Despite any strained complaining that the small press is dead, I think more books have come out this summer than maybe ever before. Like, in all of history. There are so many new books coming out every month you could practically build a house out of them and bury yourself in it, reading your walls and your bed and your toilet until you go insane. Among the massive list of new shit, here are five of the more recent small press titles that got my skin going, each of which in their own way reconfigure the ideas of genre, notion, and form.

Troublers by Rob Walsh [Caketrain]

It’s pretty rare that a collection of short stories does anything for me beyond making me feel like I’m watching someone exercise. Rob Walsh, though, comes out of nowhere with Troublers, taking one insane premise after another and exploring them with sentences that catch you off guard at every turn. There’s a story where a guy builds a playpen for his baby daughters and leaves them in the playpen for 40 years, until he dies. There’s a woman who spends years digging a hole in her backyard for no specific reason. There’s a baby who keeps waking its parents up in the middle of the night, touching their bodies strangely. Among the book’s many tricks and traps and desperate people, it is the constantly stunning logic of Walsh's sentences that hold the ship together, at once both aurally resonant and bizarre, like, “By glancing between my own bites, I supervised my wife’s eating.” Overall, a good weapon kit of strange air for people who like Gordon Lish mashed against Matthew Derby and George Saunders after being locked in a closet for five years.

Throne of Blood by Cassandra Troyan [Solar Luxuriance]

Throne of Blood opens with the casually terrifying sentence, “Every year just about spring the drained lake muds with the girls of winter bloated and tangled at the bottom in the wreckage of tree artifacts” and then pretty much goes everywhere from there. Troyan is hell-bent on bending hell into the idea of bodies and communication, to such extent that the book is constantly shifting gears, constantly refocusing your attention through dialogues with killers and text messages from medically demented sex fiends. Any time you might settle into the idea of having a direction, the book switches from anorexic to starving to melodramatic to terrified to pissed. “CHICKEN SALAD SANDWICH / CHICKEN SALAD SANDWICH / CHICKEN SALAD SANDWICH” it says on one page, and on the next: “I have been a woman for too long / in that fall there is levity / and the skullfucked panorama of / the future.” An insane quasi-monologue straight out of the death dream of Artaud stuck in the body of a 20-something female going fucking bananas on the internet, this shit is nice.

Grace Period: Notebooks, 1998-2007 by Aaron Kunin [Letter Machine]

Grace Periodcomprises a decade of notebooks from quasi-conceptualist Aaron Kunin, whose previous works have become known for their ability to re-approach old forms in ways that make them seem entirely different. Here, over the course of 19 different journals spanning periods of often somewhere around six months, Kunin opens up his personal sets of individually numbered inquisitions, aphorisms, lyrics, dialogues, cryptic fragments, dreams, commands, and all other sorts of jotted ideas. It’s interesting to watch Kunin’s mind switch through modes over the course of the book, developing preoccupations, ways of thinking, and passing ideas, which slowly accumulate into an image of the development of a highly provocative vision. “Some people have the right to touch you,” says a note from an early notebook, in 1998; then, in 2002, “I get annoyed at art that asks me to participate, which is just to say that I don’t like being told how to participate,” and in 2005, simply, “The bed breathing under your back.” In total, these complied ideas are a strange museum, somehow comforting to peel through, fall around in, eat from, poke, and roll.

The Skin Team by Jordaan Mason [Magic Helcopter]

The Skin Team reads like a patchwork catalog of bruises, weaving segmented blocks of methodical narrative threaded together into something kind of beyond categorization, as far as novels go. There’s a story here, but the story keeps mutating, and dissecting itself as it goes on trying to understand the strange relations between its characters. Bizarre teams named after colors ride horses through the woods, birds flock in the sky in disturbed patterns among smoke coming from nowhere, kids communicate hidden information about water telepathically, calm suicide notes concerned with jumping off of bridges quietly change hands between passively violent scenes of adolescent sex. “The horse’s death was not investigated,” reads a single sentence stranded on a page alone near the middle of the book, “mostly because all investigative energy was spent on figuring out who started the fire.” There is certainly a sense of the Lynchian, as well as the novels of Dennis Cooper, carried in sentences that together feel close to the same long slow gravity you might have felt exploring a strange relative’s house as a child, expecting on any wall to find a button that would open up into a larger, hidden room.

Murder by Danielle Collobert [Litmus Press]

This is the first novel by Danielle Collobert, an experimental French writer who killed herself in a hotel on her 38th birthday. Known perhaps most widely for her poetry, which often combined small, strange, nearly robotic fragments that somehow disturbed physics and sleep in the same breath, Murder is the first work of longer prose to appear in English, and like the rest of her writing, it’s as unsettling as clouds of smoke rolling through low dark. Originally published by Gallimard in 1964, Murder was written while Collobert was living as an exile in Italy during the Algerian War. Despite what its blunt title might suggest, Murder is an extremely sleek and mystifying book, bent on the exploration of a destructive feeling looming over all. The narrator has trouble remembering her name, often gets lost in public as if being pushed into a labyrinth in daylight, finds dead bodies in fields, animals go insane. She keeps waiting for something to happen, and yet it is the weird meditative pauses, the blank between the signals, that is the most unnerving. Memories might carry the worst damage of all. “They tortured me,” the narrator tells us, “kneaded me, dilapidated me, trampled me. My bones are an erosion. I have no more support. I’m lying down, forever paralyzed. If someone had the idea to stand me up, on my feet, I would spread out like an enormous drop of some liquid, formless. A mass.” The same way a murder mystery is most stabbing leading up to its reveal, Murder lingers long inside the blank before death, haunting anyone who will get near enough to share its air with calm-faced corridors of sentences.

Previously by Blake Butler - Rachel Glaser’s Hypercolor Multitude of Moods

@blakebutler

Photo by Martin Armstrong

At a checkpoint along the Hadi Nasrallah road in Beirut’s southern suburb of Dahiyeh a group of plain-clothed men inspected the flow of traffic and intermittently ordered cars to the side of the road. In the background a plume of thick smoke snaked into the air from the neighborhood of Ruwaiss, the remnants of a car bomb that rocked the area an hour earlier. Sirens rung out among the melee of traffic. The checkpoint was manned not by the Lebanese Army but by the Lebanese Shia party Hezbollah. As we made our way toward the checkpoint the air became more acrid. Some residents appeared relatively calm; others moved with more urgency.

Thursday’s explosion in the Dahiyeh—an almost autonomous state-within-a-state controlled by the Lebanese Shia party Hezbollah—was the second of such attacks to hit the area in the last couple of months. Local and international media report that 24 people died and over 250 were injured. It was the latest in a series of events that are dragging Lebanon towards Syria's Civil War.

Since irrefutable evidence of Hezbollah’s military participation on behalf of the Assad regime across the Syrian border surfaced in May such attacks have become increasingly inevitable. Salafist groups within the Syrian opposition have threatened retributive action for Hezbollah’s intervention in Syria. While the Iran-backed Shia party are far from enemy-free on the home front, particularly among elements of Lebanon’s Sunni polity who support the Syrian opposition.

In June in the port city of Sidon, 20 miles south of Beirut, supporters of Salafist Sheikh Ahmad Assir clashed with the Lebanese Army and according to some sources members of Hezbollah, leaving over 40 dead. In Tripoli, Lebanon’s second city, skirmishes between groups on either side of the dividing line in Syria have become routine over the course of 2013. Kidnappings, a particular forte of Lebanese militias during Lebanon’s own civil war (1975-1990), are also becoming increasingly common.

After the checkpoint my colleague parked the car and we headed towards the blast site.  

Photo by Hasan Shaaban, who made it to the blast site, unlike the author.

On the street-corners we passed young people conversing frantically and relaying messages on mobiles and walkie-talkies. A few wore black vests with the distinctive symbol of the Amal movement—Lebanon’s second Shia party, accustomed to playing second fiddle to Hezbollah—printed on the back but most of these kids just wore jeans and knock off designer T-shirts. Closer to the scene of the blast a couple of women stood inside a mausoleum dedicated to Hezbollah members killed in the 2006 July war with Israel.

Some local residents pointed us towards the scene of the blast, still a quarter of a mile away, but others were less certain of our presence. It is far from uncommon for press to have difficulties in the Dahiyeh, particularly at a time when Hezbollah is under attack.

A dude wearing fluorescent yellow sneakers and an Armani T-shirt noticed us as we turned a corner.

“What’s in the bag?” he asked. I passed it to him, and he pulled out my camera and reached for his walkie-talkie.

“You can’t go further. The situation is very bad,” he said. We tried to assert our journalistic right to be there, but he was having none of it.

A couple of minutes later a more authoritative figure wearing a baseball cap appeared. First on a scooter and then minutes later behind the wheel of a plateless, blacked out, ebony Mercedez S Class. He beckoned me and my colleague towards the back of the car. We didn’t really have a choice to refuse.

The car drove away from the scene of the blast, and the man in the baseball cap explained that the situation is worse than last month’s bombing in the Bir al-Abed neighborhood of Beirut when 53 people were wounded. Nonetheless, Hezbollah have the situation under control and the wounded are being transported to hospitals, he assured. He stopped talking to us and faced the road, providing the driver with directions.

I had been in cars with Hezbollah in the past, but this was different. In May during a trip to Hermel in Lebanon’s Bekaa valley I’d been accompanied first by a courteous French speaking woman named Zeinab dressed in an Iranian style black chador and later to the Lebanese-Syrian border by a bespectacled man in camo who cranked the gear stick with a prosthetic plastic hand. At that time, Hezbollah were using Hermel as a launch pad for their attacks alongside the Syrian army against rebels in the strategically significant town of Qusair in Homs province. At that time I had also been invited. This time around Hezbollah were being besieged in their own backyard and some foreign press were having difficulties gaining access to the scene.


Photo by Hasan Shaaban.

The car pulled down a quiet backstreet and stopped outside what looked like a social club. They lead us in and a giant poster of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenei—founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran—was hung from the back wall, flanked by lesser dignitaries from the Hezbollah theo-political pantheon.

My colleague and I were separated behind black partitions at either side of the hall. A glass of water was placed on the table behind the partition next to three brown plastic chairs. In the corner of the hallway a group of teenagers sat eating chicken tawouk.

The man in the cap left, and a clean-cut, smiling man named Issa joined us accompanied by a silent scribe with a shaved pate.

“I don’t speak much English so you are going to have to help me in Arabic,” says Issa, though he speaks good English.

He proceeded to ask a series of questions our whereabouts at the time of the blast, my journalistic credentials, and my reasons for being in the area. Halfway through relaying the required information, another man appeared around the corner of the partition. Speaking to Issa in rapid-fire Arabic he said something about the use of force in connection with another detainee. Later I find out my colleague was told he’d probably be staying the night. But Issa turned to me, and said apologetically, “We do not do such things. We have certain procedures.”

After a few more minutes of questioning Issa got up satisfied. The otherwise silent scribe asked me if I wanted more water, but Issa decided a refill wouldn't be necessary.

Half an hour later Issa returned with my possessions.

“Please, just make sure that everything is there,” he said, before escorting us to another blacked out, plateless, ebony car. This time it’s a Jeep Cherokee. I saw a TV on the street that was broadcasting footage of the blast. A group called Saraya Aisha Um al Muqmeneen (Brigade of Aisha, Mother of the Faithful) claimed responsibility for the attack—the same group claimed last month’s blast nearby in Bir Al-Abed.

We were escorted back to our car and we jumped in accompanied by a non-descript figure who was there  to ensure our “safe departure” from the area. When we stopped at an intersection, I saw a youth in a pink T-shirt sprint across the road before hopping onto the back of a waiting moped. Three shots rang out. The man in the back told us to keep driving.

When we reached the highway the man got out of the car and offered us a blessing: “Allah Ma’ak” (God be with you), he said before switching to English. “Drive Safely.”

@ScotinBeirut

Related:

Renegade Clerics Are Battling Hezbollah in Lebanon

Pop Stars and Radical Clerics Are Fighting the Army in Lebanon

Since the ouster of former Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi by the military on July 3, clashes between pro-Morsi supporters and the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF) have left the country’s streets stained with blood. 

On July 24, General Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi called for a security mandate that would fight the “violence and terrorism,” and for a 7 PM to 6 AM curfew to be enforced. The situation took a turn for the worse this week when the military opened fire on Morsi supporters and Muslim Brotherhood members near Nasr City. The death toll from the massacre climbed to over 600. The country has completely shut down: businesses remain closed, railways are suspended, and people are terrified to leave their homes. The original revolutionaries who marched for democracy are squeezed out of the equation as the military and Morsi supporters keep fighting and bodies continue to spill out of morgues and into mosques. 

We video chatted with Gigi Ibrahim, a prominent activist in the Egyptian revolution, to try to make sense of everything that's been happening in the country.

@Gsquare86

@notsovanilla

More from Gigi:

Egypt After Morsi with Gigi Ibrahim

Gigi Ibrahim Discusses What Happens Next in Egypt with Tim Pool

Photos by Mauricio Castillo

Graffiti muralist, artist, and wanderer of the world David Choe has already had a lifetime’s worth of adventures. He made $200 million when Facebook went public thanks to his taking stock instead of cash when he painted the company’s headquarters; he’s hitchhiked across the United States on our show Thumb’s Up! (which I edited, way back when I worked in the VICE Brooklyn office); and his art is on walls and in collections all over the world—not to mention on the cover of VICE last year. But one thing he hasn’t done in the past four years is have a gallery show.

Well, he’s having one this Saturday in Mexico City. It’s called SNOWMAN MONKEY BBQ, it’s open to the public, and it has everything you would expect from Choe: two giant murals done primarily with spray paint, a series of watercolors, a few oil and acrylic paintings, a cyborg horse sculpture, and an army of piñatas carrying a giant whale.

I recently chatted with him to see how Mexico City was treating him and to find out when he’d do a new season of Thumbs Up!

VICE: So tell me how this show came about.
David Choe: I’ve been a gambling addict for most of my adult life. The baccarat room in most casinos is filled with Chinese people, and if you are not high-stakes gambler, to walk into that room is intimidating. It’s very loud, and there’s a lot of superstition, and everything is in Chinese, even in in Vegas. But every once in a while, you’d hear an American word screamed out—either “monkey,” which means you want a face card; “snowman,” which means you need an eight; and “BBQ,” which is when you lose—you get a six and the dealer gets a seven, and you get BBQ’ed. I guess it sounds like something in Chinese. And I was like, this is the fucking craziest game, its literally like 50/50, like flipping a coin, and people are betting millions of thousands of dollars. When I was a young man I thought, I’ll never be like those people. Cut to ten years later, and I’m screaming, “Monkey, monkey, snowman, snowman!” louder than anyone at the table, risking my entire life savings, losing everything, winning everything.

This is my first show in four years. And everyone goes, like, "What’s the holdup?" Well, I was busy screaming “BBQ, monkey, snowman!” I was gambling every single day at every casino in the world, every Indian reservation casino, Monte Carlo, Macau, anywhere where there’s gambling. I fell deep into addiction. But I don’t gamble anymore; I haven’t gambled in almost two years. I went to rehab and all that shit, which is gay, but I did it. I think one out of four gambling addicts kill themselves.

So I thought it was time to do a show, and when they asked me to think of a name for the show, SNOWMAN MONKEY BBQ seemed like the right choice.

After all these years, you could have done a show anywhere. Why did you decide to do it in Mexico?
First of all, I love Mexico. I want to do shows where I like to hang out, cause that’s where I’m gonna make the artwork. I think it’s really gay when you’re an artist—especially if you call yourself a street artist, which sounds gay already—and you just make everything at your house, in the safety of your home, with all your Google images and references. I like to go to different places and have the experience of living there infect my art.

I can definitely see some Mexican references in the work you have here.
There’s all the huichol stuff I’ve seen at markets. I went to this market and—I guess you are not allowed to sell it—but this guy had peyote. I also did ayahuasca two years ago in Colombia with the Kogi tribe, and it was like, wow.

When you see the hallucinogenic patterns, the colors—I can’t even help it, it just comes out. For almost every art show I had in my early 20s, I would go to the art store and pick out colors like black, brown, and gray. That was my color palette. And now I’m like, “Give me the brightest orange, the brightest blue, the brightest green!” I love color.  

What about other Mexican references? I see some eagle and jaguar heads and a guy with a wrestling mask opening a giant vagina.
I go by this piñata shop every day, and it’s always like, the most retarded versions of R2-D2, Donald Duck... it’s amazing. All those piñatas are like Iron Man, Wonder Woman, they are all toys and kids’ stuff, and you hit them at kids’ parties. And then there’s a naked lady stripper piñata—it must look so disturbing to have people beating a naked woman with sticks.

I just went to the store one day and I was like, “I want everything.” And then I went back and gave them a drawing of Munko, which is the simplest stupid whale with a buck tooth. And they said, “How big do you want it?” A VW bug went by, and I said, “That size?” And they said, “Whaaat? That’s gonna be mucho dinero!” And I said, “That’s OK.”

Also, right when I got here, I met up with my friend and we went swimming with the whale sharks near Cancun, which was the most amazing, unbelievable experience. So I painted a giant whale shark—his mouth is ripping open with everything spilling out. Every single thing about the show is the imagery that I’ve taken in since I’ve been in Mexico: the places I’ve been, the fucking fish that I swim with. The paint here, the colors, all the materials that I used are from Mexico.

What about your other projects? Do you still have your radio show?
DVDASA is a podcast that I started in January. Every episode is getting more and more listeners, which is fucking crazy. We are having huge guests like Eli Roth, Lisa Ling, and John Cusack. It’s hosted by me, Asa Akira, and all our friends who hang out at the studio. It’s completely ruining my life. I’ve burned every bridge possible. I’ll tell the story of a girl I used to date, and I’ll change her name—I’d say something like “Stephanie,” you know? And people online would say, “This is the person he was talking about,” and then I’ll get a call from them. “Hey Dave, what the fuck is your problem? You are talking shit about me.” But it makes my life easier. It’s like going to the shrink. The reason why I haven’t gambled in two years is I’ve had three therapists, and I stopped seeing them about six months ago. And everyone is like, “Why did you stop?” I got my podcast, that’s why.

What about Thumbs Up!? Is there a new season in the pipeline?
We just finished shooting season four! We didn’t have much time, so we said, “Fuck it, let's just go from San Francisco to New York.” And I think it might be our craziest season so far. It was definitely fucking crazy shit, but it always is. Any time you are on the road asking someone for a ride it’s gonna get weird.

You made some art with Pedro Friedeberg for this show, right?
Yeah, I met Pedro last time I was here. Pedro Friedeberg is the last living Mexican surrealist. We have mutual friends and they were like, “Dave, you have to meet Pedro, he’ll love your shit, you’ll love his stuff,” so last time I came to Mexico I went to his house. He drinks like ten shots of mezcal every day, which does nothing to him, and I had one sip and I thought I was gonna die in his house—and his house is like... there’s not one inch of his house that doesn’t have art on it. He has all of his art and his friends’ art, and it’s just fucking surreal. He’s one of those cool old guys, he’s seen it all, been through it all, he’s been married a couple of times, all that shit.

I told him I’m doing this show here, and he was like, “Yeah, we should paint something together.” So we did the exquisite corpse where you fold the paper in half, and he would draw a serpent head and I would draw some hairy tits on it. They might actually be the best paintings in the show. We put like zero thought into them, we were being as stupid as possible, he was on the mezcal, we were just being sloppy fucking artists, just trying to crack each other up. If I’m not going to be a young dead artist, then I want to be an old cool guy like this. It’s fucking amazing to paint with a legend like that, you know?

If you are in Mexico City, go see David Choe’s show at the Museo Universitario del Chopo. It will be on display from August 17 to October 27. If you’re not, you can see the catalogue and some photos from the show here: snowmanmonkeybbq.mx

More art stuff:

Johnny Ryan's Chick Tracts

Skateable Art Is Not a Crime

Self-Portrait as a Nun with Some of My Mother's Favorite Famous People

Photo by Flickr user Jeremy Hall. 

Welcome to a special Hatin’ on Obama edition of This Week in Racism. I’ll be ranking news stories on a scale of 1 to RACIST, with “1” being the least racist and “RACIST” being the most racist.

- I get that a significant portion of the American public hates Barack Obama. Politicians can’t please everyone, and this country is in a particularly sticky rut. Unemployment is still hovering around seven percent, the Middle East is consumed with turmoil (again), and I still don’t have a jetpack. All of this is solely Obama’s fault.

Rather than proposing actual solutions to these intractable problems, a select few heroes have taken it upon themselves to incite the kind of racially incendiary hysteria that many thought had gone out of fashion around the same time whittlin' ceased to be a socially acceptable pastime.

One of these heroes is science fiction writer Orson Scott Card (best known for Ender's Game), who was already recognized as a complete asshole and an unrepentant homophobe, so it should be no surprise that he came out as one of the nuttier anti-Obama zealots.

In an essay titled “Unlikely Events” published on his personal blog in May (it wasn't noticed until this week, probably because who the fuck reads Orson Scott Card's personal blog?), Card predicted a future where President Obama has turned into a Hitler-like dictator who uses street gangs to pacify the citizenry before placing his wife Michelle on the throne of the United States. He calls this essay a “silly thought experiment,” which is nice, because it means that he at least knows that what he’s written is completely fucking stupid.

Before getting into the Glenn Beck-esque, masochistic fantasy he’s constructed for himself, he claims that Barack Obama “hates the very idea of compromise; he demonizes his critics.” This is in preamble to a screed in which the author demonizes someone he doesn’t agree with.

If you wondering when all of this stops being just crazy, but also becomes racist, look no further than the following passage:

“Having been anointed from the start of his career because he was that magical combination—a black man who talks like a white man (that's what they mean by calling him "articulate" and a "great speaker")—he has never had to work for a living, and he has never had to struggle to accomplish goals. He despises ordinary people, is hostile to any religion that doesn't have Obama as its deity, and his contempt for the military is complete.”

This implies two things: one, that intelligence is synonymous with talking “like a white man,” and two, that an Ivy League-educated man from a middle-class family who was elected President of the United States twice “never had to work for a living.” How does one define work these days? Maybe America’s next president can be a 75-year-old minimum wage earner who greets Walmart patrons? Or maybe it should be a dude who comes up with pretend stories for a living. Go fuck yourself, Card. RACIST

- It’s not just famous authors who are turning the fire hoses on Barack Obama. It’s also the Missouri State Fair. In between the “4H/FFA Meat Pen Competition” and the Missouri State Fair Queen (congrats to you, Ashley Bauer!), there was a rodeo featuring a clown wearing an Obama mask. Again, I fully understand the need to criticize our government. What I don’t fully grasp is why that criticism has to turn into simulated violence that looks a hell of a lot like a minstrel show.

The announcer at the aforementioned rodeo was heard saying, “We’re gonna stomp Obama now! As soon as their bull comes out, Obama don’t you move. He’s gonna getcha, getcha, getcha, getcha!” An eyewitness described the scene as “like an effigy at a Klan rally.” 

Maybe it’s time that we collectively admit a very painful truth: the United States of America is not ready to have a black president. As case after case of obnoxious, hateful rhetoric comes to light, it’s impossible to continue pretending that this is a “post-racial society” or that Obama’s election was a watershed moment. The fact that I have been doing this column every week for five months and haven’t ever been short of material is proofthat we have a long way to go.

Pundits like Ann Coulter who want to claim that liberals use race as a wedge issue ignore blatant acts of prejudice when they target people they don’t like. Minimizing racism after hearing stories like this is a harmful lie, and it’s RACIST.

- You might think that the answer to our racist, racist society is education. Unfortunately, a study is about to be released by sociology doctoral candidate, Geoffrey Wodtke, that claims that educated people are no less likely to be racist than uneducated people.

Wodtke told Science Daily, “High-ability whites are less likely to report prejudiced attitudes and more likely to say they support racial integration in principle, but they are no more likely than lower-ability whites to support open housing laws and are less likely to support school busing and affirmative action programs.”

Disagreeing with those positions aren’t necessarily signs of racism, but Wodtke continues:

"More intelligent members of the dominant group are just better at legitimizing and protecting their privileged position than less intelligent members. In modern America, where blacks are mobilized to challenge racial inequality, this means that intelligent whites say—and may in fact truly believe—all the right things about racial equality in principle, but they just don’t actually do anything that would eliminate the privileges to which they have become accustomed.”

It’s comforting to think that those in positions of authority are more enlightened, but without acting on their statements, it’s as hollow as me bemoaning the effects of global warming but refusing to stop driving my car two blocks to buy a 7-Eleven hot dog. 9

The Ten Most Racist Tweets of the Week [all grammar sic'd]:

10. @al_yanski: I'mnot racist I just really don't like Indian people

9. @benzo_diazepine: I'mnot racist at all, but black dick scares me

8. @realtreeromeo: Do you like black people? — Yea I have no problem with blacks. N*ggers are a different story....

7. @erikalovesyew: Would you fuck a black guy ? — No and no I'm not racist.

6. @high_imemily_: I'mnot racist at all but I know for a fact sometimes different races try to pull the race card and use it to their advantage

5. @WLGTchipthaarip: hella asians in the lab surprise surprise

4. @Deannay_Auldth: How many Mexícans does it take to build a,,,,,,, oh shit, they're done,

3. @SmoosieQ: Can someone please explain to me how the term "self deportation" is racist? Because I'm really not seeing it.

2. @let_live182: I'm not racist but I hate every race, whether you're brown white or black please enter my gas chamber

1. @thilanwij: I'mthe only non African American person on this shuttle #notracist

Last Week in Racism: Oprah Accused a Swiss Person of Racism

@dave_schilling

A “Day of Anger” was called for by the Muslim Brotherhood today, in response to the murder of more than 600 Mohamed Morsi supporters on Wednesday. The massacre was carried out by the Egyptian military, as part of a crackdown on sit-ins led by the Brotherhood in the cities of Rabba Al-Adawiya and Nahda. Before the attack, the Brotherhood had organized over 20 marches to converge on central Cairo’s Ramses Square as a show of defiance to the military coup, which ousted former president Morsi on July 3.

The protest in Ramses remained peaceful for about an hour, until armed men reportedly attacked the nearby Asbakeya Police Station. (Pro-Morsi protesters, however, deny this and claim that the police started firing without provocation.)

“I have been here since the start and I tell you nobody did anything,” claimed Mohamed Ali, a lifelong Muslim Brotherhood member. “The police just attacked us. If anyone is shooting, it is either police or counter-revolutionary thugs.”

When I arrived at Ramses Square, the tension—and gun smoke—in the air was palpable. The blasts were very real and very loud. A metronomic crack of a rifle rang out every 30 seconds or so, interrupting the drumming of the helicopters circling overhead. Every now and again, a short burst of heavy automatic fire could be heard. It was impossible to know which direction the shots was coming from, or who was doing it, but a group of men started anxiously pointing to a nearby bridge where a couple of armoured trucks had parked. Still 200 yards from the square, people were hugging the walls, crowding together behind the corners of buildings for cover.

“Do you see us?” cried Mohamed, “Do you see any weapons? We are peaceful and they are killing us, these dogs.” A man across the streets started a chant of “The Interior Ministry are thugs,” and everyone echoed his sentiment.

Despite the chant, MB members were also seen with weapons. Egyptian state TV widely broadcast MB members firing assault weapons on 15 May bridge during a march toward Ramses Square. Later, the State TV showed the on-going clashes under the running banner “Egypt Fighting Terrorism.”

Not five minutes after speaking to Mohamed, I stumbled across two men on the periphery of the square who were assembling Molotov cocktails from two leftover crates filled with empty glass coke bottles, one carefully placing pre-cut cloth into each of the bottles while the other carefully inspected each one. They reprimanded me as I tried to take a photo and pointed instead toward the police. “Take a photo of them,” one of the men told me. “They’re the killers”.

The closer you were to the square the faster people moved, shadowing the buildings for cover. A 63-year-old retired engineer approached asking to borrow my pen. On his left forearm he began to write a phone number and above it, his name “Wael.” “It’s my family’s number, just in case I am killed,” he explained to me. “I am not a supporter of Mohamed Morsi you must understand, I am just anti-army and anti-coup.”

Just past Al Ahmar hospital, about 150 feet south of Ramses Square, the gunshots became so loud they sounded like they were being fired right beside me. After one such bang, a man—30 feet in front of me—stumbled. A quarter-sized hole had appeared in his upper left arm, blood squirting out. After two steps, he fell over and in less than 30 seconds was scooped up by fellow protestors, bandaged, and placed on a scooter that took him to another hospital.

Immediately, people rushed to the locked gates of the Al Ahmar hospital. “We are dying here,” they yelled to the doctors standing inside. One man started shaking the gates so violently others had to restrain him, but not before more gunshots were heard, sending the crowd running for better cover.

Across the country violent clashes have endured, and this likely won’t be the last. Meanwhile, the Armed Forces’ reasoning—that cracking down on the sit-ins was the first step to stability and security—seems dubious at best. With every death, another martyr is made and the divide between the Armed Forces and the Muslim Brotherhood grows. At this pace, it is beginning to seem impossible that a peaceful reconciliation can be made anytime soon.

More from Egypt:

VICE Speaks with Gigi Ibrahim About Violence in Egypt

Mosques Are Becoming Morgues in Cairo

Muslim Brotherhood Supporters Are Burning Churches in Egypt

Image created by the author's father.

In a recent Amazon Kindle Singles interview, President Obama blamed Kim Kardashian and Kanye West for the death of the American dream. “[In the past] kids weren’t monitoring every day what Kim Kardashian was wearing or where Kanye West was going on vacation and thinking that somehow that was the mark of success," he said. 

You don't need to be an underemployed college graduate to know this comment is ludicrous—Kimye has nothing to do with America's massive inequality. Kanye West grew up with a single mother in urban Chicago, toiled at the mall for years while tirelessly writing beats, and eventually became a superstar, creating some of the decades most loved and iconic albums in the process. And like me, Kim is the descendent of survivors of the Armenian genocide. If you haven't heard about this genocide, it's because Obama and past presidents have refused to acknowledge this horror story, because they worry they might damage diplomatic ties with Turkey. Basically, in 1915 the Ottoman government took it upon themselves to exterminate the Armenian ethnic minority that made its home in modern-day Turkey; over a million Armenians were killed, and Hitler went on to use the genocide as a model and inspiration for the Holocaust. 

Obama says Kim's booty clapped the American dream into submission, but Kim is a targeted ethnic group's descendent who went on to capitalize on what God gave her (namely, her big butt), make a name for herself, and start her own family with a rich rapper who also has humble roots. Call me crazy, but that sounds like the American dream to me. 

And besides that, Kim and Kanye are pop culture icons who have nothing to do with the fact that that I am one of many over-educated college graduates saddled with student debt wondering when I’ll be able to move out of my childhood bedroom. To solve the game of Clue that is “Who ruined America?,” Obama should probably look past the relatively harmless world of reality-television materialism and examine his administration and the leaders that have come before him. You know, dream-crushers like these motherfuckers:

Image via Wiki Commons.

THE SUPREME COURT

These conservative farts reversed the Voting Rights Act, because they believe you can use The Secret to wish away racism. But it’s hard to live the American dream when you can't vote, and countless backwards states have trampled to pass restrictive voting laws with the enthusiasm of Black Friday shoppers stampeding for a flat screen TV. Oh. Also, I don’t know if you’ve heard, but it's pretty much legal to kill black teens in Florida now. 

Image by Flickr user DonkeyHotey.

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION

I don't need to tell you how much George W. Bush sucked. Just go look at the pins on your old middle school backpack. 

Image via Wiki Commons.

THE NRA

Part of living the American dream means feeling safe, and yet I can probably find more people on the internet willing to defend George Zimmerman than Kris Jenner's new talk show. For instance, the NRA treasures their right to shoot at shit more than human life. Even worse than these weird man-babies is the terrified congress that supports them against the wishes of 86 percent of the public. My uncle is a former felon who rides a Harley and owns a shitload of handguns and a petting zoo of rottweilers, and even he thinks that automatic weapons are stupid and unnecessary. His motto is "If you can't kill it with six bullets, you have bigger problems on your hands." 

Screenshot of the Animaniacs theme song.

BILL CLINTON

Even Bill Clinton, the saxophonist for the Animaniacs, fucked with the possibility of obtaining the American dream. Yeah, Billy Boy presided over an era of serenity and economic prosperity—one that is referenced over and over again when we discuss how fucked the state of our country is—but he also passed the Defense of Marriage Act (screwing the homosexuals who voted for him up the ass) and reversed the Glass-Stegall legislation passed during the Great Depression, which regulated commercial banks to prevent another Great Depression. “The Glass–Steagall law is no longer appropriate,” he said, staring suggestively at a cigar. And ten years later the American economy deflated like Anna Nicole’s first boob job. If you want to believe that Kim buying a house full of gold toilets contributes to American decay, you have to admit that Clinton was a pretty strong dream killer.

Image via Wiki Commons.

BABY BOOMERS

These are the baby boomers. They wear organic deodorant and bloviate about “free love” and other virtues they learned at the dirt-orgy known as Woodstock 1969. Later, they used these values to elect an anti-semitic peanut farmer named Jimmy Carter, the alien uber-lord Ronald Regan, and the entire Bush Dynasty. Oblivious to sub-prime mortgage rates, the boomers also bought condo after condo till they sank the economy like a Carnival cruise ship. Despite all this, they call unemployed college grads lazy, as if they didn't create the economy that has forced kids with law degrees to live with their mothers. And if you ask the boomers about the impending social security crisis created by their rapidly aging demographic, they will deflect with a complaint about how nobody makes eye contact on the subway anymore. The worst part is the boomers make these points via bulleted chain emails.

Image via Wiki Commons.

OBAMA

Barack Obama is not about to collect social security, but he’s just as responsible for America’s decline as the fat cats that came before him. He loves over-reaching national security laws so much, Michelle makes bitchy jokes about PRISM whenever she gets too tipsy at parties. Thanks to Obama, even the most hardworking and upstanding citizens can be spied on for ordering a pressure cooker online. And if you don't think your information is being looked at, you're wrong.

Start using the NSA's three-hops rule and you'll shock yourself. I have two three-hop connections to the Boston Bombers, a two-hop connection to Timothy McVeigh, and a three-hop connection to Whitey Bulger. Just admitting that on the internet means a snickering office of NSA nerds have legal justification to comb through my break-up texts. And I’m very, very boring. I have a great books degree and live tweet episodes of Princesses Long Island. That’s about it.

But in Obama’s mind, watching Princesses Long Island is a problem. Going after Kimye isn’t the first time Obama has criticized reality television to make a point—Obama loves to use popular culture as a tool to explain America. And by using the Kardashians as a symbol, he admits that Americans know and understand the first family of reality television. Obama uses pop culture to his advantage by making a big show of being “just like us,” upping his credibility factor through Star Wars jokes and a friendship with Jay-Z. What makes Hov cool and his BFF and collaborator Kanye a “jackass” who knocked up the woman who murdered the American dream? Both men perpetuate materialism in their rhymes, but at least Kanye's lyrics question our cultural obsession with chains and croissants. Obama’s reasoning is unclear. Maybe he needs to stay in his own wheelhouse and point the blame at the powerful people who actually exert control rather than taking cheap shots at the lowest common denominator.   

@The_Sample_Life

Previously - The Monarch Mind Control Mystique

VICE’s Wail Gzoly sent us these harrowing photographs of clashes between pro-Morsi supporters and Egyptian security forces from Friday.

Violence continues Saturday at Ramses Square in Downtown Cairo, and some experts are indicating that the Egyptian military is being purposefully brutal on Islamists in order to foment long-standing animosity and turmoil.

Photo of Falcon Bowse.

For this week's Mahal, I headed over to Falcon Bowse's pop-up shop in Greenpoint, Brooklyn to chat with with Falcon Bowse himself. Also known as Fuckin' Boss, Falcon has spent many years traveling between New York and San Francisco creating homies' tatts and doing interior design. His most recent project, the Amazing Falcon Bowse T-shirt Transformation Program, creates five-panel hats out of t-shirts. In between making some rad skater's new hats, he turned my favorite shirt into a hat and spoke to me about his new store.

VICE: You've lived in Florida for most of your life. How did you end up in New York City?
Falcon Bowse: I've been coming to New York City for the summer for most of my life. This year I was up here with the gx1000 crew filming, skating, and getting my kickstarter project ready. The day I was leaving New York, I bumped into Joel Mienholz while randomly walking around Manhattan. I knew Joel from Florida, but hadn't seem him for years. I had a couple of the hats I made out of shirts in my backpack and showed him a Hopps, and he got so siked. His brain started going a million miles per hour, and he was like, “We have to do a gallery show here in New York.” I told him, “I leave tomorrow night, but that would be amazing, and I'd love to, but that would be pretty hard to figure out that quick.”

So I get a text from him the next morning with an address, and it says “Show up.” Just so happens to be about 500 feet from my friends apartment I've been staying at in Greenpoint. I walk up, and there’s Joel and a sexy lil lady. I introduce myself, and she says, “So good to meet you. I'm Rachel, and here's your keys!” She just signed the lease on a gallery space and had nothing planned for the month of August and just handed it right over to me to make into a Falcon Bowse kickstarter pop-up shop. Insane.

What led you into the hat business?
I always wanted to have my own company. Growing up skating, I remember melting down my mom’s candles and crayons and selling them to other kids as wax. When I wanted to start Falcon Bowse, one of the first things I wanted to do was five-panels, but when I looked into it the smallest minimum orders were like 200, 500, or 1,000, and they were super expensive unless you went overseas to get them unsustainably made. So I started with shirts, dying them with fruits and veggies, making my own labels, cutting up pants, and making belts. It was pretty easy actually, but they looked pretty fucked up, so it did take a long time to figure out how to make them look proper (iron everything, every step). I don't remember the thought process exactly, but one day I just tried a t-shirt, because it already had a sick screen print on it, and I knew I could do any fabric. I messed with interfacing to get the thickness right, and then it just worked, and I was sparked.

How to make a five-panel hat from a t-shirt.

What does the five-panel hat mean to you?
Five-panels are a really simple beautiful design with endless combinations of fabric possibilities. I'm not obsessed with collecting them or even wearing them.

Has the community been receptive to the project?
I don't even live in NYC, but the support from old friends and [the ability to] meet people and become instant old friends has been insane. Everyone has seriously gone out of their way to participate in one way or another to make this project a success. After getting a completely empty storefront, I called a girl named Trish I had met a day earlier, who has a set building warehouse and community in Greenpoint called Domestic Construction. She let me get right in and use all the materials and machines for my store. Then I needed more boards with graphics that match shirt graphics and more shirts, so Josh at Theories of Atlantis opened up his warehouse without hesitation and helped me out. Which is still crazy to me cause I grew up immortalizing all the dudes in the static videos and stuff. The homies presence is the absolute shit. All the Florida homies are here at the shop everyday.

Falcon chilling with a homie who just got a new five-panel hat.

What's your goal for The Amazing Falcon Bowse T-shirt Transformation Program?
What I want to do with Falcon Bowse is keep putting out hand-made, quality pieces of clothing made in a sustainable, environmentally friendly manner. The whole idea is to just bring us all together as skateboarders and creative people in general. It’s to promote a collaborative effort between all skateboarders and brands as a reminder of our common passion that is skating.

@RedAlurk

Previously - Billy Rohan Left Florida to Create Illuminati Videos

In the days before online video, a long-bearded man dancing with his pet raccoon to Aretha Franklin on his porch in rural Tennessee would have gone unnoticed, just one weird blissful moment in a world full of them. But Mark “Coonrippy” Brown’s clip (above) of him dancing with his four-legged companion Gunshow has gone viral viral since he posted it in July 2012, racking up more than 1 million views on YouTube and attracting so much attention it was featured on The Tonight Show and Good Morning America, which are like YouTube for old people.

It got some not-so-welcome attention, however—according to Coonrippy, the video became so popular that the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency (TWRA) decided to step in and confiscate his raccoon, Rebekah, in late July. (By this time, Gunshow had gone on to that great hollow tree in the sky, but Coonrippy had a new raccoon pet.) Rebakah was taken to a wildlife rehabilitation center, even though arguably all she needed to be “rehabilitated” from was having a decent life as part of a family. She even got to take showers:

Coonrippy, a former animal control officer who lives in Gallatin, isn’t taking this lying down. He’s launched something of a media offense, telling his raccoon-loving fans on Facebook and YouTube to call upon Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam to free Rebekah and return her to him. He’s given interviews to all sorts of radio and TV stations, and his story of one man fighting the unfeeling law that stole his furry loved one has captured the imagination of the nearly 5,000 people who signed a petition at Change.org. (That petition wasn’t even started by Coonrippy, but by a stranger in California who heard about his cause.) It remains to be seen whether Haslam will pardon Rebekah, but this seems to be a clear-cut case of the government abusing its power and taking what it has no right to take. I recently spoke with Coonrippy on the phone while he was driving to an undisclosed location to take a much-needed break from the media.

VICE: What law did the TWRA accuse you of breaking, exactly? Is it illegal to keep raccoons as pets?
Mark “Coonrippy” Brown: You cannot keep any wildlife in captivity. But my argument with them was that if this is the case, then every elementary school and biology class in high school and college is in violation if they've got tadpoles in an aquarium or a garter snake, or even if a child brings a box turtle to show-and-tell.

They didn't care for that line of argument, it seems.
Well, they did say something along the lines of schools are in violation, but they're not going to do a walkaround in every school in Tennessee. But when you have a raccoon on your shoulder in the shower and you make a viral video, if you've already had one viral video under your belt, it kind of draws a little attention to yourself.

Do you have any other animals besides Rebekah?
We've got a couple of rabbits that we raise. They're out there in the yard somewhere. But I can't distinguish those from the other nine hanging around. We have a possum; his name is Henry. We throw food outside for him around eight or nine, and he'll show up and eat it.

We had another raccoon while I was an animal control officer. I got a phone call from the police department that said there was a rabid raccoon. When I got there, the raccoon was disoriented so I put him in a cage. I brought him home and got to looking at him, thought I'd give him something to drink, and put a bowl of water in his cage. I saw him drinking water, so I knew he could swallow—I knew he wasn't rabid. And then I put some scraps of food out there, and he ate them. After about 15 minutes later, we opened the door and let him out. He meandered off about a foot, then turned around, went right back into the cage, and continued eating. We named him John Boat. He's still out there somewhere; we used to see him quite often. I haven't seen him in a while, but I'm sure he's still out there.

So you have a special sort of feeling towards racoons?
Yeah, I've been called the raccoon whisperer. [laughs]

Has this been the case your whole life?
Well, I've had wild pets ever since I was able to go catch one. I had a skunk named Pepé Le Pew. I had a deer one time named Trophy—that was not a good name to give a buck deer... I had a hog one time with a broken leg, his name was Aesop, as in the fables. The list goes on and on. I had two squirrels named Heckle and Jeckle. I had an owl, a little screech owl named Mr. Bird—I come to find out he was Mrs. Bird. She flew off and had lots of babies. She used to come around all the time, but I haven't seen her lately. My place was pretty much a haven for wildlife. It still is.

But the whole story about Rebekah is a high school agriculture teacher had a chicken house project somewhere and there was a raccoon in there killing chickens. So she ordered two of his students to kill the raccoon. After they killed this raccoon they found out she had two babies. They called me because they knew I had a history of [looking after] orphaned animals.

The officials told me that if Rebekah is too domesticated, she'll more than likely be used as an educational tool at TWRA-hosted events. But she’ll be in captivity. And the other side is, if she is released back into the wild, then a $28 hunting license is all you need to go legally shoot her out of the top of a tree. You can have your coon dogs chase her through the woods. I protected her from both captivity and from being killed. But that's what weird: You can't get a permit to keep one, yet you can get a permit to kill one.

Was she like a pet when she was with you? Or did she come and go?
She could come and go as she pleased. But when she was there and we weren’t, we treated her no different than you would treat your house cat or your house dog. I had a mansion of a cage inside the house that she stayed in. It’s just like your dog—you keep them penned up so they don't chew your furniture up and crap all over the house while you're gone. Then when I come home we let her out and she did what she did. But she did use the litter box too, by the way.

Did you train her to do that?
Well yes and no. If you sense she needs to do her business and you set her in the litter box once or twice, she’ll always go back to the same place. With raccoons, once you get them using the bathroom in one place, they'll always go back to it.

Do you think people should not be allowed to keep raccoons generally?
Well yes and no. You know, we’ve got so many laws out there right now that it's actually pathetic. And this is the way it's always been. When there are not enough criminals, our government actually creates them. But I'm not saying everybody who wants a raccoon should go out and have one. I wouldn't recommend anyone having a raccoon, unless they know a little bit about the behavior of that animal. And I wouldn’t go out and try to domesticate a raccoon that was taken from its mother, or a month old, or two months old. You've got to imprint them. When they open their eyes [for the first time] and you're what they see, then that's where the imprint starts. But it's real hard to domesticate something that already knows what it is.

Hopefully no one who doesn’t have your expertise will go out and get a raccoon.
Yeah, you've got to have some experience. You've got to know what you're doing. You can't just raise it if you haven't a clue what to do. And I happen to know. It's just one of my areas of expertise. Some people are experts in electricity. Some people are experts at working on automobiles. Some people are experts at heart surgery. I happen to be an expert at whispering to 'coons, I guess.

@HCheadle

More on how people and animals live together in harmony:

The Man Who Eats Roadkill

Have Animals Declared War on Us?

The British Badger War Begins

It can be strangely refreshing when an artist decides to get back to basics. Things seem clearer, easier to decipher, and simpler. They lock into what’s really important and go for it. Filmmaker Riley Stearns left society and traveled deep into the woods to find his story. Not only did he shred the story to its essentials, but the film's production as well. Four actors in one location with a few shots of nature sprinkled in to show time passing. This movie could’ve cost $50 to make, but he uses his stripped down budget to enhance its aesthetic. Most of the action occurs off-screen, that makes it all the more dynamic. Even the title of the film, The Cub, is explicit and direct. It’s the story of a five-year-old girl who reads at an eight-year-old’s level being turned over by her middle-class parents to a pack of wolves to learn “strength, self-reliance, and cunning behavior." The girl is timid at first, clutching to her father’s leg, but as he says, “[Wolves] can smell fear,” so she woman’s up. 

—Jeffrey Bowers

More VICE Shorts:

'Death to the Tinman' by Ray Tintori

'I Love Sarah Jane' by Spencer Susser

'The Ellington Kid' by Dan Sully

On Friday, August 16, 2013, the Muslim Brotherhood called for a “Day of Anger” following the brutal clearing of two pro-Morsi sit-ins by Egyptian security forces that killed over 600 people on Wednesday.

Thousands of supporters of deposed president Mohamed Morsi gathered in Cairo’s Ramses Square for noon prayers Friday. Violent clashes between police and protesters followed throughout the day, resulting in dozens of deaths. 

VICE's Wail Gzoly sent us this video dispatch from the day's events. He captured armed pro-Morsi protesters exchanging fire with police near the Azbakeya police station in Cairo and civilians fighting each other too. Some of the gun-toting Muslim Brotherhood members saw Wail's camera and threatened to kill him if he filmed them. 

Some of the footage is very graphic and disturbing.

More from Egypt:

Death Toll Rises on Day of Anger

VICE Speaks with Gigi Ibrahim About the Violence in Egypt

Image via Flickr user Alex Weimer.

In my weeded out life, I try to focus on the lucky little bonuses the universe throws my way. Many of these joys are a direct result of my struggling memory—a forgotten gram found in a neglected pair of pants, a condom discovered in my room in the nick of time, the other half of that awesome sandwich from yesterday. It’s never anything mindblowing, really; just little occurrences that let you know the odds are in your favor. I try not to take these moments for granted, but I recently had a couple of stressful days and found myself thinking, I need a break! A break never came, but the stress reminded me of something that happened on a road trip with my brother, whom I call Bhai.

Bhai and I have done a million road trips together, and I thoroughly enjoy having him as a travel companion, although he can be kind of a pain in the ass while he’s driving—he’s one of those people that insists that the shotgun rider’s main responsibility is to make things easier for the driver, and he can be a real Nazi about the music selection. Nevertheless, he is my brother and my number one chiefing buddy from way back in the day, so the rides are always a blazy adventure. On one particular trip, we were part of a family caravan on our way to my uncle’s wedding in Toronto. The grownups and kids were in a big SUV, and the in-betweeners, Bhai and I, were in a compact rental car leading the way.

When we left New York early that morning, we hit the highway in an orderly line with the family car behind us, so it was impossible to smoke without being detected. About an hour in, I slyly rolled a joint, and just at the right moment, Bhai zipped the little compact into the next lane—we lost ourselves in the other traffic for just enough time to smoke. Moments later, we repositioned ourselves in front of the unsuspecting fam. We repeated this exercise five or six more times on the long drive north, and we successfully hid our smoking from the family—although there were definitely several other cars not related to us that were visibly offended by the two rapidly blazing brown guys tearing up I-90 in a Geo Metro.

The plan was to drop the rental car off at Buffalo Airport, where we’d meet a cousin who would drive us both to our uncle’s place in Canada. The cousin was not down with weed, so I began panicking. Mind you, I wasn’t panicking because I was stoned retarded and about to be trapped in a car with a lame-wad Desi family member. I was panicking because there were at least two grams of haze left in the jar. We didn’t want to risk taking it over the border with us, but we didn’t have enough time to smoke it—and I most definitely was not going to let us throw it in the garbage. We sat in the rental lot and I twiddled the plastic Cartoon Network cube in my fingers. I hopped out, and as my brother went and returned the car, I walked into an empty parking spot and dropped the cube behind the cement bar. I read the space number aloud, “346,” cringed at what a waste this was, and walked back to the entrance where our cousin had already collected Bhai. As soon as I got in the back seat, I realized I had a pack of hemp papers in my pocket. Not wanting to have even the mildest contraband when crossing the border, I discretely tossed the pack out the car window before we exited the parking garage.

After that, we were in Toronto for several days doing the usual brown people wedding stuff: standing around awkwardly talking to relatives that we weren’t sure we were related to, sustaining painful chit-chat with people we were related to and wished we weren’t, and trying not to check out any girls because we might be related to them. We managed to sneak in a few beers and a game of pool that week, but other than that it was pretty boring. That boredom extended all the way to the drive back to Buffalo with the same cousin. Neither Bhai nor I had blazed in many days, and we were about to hop on a flight from Buffalo back to New York. The worst part was that we had about four hours to kill before the flight, because my cousin wanted to get back to his shitty life in Buffalo mad early in the morning.

He dropped us off at the terminal; we waited until he had pulled away to light cigarettes. I pulled the printout of our reservation from my pocket to double check the flight time and noticed the flight number. I read it out loud to Bhai: “Delta 346 to New York.” He looked at me blankly. “Do you think that Cartoon Network cube is still sitting where I left it?” I wondered out loud. 

“No fucking way,” said Bhai with a tone that was both skeptical and hopeful. Without another word, we walked into the terminal and followed the signs to the rental car lot. I told the attendant we had lost some keys a little over a week earlier and asked if we could take a look where we had left the car. He ineptly waved us in, and we trekked up to the third floor and counted our way to space 346.

There was a car parked in 346, and its front bumper was edged over the cement bar. I reached under it to feel around and could not believe my senses when my fingers gripped a plastic cube. The weed was still there! I pulled it out and waved it at Bhai, whose eyes went wide with excitement. We rejoiced for a moment before getting serious about the next steps of the process.

The weed had sat out there for many humid mornings, so it was a little damp but still smelled potent as hell. A little tobacco would help it burn just fine. But we lacked papers and a secure place to smoke. Bhai proposed emptying out a cigarette and stuffing it with the weed—the added benefit of camouflage would allow us to smoke it anywhere out of noseshot. On the other hand, I was feeling lucky. I led us back to the entrance of the lot. Just after I waved a thank you to the attendant, I gave the entire entranceway a hard scan. My eyes stopped at a little white rectangle—sure enough, the pack of hemp papers was sitting at the base of the gate. I snatched them up, and we hurried off.

I handed everything to Bhai. He went into the bathroom and rolled our little bonus into a smooth, cigarette-like spliff. We triumphantly chiefed that bad boy at the far end of the pavement outside the terminal. Having not smoked in days, we got extra ripped, and the rest of the excursion was all the more bearable for it. It is definitively one of the best things that has ever happened to me.

For this and all the other wins I experience, I thank the universe. I wish you, dear reader, the same fortune in all things weed.

@ImYourKid

Previously - The Panickers

The Black Fish’s founder Wietse van der Werf. Photo by Chris Grodotzki.

On a warm night in July 2012, off the island of Ugljan in the Croatian Adriatic, two activists slipped into the water near a line of huge fish farms. Security boats patrolled the perimeter of the vast circular nets, as guards stationed on a nearby hill kept watch through the night. And for good reason: The thousands of bluefin tuna in the farms, destined for the tables of Japanese sushi restaurants, were worth millions. Individual fish routinely sell for more than $1,500 at wholesale markets in Tokyo and closer to home. The Croatian tuna had been caught as juveniles under a loophole in international law, and were being “fattened up” before heading to market.

Wearing tactical diving gear, the divers arrived at the first net, slicing three quarters of its length and sending bluefin streaming out. The divers swam to another net, repeating the process, and then headed home. The security teams circling above were none the wiser until the following day. The activists, from a group known as the Black Fish, were long gone. The raid was similar to a previous attack in September 2010, when Black Fish divers freed dolphins from holding pens near Taiji, Japan.

A sailor prepares to head out to sea with five 2.5 kilometer nets in ant'Agata di Militello, Sicily. 2.5 kilometers is the legal limit but Mediterranean fisherman often join multiple nets of this size together to get around the law. Photo by Chris Grodotzki.

Since the action in Japan and Croatia, the group has turned its sights on drift nets—long, fine nets suspended from buoys, typically across fish migration paths. Banned in international waters since 1992, the longest nets, which can stretch 50 miles behind industrial-sized fishing vessels, are associated with almost indiscriminate killing of marine life. Their mesh size can be as little as ten centimeters, meaning young fish are caught before they can reproduce. Sea turtles, dolphins, and sharks also fall prey, and since they’re illegal to catch, they’re returned, often mortally wounded, to the ocean.

In spite of the ban put in place at the urging of the UN, the practice continues. From the Indian Ocean to the North Pacific, illegal drift nets are still in use, and no proper authority exists to monitor their use or bring prosecutions. In the Mediterranean, their use is often controlled by various mobs, according to the Black Fish’s founder Wietse van der Werf: “Organized crime and corruption is a big part of why drift netting carries on in the Mediterranean. The Calabrian mafia is known to run the biggest operation in Europe, right alongside the biggest cocaine-running operation—they’re pretty much one and the same.”

And they’re hard to catch, said Wietse. When EU inspectors roll around, corrupt captains will take their nets to pieces, head to sea, or “re-flag” their boats, dodging European rules by hoisting a North African flag. A few years ago, Italian fishermen were given millions to hand over their drift nets and invest in more “sustainable” gear—they immediately spent the cash on bigger, badder drift nets. These were either stored in non-EU countries or overlooked by corrupt Italian officials (paid off, ironically, using the money set aside for newer, less damaging nets).

A member of the Black Fish toying around with a quadcopter supplied by ShadowView. Photo by Chris Grodotzki.

So illegal fishermen have to be caught actually using the nets in order to be brought to justice. Which is why the Black Fish have begun to invest in drones. With the help of ShadowView, a non-profit which provides charities and NGOs with unmanned helicopters and planes, the group has begun monitoring ports for signs of illegal kit. They’ve just finished a series of “port inspections” in Albania and Italy, using cameras mounted on small “quadcoptor” drones to gather evidence from above.

Posing as beach-towelled vacationers, Wietse and his undercover crews normally go unnoticed until their little robot is buzzing above a bunch of pissed off fishermen. In other spots, like Libya and Tunisia, drones tend not to go down so well, so the Black Fish use hidden cameras and a tourists’ blank expression to wander around ports with impunity. The group is still analyzing their videos and pictures from this year, but have already spotted several “blacklisted” vessels, each tied to illegal fishing in the past. A few weeks ago, they spotted dead sea turtles—“Among the most highly protected species in the world,” Wietse said—tangled in Tunisian nets.

A Black Fish member logging the registration numbers of fishing boats that have been blacklisted by the EU. Photo by Chris Grodotzki.

However, to properly catch the estimated 500 illegal Mediterranean driftnetters in action will take bigger, more expensive drones. By next year, Wietse plans to run big, “fixed wing,” petrol-powered unmanned planes, with a much bigger range, which should be able to conclusively prove illegal drift net use. “When governments can’t do anything about such a vital problem,” he told me, “volunteers with a little time and money can make a positive difference.”

Also next year, the Black Fish plan to score a second-hand coastguard ship to use as a platform for drones and speedboats fast enough to catch drift net users red-handed. They also have a plan to create a diplomatic incident and force the issue: “Once we have the ship,” Wietse told me, “we want to put a British flag on it and then try to enforce the law somewhere close to, say, Spain. This would anger the Spanish and force them to pick sides—illegal poachers or European law. With any luck, this will create an international problem and force governments to crack down.”

Wietse is critical of celebrity fishing activists Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall who support the relaxation of rules over fish that are discarded for being too small or outside of quotas, arguing that their approach is just a way of allowing young fish to be caught and sold legally. He’s also sceptical of so-called “sustainable” fishing in general, which he says “legitimizes destructive fishing,” offering little more than a warm glow to “ethical” shoppers.

The shell of a sea turtle, one of the world's most protected species, found in Tunisia.

When they’re not angering mafia boat crews, the Black Fish are training teams in diving and other skills in order to widen the organization’s scope. Wietse likens his plan to the early days of police forces, in which private militias were formed into organized forces in their own local areas. They’ve made a film with the help of volunteers, and are spending the winter lecturing and raising money to buy their ship.

Over-fishing isn’t the only target of activists with drones. ShadowView are working with the conservation charity SPOTS to catch poachers at secret locations in South Africa, with the Sea Shepherd group filming illegal seal slaughter on the Namibian coast, and with the League Against Cruel Sports in the UK to film illegal fox hunts. Protesters have been using drones to spy on cops for a couple of years now, and their price is falling.

But for Wietse, perhaps unsurprisingly, driftnets and over-fishing are still the main aim: “The death of the seas is the worst environmental problem we face, and using drift nets is like destroying a forest to catch a couple of wild boar—it’s just insane.” Luckily, according to him, “It’s also one of the easiest problems to solve—it just needs to be addressed now.”

@alexchitty

More from the human race's war on the animal kingdom:

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Animals Vs. Us

Scuffles and gunshots rang out in Ramses Square on Saturday as police arrested Muslim Brotherhood members at the al Fatah mosque in central Cairo. Police stormed the mosque after claiming that protesters inside were firing at them from the mosque's minaret. They had been hiding out at the mosque since Friday's “Day of Anger.”

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Image via Flickr user another.point.in.time.

This week, I lost a childhood friend to drugs and alcohol. He was only 24 years old. My friend was a brilliant musician and talented artist, but he was also dependant on benzodiazepines to function. Although we’re still waiting on a coroner’s report, I believe his drug addiction may have contributed to his death.

My friend never spoke about why he used or if he suffered from childhood trauma. All I know is that he liked to use the way that I did. I remember one time he invited me to Disneyland when I was sixteen. He had a hotel room there, and by the time I showed up at 2PM, he had already started partying. At the time the amount of drinks he drank, pot he smoked, and Xanax he snorted didn’t seem like a big deal. Looking back, I wonder why he needed all those substances just to ride Splash Mountain.

Sadly, he’s not my first friend to die of a drug addiction—he’s isn’t even the first friend I've lost this year. But his death still blows my mind, because going to friends’ funerals never gets easier. To see the parents’ despair is gut wrenching, and as the mother of a newborn baby, I can’t imagine my child leaving this world before me. Young peoples' deaths leave their friends and family with many unanswered questions—the biggest one being “What could I have done differently to prevent my child’s overdose?” But I understand how these deaths can happen. Having been addicted to prescription medication myself, I know first hand how dangerous these drugs can be.

At a very young age, psychiatrists prescribed me large doses of medication, but never taught me about the drugs’ addictive nature and side effects, which can be fatal. When my doctor first gave me Xanax, he never mentioned the drug can cause seizures, heart attack, stroke, and hallucinations if I abruptly stopped using them. Instead, after years of use, I began to depend on the drug. It led me to having even bigger anxiety attacks than I was having in the first place, because the thought of not having enough sent me into a state of paranoia. If I didn’t have the benzos to numb the pain and trauma, I believed I wouldn’t be able to function—I went into a spiraling hole of fear and wasn’t able to leave my house.

What has happened to my friends and me aren’t isolated events. Currently, 70 percent of Americans are on some sort of prescription medication. The US Center for Disease Control report says, “The estimated number of [Emergency Room] visits involving nonmedical use of benzodiazepines increased 89 percent during 2004-2008 (from 143,500 to 271,700 visits) and another 24 percent during 2007-2008."  

People weren’t always this way. Robert Whitaker, author of Mad in America, measured both historical Social Security Administration payments for the mentally ill and rates of mental illness hospitalizations. In the US one in 300 were considered mentally ill in 1955. Today, one in 50 people are diagnosed as mentally ill.  And according to the National Institute of Mental Health, Anxiety Disorders affect about 40 million American adults age 18 years and older. 

Clearly, people are using these drugs because we're afraid. But what are we afraid of? I personally was afraid of the pain. The pain associated with living a life without a bumper or a safety net, which were my drugs. It seems as if we must be afraid of life, itself, afraid of the human experience.  The English philosopher and mystic, Alan Watts, called it the “quaking mess.”  This is what we are. To be human involves a certain amount of shakiness, anxiety, and a sense of separation.  But what makes the problem unbearable is our attempt to try to get away from this. 

I know my friend must have tried to get help in the past, but I don't know how. At one point or another, every person who abuses drugs questions their use and tries to find a way out. It was absolutely vital for me to get off all medication when I chose the path of sobriety—I knew that I needed to rip the Band-Aid off and face my life head on in order to recover.

Unfortunately, many of us do not know the way out.  We are lost and turn to doctors and licensed professionals for help who then give us quick fixes for our unbearable problems that has lead to the deaths of many of my friends and many more to come. There is hope; slowly but surely we can all make the decision to wake up and face this human experience together as a community. But if we don’t change, in fifty years, we could all be a bunch of fucking zombies. All walking around (or probably driving) and going shopping; not really home, but not dead either. Zombies because someone thought it would be a good idea for thousands of people to heal their pain with drugs. If we don’t experience the pain and the challenges, then we also can’t experience the joy and elation of being alive.

@ItsAlexisNeiers

Previously - How Do We Solve North America's Heroin Epidemic 

 

Yemeni Soldiers (Image via)

Things are getting really messy in Yemen at the moment. With soldiers being murdered in their sleep, embassies closing en masse in fear of an imminent wave of attacks and multiple drone strikes, the country seems to be the latest sandbox full of blood in the US’ War on Terror.

Not that this warzone is all that new. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) have had a presence in the area for years, their membership rising from around 300 in 2009 up to an estimated 1,000 today. In an attempt to combat this rise in manpower, the US has escalated its infamous drone programme, allegedly targeting high-ranking AQAP members, although according to reports they've yet to actually kill any of them.

Is this hit and hope policy really the best way to fight al-Qaeda in Yemen? Or are these drone strikes, which have a habit of killing civilians, exactly the PR ammo al-Qaeda need to lure new recruits in a country that is already as politically stable as a gang of jihadists on a bouncy castle?

“Drones will always be an easy way for [organisations like al-Qaeda] to gain anti-American support,” Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, from the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, told me. “When something like a drone strike comes crashing down in people's front bedrooms or front rooms, that's going to help you recruit and radicalise, absolutely.”

This is already the case in other places with a heavy US drone presence, such as Pakistan. According to research, the drone policy has caused the majority of the population to see the US as an enemy, with strikes killing civilians, breeding resentment towards the US and undermining Pakistan’s sovereignty. Indeed, the foiled Times Square bomber declared that his attack was intended as payback for the US’ worldwide use of drones, a point that is seldom admitted by advocates of "targeted killings".  

Depressingly, commentators believe that the use of drone strikes in Yemen could be even more damaging than they have been in Pakistan. Michael Boyle, an expert on terrorism and political violence, and author of The Costs and Consequences of Drone Warfare, told me about some vital differences between the two when it comes to patterns of al-Qaeda affiliation. “The membership of al-Qaeda in a place like Pakistan comprises people who come from many areas, such as Russia, the Middle East, Africa and Asia," he explained. "They come to Pakistan to fight. In Yemen, however, al-Qaeda membership is dominated by people who were born and raised in the country, with deep connections to the local tribal structures.”

An MQ-9 Reaper (Image via)

This means that when a drone strike kills an unintended target, it is likely to be someone's brother, father, uncle or son; sister, mother, aunt or daughter. This situation is probably going to breed more desire for retribution than the death of a fellow soldier, no matter how strong the thirst for vengeful jihad. There is also the threat of killing someone with strong connections to a clan or tribe and generating a level of public outrage that could destabilise the Yemeni government.

It is these close-knit ties of people who may not have any kind of connection to al-Qaeda that make Yemen a completely different battlefield to Afghanistan or Pakistan. According to Ibrahim Mothana, a Yemeni youth activist, “Drone strikes are causing more and more Yemenis to hate America and join radical militants; they are not driven by ideology but rather by a sense of revenge and despair.” During the latest escalation of violence, Yemeni bloggers have claimed “there is more hostility now in Yemen against the US because of these attacks”. Even Robert Grenier, a former CIA station head, has said that the US’ policy in Yemen runs the risk of turning the country into a "safe haven" for al-Qaeda.

Even as academics, experts and Yemenis themselves are saying that drones may be contributing to a rise in al-Qaeda's local fanbase, the US government are seeking to place the blame elsewhere. In the recent sentencing of Bradley Manning, prosecutors claimed that his leak of over 700,000 files to WikiLeaks had aided al-Qaeda’s recruitment efforts.

Yemeni Civilians (Image via)

However, visit any local Yemeni news website and you’ll be greeted with images of the latest bloodied drone strike victims. As a Yemeni, what's more likely to make you resent the US: whatever you happen to see of Manning's leaks, or the very real threat of a missile killing your family at any moment?

Admittedly, it's difficult to know exactly how many Yemenis have been "radicalised" because of the drones' presence, and how many of these people actually end up joining their local al-Qaeda division. It's not something that's particularly easy to research with any kind of authority – there's no bubbly al-Qaeda PR girl sat in an office in Sana'a somewhere who will gladly pull the latest membership stats for you.

Of course, it's also possible that the tribes will come to blame al-Qaeda for attracting drone strikes. “Al-Qaeda have a global plan, but they've had to relegate those global concerns in favour of local ones to make these tribal alliances," Meleagrou-Hitchens explains. "But in the end, they will continue to pursue this global strategy and at some point that is going to dawn on their allies [the tribes]: that these guys are going to bring a lot more trouble than they're worth.”

An RQ-1 Predator (Image via)

If al-Qaeda, or the myriad other extremist Islamist groups, can only survive by keeping alliances with the tribes, then it follows that the US might ultimately need the tribes' support to lessen radical Islam's grip on the area. Meleagrou-Hitchens has some ideas about how Obama's administration might go about courting that support: “I think the US would have to encourage the Yemeni government to start helping people outside of the main cities. When al-Qaeda come along and say to the tribes that they can help with their running water, their crops, etc, then they'll ally with them. So you have to be able to offer them what al-Qaeda is offering – or at least make sure the Yemeni government does.”

But by alienating these same tribes through murder of their friends and relatives, the US seems to be making the whole situation worse. "At the moment, the US is the worst and most feared enemy,” a Yemeni-born blogger known as Noon told me over email. “The US drones have claimed the lives of many more people than al-Qaeda. While al-Qaeda targets military personnel in Yemen, the US drones kill arbitrarily without differentiating between civilians and so called ‘militants’.”

One of the main attractions drones hold for the US is that they allow them to wage war remotely, thus avoiding the loss of life to military personnel and the domestic ill-feeling back home that comes with it. However, ultimately the resentment that drone strikes cause has to be focused somewhere and at this stage it looks most likely to turn various factions within the country against each other. With clashes erupting between Yemeni forces and local tribespeople and al-Qaeda looking to break their members out of local prisons, the situation in Yemen seems primed for civil war and insurgency.

Follow Joseph on Twitter: @josephfcox

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The Drone Ranger: Obama's Dirty Wars – by Greg Palast

Are BT Helping Obama Wage His Secret Yemeni Drone War?