A photo from last week's Sammy Yatim protest. By Michael Toledano for VICE Canada.

Just over three weeks ago, a Toronto Police officer named James Forcillo shot 18-year old Sammy Yatim nine times (six bullets were fired when Sammy was already down on the ground), and this morning, news broke that Forcillo is being charged with second-degree murder. This will undoubtedly come as a massive relief for many people—first and foremost being the Yatim family, who sent Sammy to Canada from his native, violence-ridden Syria five years ago to live a better, safer life.

Then there are the hundreds of people who protested for justice on two separate occasions—yelling out the names of other (often mentally ill) victims of police gunfire, holding enraged signs calling for police disarmament, and rallying together to focus the city’s anger and sadness towards something more constructive and positive.

I’m personally surprised that James Forcillo is facing such a serious charge. It was only about 24 hours ago that I was expressing my skepticism with a couple of friends over a just outcome from the Toronto Police’s watchdog Special Investigations Group. I know I wasn’t alone in thinking that, and it’s not hard to understand why. From 2008-2013, the SIU has looked into the deaths of 44 people who were killed by the Toronto Police—15 of them by gunfire. Out of those 44 deaths, only one cop was ever charged, and none were convicted. Beyond that five year period, every incident of a police officer being charged with manslaughter or murder has ended in acquittal.

So what makes this incident so different? Obviously it has a lot to do with the cell phone footage—shot by two different witnesses—that really invigorated the city and the media’s criticism and disgust at the level of force used against the teenager. Without that HD footage circulating around social media within hours of Sammy’s death, there would be more opportunity to discount the eyewitness reports, change up the truth, and perhaps absolve James Forcillo of culpability. It’s not likely that a man who shot a teenager nine times would be easily stripped of all liability—even without video evidence—but it certainly helped to have crisp footage of the disturbingly violent incident to push this investigation along.

This should also come as a relief to anyone who is a relative, friend, co-worker, classmate, or acquaintance of any Torontonian with mental illness. While Sammy Yatim was never diagnosed with any sort of mental disorder, his behavior on the night of his death, which led the police to be called in the first place, certainly indicates that something had gone wrong for him personally. As former Police officer Ross McLean pointed out to Global News, there was no attempt to de-escalate the situation once those 23 police officers arrived on scene to detain Sammy Yatim.

Ross posits that the cop could have tried to neutralize the situation by simply asking: “What’s wrong?” Instead of, “take one step forward, and you’re done,” which is what James Forcillo appears to be saying to Sammy Yatim in the video footage.

While we will need to wait and see how James Forcillo’s trial goes, it’s a positive sign to see the Toronto Police responding appropriately to the apparent wrongdoing of one of their officers. The skepticism that many have felt towards the city’s protectors should be partially alleviated now, and hopefully there will be stronger training put in place to hopefully prevent something like this from happening again.

Follow Patrick on Twitter: @patrickmcguire

More on Sammy Yatim:

Why Did the Toronto Police Kill Sammy Yatim?

Hundreds of People Protested the Toronto Police’s Killing of Sammy Yatim

There Have Been Some Troubling Responses to Sammy Yatim’s Death

A Recap of the Second Sammy Yatim Protest

Photos by Valerie Phillips and Arvida Byström

Retouching by Ben Pickett at Touch Digital
Special thanks to Lark
All images taken from Valerie Phillips's forthcoming zine This is My Drivers License

Click through to the next page for more.

More from this issue:

Prison Pit

Meryton Revisited

Wave of Immolation

Image via Flickr user Rébus

Early in the morning of August 6, Miami Beach police fired a Taser burst into the chest of Israel Hernandez, an 18-year-old artist and skater who was running from a half dozen cops after they saw him spray-painting a boarded-up, abandoned McDonald’s. Shortly after Hernandez was taken into custody, he went into cardiac arrest and subsequently died in the hospital, a casualty of the cops' decision to shock him with a stun gun. It turned out that the officer responsible, Jorge Mercaco, has a history of being accused of using excessive force—the Miami New Times reported on Thursday that he once arrested of a woman who did nothing more than ask him for directions, and in 2008 Mercado and another officer beat and Tasered an Iraq War veteran and his friend. (None of these accusations led to the officer being disciplined.)

Mercado remains on administrative leave, which is typical when a suspect dies after a police action. An autopsy of Hernandez is pending, along with three different investigations by the local DA, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, and the Miami Beach Police Department’s Internal Affairs division. The cops, naturally, are defending Mercado’s choice to use the weapon on Hernandez. It remains to be seen whether the police officially misused their Tasers, since Hernandez supposedly refused to obey their commands and was arguably a potential threat—the cops claim the teenager ran at them when they cornered him, and police chief Ray Martinez told the Miami Herald, “The officers were forced to use the Taser to avoid a physical incident.” But is it policy to aggressively chase a kid for graffiting an abandoned building? And should it be? 

Tasers aren’t a bad invention, and even help save lives in situations where cops would otherwise be firing real guns—but they’re also too often a crutch for law enforcement. Instead of being wielded by brave officers who use them to avoid killing dangerous lawbreakers, Tasers are often used by mean or lazy cops to neutralize such nonthreats as streakers, pregnant women who are pissed about parking tickets, disorderly ten-year-olds, the mentally disabled, and lost autistic children.

Like flashbang grenades, beanbag rounds, and rubber bullets, Tasers are touted as nonlethal weapons, and to be fair, most of the time they don’t kill people. But there are some horrific exceptions. The dangers of Tasers are still being debated, even as their use is on the rise in large cities. A 2011 study by the New York Civil Liberties Union found that police in that state misused Tasers is as many as 60 percent of incidents—cops were frequently Tasering people without warning them, using the potentially deadly weapons on the elderly and the visibly infirm, and even shocking those already in cuffs. In 2012, Amnesty International counted 500 people who died after being Tasered in the last decade; many of the deaths were officially attributed to other causes, but “medical examiners have listed Tasers as a cause or contributing factor in more than 60 deaths, and in a number of other cases the exact cause of death is unknown,” according to Amnesty. That same year, the New York Times reported on a study that suggested Taser shots to the chest are particularly dangerous and can lead to cardiac arrest. (The company that manufactures the stun guns advises against shooting people in the chest with them, but the NYCLU says that chest shots were used in more than a quarter of Taser incidents it reviewed.)

You can argue that Israel Hernandez shouldn’t have fled from the cops, if only for his own safety. But if we’re going to give the police the power to shock and potentially kill civilians, they’re going to need to exercise some judgment. They should be able to figure out that chasing and Tasering a teenaged suspect who was spray-painting an abandoned building is an overreaction. Their training should include the idea that while “nonlethal” force is preferable to using live ammunition, sometimes they don’t need to use force at all.

On to the rest of this week’s bad cops:

- NYPD commissioner Raymond Kelly said on Sunday that if stop and frisk is stopped, crime—particularly crime against minorities—will go up, since minorities are also disproportionately the victims of violence. But it’s not as if the policy was ridding poor black and hispanic neighborhoods of guns and evildoers—90 percent of those stopped and frisked under the now-unconstitutional NYPD policy are not arrested, and police rarely find a weapon. 

- George Madison Jr. was out biking in his hometown of Evansville, Indiana, on August 13 when a squad car’s abrupt left turn surprised him at an intersection. According to Madison, who is a firefighter and a preacher, when he waved his arms in response, officers Darin Clifton and Jason Clegg pulled over and began yelling at him. Madison took out his cell phone, and the cops escalated by brandishing a Taser. “Don’t make me use this,” they told him. Madison was then cuffed and asked his name and occupation, and the officers got a lot friendlier when they realized they were hassling a firefighter. Madison doesn’t want these aggro cops to lose their jobs or even be suspended, but he also doesn’t think their sudden change in attitude when they realized he was a city firefighter is a very good sign and he’s filing a formal complaint with the department. “The fact that I am a firefighter or preacher doesn’t make a difference,” he told the Evansville Courier & Press. “All anybody wants is to be treated like a human being.”

- In the dictionary next to chutzpah is a photo of Harris County, Texas, sheriff’s deputy Brady Pullen, who is suing the mother-in-law of a man Pullen killed during an incident on December 30. The deputy's complaint (he's asking for $200,000 for “mental distress”) states that Camina Figueroa did not adequately warn the cops that her son-in-law Kemal Yazar “posed a violent threat to others” during a 911 call in which she said Yazar was acting erratically after using bath salts for several days. The officers say that Yazar attacked them as soon as they walked inside, forcing them to Taser and then shoot him, and Pullen claims his nose was broken during the confrontation—but the victim’s sister-in-law, who was present, says he was nonviolent and was backing away from the officers when he was killed. Regardless, Pullen’s lawsuit is embarrassing bullshit coming from someone whose job is supposed to be protecting people, even if that means putting himself at risk.

- On Thursday, a Brooklyn man named Carlos Alcis suffered a fatal heart attack after police busted into his apartment at five in the morning because his 15-year-old son was suspected of stealing a cellphone. The family of the 43-year-old says that police took half an hour to offer any aid to him, and that they had to call 911 to get him help. The officers deny this and say they performed CPR on him.

- As previously noted in this space, 60-year-old Pensacola, Florida, resident Roy Middleton was shot in the leg by Escambia County sheriff’s deputies on July 27 at 2:40 AM while he searched through his mother’s car for a cigarette. The actions of the deputies, who are now on paid leave, drew some media attention, but their boss, Escambia County Sheriff David Morgan, didn’t issue the routine curt refusal to comment and instead claimed Middleton was not only a victim but a suspect and “the tragedy of this is the noncompliance to the directions of law enforcement officers.” It gets worse: after commentators noted that two white deputies had assaulted a black man without cause, Morgan used a speech to the local Rotary Club as an excuse to go on a long tirade about how nobody cares when black people murder white people.

- Time for our Good Cop of the Week award: Last Saturday, August 9, cops near Minneapolis, Minnesota, pulled over a guy named Andrew Paul Heim, a repeat drug offender who had $400 worth of oxycodone in his BMW. Heim led the officers on a car chase that ended when he crashed into some woods, after which the 37-year-old fled on foot, only to wind up drowning in a 20-foot-deep lake. The four cops on the scene—Jason Gehrman, John Jorgensen, Matthew George, and Kyle Eckert—took off all their gear and repeatedly dove into the dark water in hopes of saving the man. Heim ended up dying (after “shouting one last expletive at the officers,” according to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune), but we salute the efforts of the four cops.

Lucy Steigerwald is a freelance writer and photographer. Read her blog here and follow her on Twitter: @lucystag

Previously: Eric Holder Speaks Out Against Mandatory Minimums, Gives Us a Sliver of Hope

Original Osama bin Laden photo via

Last week, it was brought to a lot of people's attention that al Qaeda were active on Twitter. This was slightly less surprising than it sounds. At a grassroots level, these early masters of the viral beheading video know social media's black magic well enough, which is probably why they decided to crowdsource ideas of how they could improve their online image.

They organized a hashtag session, encouraging supporters to shout out their own suggestions for this PR revamp. Unfortunately for the jihadists, a US terrorism expert called JM Berger noticed that this was happening, and invited his followers to start using the hashtag in their own tweets and thus barge their way into the conversation. Cue loads of unfunny people lining up to take potshots at the bewildered terrorists.

These "ideas" for improving al Qaeda's online image ranged from the simply crude: 

BONERS WITH PANTS HOLES CUT OUT #اقتراحك_لتطوير_اﻹعلام_الجهادي

— Dan Whitcomb (@_dwhitcomb) August 15, 2013

To the cuttingly political:

OBAMA THIRD TERM #اقتراحك_لتطوير_اﻹعلام_الجهادي

— Dan Whitcomb (@_dwhitcomb) August 15, 2013

To the merely terrible:

— Roady (@Roady1212) August 15, 2013

To the apparently drunk:

try oral its said to be a very fun pass time #اقتراحك_لتطوير_اﻹعلام_الجهادي

— pepper monstercock (@snarewarrior) August 15, 2013

To the people who are themselves the greatest recruiting poster al Qaeda could ever hope for:

"Does this suicide belt make me look fat?" #اقتراحك_لتطوير_اﻹعلام_الجهادي

— Rob Hintz (@Rob_Hintz) August 13, 2013

All of which resulted in the original al Qaeda poster tweeting:

#اقتراحك_لتطوير_الإعلام_الجهادي العلوج الامريكية تشارك في الهاشتاق :(

— اااه يا قلبي (@gdslooptadhi) August 14, 2013

Which roughly translates from the Arabic as: "The American Infidels take part in the hashtag :("

Yep, that's the most feared terrorist group in modern history using a sad face.

But far from this dull giggle party, there was another, rather more dignified community of Twitter users who were playing the whole thing with a straight bat. These were the sincere al Qaeda sympathizers, who, away from the white noise of white Americans, were actually trying to have a serious, grown-up conversation about radical Islam's social media needs.

It'd be nice to say that many valid points were raised here. But this is the internet. And besides, most al Qaeda supporters make your average Redditor seem like a fully paid up member of the human race by comparison.

And so, we witnessed one of those great moments of empathy across the divide, where we were cheek by jowl with our enemies and suddenly aware of how like us they can be. In fact, you probably recognize these types of people and their techniques from dull brainstorming sessions you've been forced to endure.

The Bro Who Is Worried About Apathy

When I was a journalism student working on the university paper, the most regular pitch was always some starry-eyed freshman who wanted to pen 1,500 words on "student apathy." The core idea of this article is that everyone except them was apathetic to "student issues" and that only they, bold warriors, were fighting against the tide of people they saw hanging out on steps smoking cigarettes and drunkenly trying to get into one another's pants every night of the week.
 

#اقتراحك_لتطوير_الإعلام_الجهادي مقال هام حول الفتور في المنتديات الجهادية: أبي سعد العاملي- ثبته الله http://t.co/RK3jhvAy1o

— ايمن (@VoVayman) August 13, 2013

Translated suggestion on how to improve al Qaeda's social media presence: Important article about apathy in jihadist forums: http://t.co/RK3jhvAy1o

If you follow the link included in VoVayman's tweet, it leads to an article bemoaning the laziness of the users and moderators on jihadi forums. Alas, it seems that although they probably drink less than the average Western student, there are still jihadis out there who are prone to bone idle inertia.

The Artful Restatement of the Sublimely Obvious

Experience teaches us that in any meeting there will be a good 30 percent of folk who want to say something, anything, just to prove to everyone else in the room that they exist. Not actually having anything to say should never be an impediment to this. After all, if it's stunningly obvious, then it's probably true, isn't it?

المقاطع القصيرة على اليوتيوب التي لاتتجاوز مدتها دقيقتين إلى ثلاث دقائق تجد مشاهدة وقبول أكثر #اقتراحك_لتطوير_الإعلام_الجهادي

— مُسَعِّرْ (@m5seer) August 13, 2013

Translated suggestion on how to improve al Qaeda's social media presence: Short clips on YouTube with a duration not to exceed two to three minutes for people to find and watch

Throw away your copy of Virality For Dummies and make way for Arabian Seth Godin, a.k.a. m5seer, who has absorbed the social media formula that in order to make clips shareable, they need to be the sort of thing you can punch through quickly before your boss notices (though I wouldn't advise watching too much al Qaeda content at work).

There were even those who ventured beyond this realm of pointless banality. They had heard about social media. They knew it involved at least two things, YouTube and Twitter:

#اقتراحك_لتطوير_الإعلام_الجهادي انشاء حساب رسمي في اليوتيوب وتويتر واي واحد عنده خبر يسلمه للحساب مع التوثيق ثم ينشر

— المعتصم (@Al_Mutassim) August 13, 2013

Translated suggestion on how to improve al Qaeda's social media presence: Formally set up an account on YouTube and Twitter to deliver news.

And there were also those who knew that the use of hashtags is commonplace on Twitter:

#اقتراحك_لتطوير_الإعلام_الجهادي أقترح على تفعيل هاشتاقات جهاديه بشكل يومي في تويتر

— جهْبِذٌ (@an2007a) August 14, 2013

Translated suggestion on how to improve al Qaeda's social media presence: I suggest to activate the hashtag #jihad on a daily basis on Twitter

Meanwhile, roorooroo30 felt it was worth getting even more basic with the back to basics:

تذكير الناس دائما بان الجهاد ذروة سنام الاسلام .تلقائيا سيتاتي الاعلام #اقتراحك_لتطوير_الإعلام_الجهادي

— makah (@roorooroo30) August 13, 2013

Translated suggestion on how to improve al Qaeda's social media presence: Always remind people that jihad is the pinnacle of Islam.

Look, roorooroo30: it really is no understatement to say that jihad is and always has been front and center of the al Qaeda brand space. Suggesting it might be a good idea for them to reinforce this is a bit like bemoaning the lack of balls out anti-Semitism in Nazi-propaganda literature.

The Change-Resistors

No matter whether you're loading old Soviet-made rocket launchers into the back of a truck for delivery to Kandahar or simply brainstorming fresh social media ideas inside a disused aspirin factory in Yemen, there's always someone in any organization who won't let their dreams be muddied by the cold realities of business. Who seems to feel that rather than the product being wrong, it's just the customer's own damned fault for not understanding that the product is right for them.

“The most challenging element of working with resistors is that they can sap the energy out of the room,” says management guru Richard Batchelor. And brother, you could feel the jihadi lightbulbs dimming as some supporters insisted that what was wrong with Global Jihad wasn't Global Jihad at all, it was simply that the public hadn't developed the right opinions about Global Jihad yet.

@A_16008 (tweet since deleted)
Translated suggestion on how to improve al Qaeda's social media presence: Demonstrate the real jihad picture of mujahideen life because it has been tarnished by the west.

@pooroo31 (tweet since deleted)
Translated suggestion on how to improve al Qaeda's social media presence: There should be a strong voice of right to counter the voice of falsehood and we must respond to fabrications that deceive the people who are prone to hypocrisy, immorality and infidelity.

So basically, rather than making propaganda, al Qaeda should... make propaganda? Not entirely sure I follow that, to be honest, but then I guess I'm not the kind of guy who wants to blow up the West.

Let's Make a Pretty Picture

If you can't actually improve your product, a good way to dominate a meeting is simply to suggest that it isn't good-looking enough. When you think about it, everything could be prettier. There are even parts of the Northern Lights that no right-minded person would spend more than a couple of seconds looking at. Like all those manufactured tabloid outrages about the London 2012 Olympics logo or the renaming of the post office, the first refuge of any clueless management team is to spend a fortune redesigning the letterhead:
 

#اقتراحك_لتطوير_الإعلام_الجهادي الإهتمام بالتصميم والمونتاج بأشكاله المتنوعه لتقريب فكره الاصدار للعوام

— الخنساء الموحدة (@al_khansaa2) August 13, 2013

Translated suggestion on how to improve al Qaeda's social media presence: More interesting design and diverse forms of montage to get the idea of jihad across.

Someone at al Qaeda HQ better be honing their Photoshop skills.

The Assholes with Really Good Ideas

Then there are the worst kind of people. The ones who unite everyone else in revulsion for their sensible, well-plotted, creative proposals. It is always a shock, once you leave school, to suddenly be told by society that you can no longer bogwash these people. In fact, you are probably going to have to take your orders from them.

Case in point, HodhodSo2, who has turned up with a neatly Velo-bound folder containing a long list of actionable media-terror-image-improvement points:

HodhodSo2's translated suggestions on how to improve al Qaeda's social media presence:
 
1. Create mailing groups so that the brothers who register can pursue their jihad versions.
 
2. Issue a weekly magazine published every Friday.

3. Update the links on the internet and on YouTube for the unemployed to see.
 
4. Diversify the media material we're producing so it can exist on a variety of formats:

- Video (to watch)
- Speech/Sounds (to listen)
- Writing (to read)

And on, through to point 15: “When producing jihadist media, sincerity has a great role to play, and can have amazing effects.” Signing off with a wink and a piece of punchable homespun folksy philosophy: this cretin has thought of everything.

So, all you jihadist Twitter addicts out there, don't fear, for as Egypt spins faster and faster down the plughole, you can rely on the al Qaeda street teams to be there in ever-greater numbers, sewing their authentic buzz hype, bombarding the networks with their #fanspeak, blazing a social media trail toward a better jihad.

Follow Gavin on Twitter: @hurtgavinhaynes

More on al Qaeda:

Al-Qaeda Prison Breaks Could Lead to a New Wave of Attacks

I Spoke to a Member of the Most Feared Jihadist Group in Syria

WATCH – Waiting for al-Qaeda

Thanks for a country where nobody’s allowed to mind his own business. Thanks for a nation of finks. (William S. Burroughs, A Thanksgiving Prayer)

In Bucharest, the psychological damage inflicted on a society subjected to surveillance terror is apparent everywhere when you scratch the surface, even 24 years after the fall of Ceauşescu—in the suspicion older Romanians show toward one another; in the furtiveness and compulsive cheating rampant among shopkeepers and service providers; in the resigned abjection of young people who can imagine no future options besides (a) colorless, lifelong conformity in a degrading job or (b) membership in a neo-Nazi gang; in the atmosphere of demoralized powerlessness that suffuses daily life in Bucharest as perceptibly as melancholia pervades Istanbul. No problem too small to be insoluble, no conflict unthreatening enough to resolve without trauma. And in the countryside, people say, it’s worse.

*

In line at an airport immigration check, the couple ahead of me debated which of their passports to use. They each shuffled at least five, like cards in a poker hand, all issued by different countries. The two sounded postcoitally blowsy, absorbed in their own sleepy dithering. They asked if I’d been around Taksim Square the night before. They had been sprayed, it turned out, with the same wave of tear gas I had walked into three blocks down the street. Like me, they’d spent all night rinsing their eyeballs, and now could easily fall alseep on their feet.

“We just got married,” the woman said, making a little snort, as if they shared a few doubts about whether this had been a great idea. She was 40ish, dubiously blond, pale, strong-chinned, gray-eyed, very pretty, of unguessable nationality, wearing a frazzled old Chanel suit and no makeup. Her partner was a hefty man, possibly Lebanese, with a stippled whitish fringe along the trim line of his thick black hair. Youthfully loose-limbed, but paunchy and quite a bit older. One pale-aubergine shirttail fluttered at his zipper; the other was stuffed into his pants. He was trying to be amusing and, unlike most people in airports, succeeding. “Guess where we’re going,” the woman quizzed with mock haplessness. “Cairo, jewel of the Nile,” her new spouse chimed in, rolling jaded eyes at the predictable ironies of travel. I had a half-conscious flash that these people weren’t touring or jetsetting at all, but testing out a much-revised script for incipient flaws, a fiction close enough to reality to go unchallenged in public. The immigration person waved them forward. “And then, what the hell,” the woman laughed as she walked away, “Beirut. How’s that for a dream honeymoon?”

*

It’s possible that people intending to do bad things use the telephone and the internet to plan them, if they are also morons. However, morons are not noted for their planning skills. I suppose it would be nice if some bad things could be prevented before they happen without turning the world into a police state. The “eye in the sky” in casinos nips a lot of card counting and skimming and other scams in the bud. But if you place every human being or even everybody in a single country under invasive surveillance, a police state is what you get, even if the collected data is scattered around unsorted in a mainframe until a particular person becomes “a person of interest.”

*

The overriding imperative of any bureaucracy funded by the state is its own self-perpetuation. If its purported reason to exist threatens to disappear, a bureaucracy will create whatever conditions it was supposed to eliminate. A drug enforcement agency will deal drugs. An anti-terrorism agency will breed its own terrorists, attracting weak-minded, potentially volatile people into bogus conspiracy cells. A central intelligence agency or so-called department of homeland security will manufacture threats to security, for example the recent “increased chatter alarm” that closed all the embassies in North Africa for a week.

If these glue traps for federal revenue are allowed to collect unlimited information about everybody, they can also make anybody into a terrorist, a drug mule, or whatever other menace a potential agency or department budget reduction calls for, cutting and pasting together a flimsy but widely believable, totally distorted version of any individual for public consumption, using bits of his or her data that have been parked in a massive hard drive in North Dakota or Utah or one of the other storage states. Last words of Lee Harvey Oswald: “I’m just a patsy.”

*

In Kiss the Hand You Cannot Bite, a book about the rise and fall of Ceauşescu, Edward Behr quotes a former Securitate official: “Imagine a huge apparatus spreading rumors, fear, and terror, an atmosphere in which common people feel that if they try and do the most insignificant thing identified as an act of opposition…they will disappear. It was psychological terror that paralyzed the Romanian population, and the most outstanding piece of disinformation was the rumor, deliberately spread by Securitate itself, that one out of every four Romanians was a Securitate informer.”

*

Local “unrest” distracted me from Egyptian news in Sofia, where comparatively festive marches “turned violent,” as the wire services put it, only once, on the 41^st consecutive night of demos, when protesters trapped journalists and politicians in the Parliament building, then stoned a police bus sent to extract them. It felt much easier to identify with angry Bulgarians, angry Turks in Taksim Square, than with the factional mix of Islamists in Cairo. The Istanbul demos targeted once-popular Prime Minister Recep Erdoǧan after he proposed razing Gezi Park and replacing it with an Ottoman Disney Mall. (Erdoǧan’s biography features the most piquant dependent clause I’ve come across recently, citing the fecund marriage of the former sesame bun seller and anti-Semitic playwright to Ermine Güilbaran “despite his homosexual background.” About which, there isn’t another word.) The Bulgarians, unusually effective street agitators (aside from bringing down the whole government last February, demos recently produced a total ban on shale oil extraction), were enraged by the government’s ongoing collusion with crime syndicates-turned-corporations that control much of the country’s industry and resources. These things made sense. I understood where they came from. It takes no imagination at all to perceive the US since 9/11, notably New York under Mayors Guiliani and Bloomberg, as a more elusively layered, distractingly overdecorated version of Bulgaria Today or Istanbul Now, if you throw in an electronic upgrade of the East German Stasi, the Romanian Securitate, the Soviet KGB, and the Albanian SHIK. Egypt, however…

*

To pilfer the title of Ivana Lowell’s brilliant memoir, why not say what happened? According to Alan Taylor’s The Civil War of 1812, even before the American Revolution scores of colonists in every trade and profession fled the soon-to-be-United States for remote parts of Canada, disgusted by the corruption and unbridled avarice that already permeated life in American towns and cities. By 1871, reporting on the fantastic chicaneries of the Gilded Age robber barons and the rotten judiciary they manipulated to thwart one another, Charles F. Adams, Jr. was able to write of an atypical judge, with no fear of intelligent contradiction: “At this particular juncture Mr. Justice Sutherland, a magistrate of such pure character and unsullied reputation that it is inexplicable how he ever came to be elevated to the bench on which he sits…” How different the US might be, today when the piratical ruthlessness of the Gilded Age amounts to a pimple on Lloyd Blankfein’s ass, if every school child were taught the actual history of the country, instead of being stuffed with platitudes glorifying the supreme greatness and goodness of the place where he or she happened to be born.

*

I registered Egypt as a creepy smudge when it appeared on Bulgarian TV, which I only turned on for news of Edward Snowden, marooned at the time in the Moscow airport. Now, in Bucharest, I catch myself doing the same: Egypt seems even more distant, a catastrophe with no solution and no exit. I don’t know how to reconcile the contradictions embedded in it. I can’t look at it. Among other things, it would force me to consider: do I honestly ‘believe’ in democracy?

I’m old enough to know America itself doesn’t, since until very recently, any democratically elected head of state or popular leader anywhere whom the US couldn’t control swiftly experienced a CIA-sponsored insurgency or coup d’etat—Arbenz, Mossadegh, Allende, Aristide, Sukarno, Lumumba, Trujillo, Diem, Goulart in Brazil, Nkrumah in Ghana, to name just a few, and then there are all the failed coups, against Castro, Chavez—the list covers every continent except Australia, where I think the US mainly just rigs elections. Everybody in this world, except in America, understands exactly what the single mission statement of US policy is: “You do it our way or we’ll push your face in.”

*

No answer, no exit: asking people to choose between the Egyptian military and the Muslim Brotherhood is the same as asking if they’d rather be sent to Auschwitz or Treblinka.

*

Beside the veranda of his carpet emporium, Ahmet’s ringlets brushed John-from-Melbourne’s ear while they sipped mint tea, slouched on fat embroidered pillows. In the midafternoon heat, they lolled like pashas on a vast Soumak carpet laid out on the ground. Ahmet’s piccolo, a cherubic but very pushy 15-year-old, had “teasingly” escorted me the length of the bazaar, from a fabric shop also owned by Ahmet, where I had been on the verge of getting laid by one of his employees. Ahmet had been there earlier, striking Mae West poses and exhausting his supply of sexual innuendoes. Ahmet was what used to be called a camp. Not my thing. Now I had to deal with him again, taking in a tableau of pudgy, effeminate carpet shill nuzzling lanky, louche-looking retiree from Down Under, which strongly suggested that Ahmet and John were carnally familiar old friends. I took John for an expat living in Istanbul since at least the Battle of Gallipoli, if not the Crimean War.

After a lot of misfounded conversation, I gleaned that he was nothing of the kind. Depressingly, he was two years younger than I was. He had arrived two days before on a loosely organized package tour, and had met Ahmet for the first time that morning. He wasn’t gay, or not much, just comfortable with body contact. This was the six-hour anniversary of Ahmet’s campaign to sell him a carpet, subtracting an hour for lunch and another for Ahmet’s mosque duty. Merchants in the Old Bazaar not only drip charm and oblige you to drink tea with them for hours, but will happily fuck you in the ass to make a sale. The playfulness involved often looks and feels more personal than it is, though.

*

Democracy, Schmemocracy. It’s irrelevant to the people who manage the country, a joke to the people who own it. A local example, of course, is New York’s City Council, led by Christine Quinn, abolishing mayoral term limits after they were set by a voter referendum—the most unambiguous expression of the citizens’ wishes in a democracy (unless the ballot question is constructed by Californian Jesuits). What I’m not certain about is whether I support, believe in, advocate, adhere to, “democracy,” if the outcome is or might be something very evil.

*

Silence was the enemy of Ahmet’s trade. He had a Wagnerian opera’s worth of rug chat stored in an otherwise fallow brain. At times, weirdly, losing himself in the throes of a marketing aria, he appeared to mutate, like a human CGI effect, into a more urbane, philosophically detached, European personality, even a hereditary duke or viscount, from a country far west of Turkey. Or an actor, perhaps, researching the role of a faggy Levantine rug peddler, who sets off for lunch at the Four Seasons before remembering he’s still in greasepaint and a cheap rehearsal costume. These improvised personality touches—ruminative, skeptical, fitfully dismissive, florid, conflicted, judicious, brazenly unctuous by turns—began to suggest that somebody else was trying to sell him the carpet. He made two paltry sales all day, both dismayingly irrelevant to his current business plan. His current business plan was to somehow unload a centuries-old Isfahan consignment item, valued at two hundred thousand euros. Everyone entering the shop wanted a look at it, since Ahmet invoked it as if it were the Holy Grail. Absurdly, I thought, he went as far as to tell people he expected the thing to triple in value on its next appraisal, and prayed some devilish shrewd customer wouldn’t wrest it from his inventory before that. However, Ahmet could divine with amazing accuracy the net worth and disposable income of any living human being, and saw that none of the day’s marks had remotely enough assets to buy it. He was just fucking with himself. It seemed mildly endearing.

*

The Obama administration scrambles to glue a happy face on its out-of-control spy agencies, while the director of the NSA lies to Congress, not only about the fact of rampant domestic spying, but about the number of terrorist plots the NSA has thwarted by means of any of its surveillance programs. At first it’s 50, then it’s ten, then it’s down to five, finally it’s “I don’t have the exact figures in front of me.” Exactly none, apparently. Even Joe McCarthy was less obviously full of shit. By the time James M. Clapper, if that really is his name, finished testilying under oath, news of the illegal liaison between NSA and the DEA had already leaked from the cache of yet-unpublished Snowden documents. It’s brilliant to release the sordid truth one item at a time, right after The Clapper or some other federal sinkhole has been forced to admit the last one and indignantly denied that the logically inevitable next one could even be possible.

*

When Ahmet disappeared to cook tea, John mentioned that Cairo was the next stop on his itinerary. The question of whether to cancel hovered in the muzzy air. “Of course you should go,” I said, yawning. “They’re not rioting in Luxor or Alexandria, are they?”I had no idea if “they” were or not, but it was just rioting, as far as anyone knew. Maybe it would stop, the way the bazaar stopped when the prayer call, crackling with dense static, bleated like a scary foghorn from the Fatih Cadde mosque across the road. “Not yet,” John said. “Unless all hell breaks loose before Tuesday, I’m going. I only get away from Melbourne once a year; anyway, it’s already paid for.”

I meant not to sound too encouraging, but life really is cheatingly brief. And people who never travel tend to imagine, when trouble erupts in a distant country, that its entire landmass has seized into convulsions. I reminded John that he knew better, though I had scrubbed Egypt from my own vague plans that morning. John wasn’t American, I rationalized, he would be less unwelcome than I in a combat zone, or else less attractive as a hostage, if it came to that. “Either things will calm down before you get there,” I said, “or you’ll have a great story to tell your grandchildren.”

“Anyway,” John said, “I check the embassy travel advisory every day.”

“Sometimes,” I said,“even when there’s a war, if the Hilton stays open, it means you can travel around and still avoid the whole thing if you’re careful.”

It really didn’t occur to me until 3 AM, when I was feeding cats in the streets near my hotel, to ask myself what is always somehow an untimely question: “Why the fuck did I say that?”

*

Obama—not to be outdone in devising the “least untruthful” excuse for a money-gobbling vortex of warrantless searches and supine FISA court judges who sign off on anything put in front of them—assures us that he had planned some purgative review of the NSA even before Edward Snowden was a drop of cum in his father’s balls, so there! How sad that the still-inspiring symbolism of Obama’s election has turned out to be the only unqualifiedly positive thing about his presidency—even Obamacare is so deeply compromised by concessions to the insurance industry that its main value is likewise located in the realm of the symbolic. I’m rarely moved by the rhetorical style of Ivy League valedictory addresses, so when people say “the president made a great speech,” it’s just an unnecessary reminder that actions speak louder than words. And in the matter of Edward Snowden’s immeasurably laudable and invaluable public service, and regarding the NSA, CIA, FBI, DEA et al., the next shoe to drop will doubtlessly be federal collection of all citizens’ medical records—and, since all the acronyms are having a gang bang, why not let the IRS in on the fun, along with the family doctor?

Previously by Gary Indiana - Weiner's Dong, and Other Products of the Perfected Civilization

Photo via Flickr user KOMUNews

Sometimes phones are a pain in the dick even in the real world. I remember when cellphones turned into a necessity and you could no longer fall off the grid every day just by leaving the house—I miss being able to have that freedom. People wanted to be able to connect with each other whenever they desire, and that turned into everyone being forced to be available to everyone 24/7. Walk down the street sometime and count how many people are staring at their little screens.

Not having your cellphone is such a vicious bitch when you’re locked up. Maybe it wouldn’t have been as bad 15 years ago, but now we’re so used to interacting all the time that inmates go crazy when they can’t even text their people. Dummies in the last county jail I was at did something they called “texting”—they would call someone collect then say something megaquick when the operator asked for their name, and the person on the other end would do the same thing. They’d go back and forth like this for an hour without being charged a penny, but they’d waste 50 minutes of that hour listening to recordings and pressing buttons. Meanwhile we had people who really wanted to use the pay phone waiting while these jerk-offs “texted.”

The reason the texters did that was phone calls from jails and prisons are so insanely expensive, it’s practically criminal—some folks have paid $17 for a measly 15-minute call. A couple weeks ago the FCC finally did the right thing and put a cap on how much inmates can be charged for out-of-state calls by the private carriers who rob 'em blind. That’s important, ‘cause people in prison really have no choice but to pay whatever those predators charge, unless they want to wither away in the clink-clink without talking to anyone they know.

There have been some reforms at the local level before this—in New York they changed the prices back in February 2010 to be more affordable. It actually made things harder in some ways ‘cause now almost everyone can afford to call people, so the phone lines backed the fuck up, but overall, clearly it was a very positive move.

The worst problems I encountered were in the county jail. What Saratoga County used to do and Westchester County still does is 100 percent foul and disgusting. This god-awful company, Global Tel Link, ran things at Westchester and absolutely slayed people’s savings. I talked to a few guys fighting their cases for close to a year who had spent in the ballpark of $10,000 on phone calls. If you really use the phone for business reasons or your people just miss you and you’re on the phone an hour a day, which isn’t that crazy, you’re going to spend at least $200 a week. The real motherfucker is the connection fee, which costs you almost $3 every time you dial a number. You’d be better off rarely calling but talking for a long time when you do, but they fuck you there, too—they limit your calls to 20 minutes. Not that inmates respect that rule; after their time runs out, instead of passing the phone off to the next dude, they just call again and getting another “click.” Also, the phones suck and hang up all the time, so you often need to call again and pay another $3 connection fee.

Global Tel Link also charges you to add money to your account—for every $25 they take $5. I remember it cost me 28 cents a minute for local calls, but even my girl’s number in nearby New York City was 40 cents a minute and my parents’ landline in Arizona was nearly a dollar a minute. Before I learned my lesson I called my parents three times and talked to them for a few minutes each time, and that cost $25. It’s insane. I didn’t need to talk to my girl and parents, but it was really helpful sometimes, and forcing inmates to pay so much money to talk to someone who’s not a criminal or a prison guard seems unnecessarily cruel. Who has an extra $200 to simply stay in touch with their loved ones?

Some states get a percentage of the profits made off of these pricey phone calls, and therefore have incentive to grant contracts to companies that charge more. It’s pretty obvious how awful this setup is, and it’s good that the FCC has finally decided to step in. The only problem is that the new rule only affects interstate calls, I guess because they don’t have any authority over local calls, which are still fiendishly expensive.

In Orange is the New Black, the great Netflix series about prison, you’ll notice that every time the main character uses the phone someone is next to her crying. Inmates call the phone the “stress box” and we’ve got a love/hate relationship with it. We love hearing real people’s voices, but usually we receive bad news on the phone as well, and we’re so damn powerless that we’re often overflowing with frustration. It’s extremely dong-blasted difficult to maintain a healthy relationship with anyone, especially your kids, when you’re locked up, but it’s even more impossible when it’s basically a dollar a minute to talk to them. You better be saying some important shit, ‘cause you don’t even have a job to pay for the charges anymore. Your people are pissed you’re locked up, and, on top of that, now you’re costing them a testicle and a twat every time you call them to handle shit (a.k.a. ask them for more stuff). You end up not having any time or money for small talk, and it doesn’t take long for your people to question why exactly it is that they love you.

Most people in prison and jail aren’t exactly rich in the first place, and charging them so much for calls is kicking them while they’re down. It’s unconscionable. That’s why lots of people who get locked up say, “Fuck that fuckin’ stress box... I’m staying off the phone this time around.” It really does drive people crazy… We often hear that we’re being cheated on, that our daughters are being whores, our wives are leaving us, that our moms are sick, or maybe our lawyer even tells us that the DA won’t budge on a big number, and all the while we’re impotent, stuck behind bars. Let’s just hope that in the future we stop getting ripped off while we get our hearts ripped out.

Bert Burykill is the pseudonym of our prison correspondent, who has spent time in a number of prisons in New York State. He tweets here.

Previously: ‘Orange Is the New Black’ Through the Eyes of an Ex-Con

The centre of the MIlky Way: soon to be used as target practice for flying canisters of human remains. via WikiCommons.

Dying in and of itself comes with the usual long list of shit you gotta deal with, but thinking about what to do with your remains after you die is pretty stressful too. Most religions have strict burial guidelines. Jews are all about keeping it simple with a plain wooden coffin, Christians let you have pimped out coffins or urns to throw one’s ashes in, and Muslims wrap the body to make sure it gets into the ground ASAP.

But if you aren’t into doing it the religious way and want something different than an ceramic vase full of your dead ash that will sit on top of your kid’s fireplace until your loser grandkid knocks it over, Elysium Space can shoot launch your remains into outer space. They aren’t the first ones to do it, but they are doing it for the cheapest! So that perked my attention. I called up Thomas Civeit, the former NASA engineer who founded the company, and asked him how it works.

VICE: So why did you decide to devote your life to shooting human remains into outer space?
Thomas: I thought that all the new technologies, which are coming that make space accessible for almost everyone could be used for different things than just science and technology because the Cosmo systems are meaningful for so many people.

How does one get their ashes into space?
People place a symbolic portion of the ashes in some small capsules [0.4 inches cubed] and then we collect all these capsules and we place them into a small nano satellite, then this spacecraft is integrated into a rocket—the same kind of rocket that launches scientific or commercial satellites. And eventually they are deployed into space.

Is each one separated individually or is it mixed in with other people? I’m a private person and I wouldn’t want to be with anyone else…
Each person has their own capsule.

How long are the ashes up there for?
The mission lifetime varies, so if it’s 400km away like the International Space Station it would be in orbit for about a year. If the altitude is higher it’s longer, if it’s lower it’s shorter, so it varies from a few months to several years.

Is there any worry about more satellites being in our orbit or is there enough room up there?
You mean like orbital pollution? It’s a common question. It’s interesting to see that people are worried about it and we’re also worried about it. And we actually do not create orbital pollution because of what I just explained. It’s not going to be in orbit forever, so because after some months it just burns up—no orbital pollution.

Does it burn up completely?
It does. There’s nothing remaining.

Why do people even want to do this?
People want to celebrate the life of someone and are not so interested in the religious ritual thing as they used to be. So, we are bringing something meaningful to people that they can do to celebrate the life of someone, which is different from traditional burial or these kinds of things.

The cheapest way to get into space is to die and be incinerated. via WikiCommons.

The Greek word Elysium actually means afterlife, do you believe in that at all or do you just like the word?
Personally, wow that’s a pretty deep subject…

I just want to know cause death and burial is a deep question…
I’m certainly a spiritual person and I do believe we need celebration especially in such an important moment, but I don’t have a specific religion.

Are you an atheist?
Yeah.

Have you met anyone who thought they had a belief system or religion maybe that thought sending their ashes to space was part of what they are meant to do?
Not yet. I could imagine because space is very special, but I think it’s new for humanity that we have this option to maybe this will happen, but it hasn’t happened yet.

What kinds of people are signing up for this then?
Interestingly it’s beyond space enthusiasts. Space is something really universal and it’s a meaningful place for humanity, so actually people just connect to it because it’s beautiful and because it’s meaningful. In general, people who like to put their ashes in beautiful places like beaches or some place they like are very likely to like the idea of space as well for the same reason.

Religion and burial itself are both really sensitive subjects. Have you had anybody who was super pissed about your plans to shoot human remains off of planet Earth?
No, actually I’ve never heard any negative feedback about it. I really feel like people are ready for this and it doesn’t hurt any feelings.

How long before you’ll be able to expand and put ashes on the Moon?
For a long-term vision we’d be very happy to do that and offer other services like the Moon or deep space or you know even the Sun, some people ask for the Sun. But we want to make our services affordable and I think it’s still a little bit too early for that, but I would say in the next few years that would be possible.

Are people able to decorate the capsule?
We already offer people the option to engrave their initials on the capsule to make it a bit more personal and customized. And the idea of making the capsule even more custom seems very good and I believe that in the future we will improve that.

How often are you going to be doing launches?
Next year during the summer will be our first launch and then we hope to have several launches increasing over time.

How many people have asked for this service?
Overall for next year’s launch we expect it could be 100 people or more. 100 is a minimum, but we could have hundreds.

Will there need to be tests beforehand, or do you already know this is technology that is going to work?
We are all aerospace engineers and we do all the tests so we know that the technology that we use goes through safety requirements and engineering requirements and procedures.

Are you going to shoot your ashes into space?
I will, certainly.

OK last question, do you believe in aliens?
I’ve never met them. I’m very rational, and I don’t believe in what I don’t see.

Tweet Joel before he sends his ashes into space one day: @JoelBalsam

Watch MOTHERBOARD's show about Space, Spaced Out.

Photo by Mosa'ab Elshamy.

It's been just over a year since Egyptians, having thrown off the rule of Hosni Mubarak, voted in the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohammed Morsi as their first ever democratically elected president. At the time, it wasn't seen as just a victory for politically minded Islamists, but also for the concept of democracy in the Muslim world. Founded in 1928 to agitate against British colonial rule, the Brotherhood had spent most of the intervening decades as a banned, secretive movement, its membership frequently rounded up by the country’s military rulers in mass arrests that often ended in torture and execution. As the expert on jihadist groups, Aaron Y Zelin, notes, the consequences of this conflict are still being felt: "After the military crackdown in 1954, we saw over the next two and a half decades different breakaway factions either attempt coups and assassinations or outright low-level insurgency campaigns. This led to the rise of what we know as jihadism today."

After 80 years spent operating in the shadows, the Brotherhood’s electoral success seemed to disprove the claims of radical thinkers like Sayyid Qutb, who asserted that Islamism would never be allowed to govern democratically in the Middle East. (This claim is made often, despite the fact that in those few Arab countries that actually hold elections, Islamist parties consistently win the most votes.) Jihadist advocates of armed struggle had always claimed that the concept of democracy was a sham, and that as soon as an Islamist party achieved power, there would be a reoccurrence of the scenario seen in Algeria in 1991 – when the newly-elected Islamist government was overthrown by a military regime, plunging the country into a vicious civil war of almost unimaginable brutality.

So when Egypt’s new military regime overthrew the country’s elected president Mohammed Morsi’s government last month, the celebrity pundits of the jihadist world were quick to say "I told you so." Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri – an Egyptian, and former member of the Muslim Brotherhood – rushed out an audio recording from his secret lair declaring that Egypt’s coup “is the greatest proof of the failure of the democratic path to achieve an Islamic government… the battle isn’t over, it has just begun… the Islamic nation should offer victims and sacrifices to achieve what it wants and restore power from the corrupt authority governing Egypt.” Influential jihadist cleric Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi made a statement claiming that the coup proved the superiority of “the bullet box over the ballot box”, and al-Qaeda-linked social media has recently exploded in calls for jihad in Egypt. So, is civil war inevitable?

If Egypt’s new ruler General Abdelfateh el-Sisi hopes to keep the Brotherhood’s supporters engaged in the political process, he’s going about it in a strange way. In the past week, over a thousand protesters have been killed and many more injured in the worst spate of political violence in Egypt’s modern history. Now, the new regime are openly discussing the possibility of banning the Muslim Brotherhood altogether. Targeted for dissolution by Prime Minister Hazem el-Beblawi and demonised by state media as "terrorists", there seems to be a desire from many to send Egypt’s Islamists back into the shadows where, many fear, jihadist violence will seem an increasingly attractive option.

According to Matthew Henman, a senior analyst at Jane's Terrorism and Insurgency Centre, “a key concern is what the reaction of the Muslim Brotherhood and its support base will be if the current situation does not resolve itself with the reintegration of the Brotherhood into the political sphere. It is worth emphasising that Morsi was democratically elected and has a substantial base of support in more rural conservative areas of Egypt.” The country has faced this kind of "problem" before – throughout the 1990s, Egypt struggled with a jihadist insurgency in the rural South which wrecked the country’s economy and was used by former dictator Mubarak to justify 30 years of repressive state security. The situation in Egypt now, however, is nothing like the 1990s – it’s far, far worse.

From Libya to Syria, the souring of the Arab Spring has led to an explosion in jihadist violence across the Middle East, and the rallying power of the internet has enabled Islamist insurgent groups to recruit new fighters with a constant stream of bloodcurdling – and it has to be said, viscerally thrilling – YouTube videos combining explosive ultraviolence with stirring music. These have been disseminated on Facebook and Twitter, the virtual shop windows of the jihadist world, in Syria and now in Egypt by new groups that have formed in the two months since Morsi’s fall. Organisations like Ansar al-Sharia in Egypt and the Abdullah Azzam Brigades have used these portals to vow to install Sharia law in the country by arming and training fighters to overthrow the "apostate" regime currently built around the military authority of General al-Sisi. Egypt shares 1,000 miles of poorly-guarded desert border with Libya, a failing state whose stocks of military-grade weaponry looted from Gaddafi’s vast armouries have fuelled insurgencies from Syria to Mali – if civil war comes to Egypt, its proponents won’t have any trouble tooling up.

Already, Egypt’s restive province of Sinai has seen a spike in jihadist violence, with at least 61 members of the security forces killed in increasingly daring attacks (including 25 police recruits ambushed and shot dead at the roadside on Monday morning). According to Henman, “It is not inconceivable that a similar situation could emerge in other areas of the country, fuelled by the military's seeming desire to exclude the Muslim Brotherhood from government, and particularly if they ban the Brotherhood.”

Even in the country’s heartland, an uptick in armed violence has seen security forces killed by unknown assailants. As police and army snipers massacred hundreds of civilian demonstrators in central Cairo, armed Morsi supporters began to appear in protests, firing back with automatic rifles. One British protester at the bloody Ramses Square demonstration – who wishes to remain anonymous – witnessed the crowd cheering as “a small convoy of vehicles, bearing the iconic 'black flag' of Islamists” entered the protest at the height of the clashes. “Inside masked men, armed with assault rifles and shotguns waved to the crowds. Perhaps most telling was the reaction of the crowd. After days of being slaughtered it was difficult to find a person who would argue against fighting back.”

And fight back they have. On Wednesday in the Giza suburb of Kerdasa, while the army crushed the Brotherhood's Rabaa sit-in, a police station was stormed, and 11 officers were executed before the building was burned down. A wave of arson attacks against churches and businesses owned by Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority, along with the sudden sprouting of unofficial checkpoints run by armed pro-regime militias, has fuelled fears that the country is slipping into civil war.

Footage of unarmed protesters being gunned down in the street looks disturbingly like that from Syria at the beginning of the revolution two and a half years ago. In Syria, it took almost a year before the repression of demonstrations led to the formation of the Free Syrian Army and the beginning of all-out war – though more protesters have been killed in just one week in Egypt than in the first two months of the Syrian uprising. Syria's bloody civil war isn't just a vision of Egypt's dark potential future, but a training school for a new generation of jihadists. "What happens if Egyptians fighting against the Assad regime in Syria come home?" wonders Zelin. "Will they join the front in the Sinai? Will they attempt actions in the Nile Valley? It's still too early to know, but they are definitely a wild card."

The risk is that with the Brotherhood’s leadership arrested or driven underground, the tightly disciplined organisation may lose control of its supporters, some of whom, angered by the bloody crackdown, could turn towards more radical armed groups for both protection and revenge. "I think we will at the very least see a low-level insurgency in the Sinai," warns Zelin. "But it's difficult to predict if that will transpire in the Nile Valley. The stability that the military seeks will likely not come to fruition in the near or long-term. I suspect we might see assassination attempts and attacks on security services."

In overthrowing Morsi, Egypt’s military and its civilian supporters nudged the country towards the edge of the abyss. But by banning the Muslim Brotherhood entirely, the new regime may plunge Egypt deep into a period of civil conflict that proves impossible for politicians or the international community to resolve for many years to come.

Aaron Y Zelin is Richard Borow Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Follow him on Twitter: @azelin

Matthew Henman is Senior Analyst and Deputy Editor at IHS Jane's Terrorism and Insurgency Centre (JTIC). Follow him on Twitter: @JTICMattHenman

Related:

Video from the Muslim Brotherhood's "Day of Anger"

Mosques Are Becoming Morgues in Cairo

Death Toll Rises on Egypt's "Day of Anger"

The VICE Podcast Show is a weekly discussion which delves inside the minds of some of the most interesting, creative, and bizarre people within the VICE universe. This week, Reihan Salam gets comedian Reggie Watts to reveal his agenda of world domination and creative disruption.

Here is just the audio from this week's discussion:

Previously on the podcast - Michael Wahid Hanna on the New Wave of Violence in Egypt

Check out Reggie on the Jash YouTube channel, here: www.youtube.com/user/ReggieWattsJash.

Our podcasts are on iTunes, here: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/vice-…id634513189?mt=2.

On Friday, August 9, at the unseemly hour of two o'clock in the morning, the main gate of Puente Grande prison opened, and a godfather in the Mexican narcotics trade walked out into the darkness a free man. By then, Rafael Caro Quintero, former founder and leader of the Guadalajara Cartel, had served 28 years of a 40-year prison sentence for drug trafficking and the audacious 1985 murder of a DEA agent named Enrique 'Kiki' Camarena.

The order for Caro's release was given by a three-judge appeals panel in his home state of Jalisco, overturning the murder conviction on a technicality. The court decided that Caro should have been tried in a state and not federal court at the time because Kiki Camarena—who worked undercover—was not officially in the US’s diplomatic corps in Mexico. With that, judges reduced his prison sentence to 15 years. Having already served 28, he was free to go.

The release of the most historically powerful and connected drug lord in modern Mexican history—a still potent symbol for US antidrug agencies—immediately aroused suspicions, and led to the Mexican attorney general to issue a warrant for a "provisional detention" after receiving a request from the United States on Wednesday of last week.

For one thing, the appeals court declined to send the murder case back to the state courts, opting instead for immediate release. Also, prior to the warrant being issued, Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam released a statement saying only that Quintero being set free “worried” him. Then there is the US government's claims in media reports that it was not notified of the release beforehand, learning about it only it after the fact from the news.

"We've been told it was a technicality," said Jack Riley, director of the DEA's Chicago Field Division and former head of its El Paso office, "but I'm sure that everybody's going to look real hard at it to make sure it was legitimate." 

The US Department of Justice has had a standing request for Mexico to extradite Caro Quintero since 1987, and they have 60 days to formally request extradition if and when Quintero is detained. Riley explained the extradition request had previously been a low priority after Caro received his four-decade prison sentence. "They wouldn't consider extradition because at that point it didn't make sense because he was never going to get out of Mexican custody," Riley said.

But Caro Quintero was probably not sitting out his sentence idly for all those years. In June, the US Treasury Department had invoked the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act to freeze the banking assets of 15 businesses bankrolled by Caro, as well as those of 18 of his relatives and associates, including his wife, four children, and daughter-in-law.

Riley said he was "deeply troubled" at news of Caro's release from jail, and said the Justice Department will likely continue to explore the possibility of apprehending Caro for extradition. "We're still looking into that to really figure out where exactly the process is now. We're also looking at where the investigations took place in California, working with the US Attorneys and the Department of Justice there to see whatever we've got to do to recreate the extradition process so that we get him on US soil."

Since Caro was already tried once for Camarena's murder, he cannot legally be tried for it a second time. The charges he faces in the US are limited to his drug-trafficking activities. Any extradition to the US would have to be on the basis of those other crimes, and not Camarena's murder.

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto. Photo via Wikipedia Commons

The release of Caro comes at a sensitive time for US authorities as they negotiate with Mexico's new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, the basis for cross-border cooperation in matters of intelligence sharing and drug interdiction.

President Peña Nieto has yet to give a clear sign that his administration will permit US law enforcement and intelligence agencies the same degree of influence over antidrug operations that they enjoyed during the 12-year reign of his presidential predecessors from the opposition National Action Party, which ended last year.

There is no doubt, however, that Peña Nieto and his party, the Institutional Revolution Party, have the most to lose if Caro were ever to appear in a US courtroom. The PRI is heavily implicated in the worst excesses of Caro's time at the head of the Guadalajara Cartel.

No gangster in his day was more politically connected than Caro Quintero. At 32, he smoked cocaine in the saddle of a dancing horse in the middle of a raucous party in Guadalajara, to the delight of a PRI state representative who was the brother-in-law of a former PRI president of Mexico. Henchmen who worked for Caro testified to spending four weeks counting out by hand a $400 million-cash bribe for a high official in a PRI government. The director of the Mexican FBI in the administration of another PRI president was on Caro's direct payroll.

And on it went. Caro Quintero's teenage girlfriend Sara Cosio was the niece of Guillermo Cosío Vidaurri, the former mayor of Guadalajara, a national secretary of the PRI at the time of Caro's arrest, who became governor of Jalisco state four years later. Caro claimed the uncle drove a Mercury Cougar that he had given him as a gift. A bodyguard for the Guadalajara Cartel who witnessed the torture of Camarena later testified in a US court that the governor of Jalisco state and the sitting Mexican Secretary of the Interior, both PRI politicians, sat near the open door to the room where Camarena was being interrogated to better hear what he was saying about their own collusion with drug-trafficking.

Like the wedding scene in The Godfather, the young men who in ten years' time would be slashing at one another's throats as the heads of warring cartels in Sinaloa, Tijuana, and Juarez were then peacefully coexisting in wealth and impunity in the same city, as part of the same syndicate, under the leadership of men like Caro Quintero, Carlos Fonseca, and Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo.

Was it only hubris that caused them to believe they could abduct, torture and murder a DEA agent intent on making problems for them? In the fall of 1984, Camarena had led a raid by DEA and Mexican Federal Police on Caro's pride and joy, the Buffalo Ranch, a marijuana plantation of 1,300 acres in Chihuahua state – the largest field ever put to the torch by law enforcement. El Bufalo employed ten thousand field hands and yielded a harvest of up to 6,000 tons of weed, with a street value of $8 billion dollars.

The murder of Camarena was a pivotal event in the drug war in Mexico. On one hand, it enhanced the power of the DEA like never before.

"It really led to the agency expanding," Riley said, "because for us to be successful here domestically we've got to operate with our foreign counterparts in parts of the world where the narcotics are coming from."

In doing so, it fed the DEA's single-minded quest to bring down the cartel and government officials responsible for it, leading to the discovery that Caro was providing material support to the CIA's Contra guerilla army in Nicaragua.

In 1990, the anti-drug agency issued a report on the cartel's cooperation with the CIA mission in Central America. Among its findings was that Caro Quintero permitted a ranch he owned in Vercruz state to be used as a guerrilla training camp. The report concludes that “the operations/training at the camp were conducted by the American CIA, using the DFS [Mexico's FBI] as cover, in the event any questions were raised as to who was running the [camp]” and that “Representatives of the DFS, which was the front for the training camp, were in fact acting in consort with major drug overlords to insure a flow of narcotics through Mexico and into the United States.” The DEA's main source for the information was a cartel insider who set up the communications network for the Mexican cartel and its law enforcement partners in the early 1980s and mid 1980s. 

It remains to be seen if and when the US government will request extradition for Quintera, or if the Mexican government will even be able to capture him. Like no other instance in the history of the drug war in Mexico, the murder of Kiki Camarena, or more specifically the numerous investigations and court cases that followed it, revealed the inner workings of the Mexican government's inability to control the cartels. The uncertainty surrounding the release of Rafael Caro Quintera after 28 years in prison for that same murder may have already done as much to suggest that that situation persists.

Jason McGahan is a journalist in South America.

For more on drugs:

It's Good to Be the King

Tanks for the Memories

3,500 Cops Who Want All Drugs to Be Legal

Slane Castle in Ireland, site of the concert in question. Via Wiki Commons.

What do you do when hundreds, if not thousands, of people are sharing what technically amounts to child porn on social media? We’re about to find out in Ireland.

During Saturday’s Eminem concert in Slane Castle, a teen girl was photographed giving a man oral sex, as well as the man fingering her while she sucked his face. By Sunday afternoon, whoever the creep was that took the photos uploaded them onto the internet, and they went viral. The hashtag #slanegirl trended on Twitter, and the three different photos circulated for more than 24 hours, even trending globally for a brief period early Monday morning. Some tweets of the image got more than 200 retweets.

Over on Facebook, people are complaining about seeing the image repeatedly in their timeline, while a “Slane Girl” Facebook page received 8,000 likes before being removed early Monday.  

As double standards would have it, the guys featured in the incriminating photos are being called “hero” and “legend” while the girl is currently being slut-shamed, mocked and occasionally pitied. No one has bothered to identify the males, but the girl’s identity has been discovered (on her Instagram she lists her age as 16) and circulated.

Irish authorities have confirmed that the girl in question is underage, and have launched an investigation. While the authorities have not yet contacted the man or the photographer, they presumably will, as everything depicted in the photographs could be considered child pornography. Sharing pornographic images of anyone under 18 (or 17 in Ireland) is illegal, and even if the others involved are also underage, they could still be charged with the distribution of child porn.

Read the rest over at Motherboard.

Illustrations By: Cahill Wessel

Montreal-based writer and former VICE editor Adam Leith Gollner is one of those seemingly regular Joes who continually finds himself in strange, almost unbelievable situations. His life has been peppered with so many “What the fuck?” moments that might cause you to wonder if you’re wasting your life. (You are.) He attributes this to a natural curiosity, openness, and a constant search for things to write about. I think it’s partly that, and partly some sort of cosmic charisma and weird horseshoe-up-his-ass thing. Either way, when you get an email from Adam asking if you want to visit the private Caribbean island of a world-famous illusionist in search of the fountain of youth, you don’t question it. You just say yes and start packing your bags. This happened to me a few years ago. The story, recounted here, is an excerpt from Adam’s new work The Book of Immortality: The Science, Belief, and Magic Behind Living Forever, out this month on Scribner in the US and Doubleday in Canada. —Rafael Katigbak, editor VICE Canada

S

everal years ago, the magician David Copperfield issued a press release stating he’d discovered the fountain of youth on his private islands in the Bahamas. “We found this liquid that in its simple stages can actually do miraculous things,” Copperfield claimed. “You can take dead leaves, they come into contact with the water, they become full of life again. Bugs or insects that are near death come in contact with the water, they fly away. It’s an amazing thing, very exciting.”

Copperfield had hired biologists and geologists to examine the fountain’s potential effects on humans. Until the tests were carried out, the magician said, he was refusing anyone else access to the water. Its precise location—a spot where “everything is more vibrant, ageless, and full of life”—is a secret. 

All I knew was that the fountain was somewhere on one of the 11 Islands of Copperfield Bay, a 700-acre archipelago he’d discovered by drawing a cartographical line from Stonehenge to the statues of Easter Island and another line between the Great Pyramid of Giza and the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacán; the lines intersected at the exact latitude and longitude of his Caribbean hideaway. In aerial photographs, the main island resembles a bat with its wings outstretched.

It seemed like a story just waiting to be written, and after a lengthy negotiating period, Copperfield agreed to let me visit for a few days. He was adamant in his refusal to show me the fountain, which he described as “a liquid that reverses genes.” 

“You won’t see my wrinkled hand go into a stream and come out young,” he said. “This is not a trick. But if you want to talk about the meaning of the fountain—that, we can do. I speak about the fountain with great verbal aplomb.”

I was fine with that; after all, I’d still be able to sneak out at night and try to find it. 

Shortly before the trip, Copperfield suggested I bring someone along. “To be there alone is going to suck,” he explained. “All the experiences on Musha are shared experiences.” I didn’t want to go with my girlfriend, as a 21-year-old beauty-pageant runner-up had accused Copperfield of raping her on the island (the charges were ultimately dropped). Instead, I decided to bring my former bandmate Rafael Katigbak, editor of VICE’s Canadian edition and an amateur magician who as a child idolized David Copperfield. “God, I hope he rapes me,” Raf sighed, faux dreamily, when I filled him in on the allegations. Here’s what happened instead.

As we entered the infinite blue of the Atlantic adjacent to Exuma International Airport, our speedboat skimmed toward the Out Islands. “I feel like I’m home,” said Raf, putting his feet up and flipping through a copy of Private Jet Lifestyle magazine.

About 45 minutes later, we arrived at Musha Cay, the main island of Copperfield Bay. Just off the dock, stairs lead to a large building called the Landings, a tasteful wooden affair painted in pastel green, blue, and yellow. Above it, perched atop the island’s zenith, lay a dark mansion. As we prepared to disembark, the boat’s captain pointed out four or five sharks in the water, saying they lived under the quay.

“Are they pets?” I asked.

“Nah, they just live here.”

“But do they belong to David?”

“No, they’re wild sharks, but this is their home.”

“So sharks just choose to come live here under the front porch?” interjected Raf.

“That’s right,” answered a blond, bland, and slightly impatient managerial-type woman dressed in a Musha Cay golf shirt standing on the pier. “But they’re not dangerous. You can even go down there and swim with them while you’re here.”

“Do they bite?”

“Not really,” she answered with a strained smile. “But don’t stick out your fingers around them. Don’t grab their tails, either. And don’t creep up on them from behind.”

As the various majordomos, butlers, and concierges introduced themselves and made sure we didn’t lift any of our suitcases, a pair of skinny legs in gray Crocs and peachy-pink surfers’ shorts strolled down the stairs. Copperfield’s crisply ironed shirt was as black as his bushy eyebrows. His face was partially concealed by a small-domed black cap. As he approached, his deep-set eyes brightened, becoming big and glossy.

He was friendly, if formal, and appeared pressed for time. As soon as we shook hands, he looked at his watch and suggested we tour the island before dinner. He started by showing us a game room in the reception area. Houdini’s personal billiard table serves as the centerpiece. He showed off some of his other collectibles, including a creaky fortune-teller machine, an early motion-picture device called a Mutoscope, and a 100-year-old claw-digger amusement device.

Several members of his team sat around a television monitor watching footage they’d shot a day or two earlier. Copperfield explained that he’d brought down some Sports Illustrated models and Vogue cover girls to do a shoot for a calendar he was working on. One evening, they’d all played an indigenous game called the Musha 500. We watched them go at it.

The bikini- and stiletto-clad girls stood on the beach, clustered around two shallow trenches filled with water. Each “racetrack,” or aquatic corridor, was about four inches deep and four inches wide, and maybe ten feet long. Two girls each selected a goldfish from a central tank, placing one fish in their respective trenches. A whistle sounded. The models put straws in their mouths and started blowing bubbles into the water to make the fish swim forward. The freaked-out fish kept darting around, forward and backward, as the ultrathin models puffed furiously into their straws. One of them nearly got her goldfish to swim to the finish line before it abruptly turned around and zigzagged back down the concourse. “Merde!” she cried.

Copperfield excitedly told us how much fun the models had while they were here. As he spoke, the staff would laugh in unison, even if he wasn’t saying anything all that funny. Raf looked over at me and rolled his eyes. Copperfield then walked us outside, explaining that we’d be able to check out the rest of the Landings later on, after dinner but just before sunset. 

“Is the fountain on this island?” I asked, getting down to business.

“We can speak at length about the fountain tomorrow, after we go out and see the other islands,” he explained tersely, leading us along a paved road.

“Are there cars down here?” Raf inquired.

“There could be, but we prefer golf carts,” Copperfield said as he slid into his buggy’s driver’s seat, coolly indicating that I should sit next to him. Raf jumped into another cart driven by an assistant, and we all pulled out. “There used to be two limousines on Imagine Island,” said Copperfield, explaining how drug smugglers had used these islands as landing pads in the past. “They’d bring in female accompaniment to inhabit it. The movie Blow really happened at Norman’s Cay. A lot of cocaine went through Exuma.”

Musha Cay was larger than I’d anticipated, and greener. Oleanders and other lush flowers pulsated in the subtropical warmth. The sky had been overcast on our arrival, but slanting daggers of sunlight were now carving through the clouds, illuminating the Listerine waves below. The water, beautifully translucent, shimmered with almost unreal blue-green radiance. I asked Copperfield what color he thought it was.

“I don’t even try to describe the sea anymore,” he answered. “You end up using adjectives like cerulean. After all this time in the Caribbean, I let the photographs do the talking. Scratch that—it’s so many spectrums of blue you can’t even photograph it. You have to see it.”

As we steered away from the ocean, he pointed out other Musha must-sees, such as a statuesque 17th-century head from Burma and a collection of royal thrones from Africa. “Here’s a Sri Lankan god I found on my travels,” he crowed, indicating a bejeweled, big-eared, mustachioed stone sculpture holding a conch in one hand, and what appeared to be a toilet plunger in the other.

“What’s his name?” I asked

“Super Mario.”

“Has sense of humor,” I jotted into my notebook, and quickly flipped the page in case he was reading over my shoulder.

Our cart serpentined along a mazelike configuration of roads. I asked if it was possible to get lost on Musha. Copperfield stressed the importance of sticking to the paths because there were holes all over the island. “If you fall in, you can go quite deep down. It’s dangerous. Some holes stretch all the way through the island’s core into the ocean.”

The warning sounded genuine—but it could also have been a possible clue to the fountain’s whereabouts. I started scanning for any signs of life off the main path.

As we drove upward, toward the manor, he told me that he maintains a full-time staff of over 30 employees on the island, including a zookeeper. He pointed out some of his toucans—Toco Toucans, he specified, “the Rolls-Royces of toucans.” I wanted to ask him about the sharks, but he embarked on a long story about the herd of African giraffes he’d purchased that would soon be wandering all over the island. “They’ll eat off your plate,” he said, “over there in the Valley of the Giants. I’m building them a whole compound with bedrooms for when the weather’s bad.” He was also putting the finishing touches on something called the Secret Village, a hidden passageway that opens into a three-acre replica of Angkor Wat with “mind-reading monkeys who crawl all over you.”

As he spoke, a little bird scampered across the road. “Baby egret!” he said with wonderment.

“Is a baby eagle called an egret?” I inquired, putting my pen down momentarily. “Or is it an egress? No, wait, an egress is an exit, a way out, an escape, right?”

“A baby eagle is an eaglet. We have a lot of crab-eating egrets down here.” Copperfield glanced over at my notepad and suggested I transcribe the following sentence: “As David Copperfield drove me to Highview, the highest point on Musha Cay, a crab-eating egret crossed my path.”

Only when we walked into his mansion did it sink in that we had actually arrived, that we were inside the magician’s abode. Copperfield showed off more exotic collectibles: cobra sculptures rising from the ground, maharaja chairs, carved prayer beds from Afghanistan (“their heads point toward Mecca”). The downstairs suite contained an African-themed room with idols, masks, headdresses, and figurines used in tribal ceremonies. He took us into the dining room and showed us a canoe hanging from the ceiling that doubled as a chandelier. “Check this out,” he purred, pushing a button. The ship started slowly descending. “It levitates down from the ceiling on special occasions. That’s cool, right?”

“Yeah!” Raf yelped.

“What happens once it comes all the way down?” I asked.

“Anything you want,” he said, slightly miffed at my lack of imagination. “You can put dinner in it ahead of time, to impress your girlfriend, or place an engagement ring in it. Things like that.”

In the master bedroom, he flipped another switch and a huge TV situated inside a wicker Indian chest floated out of the ground.

“Whoa! Where does it come from?” Raf asked.

“It’s magic.” Copperfield grinned.

The other rooms, vaguely reminiscent of Graceland, evoked a sort of strangeness that only comes with peering in on a superstar magician’s private domestic life. As I perused the rarities on display, I half expected to come across a genuinely magical item, like transparent wings or a cloak of levitation.

He wanted us to see the fitness center, so we jumped back into the golf carts. It looked like a basic corporate-hotel workout room, albeit one with an antique carnival-strongman statue out front. On the wall inside, he pointed out a photograph of the same strongman at the base of the Eiffel Tower, explaining that the statue dated back to the monument’s unveiling at the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris. The photo looked doctored. “It’s amazing what you can do with Photoshop these days,” I blurted out.

“That’s not Photoshop!” Copperfield protested,
almost hurt.

“No, of course not,” I apologized. “Just a joke.”

For our next stop, he took us down to Coconut Beach, one of the islands’ main sand strips, neatly littered with Windsurfers, Yamaha WaveRunners, and the makings of Dave’s Drive-In movie theater. He described Musha as his most important project to date. He oversees even the tiniest of details, he said, from selecting the board games (“like Clue”) to designing the telephone users’ manual.

He parked the golf cart on a bed of white sand meticulously raked into swirls and geometric patterns. “If it’s not 100 percent exactly how I want it to be, it’s a waste of my time,” he said. The statement’s undertow pulled me in. Copperfield’s perfectionism suggested not only a desire to have things done properly and precisely, but also that he sees himself as being somehow above reality’s imperfections. This character trait is exemplified by his desire to own a private island—to create paradise and live apart from the rest of humanity, to have no attachments and live in a blissful state of narcissistic fulfillment. To have things be exactly how you want them to be. To no longer suffer. To be perfect.

Epic orchestral music reverberated through the breeze from some hidden hi-fi system. The music sounded heroic: full of horn swells, harp swoops, flute trills, and tribal drums, Braveheart for a moment, Lion King the next. It heightened the dramatic intrigue of being on the island, creating a sense that something monumental could happen at any instant.

“What’s this music?” I asked him.

“Magic music,” he answered, straight-faced. “You’ll find Klipsch speakers scattered among the palm trees.”

Maybe I was reading too much into it. He certainly took pride in his possessions and clearly cared a great deal about the island. Sure, he had an obsessive side, but despite his ludicrous wealth, Copperfield seemed reasonably normal—tense, certainly, and highly sensitive, but also hospitable, sardonically humorous, and a bit goofy. But his perfectionist tendencies soon came to the fore again when he demonstrated the specific way he liked the pillows arranged on the chaise lounges. “Even the Balinese daybeds have secret compartments,” he added, opening a chair to show us an instructional document on pillow placement.

Expounding on how much Musha meant to him, Copperfield said he wanted my readers to understand the passion he felt for this place. It was where he came to “escape from the escapes.” How strange it must be to need a break from escaping, I thought, to take time off from working as an escapologist.

He spoke about how, despite the prohibitive costs of running the island, nothing could prevent him from focusing all his energies on his fabricated paradise. But it wasn’t just about the sugar-sand beaches, he went on, it was about imbuing them with stories. He explained his plans for a haunted island where it would snow on the beach. Soon guests would be able to go on “yeti quests,” where Sherpas would make water magically appear out of thin air. “What makes me happy is people going like this…” he dropped his jaw. “Everything comes back to that.”

When he took a break to respond to a call on his walkie-talkie, Raf and I had a chance to speak openly. “This place is truly amazing,” he whispered. “But David is like a kid who just wants to show off all his stuff. And he’s kind of tacky, no?”

“He has so many secret things,” I replied. “Secret cays, secret TV stands that rise out of the ground on hydraulics, secret passageways leading to secret monkey enclaves, secret underground chambers, secret daybeds. Everything has a secret compartment!”

“You never know what you need to hide, I guess,” Raf said.

The tour concluded with Copperfield showing us the various accommodation options, all of which were waterfront houses. In one of the buildings he took a moment to make sure we took notice of the laminated page he’d made that explains how the remote controls worked. He told us how guests who visit the island can spend their entire trip letting it all hang out: “Some people just want to come here and be naked and play bongos. Musha is a place where you can be totally fucking naked because it’s secluded and there’s no paparazzi around.”

As our golf cart hummed past an empty tennis court, Copperfield asked what I thought about the tour.

I told him that everything was useful, even though I wasn’t sure what would make it into the final story. “You never know until you’ve done all the reporting,” I said. “But I love the feeling of not knowing, of lost in a story as it’s coming together. I feel like I’m in the labyrinth right now.”

As he dropped us off at our beach house, he mumbled something into the breeze about how much he appreciates being lost in illusions himself.

W

hat a shithole,” joked Raf, walking into Pier House, our hyperluxurious two-bedroom suite. The décor drew upon the Far East—large shadow-theater puppets, Buddhist masks, and a carved temple archway painted in fading primary colors. Raf busied himself in the snack pantry, a larder closet stocked with chips, candy bars, cookies, crackers, nuts, popcorn, pretzels, Snapea Crisps, and any other junk food you could ever want. “No Tab cola though,” he tsked before grabbing a couple of coffee pods for the in-room espresso machine and started making macchiatos.

“That thing was so Photoshopped it’s not even funny,” he said, adjusting the steam wand’s intensity.

“You really think so?” I asked, no longer sure. “He wouldn’t be so audacious to pull a fast one like that.”

“Like that?” Raf scoffed. “The guy walked through the Great Wall of China, he made the Statue of Liberty disappear—that’s what he does, he pulls fast ones. That Photoshop image is small potatoes. Audacious. Ha!”

After a final snort, Raf started singing the words “We’re in David Copperfield’s private island resort” to a childish melody. He laughed maniacally and looked to the heavens. Stopping suddenly, he threw me a cut eye. “You realize we’re being filmed, right now, through this Laotian mask.”

I immediately started talking loudly about how magical Musha felt, lauding David’s passion, complimenting his taste, noting the exquisiteness of his many Asian sculptures. I filled Raf in on what David had said about this place being his most important project. “He’s a perfectionist,” I concluded. “One hundred percent or nothing.”

“That’s David Copperfield,” Raf said. “An OCD Jewish nerd who can make you believe he levitated over the Grand Canyon. A magician surrounded by supermodels on his island. What a tough life.”

Moments later, a black winged creature flew into the room and fluttered about erratically. “A bat!” I screamed. Transylvanian thoughts caromed through my mind. “No… wait! It’s a fucking moth!” Raf shouted, as it hurtled to a stop upside down in a corner where the ceiling met the wall. “Holy shit, David Copperfield just flew in here as a moth! Can he do that?”

We edged closer. Before us quivered an extremely large, velvety-black butterfly. Two striking dark-brown eyes looked out at us, one on either wing. It had the wingspan of a sparrow. Raf began shooting photos from different angles, and we both made various shooing motions, to no avail. It didn’t move again, so eventually we gave up and decided to unpack. By the time we left the Pier House for dinner, the winged insect had vanished.

As we drove our golf cart toward the Landings, I spotted a sign that read petrified lake. Had it been there before, when we rolled through earlier? Neither Raf nor I had noticed it during the tour, and it seemed like something that would’ve caught our eye. I made a note to investigate it later. By the time we showed up in the Houdini billiard room, it was about ten minutes later than Copperfield had suggested. His vexation was palpable.

A couple of assistants were milling around, offering cocktails. His girlfriend, a gorgeous European model (who, given Copperfield’s request that she remain anonymous, I shall refer to as “M”) sat next to him. As Copperfield had intimated earlier, she spoke about how her supermodel friends from Sports Illustrated and Vogue had loved their time on the island. One of them had said how coming here felt like coming home.

“That’s what Raf said when we were on the boat,” I chimed in.

“That’s why I do this,” Copperfield said. “To make you feel like you’ve gone back to being a child again. That, and getting this reaction—” his jaw dropped.

He directed our attention toward the television screen displaying a promotional clip about his home in New York, a four-story penthouse apartment on East 57th and Lexington. The camera panned through a playroom full of penny-arcade games, carnival muscle-strength challenges, and other antique funfair curiosities. In the living room a number of nude wooden people were nailed to the two-story-high wall in various contortions.

“What are those?” I asked. The mannequins pinned up there like human creepy-crawlies made me think of the dark butterfly in our room.

“They’re incredibly rare life-size models,” Copperfield answered.

“Models?” Raf asked, turning slowly to look at M.

“Around the turn of the last century,” Copperfield said, “it was illegal for artists to hire real-life models, so they used articulated lay figures like those. I even have one that belonged to Cézanne.”

Watching the models dangling from the wall, I remembered reading something about a warehouse he owned in Las Vegas that was recently raided by the FBI during their investigation of the alleged rape: entry requires tweaking a mannequin’s nipple.

Other weird contraptions flitted across the screen. “Initiation devices,” Copperfield clarified.

“What sort of initiations?” I asked.

“You know, trick chairs, paddle machines that whack you in the butt, novelty electroshock games, kind of benign hazing things like that. I also have tons of ray guns. You’ve gotta come out to Vegas and see my warehouse. It’s huge. I have a whole room full of ventriloquial dummies.”

“Do you consider yourself a collector?” I asked.

“I don’t really like that term,” Copperfield said plainly. “I’m not an accumulator. I love objects that carry with them amazing stories. But I don’t want to be seen as a collector.”

The magician’s girlfriend interjected: “Wouldn’t you like to start collecting women’s shoes, size nine and a half?”

Copperfield pursed his lips, reaching for a glass of water.

Raf took the cue: “Wow—nine and a half? You have big feet!”

“I know!” M groaned, growing self-conscious. “I’m so embarrassed about them.”

But her feet seemed perfectly normal to me. Copperfield handled it deftly and politely, explaining how all people have parts of themselves they are sensitive about, and how we all deal with them as children. He even mentioned his own complex: big ears, which explained his affinity for Super Mario, a.k.a. the Sri Lankan god statue with the huge lobes. “Childhood is what shapes us,” he said. “It’s how you use your markers and devastations that counts.”

It was just one of the many nuggets of wisdom he generously dropped during our time together, which included sayings about everything from forgiveness to decision making. These included gems such as “Grudges hurt the grudger more than the grudge,” “The more successful you become, the harder it is to focus on family,” and “If you really want something to happen, you can force it to happen by your drive and your force, and that’s a kind of supernatural effect.”

As we sat around the dining table, he told us a story about going to a camp in Warren, New Jersey, as a child: “At Camp Harmony, we spent two weeks searching for a guide who’d been kidnapped by Indians. It was just a game, but I was living it. That’s what I do here on Musha Cay. My whole life goes back to that camp experience when I was three or four. The yeti quest I’m working on, where Sherpas will make it snow on the beach, it’s just a variation on that. Everything is. Everything I do is about getting people’s jaws to drop. The canoe is cool—but not as cool as having that canoe come down from the ceiling full of sushi. That’s kaw,” he said, dropping his jaw.

The kitchen staff served each of us a braised-lamb dish, except for Copperfield, who was brought a platter of breaded chicken fingers. Copperfield’s fondness for chicken fingers goes way back, and he would eat them for dinner the rest of our stay, while we were treated to a variety of seafood and other meats. (In 1993, shortly after he proposed to Claudia Schiffer, a journalist joined the couple on a limo ride to Planet Hollywood in Manhattan, where he watched them “feast” on chicken fingers.)

Over dinner, David spoke of magic’s illustrious past, mentioning how magicians had been kings’ confidants, and how they’d always held high posts throughout history.

“So what position do you want in Obama’s cabinet?” Raf nibbled.

“Well, Ronald Reagan did offer me a post after a show in Ford’s Theatre,” said Copperfield. “He wanted me to make things vanish.”

“Like his wife,” added his girlfriend.

“Now, now,” chuckled Copperfield.

When the staff cleared our plates, he asked what we wanted to do.

“Should we people watch?” I joked.

“You can’t do that here,” he sniffed petulantly, and suggested we play board games or do some karaoke.

“Raf is incredible at karaoke,” I jumped in, trying to get back to an upbeat place.

“We’ll see about that,” Copperfield said.

“I have my own machine at home.” Raf shrugged, unperturbed.

As Copperfield moved inside to set things up with a gaggle of helpers, Raf and I lingered on the dock, looking down at the sharks drifting through the waves below. Raf wondered what M thought of all those models crucified on the wall.

“She’s so beautiful I can barely look at her,” I said. “It’s like watching the sun.”

“Through diamonds,” Raf added. “She’s too beautiful. The whole island is. You almost need to turn your eyes away. Or talk about how big her feet are.”

On our way into the karaoke room, I noticed an illustrated map of Musha. I couldn’t locate the Petrified Lake, but I did find a body of water marked the sanctuary in its general vicinity. A sanctuary? A consecrated place where sacred objects are kept?

“Did we see the Sanctuary today?” I asked, walking into the room.

“No,” Copperfield answered definitively. His seriousness made me reluctant to press the matter, while simultaneously affirming my hunch. Whether sanctuary or petrified lake, its liquids would undoubtedly be worth exploring. 

Copyright © 2013 by 9165-2610 Quebec, Inc. From the forthcoming book THE BOOK OF IMMORTALITY: The Science, Belief, and Magic Behind Living Forever by Adam Leith Gollner to be published in the US by Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc, and in Canada by Doubleday Canada. Printed by permission.

@adamgollner

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Arrow Brown at his desk in the Bandit office with his daughter Tridia, fourth from the right, and his son Deno, the little boy in the pink suit in the middle. Photo courtesy of Numero Group.

Between 1969 and 1981, the Bandit soul and funk label put out some of the choicest cuts Chicago’s South Side had to offer. It was run by Arrow Brown, a charismatic, womanizing hustler in a black fedora, the youngest of 22 children in a family originally from Mississippi. In Chicago, he got married and did the 9-to-5 thing, but it wasn’t for him. As his town’s scene exploded, he decided that music was where he’d make his fortune. He didn’t want to work too hard though, and finding that, with his languid smile and ability to exploit weakness, he had a peculiar hold over women, he established a harem on Martin Luther King Drive. A revolving cast of women lived there, did his chores, and funded his musical exploits with their welfare checks. What he established was a personality cult in which he was the revered figure and his acolytes were his wives, daughters, and anyone who happened to be sent to him to make it in the soul game.

Despite being one of the most polygamous men in the US, he was a jealous guy who couldn’t stand it when any of his women became too attached to other men. This was to be the downfall of many of his groups, none of whom really hit the big time. In the end, Arrow’s women left him and he died alone. His daughter, Tridia, was in the most successful of these groups, the Majestic Arrows (Arrow’s acts tended to have Arrow in their name), as well as in a later group, Touch of Love. With a new anthology of Bandit’s music being released by Chicago’s Numero Group, I got in touch with Tridia to find out the real story of Arrow—one that involves guns, surveillance, and underage sex.

VICE: When did you start spending time with your dad?
Tridia Clark: I saw my dad when I was two years old, but I didn’t see him after that until I was 21, when my mother found out he was a record producer and got in touch with him because she knew I loved music. This was in the 70s. He had a group called the Majestic Arrows and he told me that I should try out for them. I rehearsed with them, joined them, and we turned out pretty good until we broke up.

The Majestic Arrows was split up because two members had been getting a little intimate with each other, right?
Dad had a policy about no fraternizing, but of course he was pretty outgoing himself. There was a young lady and a young man in the group who got together and they were both married. Dad didn’t like that. But that didn’t really break the group up. What broke it up was that we did a show with a promoter who my dad didn’t like. They’d had some kind of discrepancy with each other over payment. We went there to do the show and we didn’t get paid. The rest of the group went back to my father’s house and when I got there, they told me that he’d got his gun out, shot over their heads a whole lot, and that the group was broken up.

Did Arrow not see that his “no fraternizing” policy was hypocritical, given that he was living with numerous different women?
Well, he was the leader and that’s the way it went.

Why did so many people go along with it?
Because he was quite charming. He had a very tantalizing smile and you know Dad had his good points too. He was a good guy—not in every sense of the word—but he was a good guy nonetheless, in certain circumstances. He liked a lot of attention and whatever he said went. Not always with me because we’re both stubborn, we’re both Aries. Not that I believe in any of that.

Well, I guess you should never underestimate the power of the Bull. What would you argue with him about?
I actually fussed to him when I found out about the ladies in the house. I thought that was very degrading. Some started as young as ten years old. But I didn’t find out about that until later. He would meet the girls’ mothers first and then he’d go from there.

He was sleeping with girls that young?
From ten years old. He told me because I cried one night I spent there. I heard something and I thought it was one of the young girls I was close to. I asked him why he did it, and he told me that her mother had said it was OK and that it was better that he did it because otherwise they’d meet someone in the street who’d mess them around. So, his logic was that it was better for him to mess them around than a stranger. It was so hard to hear that and the creeping around at night and all the stuff that was going on.

That’s a terrible kind of twisted logic.
Yes, and we were on edge when he was around because he could go off on anything. Dad had a habit of turning on intercoms to hear what everyone in the house was saying. I told this girl that everyone is a liar now and then, even my dad. He stormed down the stairs and he said, “Tridia, are you calling me a liar?" I said, “No, Dad, but everyone tells lies from time to time, even you.” He said, “Take it back, take it back.” I told him that I wouldn’t take it back, that my daddy’s mouth was not a prayer book. I went up the stairs, daddy pulls out a gun and tells me he was going to shoot me if I didn’t get out of his house or apologize. So I got out of his house.

He kept intercoms around the house?
Yes, he kept intercoms so he could listen to us. What he was afraid of was exactly what happened: that someone would come and talk to the ladies and they’d leave him. And that would destroy his empire.

Was there a lot of jealousy flying around between his women?
Oh, there was quite a lot of it, but they knew better than to act up because if they did he would punish them. Some of them were his cooks, some did other chores, and most had his babies. Everyone was on welfare, which he took, although Deno, my brother, made money for Dad from commercials and films. I can’t say for sure, but Deno’s friend told me he’d made a million dollars and that dad had squandered it all.

Did he take money from you?
There were a lot of times when we were doing shows that I would not get paid. Dad would tell me that they did not get paid, which was not the truth. I was the only one in the group who wouldn’t get paid and he felt like he could do that because I was his daughter.

Were you afraid when he pulled a gun on you?
Absolutely not! I just didn’t have the fear. He could have pulled the trigger, but I might have been a bit nutty at the time and I know God is good, so I didn’t worry about it.

I imagine I’d be way less brave about it. Did you ever live in his house?
I used to spend the night but I never lived there. His women were really pleasant. Some of them were sneaky but most of them were nice. I got along with them well. My mother didn’t care for me spending the night at Dad’s and she didn’t like that I got along with the women. But we went there because dad had the parties every Friday and Saturday night! We’d fry up some chicken feet, we’d sing and play music, and dad would get his women to go to the store and get all the drinks we wanted.

And if anyone tried to talk to his women, he’d get angry?
Yeah, he was very jealous, which was crazy because he’d get jealous and yet he’d still try to put you together with somebody.

In the end, your father’s women left him.
I talked to some of them and told them that they were in an awful situation and that they should get out. I told them their children were too young for him to be doing what he was doing to them, even though the mothers agreed to it, which is why he did what he did. They got out in the end.

After the label ended and his women left, did you see him much?
I’d go and visit him because he was sick. He’d look at me and say, with a grin, “Why are you looking at me like that? I’m not dead yet.” He’d still try and grab the nurses in the hospital and I’d say, “Dad, leave the nurses alone.” He was a womanizer to the end. Before I met him, I was told he was a pimp.

And was he?
He acted like a pimp. He always had a brand new car and he always looked successful, so people thought he could do things for them. Sometimes he’d give one of his women to a man for a short time so he could get the money when she came back. But he wasn’t a pimp-pimp, if you know what I mean.

The box set of Eccentric Soul: The Bandit Label contains every track Arrow Brown had a hand in, and is out now. There’s also a paperback with a 15,000-word essay and 50 period photographs. For more information visit numerogroup.com

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All photos by the author

It’s been a good year for pot lovers. The new recreational weed laws Washington and Colorado passed last November have taken effect. Illinois just became the 20th state to legalize medical marijuana. An industry eager to help users find and ingest their favorite strain grows larger and more legitimate by the day. And the federal government—which still outlaws producing, selling, and using pot—has yet to pull the plug.

So naturally, the vibe at the 22nd annual Hempfest—the massive pot pageant held in Seattle, Washington, this past weekend—was 100 percent celebratory. Sure, there were the usual activists calling for an end to federal prohibition. But the real business of the three-day weed-stravaganza was to make a leisurely victory lap to mark the state’s recent legalization of recreational ganja.

The scene at this so-called protestival, was fairly predictable, especially if you’ve spent time at freakier potcentric scenes like Phish or Grateful Dead concerts (events I’ve been to more times than I’d like to admit). Teens and seniors alike crowded Seattle’s downtown waterfront park to shop, dance, take in the sun, make a statement, people watch, and light up.

To answer your question, yes, there were bongs available for purchase.

Half a dozen stages featured an endless loop of reggae and cosmogroove (yes, that is a real genre). Speakers gushed excitedly about the beginning of the end of prohibition and the remaining work to be done. Vapes, pipes, bongs, grinders, memorabilia, and munchies spilled from hundreds of vendor booths. Pot leaves embellished stages, products, business cards, T-shirts, and port-a-potties. Even Ken Kesey’s legendary Further bus made an appearance. Everywhere I looked, someone was firing up a joint, pipe, or bong.

Washington’s new marijuana policy doesn’t allow imbibing in public, but Hempfest has traditionally been a safe haven for getting baked. This year, Seattle police not only turned a blind eye, they faced the sinsemilla head on. Department spokesman Sergeant Sean Whitcomb joined the event’s roster of speakers, and as you no doubt heard, cops distributed bags of Doritos to educate dope enthusiasts about the dos and don’ts of the new law. (“Don’t drive while high… Do listen to Dark Side of the Moon at a reasonable volume.”) Needless to say, Hempfesters were really freaking happy.

You're either on the bus or off the bus. If you're on the bus and you get left behind, you're still on the bus anyway, but if you're off the bus to begin with and get on the bus, shit, how does that go again?

“It’s amazing. It’s extraordinary,” Kyle Volcano, a professional glassblower from Eugene, Oregon, told me when I asked what he thought of the government’s newfound permissiveness toward herb. Volcano, who’s in his early 20s, has been working for hand-blown bong and pipe wholesaler Special K since he was 17. He’s never done any drugs, but the idea that others now can enjoy a smoke without breaking the law thrills him, as does the growing legitimacy of the paraphernalia industry he works in.

“Henry Hemp,” from Lodi, California, who’s been a staple at potfests for nearly a decade, was equally elated that the plant is getting its due. Hemp, who spoke to me while wearing a Styrofoam pot leaf on his head, told me that after his two-year-old daughter was born, Child Protective Services came to investigate mom and dad’s marijuana habit. Fortunately, CPS deemed Mr. and Mrs. Hemp fit parents and backed off. “I’m not some Peter Pothead,” Hemp said.

Henry Hemp and Lexie Lego, who both look like they could host an inappropriately weedcentric children's TV show.

Not everyone at Hempfest was singing the praises of I-502, Washington’s new recreational ganja law. I met Dale Rogers, a.k.a. Garth 420, while he and three other Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence were vamping for a cop who wanted to snap their photo. Rogers has been running medical marijuana collectives in Seattle for 15 years and advocating for AIDS and cancer patients even longer. He’s concerned the state will try to tax medical pot just as it plans to do with recreational pot. “It’s not fair,” said Rogers, decked in black leather and KISS-style face paint. “Medical patients have a different need than recreational users.”

The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

Nonprofit drug policy groups shared other concerns about the new law with me. One activist from Sensible Washington worried that the state’s proposed pot DUI testing method might be unfair to users who ingested marijuana days earlier but would be judged to be technically over the legal limit.

By and large though, optimism—and perhaps more notably, entrepreneurialism—reigned supreme. Among the vendors were software developers, concentrate makers, product testing labs, and a host of other new businesses hoping to cash in on Washington’s legal weed market. I had a nice chat with “Lexie Lego,” a model with booth-babe company 420Nurses, who came up from Los Angeles to help “Fredo,” a pipe vendor working his 15th potfest this summer. Two guys dressed as a blunt and a bag of weed brought along their publicist to hand out cards for their new medical marijuana delivery service; all three had just moved to Seattle from Miami.

Do you think these guys enjoy smoking weed?

At the high point—sorry, everyone!—of the afternoon, a plane pulling a banner ad for the website CaliforniaFinest420.com, which sells packs of pot cigarettes, blazed by. Even the woman who collected my signature for a petition related to background checks for gun buyers told me she wanted to open a pot dispensary.

As the sun began to drop and I made my way to the exit, the closing band of the day echoed this idealism. The singer congratulated the crowd on making Mary Jane legal and pondered the significance of it, for Washington and elsewhere. “Everybody’s feeling it,” he said. “They’re feeling it around the world.”

Apparently I was feeling it, too, because when I reached the cops gathered at the event exit, I asked the same thing all the other Hempfesters were asking: “Where’s our Doritos?” “No comment,” I was told. Time to go home. It wasn’t exactly the playful banter that marked the Seattle PD’s Twitter feed in the days leading up to the fest. I guess not everyone was feeling it.

I didn’t let their ill humor sour my mood. Instead, I found the friends I arrived with, headed home, and for the first time in more than a decade, smoked some dope. Hey man, it's legal now.

Michelle Goodman is a freelance writer in Seattle who’s written about pot-preneurs and enthusiasts for Entrepreneur, Seattle magazine, and The Magazine. On Twitter: @anti9to5guide

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Girls are always accusing guys of being dicks for not calling them back after a few dates or a one-night stay in pound town. Girls do this too. I had my first foray in the age-old art of dropping off the face of the Earth after two dates with someone six months ago. I wasn’t interested in pursuing anything further with him, but I didn’t want to write something that sounded like a Human Resources woman informing him that he sucked at a job interview, so I just didn’t write back when he asked me out again over text. The guilt still haunts me. I imagine my spurn left him with chronic feelings of inadequacy and maybe a drug problem. I thought an open letter to him would be easier and less risky for me because, according to my fantasy, he lives in a gutter now and will never see this anyway.

Dear [Name Redacted],

How are you? I hope you’ve been well. I have your sock. I thought that would have been a funny thing to hand back to you on our third date, but we never got to that third date because the thought of seeing you again gave me a twinge of the ol’ diarrhea stomach (like butterflies but with poop). You can tell I’m not feeling it romantically between us because, first off, I never returned your text asking me out again, and secondly, in the previous sentence I revealed that I take number twos and when I’m full of dread, they’re not solid.

I know I should have just answered your simple text, “Hey, let me know what you’re up to this weekend? Last night was a blast!” But I couldn’t. To me it wasn’t that simple. If you had just written, “Last night was a blast,” I could have lied and said, “Yeah. A blast!” It was fun to have drinks with you, but when you put your hands under my blouse later in my living room and said, delightedly, “No bra!? Naked boobs?!”—I lost my boner. I wish I could be like what I imagine Angelina Jolie to be like in that situation. I’d have taken your hands in a sultry, condescending tone, “Honey, no,” then sit down all annoyed in my latex pantsuit, wave you out of my place as I call Billy Bob Thornton and say, “Can you get over here and bone me? No… he’s just leaving.”

Except for the boob thing, which made me feel like a perverted, lonely eighth grade algebra teacher who took home a student, you didn’t do anything wrong. I did. I shouldn’t have gone on that first date with you. The first time we met, for two seconds at a party, I already suspected I wouldn’t be attracted to you. I remember thinking, His head looks really, really heavy. You have a large head. Your face is very, very cute, but Irish guys have fooled me before with their sweet faces and skulls of osmium. If you had rested your head on my stomach it would have ruptured a kidney.

When I accidentally spilled my glass of wine on my shirt at the restaurant you were so sweet to run to your car and bring me your (clean) *New York Rangers t-shirt for me to wear. But I got scared when your eyes lit up and you said, “I’m going to get you to watch hockey with me on weekends.” It felt like a test to see what I would say as visions ran through your head of your ex-girlfriend screaming, “Can we just go to the fucking farmer’s market once like all the other couples? Who cares about the goddamn Rangers?” I could feel—the way men can sense when women are on the hunt for a husband—that you’re on the hunt for a specific type of girlfriend. Maybe a Jennifer Lawrence in Silver Linings Playbook type, minus the slight mental illness? But I’m never going to watch sports and drink beer with your family. In fact, I wish men didn’t have families. 

You’re probably wondering why I made out with you in the parking lot. I don’t know. I guess because I couldn’t find my keys in my purse fast enough and the silence was awkward. Also, I think your head has a gravitational pull.

Anyway, here’s a bit of advice: Next time you take a girl out twice, if she isn’t bothering you the next day she doesn’t want to be asked out again. When I like someone, I send off one of my patented ‘fake texts’ the next morning. It goes a little something like this: ”Hey! I’m running like five minutes late but grab our table and order me a mimosa!” I’ll send that to a guy I like on Saturday afternoon followed up about three minutes later with an, “Oh, sorry! I meant to send that to my friend Margaret… her name is right above yours in my text threads. Lol. Have a great day!” Now you’ve heard from me. You know that I’m out at brunch not even thinking of you! (Even though I’m not out at brunch and I am thinking of you.)

I should have just cancelled the second date but I felt like that would be too dramatic—who cancels a date just because they don’t want to grow old with someone? Just relax and have some fucking ravioli, right? You don’t want to ask me out again if you ever get out of the gutter. I’m a neurotic loner. An over-thinking rebel. So long.I hope you find the girl of your dreams who wears your hockey jersey over her very nice naked boobs.

Love, (not in that way)

Jen

*Hockey team changed to protect the identity of my date.

Previously - Dear Mattell, Here Is How to Make a Goth Doll

Jen's first book, I Can Barely Take Care of Myself, is a New York Times bestseller. Buy a copy for yourself and all your friends here. She's also on Twitter, follow her @JenKirkman.

If you’ve ever had a near-death experience, chances are you’ve been fortunate enough—depending on how you look at it—to hear music that sounds identical to the blissed-out tones produced by the mononymous minstrel Iasos. In 1989, a scientist at Plymouth State College in New Hampshire discovered that Iasos’ music—in particular a piece called “The Angels of Comfort”—bore a remarkable resemblance to the divine strains heard by people as they dipped a toe into that sun-dappled dimension between the present and the not-so-present. Yet that information would not surprise Iasos one bit, because the 66-year-old believes he is an earthly conduit for the musical expressions of a being named Vista, who transmits ideas to Iasos telepathically, which he then turns into song. Iasos, who was born in Greece but raised in California from the age of four, has enjoyed these visitations for some 40 years, during which he’s released many albums of enlightened instrumental music and held workshops around the world on the restorative qualities of sound.

A true outsider and in many ways a visionary artist, Iasos is up there with the likes of Vangelis, Brian Eno, and his old pal Steven Halpern as one of the electronic pioneers of what became known as new age music in the mid-1970s. In recognition of his restless spirit, Chicago’s Numero Group recently put out Celestial Soul Portrait, a selection of tracks from the first decade of Iasos’ career that draw attention to the experimental nature and uncanny beauty of his work. For a cosmic voyager, Iasos was surprisingly easy to get hold of—we spoke on the phone—and came across as pretty normal and, as he puts it, “grounded.” He lives in Marin County, north of San Francisco, where his daily routine includes meditation, yoga, feeding the local deer, and spending time in the studio making music and visuals.

VICE: Greetings, Iasos! How are you?
Iasos: I’m fantastic! I just came back from a concert in Los Angeles and it couldn’t have gone better! It was sold out; standing room only. It was a young, playful crowd. There were a lot of beaming, happy faces. I had quite a time.

Do your concerts always go so well?
The one before, in Portland, Oregon, was even better. You see, I measure the dramatic impact I have on the audience by how much stillness there is when I take a bow to signify that the concert is over. Because if they really get it, they’re really zoned out and no one gets up. In Portland it lasted so long it was almost embarrassing. I bowed to signify it was over and then I went to the front of the stage and nobody got up. Then one minute went by and nobody got up, there was silence. Two minutes after, six minutes after… I thought this is too much and walked into the lobby and that broke the spell.

A lot of people will encounter Iasos for the first time through Celestial Soul Portrait, which shines a light on your earlier work. Is there renewed interest in your music?
It’s funny you say that. Ever since I started, my close friends have always said, “Iasos, you’re way ahead of your time.” And now that it’s 2013, people are getting interested in music I released in 1975. So it kind of verifies them saying that.

I have to say it’s encouraging to hear you talking like a completely normal person. Having seen photos of you and listened to your music, I had the impression you’d be a  pretty zoned-out individual.
[hysterical laughter] That’s very funny! It’s funny that you expected me to be zoned-out. I am grounded and present.

What was your state of mind in 1975 when you were making your first album, Inter-Dimensional Music?
Same as it is now! I’m trying to externalize the musical visions I’m getting in my mind, which are very heavenly and paradise-like. In those days I did it with acoustic instruments that were electronically processed. Nowadays there is all sorts of software to do all sorts of outrageous things with sound. So I’m just taking advantage of whatever technology is available at the time, to get as close as I can to an approximation of what I’m hearing in my mind.

You’ve devised a kind of “paradise range” for your music, a celestial scale. How did you come up with this?
You don’t know the story?

I might have heard it, but it would be good to hear it from the horse’s mouth, as it were.
I started learning piano when I was eight years old, and I took flute lessons when I was ten years old. My formal training was only grade school and high school, and after that I was self-taught. I reached the point where I could play flute along with classical music and figure out the chords, so I learned a lot about chords and harmony that way. And then at a certain point in the early 70s I started spontaneously hearing a certain type of music in my mind. I had no idea where it was coming from. It wasn’t anything like any Earth music, and it was uplifting and happy and full of love. It was so harmonious as to be unearthly, and it was full of unusual sounds. This was before there were synthesizers.


Iasos and his flute salute the sky at Big Sur, California. Photo courtesy of Numero Group.

When you say “Earth music,” what do you mean?
The kind of music you hear on planet Earth. It wasn’t like any of it. I had no idea how to create this, and then a voice in my mind said, “You can do this!” And I trusted it, so I started working on it. Then about two years later I had a profound spiritual experience where I was doing automatic writing with this spiritual teacher. Whenever I did this with her she would say, “You will now write with so-and-so”—typically it would be some ascended master, like, “You will write with Hilarian or Saint Germain.” And after just a few minutes of writing, I would sense their unique personality. When she said, “You’ll now write with Vista,” I’d never heard of him, so I just started writing. After a few sentences, I sensed his personality and the instant I did there was a flash of cognition that went through my mind. BLAM! Suddenly I remembered a whole bunch of stuff. I remembered that this being, Vista, had made an agreement with me before I was born. The agreement was that I would incarnate on planet Earth, I would become proficient in music, and then he would transmit musical ideas and later visual ideas into my mind, and I would do my best to externalize them so that other people could benefit from it.

OK! And how do you picture Vista?
When you reach that level of consciousness, form is optional and flexible. There’s no particular form. However, I sense his unique personality, his soul, his heart.

Can you communicate with him at any time, or is the connection strongest when, say, you’re working on music?
I invite him when I work on music and I invite him to influence me when I’m doing live concerts also. It’s more a one-way thing where he transmits ideas to me, although there have been a few wild exceptions where I asked for something and got it really immediately in a very dramatic way that blew me away.


What happened?
Once before a concert I was backstage tuning in to Vista and I said, “Vista, I would love to experience your energy more vividly than usual.” To my surprise, maybe two and a half seconds after I put out that telepathic request, suddenly—BZZZTT!—he transmitted an unbelievably concentrated beam of visual patterns from his third eye into my third eye. Now, imagine 30 hours of the most glorious visuals you’ve ever seen, continuously flowing and changing and evolving and undulating and morphing. And then imagine squeezing all that into about one second.

Sounds like an intense LSD trip.
I wouldn’t say it was similar to that. This was very concentrated.

How receptive was the Los Angeles music industry to the records you were putting out in the mid to late 70s?
That’s a joke. They weren’t receptive at all. Before my first record came out, I remember going to big record companies like Columbia Records in San Francisco to play them the music I wanted to release, and they would laugh at me because they couldn’t get it. This was before new age music existed. They couldn’t see a new success formula in music that would work. They only knew success formulas that were already working. So they’d laugh at me, saying, “Where’s the beat? Where’s the catch? Where’s the lyrics?” They didn’t understand it at all. That’s all fine, I did it in an alternative way.

When you heard of other people making similar music to you in the 70s, did you reach out to them, or did they get in touch with you?
Well, I live in Marin County, and the new age sort of started in America, and in America the new age started in California, and in California the new age started in the Bay Area, and in the Bay Area the new age started in Marin County, so I was in the center of the vortex. I had a lot of friends in Marin County who were spiritual teachers, and friends who were musicians and friends who were visionary artists, all in the new age field.

Have certain life events informed your work, or has the music of others influenced you at all?
It had very secondary, minor effects. For example, I like Jimi Hendrix; I like his magnificent ability to weave melodies. I like the rhythms in Santana. I like the lush textures in Martin Denny’s music. I like the classical chords in Ravel and Debussy and Respighi. There have been some influences, but over 90 percent of it is what I’m getting internally.

Do you keep abreast of modern electronic music? There’s a lot of new new age-style music floating around these days.
I’m very ignorant about it except for what people share with me. I’m not looking for it because I’m too busy creating my own. I don’t need that external influence as I’m getting ideas internally.

Did you listen to Brian Eno or Vangelis in the 70s? They were your contemporaries in the world of progressive electronic music.
I heard their music and I like Vangelis—some of his stuff is heavenly. He covers a wide range emotionally, whereas I’m focused only on the blissful part of it. Eno was very creative and very spacey. I don’t especially resonate with it, but I respect him very much as a musician.

Do you fear death?
Well, my girlfriend asked me the same question and I gave her the same answer: part of me does and part of me does not. The physical body has its own consciousness and it’s programmed to stay alive no matter what, so my physical body has an extreme fear of death. But my soul does not fear it at all because I know it’s from where I came from in the beginning, a wonderful, loving space. So part of me is afraid and part of me is not afraid at all and they both coexist happily together.

The Numero Group compilation Celestial Soul Portrait is out now, as is Iasos’ new single “Smooth Sailing Over Enchanted Lands.” Dive into iasos.com for a world of pure bliss and positivity.

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The homepage of LoveFlutter.com

Last week I was forwarded a press release for a new dating website called LoveFlutter.com. Interestingly, it promises to screen out people who are "boring":

“To coincide with our launch we’ve worked with Dr. Simon Moore of the British Psychological Society to create a 60-second test that scores how interesting a person is, out of 100. It’s called The Quirky-Interesting Test and we’re harnessing it to exclude any ‘unexciting’ types at sign-up. Potential members must pass the test in order to join LoveFlutter.”

Wow. An innovative new test backed by a real-life scientist who deems himself an authority on what is "quirky" and "interesting"? This sounded like exactly the kind of tonic my love life has long been in dire need of. Could science tell me whether I was interesting enough to be allowed to have sex with people?

Disappointingly, when I looked at the Q-I test the questions didn’t seem very science-based. They didn't look very fun-based, either, unless you think fun is something marketing executives have in brainstorming sessions in beige conference rooms [sic]:

“How many times have you travelled outside you own country in the last six months?"

"Have you completed or would you consider a bungee jump?"

"If you were in a band (and could play guitar or sing), what role would you take?"

"How many people liked, commented, or RTed your most recent status update/tweet?"

"Would you go to the cinema on your own?"

"How many languages can you speak?"

"How many gigs have you been to in the last six months?"

"After a hard day's work, what would you rather watch on TV (sitcoms, documentaries, or reality TV)?"

Well, hang on. Let's analyze this barrage of leading questions. Go to London City airport and collar any one of the thousands of accountants who split their time between the UK office and bars that close at 9 PM in Zurich—then come back and tell me, was it a particularly riveting conversation? Is Keith Richards more or less interesting than Dan Gillespie Sells (the guy from the Feeling)? What if something you'd tweeted had amassed 21,000 RTs because people hate you and think you're an idiot? What if you haven't been to any gigs in the last six months, but you are a regular at Pedestal or the Royal Opera House, or both?

Clearly, none of these questions have much to do with how interesting you are. This test is not going to exclude boring people. It may, however, exclude people who aren’t wealthy enough to go abroad three times in six months, or aren't educated enough to be able to speak three languages, or aren't able-bodied enough to be up for gigs and bungee jumps. "Interesting" in this case seems to be employed as a synonym for “a middle-class professional with conventional interests.”

There are plenty of dating websites with dodgy matching methods. Does it really matter that LoveFlutter is adding to that pool? Some professionals would argue that it does. Psychologist Dr. Petra Boynton explained to me that she’s spent years giving advice to people who've been “made to feel rubbish and under-confident for not being ‘good’ at dating, or who believe themselves to be ‘boring’ or ‘undatable.’" She adds that at the workshops she runs for mental health service users, "this kind of anxiety really comes through—the pressure to be 'exciting' is very difficult for many."

When I emailed LoveFlutter’s cofounder and spokesman, Daigo Smith, he accepted that the quality of "interestingness" is a subjective thing, and didn’t really defend the test as a scientific exercise. “What we're trying to achieve is to gather like-minded, interesting singles together in one place so they can meet each other and connect around things they love doing,” he told me. “As for excluding people and telling them they're 'not interesting,' we do that in a nice way. We never tell someone they're boring, that'd be really negative—we just hint that they might want to explore their interesting side a little more."

He didn't explain what this exploration might involve—a "quirky" bungee jump?—but he did defend his website's screening policy. "The 'boring' angle is just what the press have latched onto,” he said.

That sounds fair enough, but the wider online dating industry is starting to look as bad for consumers as the self-help market. There, accepted best practices have been obfuscated by crowds of market players who sell elaborate solutions based on making people's problems seem more complex than they really are. Attaching a voice of "science" to your product—ideally the voice of someone who can spout lots of complicated-sounding words to cover up his lack of ideas—can give you a real edge over your competitors. Meanwhile, people with real problems are left adrift in a minefield of bad advice, with sites like LoveFlutter only adding to the difficulty of finding companionship in an uncaring universe.

So what is LoveFlutter's in-house scientist, Dr. Simon Moore—a professional psychologist and member of the British Psychological Society—doing promoting such an enterprise? “Surely it's better that trained professionals are offering advice, guidance, and support to such work rather than letting any old person develop unsupported and lay work which no doubt will cause bigger ethical and psychological problems,” he argued when I challenged him.

What, then, is the science supporting this particular work? “Scientifically the more interesting you are, the more likely it is that you'll attract more interest..."

Right, OK.

"...and also people will stay interested in you for longer. So the site tries to reflect that aspect.”

Again, there's a problem with whose definition of "interesting" we're working with here. Is it a scientific one? Moore’s explanation of the test’s logic suggested a rather... traditional view: “We know that males look for signs of physical attraction in prospective long-term mates, as attraction signals health, good genetic stock, youth and energy—things required for producing healthy offspring. Females on the other hand look for signs of resources—not just money, but status, personality, intelligence, humor—as these are all signs that the male can A.) provide for children and B.) invest good genes in a child. So, interesting males suggest that they can cope with numerous tasks—that they are resourceful and intelligent.”

In other words, while Moore did accept that, “obviously 'attractive,' 'sexy,' and 'interesting' are all somewhat subjective judgment values,” it seems the test is predicated on the idea that men should be useful and women should look pretty, a theory enthusiastically endorsed by cavemen. Revolutionary stuff here.

Every profession has its sellouts, and science is no exception. Recent history is littered with examples of scientists who have been willing to sell their authority to all manner of dubious commercial partners. Susan Greenfield used to promote a "brain-training" program called MindFit, before deciding that computers were melting our brains, while TV’s Robert Winston used to be an enthusiastic cheerleader for fish-oil supplements.

With LoveFlutter, some would say that Moore joins that long and ignoble tradition. Is it harmless? Moore argued to me that “it's no different ethically than asking questions of someone in a bar,” but then questions in a bar don’t come endorsed by professional doctors carrying the initials of the British Psychological Society.

Of course there’s nothing wrong with scientists taking their expertise into industry, but there is a danger in attaching the label of scientific credibility to things that haven’t earned it. It misleads the public and it degrades the label for everybody else. More than that, it provides another easy stick to beat psychology with, a field already struggling thanks to the behaviour of its mediocre professional body, and a small army of "professionals" whose main ambition seems to be to get on television. Perhaps they should spend a little more time sorting out their own affairs. I know a very interesting dating website.

Martin Robbins is a writer and talker who blogs about weird and wonderful things for the Guardian and New Statesman. Here Be Dragons is a column that explores denial, conflict, and mystery at the wild fringes of science and human understanding. Find him on Twitter @mjrobbins, or email tips and feedback to martin@mjrobbins.net.

More on online dating:

Juggalos Are OK, Cupid

Sparkology Is for Yuppies who Can't Get Laid

Lies Everyone Tells on Dating Websites

Presumably painted by a Near Term Extinctionist. via Flickr.

If you were to zoom out and take a comparative look back at our planet during the 1950s from some sort of cosmic time-travelling orbiter cube, you would probably first notice that millions of pieces of space trash had disappeared from orbit.

The moon would appear six and a half feet closer to Earth, and the continents of Europe and North America would be four feet closer together. Zooming in, you would be able to spot some of the industrial clambering of the Golden Age of Capitalism in the West and some of the stilted attempts at the Great Leap Forward in the East. Lasers, bar codes, contraceptives, hydrogen bombs, microchips, credit cards, synthesizers, superglue, Barbie dolls, pharmaceuticals, factory farming, and distortion pedals would just be coming into existence.

There would be two thirds fewer humans on the planet than there are now. Over a million different species of plants and animals would exist that have since gone extinct.  There would be 90 percent more fish, a billion less tons of plastic, and 40 percent more phytoplankton (producers of half the planet’s oxygen) in the oceans. There would be twice as many trees covering the land and about three times more drinking water available from ancient aquifers. There would be about 80 percent more ice covering the northern pole during the summer season and 30 percent less carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere. The list goes on...

Most educated and semi-concerned people know that these sorts of sordid details make up the backdrop of our retina-screened, ethylene-ripened story of progress, but what happens when you start stringing them all together?

If Doomsday Preppers, the highest rated show on the National Geographic Channel is any indication, the general public seems to be getting ready for some sort of societal collapse. There have always been doomsday prophets and cults around and everyone has their own personal view of how the apocalypse will probably go down (ascension of pure souls, zombie crows), but in the midst of all of the Mayan Calendar/Timewave Zero/Rapture babble, there are some clarion calls coming from a crowd that’s less into bugout bags and eschatology: well-respected scientists and journalists who have come to some scarily-sane sounding conclusions about the threat of human-induced climate change on the survival of the human species.

Recent data seems to suggest that we may have already tripped several irrevocable, non-linear, positive feedback loops (melting of permafrost, methane hydrates, and arctic sea ice) that make an average global temperature increase of only 2°C by 2100 seem like a fairy tale. Instead, we’re talking 4°C, 6°C, 10°C, 16°C (????????) here.

The link between rapid climate change and human extinction is basically this: the planet becomes uninhabitable by humans if the average temperature goes up by 4-6°C. It doesn’t sound like a lot because we’re used to the temperature changing 15°C overnight, but the thing that is not mentioned enough is that even a 2-3°C average increase would give us temperatures that regularly surpass 40°C (104°F) in North America and Europe, and soar even higher near the equator. Human bodies start to break down after six hours at a wet-bulb (100% humidity) temperature of 35°C (95°F). This makes the 2003 heat wave in Europe that killed over 70,000 people seem like not a very big deal.

Factoring in the increase we’re already seeing in heat waves, droughts, wildfires, massive storms, food and water shortages, deforestation, ocean acidification, and sea level rise some are seeing the writing on the wall:

We’re all gonna die!

If you want to freak yourself the fuck out, spend a few hours trying to refute the mounting evidence of our impending doom heralded by the man who gave the Near Term Extinction movement its name, Guy McPherson, on his blog Nature Bats Last. McPherson is a former Professor Emeritus of Natural Resources and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona, who left his cushy tenured academic career and now lives in a straw-bale house on a sustainable commune in rural New Mexico in an attempt to “walk away from Empire.” There are a lot of interviews and videos available of Dr. McPherson talking about NTE if you want to boost your pessimism about the future to suicidal/ruin-any-dinner-party levels.

If you are in need of an ultimate mind-fuck, there is a long essay on McPherson’s site entitled “The Irreconcilable Acceptance of Near Term Extinction” written by a lifelong environmental activist named Daniel Drumright. He writes about trying to come to terms with what it means to be on a clear path toward extinction now that it’s probably too late to do anything about it (hint: suicide or shrooms). As Drumright points out, the entirety of human philosophy, religion, and politics doesn’t really provide a framework for processing the psychological terror of all of humanity not existing in the near future.

Outside of the official NTE enclave, there are a lot of scientists and journalists who would probably try to avoid being labeled as NTE proponents, but are still making the same sort of dire predictions about our collective fate. They may not believe that humans will ALL be gone by mid-century, but massive, catastrophic “population decline” due to human-induced rapid climate change is not out of the picture.

James Hansen, the former head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the world’s leading climatologists has recently retired from his position after 43 years in order to concentrate on climate-change activism. He predicts that without full de-carbonization by 2030, global CO₂ emissions will be 16 times higher than in 1950, guaranteeing catastrophic climate change. In an essay published in April of this year, Hansen states:

“If we should ‘succeed’ in digging up and burning all fossil fuels, some parts of the planet would become literally uninhabitable, with some times during the year having wet bulb temperatures exceeding 35°C. At such temperatures, for reasons of physiology and physics, humans cannot survive… it is physically impossible for the environment to carry away the 100W of metabolic heat that a human body generates when it is at rest. Thus even a person lying quietly naked in hurricane force winds would be unable to survive.”

Bill McKibben, prominent green journalist, author, distinguished scholar, and one of the founders of 350.org—the movement that aims to reduce atmospheric CO₂ levels to 350ppm in the hopes of avoiding runaway climate change—wrote a book in 2011 called Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. In it he highlights current environmental changes that have put us past the predictions that had previously been reserved for the end of the 21^st century. He emphasizes that the popular political rhetoric that we need to do something about climate change for our “grandchildren” is sorely out of touch with reality. This is happening now. We’re already living on a sci-fi planet from a parallel universe:

 “The Arctic ice cap is melting, the great glacier above Greenland is thinning, both with disconcerting and unexpected speed. The oceans are distinctly more acid and their level is rising…The greatest storms on our planet, hurricanes and cyclones, have become more powerful…The great rain forest of the Amazon is drying on its margins…The great boreal forest of North America is dying in a matter of years… [This] new planet looks more or less like our own but clearly isn’t… This is the biggest thing that’s ever happened.”

Climate Change protesters in Melbourne. via Flickr.

Peter Ward is a paleontologist and author whose 2007 book Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What they Can Tell Us About the Future, provides evidence that all but one of the major global extinction events (dinosaurs) occurred due to rapid climate change caused by increased atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. This time around, the carbon dioxide increase happens to be coming from humans figuring out how to dig billions of tons of carbon out of the ground—and releasing it into the air. Ward states that during the last 10,000 years in which human civilization has emerged, our carbon dioxide levels and climate have remained anomalously stable, but the future doesn’t look so good:

“The average global temperature has changed as much as 18°F [8°C] in a few decades. The average global temperature is 59°F [15°C]. Imagine that it shot to 75°F [24°C] or dropped to 40°F [4°C], in a century or less. We have no experience of such a world... at minimum, such sudden changes would create catastrophic storms of unbelievable magnitude and fury...lashing the continents not once a decade or century but several times each year...For most of the last 100,000 years, an abruptly changing climate was the rule, not the exception.”

Far from being a Mother Earth lover, Ward has also developed an anti-Gaia hypothesis that he calls the “Medea Hypothesis” in which complex life, instead of being in symbiotic harmony with the environment, is actually a horrible nuisance. In this hypothesis, the planet and microbial life have worked together multiple times to trigger mass extinction events that have almost succeeded in returning the earth to its microbe-dominant state. In other words, Mother Earth might be Microbe Earth and she might be trying to kill her kids.

Scientists are putting out the warning call that rapid, life-threatening climate change lies ahead in our near future—but most are drowned out by the political arguments and denialist rhetoric of climate change skeptics. The well-funded effort by free market think tanks, energy lobbyists, and industry advocates to blur the public perception of climate science should come as no surprise. The thermodynamic forcing effects of an ice-free artic by 2015 don’t seem so threatening if you stand to gain billions of dollars by sending drill bits into the potentially huge oil reservoirs there.

It may not be the case that the southwest US will be uninhabitable by 2035, or that all of human life will be extinguished in a generation, but we should probably start to acknowledge and internalize what some of the people who have given their lives to better understand this planet are saying about it. It’s depressing to think that humans, in our current state, could be the Omega Point of consciousness. Maybe sentience and the knowledge of our inevitable death have given us a sort of survival vertigo that we can’t overcome. As the separate paths of environmental exploitation quickly and quietly converge around us, we might just tumble off the precipice, drunk on fossil fuels, making duck faces into black mirrors.

Previously:

We Spoke to a Climate Change Expert about Flooding in Canadian Cities

Kangaroo Scrotums Are the New Victims of Global Warming

Get to Know Your Catastrophic Landscapes

A protester protesting prorogation last time parliament was prorogued. via Flickr.

Stephen Harper wants to hit the snooze button on the Canadian government’s summer vacation. While basically any student in the western world can identify with this need to keep the good times rolling, it’s not exactly the most confidence-inducing behaviour for a responsible, reliable government to be condoning. And yet, yesterday it was announced that parliament will be prorogued, a.k.a. delayed, until October—instead of starting on September 16^th. The exact date for a return hasn’t been set yet, but it’s probably going to be after Canada’s collective Thanksgiving food coma.

According to Steve, the extra month will give him time to write a big speech to Canadians called a throne speech and groom his new cabinet ministers by teaching them things like “who to engage or avoid: friend and enemy.”

Some political pundits on CBC and CTV have told their audiences to not freak out. According to them, Canadian parliaments prorogue all the time (which, especially under Stephen Harper, is true), but I see all of this differently: freak out, people!

Historically, between the birth of lil’ baby Canada up until the 1950s, governments were prorogued—sometimes for half of the year—so parliamentarians could spend time in their local constituencies to address local issues. Then, they realized they could just use the phone for that most of the time, or later, email, so finding an excuse to avoid debate in the House of Commons and Senate became more difficult to explain.

In Australia, another Commonwealth parliamentary democracy, prorogation is explicitly meant to be a break for when discussion in the House is going nowhere. Because of that, they conventionally call an election right after a prorogation, like they are in the middle of doing right now.

Meanwhile in Canada, Harper has prorogued parliament four times in the last six years for some pretty sketchy reasons. The sketchiest of all was in 2008, when the PM asked the Governor General to prorogue parliament to avoid losing his job, due to a vote of non-confidence quickly following his minority victory that same year. The Governor General had the opportunity to refuse the Prime Minister—pretty much the only time that this could happen—and chose to do just what Stevie asked of her.

Then in 2010, Harper prorogued again supposedly due to the Winter Olympics, but more likely to avoid discussion on Canada’s treatment of Afghan detainees.

Now Harper again finds himself in deep shit and is apparently choosing to cut and run from debate in the House of Commons just when his Senate seems to be mired in scandal. This summer, there was the former Cabinet Minister Bev Oda who resigned for wasting money on a $16 glass of orange juice among other things—and the perpetual Senate shitstorm that has all sorts of people (including me) asking why the hell we have it in the first place.

The Liberals and NDP have been saying this prorogation is just another example of the PM dipping out when the going gets tough. The NDP’s grizzly leader Thomas Mulcair tweeted this snappy joke: “Stephen Harper can run but he can't hide forever. Maybe by Halloween he'll try dressing up as an accountable Prime Minister. #prorogation.” SNAP!

While Stephen Harper learns how to use his grandmother’s sewing machine to make his accountability costume, the reality is, if parliament is delayed, Harper is still going to be attacked for these scandals. It’s also not a stretch to say that Harper hides from parliament. Over the past year, Harper has “coincidentally” been away from the House of Commons when he probably should have been dealing with important issueslike when Mike Duffy was slipped $90,000 from Harper’s advisor Nigel Wright to pony up for some overspending, and when Harper was busy meeting with pandas instead of spokespeople for Idle No More.

In fairness to Harper, even if he sits through a barrage of hate for appointing three of the four senators who have been caught wasting public funds, including the latest culprit Pamela Wallin, he still needs to wait for the Supreme Court to decide if it’s even constitutionally possible for the government to get rid of this fucking Senate thing without asking all the provinces. That decision isn’t expected until fall at the earliest.

But more things happen in parliament than Question Period where the opposition rips on the government. Parliament Hill is actually meant to debate things called bills and legislation, remember those? A delayed start to parliament means that train regulation isn’t being debated to stop disasters like the tragedy of Lac Mégantic from happening again or Bill C-54, which sets limitations on high-risk offenders who were found not criminally responsible due to mental illness. Democracy is slow enough as it is, maybe it’s time we tell them that summer playtime is over.

Massively important political issues aside, Stephen Harper is clearly an eternal summer kinda guy. So until parliament resumes, let’s keep the good times going, right? Hit the lake for some fishing, shoot some fireworks at your friends, and spend all your time day-drinking at picnics. You’ll probably catch somebody who is supposed to be running our country out there with you.

Follow Joel on Twitter: @JoelBalsam

Previously:

The Canadian Senate is a Waste of Money

Another Canadian Senator is Wasting our Money