Photo by Flickr User mtume_soul.

Across the United States, fast food workers are throwing down their aprons and spatulas, and taking to the streets to demand a living wage. The current federal minimum wage is a paltry $7.25 an hour. That’s pretty impossible to live on, unless your body can some how process enough sustenance to survive by chewing the same piece of bubble gum for every meal.

Workers are now protesting in 60 American cities, hoping to bump their pay all the way to $15 an hour. If their demand is met, then they can hope to chew a different piece of bubble gum for every meal. Talk about supersizing your income! Wow.

I certainly am supportive of any effort to help people live better lives. The fast food sector continues to grow, where other industries keep contracting, and yet the pay rates remain stagnant. The downside to this strike is that fast food has never been more delicious. We are living in a “post-Double Down” world, and in that world, the fast food arms race shows no signs of cooling down. I can get a taco made out of a ranch flavored tortilla chip. Give yourself a moment to let that sink in. This is some next level shit.

Will we lose the spirit of innovation that has led us to this promised land of convenience and culinary excellence? Could an increase in the minimum wage bring about an extra helping of fast food austerity? I certainly hope not, but here are some of the little bundles of joy we could lose out on in the coming months:

The Fry Burger

It’s a burger that already comes with fries. Not like a value meal. I mean, like the fries are on the burger. I’ve often wondered what the point of separating the two dishes was. Is there some hotshot in the paper products industry who was demanding that fries get their own packaging so that he or she could keep selling us more paper? I commend this burger for breaking down the walls between fried potato mash and charred bovine flesh.

Mighty Wings

Did you ever imagine you could get a chicken wing from a drive-thru? Who dreamt this up? Were you on peyote? Mushrooms? Molly? Did this vision come to you after intense electroshock treatment? To the person that made this leap of faith, whatever it took for you to go on this spirit-quest, just know that it was all worth it. I will see you in Valhalla.

The Waffle Taco

For a mere 99 cents, you can purchase a waffle folded up like a taco shell. What is inside that waffle is only limited by your imagination. Right now, Taco Bell is shoving just about anything they can find out back into their Waffle Taco. Sausage? You’re goddamn right. Chicken and gravy? Yup. A bunch of fucking berries? Sure, why not? Personally, I’m hoping the next thing they do is put a 7-Layer Burrito in there.

Pop Tart Ice Cream Sandwich

This dish is something you could really just make yourself, much like a lot of fast food gimmicks. I can make a waffle taco at home. I can put French fries on a burger. It’s not that difficult. I have hands with fingers and a brain to make them move. I can use those fingers and that brain to create and experiment with food. The problem with that attitude is that there’s an entire industry full of people whose lifeblood is putting ice cream between a pop tart. Scoff all you want, but the Pop Tart Ice Cream Sandwich is as important to the American economy as the internal combustion engine used to be.

The Big Fat Fatty

For $50 (or one day’s work for a fast food employee… after taxes), you can buy this sandwich. On this sandwich you will receive the following in your mouth:

• Philly cheesesteak
• Cheeseburgers
• Pastrami
• Chicken fingers
• Bacon
• Mozzarella sticks
• Fried eggs
• Jalapeño poppers
• French fries
• Onion rings
• Chili
• Marinara sauce
• “Fat” Sauce

All of this comes in between a 27-inch garlic roll. That’s one day’s worth of work for an employee at a fast food restaurant. One single day. You’re looking at enough food to feed a family of four for an entire week. Are you starting to understand? There is an ecosystem in place, a delicate balance. Our demented society has created a new food chain. On top of that food chain are the restaurants, offering convenience, relative cleanliness, affordability, and most importantly, quantity. On the bottom of the food chain is the worker. He or she works for very little, but can take home a 27-inch sandwich covered in fried slop for practically nothing. You might be surprised to find that this “sandwich” does not come in a horse trough. The ultimate convenience would be to just shove your head in the trough and chow down. I’m sure we’ll get there at some point.

When we start paying fast food employees what they deserve, that means either the price of fast food has to go up, or the amount of food they give us is going to have to go down. Fast food workers will start eating real, healthy food, because they can finally afford it. The restaurants will stop making gimmicky dishes to serve to middle class people like me ironically, because they’ll no longer be able to make the same profit margin they used to. The food chain collapses. The drive-thru apocalypse begins.

It’s time to ask ourselves one important question: Can we live in a world where we put our own French fries on our burgers so that other people can live decent, happy lives? I think you know the answer.

Start supporting your local fast food worker as soon as you can. Also, for the price of a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, you can buy Dave's book, Letters from My Therapist on Amazon and iBookstore. There are way less calories in his book.

@dave_schilling

Photo via Flickr user Jennifer Peyton.

There are very few valuable items in this world that are shared enthusiastically among both friends and strangers—in fact, it seems that weed might be the only one. Its inexplicable that asking someone for a cigarette always elicits a grimace, but asking a stranger for a hit usually leads not only to stonedness but also to conversation and new acquaintances. I'm the sort that shares without a caveat, and most of my friends are the same way, leading to a democratic system functioning purely on good vibes. That's why its especially unsettling when one friend accuses another of being a sneak. 

Many summers ago, I was crashing at my buddy Prik's place in New York when I got a call from Shoob, a friend I had known even longer than Prik. My mom and Shoob's mom were friends. They were pregnant with us at the same time—in fact, our maternal grandfathers were buddies since they were like eight years old. We were close as kids and then friends again as teenagers. With Shoob on guitar and me on the drums, we'd play “Say It Ain't So” and “Brain Stew” in my dad’s attic. We'd drifted apart after high school, but our relationship is the kind of friendship that requires little maintenance—its always a pleasure when he pops back into my life. This particular summer, Shoob was on tour with his band. As soon as he mentioned he was in town, I invited him over to Prik's place. 

When he finally got to the place, Shoob asked if he could invite his bandmate Bas over. I overheard them on the phone; Bas asked if we had any milk. Prik and I thought that was pretty fucking weird, so I told Shoob we didn't want any more people over. I suggested we blaze. 

Prik was kind enough to furnish the weed since I had none (good vibe democracy at work). We chilled for a while before Shoob left to meet his crazy-ass bandmate. About an hour later, when Prik went to roll another joint, he couldn't find his weed. He frantically went through the couches and looked under the magazines and checked the kitchen, finding nothing. Exasperated, he shouted, “Your fucking friend took it!” I was deeply offended. “That's my friend from way back, Prik. Like way, way back. Way backer than even you. He wouldn't steal from me. Don't blame him because of your own forgetful ass.” Prik wouldn't let it go. He insisted I call Shoob and at least ask if he pocketed it by accident. For the sake of mollifying my host, I placed a call to Shoob. I laughed and told him that my friend was missing his weed and was wondering if he'd mistakenly grabbed it or if his nut ass bandmate was asking for some. Shoob sounded shocked at the insinuation, and I immediately apologized. I quickly got off the phone and scowled at Prik—he had made me look like a dick to my old friend. We argued about it for a while, did a deep search of the place, and finally broke down and ordered more weed. I was still pretty annoyed that Prik would even suggest my old friend was a sneak, and he wouldn't budge on his theory despite the courtesy phone call. Being homeboys, we eventually dropped the subject and played video games. 

I didn't see Shoob for at least another year and pretty much forgot about the whole thing. About seven years later, through an odd and random chain of events, I ended up in a band with Bas, the milk-thirsty guy who used to play with Shoob. By now I had learned that he was most definitely a nut, but I turned out to be a little off my rocker too, so we got along just fine and still do. We were hanging out in Philly when he mentioned that he wanted some milk. Something dinged in my head, and I burst out laughing. I told Bass about the time I told Shoob not to invite him over. As I told the story, my memory became clearer. I told Bas that the weirdest thing happened that night—I had hollered at my other friend for blaming Shoob for stealing weed. Bas stopped laughing and looked at me with the most serious look he could muster. (It wasn't very serious by normal standards.) He said, “That fucker totally stole your friends weed.” At the time of the incident, Shoob was going through some addiction issues that led him to compulsive behavior. Bas told me that on tour, when they were being handed tons of drugs, Shoob would gank all kinds of shit from unsuspecting people, most of whom were friendly and willing to share in the first place. Apparently, he got a kick out of stealing. Bas said he didnt remember that particular night, but that Shoob was almost definitely responsible. I still didn't want to believe that I was one of the people Shoob enjoyed screwing over, but the evidence was just too compelling. I promised myself I would wait till I saw Shoob in person and then I would confront him about it. 

Not long after learning this truth, Bas, some music friends, and I met up with Shoob while he was passing through Philly and staying at a friend’s place. When he opened the front door of the building to let us in, I couldn't hold my tongue. Without a greeting, I launched into it: “Summer of 2004, a Tuesday...” As I laid out the whole scenario for him, a look of admittance came over his face. He stopped me and told me that he had taken it. He was in a dark place and did a dickish thing. He apologized deeply and sincerely. I looked at my old friend's face, put my hand on his shoulder, and said, “OK, fuckface. You owe my homeboy Prik a cube of weed.”

Its been years since that conversation. Today, Shoob and I are cool. He's doing fine and doesn't smoke weed anymore, but when he comes by my place, I still have to check if my weed is safe. I hate that I have to do this, but that's just what the fuck happens when someone breaks your trust. I don't care about the money that weed costs me when I'm sharing it or whether or not I've been smoked out as much as I smoke out—that's why its shitty when someone takes advantage of the good vibes.  I did my part to mend the infraction by apologizing to Prik, who by then was back in Thailand. But the cube of weed Shoob stole has yet to be replaced. 

@ImYourKid

Previously - Jummy's Infinite Stash 

Image courtesy of Simon & Schuster.

Where most comedians deal with drunks and hecklers, Loni Love often finds herself bombarded with audience members asking her for relationship help—she's become so well-known among women and gay men for her hilarious routines about sex and love that people ask her for advice. Recently, Loni decided it was time to compile all her advice in one place: Love Him or Leave Him, But Don’t Get Stuck with the Tab, her new book recently published by Simon & Schuster. Unlike most boring dating guides, this amazing book provides conventional wisdom on weird real world topics people actually deal with when they're dating dudes—you know, stuff like anal sex and dating guys named Skillet. Last week, I called Loni to talk about small dicks, the inspiration for her book, and why some liquors make women mistake Flavor Flav for Denzel Washington. 

VICE: What was the straw that made you decide that it was time to write a dating advice book? 
Loni Love: I just wanted to give a woman’s perspective about love and relationships. I think we have a lot of men out there who’ve written books, especially comedians. So I wanted to give a female perspective as well as a funny perspective.

Do the guys you date worry you're going to make fun of them in your act?
Especially if they have a little penis, yeah. 

In your book you talk a lot about how you love to drink. But in one of your routines you say brown liquor will make girls think Flavor Flav looks like Denzel Washington. What should people drink on dates?
First of all, you need to have a limit when you go out, especially for the first date. No more than two alcoholic drinks and keep them light drinks. If you’re like me, you can go over to the dark liquor side, because I can handle that. 

What are some warning signs that you think women tend to ignore?
If you’re on a date and his conversation is all sexual—all he’s doing is talking about sex and sexual things—that’s a warning sign. If he’s constantly looking at his phone. If he actually answers it, I think that’s rude. Also, see how he orders. Does he order first and just leave you out? Does he ask what you want? He should be a gentleman.

What do you think of Kim and Kanye as a couple?
I like Kim. I think she’s hired more black men than the federal government. I think those two are made for each other—they both like attention; they both crave it. I can imagine they text each other, “Where you at? Where you at?” I think that’s an example of two people who are made for each other.

In your book you have a lot of advice for people dating their ex’s family members. Does that really come up?
Yeah! It happens all the time.

That’s crazy…
Yeah, it is crazy. But this is what I’m saying! It’s a new day when it comes to dating. We’ve been hiding a lot of things, and the thing that I like about this book is that it opens stuff up. It may seem like it’s far out, but I just replied to how many people who were like, “Yeah I was wondering, I wanted to date my boyfriend’s brother...”

So when can I stop shaving my legs in a relationship?
You can never stop shaving, because your legs are probably hairy. And that would hurt that man. [Laughs.] I mean there are some guys who don’t mind hairy legs.

Should a guy still be paying on my first date, or should I expect to be splitting a check from now on because I’m a feminist and a modern lady?
I think on a first date you should offer to pay half, but if he says you should, you should not deal with him, because he’s a cheap ass.

What's the main lesson you want your readers to learn about dating? 
Basically, it’s the title of my book, because I wanted to make a statement to women. I don’t care what you do. You can be with him or don’t, but don’t get stuck with any tab. The tab is a metaphor for problems: unwanted pregnancy, diseases, power bills, mortgages, whatever. Just don’t get stuck with anything. Love yourself first.

@The_Sample_Life

Previously – No Matter What I Do, I Feel the Pain

Photo via Flickr user Marcus Hansson

Here's a revelation that's also a brag: as dusk was settling over a music festival I attended recently, I was coming in the middle of a crowd. Coming from being fingered by a man in public, outdoors, at the hand—literally—of a man who was the lover of my friend Alexander. He kissed me afterwards and then gestured for me to kiss another man, who then kissed another man, who then kissed me.

I was at the center of a queer Dionysian cabal, and in my post-orgasm rush, I saw God. High in the sky, she rose up: a hologram above the rainbow stage lasers and the sea of bodies. One of my boys started feeling me up, and I fell back down into my body, into my breasts, into my T-shirt. Here I was, surrounded by queens and twinks, none of us bashful. I was a straight (ish) woman grinding against a gaggle of gay boys. And this is the bragging part: I was finally having sex like a gay man. 

For years, my best women friends and I have bemoaned our inability to bang like our gay male peers, who seemed to practice an ideal of free love we longed for, full of equal opportunity objectification, elective nonmonogamy, unashamed sluttiness, and a communal acceptance of all of the above. Gay sex land was, to us, a magical place where traditional monogamy was possible, maybe, but usually questioned; where jealousy wasn’t nonexistent but it could either be ignored or made hot. Although some of our gay friends were in long-term relationships and some of them were single, all these boys were allowed to be attached to others—or at least express desire for attachments with others.

Not all gay men want to have sex one way, but my female friends and I envied the kind of fucking we often saw in our gay friends’ lives, because we too were hungry for other bodies. Our experience told us (and science has started to back this up) that women desire sex just as much as men and can desire multiple partners just like (some) men.

The epiphany that I could fuck like a gay boy came thanks to some practiced hands, the natural high of the concert, and, OK, also a bag of psilocybin mushrooms, but the seed was planted (so to speak, not actually, because safety first kids) the night before when I took home a man I’d wanted for years who I'll call Jake.

I had never made my desire for Jake explicit, which is something we talked about the night we ended up sleeping together. I’m bad at coming on to dudes, I realized, and I wait for them to make the first move. Jake coached me to be more like our friend Marlon, a gorgeous little gay who persistently tries to corner Jake at dance parties despite Jake’s obvious heterosexuality. Jake told me he wasn’t put off by Marlon’s come-ons but he would be turned on if someone like me hit on him. “Jump the boys,” Jake advised me. So I started with him.

In the past, I hadn't approached men not because I didn’t want to or men didn’t want me to, but because of the power dynamics of traditional heterosexual relations. The scripts of courtship are well rehearsed: singledom as a path to coupledom and coupledom as defined by a property-oriented monogamy. The woman is the beloved, the man is the lover, pursuer and pursued, blah blah blah. None of this ever fit me. I envied my gay male peers, because they got to start fresh and write dynamics to suit their desires, rather than forcing their desires to fit some predetermined model.

The simplest means I’ve found to rewrite the heteronormative script is to come right out and say that’s what I’m doing. I like telling people I’m trying to fuck like my favorite gay boys, because it’s specific and funnier than saying, “I’m trying to practice gender neutral open liaisons, not necessarily nonmonogamy but openness, you know, like, as in, whatever comes, and hopefully I will many times.”

Since my finger-banging revelation, I’ve been telling all of the boys and girls I’m intimate with about my project to have sex like a gay man. The conversations that have followed have been as incredible as the sex we’re having.

Yesterday, the boy I’m crushing on the hardest texted me that he’d found a passage in Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick, my favorite book, which I’d lent to him after his first visit to my bedroom, “where ck says she wants the sex life of a gay man!!” I asked him to send me the quotation.

This is the question that the book asks, a question that I've thought a lot about lately:

"My entire state of being’s changed because I’ve become by sexuality: female, straight, wanting to love men, be fucked. Is there a way of living with this like a gay person, proudly?"

In I Love Dick, the answer answer lies not in sex acts but in what I'll clunkily call "word acts." “Reading delivers on the promise that sex raises but hardly ever can fulfill,” Kraus writes, “getting larger because you’re entering another person’s language, cadence, heart and mind.” Similarly, often taking hold of what we desire, becoming what we want to be, can be as simple as saying what we want—we enter new realms of ourselves by declaring our needs and our wants, and find that we were surrounded by the solution to our problems all along.

@Fifidunks

More about sex in the 21st century:

Weinergates in Waiting: Will My Sexts Come Back to Haunt Me

Taco Bell and Broken Hymens

Stoya: Feminism and Me

The rent is still too damn high. It’s so high that Jimmy McMillan, the founder and pretty much the only member of the Rent Is Too Damn High Party, can't afford a campaign office for his latest bid to become the mayor of New York City.

You may remember Jimmy as a meme of the week back in 2010, when he ran for governor of New York State and ranted about karate, marrying a shoe, and the rent being “too damn high” at a televised debate. But though the public interest has mostly moved on, he's not giving up on his political ambitions—for the past few months he has been running a haphazard campaign headquartered in his own car, talking to anyone who will still listen. He hasn't held any public press conferences and mostly stayed out of the media conversation until he endorsed Anthony Weiner earlier this month.

The two met by happenstance at an IHOP in Harlem, where Jimmy posed with the former congressman and perennial sexter in a photo he would later distribute while touting his endorsement. “We all are freaky. He just exposed his freaky-ism in the wrong way,” Jimmy told me. “I think Anthony needs someone like me to tell him, ‘Don’t be afraid to go get help if you need it.’”

Despite his endorsement of Weiner, Jimmy is still running for office. He has said that he has enough signatures to make it onto the ballot running as a member of his own party, which precludes him from competing with Weiner in the Democratic Party primary.

“This is a very great time for New Yorkers to have a people’s party coming to represent the necessity of issues,” Jimmy told me. “There are a lot of issues that affect the city of New York, but none is more important than rent. If you can’t afford to pay your rent, you’re not going to be here.”

Statements like these initially read as egregious oversimplifications of issues, funneling socio-political commentary into one-sentence punch lines. But pretty much every mayoral candidate claims he or she wants to keep gentrification and outlandish real estate prices from swallowing the dreams of families and young people who want to be able to live in a reasonable apartment on a reasonable salary. The only difference, of course, is we’re laughing at Jimmy.

Jimmy claims that this is what he's going for—he's trying to be a viral video, a joke candidate. “I’m glad they’re looking at this funny,” he said. “Because when the landlord gives them the rent receipt, they don’t think it’s funny no more. I’m glad. Everything is turning out just the way I want it.”

He seems to view the candidate he endorsed (who is now polling in the single digits after an almost comically disastrous campaign) in similar terms.

“[Weiner] created a character called Carlos Danger," Jimmy said. “Ooh, that is a marketing bonanza… He can put a hat on a dildo and call himself ‘Carlos Danger.’ Everyone will get it for someone just as a gift. He can make a billion dollars out of that in one month.”

In moments like these, the famously mustachioed perennial candidate's brand of twisted humor resembles that of a drunk uncle delivering a speech at Thanksgiving. But no one likes a rehearsed politician. During City Council Speaker Christine Quinn’s campaign, critics have accused her of being calculated. Say whatever you want about him, Jimmy's hardly that. He lives and dies by his impulsivity, captivating people with his random outbursts and strange comments.

He doesn’t have a hope in hell of pulling his shit together, let alone getting any serious attention in the mayor’s race. But he pushes ahead in a way that suggests he’s not doing it for sport—Jimmy would probably say the same things he says if they weren’t recorded by cameras and uploaded to YouTube.

In his own odd way, Jimmy has always had integrity. Unlike Weiner, whose media-provoking antics are seemingly driven by hyperbolic ego, Jimmy presents himself in this unvarnished, unscripted manner because he thinks he’s doing the right thing. It dates back to when he came back from fighting in the Vietnam War—a financially difficult time that prompted him to seek a job as a male stripper, he told a sex podcast.

“I would pass by this place and see ‘stripper wanted,’” he said. “I went by the hardware store and got a ruler. I walked in there, and the guy said, ‘OK. You want the job?’ and I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘OK you have to audition.’ ‘What I got to do?’ ‘Pull it down, we gotta check it out.’ I said, ‘OK no problem.’”

This anecdote, like many of his others, is insane, serves no clear political purpose, and is perhaps a figment of his imagination. But it's also about the only issue he cares about: the plight of the unfortunate. Jimmy said he stripped in order to raise money for surgery for his daughter, a victim of deformity as a result of his exposure to Agent Orange. When he showed up at his daughter's house with a suitcase full of money, though, he was driven away by her stepdad. You get the sense that he's been getting thrown out of places and treated as a not particularly funny joke for a long time.

But in the heat of the political season, a steamy summer in New York that has seen the rise and fall of Carlos Danger and the return of a prostitute-visiting former governor, is screaming about the rent really all that crazy?

@GideonResnick

More about the mayor's race: 

Good Riddance to Anthony Weiner

Anthony Weiner and the Problem with Sex Addiction

I Spoke to Some Sex Addicts About Anthony Weiner

Driving through the streets of Aleppo.

My heart is in my throat. I haven't taken a full breath for 24 hours. On the horizon is the sight I'd been hoping to avoid: black flags and men in smocks with AK-47s slung casually over their shoulders—which means a checkpoint manned by jihadist fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, a.k.a. ISIS, a.k.a. the latest and most feared incarnation of al-Qaeda in Syria.

Since I arrived in the Syrian rebel stronghold of Aleppo, ISIS has taken control of every road back to Turkey. Numerous people have disappeared on this route lately, but I'm left with no choice but to chance it.

The men motion for us to stop.

A niqab covers my face. I'm now regretting losing my veil late one night not too long ago. I hope my blue eyes won't give me away as I look down in a bid to avoid becoming the latest abductee to disappear in Syria. 

A man leans into the car. Time stands still. We're waved on.

I exhale loudly, much to the amusement of my AK-47-wielding friends. The commander turns around, laughing. “Don't worry,” he says, “the Islamists won't slit your throat—I have a grenade,” while miming throwing a very real grenade out of the passenger window. So I guess that's alright then.

As lawlessness has taken hold of the fractured country, kidnapping has become more and more common, especially in the north. The biggest threat to journalists is no longer shelling or sniper fire, despite the constant sound of artillery and plumes of smoke that are sometimes visible from across the Turkish border—the thing we are most afraid of is that we will disappear. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reports that 15 journalists are currently missing in the country, and if that number included international aid workers, Syrian activists, and fixers, it would be much larger.

According to Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director at Human Rights Watch, “[Kidnapping] started mostly when fighting broke out in Aleppo, and has developed and grown since then into a broader trend across many parts of Syria."

Those still covering the civil war are united by a sense of duty to report on what is happening in the country. But given the risk of abduction and the prospect of drawn-out rescue operations that drain resources from our colleagues and endanger our fixers and friends, we are being forced to reassess the way we cover the ongoing conflict.

Fighters from Jabhat al-Nusra, a jihadist rebel group thought to be responsible for a number of kidnappings. Photo by Benjamin Hiller

Early cases of kidnapping were undertaken by the regime or motivated by the prospect of a ransom. For example, 34-year-old French photographer Jonathan Alpeyrie had his release secured last month by a large payment from a Syrian businessman. Recent kidnappings, however, do not appear to be as transactional.

Charles Lister, an analyst at IHS Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Centre, closely follows events in Syria and has noticed a significant change in the environment. “Recent weeks have seen a discernible spike in reported kidnappings in northern Syria, particularly of local activists and opposition journalists,” he said.

The trend coincides with the fast and extraordinarily rise in influence of ISIS across the north of the country since May. They’re often blamed for the kidnappings, frequently without hard evidence. Lister won't be drawn into making conclusions about the reasons behind the spike, but said, “If indeed ISIS is culpable, this would suggest a systematic strategy of neutralizing moderate figures in northern Syria who are publicly willing to express opposition to localized ISIS rule.”

In other words, the threat of kidnapping evokes a kind of terror that snipers and mortars cannot. 

Every day in Aleppo I received word of another colleague, friend, or activist being abducted, and eventually a crippling sense of panic set in. The idea that I could be taken at any minute became the foundation for a terrifying mental prison. During my last night in town, I sat chain smoking, scared into silence—the power of this weapon against those living in its sights.

Andy Cottom, a British trauma therapist who focuses on the effects of conflict, told me that the aim of kidnapping in war is to “instil terror,” adding that terror in its truest form (as opposed to the amorphous war on terror version) “really is the most effective tool an enemy can put into you.”

Austin Tice, an American journalist who has been missing for over a year.

For those covering Syria, that terror is compounded as sobering anniversaries begin to pass. Last month marked one year since the kidnapping of Austin Tice, a 32-year-old American journalist who disappeared in Daraya, near Damascus, and is thought to be in the custody of the Syrian government. His colleague and friend Christy Wilcox, who has herself covered the conflict in Syria, says locating him has been difficult. "Lack of information is an ongoing theme in Syria,” she told me. “And it makes it hard to get to the point where anyone can negotiate or help get the person home safely.”

This view is supported by a kidnapping, ransom, and extraction security specialist who has worked on several cases in Syria and wished to remain anonymous. “I wouldn't say it's like finding a needle in a haystack,” he told me. “It's more like finding the right needle in the right haystack. We don't even know which haystack to look in.”

The only way to gain insight into the sometimes seemingly arbitrary way people are kidnapped is to examine the few cases that have been resolved. In January of this year, journalist Balint Szlanko was abducted in Aleppo along with two colleagues. He explained his ordeal in the Daily Beast, writing, “The abduction was quick and professional. In a few seconds we were dragged out of our car, our hands were cuffed behind our backs, we were blindfolded and thrust into two cars... The whole thing felt surreal and scary.”

After 12 hours, the trio were released as quickly as they had been taken, and months later still have no idea who took them or why they were let go. “Perhaps they realized they had taken the wrong guys. Or perhaps they released us because they changed their minds, because people had been looking for us,” wrote Szlanko.

In many cases, the disappearance of journalists is kept under wraps for their safety. Yet once you've told members of the press about abductions to help them avoid a similar fate, it's difficult to then ask them not to pass on that information, as it goes against a journalistic instinct to report the news. Notably, the kidnapping of Richard Engel, an NBC correspondent who was abducted in Syria last December, was kept fairly quiet until Gawker's John Cook wrote a post announcing Engel's disappearance. He was criticized by many journalists and later justified his actions in an update to the original post. “No one told me anything that indicated a specific, or even general, threat to Engel's safety,” he wrote.

Robert Young Pelton, author of the Somalia Report and vocal opponent of media blackouts, came out in support of Cook's supported the decision. In a follow-up piece on Gawker, he wrote, “There exists no proof that censorship helps expedite a safe release, and there is no proof that accurate information about a victim harms him... Censorship historically has only covered up a host of corporate incompetence and handwringing.” He suggested that blackouts benefit employers trying to keep such incidents quiet, not kidnappees.

CPJ’s journalist security advisor, Frank Smyth, takes a more measured view of blackouts. “There is no single template showing how to handle such cases, as each deserves its own careful examination,” he said, “Claiming that there is no evidence that harm would be done by publicizing a case is not an argument in favour of publicity.”

In any case, g
iven the widespread use of blackouts, it’s reasonable to assume that the 15 cases reported by CPJ are just the tip of the iceberg.

So what does this mean for journalists covering the war? For Szlanko, “It all adds up to what I'm doing now, which is not going there.” Wilcox, however, believes that “reporting on the conflict in Syria is still important. However, when colleagues and other people go missing, it just adds to the already insurmountable issues.”

While individual reporters weight the risks in staying in a country that has become even more dangerous for them, all agree that stories from the war are important—especially in light of the alleged chemical attack perpetrated by the regime that now has the US ready to intervene.

It is impossible to see the frothing mouths of dying children and feel comfortable that this kind of suffering may go unreported. But the time when we believed our coverage might change the course of the war has passed. Instead, many of us have invested ourselves in this complex and frustrating story in the hope that, in some small way, the ritual of documentation will honor the innocents victimized by this ongoing disaster. The risks have brought on-the-ground reporting in Syria to a standstill, but that only means we must redouble our efforts to report on this bloody and seemingly endless war.

Follow Emma on Twitter: @ejbeals

More from Syria:

I Ate Ice Cream with a Member of al-Qaeda in Syria

Inside the Free Syrian Army's Secret DIY Weapons Factory

Chatting About 'Game of Thrones' With Syria's Most Feared Islamic Militants

Nha Nghis in Hanoi’s Long Biên district.

Vietnam has its priorities firmly in place. A pack of Marlboro Reds is cheaper than a cup of coffee, a liter of Hanoi Vodka costs less than a box of cereal, and the best part of two months each year are given over to a huge party called Tết, which is kind of like New Year's Eve and Mardi Gras rolled into one, but with a few more firecrackers, masks, and games of "catch the duck blindfolded" (note: that is not a euphemism).

But it's at lunchtimes when Hanoi, the country's capital, really comes into its own. While the rest of us are stuck wrestling with a cost-benefit analysis of splashing an extra buck on a sandwich with real animal meat in it, horny Hanoians are meeting in specialized motels called Nha Nghis across the city for some afternoon delight.

The Nha Nghi (which translates to “rest house”) is a fairly modern phenomenon, but in the past decade the hotels have sprung up throughout the country’s major cities, and it's easy to see why they're so popular among people sneaking in quickies with either their lover, a stranger they met online, or a prostitute. Considering they start at just three dollars an hour, the rooms are remarkably clean and well-furnished. The one I checked out in Hanoi’s Long Biên district reminded me a bit of a Travelodge, only without the continental breakfast of cereal and stale danishes.

An alley full of Nha Nghis in Hanoi's Hai Ba Trung District.

In Vietnam, sex before marriage is common but still considered a bit too taboo to engage in openly, so Nha Nghis provide the ideal cover for young lovers eager to escape the judgment of their parents. But the hotels aren't just for the young—adults all the way into their late 60s rendezvous with their bit on the side at Nha Nghis. Some of them book rooms months in advance for Valentine's Day and public holidays. Officially, the national sport is đá cầu (it's sort of like badminton with your feet); unofficially, it's doin' it. 

“Contrary to their repressed image in the West, Vietnamese people are actually very liberal and affairs are extremely common,” one hotel worker informed me. “My ex-partner was a wealthy man and would meet up with three or more girls a week. When it's so easy to hook up, Vietnamese find it difficult to be faithful—especially the men.“

As with most tales of 21st century sordidness, the internet had a large role to play in the explosion of Nha Nghis. Yahoo Chat became wildly popular in Vietnam during the mid-2000s and, all of a sudden, cyber Casanovas had an endless amount of potential partners to poke, persuade, and plead into the sack. All they needed was a place to do the deed.

Hung, who didn't want his face pictured, sits in a coffee shop in Hanoi's Old Quarter.

Hung, a borderline sexual deviant who claims to have bedded over 60 girls in Nha Nghis across a two-year period before doing the “honorable thing” and marrying the first girl he impregnated, said chatrooms gave a new lease on life to his brand of no-strings-attached recreation. “For me, it was very simple—I would say some nice things to a girl and let things move on from there,” he told me. “Once we’re talking, I can date her; once we date, I can kiss her; once I kiss her, I can touch her boobs; and once that happens I can fuck her.”

As you can probably deduce by now, Nha Nghi liasions can come with a sizeable dose of misogyny. Though many Nha Nghi users are couples who just want to hook up without attracting the scorn of society, the hotels are also used by serial sleazebags like Hung and his peers, who have been known to swap phone numbers of girls who put out (referred to as “one knots”). Lauxanh, Vietnam’s most popular porn website, has a forum where men share photos of their conquests and rate girls' “assets” out of ten.

Of larger concern is that though hookup culture has made its way to Vietnam, contraception isn't often used, especially by young people. Vietnam has by far the highest rate of teen abortions in Southeast Asia, and incidences of STDs are also thought to alarmingly high, though since it's common for people to quietly get treated by private doctors those statistics are difficult to find. According the Ministry of Health, there were 213,400 people living with HIV in Vietnam as of May; many of them are likely sex workers.

Trang, a sex worker, waits for clients near Thuyen Quang Lake in Hanoi.

Trang, a 33-year-old prostitute who has worked Hanoi’s streets for ten years, services up to eight customers a day, either in Nha Nghis or public toilets for around $4.50 apiece. “I contracted HIV from one of my clients—I don’t know who—and my health is declining,” she said. “I’d like to get out of it, but this is the only way I can afford medicine. Nha Nghis aren’t ideal, but they’re a lot safer than the streets, and most owners make sure nothing dangerous happens.”

Although they have been targeted for their links to prostitution, Nha Nghis seem safe from government censure for now—the Communist Party seems more focused on tackling the spread of HIV. The rest houses are popular across all sections of society and most people I spoke to felt they provided a useful service for carefree couples in a country still calibrating its moral compass. But while most Nha Nghi visits simply serve to scratch an itch, some cost the vulnerable a lot more than a few dollars.

Follow Jak on Twitter: @JakPhillips

More from Vietnam:

Vietnam Won't Stop Locking Up Its Bloggers

The Secret History of the Vietnam War

I Ate a Dog in Hanoi

Israeli Interior Minister Gideon Sa'ar, who last week announced that he will start deporting Israel's African migrants to Uganda. (Photo via) 

Earlier this month, it was reported that Israel were trying to swap Africans for arms. Or, more specifically, broker a deal with a number of unspecified African countries that would see thousands of African refugees included in lucrative deals for Israeli weapons and military training. If you take back these annoying, resources-sapping asylum seekers, the Israelis seemed to be saying, you can buy our guns for cheap.

The Israeli government is currently detaining thousands of African asylum seekers in desert prisons on the Egyptian border. Many of them now face being shipped off, against their will, to whichever African country will take them. Seemingly no thought has been paid to sending asylum seekers back to oppressive regimes they may have been fleeing in the first place.  

It seems that a deal has now been struck, as late last week Israeli Interior Minister Gideon Sa'ar announced that he would start the process of deporting migrants to Uganda.    

The Israeli government already have strong relations with their Ugandan counterparts, with Israel currently "working to introduce sophisticated agro-technology" to the country. But it is newer support to Uganda's military – weapons, training, fighter jets and possibly drones – that many suspect to be behind the country's decision to import asylum seekers from Israel.

"We're hoping to operate in the coming weeks and months in a way that will make another exit for infiltrators in the country,” Sa’ar explained, “while trying to reach agreements with more countries.”

The Saharonim detention facility in the Negev desert, where African refugees are being detained. (Photo courtesy of Karin Keil from the Hotline for Migrant Workers.)

Around 40,000 of these "infiltrators" are Eritreans, trying to escape a country with one of the worst human rights records on Earth. According to a 2012 report from the US State Department, over the past year “unlawful killings by security forces continued, as did torture, harsh prison conditions and incommunicado detention, which sometimes resulted in death. The government continued to force persons to participate in its national service programme, often for periods of indefinite duration. The government also severely restricted civil liberties, including freedom of speech, press, assembly, association and religion […] An international NGO reported that the government continued to hold five to ten thousand suspected political opponents without charge and perhaps tens of thousands of additional persons suspected of evading or deserting national service."

These people aren’t coming to Israel because they fancy upping their matzah intake or living on Palestinian land illegally; they're genuinely trying to escape persecution and find a way to survive.     

One such Eritrean is Awat Ashbar, who has been living in Israel for six years. “If Israel returns me to Uganda, it’s like putting a knife to my gut,” he told Haaretz. “Uganda will send us to Eritrea. We are very afraid.”

A UN-supplied refugee camp near the border of Ethiopia, accommodating some of the thousands of Eritreans who flee across the border every year. (Photo by Dan Connell)

And it appears that Sa'ar's eviction plan doesn't only apply to those detained in the desert camps (often on spurious charges), but also to the remaining 54,000 African asylum seekers in Israel. In what the Israeli government presumably sees as a generous handout, each migrant's flight to Uganda will be paid for, their "absorption" into society – whatever that involves – will be financed and they'll receive $1,500 (£962) of pocket money. 

The Israeli government insist that migrants put themselves forward for deportation "voluntarily". However, there have been allegations that "voluntarily", in this case, translates to something more akin to "eventually agreeing after coercion and outright pressure". Plus, if they don't jump at the chance to be shipped back to a life of persecution after a certain amount of time, they’ll eventually be forced to leave against their will anyway.

In response to the announcement, a group of NGOs – including Amnesty International Israel – said that, “For years, the Interior Ministry has spoken of an agreement with a third country to buy Israeli asylum seekers in exchange for weapons and money, and Uganda has been mentioned. But it turns out that Uganda is an unsafe country and there is no way to assure the safety of those deported there. Last March, Israel expelled an Eritrean asylum seeker to Uganda, which was quick to deny any agreement with it and expelled him immediately upon his arrival.”

Strangely, when I contacted David Apollo Kazungu – the commissioner for the Ugandan government’s Refugee Department – he told me that, “No such agreement is in place between Uganda and Israel,” and that, “Uganda fully respects and encourages state parties to respect rights of refugees, including the principle of 'non-refoulement’ and burden sharing.”

Sigal Rozen, on the right.

So the apparent adherence to non-refoulement – an important part of international law that aims to protect refugees from being sent back to either their country of origin or a new place altogether where their lives and freedom could be threatened – is promising. However, the denial of the entire scheme's existence by the Ugandan government is worrying, according to Sigal Rozen from the Hotline for Migrant Workers: “Since they deny the existence of an agreement and […] the extremely poor human rights record of Uganda," she told me, "they [the asylum seekers] will be in real danger.”

It is unknown when the asylum seekers will be herded onto a plane headed towards their new enforced country of residence, what status – refugee or otherwise – they’ll receive upon arrival, or even if they’ll subsequently get deported back to the country they are seeking asylum from in the first place.

However, Sigal didn't sound hopeful: “If they [get] deported, then I am afraid that they will be sent back to their country of origin.”

Follow Joseph on Twitter: @josephfcox

Israel Are Getting Rid of Their African Migrants By Including Them in Arms Deals

Forty-Thousand Bedouin Are Being Kicked Off Their Land by Israel

The Footballer Who Went to Prison for Being Talented

WATCH – Israel's Killer Robots

Shakila's dead body. (Photo via)

On a cold January afternoon last year, Qurban the bodyguard left his boss's house in Bamyan province, Afghanistan to buy some coal at the bazar. Qurban's boss was Wahidi Beheshti – governor of a remote district in Bamyan province – who had been allowing Qurban, his wife Soraya and her 16-year-old sister Shakila to stay at his home.

As Bamyan is among the more secure of Afghanistan's provinces, Qurban thought little of heading into town without his Kalashnikov. However, it was that sense of security that saw him return to Beheshti's house to find Shakila lying on the floor, barely conscious, bleeding to death from a single gunshot wound to the chest. Qurban's weapon, which the police later determined had fired the fatal shot, was leant against the wall on the far side of the room.    

I heard all of this at the end of last month during a press conference organised by the Kabul-based NGO, Human Rights and Eradication of Violence Organisation (HREVO), which hosted Shakila’s brother, Mohammad Alam, Zahara Sepehr, director of the Afghan women and children's support organisation DSAWCO, and Aziz Rafi from Afghanistan’s Civil Society and Human Rights Network.



Wahidi Beheshti maintains that he played no part in Shakila’s murder, yet at the time of Shakila's death he refused to call the police and instead carried the teenager’s lifeless body to his car. However, according to Sepehr, the shot and the commotion that ensued alerted Beheshti's neighbours, who called the police.



Beheshti told the police that he was in prayer at the time of the murder and didn't even hear the gunshot, despite the fact that Soraya, Shakila's sister, heard it from outside, before rushing indoors to find Shakila unable to talk and barely able to move her limbs. "Despite the powerful 7.62 calibre round piercing Shakila’s heart and exiting through the back of her body, she managed to cling onto life for a full 20 minutes after the shooting," Mohammad Alam added.



It should be noted here that Beheshti hails from a powerful family. His brother, Jamal Fakhul Beheshti, is an MP and his father was a warlord during the jihad against the Soviet invasion. He has used that power at every juncture in a bid to “wrap the matter up in whatever way possible”. According to Zahara, the court initially found the governor not guilty, citing the fact that not enough evidence was found in the initial police investigation.

However, after it emerged that the court was potentially under Beheshti’s influence, the case moved to a second meeting, where the governor tried to blame Qurban for the murder. "Wahidi," Mohammad Alam explained, "then contacted our family, saying that the only way Qurban could be spared jail was if they called Shakila’s demise a suicide."



At the second hearing, the judge ruled out suicide after observing the impossibility of a girl Shakila's size shooting herself in the chest with a Kalashnikov, before leaning it against a wall and walking across the room to die. Not a trace of blood was found on the weapon or anywhere else in the room.

From left to right, Mohammad Alam, Zahara Sepehr (Director of Development and Support at the Afghan Women and Children Organisation) and Wadood Pedram (Executive Director of HREVO).

Today, more than a year and a half after the incident, Beheshti is not only a free man, but remains in office despite prominent civil society groups and local media outlets pointing to his guilt. Even more depressingly, according to Aziz Rafi, there remained a strong chance of Beheshti ultimately walking away as a free man.

Rafi blamed “Afghanistan’s culture of impunity” among its leaders, reinforced by the population’s “lack of political will” as the chief barriers to justice. Abdul Wadood Pedram, Executive Director of HREVO, agreed: "In Afghanistan, there is no [political] system, just relationships between high profile people who protect their own interests," he explained. "There is no rule of law; law is only implemented for ordinary people, further undermining the Afghans' faith in the political system."



After the years of turmoil that followed the bloody, Soviet-backed Saur Revolution in 1978, and the subsequent invasion that plunged the country into a chaos from which it is still recovering, efforts at nation building (at first by Pakistan and then by the United Nations) focused on "strong men", many of whom were despised by a broader populous who longed for peace. Women in general, as well as civil society organisations and unarmed moderates, were completely left out of any state building attempts.



During an informal gathering at Kabul’s Ministry of Information and Culture, Dr Ashraf Ghani – former chancellor of Kabul University – told me that protracted warfare in Afghanistan has nurtured a political climate in which people hold little respect for titles or positions of authority, instead focusing solely on the individuals in office.

"Once that person leaves, the ministerial title becomes effectively meaningless and the next incumbent has to start from scratch – gradually building the loyalty and support of the population," he said. "This both undermines – and is indicative of – a culture that holds little or no regard for the rule of law or for the political system itself."



The case has yet to be concluded, but was moved to Kabul in order to be formally closed on the grounds of "not enough evidence", leaving Beheshti to walk free. If this happens, it will strike yet another blow to the rule of law in Afghanistan, and only foster more disenfranchisement from Afghans towards their government.

Follow Maximilian on Twitter: @MTIClarke

More on Afghanistan:

Techno Raving and Dead Goat Polo at Silk Road Festival

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Daniel Fino Galvan, the convicted paedophile who was pardoned by the king of Morocco. Police handout

When convicted Spanish pedophile Daniel Fino Galvan was pardoned by the king of Morocco last month, ferocious protests erupted all over the country. The child molester—who had only served a year and a half of his 30-year sentence for raping 11 children in the north African country—was among the 48 Spanish citizens released from Moroccan jails on the request of Spanish King Juan Carlos during his recent official visit.

After widespread outrage from the Moroccan public—and after their protests had been cleared by police with bats—the king revoked the pardon and, days later, Galvan was rearrested in Spain. There is no precedent of Moroccans disagreeing with a royal decision and the events have shaken the authorities, dredging up a long-standing mistrust between the country's monarchy and elected officials, neither of whom wanted to take responsibility for Galvan’s release.

The king claims he had no idea of Galvan's crimes and would have never pardoned him had he been aware. Which might seem like a bulletproof defense to King Mohammed, but actually almost makes things worse; how can a population support a king who carelessly releases pedophiles from incarceration without even checking their crimes, before brazenly shifting the blame wherever he can? The chief of prisons, sacked in response to the protests, is widely seen as a scapegoat, but I'm assuming that vindication doesn't exactly validate the fact that he lost his job for somebody else's mistake.   

Graffiti in Morocco calling King Mohammed an "an accomplice of Spanish murderers." Photo via 

Depressingly, Galvan's is not a unique case. Just over a month before his early release, a British man was arrested in Tetouan, northern Morocco, after abducting a six-year-old girl; a month before that, a 60-year-old French man was sentenced to 12 years in a Casablanca prison for sexually abusing a number of young children. Reports surrounding both those cases painted Morocco as a pedophile haven, being much easier to access from Europe (it's the only place Ryanair flies to outside of Europe) than southeast Asia's child-abuse vacation destinations and populated by disadvantaged children—an easy target for pedophile tourists.

Morocco has been a blind spot for decades. Despite pretty stringent laws against homosexuality, it was the favored getaway location for high-profile gay men before Western Europe began to relax its stance on same-sex relationships; sex-change operations were taking place in Morocco before countries in Europe legalized them, and the prevalence of hash on the country's streets is a cliche based firmly in fact.    

Unfortunately, for all the benefits of its relatively lax authority, that freedom allows other notably more abhorrent freedoms to slip through, angering Moroccans, who first protested in Casablanca in May for better protection of children and then much more heatedly in the days following Galvan's release.   

A demonstration in front of the Moroccan embassy in Brussels after the Moroccan king pardoned Galvan. Photo via

At his original trial, the judge asked Galvan why he came to Morocco to abuse children. Galvan replied, “Because it’s cheap and, with money, you can get anything you want.” Galvan’s crude response has been echoed by a number of the people I contacted.

I asked Bhati Patel, CEO of ECPAT UK, an organization working to stop children being sexually exploited and trafficked, why Morocco was suffering so much. She told me that "poverty is high [in Morocco], inequality is high, and they see that the government is not playing its part in protecting children […] they look for regions where they know that they can get away with this action and there is easily available access to children."

There are a couple of things that make tackling the problem difficult. Firstly, there’s no knowing who these pedophiles could be. As Patel explained to me, "There isn’t a single profile of who the pedophile is—it could be anyone. It could be a politician, it could be a local person traveling abroad, because travel has become quite cheap now. There isn’t a single profiling characteristic.” Patel's mention to politicians is a reference to the French government minister who was accused a few years ago of having orgies with underage boys in Marrakech.

Najat Anwar, chair of the Touche Pas à Mon Enfant association.

Secondly, there are almost no statistics on the subject. I got in contact with Najat Anwar, chair of the Touche Pas à Mon Enfant (Don't Touch My Child) association. "The official statistics on pedo-tourism are basically nonexistent," she told me. "A few years ago, we could give the public some statistics about the year, but those were based solely on the complaints received by our organization. It’s because of this that the observation of children has such an essential role to play in the calculation and diffusion of statistics, but hits insurmountable legal obstacles and therefore we can only count the declared cases of paedophilia, which remain an insignificantly small proportion of the total."

Touche Pas à Mon Enfant were an integral part of the original Casablanca protests in May. I asked Najat what she thought of the recent protests over Galvan’s release. "If it’s as much of an awakening as we think it is, it has been wonderful," she answered. "The popular abhorrence toward this freeing has made Moroccans feel that a grave danger threatens their children. We simply hope this mobilization will be long-lasting rather than an ephemeral spark."

The mixture of Morocco’s close proximity to Europe, the in-expense of getting there, the poverty in rural areas, and the authorities' tendency to turn a blind eye has left Morocco with a serious problem—one that will especially affect children from poorer backgrounds, often forgotten in the financially segregated Middle East.

Though there are a few growing organizations like Touche Pas à Mon Enfant, which is composed mainly of parents taking matters into their own hands, the authorities have a long way to go to fix the poverty, lack of enforcement, and corruption that has left Morocco’s children so vulnerable.

As Najat told me, "There’s still a lot to be done for the child victims of this dirty tourism, and we have hope, we have a dream. I hope this popular awakening through the Galvan case will make other potential foreign pedophiles think twice. The dream is for our country to be visited for its beaches and its mountains, not for its children."

Follow James on Twitter: @duckytennent

More stories about paedophilia:

An Interview with a Convicted Paedophile

The Journalist Who Was Arrested for Investigating Jersey's Paedophile Orphanage

Verizon, embodied as a rat, from a union protest in Philadelphia. via WikiCommons.

I don't think anyone can argue that the average cell phone bill in Canada isn't insanely overpriced. We only have to look at the crushingly honest discovery from a July report published by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, to see that Canadians pay some of the highest rates in the industrialized world for the worst cell phone service.

Needless to say, when rumours began surfacing that Verizon may be entering the Canadian wireless market everyone was pretty stoked. In fact, a Forum Research poll in July revealed that 71% of Canadians surveyed believed Verizon entering the country would be good for customers and 58% said foreign ownership restrictions should be lifted. Clearly the only people who were not stoked were the Big Three mobile providers—Telus, Bell, and Rogers—who spent the summer freaking out like a bunch of cornered rodents whose big chunk of cheddar was about to be taken away.

But yesterday, those same freaked out little rascals, who collectively control 93% of the Canadian wireless market, were able to relax and return to their regularly scheduled program of charging Canadians up the ass for our cell phone use, as Verizon decided to not enter Canada after all, opting instead to buy out the 45% stake in its wireless division currently held by Vodaphone.

Verizon's $130-billion buyout of Vodaphone's stake will give them full ownership of their US operations, and likely means they'll be keeping their hands out of our spectrum auction in January. While it may sound somewhat futuristic the spectrum auction was set up to allow new entrants to the market to bid on two blocks (there are four “prime blocks” up for sale) of the spectrum while incumbent carriers are limited to just one block. The spectrum auction was set up to allow a bit more competition and it was the average Canadian’s best shot at getting reasonable cell phone rates. Of course Bell, Telus, and Rogers were bummed about their handicap, and spent the summer rolling out a massive advertising campaign to sway public opinion, making the argument that new carriers wouldn’t be as good as providing rural service.

Aside from all this, when it was revealed Verizon was complicit in spying on citizens by the NSA, the Big Three used all of the negative attention as the perfect opportunity to imply that Verizon would spy on Canadians as well, warning that the company should be subject to an Industry Canada security review.

But now that this Vodaphone deal has gone through, most analysts believe Verizon will stay out of the spectrum auction. Others, like Steve Anderson, executive director at Open Media, speculated that even if this deal hadn't gone through, the chances of Verizon expanding north were slim to none considering everything else that stood in their way.

“They can't buy out the big companies because there's restrictions on that. They can only invest in a startup and grow that startup,” said Steve. “Considering the bundled services, the branding, the lobbying capacity of the Big Three providers, they'd have to invest billions and they wouldn't make money for years. I wouldn't be surprised if they took a look at the cozy relationship between the Big Three and the government and decide it's not worth it with the cards stacked as they are now.”

Despite an onslaught of opposition from Canadian carriers, Harper has stood behind the structure of the auction with Industry Minister James Moore by his side, citing lower cell phone rates and better competition.

While Verizon's decision to not come to Canada is a blow to consumers, there is a bigger problem at the heart of all this, as Steve explained to me. The problem is that the Big Three control 85 percent the cellular network infrastructure. Imagine if a car company had control over all the Canadian highways and was able to charge a fee or restrict other kinds of cars from using them. Ridiculous, right? This is essentially what small, independent providers have to face when they attempt to break into the market to reach Canadians over the Big Three’s network. Now that the Verizon threat has been squashed, the big companies can retain the massive amount of control over the infrastructure and can continue charge us whatever they want.

Over the past few months, we’ve seen the lengths to which Rogers, Bell and Telus will go to keep their competition out of Canada, and while the restrictions on foreign ownership are reasonable, the Big Three's ability to block independent providers from accessing our digital infrastructure means if we want decent service, we'll have keep dishing out absurd amounts of cash, while companies like Wind, Mobilicity and Public Mobile struggle to get themselves off the ground. Even though the Harper government has taken steps in the right direction and stuck to their guns, bolder policies are definitely needed to improve access to the spectrum for independent providers. Until a new challenger can enter, however, the Big Three will continue to overcharge us for all of the YouTube videos of kittens and puppies we love stream on our smartphones.

More on the Canadian telecom monopoly:

Bell Media and Astral's Merger Is Going to Make the Canadian Media Even Worse

Photo via Flickr user Sam Stokes

On Sunday, the New York Times revealed the existence of a program known as the Hemisphere Project, which gives the Drug Enforcement Administration and local law enforcement agencies around the country access to a database of Americans’ phone records that goes back to 1987. You might think that a judge would have to sign off on a subpoena in order for the cops to view your phone records, but the process is actually much more streamlined (and invasive): the federal government reportedly pays AT&T to have the telecom giant’s employees sit next to DEA agents and local police detectives and show them whatever data they need. Technically, the information is stored by AT&T and not the government (this avoids some sticky legal issues), but in practice the cops have access to a database that logs billions of calls a day and includes not only who you called, but where you were when you placed the call. (Your call gets logged if it passes through an AT&T-owned system; you don’t have to be a customer of the company for them to have your data.) The current official Obama administration excuse for the program they were forced to admit the existence of is that it helps track down drug dealers and other criminals who tend to use difficult-to-track disposable cellphones.

This story comes on the heels of a story published by Reuters last month that detailed the NSA´s quasi-legal habit of passing on tips to other agencies, like the DEA, that don’t normally work on national security-related cases. After being given these tips, investigators then “recreate” where they got their evidence in a trick known as “parallel construction,” which allows them to hide where they got their information from defendants, judges, and even prosecutors. (Members of Congress have been pressing Attorney General Eric Holder about this, and he claims this is a common tactic used to protect sources.)

All these revelations about the scope of the information the DEA has access to are frightening, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise. Although the government originally claimed that it would only use its massive powers of data collection and surveillance in serious, rare, 24-type situations, of course they are using these same powers to go after more mundane criminals. For instance, “sneak and peek” warrants, which allow the police to search your property without informing you as they normally would, were legalized by the terrorism-centric PATRIOT Act but somehow wound up being used more often in drug investigations. This sort of codependent relationship between the war on drugs and the national security state makes it difficult to separate the two. It’s becoming clear that it's unrealistic to ask the government to play by the rules law enforcement is supposed to be following except in situations where big bad terrorists are involved; mission creep is inevitable. More than one tentacle of government needs to be hacked off before Americans get some privacy back.

Now on to this week´s bad cops:

- On Friday, several police groups responded in writing to the Department of Justice memo announcing that the laws legalizing marijuana in Colorado and Washington state will be more or less respected. Their letter—signed by the Major County Sheriffs’ Association, the National Sheriffs’ Association, the Association of State Criminal Investigative Agencies, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the National Narcotic Officers Associations’ Coalition, the Major Cities Chiefs Police Association, and the Police Executive Research Forum—claims that the DOJ has made cops’ jobs “infinitely harder” and repeats old cliches about marijuana being a dangerous “gateway drug” that “can also be directly tied to violent crime.” Someone needs to introduce these officers to the good folks at Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, who could teach them a thing or two about why cops should welcome the end of the drug war as much as anyone else.

- The Altoona, Pennsylvania, police department is being sued by a man who says one of their officers shot him for holding a pair of boxer shorts back in April. According to the lawsuit, James D. Weyant was walking back from his girlfriend´s house at 4 AM clad in an oversized hoodie and loose-fitting Guitar Hero-theme boxers that he had to hold up with one hand. Natually enough, when he needed both hands to light a cigarette he decided to take off his boxers so he wouldn’t need to keep holding the dang things up. (He says the hoodie covered his indecent bits.) That’s when officer Mark Sprouse drove up and shot him, allegedly without even issuing any warnings to the 46-year-old. The district attorney claims that Sprouse thought the boxers Weyant was carrying were a gun, and a review board concluded that the cop had “followed departmental policies and procedures.”

- In what the Dallas Observer dubbed “the lamest federal raid in history,” Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) came after a leather retailer named Teskey´s Saddle Shop on Wednesday, shutting down the store’s locations in Fort Worth and Weatherford, Texas, for a day. Rumors that the shops were involved in drug dealing or human trafficking circulated, but it turns out that what brought the Feds was their discovery that Teskey’s was selling leather belts that didn’t have a label identifying where they were made, a violation of customs law.

- A Bronx, New York, district attorney indicted officer Michael Ackermann on Monday on multiple counts, including three felonies, stemming from his arrest of New York Times photographer Robert Stolarik last year. Stolarik got arrested for interfering with the arrest of a teenage suspect and Ackermann claimed that the photographer was using a flash to blind the officer—but Stolarik didn’t even have a flash on him. Now it’s the cop, not the photographer, who is facing charges for fabricating official records.

- According to the Associated Press, since 9/11 the NYPD has labeled more than a dozen mosques as terrorist organizations, meaning that anyone who attends worship at one of them could be targeted by an investigation. Predictably, mayor Michael Bloomberg and NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly have defended these invasive tactics—which have never led to any mosques actually being charged with anything—while Muslim and civil liberties groups are horrified.

- The family of 18-year-old Israel Hernandez, the graffiti artist who died on August 6 after being tasered by Miami Beach Police, has filed a lawsuit against the police department and the city. Hernandez´s family says officers used excessive force against him, especially considering this was all over a nonviolent misdemeanor charge.

- Last week in Leland, North Carolina, 19-year-old Gabriel Self was arrested for filming officer John Keel cuffing a man suspected of possessing drug paraphernalia. Local police chief Mike James responded admirably: he instituted a department-wide revaluation of policy on how to deal with citizens filming cops, and Keel will be retrained after serving a 28-day unpaid suspension. Self´s initial charges, meanwhile, were dropped. Our Good Cop of the Week award goes to James for teaching his officers not to respond irrationally to people filming them.

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

Previously: The Cops Should Always Be on Camera

Mahmoud Sarsak

In the West, athletes tend to get in trouble with the cops for totalling their cars while drunk, having sex with prostitutes, or brawling in expensive nightclubs. Mahmoud Sarsak, on the other hand, was seemingly arrested just for being a decent Palestinian soccer player. He was lifted by the Israeli security services in July 2009 while crossing from Gaza to the West Bank and wasn’t released until July 2012, after a 96-day hunger strike. The Israelis accused him of being a member of the militant group Islamic Jihad and said that he once planted a bomb that had injured an Israeli soldier. But they didn’t have any evidence and, after three years of torture and imprisonment, couldn’t get a confession. Palestinians suspect that he was arrested simply because the Israelis were afraid that Mahmoud—who was the youngest-ever player in the Palestine League at just 14 years old—would soon be smashing in goals for a popular team and tearing off his shirt to reveal pro-Palestine messages.

The controversy reared its head again last June when the European Under-21 Championship was held in Israel, to the consternation of pro-Palestinian campaigners. The tournament also made use of the stadium belonging to Beitar Jerusalem, a club with an openly racist fanbase who refuse to accept Muslim players.

I recently met up with Mahmoud and his translator, Ayman Abuawwad, to drink mint tea, talk soccer, and hear about his horrible experiences being tortured in an Israeli jail.

VICE: Hi, Mahmoud. Could you tell me a bit about your soccer career before you were incarcerated?
Mahmoud Sarsak: I grew up in a refugee camp in the Gaza strip. There was a soccer club there and I would often train. It started from there and eventually I got into the Palestinian national youth team, then the Palestinian national team and the Olympic team. I was a center forward and a right winger.

Who did you look up to?
Del Piero, Zidane, and Mohamed Aboutrika, one of the most popular Egyptian soccer players.

To be honest, all we ever hear about Gaza here is that it’s a huge open prison that is occasionally bombed. How big a part does soccer play in daily life there?
Soccer is a crucial part of Palestinian culture in general, particularly with the refugees. Living in a refugee camp does not mean you can’t play sports.

Is there a league structure? How does it all work?
I can’t think of any other country that has two separate league structures. We have one for the West Bank and one for the Gaza strip because of the geographical separation. The one for the West Bank is a little more organized and more regular because there’s more stability. In Gaza, we’re lucky if we get one championship done every four years. We keep on getting interrupted by attacks, incursions, airstrikes, and the rest of it.

Mahmoud with London Gaza FC

Do you think Israel targeted you specifically because you were a soccer player?
The whole thing was quite bizarre, you know? I got a contract to go and play professionally with the national team in the West Bank. I asked Israel for the papers to travel and they were granted. I was at the final checkpoint, on the north of Gaza which is Fort Erez, and in the waiting pool I was called for an intelligence meeting inside the room. After the meeting, they decided to transfer me to Ashkelon prison for investigation.

What happened there?
I was held for 45 days with no charge, being humiliated and tortured. They couldn’t get anything out of me. Eventually they came up with this accusation that I was an "unlawful combatant."

What does that mean?
The strange thing about this is that the unlawful combatant law is an Israeli law that applies only to non-Palestinians. For example, Lebanese people who get caught inside Israel or by the border might get called an unlawful combatant.

That’s weird. Where did that come from?
It’s strange. I think they just couldn’t think of anything else.

Logo of the Palestinian Football Association (Photo via)

So why do you think they did it?
I don’t know. In prison I was shocked to see so many PhD-holders and professional soccer players—the place was full of talented Palestinians. I think it’s an Israeli policy to prevent Palestinian talent from shining and showing a civilized face to the world.

I guess a Palestinian Pirlo would be good for the cause. Sorry to make you relive this, but could you tell me how they tortured you?
They use different torture techniques for different people. With me, they would interrogate me for several days and not let me sleep. One session went on for 14 hours continuously, then they would tie me to a chair for a couple of hours in a room with loud music so that I couldn’t sleep and then they would start again.

Shit.
Sometimes when they put me in the chair they would also turn the whole room into a fridge. So the room would be around 12 degrees for about half an hour. When I had almost fainted they would take me to a hospital to revive me so that they could start questioning me again.

What kind of questions would they ask you?
They wanted me to admit to something that I didn’t do, because that would justify the whole thing, nationally and internationally.

I’ve heard that accusation has been put to you numerous times since your release and you’re sick of refuting it.
[Mahmoud looks visibly frustrated] I was in jail without any charge. When I got out, there was no charge, no accusations, nothing. The Zionist lobby always tries to portray Israel as a civilized country that abides by human rights law—that it's peace-loving and so on. Israel actually asked some European countries not to let me in on the grounds that I’m a “terrorist.” They try to discredit and silence any Palestinian who comes to the surface in the Western media.

How did things progress over the three years of your incarceration?
The first 45 days were the hardest; there was mental, physical, and verbal torture. Then they transferred me to a jail cell with other prisoners for eight months. After that, they called me back for another 12 days of torture and interrogation. It happened three or four times over my imprisonment.

Mahmoud remembers the 96 victims of the Hillsborough disaster, coincidentally the same number of days that he was on hunger strike.

When did you start trying to get yourself out of there?
There was a guy called Zakariya Issa. He was in a cell and he had cancer and they didn’t help him. He died in his cell. That was a turning point. I started thinking, “I need to help myself because nobody else is going to help me.” For example, FIFA wasn't helping me at this point.

So what did you do?
I did a hunger strike for 96 days to show the world that there are people in cells whom they had forgotten about.

As an athlete, that probably wasn’t the best for your body.
I lost half my weight and my muscles were damaged.

And after those 96 days you were released. It seems a bit random that they would suddenly release you, given that your detention was quite arbitrary in the first place.
The hunger strike gathered momentum nationally and internationally. FIFA and UEFA started applying pressure. Big soccer personalities like Eric Cantona, Abou Diaby, Frédéric Kanouté, and Lilian Thuram also got involved in an international campaign of collecting signatures and a petition to release me.

How did it feel to be released?
During my hunger strike, I came close to dying and when I got out I felt like I was born again. I was so happy to have my freedom and see my family again. At the same time I was sad to leave my brothers suffering in jail.

Your career was put on hold, but was it ruined forever?
Three years of my life were taken from me. I was in prison between the ages of 21 and 24—some of the best years for a soccer player when you’re young and agile. I was damaged both in terms of health and psychologically. After going to prison, it took me eight months to be physically able to train again. I haven’t lost hope. I’m going to go back into training and carry on with my career if I can.

Good luck, Mahmoud. Thanks for your time.

Thanks to Ayman Abuawadd for translation.

Follow Simon on Twitter: @SimonChilds13

More about life in Palestine:

WATCH – Resistance in the West Bank

WATCH – Crime and Punishment in the Gaza Strip

After getting locked out of her apartment, a young woman finds herself in the company of a strange and lonely neighbor.

Eat! is a short film directed by Janicza Bravo and starring Brett Gelman and Katherine Waterston.

Watch this little behind-the-scenes thing we made about the film.

More from Brett Gelman on VICE:

Rat Tail

Combover

Toupee

Frau Grautisch lived near us in Cologne. She was at daggers drawn with Aunt Adelheid, and friends with me. I’d run into her only a couple of days before, when she was fetching a liter of beer from the Päffgen Bar. “For my Miebes,” she told me. “Once he’s put that lot inside him he’ll be ready for his bed. I don’t mind him drinking twice what he’s used to these days, just as long as he doesn’t go out to the pub. A woman who loves her husband and wants to keep him isn’t letting him out to the pub, not these days. Liable to shoot their mouths off, men are, here in Cologne. And when they’ve had a few they will start on about those stupid politics, cracking jokes and making filthy remarks, thinking it’s all among friends. Then they wake up the next day with a thick head, and some jealous person or other whose business isn’t doing well will have gone chasing off to the Gestapo or some Party office of what-have-you to inform on them. When I get home now, Sanna, I’ll find my old man sitting there grumbling. ‘Elvira,’ he says, ‘this place is no better than a concentration camp.’ ‘Fancy you not noticing that before,’ says I. ‘We’re all in a concentration camp, the whole nation is, it’s only the Government can go running around free.”

(From Irmgard Keun’s novel After Midnight)

*

The Syrian Foreign Minister says that as of August 25, 2013, the United States has killed 2,548 people in drone attacks since 2005, based on “clear and compelling evidence.” Syria says it is considering a “limited, narrow act” in the form of a punitive military strike against the US, stating that “failure to respond would put Syrian credibility at stake.”

*

“Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.” Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Motion.

*

A mild disturbance next morning ruffled the staff. It began with the young gardener, Walter Traherne, who tramped into the kitchen in mud-spattered Wellingtons and overalls powdered with a lime green pesticide, declaring that moles were destroying the flowerbeds.

Walter usually strove for a D. H. Lawrence effect, lounging in doorways, his pelvis outthrust, fingering his black jawline beard, in an effort to make himself interesting to Nelly. Walter’s “toil-muscled, poetically rough-hewn son of the Earth” act had allegedly snared countless wives and daughters of palmy summer people in the area. But today he was all apocalypse, linking the moles with an invasive beetle species gobbling up phloem in the fir trees, and some type of hookworm infesting the local water.

“You can see the pattern, can’t you?” Walter violently insisted, Gauloise-package-blue eyes ablaze. Loose hoops of turquoise garden hose were bunched on his shoulder and his hand gripped the hose nozzle tersely. “First beetles. Now moles. Wormy water. A seawall collapsed out in Springs last week. If it’s not global warming, I’d like to know what is. But try telling that to those Board of Selectmen bastards.”

Nelly, basting a tray of squabs with a brush soaked in soy sauce, paused in her efforts and glanced at him warily.  

“You suspect a pattern,” she said, in a therapist’s neutral voice. Normally, Nelly’s voice alarmingly combined rasping loudness with soft, lilting inflections. “The Whispering Foghorn,” Mrs. Hayworth called her. “She lives in a louder world than we do.”

Pinkish breast meat, visible through papery skins, revolted her. King of Birds, my ass, she thought. She studied Matthew’s narrow back hunched over the cooking island, the pen in his fingers tapping out a private anthem on the black granite counter. He wore a sleeveless denim vest with no shirt underneath. His shaved head and the squiggly black and orange tattoos on his arms and neck gave him a convict allure. “Don’t forget fennel,” she said.

As Nelly squigetted lemon juice over the soy sauce, Matthew tried and failed to imagine Walter as a green-spirited political bellwether. The man never has anything on his mind except pussy, thought Matthew, yet here he is striking civic-minded poses. He seems genuinely upset—that’s the jarring aspect.

“Snot a suspicion, it’s a fact.”

“Well,” said Nelly, straightening. She daubed her hands on a drying-up cloth. “Obviously we’re doomed. Why not spend your final moments elsewhere?”

Matthew chortled as he added fennel to his shopping list.

“That’s that,” he said, turning to Walter. “We had the number of an exterminator somewhere.”

“I hate the thought of killing them,” Nelly said. “Couldn’t they be trapped and released in the wild?”

“This is the wild,” Matthew pointed out, “as far as a mole’s concerned.”

(From my long-unfinished novel, Diving for Teeth)

*

Dear M.,

Since returning from the Balkans I have had a raging case of stress dermatitis. It’s almost gone now. In fairness to New York, it started in Istanbul, got worse in Bulgaria, even worse in Romania and Croatia—and, FYI, you cannot buy any antihistamines over the counter anywhere in the Balkans, the only thing available is “Claratin,” which I don’t think is even how the authentic product is spelled, and it’s useless. In Berlin the pharmacies had two alternative products, both of no avail. In Paris, predictably, the whole problem went away and only flared up again after landing at JFK.

The problem, my doctor says, is that even when I don’t know I’m stressed out, I am. This is the same doctor who told me, when I was temporarily, improbably rich a few years ago and couldn’t figure out why I felt the same disorientation I felt when something terrible happened, “Your body doesn’t know the difference.” He also wanted to put me back on Klonopin, and even whipped out a prescription pad. I actually had to remind him what I went through getting off Klonopin.

Anyway, a dead month in a dead town. I saw the Paul Schrader-Lindsay Lohan-Brett Ellis film, The Canyons, which I liked a lot. Every minute it looked as if it were teetering on the edge of becoming a really ludicrously bad film, yet it never did and managed, in fact, to be a good one. It’s darker than films are generally allowed to get these days, and seems to have survived a real overkill of bad press from people who reflexively hate all three major participants, so good for them. I also saw In a World…, a smart, light, lovely movie about a woman trying to break into the movie-trailer-voiceover business by Lake Bell, an actress who’s also on my favorite cable show, Children’s Hospital. Just near the end, there is a very short scene with Geena Davis that really does leave the audience something to think about for more than ten minutes, which in my opinion is a soaring accomplishment. I saw something else I’m forgetting—I know I ducked into a screening of something that was either really great or really magnificently disgusting one day when I got caught in the rain, but I forget what or which it was.

Time Warner, my cable provider, is in an infantile row with CBS, which owns Showtime, which I subscribe to along with HBO and RAI and something else I don’t know the name of, Thrillmax or Doublemax or Climax or whatever, which is four or five stations of soft porn and brainless action movies. Time Warner’s version of this dispute is stupidly, truculently displayed where the stations that carry Nurse Jackie, Dexter, and other shows I like to watch normally appear. (I don’t really follow Dexter, but Charlotte Rampling is in the final season and I’m very pissed that I’m being charged to see her in it but unable to do so.) My Netflix, Hulu, AT&T, and YMCA accounts, and all other internet autopayments, were cancelled when I had to replace my bank card in Bucharest, since the bank changed the security code. Since then, I’ve become increasingly internet-phobic and decided not to pay anything online, so I’m leaving all that stuff in the present, cancelled state.

Relatedly, this month I read the new John LeCarré, A Delicate Truth; Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood & The Prison of Belief; three books about Romania; Todorov’s The Fragility of Goodness: Why Bulgaria’s Jews Survived the Holocaust; The Rule of Barbarism, by Abdellatif Laâbi; and re-read Hannah Arendt’s “Lying in Politics;” Kafka’s collected stories (most of them); as well as all 1,000 pages of Olivia Manning’s The Balkan Trilogy; plus two novels by Irmgard Keun, the Anita Loos of anti-Nazi Nazi Germany—proving, if proof were needed, that I can avoid writing without any help from Netflix, Hulu, or Showtime.

I would say how intelligent I think the British Parliament was in voting down any UK involvement in this completely insane US plan to bomb Syria, but I know how you despise the British Parliament, the normal inanity of which you have to deal with, whereas I don’t. I can’t believe the US is selling this in the same package they sold the Iraq invasion in, or that anyone in the US Congress besides John McCain and affiliated warmongers is buying it—even if none of them have any morals, these things cost a lot of money they could skim with much less risk of blowback. The truly incredible $53 billion intelligence budget (that we know of), added to the cost (that we know of) of another “controlled intervention,” added to the costs (that we know of) of the ongoing US military actions in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Et Cetera could at this point send every underprivileged child in the US through four years of a fucking Ivy League university, followed by graduate school, with enough left over to repair the infrastructure of at least ten major US cities, upgrade the entire US health system, and construct a high-speed rail system. That’s counting, or maybe not even counting, the gazillions we don’t know about because they’re classified and exempt from congressional oversight. Yet none of it’s enough to hire more than 33 translators fluent in Arabic at the FBI, a few more at the NSA, and a few more at the CIA. Where does all that money go? “Administrative costs.” Like all the money these poor damaged people pay the Church of Scientology to be turned into zombies.

And why is Hollande suddenly hot to trot, when a huge French majority is against him? I was completely in favor of France’s Mali intervention, but that too was a situation produced by our meddling in Libya—everything really does come down to Newtonian physics at this point. When Putin begins to sound like the voice of reason, we are in big, big trouble. He’s completely right and logical to ask: Why would Assad use chemical weapons when he’s already winning? And, as a friend wrote this morning, what’s so different about killing people with poison gas from killing them with bombs? Whose interests are served by a US “strategic strike,” if not those of Alvin Quackenbush himself? (I realize this email already contains many algorithmically key words like “bomb,” “intervention,” “Mali,” “Syria,” and, I suppose, “war,” but as a native writer of English, I’m really tired of spelling that name without a “u” after “Q.”)

You’ve probably been spared the Jay-Z video “Picasso Baby”—but really, M., I’m not suggesting you YouTube it, but it’s beyond anything. Art as haute bourgeois playpen, complete with pen. I like Jay-Z, who came to Havana with Beyoncé this summer, so I managed to watch the first 20 seconds, on the strength of my belief that he was thinking, It’s so easy to get a bunch of pretentious white people to make total assholes of themselves. Which I’m sure he was. Then the sight of former conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner, scraggly beard and hair grown down to his ankles, lolling on a “staring bench” across from the star, looking for all the world like an overgrown, drooling baby in a high chair, really made me gag and turn it off. The asshole-in-chief in this instance was Marina Abramović, who floats in at the outset like Vampira, and who is scheduled to assist, I read somewhere, in raping the last virgin forest in Norway to make way for an Arts Center, in pursuit of one of her many fabulous dreams. Another of her many dreams about to come true is a Rem Koolhaas-designed, Kickstarter-funded temple to herself in Hudson, New York, following, I guess, a Robert Wilson opera entitled, The Life and Death of Marina Abramović, a glossy picture book of which a bookstore owner in Berlin showed me last month, with depressing enthusiasm over “all the fascinating New York downtown characters.” Which sounded like something on the Cartoon Network. What a changed lady this particular cartoon character is from the amusing Yugoslavian party girl I knew and liked, and, actually, cohabited with for several weeks, along with her then-art-partner-Ulay, in Bangkok 30 years ago; the daft, madcap, hard-drinking Vixen of Belgrade with whom, years later on the island of Hydra, I composed a scathing song about Intercontinental Hotel magnate Dakis Joannou and the obscene power of money, which we sang to his face at dinner the same evening. (At the time, St. M.A. was fresh from a slew of real-estate acquisitions in Brazil, if memory serves.) A friend recently described the more recent incarnation of Marina as a cross between Stalin and a postcard of the Virgin Mary; throw in Aimee Semple McPherson and it’s beyond my powers of nostalgic credulity to disagree.

Lest I leave you on a cranky note, you probably didn’t hear that two adorable kittens trapped on a subway track in New York were saved the other day, as an MTA driver kept his train stopped for two hours until they were rescued. Anthony Weiner’s spokesperson has already gone on record to say that the erstwhile congressman “would give his life” to save those kitties if he were mayor; Christine Quinn, now trailing the infinitely preferable Bill de Blasio in the mayoral polls here, has also put it out that she would have stopped the train to save the kittens. Well, she might say that and even believe it, until becoming mayor. I don’t think the actual mayor had anything to do with this—I find it hard to believe that people prepared to roll over bodies with a tank to get what they want would brake for two kittens, though stranger things do happen all the time: this pussy rescue is just an example of the fragile goodness Todorov writes about, which most people are capable of at least now and then—the same kind of fragile goodness that saved the Jews of Bulgaria.

Lots of love to you and C.,

G.

*

PS Tonight, suddenly, inexplicably: Showtime has reappeared. With a Dexter catchup marathon. I didn’t realize how long it had been since I even watched Dexter—I have absolutely no idea what is happening on this series. There seems to be a serial-killer encounter group going on. If I am reading the episode I just saw correctly, Charlotte Rampling just debrained a hunky young trainee maniac, and is contemplating what appears to be his very small brain in a jar of formaldehyde.

*

In the kitchen, she found Matthew playing with Lily the calico, or Lily the calico playing with Matthew, it was never clear which it was, Matthew got Lily to swat at a Cat Dancer, but the cat only pretended to be hypnotized by it. Lily got more fun, it seemed, out of waiting until Matthew himself became hypnotized by it, and then strutting off with an attitude of complete boredom.

“They’re smarter than we are,” said Matthew, not for the first time.

The rain had thickened and poured in sheets down the slopes of the skylight.

“Speak for yourself,” Nelly said. “When she opens the can for herself I’ll agree with you.”

“But that’s where she’s smarter,” Matthew said. “She knows how to get us to open it for her.”

(More from my unfinished novel, Diving for Teeth)

Previously by Gary Indiana - Romanian Notes