If you’ve been anywhere near a screen or old-timey print publication that aims to provide you with Canadian news, you’ve most likely heard the oh so shocking news that Canada’s dorkiest sexiest politician, Justin Trudeau has at one point in his career been stoned.

Even though Justin has been parading around praising marijuana and asking for its decriminalization, the “news” that he enjoys the chronic leaf appeared to come as a surprise to all sorts of easily surprised individuals. The fact that Justin’s soft, delicate, perfectly moisturized lips have been wrapped around a joint and/or bong is important enough to make a blip on our national radar—when King Robbie Ford is arm wrestling Hulk Hogan and sinkholes are opening in Montreal—is ludicrous. As far as I’m concerned, Justin can put his marijuana-decriminalization mouth around whatever THC-delivery device he desires.

57 per cent of Canadians are in favour of legalizing marijuana, and 66 per cent of the country thinks that weed will be legalized within the next decade.On top of that, the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police voted earlier this week in favour of reforming Canada’s drug laws. They believe Canadians who are found with 30 grams or less should be given tickets, instead of having their lives ruined with a criminal record. Radical.

As a VICE writer who lives in Montreal—where on Sundays during the hippy-fest known as Tam-Tams, the cross at the top of the mountain is a challenge to see through the gigantic weed cloud—I realize I’m very biased. I’d rather laugh off a weed scandal while I put on my LARPing gear and prepare to hit my friends with giant foam Q-tips, before we all get massively blazed and smash our palms against cheap souvenir bongos, but I think the country at large should take it easy on Justin.

The anecdote he shared with a journalist from the Huffington Post about the last time he “had a puff” is probably one of the most inoffensive stories I’ve ever heard. It’s not like he’s been photographed with dead drug dealers like some other politicians, so let’s put this all into perspective. Here’s exactly what Justin said happened, three years ago:

“We had a few good friends over for a dinner party, our kids were at their grandmother's for the night, and one of our friends lit a joint and passed it around. I had a puff.”

I’ve previously established how much of a try-hard JT is when it comes to being cool and edgy. So this is probably how it actually went down: Justin Trudeau is standing in the backyard of his magnificent suburban home, enjoying his favourite Canadian beer. He probably just finished performing his most famous joke—the one where he purposefully falls down the stairs in the most awkward way possible.

He’s standing by the pool, his wife clinging onto his arm, trying to entertain his guests with a “wacky youtube” someone “twittered” to him recently. He’s basically being the Justin we all know and feel weird about love.

Then, just as he awkwardly segues into trying to explain to his guests the importance of decriminalizing marijuana, his friend says “speaking of which” and pulls out what Justin would cringingly refer to as a “sweet doobie-joint."

While Justin’s “not someone who is particularly interested in altered states,” he sure is interested in being the cool guy. As the joint gets passed from hand-to-mouth-to-mouth-to-hand, Justin begins to feel uneasy. Not because he doesn’t know whether he should smoke or not—he knows Canada’s existing drug laws are totally absurd even though he voted for bill C-15 which imposed stricter penalties for marijuana related offences—but rather, he’s wondering how he’s going to maneuver the thing. The guy has allegedly only smoked five or six times, and hasn’t mastered the art of holding a joint the way most pot-smoking Canadians have for the better part of their adult lives.

It’s finally his turn. He pinches it firmly between his thumb and forefinger and fans his other fingers out like he’s making an “okay” sign. He squeezes the poor lil’ pinner too hard, crushing the cardboard filter his friend so carefully crafted in the bathroom earlier. The unnecessary pressure applied by Justin’s strong boxing-champion hands prevents any significant amount of smoke from making it inside his body. He’s not aware of it. He’s smiling. He did it. He thinks he’s now “on pot” and high as a kite. But most importantly, he’s part of the gang. “That’s good shit,” he says and nods with a grin.

I see this episode as another way for Justin to stay relevant to Canadians. No matter what the guy does, people will talk about it. By judging from his smirk during the controversial interview in which he admitted to smoking weed as an MP, he’s happy we are talking about him—even if it’s for something as irrelevant as a single “puff.” Justin might be clumsy, but he’s surprisingly honest, and that’s something I can get down with. If people want to bash the dreamy politician that Justin is, why not pick a real issue? As Canadians, we’ve shown in the past that we don’t give much of a fuck about our leaders’ drug use. So why don’t we cut JT a bit of slack and sit back, smoke some BC Bud and enjoy one of our country’s greatest natural resources.


Follow Steph on Twitter: @smvoyer

Previously:

I Want to Bone Justin Trudeau

Photo via Flickr user Oakley Originals

For the past 12 months, police officers in Rialto, California, have been wearing cameras while on duty as part of a pilot program. It’s expensive to mount a camera on every uniformed cop, but the idea is that by recording all the interactions between officers and civilians and suspects, cops will behave better and complaints against the department will be quickly resolved—if someone makes a claim about being mistreated, it can be easily proved or disproved by a look at the tape. The experiment seems to be going well, and starting September 1, all 66 uniformed officers in Rialto will wear them. Complaints against the department have gone down 88 percent over the course of the year-long study while the use of force by officers declined by more than half, implying that cameras really do benefit both police and civilians. Indeed, a New York Daily News article highlighted the case of Rialto cop Randy Peterson, who was cleared of an excessive-force allegation lodged against him by a mentally disturbed man thanks to his body camera.

But not all departments are as forward-thinking as Rialto’s, or as concerned with the future of police accountability. On August 12, when the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk policy was ruled unconstitutionally racist, the judge pointed to Rialto as an example of how to make cops accountable while ordering the NYPD to institute a similar program. The cops aren’t happy about this, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg—who generally supports surveillance when it comes to monitoring the civilian population—called the idea “a nightmare.” NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly also sounded dubious, saying that these body cameras have only been tried in much smaller cities than New York (Rialto has about 100,000 people). And it’s true that since these body cameras cost $900 a pop, outfitting all of New York’s 35,000 uniformed officers might prove fiscally impossible.

Cops generally object to being filmed even when it doesn’t cost their departments money. It’s easy to find footage on YouTube of cops objecting to being filmed by civilians—sometimes violently, sometimes with illegal arrests. Websites like Photography Is Not a Crime and Copblock are devoted to filming police, reporting on incidents where cops violate the civil rights of people who try to do so, and encouraging everyone to keep a close eye on law enforcement. You’ll even hear horror stories of people in states with restrictive wiretapping laws like Indiana and Massachusetts facing criminal prosecutions for trying to record the cops. The charges are usually eventually dropped, but the question remains: Why, if they aren’t doing anything wrong, are the police so afraid of being filmed?

Cameras won’t magically cause corrupt or cruel cops to behave better, and if we attached them to every officer in the country there would still be questions about when the cops would be allowed to turn them off and who would have access to the footage. But Rialto’s new project is a hell of a start. It’s a fundamental right to film in public—particularly when the subject of the recording is public servants on the job—and police departments could do themselves a big favor if they start embracing the transparency that body cameras represent.

Now on to this week’s bad cops:

- On July 28, police were sent to the Phoenix, Arizona, home of 44-year-old Michael Ruiz, who had reportedly been acting erratic. Ruiz, who had a history of drug abuse, climbed onto the roof of his apartment complex, and when the cops finally got him down they cuffed him and Tasered him multiple times while yelling, “Stop resisting!” Neighbors who witnessed the confrontation recorded it, and in the video you can see Ruiz’s head repeatedly striking the steps as officers drag him to their cruiser. Ruiz’s father was a 29-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department and he’s demanding an explanation. An autopsy and toxicology report on Ruiz will be forthcoming.

- Police in Beeville, Texas, are complaining that they don’t have enough money for their SWAT team, and are asking for $30,000 from the city to purchase equipment. This is kinda odd because Beeville has a population of 13,000 and hasn’t had a murder since 2005.

- A Sunnyside, Washington, librarian with a habit of filming police got in trouble last month for turning his camera on a SWAT team raiding the home of a suspected laptop thief and supposed gang member. But on Tuesday, cops, prosecutors, and a judge said that 28-year-old Thomas Warren was well within his rights to film the SWAT team. His arrest was a “mistake,” said Sunnyside's deputy police chief, Phil Schenck. Warren is still considering a lawsuit, and won’t stop filming the police.

- On August 22, an Oakland, California, SWAT team evicted a dozen squatters from a building they had lived in for several months. Cops describe the property as being filthy, while the crust punks called the police’s use of force excessive. One said the “fascists” pointed guns at him. Another person was arrested for spitting in a cop’s face. While the the squatters were definitely breaking the law, it’s not clear why they needed to be moved out at gunpoint.

- While the NYPD’s stop and frisk program has gotten a lot of attention lately, Detroit cops have been carrying out similar searches for the past several years. The New York ruling will not change Detroit’s policies, though they may be re-evaluated.

- The mayor and a city council member in Raleigh, North Carolina, are looking into changing a law which prohibits the dispersal of food in city parks without a permit. This comes after an incident last weekend where volunteers from charities were stopped by police from passing out breakfast biscuits to the homeless.

- If you’re trying to understand how the NYPD morphed into a kind of mini CIA, check out New York magazine’s in-depth look at how the department changed after 9/11.

- Over at the Huffington Post, Radley Balko rounded up several cop accounts that point to their disturbing habit to call themselves “warriors” or “soldiers” and compare their job to that of a US soldier in Afghanistan.

- Our Good Cop of the Week award goes to the Leander, Texas, police department, which enrolled their officers in an eight-hour training course on canine aggression after an officer injured a dog while trying to serve a warrant on a wrong house in June. The award comes with an asterisk, however, because the department refuses to pay the dog’s family’s vet bills since, as the police’s legal representative said, “The officer had a legal right to be on the property since he was trying to serve a warrant, even if it was the wrong address." The family plans to file a lawsuit for the cost of those doggy medical bills.

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

Previously: Stop Tasering Us, Police Bros

Polyamory supporters in San Francisco. via WikiCommons.

Tall, dark and handsome. That’s the general idea of a perfect husband when you’re a little girl. You can’t really imagine what he’ll look like, but you imagine he’ll be waiting for you at the end of the aisle. You exchange vows in your own mind, have a tea party with some stuffed animals, then forget all about the fake wedding and run off to skin your knees somewhere. It’s pretty stereotypical to see little girls plan their dream weddings and with the onslaught of television shows geared toward monogamy like Say Yes to the Dress, Bridezilla, Four Weddings and the countless other trashy programs that seem to be coming out, it seems like the whole world is putting on the heat to find that one eternal true love.

Anyway, I can’t tell whether it’s because I always develop a wandering eye after a few months, or if I just start to feel suffocated and trapped like a tiger in a cage, but monogamy always gives me that same old feeling of jamming a puzzle piece into the wrong place. I thought people in committed relationships were huge suckers. Then I had a friend sit me down and explain polyamory.
 
For those of you who aren’t aware of what polyamory is, it’s kind of like an open relationship but better. It’s based on the belief of loving multiple partners, so you can have many lovers, yet still forge deep and involved emotional relationships. The ideal polyamorous relationships are egalitarian, communicative, and honest. It sounds a little complicated at first, but once you get into the swing of things it’s can be a pretty great way of living if you’ve struggle with the idea of “till death do us part”. The more I thought about it the more I considered it to be the exact kind of relationship that I would like. Basically, it seemed like a really good way to be pro-slut without hurting anyone.

I called up Zoe Duff, the director of the Canadian Polyamory Advocacy Association, one of the organizers to “Claiming Our Right To Love,” the first ever Poly Convention in British Columbia, and author of Love Alternatively Expressed which is due to be out this fall, to dispel some misunderstandings of polyamory and maybe help me sort out why I generally feel less than human when it comes to traditional relationships.

VICE: Some of my friends who are presently in polyamorous relationships talk about the "rules" of being poly. What are some of these rules?
Zoe Duff: Polyamory has the knowledge and consent of all partners as a key component. Fundamental to the philosophy is open honest communication and moving into new relationships with more than just consent but the support of all partners. The rules of any poly relationship are negotiated by the people in that relationship and modified as new people are added.  Deborah Anapole's book Polyamory: The New Loving Without Limits has lots of tips for the successful practice of polyamory. Moving at the pace of the slowest partner is one that comes to mind. You don't push your partner into accepting a new partner however enthralled you are with him/her. You slow it down and negotiate as your partner is comfortable. Getting ongoing feedback from your partners to ensure that they all are getting a fair share of your time and energy is another.

Can you quickly explain to me some of the pros of being in a polyamorous relationship?
There are more minds on the problem, more incomes on the bills, more hands to take care of the housework, and more loving parents/grandparents to take care of the kids. Partners share different interests with you and so there is someone to dance with, someone to laugh with, someone to fix your computer, lots of snuggles, and schedule permitting, lots of great sex.

What are some of the down sides of a polyamorous relationship?
Poly is a lot of work. If more monogamous people worked this hard on communication, compromise, and inclusivity there would be a much lower divorce rate. Things like jealousy and safer sex are obvious issues that come up more often in poly relationships—but in general, poly people learn to negotiate honestly and find solutions. Sometimes this is very hard work. You can't get away with hiding information or bad behaviour. 

How do you avoid jealousy? It’s so human.
The trick is to keep the feedback continuous and be alert to the first signs of jealousy. It is a perfectly natural reaction to needs not being met. It is important to openly discuss it and find the true source. There are desensitizing exercises that are terrific in Deborah Anapole's book. You should not feel like you are "not poly enough" because you are experiencing jealousy, and it is essential that your partners work with you and support you working through it. There is always a period of adjustment when new people are added to the relationship, and if everyone works together with compromise and consideration the balance is restored and the relationship shared by all is enhanced.

Official swag from PolyCon, the convention for polyamorists. via the Canadian Polyamory Advocacy Association.

What is the difference between polyamory and polygamy?
Polygamy can be polygyny (one male, several females) or polyandry (one female, several males). It is most often the former, and the relationships involve a marriage rite that is entrenched in some organized religious doctrine. The relationships are governed by the dominant partner—usually the male head of household—and his role is sanctioned by the religious community. This dominant partner is the only partner to have the right to take on new partners, although the knowledge of current partners and their acceptance is considered a key factor to the marriage covenant.

Polyamory can be any configuration of gender and size from the smaller group of three partners to an extended network of unlimited partners. Partners may or may not live together to still be considered members of the family unit. Most commonly, all partners have equal rights and responsibilities as well as full knowledge and consent to other partners joining the family. There are no set rules to how these relationships work, and are negotiated amongst the people involved.

How do you go about choosing a new partner to add to your already existing relationship?
Generally that is a process that you agree upon with your other partners. Everyone has a different amount of discussion required in being comfortable with adding new partners. In our family, we most often meet someone through an online dating site or a poly community event. If it’s online, we meet for coffee first and then date the person with the understanding that we are in a poly family and any long term relationship would involve getting to know other family members. If the new person is a poly community member, likely we all know them anyway. We all date outside of the household but a new partner that is to move intothe house must have the approval of all partners.  In my experience it is important for the same gender partners or "metamours" to have a good solid friendship for poly households to be happily successful.

What’s the worst thing you’ve ever seen from people who have attempted a poly relationship?
It never ceases to amaze me how someone who has struggled with discrimination will in turn be critical of someone else's choices because they differ from theirs. This happens in the poly community because we are reinventing relationship forms and living on the growing edge of personal development. “You don't do poly the way I do so you're wrong.” That’s very counterproductive to community building and always hurtful.

Poly is about negotiating for a balance in the needs of those in your poly configuration and being inclusive and at least tolerant of the expression of other people who claim to espouse the same philosophy.

Would you say you're more of an asexual or a "quirky alone?" via Flickr.

Do you have any crazy poly stories to share with us? 
The best poly stories are happy poly moments when the concept of "compersion" is realized. Compersion is when you can find happiness in the happiness of someone you love being loved by someone else.  These are noted on poly lists a lot. Moments when you get the "aha" that poly is working and the philosophy is a reality.  My best poly story is simply the bliss of walking hand in hand down the street in Vancouver with both of my partners at the same time and not getting one puzzled look or rude comment.  Sitting in a movie theatre holding hands and cuddling with both of them. Stopping outside my workplace to kiss each goodbye after a lunch date and not even caring if there were puzzled looks by passersby.   The craziness of poly is the wonderfulness that it isn't crazy—it is somebody's version of normal and all is right with the world regardless of who you or I love.

For those of us who are thinking of making the switch to polyamory, how do you know if a poly relationship is good for you?
Same as any other relationship. Are you happy?  Do you feel like your needs are met and you are valued by your partners? Is the level of communication and participation in decision making appropriate for your needs? Do you feel empowered and loved beyond any other experience that you wouldn't trade for anything? Relationships are always a work in progress, so you might not have all of that right now, but if you have none of it and you cry yourself to sleep at night, you’re in the wrong relationship regardless of how many partners you have.

Follow Gabe on Twitter: @gabekill

More non-traditional relationship stuff:

Exploring Polyamory with a Bunch of Horny Nerds

Shut the Hell Up About My Open Relationship

After Gay Marriage, Why Not Polygamy?

Above, the Jaylaani barbershop. Below to the left, a Gaboye in front of the shop. 

The Jaylaani barbershop in the center of Hargeisa, Somaliland, does good business. It’s nothing special as far as barbershops go—actually it’s a little raggedy. The counters are littered with tufts of hair and discarded khat leaves, broken and mismatched trimmers and razors, and creams and ointments with crusty containers and labels in languages no one in the shop can read. But it’s an institution. It’s the kind of place where people come just to sit outside and chat. The Jaylaani barbershop has developed enough of a following that it’s one of the few businesses in Hargeisa that stays open in the afternoon, when everyone’s off chewing khat.

But the men who run Jaylaani, past the small talk and professionalism, are worried. They are members of an ambiguous ethnosocial class often referred to as “the minority clan,” because their actual name, Midgaan, which encompasses the Timal, Yibir, Gaboye, and other groups, doubles as an insult. While some Midgaan are trying to reclaim that name, they still see it as a connoting pseudo-slavery in Somali society, where they’ve traditionally been restricted to “unclean” work, like barbering, blacksmithing, infibulation, and leatherwork.

For all their murky and disturbing history, being relegated to menial jobs at least meant they had regular work. However, the majority clans of Somaliland have found a way to get into the barbering business over the past few years without dirtying their hands. They’ve done it by building barbershops, stocking them with new and functional equipment, and then hiring the cheap labor of illegal or ambiguous Ethiopian migrants to compete with or even undercut the traditional barbers on quality and price.

Members of the Ubah Social Welfare Organization, a minority-run minority rights advocacy group, estimate that more than 20 barbershops have closed in the face of such competition. And now one of these competitors has moved in down the street from Jaylaani, throwing the security of the community in doubt.

Most politicians in Somaliland say there’s little need to worry, as there are many opportunities for the Midgaan. They say that their lot is improving rapidly in terms of legal, cultural, and economic equality with the majority clan. Mohamed and Ahmed Ibrahim Hassan, two brothers who work at Jaylaani, say it’s true that some Midgaan have made it into government jobs or the security forces and their lives have improved materially over the past 20 years of Somaliland’s independence. But many of those improvements have come through concentrated efforts by USWO and aid organizations, who partner with international donors on simple projects like making sure there's more than one toilet per ten families in the Gaboye ghetto, or creating incentives and scholarships to keep Midgaan children from dropping out of school in the face of bigotry.

Above, an Ethiopian cafe. Below to the left, Yusuf Xabashi.

But even with such efforts, as of 2006, when the Voice of Somaliland Minority Women Organization conducted a survey of the Midgaan in Hargeisa, most of the Midgaan lived off less than $1 per day, at least half of the population was unemployed, and only 20 percent attended school. Even now, only between 30 and 40 Midgaan (out of perhaps 10,000 in Hargeisa alone, by Mohamed’s rough estimates) are attending or have graduated from universities. And, USWO insists, you’d be hard-pressed to find one Midgaan in a technical school, despite their history of work in technical/vocational trades. Given that vocational skills are more in demand here than university skills, USWO officials suspect they’re being systematically barred from potential new means of employment despite their current employment crisis. 

Beyond the simple question of whether or not jobs exist, Mohamed and Ahmed can both recount numerous instances of persistent discrimination—persecution and beatings of Midgaan and non-Midgaan youths in relationships, systematic preference for non-Midgaan among equally qualified job candidates, and a lack of access to justice through the police, elders, or courts. Mohamed and Ahmed’s anecdotes of oppression are supported by the findings of numerous aid organizations. The legend in Mohamed and Ahmed’s clan is that their ancestors hunted with bows and poisoned arrows, so the meat they ate died without having been slaughtered in halal fashion, hence they were ritually unclean. And many majority clans still refuse to so much as eat from the same plate as a Midgaan, making the barriers to social, political, and economic justice hard to overcome.

They could dissimulate easily, as there’s no physical type associated with a Midgaan. But Mohamed and Ahmed say the question "What is your clan?" is common, and they don’t want to hide from who they are. They’re proud of their identity and their history and they’d rather not increase stigma and discrimination by hiding behind a false identity, admitting implicitly that the Midgaan are a base people.

They could flee the nation, as in the past Midgaans found success and less discrimination in nations like Libya. But instability in the region, and the growing threats of human trafficking (including a severe regional fear of organ harvesting) prevents them from leaving. There is a US program, recognizing the poor situation of minorities, to give them preferred immigration status and bring over large groups, but all the Midgaan I’ve encountered have stories of individuals who, in need of immediate cash, sell their registries to majority Somalis.

So for now, aside from a few success stories and the vague potential of a better life somehow in the future (despite massive national unemployment and persistent low- to high-level discrimination), these threatened jobs are all the Midgaan have. The problem is that these are also the only jobs the Ethiopian migrants have.

Accounts of the number of Ethiopians in Somaliland and their status vary wildly, as some come for a short time and return, some are just stuck in the nation temporarily, and many are uncounted totally or trying to blend in. The first wave was in the early 90s, just after the de facto independent state was proclaimed. They were treated well by those Somalilanders who’d fled to Ethiopia for refuge during Somalia’s Civil War.

One of the early Ethiopian refugees, Yusuf Xabashi, who adopted a Somali name, recalls how the Ethiopians flooding Somaliland changed over time. In the 2000s, when migration was in the tens of thousands, fewer and fewer Ethiopians were political refugees and more and more were Oromo migrants coming over to beg seasonally. They would pass through to Somali ports to go to Yemen and the Gulf for work, run out of money, and get stuck. Or they would just be traveling to Hargeisa to seek a job. This shift caused attitudes towards the Ethiopians to change.

An increasing number of improvements in Somaliland’s security and infrastructure have made it an enticing migration route. Information and remittance networks have provided the money for Ethiopians to travel, but regional instabilities in destination countries like Libya, Yemen, and Syria have bottlenecked the migrants into Somaliland and Puntland’s urban centers, For those who get stuck en route, the pressure mounts to offer labor on the cheap and work the most miserable jobs—ditch digging, toilet cleaning, etc.

While theoretically the Ethiopian migrants are decent for large-scale economics and politics, buying goods and providing cheap services, their association with street begging and their employment amid massive Somalilander unemployment has led to widespread xenophobia and discrimination: they are seen as potential vessels of terrorism, tuberculosis, and HIV. The many Muslim Oromo are accused of being fakers. And “Christian” and “Xabashi” (Ethiopian) have become derogatory terms of marginalization. NGO workers in the country caution against taking the claims of discrimination at face value, as claims of physical attacks and systematic denial of services are often exaggerated to push the hands of aid providers. But even if exaggerated, it’s undeniable that the Ethiopian migrants are in some level of marginalization. So, out of necessity and lack of options, they take the jobs given, and those include barbering.

The truly troubling thing about the Midgaan-Ethiopian competition for barbering and other “unclean” jobs is that, if these minority groups joined forces, they’d constitute a fair power block of well over 100,000 people in a nation of just 3.5 million. But the groups can’t even unite within themselves. Last year, recount Mohamed and Ahmed, the Midgaan tried to secure a seat on the local council of Hargeisa, but each of the four minority clans put up their own candidates, refused to consolidate behind one, and were firmly trounced. And within the Ethiopian communities, many seasonal migrants from the Ogaden refuse to identify as Ethiopian, choosing to pass as Somalis, while the older immigrants tend to discount and distance themselves from the recent economic migrants who give them and more recent political refugees and asylum seekers a “bad name.”

Mohamed and Ahmed stress that even if they could overcome their internal fractures, they all live so hand-to-mouth (both they and the Ethiopians have no access to remittances to sustain them when out of work like majority Somalilanders do) and in such geographically dispersed and demographically negligible communities that there’s little chance of organizing coordinated action. So for now everyone’s stuck in a wary standoff, with the Midgaan and Ethiopians eyeing each other from down the street. And in this fractious struggle, which creates a perverse market competition, the majority consumers win. No one’s sure, though, what will happen to the losers. They just don’t want to be the ones who lose. 

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I didn’t belong there. That fact was abundantly clear. If I wasn’t tipped off by the parents who winced at me dead-eyed as I stood behind their bedazzled progeny, it was probably the box office clerk who asked me thrice, “One? Just one ticket. ...One?” when I exchanged my hard-earned cash for admittance into the concert of a 10-year old rapper named Matty B.

My shame was most definitely felt as I was then escorted by one of the venue’s mute employees to the highly coveted front-row-center seat. I glanced to my neighbors and found a sleepy four-year-old leaning on her overweight mother, and before they could question my presence I was off into the crowd, desperate for a read.

Were these hundreds of children about to attend their own personal Beatlemania? The glittery signs and homemade t-shirts were certainly a hint in the right direction, but there was something off. Beyond the weird cavernous ‘off-hours’ feeling a music venue has during the light of day, the tone of this concert was met with equal-parts confusion and compliance. As if to say, “Should we have a good time? We should have a good time.” These kids could’ve been anywhere.

I leaned against the bar, nibbling on the tip of my beer cup and thinking about the Spice Girls. For me, they were the thriving heartbeat behind every slumber party, the basis of our elementary school playground games, the soundtrack to our young impressionable lives. It is my belief that every young child deserves their own Spice Girls - the pop celebrities that give kids famous imaginary friends and an excuse to assert your own music taste in post-soccer car rides. I assumed Matty B was this to the hundreds of kids surrounding me, but something seemed off.

I found a kindred spirit in the Matty B merch guy whose mutual exhaustion spoke to me. He similarly stood out, and through his wispy beard strained to seem stoked to be peddling pastel-hued fanny-packs. “So, have you been touring with Matty B this entire time?” The guy shrugged his shoulders, “To be honest, I’ve never heard of him before today. I work for the merch company, not for the artists themselves. I just show up where they tell me to show up.”

He didn’t seem startled in the slightest that a grown-ass woman was there solo. He didn’t seem to know where he was, but he did bring light to the general lack of fanfare received from the adults in charge. For them, it was just another day on the job - which I partly expected, but the lack of acknowledgment that this kid was anything close to a pop sensation was weird to me.

The tween crowd waited with bored anticipation as the opening act took the stage. A fourteen year old who dressed nineteen sang cover after cover of Selena Gomez songs and struggled to get a rise out of the joint. She contained a bubblegum sweetness that left a murky residue in the mouths of all who remembered the ‘90s. Pausing before every chorus shouting a rehearsed, “Y’all havin’ fun tonight?” to a crowd that politely raised their arms with a half-assed “Wooooo,” I sensed just how far off this was on the ‘rock’n’roll’ map. And as if that were not enough, her DJ sidekick nodding joylessly to the beat of the music really “took it to the next lev.”

Why was it nap time for this audience? I had anticipated the chaotic glass-shattering atmosphere that only occurs when more than five little girls are gathered in a room. Instead, I saw slumped over children, parents with a glazed stare, little girls sitting poised with their Matty B signs waiting for the signal to begin having their good time. This certainly wasn’t the atmosphere I'd imagined would accompany a room full of young girls attending the concert of one of their tween idols.

Finally, the big moment approached: the lights dimmed as a black-and-white portrait of the star shone brightly on a projector screen. A countdown began to toll as his back-up dancers took their places. For a moment, I felt transported to an elementary school auditorium, about to bear witness to the most lavish 4th grade Talent Show there ever was.

The first thing I noticed was Matty B’s “posse,” a handful of kids age 7 to 12 who popped’n’locked and fumbled through other breakdancey-like moves. It was as if they had just been picked up from a Gymboree dance class and shuttled over in one of those mini-vans where every member of the family was represented in sticker form.

Matty B began his set with a couple of his original songs, something about wanting to hang out with his friends but having to do chores. You know, shit we can all relate to. He’s a normal kid, this Matty B, not one of them ‘big city rappers,’ like his voting-age peers.

My favorite dancer emerged in the form of a tiny African-American kid who swagged with his oversized dreads and obediently waited for his cue onstage, even if it lagged a little from the rest of the posse. If I was recasting The Little Rascals, I’d have found my Buckwheat.

I became fixated on the scope of ages present: A five-year-old who seemed to hold excitement within five minute spurts. A fourteen-year-old was only half-aware that she was quickly fading out of the appropriate age bracket. An eager Father dressed all in pink stood apart as an anomaly to the crowd of consenting adults. More on him: Was he gregariously dressed to gain the enthusiasm of his spawn? Was he alone - like me? Does Matty B remind him of the son he never had? I wish I knew the answers.

Covers were a big theme throughout the afternoon, as the young girl pop singer returned to the stage to sing yet another Top 40 hit. It was as if the fame machine moved so fast into town and the parents of these mini-stars pushed them in so hastily, producing original music never even occurred to them. It used to be that you paid your dues by learning to write your own music, parading your malleable persona in front of a team of managers and record labels. Now all you need is a checkbook and a gimmick, and this kid’s is slowly slipping with each birthday.

A lot of the songs performed were G-rated versions of pop hits, similar to the popular CD series, “Kidz Bop” where the lyrics were swapped out. Justin Bieber’s, “If I were your boyfriend,” was cleverly switched to, “If I was your best friend” to make it more age-appropriate. Though, with the recent Miley Cyrus reputation-burning VMAs performance, one wonders if there is a sustainability and need for squeaky-clean pop stars. Do these kids realize that this may be a waiting room for a latex bikini phase? Do the parents thank the heavens that their kid is here and not at a Lady Gaga concert? Perhaps that’s what motivated the enthusiasm of the elaborately-dressed Father in pink; or the families that dressed in home-made shirts with Matty B’s face ironed on. Maybe we do need a kid like Matty after all, to pose the other side of the argument. At least, until puberty hits.

I left during the last song in an attempt to avoid the rush of families.  I quickly caught the attention of the Merch Guy as I left. “Where’s your next stop?” He sighed, “Atlanta. Some kid who was reblogged by a famous rapper. I dunno. It’s weird.” I nodded like I knew what he was talking about. Like I was a part of "the biz" somehow. “See ya around.” I lied, making my way to the exit.

As I walked out, I felt a billion miles away from the earth-shattering excitement a little girl feels over finding her first “pop idols.” In my opinion, these new kids they got driving the bus can’t possibly hold a candle to the five Girl Power goddesses I desperately tried to emulate. In truth, behind every tween idol is a Merch Guy who doesn’t know what the fuck is going on. In every concert venue is a group of girls who follow suit in their admiration robotically, and some that bide their time by napping until their parent’s “Sunday day out,” commences over curly fries. The players have changed, but the game is just the same.

@juliaprescott

More soul-crushing concerts:

Living the High Life in a Music Festival VIP Section

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Lily wears I.D. Sarrieri bra and knickers, Charlie May skirt, American Apparel necklace, vintage ballet shoes

PHOTOS: ROBERT HARPER
STYLING: BERTIE BRANDES, CHARLOTTE ROBERTS

Make-up: Philippe Miletto using MAC Pro
Hair: Sharmaine Cox at Bleach London
Photographer's assistant: Pablo Marks
Stylists' assistant: Olivia Pigeon

Models: Veronica G @D1 Models, Lily Newmark, Lauren Crispin

Click through to the next page to see more pictures.

Lauren wears vintage leotard and tights, Superdry jumper, vintage choker, MCS London scrunchie; Veronica wears vintage Calvin Klein jeans T-shirt, I.D. Sarrieri tutu, Nike shorts, MCS London scrunchie

Bitching and Junkfood leotard, Pineapple legwarmers, vintage ballet shoes and necklace

Pineapple sports bra, I.D. Sarrieri tutu, Nike shorts, Marks and Spencers socks, Nike Air Max trainers, MCS London scrunchie, LC-DB backpack

From left: Lily wears Champion T-shirt, MCS London scrunchie; Veronica wears Vivetta cardigan, MCS London scrunchie; Lauren wears Pineapple leotard, vintage choker, MCS London scrunchie

Martina Spetlova dress, MCS London scrunchie, Fountain of Youth soda (just seen)

From left: Veronica wears Schott NYC leather jacket, Marks and Spencers tights, Superdry bag, MCS London scrunchie; Lily wears Champion T-shirt, Nike shorts, Pineapple legwarmers, MCS London scrunchie

Vintage dress and ballet shoes, Ray-Ban sunglasses, MCS London scrunchie (on wrist)

More fashion on VICE:

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Photo by Jake Weigl 

The animals in Australia’s Northern Territory tend to be bigger and stranger than wildlife elsewhere, so when reports emerged in June that thousands of feral cats, reportedly weighing up to 45 pounds, were roaming around and tearing apart anything smaller and less mean than them, it wasn’t exactly a shock. But it is a problem—the cats are growing bigger and bigger and killing so many small critters, they’re damaging the biodiversity of the ecosystem.

Graeme Gillespie, the director of terrestrial ecosystems for the Northern Territory Department of Land Resource Management, didn’t seem terribly worried about the size of the cats when I called him—he said they aren’t really much bigger than the biggest domestic cats—but he acknowledged there was a problem. “Even a small cat will eat several birds, reptiles, or mammals in a 24-hour period,” he said. “So you do the math on that, one cat might be eating 2,000 animals a year.”

Georgia Vallance, a researcher who has seen the stomachs of these cats cut open for analysis, agreed. “The amount of animals inside these cats is staggering,” she said. “One that was culled had the remains of two sugar gliders, a velvet gecko, a bird, and some insects—that’s just one cat, over one day.”

Tracking and studying the massive felines is much harder than you’d think, given their size. “They’re very secretive, very cryptic, they’re solitary animals, and mostly nocturnal,” Graeme explained. “They’re very hard to trap, and if you trap a feral cat once, that cat will remember it and avoid traps in the future.” 

So, following what might be described as basic Warner Bros. cartoon logic, the scientists are bringing in dogs. Dean Yirbarbuk, the chairman of the Warddeken ranger group, told a local news website that the canines “specialize in cats… They chase the cats, they catch them in the tree so we can tranquilize them or catch them somehow, so we put a radio collar on them and track them with a beacon.” 

Graeme stressed that these cat-trapping dogs needed to be the best of the best. “Not all dogs can do it,” he said. “Certain breeds of dogs can do it, and certain individual dogs within those breeds can do this. You might train three or four dogs, and only one of them works, so it’s quite specialized.”

I asked him if there weren’t more sophisticated ways to kill a cat—can’t you use drones for this?—and he reminded me that canines were bred over thousands of years to hunt like this. “They’ve got a sense of smell and a sense of taste that is more than 100,000 times more powerful than ours, so they can follow tracks extremely effectively.”

The project has been met with universal enthusiasm, not only as an ingenious way to tackle an environmental concern, but also as a showdown between two of history’s greatest rivals.

More from The Hox Box Issue:

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The Ghost Rapes of Bolivia

Babysit My Ass

A coca leaf. Photo via

According to a UN report released earlier this month, coca growing in Colombia is down by 25 percent. At first glance, the news appears to be either welcome—if you’re of the Michele Leonhart, war-on-drugs school of thought—or panic inducing, if you’re a cokehead. But then a lot of things are panic inducing if you’re a cokehead.

The specifics: between 2011 and the end of 2012, the area of land coca was being grown on was reduced by about a quarter, from 64,000 hectares to 48,000 hectares. The farm-gate value—literally the value of the product at the farm’s gate—of the coca leaf and its derivatives in Colombia also decreased, dropping from $422 million to $370 million.

According to the BBC, the only parts of the country that saw an increase in coca growing were those where the work of the police is hampered by FARC rebels and drug gangs—Norte de Santander, Caquetá, and Chocó.

You might think that less coca must mean less cocaine coming out of South America, translating to less cocaine on the streets of places like New York and London. Well, not necessarily. It’s complicated, according to the people who know about this sort of thing. Ricardo Vargas Meza, a sociologist who specializes in Colombian coca production, says that for years there have been problems with the reliability of coca-cultivation stats, since no one can agree on how much cocaine you can get from each individual coca leaf.

Coletta Youngers, a senior fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America, says that it's also important to consider the quality of coca-production techniques. In recent years, improvements in this field have meant that more coke can be produced from fewer leaves. So, while some—like the Colombian government, the US and UN themselves—may point to the report as signs of progress in the war on drugs, Youngers argues that “these statistics don’t tell us a whole lot.” She also claims that there is “more than enough cocaine produced in the region to meet world demand," and the regional aspect is obviously an important factor here—while traffickers may have moved out of Colombia, Vargas Meza says that many are now working in Bolivia and Peru.

A coca tree in Colombia. Photo via

While 2012 still saw 309 tons of cocaine produced in Colombia, making it an $8 billion industry, Vargas Meza and Youngers both suggest other reasons for the supposed decline recorded in the UN's report. An important factor, they say, is the country's illicit-mining boom. Some of the guerrilla groups and cartels that control the regions that have historically grown coca crops have moved away from producing coke, deciding to profit instead from the mineral trade, since you can’t eradicate mines by aerial fumigation.

Another reason is that Peru has now surpassed Colombia as the world's largest supplier of coca that is used for making blow. Vanda Felbab-Brown is a senior fellow specializing in foreign policy at the Washington DC-based think tank The Brookings Institution. She says that despite talk of coordinated, regional approaches to tackling narcotics production, often one country with a significant problem is more than happy to foist their headache onto their neighbors and call it a success. Which, in a nutshell, is what may have happened with Peru.

Then there is the mentality of today's cartels, who aren't inclined to be as brash and balls-out as Pablo Escobar's infamous Medellin outfit. Felbab-Brown says the current kingpins learned from the 1980s that being overly aggressive and ostentatious is not the way to run an international cocaine empire.

Youngers agrees. There is still much work to be done to puncture the hemisphere’s illicit drug trade, she says.

“Both the US and Colombian governments have been saying for some time that this is a big success, that they’re turning the corner,” she told me. “The reality is that the drug trade is alive and well in Colombia. You don’t have the Pablo Escobars that just dominate any more; you have smaller operations that are much harder to combat.”

If the Colombian authorities are looking for ways to do this, they could do worse than study Bolivia's tactics. The country has—for the most part—chosen not to carry out forced eradication of coca leaves. It achieved its reduction in crops through economic development by creating initiatives that allow coca farmers to develop other sources of income. Youngers told me that one of the problems with forced eradication of coca crops is that poor farmers are deprived of their main source of income, meaning they quickly replant the coca plants, creating a one step forward, two steps back situation.

These are people who are barely eking out an existence. According to the UN report, while the amount of land in Colombia devoted to growing coca is the lowest in the country's recorded history, the average Colombian coca farmer makes just $1,220 annually. So while the market may be less flooded, those working it aren't exactly creating lucrative monopolies. If the Colombian's want to do more to slow coca growth in their country, they'll need to provide other avenues of income for farmers whose sole source of revenue is the coca trade.

Follow Danny on Twitter: @DMacCash

More stories about cocaine:

New Cocaine Routes Are Wreaking Havoc in West Africa

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I Learned How to Make Blow in Colombia

Desperation is mostly inseparable from masculinity. Men strain for fame, for female attention, for sad, trivial triumphs over one another. We are a people perpetually trying to figure it all out—flexing in the mirror, using lines we've heard before, trying to seem bold and dignified. We're not cowboys or poets. If we are, we wear it as a disguise. Mostly, we are vulnerable and self-conscious and probably masturbating for the third time on a Tuesday afternoon, because we're off work and that Lea Thompson scene in All the Right Moves just came on. We are not men, but almost. Note: columns may also contain William Holden hero worship and meditations on cured meats.

Richard La Ruina is a professional seduction coach, pick-up artist (PUA), and author. He has greasy, shoulder-length brown hair, owns several leather jackets, and is exceptionally skilled at staring at people. That this staring might make a woman uncomfortable is her problem, man, because she just needs to let go of her inhibitions. In one of his videos, he demonstrates how to unbutton a girl’s jeans at a club without her noticing. In another, his primary suggestion for initiating physical contact is to tell the girl she has lint on her crotch and then attempt to wipe it off for her. He recently posted on his Facebook page, “Just writing about the time when I asked a girl what she was doing, she said she was about to watch a film and I wrote: "Cool, don't press play, I'll go buy some wine and snacks. Send me your address.’”

He does not walk the line between aggressive and felony. He rides it on a flaming unicycle while wearing a Burger King crown and performing pretend-cunnilingus on his fingers. The title of one of his e-books is How to Make Your Move With Zero Chance of Rejection. I haven’t read it, though I assume it just contains a list of the trunk dimensions in every car manufactured since 1974. 

The advertisement on Facebook for his website, Secret Attraction, is titled “Learn To Seduce Chicks.” Adding yourself to his mailing list enables you to receive his e-books and his “GAME-CHANGING videos” featuring “STEALTH ATTRACTION skills you need to start sleeping with women, IMMEDIATELY (WARNING: THIS STUFF IS POWERFUL).” The advice is preposterous, almost satirically lame, and could only make sense in a world where women have the mental capacity of a door hinge. His instruction for approaching a group of girls is to use his signature line: “Hey, are you girls talking about me?” No “Well why not?” In the video, he laughs, satisfied, and the actresses appear on the verge of literally evaporating from sheer mortification.

That La Ruina exists could easily be kicked into the bottomless void of Internet absurdity, were he not to have over 36,000 YouTube subscribers and the ability to charge $1200 for his two-day PUA bootcamp. He operates a real, sincere enterprise that attracts hundreds of dysfunctional acolytes who worship his methods.

The following is a list of thread titles on MPUAForum, for which La Ruina is a featured poster, under the name “Gambler”:  “I Lost My Alpha Male Status How Do I Get It Back?,” “Anyone Know How to Knock Down Bitch Shield?,”  “Is A Smartphone of a Top Brand Conducive to Picking up Girls?,” “How to Keep Composure Upon Seeing a Beautiful Woman,” “Help Seducing 1^st Cousin,” “Girlfriend Going to Prom With Another Guy,” “Weird Text ‘Am I allowed to cheat on you?’”

The forum is not composed of alpha males grunting and punching each other and celebrating the ways in which they’ve defiled women. It reads like one infinite conversation at the table in the cafeteria where all the kids who had vegan parents, or who weren’t allowed to go to summer camp because of that time they got swimmer’s ear in the bathtub, talked about “babes” in this vague, awed, misinformed way.  The sex-driven alpha males already possess an innate degree of arrogance and indifference to female opinion that these guys fantasize about. The men that PUA appeals to are the profoundly desperate.  These methods (persistence, uninvited physical contact, learning bizarre skills like juggling) appeal not merely in the way steroids appeal to a fringe baseball player but the way napalm and a helicopter would appeal to a kid in a nerf war. They promise things that are completely implausible and ridiculous but fuck that because it seems so easy. This is going to rescue them.

All the PUA literature focuses on something that terrifies these guys (friend zone), something scientific-sounding (oxytocin release), and an all-caps promise of something cool (HOW TO GET A GIRLFRIEND).  It plays on their marrow-deep feelings of inadequacy. Men who see the world women inhabit as a SECRET SOCIETY or a MATRIX or something you can only access with a code or by blowing into a mechanism on The Hot Chicks Door and it detecting traces of Red Bull and creatine on your breath.  They are a breed of men who seem almost exhilarated simply to float in the orbit of attractive women: making eye contact with one at a club, dancing next to one without her running away like he was a Velociraptor, scrutinizing the motives of a specific arm touch. Their usernames (Reborn Cobra, Dionysus, PassionGuy83, the punisher, beast 2013) are all strained attempts for Bold Masculinity,  audacious and “cool” only in the way the names of cartoon villains or your newly-single dad’s AdultFriendFinder handle is “cool.”

There is a glossary of PUA acronyms that is nearly a thousand entries long. There is a corresponding term for almost every interaction with a female, no matter how slight (IOI = indicator of interest; NC = number close), so that every scenario can be dissected and a refined plan can be devised.  Here is a subculture of men so underequipped and timid and paralyzingly insecure that they gravitate to a strategy to talk to human beings. They need a tutorial for Being Alive. The sex aspect is no more essential to their real lives than beating some fictitious boss on Xbox. It’s having a beacon, a tangible measure of their self-worth. The message board is a confessional; their interactions with women serve as a scrapbook for their evolution as warm-blooded organisms. One poster’s signature on the forum was “stop masturbating and watching porn for the sake of your game.”

These Game guides function like multivitamins: a mostly-unsubstantiated consolation that you can survive with an inadequate diet or, in this case, have bad skin or bad posture or not make eye contact, and there is a solution. You can transform yourself into something. The aliases and extravagant makeovers create two discrete identities; they are superheroes taking their glasses off of their greasy noses and tying capes around their necks. These identities and techniques are valuable not just for the access they provide to one realm, but for the escape they provide from another.  

Women are not seen by the posters as disposable objects but as actual conquests, like the flag outside the castle at the end of a level of NES Mario. It is some tangible representation of “making it.” While their objectives might on the surface seem lecherous and misogynistic, the men are tame, deferential, and categorically bashful.  Women are not utilities, they are symbols. The guys never mention “fucking;” they “have sex,” or “get laid.” They want girls to “check them out” and “like” them and “touch their hand.” They refer to their penises not as dicks but “M-16s” or some corny euphemism, as if sex on a vulgar level intimidated them. Sex in the sweaty, carnal, explosive sense is less important than talking to someone about it—to their friends; to their message board; to, perhaps most valuably, themselves, in a bathroom mirror, the next time they’re alone and feeling minuscule and ugly. They want it because it serves as some indisputable proof that they are no longer losers. It is this weird reenactment of the high school lives they never participated in.

Demonstrating Higher Value (DHV) is an essential part of PUA. One poster asks, “Can magic tricks be used as dhv?”  and you can half-imagine a fidgety guy standing in front of a bar entrance, with a top hat and a wand, frantically trying to cram three doves down his pants as a group of women approach. Their conception of attractive and interesting is beautifully, incredibly distorted. Another poster suggests posting “awesome” pictures on Facebook to DHV. His examples: Hugging a lion, bungee jumping, swimming with dolphins, off-road biking. They are things that would impress only your nana, but for solitary introverts, it is progress. Inadvertently, PUA has served as A Beginner’s Guide to Acting Like a Person. Being around women does not necessarily make these men alive. It makes them feel like they deserve to be.

Previously - Scott Disick: American Psycho

John Saward likes O.V. Wright and eating guacamole with no pants on. He lives in Connecticut. Follow him on Twitter @RBUAS.

Graffiti on the side of an ambulance during the recent unrest in Istanbul—which was caused, according to Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, by disruptive foreign plotters. Photo via

While Turkey continues to deal with the fallout from the massive protests in Istanbul and elsewhere, it's clear that the government isn't going to become more tolerant of dissent. Embattled Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan hasn't just been clamping down on his enemies on the streets of Istanbul and Ankara, however—he's also been pursuing them overseas, namely across the Aegean Sea in Greece, aided by the cooperation of that country's government.

Erdogan has claimed many times that Turkey's recent troubles have been caused by foreign plotters aiming to destabilize his government. While most observers dismiss these allegations as paranoia or deliberate lies on his part, this month, by pure coincidence, a boat carrying weapons, explosives, and flags bearing the insignia of the banned Turkish terroist group DHKP/C was intercepted by the Greek navy as it made its way to Turkey. Its passengers: two Greeks and two Turkish nationals.

According to the Greek daily Eleftherotypia, one of the Turkish passengers was Hasan Biber, who is wanted in his homeland for attacks carried out by the DHKP/C. Biber is one of the chief suspects in two bombings that took place in March, one at the headquarters of Erdogan's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and another at the justice ministry in Ankara.

Reports suggest that while one of the Greek suspects allegedly has connections with anarchist groups in Athens, the other claims he is innocent and was just paid €500 to drive the boat to Turkey.

Antitank shells, improvised explosive devices, bullets, hand grenades, pistols, and the flag of the outlawed Turkish leftist group DHKP/C found in the boat headed towards Turkey. Photo courtesy of Hellenic Police

The boat incident has since been used by the Greek police to justify raids on homes in various Greek cities that are known to be housing Greek anarchists and Turkish citizens. It's a handy excuse as the government steps up the crackdown on Turkish dissidents seeking asylum in Greece and homebred anarchists (a war the Greek government has been waging aggressively for the past year or so). This isn't the first time that the Greek police have carried out the Turkish government's work; earlier this year, alleged Turkish dissident Bulut Yayla was seemingly abducted by the Greek secret police and transported to Turkey under the cover of darkness. Meanwhile, details about the accused terrorists on the boat are scarce at best—in fact, pretty much the only thing we know for certain is that the suspects will be put on trial in Greece under terrorism charges. 

The relationship between Turkey and Greece, who have clashed in the past and even gone to war with one another, is complicated and strange. A few weeks ago a 72-year-old German man was arrested on the Greek island of Chios on suspicion of spying for Turkey while taking photos of military camps, ships, and machinery. Yet the two countries will cooperate when it comes to the dissidents because it's mutually beneicial—Erdogan's spin on Turkey's recent protests gets legimacy if he can point to foreign agitators coming in from Greece, while Greece gets to claim that its anarchist groups are linked with dangerous terrorists like the DHKP/C.

The governments of both countries are highly paranoid and on the constant lookout for scapegoats upon which to pin the failure of their economic and social policies—immigrants, terrorists, foreign agents, anyone.  

Follow Yiannis on Twitter: @YiannisBab

More stuff about Greece and Turkey:

The Brother of a Turkish Protester Murdered by the Police Speaks Out

A Borderline Crisis

Greece's New Anarchist Generation Is Being Tortured by Police

For the past few weeks, I’ve been touring around doing stand-up comedy, opening for a band called KEN Mode, and we recently found ourselves in Boston with nothing to do. It was a Monday, and some guy invited us to his barbecue-kegger. We arrived, I got wasted quickly, and halfway into my second ball of bacon wrapped chicken, a man named Dan—who’s been traveling with a death-metal band called Flying Snakes—approached me. In a southern drawl, he asked: "Hey, y'all wanna see a video 'bout buttwater?" I obviously said, “yes” and when I saw it I almost dickwatered my own pants from laughing so hard. Buttwater is a legendary party trick—with an anal waterfall punchline—and it was born in Orlando, Florida.

Make sure you watch past the 50 second mark.

While this footage was unfortunately shot on an ancient cell phone, the beauty of buttwater is that it doesn’t require glorious 1080p video to get the message across. Water coming out of a butt is funny at even the lowest resolution. But this blurry video of a grown man expelling water from his poop chute did not completely satisfy my curiosity. Who is this guy? Where did buttwater originate? What’s up with the mask? In order to learn more, I asked Dan to get me in touch with the buttwaterer himself: a man named Vulture. Here’s how my conversation went.

VICE: How did you get the nickname "Vulture?”
Vulture: When I was about 16 years old, after punk shows we would go out to a diner or something like that, and I wouldn’t order food because I knew there would be leftovers. I'd pick at everyone else's food or pick food off of another table. My philosophy was: I had money, I had a job, but the less money I spent on food, I could buy more punk rock t-shirts and see more punk rock shows. Then one night my friend's girlfriend was like, "This guy is like a fucking vulture. He's eating off every table in here."

So do you have a lot of sweet punk t-shirts now?
Uh yeah, well, I don't fit into them anymore. I got a little bit fat as I got older so I decided to sell most of them.

Life goes on. When did you figure out you have a gift for shooting water out of your butt?
I remember hanging out at someone's house late one night. We were swimming and our friend, who was a couple years older, was talking about [the technique that would later become buttwater] and saying how it was possible. I was like, bullshit. I just didn't believe it. So he told me how to do it. I thought, I don't know, whatever, we were probably drinking, so I gave it a whirl. 

You just have to have the, “I don't care, I'm not embarrassed, whatever” attitude. So I went ahead and did it. Everybody cracked up. I get the same reaction every time.

Isn't there a risk your colon could blow up from the water pressure?
Uh yeah, probably. That's what my friend's mom told us one time. But I was also young and stupid, and it's not like, "Dude that's fucked up. You put a hose in your ass?" No it's just like, you get a little pressure coming out of the house, and you put it up close [to your butthole] and the water goes in. It's not like I was putting a gallon up there. There are probably some risks, but I wasn't thinking about those at the time. I was thinking about the entertainment value.

The infamous buttwater wolf mask.

You're a born entertainer. Did the legend of buttwater travel outside of your friend group?
It started off with just our friends, and then it turned into doing it for 15-20 people. Then I would stay with my buddy at his house and he would have touring bands come through and I would do it for them.

Our other buddy lives in the Orlando area, so I'd go over there and he'd have some pretty big parties at his college complex with like 70 or 80 people. He'd give me a bottle of whiskey to start off the night, knowing he'd get me to buttwater by the end. 

So there was this car wash area in the complex and one night we all went down and I was [buttwatering] with the car wash hose. Then the cops came, so I decided to run back to the apartment. A cop grabbed me while I was butt-ass naked.  He said, "Where are you going?"

I said, "Back to my friend’s apartment.”

He goes, "Where are your clothes?"

I pointed at my buddy and said, "He's got 'em."

My buddy dipped behind a car and the cop goes, "Okay, get out of here!"

Then he gave my buddy a ticket for letting people run around the complex naked. Meanwhile I got to go.

From there, it turned into quite the spectacle at college parties. So much so, we were driving from a show one night and we pulled up to a light. The window was down and I drunkenly ask these guys: "Hey, where are you guys going?”

They said: "We’re looking for a party, some dude named Buttwater is going to be there." Buttwater had [become a staple] at parties in Orlando.

People would come from miles around just to see Buttwater?
Yeah, people from shows would be told that, “if you come to this party, Buttwater will happen,” but when you explain it to people they don't get it at first. Then when they see it they are like, "Oh god! That's so fucked up."

It is pretty fucked up, in a fun way. What’s the story behind the video I saw?
When that video was shot, I hadn't buttwatered for years and years and years. It was at a BBQ at the house of my college buddy and he was trying to relive the memory of 15 years ago. He's like, "Dude, you got to do it." I said, "No."

He kept pestering and pestering me, so it's easier for me just to do it. So that's why on the third time I buttwatered on him.

You got him!
Yeah, he was rolling around and he kept saying, "It was worth it! It was worth it!"

Do you always fill up your butt with a garden hose?
Yeah it was always a garden hose. We always joked about doing it live on stage, because we played in a band called "Soap in the Pee Hole.” All the lyrics were like, "I've got soap in the pee hole. It burns!" We would joke about using a turkey baster and buttwatering the crowd, but that was obviously something that would never happen.

Who are buttwater’s fans?
It's surprising how diverse crowds all are amused by it. I have this one buddy who is an attorney now, with a wife and two kids, and he had me do it for all of his lawyer friends. They'd typically be uptight people, or a little more serious and be like, "What the fuck is this?" But they thought it was the best shit they've ever seen. Probably because their lives are boring and they don't get to see [things like buttwater]. Also, this girl had me do it for her parents, because it’s her dad's favourite video, and he shows it to all his friends while they drink scotch and smoke cigars.

Do you think you can make money from buttwater?
I have no interest in doing that, plus I think plenty of people know how to it. I was never the one saying, “Let's do this.” It was always my friends.

Has buttwater ever gotten you laid?
Uh, no.

Ok. Lastly, why the wolf mask?
I got it from my friend’s band, "Wolf Face," and due to the fact every time I do it my buddies always film it. I tell them not to. No cameras. So one night my friend said, "Dude, if you're worried about that, put on a mask." I didn't want my face [connected to buttwater]. I'm 31 years old now. It was for security purposes. I'm a commercial printer now.

Your secret is safe with me, Vulture.

More about butts:

Butt Sniffing and Weed

Assplasty: Dr. Mendieta's Perfect Booties

Things I Learned from Butt Chugging

A graphical overview of the rural abortion situation in Canada, by Thomas Van Ryzewyk for VICE Canada.

Getting an abortion in Ontario is fairly easy. Unless you accidentally walk into a crisis pregnancy centre, no one will interrogate you or try to talk you out of it. I could book an appointment, the government would pay for the procedure, and no one would have to know. That's why it's so odd that outside of Ontario, trying to get an abortion is such a tedious, frustrating process.

A recent study done by researchers at UBC examined the barriers women face that prevent them from getting abortions. They surveyed abortion providers across British Columbia, asking about their experiences, their future intentions, and the occupational challenges they face day to day. They found that these barriers have become bigger and bigger over the past while: for women in rural communities, about 60 percent of abortion services provided in hospitals disappeared between 1995 and 2005.

Rural physicians working out of hospitals reported various barriers to provision, like operating room scheduling, logistical issues, high demand, professional isolation, and a lack of replacement providers.   Many providers, two of whom I spoke with, felt the need to “fly under the radar” in their communities. 

Many factors affect access to abortion in this country. Only licensed physicians can provide the service, and distances between rural communities and abortion service providers can be a massive physical and financial obstacle for women dealing with unwanted pregnancies. On top of this, abortion providers also face opposition from their own colleagues, making the situation even worse.

The study found that unlike abortion providers in urban areas who work out of purpose-specific clinics, rural providers mostly operate out of local hospitals, which comes with problems like lack of operating time for abortions, a likelihood of abortions being deferred for “urgent” non-abortion cases, and difficulties scheduling staff for the procedures, like nurses and anaesthesiologists, to accommodate those who don't want to be involved in abortion care.

“The anaesthetists…just don’t want to be in my room because they don’t get enough money per case and sometimes my case doesn’t run. I’m expendable. If there’s no anaesthetists… well, ‘It’s okay we’ll just pull the anaesthetist out of [participant]’s room’. So there’s a bit of a judgment call there on anaesthesia…there are people that have ideas about what they think is more important,” one participant told the researchers.

An abortion provider from a small city in the Cariboo District of BC, who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity, also told me about uncooperative anaesthetists. “We do a deep sedation, and there's often a challenge: several of the anaesthetists will not provide this service because they don't believe in abortion. They just won't. You have to scramble because you can't get the women in when you need to, which is frustrating,” she said. 

Being an abortion provider in a rural area can be pretty lonely, with many being the only providers in their communities, serving very large geographic areas. Some say they feel overwhelmed by the demand and that they can't meet the community's requirements because they're so restricted by the facilities. Two participants felt like they always had to be available, and one actually stopped her surgical practice because he/she couldn't find another doctor to help her provide 24-hour availability for emergency care.

One participant describes the sheer volume as a potential reason to stop. “If it’s only me trying to see everyone, with no breaks and, you know, to feel like you can’t even take a week away because, either it’d pile up or people aren’t going to be able to be seen…The biggest barrier is just…keeping myself from getting burnt out, providing the services and feeling like I can’t do as much as I want to.”

Professional isolation is often coupled with social isolation—many rural abortion providers feel like they have to keep their work quiet. One particular provider told me how she feared for what her children could face if the community knew about her work, and another was afraid to go to church because she didn't want to be seen as a person with double standards where she “believed in a religion and all of its tenets… and then performed abortions.” 

The abortion provider I spoke with from a small southern interior town in BC told me she's starting to resent having had to keep quiet about her work for the 20 or so years she's been practicing. She describes the difficulties of being the only one in her community to provide abortion services: “There are colleagues who are pro-choice who would never want to provide the service. I actually have a lot of colleagues in this town who are anti-choice, who actually put up obstructions for patients who are seeking abortions. They just don't offer referrals.”

She says abortion care is the work she finds most rewarding—even more rewarding than delivering people's babies—because that's where she receives the most appreciation from her patients. Her colleagues are the ones who give her the most flack, sometimes refusing to assist her in her obstetrical practice.

The study supports what we've heard anecdotally for years: access to abortion in rural Canada is awful. While yes, abortion providers themselves are struggling; women with unplanned pregnancies are the ones who ultimately suffer the biggest consequences. Dr. Wendy Norman, the UBC professor behind the research, explains: “Because there are so few rural communities that now have this service, often women are having to travel four or five hours to get it.” They have to get time off work, find someone to take care of the kids they may already have, and find money to pay to get to the abortion provider. “What about young girls with no money or anyone to turn to [who can] help them? Women whose lives—because of mental health and substance abuse problems—are too chaotic to solve the first problems let alone this one?” It's known that unplanned pregnancy rates among these marginalized populations and underage women are higher, explains Wendy.

In 2006, Canadians for Choice released a report called “Reality Check: a close look at accessing abortion services in Canadian hospitals.” A researcher called hospitals across the country to find out how easy it was to get an abortion and found the following: there are no abortion services in PEI, only 6% of hospitals in Alberta provide abortions, 4% do in Manitoba and New Brunswick, New Brunswick requires the approval of two physicians for an abortion to be provided, and 60% of non-providing hospitals in BC were unwilling to give the researcher further information or a referral to the researcher. And those are just the biggest findings.

The wait lists at some clinics are in the hundreds. In Kamloops, BC, for example, about 400 women need abortions but the doctor only does three abortions in the one-day a week she's actually there, because of a lack of support from the hospital. So what happens to all the women who are in the later stages of the eligibility period? Hard to believe that this still happens in Canada, but some of them are likely to take matters into their own hands or try to get an abortion outside the safety of a hospital.

“I think it starts with stigma and ends with stigma,” says Jeanette Doucet, a member of the Board of Directors at Canadians for Choice. “Women have to sneak around. It’s not like having a wart removed or like having your tonsils out. This stigma is hindering the ability of rural doctors who may well want to perform abortions in rural communities and preventing women from demanding them...[Doctors] care about their livelihoods, their place in the community, how their children are going to be treated.”

Many Canadians probably look at the craziness of the pro-life/pro-choice debate in the United States and scoff, knowing our choice to get an abortion is almost certainly safe. But even though abortions are not restricted by federal law, not every woman will get an abortion in a timely and safe way.

That's why research like Dr. Norman's is important—it sheds light on fixable problems. Women have fought for abortion rights for a long time in this country, and while we've had some big victories recently, it's important to remember that it's still an uphill battle. Until doctors are able to provide this safe, time-sensitive, and essential service without having to jump through hoops, the abortion issue in Canada is far from being resolved.

Previously:

Phony Abortion Clinics in Canada Are Scaring Women with Lies

New York's SoHo neighborhood has plenty of art galleries, and it certainly has plenty of crazy people. But an art-gallery cult? The Terrain Gallery, owned by a group called the Aesthetic Realism Foundation may well just be that.

Yesterday I was roasted for a Comedy Central program that will air on Labor Day. All the comics at the roast were great and seeing them perform their monologues amazed me. I was just happy to be in their company because they were so skilled. Each one was experienced at performing in front of a live audience, whether it was in stand-up or sketch comedy. Comedians have an way of working that involves honing their material in front of a crowd. But I realized during the roast, that essentially they are writers—they just write with their performances in mind. 

Short story writing is a different beast than live comedy, but in some ways it resembles what the comedians did at my roast. There is usually one protagonist guiding the story and there are often some insights given along the way about the human condition. When you take away the laughter, the jokes at the roast achieved the same things. Raymond Carver is generally regarded as a master of the form—he took the Hemingway iceberg theory about simple surfaces that concealed great depth and mixed that with working-class humor, alcohol, and cigarettes (or, as he insisted on spelling that word, "cigarets"). His story “The Bath” isn’t the funniest story in the world, but there is something about his writing that makes the death of a kid by a car accident not only interesting, but entertaining.

In 1981, he published “The Bath” in his collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, then revised the story and changed the titled to “A Small, Good Thing” (“AS, GT”) for his collection Cathedral. What We Talk About is noted for the minimalism of its stories. It was Carver’s first major success and it earned him a reputation as a godfather of the minimalist movement of the 80s. (It was also heavily edited by Gordon Lish.) But the revisions made to “The Bath” to turn it into “AS, GT” show that he was moving away from the dark, purposely vague, and cold world of minimalism into a more precise, redemptive, and descriptive form. The changes Carver made between the story told in "The Bath" and “AS, GT” are a perfect to dissect to learn about him and his evolution as a writer. 

One of the most obvious differences is the use of common nouns in “The Bath” and the use of proper nouns in “AS, GT,” which makes the latter a much more defined piece with more distinct characters. In “The Bath” the only two characters with names are the dying boy, Scotty, and his mother, Ann. But for the most part Ann is identified as “the mother” or “the wife” and Scotty is referred to as “the boy,” or ironically as “the birthday boy.” The characters are difficult to penetrate in “The Bath” compared to “AS, GT,” in which almost everyone gets a name except for the baker, and everyone is given a distinct personality. This difference addresses the core divergence between the stories: “The Bath” is about isolation and menace in everyday life, while “AS, GT” is about connection and redemption.

In “AS, GT” every character is given more personality so that the reality of the death can be more universal. In “The Bath,” the black family in the waiting room is described with few details—Carver doesn’t even specify that they are black, and he never reveals what happened to their child. At the end of the scene the father just shakes his head and says, “Our Nelson” to himself. There is no engagement with Ann in this version. In “AS, GT” there is an extended dialogue between Ann and the father. The black child’s circumstances are explained, and it is made clear that Ann and the black family are in the same situation. Ann and the black father empathize with each other. When Ann learns later that the black child (named Franklin in “AS, GT”) died, it makes the imminent death of her own son more universal. It shows that the pain she is feeling can be and is experienced by everyone. 

The difference in the titles also addresses this core issue. In the earlier version, “The Bath” refers to the bath that the husband takes and the one the wife intends to take when they each go home to relieve themselves from the pain of the hospital. A bath may symbolizes baptism or return to the womb or rebirth. Bathing is also a solitary act, while the title of “AS, GT” is linked to the communal act of eating. The birth references in “The Bath” might also be ironic, because the boy is hit on his birthday.

In “The Bath,” the couple cannot connect at the hospital and they both go home to be relieved of their pain. The lack of a bond between the characters in “The Bath” is obvious:

They sat like that for a while, watching the boy, not talking. From time to time he squeezed her hand until she took it away. 

     "I’ve been praying," she said.

     "Me too," the father said. "I’ve been praying too."

The couple doesn’t even look at each other in that scene. Compare to “AS, GT”:

Howard sat in the chair next to her chair. They looked at each other. He wanted to say something else and reassure her . . .

     "I’ve been praying," she said. . .

     "I’ve already prayed," he said. "I prayed this afternoon—yesterday afternoon, I mean—after you called, while I was driving to the hospital. I’ve been praying," he said.

     "That’s good," she said. For the first time, she felt they were together in it, this trouble. She realized with a start that, until now, it had only been happening to her and to Scotty. She hadn’t let Howard into it, though he was there and needed all along. She felt glad to be his wife

The feelings of the character are related with more detail in “AS, GT” and the characters connect here in a way that doesn’t happen in the earlier piece. “The Bath,” is about how the couple doesn’t connect in the face of a crisis, and never do. The baths in the story represent their desire for isolation from each other. “AS, GT” shows the couple finding it hard to connect, but as the story progresses, they come together and in the end they bond in the presence of the baker. The biscuits in that scene represent their union and redemption.

Because “AS, GT” is twice as long as “The Bath,” a whole new storyline is added in the second half. But the beginning of “AS, GT,” which closely resembles “The Bath,” is also more developed than its earlier incarnation. In “AS, GT,” Carver is concerned with creating suspense around the child’s life. The parent’s fear is constantly noted, where it is only implied in “The Bath.” The doctor in “AS, GT” is a more established character, too. He has a name and is constantly giving them conflicting messages. He will tell them the child isn’t in a coma, it’s all fine, but later he'll say that the child might be in a coma, but then he’ll say that everything is OK. In “The Bath,” the child’s lack of progress is only lightly touched on because his condition is never resolved. The child is still alive at the end of “The Bath,” so that the baker’s call feels more ominous. When he says the call has to do with Scotty, he is talking about the cake, but it could just as well be the voice of a death saying that their child has died. In “AS, GT” the parents’ fear and pain is heightened so that they can have somewhere to go at the end. They go through the terrible trial of losing a child so that they can eventually come together in a more profound way. “The Bath,” however, achieves its power by being ambiguous.    

In “AS, GT,” the baker has his own character arc, while in “The Bath,” he is mostly a bodiless demon that haunts the couple. From the beginning of “AS, GT,” he is described with more detail. When ordering the cake, Ann even contemplates the baker’s past life and wonders if he has children and can understand what she is going through. This is a setup for the baker’s admission at the end of the story where he says that he never had children and can’t remember what he was before he was a baker. The telephone calls are mentioned often at the hospital in order to remind the reader of the baker and the couple’s misunderstanding about his intentions. The phone calls are no longer used to close the story, they are used to set up Ann’s rage in order to get the couple over to the bakery. Carver explicitly stated that Ann and the baker do not connect in the first scene in order to pay it off by connecting them at the end. In “The Bath” there is no set up because the pay off is not the same. The phone calls are not discussed so that they feel more ambiguous and ominous. In “The Bath,” the baker is sketched very lightly in the beginning so that he can play the disembodied haunter. 

The change in emphasis and style in the stories is characteristic of an overall change in Carver’s writing. The move away from inarticulate despair of his earlier minimalist work is changed into a more descriptive, redemptive style. In the title story of Cathedral the protagonist learns to sympathize with a blind man that he had previously written off. The arc is similar to that of the couple’s in “AS, GT.” After “AS, GT” Carver no longer rewrote his older stories. He was moving in a new direction and he was ready to leave his old work behind him. But it was not necessarily a move for the better. “The Bath” has an implicit power that “AS, GT” lacks because in the latter everything is made plain and the ending is too soft. The abrupt, haunting ending of “The Bath” is much more unique and suggestive.

Previously: Aspects of E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel