughts on the Colorado government’s attempts to regulate the edibles market.

VICE: How did you start your career in cooking?
Melissa Parks: My mother is a big baker and so was my grandmother, so I was always interested in baking. I started baking, and at some point, decided to give bartending a whirl, too. But when I was bartending, one of the gentlemen that I became really good friends with, who was the executive chef there at the country club I worked at said to me, “You’re on the wrong side of the kitchen, honey.”

So he encouraged me to start cooking and actually ended up being one of my instructors at the first culinary school that I went to, Le Cordon Bleu. Soon after that, I started cooking professionally. I worked under some amazing chefs, at a Mediterranean-Italian style restaurant in the Minneapolis area. I love learning, so while I was there, I got a little restless. I went through Le Cordon Bleu, but didn’t go through what some people would call a “traditional-style college,” so I went back to school and learned about pastries. I was cooking during the day and doing pastries at night, before I transitioned into doing pastry work and wedding cakes full time.

How and when did you transition into making edibles?
I moved to Colorado in the early 2000s and started doing private chef work in 2005. While I was doing that, I was approached by an edibles company. To be honest, I thought it was a joke; I never even thought twice about doing it. Then as time progressed, a few of my friends who had various forms of cancer and had tasted my food and my desserts asked me, “Have you ever thought about working with marijuana, and would you ever help me to make an edible that I could consume and would be delicious?” And I was like, “Um, what?”

At that point in my life, I didn’t smoke, I didn’t do edibles, I had no understanding of it. Nothing. But I was like, “Uh, sure? Is it legal?”

I love chemistry and biochemistry, so, just out of curiosity, I started exploring edibles. I was so ignorant to marijuana and what it could do to help heal and alleviate. So as I became more interested in the business, I wanted to get involved and I wanted to do it through a company, so I literally googled “edible companies in Colorado,” and the first one that came up was a gem. I went into Bakked—they’re part of OpenVape—and I walked in their door and literally brought them unmedicated samples of 13 different items that I can make, and I said, "Look, I’ll even work for free. I just want to learn how to do this professionally.” And I did.



Medicated Butternut Squash Soup.
How did that work out for you?
I went in there and trained under the person that was making stuff for them, and then after a few tastings and samples of what I put together, they fired their head chef and I damn near had a panic attack. They gave me the position. It was scary but it was great because I wasn’t alone back there; I had experts coaching me and teaching me the science of creating edibles, it really created a love affair with it for me.

We made a documentary about medical marijuana in Canada and we talked to one local producer who was obsessed with Colorado. He kept stressing how advanced the industry is there. What’s the industry like there right now?
You know what’s funny? People that don’t live here have this idealized view of what it’s like. Here’s a perfect example of this: I went to Berlin, which is essentially the hemp capital of Europe. I was in the hemp museum, speaking with the owner, and he said, “You’re from Colorado? That’s the promised land.” And it’s hysterical because I think people look at Colorado in many different ways, but I don’t know how accurate any of them are. It is still the Wild West. And it is still trying to find its place and work within the guidelines of the laws as they seem to change drastically quite often. And if you’re not up on top of the law, then your company is at risk of forfeiting something you’ve been working so diligently on. And I think that it’s so much more professionally-driven than anybody would ever expect, myself included.

How did you put together the recipes that are in this cookbook?
Having been a chef for so long, I kept thinking that, how can I take something that people are so interested in and then evolve it? And bring it into something that has never been done before? In doing so, you also need to translate to people why this might be a good idea. Why would they want to give a sun-dried tomato and a compound butter a try on top of their steak versus simply eating a lozenge that is infused with hemp. I want this book to help educate people to the point where they feel comfortable around cannabis. And when they become comfortable around that, then I want them to incorporate it slowly into things that they might understand in their home. And to also realize that you can get creative with it. And it’s not just the brownie and it’s not just the crispy treat, it’s not those things anymore. It can be something as elegant as adding it into your balsamic onions and shitake mushroom sate. 

Seared Bone-In Ribeye topped with garlic-herb cannacompound butter.
What are the recipes that people connect with the most?
I think that people in general, if you ask them what their favourite dish is—they’re like ‘Italian’ or ‘Indian’ or ‘Mediterranean’ I think it’s the same thing with this: it’s the palette that decides how you like to consume whatever it may be, including cannabutter. But I find that because people are looking for dose-appropriate food, because with any experiment, you have to factor in human error and it's the same thing when you're cooking with this at home. I find that the people just becoming familiar with how to do this at home tend to like sauces. So, you can prepare an unmedicated dish, and that way you can share it with others and then people who want to medicate can add something like medicated caramel sauce on top of their ice cream, knowing the information that one tablespoon is approximately 8-12 mg of medium-grade bud. And I think that’s what people are asking me about the most: how can I keep this the longest and only add it when I want to versus "well, this is already all medicated, so I have to eat it all or throw it out." You think about consuming a pan of cornbread that’s all medicated now and you start worrying, “this is going to go to waste, I only wanted a little bit.”

So, I think the low dose is huge, I think the opportunity to add or take away as they might like is big. People are just looking for variety: barbecue sauces; chipotle ketchups; and because it’s so trendy now, baconjam. Those types of things where you make your steak, you make your potatoes, you make your corn, and you take your one tablespoon of baconjam on top of your steak, it’ll melt and it’ll taste great and it’ll be medicated at a certain level.

What do your peers from Le Cordon Bleu think about where your career is now?
[Laughs] After the first year, I was featured in a newspaper article and one of my old classmates saw it and posted it on Instagram. Then, of course, word spread and it started slowly leaking out and people started asking questions, and I was proud of it. I am proud of it. I’m proud to be working with cannabis. I mean, I take pride in every bit of work that I do and so I told them, ‘Absolutely. This is absolutely what I’m doing,’ and it reminds me of our food science classes: You have to test for viscosity and heat levels and volatility, and rising among high altitude. It took me a year of working with cannabis and almost wanting to put my head through a wall to try to understand how to bake at high altitudes for weddings. And now that I have these little tricks, I’m fine. People have slowly embraced it. And the more legalization came to the forefront in Colorado, the more you hear people talking about it. Now you can go to a coffee shop or happy hour and hear people talking about it, and they’re excited.



Coffee ice cream topped with cannachocolate sauce and crumbled ginger snap cookies.
What are your thoughts on the state of Colorado’s attempts to ban edibles because they pose a threat to children?
I think we have to look at it like the same way we look at prescription drugs: There are labels and there are warnings. It’s also similar with items that have been taken off the shelves—look at the different alcoholic beverages that used to have energy drinks in them or the ones that still do. You have to take it with a sense of responsibility. And if not, the reactionary response is to be like, “OK, we’re just going to take it off the market.” I think Colorado is just trying to navigate its way around legally doing something and responsibly doing something that is rapidly becoming a dominant part of the state’s culture. Everybody is talking about it. Some people are saying, “What is it? I don’t understand it.” And with that, they’re just trying to make sure others are safe. And I think that for people that are in the industry, there are only so many warnings and special containers and precautions that we can take—we also have to understand that it’s a very shared responsibility. It’s shared on the people who are producing the products and it's shared on the people who are procuring the products and keeping them in their homes. In general, I think it’s a great idea that there are very strict regulations on edibles. I like the fact that they should be somewhat identifiable. Like, having a leaf logo on individual products themselves, for instance. It’ll come down perhaps to the specifics of what’s banned and what’s not banned. There needs to be a middle ground.

What’s the most important thing people should know about baking edibles?
Be careful. Be careful making them, be careful that you actually understand the properties of what you’re working with, and really do take precautions when you’re eating edibles for the first time. If you’ve smoked marijuana, that’s an entirely different animal than actually absorbing this into your bloodstream and it’s great, it’s helpful, it’s wonderful, and it’s a really unique opportunity, but just take it slowly. Put the brakes on. I know we’re all excited, I know that this is something that everybody’s talking about. But just take a deep breath, make your edible, take a small portion, see how it affects you, and then wait a couple of days or the next day and then go from there.

To donate to Herb: Mastering the Art of Cooking with Cannabis, click here.
 

@jordanisjoso

Tommy Kruise might be our favourite Quebecker. This genuinely curious, die-hard skateboard and hip-hop head was the perfect individual to bring to St. John's rough and tumble world of punk, seafood, and George St. In the latest episode of our FACTOR-funded series, Tripping Out, we touched down in the Newfie capital on Canada Day so Tommy could meet with locals, kiss the cod, and DJ an awesome party on the birthday of our country.

The meeting room at Pionen. All photos by Emil Nordin

One hundred and fifteen feet deep under ground, inside a mountain on the Southside in central Stockholm, behind huge doors that look like a gateway to the future, lies one of the world’s coolest offices.

The first thing you’ll see when you enter this place are two massive engines that automatically start in case of a power shutdown. These are authentic German submarine engines. The mountain walls inside are covered with green plants that give you the impression that they provide the place with additional oxygen. There’s also a huge soundproof glass cube that floats above the floor, serving as a meeting room. The round carpet inside looks like the moon.

This is Pionen, one of Swedish internet provider Bahnhof’s many data centers. It’s a venue inherited from the Swedish civil defense that was built during the Cold War. During a short period in the 1990s it used to be a popular hub for Stockholm ravers. But eventually, it became what it is today: the home to Wikileaks’s servers.

“They operated their main servers from here. Later, it became common to set up servers that mirror their machinery," Jon Karlung, the CEO of Banhof, tells me. "That wasn’t ideal for us since we’re hosting a business solution, and they were saving money setting up things in a different way.

“In December 2010, when Wikileaks was at its peak, CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, and tons of other media were here. [Wikileaks’ founders] were at some hotel room somewhere launching this thing. The media wanted something visually appealing, and if there is a James Bond–looking data center around the corner, well…”

Karlung is 50 years old and very tall. He describes himself as something of a rebel, and after spending pretty much an entire day with him, I think I agree. I get the impression that this is a man who is very intelligent, who likes to play fun and games, and who fearlessly walks his own way at all times—for better and for worse. “I guess [our competitors] can get a bit uncomfortable sometimes,” he tells me as we’re drinking coffee in one of the more standard office-looking corners of Pionen.

Jon Karlung standing in the doorway to the room at Pionen where he keeps machinery for channeling heat from servers

After the coffee, he shows me around. I get to see servers IRL for the first time in my life—the things that store the stuff that makes up the internet. They're smaller than what I had expected, but inside are endless corridors of virtual information. 

We’re discussing big data, the massive collections of everybody’s online behavior and information. 

“It is possible to gather big data and analyze it, and receive amazing things and knowledge from it," Karlung says. "However, these days it’s possible to use this to shackle people. I guess you can say that there are so many things that happen in our lives online. And if you’re in this—let’s call it a closed ‘universe’—there are a few, big, dominating players who plan out the rules in that universe. I think that this ultimately is a philosophical matter. Like, what is it to be a human being?”

Sweden has recently become an attractive player on the international data center market—particularly since Facebook opened its first European data center in the northern city of Luleå last year. It’s due to the Nordics’ cold climate (which helps lower the cost of keeping the servers from overheating) that the interest in building data centers is growing. In September 2013, Microsoft announced the construction of a $250-million  data center in northern Finland, and in March  it was announced that Facebook would build a second data center close to its first. 

Naturally, this growing interest in the Nordics is received with open arms by the governments. The data centers offer jobs in places that have been depopulated in the last couple of decades. 

As we talk, Karlung tells me about a deal he has with Fortum, which is a Swedish energy provider: Instead of channeling the heat from the servers through vents and tossing it into the open air, Fortum uses the runoff to heat apartment blocks in Stockholm. Karlung says data centers where the heat isn’t taken care of and recycled cause some pretty serious pollution.

“The servers create energy, and it’d be crazy to waste it,” he says 

Karlung with one of his servers

Karlung shares his personal contact details on each and every press release posted on Bahnhof’s website and personally deals with the company’s press matters. When I ask him if he ever gets unpleasant phone calls from people who think he’s annoying, he doesn’t look bothered at all: “I let them say what they have to say and that’s it.” He tells me that it doesn’t matter if his phone number is listed or not—if someone would want to hurt him, they will find a way to do that one way or another.

But why would anyone want to hurt a CEO of an internet provider? Well, Karlung likes to pull practical jokes and perform media stunts, which he’s been doing ever since he began working at Bahnhof in 1996. 

“I’ve been in this game ever since the 'Wild West years'—when internet was like this immense power, something positive and fucking cool," he says. "If I look back at how it was in the beginning, it was a positivity that broke free. You could access things on a global scale that hadn’t been possible before—things that we take for granted today. Back then, it was freedom online, freedom of speech—not an internet used as some kind of control mechanism, it wasn’t used in a repressive way.”

The internet was made available for the Swedish public in 1994. Up until then, it had only been a service for government bodies, businesses, and universities. Internet provider Algonet—which no longer exists—is often referred to as Sweden’s first commercial ISP. But that same year, in a basement in Uppsala, Oscar Swartz set up another company that would prove to be more successful: Bahnhof. 

At that time, Karlung worked as the editor-in-chief for the men’s magazine (now a porn publication) Aktuell Rapport. He joined Bahnhof two years later when he figured that it could work to bring the magazine online. “I had been working at Aktuell Rapport for quite a few years and was pretty tired with all that," he says. "It wasn’t like the ultimate dream to keep on working with that kind of thing for all eternity. Naturally, I wanted to do something else with my life, so the question of, What can I do now? arose. So I was looking at things from a technical point of view and thought, Maybe I can do this online? But, well, it kind of fell through.”

Instead, his technology hobby took over, and Karlung left the magazine. “[The internet in the mid 90s] was so much fun! It was incredible," he says. "It was the one thing that made it possible to log on and discover the world in ways that were completely new. I mean it was a revolution that was very positive.”

The 'Alien' server hall in Kista, outside of Stockholm

One common perception that people have of Karlung is that he’s a provocateur. In 1997, he and his then companion Swartz staged a news story about Cambodian dictator Pol Pot coming to Sweden—a complete lie—which was picked up by  Reuters.

“It was pretty mad in itself. But it took a while before they figured it out. And it did cause a mess," he says. "But that was like a market-based practical joke, which showed some of the possibilities the internet has. Practical jokes are always fun if they have a serious message embedded into them. Practical jokes without any substance aren’t fun. In this case it was about the fact that you can’t trust information online. That’s given today, but back then, people considered information online to be the truth.” 

Whatever people think of Karlung, the fact is that behind the humorous take on media and sci-fi designed data centers, is a person in a very rare and powerful position. Being the CEO for an internet provider gives him the means to effect, and possibly change, the centralized direction he’s fearing that the internet is currently taking. 

“Then there was this thing with North Korea [in 2001]. They wanted us to build an internet that wasn’t the internet. They wanted a fake Yahoo, a fake Altavista [a search engine prior to Google], and a range of different websites, so that the people of North Korea could surf in a kind of small world—almost like in the Truman Show. They were supposed to surf on a mini-internet, thinking that it was the real internet. And then there would be people monitoring and controlling everybody online. People might laugh about that today and think of it as silly, but as a matter of fact, we’re in a situation where a few big players control the internet. And we are made to believe that it’s free and open. So that image of things might not be that bad.”

The deal with North Korea didn’t happen. “Plenty of things are possible—I mean you can rob a bank if you want—but this didn’t feel right even though it was an exciting thought.”

Karlung is the kind of guy who likes to take action when it comes to things he believes in. Sometimes in pretty weird ways. In 2013, Wired reported on what was, according to that magazine, “the single most enjoyable comment on the year’s NSA spying scandal.” One evening, Karlung and his friend Love Ekenberg made a video starring three gingerbread men, titled Gingerbread Data Center: NSA & Sweden Eat Cake. The film takes place at Pionen and the gingerbread men represent NSA, the Swedish Security Police, and FRA, which is the National Defence Radio Establishment in Sweden. These three institutions are government bodies that Karlung associates with internet surveillance. And he’s not particularly fond of them. The video ends with a thank you to Edward Snowden. 

Video making goes hand-in-hand with Karlung’s first experiences of the internet. “I did experimental films—and this was before video! I did 16-mm films and animations and arty stuff or whatever you like to call it. [The gingerbread video] was something we did pretty quickly, but in pretty much the same kind of spirit as those I did in the beginning.”

The gingerbread video is nothing compared to some of the hands-on measures Karlung has been doing over the years. For instance in December last year, Karlung had several meetings with the Swedish Security Police—which might explain their representation in the gingerbread video. “They wanted to access our systems in a standardized way, so that they in a standardized way could get access to a kind of information they considered having the right to access," he says. "And we considered that wrong.” 

In a response to what he believed was wrong, he decided to secretly record one of the meetings with the police. Furthermore, he handed over the recordings to the news desk at Swedish public service radio. They broadcasted the entire thing. “That might be a little bit outside of the box of what you normally do as a technical provider, but who else would do that?" he says. "There isn’t anybody else! That’s the thing. There isn’t anyone else who has that kind of access, or who is like a spider in a web at a technical provider, and who’s actually interested in these issues.” 

Karlung walking on the imported lava stones in Kista

It might be thanks to the fact that Sweden is pretty progressive in terms of freedom of speech that Karlung is able to do these stunts without getting into trouble. Or maybe due to the fact that he always seems to have the law on his side. 

Over the past decade, Bahnhof has only had one major legal issue. In 2005, the Swedish Anti-Piracy Agency alongside music giants Universal, Sony, and EMI, reported Bahnhof to the police for unlawfully spreading copyrighted files. The police searched Pionen and allegedly found the files. This was during a time when piracy was a hot topic in Sweden. The goal with the search was to find file-sharers who were customers at Bahnhof. 

Bahnhof responded with a lawsuit against the Anti-Piracy Agency on the grounds that material had been placed on the servers by an infiltrator from the Anti-Piracy Agency. Eventually, a deal was settled, and didn’t result in any legal consequences for anyone involved. 

It might sound a little odd, but Karlung’s ability to combine his hobbies and concerns with his business has given results. Despite being one of Sweden’s smaller operators, serving about 100,000 households, Bahnhof has become a trusted internet provider with a unique trademark. And it seems to be going well. The company has an annual turnover of about half a billion Swedish kroners ($88 million). 

It’s not only Pionen that is designed in a spectacular way. One of Bahnhof’s newest data centers is located a bit outside of the Swedish capital in the suburb Kista. 

From the outside, this building looks like an actual space base. There are giant, square-shaped container-like rooms made out of armor-grade steel. These various armor blocks are connected with an air-filled tent—just like you’d expect a house in space to look like. And the entire construction stands on top of red lava stones, which are imported from Iceland. All in an attempt to give the place a feel of how it would be like to be on Mars. And if that wasn’t enough: upon entering this planet, Karlung shows me (with the excitement of a child) how the doors that open the armored rooms—in which the servers are stored—make pschhh sounds. They open in a just about identical way as the doors on the spaceship in the movie Alien. 

Design aside—it is the company’s caring attitude towards the privacy of their customers that makes it unique. Probably also the fact that some of Bahnhof’s clients happened to have been big actors within the freedom of internet movement—such as WikiLeaks back in 2010. 

“I was pretty naïve, and was going to auction out everything [from Wikileaks] on eBay and donate the money to Reporters Without Borders. That was the plan. But it all fell through due to eBay not being deigned to deal with that kind of thing. The server was sold for like a couple of hundred thousands [kroners] to a guy who had used his dad’s credit card. So obviously we had to withdraw the entire thing and were like, 'Fuck this.' We actually still have both the [Wikileaks] web server and database.”

Karlung at Pionen

Bahnhof continues with their political fights for what they believe is right. In 2014 alone, Karlung and his company have been involved in two pretty chaotic media hunts, both which are related to gathering and use of personal information online. 

“It all comes down to freedom online without it being someone else’s business," he says "I mean, if I get a phone call from someone, what gives a third part the right to record that conversation, store that information for all eternity, and use it for their own purposes?”

In January, Sweden saw a new type of online service called Lexbase. It’s a business built around taking advantage of the country’s Freedom of Information Act. It’s essentially a search engine that allows its users to browse freely through criminal records of Sweden’s citizens. By typing in someone’s name, you’ll get access to some of that person’s dirtiest secrets. 

Although criminal records have always been available to the public due to the Freedom of Information Act, Lexbase changed the process of getting hold of that information—from complicated bureaucratic procedures, to anonymous and easy online browsing. 

Naturally, a shitstorm took place when the site was launched. But Lexbase’s founders failed to predict that it’s pretty upsetting for people when others take the right to share their private information with the world. Plus, the technology behind the website wasn’t advanced enough to handle the pressure. Within a few hours of the launch, Lexbase was hacked and crashed. Bahnhof hosted its servers, and became the center of attention once again. “The [founders of Lexbase] disappeared off the radar. We were left to act like some kind of press people for their stuff.” 

Following the Lexbase crash, Karlung ended their contract and edited Bahnhof’s user terms. “Now, there’s one paragraph saying that you’re not allowed to engage in ‘irresponsible circulation of gatherings of personal information.’ One thing that’s always been written in the terms is that you’re not allowed to run things that don’t work from a technical point of view, or something that can cause us major technical problems. And the formalities around [Lexbase] were the fact that their net had big technological issues.”

The updated Bahnhof terms illustrate Karlung’s engagement in civil right matters once again—as well as the success of his company. His unique position in the middle of the world wide web is in the center of another ongoing controversy.

On April 8, the European Court of Justice declared the controversial Directive 2006/24/EC—aka EU’s Data Retention Directive (DRD)—invalid. The DRD has, ever since it was introduced in 2006, been subject for debates about privacy issues and human rights matters. During the time when it was valid, the DRD made it compulsory for internet providers in all EU countries to track, collect, and store people’s online data, i.e. anything from your browsing history to chat logs and emails. Government bodies could then access this information if considered important or useful, such as during a police investigation. 

Once the DRD was gone, Bahnhof erased all of its customers’ stored data and immediately stopped the gathering of new data. But despite the court’s ruling on EU-level, Sweden’s government—which voted in favor of the DRD on a national level in 2012—did not remove the directive in the country’s laws. 

Following Bahnhof’s decision to stop the gathering of data, a conflict arose between the company and the Swedish state. Sweden’s Post and Telephone Board ruled that the DRD would continue in Sweden regardless of what the European Court of Justice had determined. Karlung refused to follow the directive, and on July 8, he turned himself in—confident that the case would eventually be brought up in the European court. “If you’re managing a telecom operator, you obviously see things that you don’t necessarily see from the outside. I mean I see what’s possible and in what ways you can use current technology to control [things].” 

But despite that Karlung has repeatedly confessed to breaking the law—on both Bahnhof’s website and via letters to the Post and Telephone Board—action against him has still not been issued by the Swedish state. 

Due to Sweden’s apparent passivity in the matter (which is weird considering that they require all of the country’s internet providers to gather data), Karlung together with Swartz (who now sits as the chairman for the 5th of July Foundation, which works for freedom of speech online) have taken further action. On September 12, the pair reported Sweden to the European Court of Justice. Karlung wrote on his website that “We will take this all the way to the EU court. But the best thing would be if the court interfered and showed Sweden what way to go.”

Check-in. Photos courtesy of the author

As the real world becomes increasingly scarier than any horror film, those of us who enjoy the thrill of a Halloween haunted attraction need to keep upping the ante. We're all just trying to chase that ever elusive scare dragon, all just trying to feel something. LA has a plethora of options for spooky theatrics that go beyond your typical haunted hayride. In the past, I’ve paid my hard-earned money to walk on “cum”-filled condoms, watch someone be “raped,” and have “used” tampons dragged across my face, all in the name of hopefully being frightened. This year, I went to Alone: An Existential Haunting in the hopes of peeling back some onion layers of my psyche and damaging myself on a more core level. 

This event, which claims on its website that it "places you as a participant in your own nightmare," is ostensibly designed to redefine the very idea of scary. It supposedly taps into your psyche, and triggers a full-blown, Fukushima-level meltdown. However, with limited information about the experience online and the event site itself acting all cloak and dagger about what it is they even do, I was left wondering if this would end up being more Krueger than Kafka. 

I arrived at the location in the heart of Skid Row in downtown LA. I had a friend accompanying me despite knowing we’d have to do the entire half-hour experience solo. We took some "before" pictures because the experience had to be documented visually, and phones and cameras were not allowed inside the attraction. I tried my best to look natural in this picture, but I ended up in some cut-rate version of an Urban Outfitters catalog crossed with the cover of a Crystal Castles album anyway. Sorry.

Before being existentially haunted

Our names were called and we rode a freight elevator up to a room where we filled out forms explaining if we’d ever taken psychotropic drugs or worn copper jewelry. I started to worry that I might need to be predisposed to belief in new age or supernatural hokum for this thing to have any impact on me. Right after I had this worry, we were led to a room to do warm-up yoga before the scaring began. Fuck. Was my lack of belief in anything going to prevent me from enjoying this as intended? Why couldn’t I just will myself to let go and be open to this stuff being real?

A few minutes into our breathing exercises, a bag was roughly placed over my head as I was yanked backward. Nice! Threats grounded in the real world! Maybe I’d be scared after all. White noise earphones were placed over my ears and I just stood immobile for a few minutes listening to a Nicolas Jaar track or something. It was a soothing, cicada-like beat. I started wishing I had any kind of talent for music. So many of my friends make things, complete projects, advance their careers. Meanwhile, I’m just begging for writing scraps to make rent. People constantly tell me, “It’ll all work out for you, Justin.” 

A bulky man started touching my shoulders and ladled me a cup of water (I think), which I drank without hesitation. Is my yearning to be scared having me put myself in dangerous situations? Do I have some sort of death wish? Is this why I seek out such experiences? They never seem to deliver, either. I went skydiving once in an effort to get the adrenaline rush I’d been craving, but due to the myriad safety checks and being strapped to a pro, I felt nothing as I plummeted to the ground. Like, oh this is a nice view and all, but no real exhilaration. 

I crawled to a man in a yarn mask and sat in a little pillowed grotto as he smeared war paint on my face. Once finished, he handed me a long braided strand attached to his mask. He gestured to me with a nod. Was I supposed to pull this piece off and take it? I didn’t want to ruin his mask. What do I do here? Am I the only one who didn’t get this? I started to move on to the next room and he pulled me back. Great. I really did fuck this up. There’s something I’m supposed to do here. A few seconds later, he pushed me away. I guess he just gave up on me. He wouldn’t be the first in my life to. Nor the last.

I was sat in a chair across a hallway from three hoodie-wearing figures, their faces obscured by the lone light behind them. Was this a commentary on Trayvon Martin and meant to prey upon white people’s fear of “unknowns”? Before I could formulate a real thought about this, the first figure ran up to me and raised his hand to strike me, but ended up landing the blow as a tickle. Great. Not this again. Another instance of being a poor tickling recipient that would probably make the tickler feel inadequate. It’s not your fault that I’m dead inside, friend. Just finish what you’re doing and we can both move on.

More crawling in the dark and I was spat out into a diner where a feral, long-haired Ring girl was scurrying around. She pulled me to a booth where we played with salt together. Some people love doing this sort of shit with their toddlers. Why don’t I want children? Is it just a lack of desire for them now or am I permanently, fundamentally broken? Millions of years of procreation stopping with me just seems like such a tragic failure.

I was led to a dining room table where an old man in a suit did a little monologue meant to creep me out in a Twin Peaks kind of way. This guy had the best chops of any of the actors yet and I started to wonder about the path that brought him here. Did he arrive in Hollywood off a bus in the 60s, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed expecting to make his mark in the world only to wind up here, decades later, an unknown, doing seasonal bullshit like this to make rent? Would I have a similar journey toward a disappointing outcome? Probably.

A woman grabbed me from behind and marched me to a door. She told me to head downstairs and look for Pablo. At the bottom of the stairs, I exited to an alley behind the building. A crew member told me the exit was ahead on the right. Oh. It’s over already? Probably not, but even so, I needed to collect my things from the front desk. As I rounded the corner, a bum asked me for change. I gave him my usual “Nah. Sorry, man.” He asked again. Wait, was this still part of it? He then asked for the watch I wasn’t wearing. I see. Well, if they wanted this part to be scarier to other people—not me—they should’ve used a black guy in a dirty old jacket instead of a white 20-something dressed like a painting of the hobo-clown Emmett Kelly. Was it racist of me to think that just now? Is my understanding of other people’s racism somehow in-and-of itself racist? Am I not appreciating my white privilege enough? I know where it manifests and subconsciously get it. But I don’t actively consider it in my day to day life. I’m sure I’m part of the problem to some people. This Norman Rockwell-style tramp corralled me back into the building and I continued to feel a troubling lack of fear.

I soon found myself in a strobe-lit room. A woman danced around the floor, which was covered with feathers. We playfully waltzed and she pushed me against the walls and then had me lie down on the cold concrete. She rested her head on my chest and I stroked her hair. This was the most intimate moment I’d had in days. Will I ever be loved again or even let myself experience love? I didn’t want this moment of the attraction to end. But, like all relationships, it eventually had to. I trudged off to the next room truly alone for the first time that night.

A Zulu warrior in a grass skirt jumped out of the darkness at me and herded me toward the real exit. Zulu? Really? Was this meant to scare people like my dad? I’m sure he’s disappointed in me. How could he not be? I haven’t lived up to my potential at all. My parents have watched me fall from grace so many times, only to be scraping by with no upward trajectory in sight. On the one hand, I hold their generation in contempt for stacking the deck against my success. On the other hand, I know it’s just as much my own missteps that have left me in my current fruitless predicament.

I was given a complimentary Dos Equis in the exit lounge while I waited for my friend to finish. I’ve been drinking more lately. Am I self-medicating? Trying to blind myself to the wolf at the door? Jesus, I’d probably have to kill myself if I got a DUI. There’d be no coming back from that sort of debt. I realized that it would be better to stick with just one beer here and drink more at home.

After the terror

A woman started painting a masquerade mask that I had been given. We chatted about my favorite parts of the night and she took off with a “See you around!” Why are connections in LA so superficial and fleeting? Of course I wouldn’t see her around. I barely see half my friends anymore. I know they’re all busy trying to survive their own lives, but it’s impossible not to feel cast aside and unwanted. Like I was never part of the group to begin with. I’ve never had trouble fitting in in any sort of clique, but when you’re such a social diplomat, it’s hard to feel like you truly belong anywhere. A nomad without a home.

I was hoping to be broken down with some enhanced interrogation techniques, Guantanamo Bay-style, given the release I had to sign at the beginning, but, yet again, was left just as unaffected as in years past. Alone might be scary if you’re spooked by modern horror movie tropes that play into eerie aesthetics, but if you’re a bit more traditional with what raises the hair on the back of your neck, a much cheaper haunted hayride is probably more your speed. What am I doing with my life? Does this article suck?

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Last night on The Tonight Show, Daniel Radcliffe professed his love of rap to Jimmy Fallon. He said he’s been obsessed with memorizing lyrically complex songs since he was young. After a quick shout-out to Eminem, the show segued into a bit in which Radcliffe admirably performed “Alphabet Aerobics” by Blackalicious, an indie hip-hop duo from Sacramento. But why is seeing Harry Potter moonlight as a tongue-twisting MC such a good late-night-TV gag?

This isn’t even the first time we’ve seen this kind of joke on Fallon. He’s done variations of it again and again. Back in February, he released a mash-up video of Brian Williams reciting Sugar Hill’s “Rappers Delight" that has racked up more than 14 million YouTube views. And he’s also had white stars like Anne Hathaway sing rap lyrics by black artists like Kendrick Lamar in a show tune style in a recurring bit on the Tonight Show.

But this comedic trope of an awkward white person rapping goes way beyond Fallon. It’s so well established that it even has a name. Known as the piss-take rap, it’s premised upon the cultural divide between stereotypically awkward caucasians and the black-dominated genre of urban hip-hop. 

In 2007, Flight of the Conchords dabbled in piss-take rap. Although the Kiwi duo drew laughs for their parodies of all kinds of music, their performance of “Hiphopopotamus Vs. Rhymenoceros” was arguably the funniest. The show’s stars cause two tough guys to back down after they display their lyrical prowess, a scenario that’s absurd considering one of the protagonists is wearing a cord jacket and uses words like “motherflipping.”

Two years later, Joaquin Phoenix turned the idea of a white guy rapping into performance art. He appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman disheveled and bearded, claiming that he wanted to abandon acting to pursue a career in hip-hop. The charade lasted for two years and produced the brilliant—fuck what you think, it is brilliant—Casey Affleck-directed documentary, I’m Not Here. In the movie, Phoenix performs at Miami’s Club LIV—a notoriously expensive nightspot—for a very confused crowd. In this instance, the piss-take rap is used to troll people sipping $20 cocktails.

Then there’s the Lonely Island comedy troupe featuring comedian Andy Samberg. They've practically made a career off of piss-take rap, releasing humorous songs like “I'm on a Boat” with T-Pain and convincing Natalie Portman to spit “Shut the fuck up and suck my dick” over a hip-hop beat in a digital short for Saturday Night Live.

It’s fascinating that it’s still often seen as joke when a white guy picks up the mic, considering white artists like Blondie and producers like Rick Rubin have contributed to the genre since its early days. Of course, Vanilla Ice, the first really popular white rapper, has been permanently labeled as a doofus, so much that his current gig is clashing with Amish folks on the DIY Network. But not all white rappers will go down in history as cultural punch lines. In late 90s, Eminem blew up and opened the floodgates, allowing more serious white MCs such as Yelawolf and Iggy Azalea to get traction and respect. 

It’s hard to say why this joke is still funny. When you try to apply the piss-take rap formula to other genres of music, it doesn't work as well. Like, isn’t Marty McFly performing that Chuck Berry song in Back to the Future the same exact thing? McFly was getting pushed around by Biff right before he picked up a guitar and pulled off one of the coolest performances in all of moviedom. If the piss-take rap joke works because it involves a character subverting our expectations, shouldn’t we be laughing at McFly instead of wishing we were him? And if it doesn’t make us crack up because McFly succeeds in wowing the crowd, then why are we so interested in gawking at Radcliffe who, actually, did a pretty good job spitting Blackalicious’s verses?

Maybe it has to do with the fact that we don’t think of the rock music Marty was playing as something co-opted from black culture—even though it certainly was. Unlike rock, however, people still see rap as the province of the urban African American community. I guess, that’s why it's funny, if not problematic, that we laugh when we see a goofy rich white dude wade into that territory.

However, with the way things are going in hip-hop, the piss-take rap joke might stop garnering big laughs, simply because—for better or worse—white guy rappers are becoming pretty common. Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy” now has the record for the longest a female rap song has spent at No. 1 on the Billboard charts. And whether or not you think it’s fair (or that the Grammys even mean anything), Macklemore won Best Rap Album last year. And Eminem isn’t just the best-selling rapper of all time, he’s the second-best single male artist of any genre. White rappers are so ever-present right now in hip-hop that in a few years finding humor in a white guy rapping might feel as played-out as Gallagher smashing a watermelon.

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