VICE's Lil Bub & Friendz is the award-winning, heartwarming story of the internet’s favourite cat and her sensational rise to international fame, starring Lil Bub, Grumpy Cat, Nyan Cat, Keyboard Cat, Scumbag Steve and the internet.

Underpinned by a classic "boy and his dog" story (only this time it's a cat), Lil Bub & Friendz chronicles Lil Bub’s journey to stardom, the world of “cat people” through the first-ever Internet Cat Video Film Festival and the virality of YouTube videos and memes fuelling the world's obsession with cats.

Lil Bub & Friendz premiered worldwide at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival, winning Best Feature Film in the Tribeca Online Festival.

Lil Bub & Friendz is directed and produced by Andy Capper and Juliette Eisner.

Visit VICE.com/en_uk/lilbub for Parts 1 - 4 this week!

Click here for the Trailer
Click here for a Sneak Peek
Click here for the Teaser
For more information on Lil Bub & Friendz, Lil Bub's Lil Book, and Lil Bub's Big Show, visit goodjob.lilbub.com

These kids are probably having an awesome time. Photo via Flickr user Taco Ekkel

You’ve likely already seen I Forgot My Phone, the short film by Charlene deGuzman that dramatizes our dependence on smartphones. It’s pulled in almost 20 million views and counting thanks to that magic social-media formula of saying something everyone pretty much agrees with: we're all hopelessly and pathetically addicted to our devices, which makes us tragically unaware of the fragile beauty of real-life moments passing us by on gossamer butterfly wings of authenticity.

The message at the heart of the film is yet another argument that technology erodes our genuine relationships and makes us stupider and less empathetic. You’ve likely heard a variation of this before—cell phones, or the internet, or computers, or television, are making things worse. As usual, it’s wrong.

Granted, smartphone abuse is a real thing—according to one study, 72 percent of Americans said they’re within five feet of their mobile devices at all times, and 9 percent said they used their phone during sex. In another survey, 51 percent of UK residents said they experience “extreme tech anxiety” when they’re separated from their phones. And common activities like texting or using social media trigger our brains’ dopamine and opioid receptors in much the same way narcotics do, meaning you can really be “addicted” to Facebook. But while it's certainly reasonable to argue that we should draw the line somewhere—tweeting while driving is clearly dangerous, for instance—it's not clear where that line should be.

Consider some familiar scenarios, some of which crop up in deGuzman's film: you're at a concert, or a restaurant, or a sporting event, and you take your phone out to take a photo or a video or send out a Tweet or Facebook status. OH NO YOU ARE MISSING OUT ON THE WONDERFUL EXPERIENCE OF BEING WITH OTHER HUMANS!

Yeah, right—have you met most people? They’re boring as shit. More likely, you are avoiding an awkward or boring conversation by checking your phone, or you’re communicating with those you’d actually like to talk to. Before smartphones, people dealt with these situations by drinking too much, pretending to be interested in someone, or just staring at the clock until the party was over. We’re not missing much if we duck into our phones instead.

Phones have eliminated distance as an obstacle to communication—why should we obey the outdated convention of talking to people who happen to be in our meatspace if we don’t want to? Wouldn't my time watching a football game or eating a meal be better shared with people in my network who I know are likely to appreciate it? Do you know anything about this band we’re listening to? No? OK, well, I’m going to briefly chat with people who do appreciate them, sorry if that ruins your precious fucking IRL-only life.

Oh no, your life of yoga on mountaintops and hanging out with people who don't like each other or you is ruined by phones!

The entire world, the sum total of human history and knowledge, is available to us on our phones—is it weird or awful that we sometimes decide to explore it when we’re at the beach or a party? Borges's Library of Babel (look it up on your phone) is resting there on the bar while you listen to your friend ramble on about some guy he's sorta-dating who doesn't listen to him, and the rude thing is to glance at that magical device? Social convention is lagging behind technology as usual, but that doesn’t mean that limiting ourselves to talking to only those within pit-smelling distance is innately better.

I'm sure the feeling is often mutual—occassionally I’ll be a boring asshole who is telling you a story centered around someone favoriting instead of retweeting a joke. Ignore me! Take out your phone and see what’s happening in Syria right now, sext your friend, check your fantasy football scores, do anything you want. You can, after all, do pretty much anything on your phone.  

If you really want to dissuade your friends and family from staring at their phones all night, here's a suggestion: be more interesting.

Apart from a few true addicts who can’t stop glancing at their unchanged Facebook timelines, if something truly grabs our attention, we don’t think about our devices in our pockets or purses. We’re not going to click away from a heart-to-heart conversation, or an amazing band’s live set, or, sure, the sun setting over the mountains, if that’s what thrills us. But just as consumers are no longer stuck reading and watching content from a few meagre sources as they were in the bad old days of traditional media, people are no longer limited to interacting with just the world in front of them.

That’s a good thing, especially if you’re someone who creates art of any kind and wants people to see it. Mobile users are responsible for 40 percent of YouTube’s traffic, meaning I Forgot My Phone has likely been viewed millions of times by people using evil smartphones, many of whom got inspired to share it with their friends and discuss it. They might have been staring at their phones’ screens for a few minutes, but that’s OK—they probably weren’t missing anything.

@lukeoneil47

More stuff about the information superhighway:

Facedown Generation

It’s Called the Internet

We Met a Pedophile on Habbo Hotel

Following his recent forays into gabber and psytrance, VICE UK's Clive Martin travels to Reading, in Berkshire, England, to breathe in the Lynx Africa body spray at a drum 'n' bass night. The scene has been a rave gateway for generations of British youth and it's still refusing to die.

More Big Nights Out:

Psytrance Rave in a Forest

The Gabber Night

A Big Night Out in... Orlando!

There’s no disputing that here in the US there seems to be some kind of state-level legislative epidemic hellbent on condemning female reproductive rights for ever more. Never mind the explosive support of Texas Senator Wendy Davis during her abortion-bill filibuster earlier this summer—Governor Rick Perry saw that the bill passed in the bat of an eye in an instantaneously appointed special session. A couple states away, in North Dakota, recent legislation aimed to prohibit abortions after six weeks but was paused by a last-minute injunction granted on July 31, mere hours before the new laws were set to take effect. Not that it matters much anyway: There's only one remaining abortion clinic in the entire state. Meanwhile, Arkansas has instituted its own ban on abortions after twelve-weeks.

So it sucks, but what are you doing about it? Probably nothing. Did you pile into a van and drive for a month straight through some of the most abortion-inhospitable states to protest in front of weird white men plaintively screaming at you to kill yourself? I doubt it.

But Sunsara Taylor gathered a crew of twenty-one fellow activists and embarked on a massive road trip—New York to Charlotte, North Carolina, by way of Fargo, Wichita, and Jackson, Mississippi. All for the purpose of demonstrating at last-remaining clinics, corrupt anti-abortion organizations, and state capitols. Their slogan: “Abortion on Demand and Without Apology.” Their name, a provocative homage to another tremendous civil rights protest that toured the Deep South: the “Abortion Rights Freedom Ride.”

I had a chance to speak with Sunsara as she and her crew wrapped up their tour in Charlotte, North Carolina.

VICE: How did it go in Charlotte?
Sunsara: Well, we went to Charlotte yesterday to make it to Moral Monday, which was a pretty major protest. In North Carolina, there are new restrictions that have been passed on abortion which would close down clinics in that state, but this is just part of the whole tapestry, nationwide, of drastic restrictions to women’s right to abortion, and really, it’s a state of emergency facing women’s rights. So we went there with that message—we had an incredible reception. We have this big, beautiful banner we’ve traveled around the country with that says “Abortion Providers Are Heroes” and people have been signing it at every stop along the country. But there, we were just mobbed with people who wanted to write a message on it and put their name on it, get literature and get connected.

Can you explain how you chose some of the stops on the tour?
[We chose] Wichita, because it’s the home of where Dr. George Tiller practiced for many years. He was stalked and hunted by Operation Rescue—Christian fascists, a very theocratic organization with ties into the power structure at the national level and who relocated their offices to Wichita to target Dr. Tiller for years, and he, as you know, was assassinated in his church, and we wanted to go there because there have been so many more restrictions passed in Kansas. Even though after four years, some people very heroically and courageously re-opened an abortion clinic, they can’t do abortions as late as Dr. Tiller had performed them. They have further restrictions there than were there four years ago. The new doctor who has been flying in there has now been outed by the anti-abortion protesters and she is being targeted and stalked in her home in Oak Park, Chicago. So we wanted to go there and rally support.

We also protested at Operation Rescue’s headquarters, one of their fake abortion clinics/crisis pregnancy centers in Wichita. And Jackson, as you know, is the only clinic in the state. Actually, that is a clinic where a law was passed that would close it as well, requiring hospital admitting privileges, and there is a temporary order from the judge that is keeping that clinic open, but a trial is set for a couple of months from now. So that clinic is targeted and we wanted to go down there and defend it.

Aside from the obvious, can you describe a little about the purpose of this bus tour?
Because there are all these attacks happening across the country, we really wanted to connect up and actually lift people’s heads to not just see these a local attacks but to see that there’s a national war on women and we need more than fighting on a local basis, we need a national counteroffensive.

The second thing was really to change the terms—this fight has never been about babies, the question of abortion has always been about what role women will have in society and the control over women and women’s enslavement. We have been very vocal in raising the slogan “Abortion on Demand and Without Apology” in order to reclaim and very very positively speak about and demand women’s access to abortion as something that there should be no compromise about, no shame about, and no restrictions.

Which town showed the most surprising amount of support?
Everywhere we went we met people who had felt suffocated until they met us. We met so many people who shared with us their stories of abortions when it was illegal. Horrifying stories, or stories of friends who didn’t survive those illegals abortions. Women got up and told these stories publicly; it required a lot of courage. It was very moving.

We learned a lot more than we knew when we left. Probably about 50 percent of the people we met most places were supportive of abortion rights on some level, and about 50 percent were against them. Within that, it broke down to where it was probably  about 15 percent who were pro-choice were enthusiastic about what we were saying and the rest of them felt that maybe it was too extreme. That was part of our point, to actually reset the terms. There’s so much defensiveness among pro-choice people. One, people don’t know how many restrictions there are, they don’t know how close we are to losing this right and our message is, “If you support this right and you are sitting back and doing nothing, then you are actually complicit in letting these rights be taken away.” You can’t hold people accountable if they don’t know, but we were telling them and then giving them a way to fight. The other thing we’d tell people is, “If you’re pro-choice and you think ‘abortion on demand’ is too extreme, then you tell me which women would you deny the right to abortion? Which women would you force to have children against their will? Which women would you want to feel ashamed and be forced to apologize for getting an abortion?”

In Wichita, I have to say, that city has been ground zero in the abortion wars for a number of years, which is why we went there. There’s been a lot of work done and public opinion created against abortion. People who were pro-choice there were a lot more timid. We went a number of places, but we went to a major mall and just kind of talked to people and did social investigation one day—it wasn’t a day of flyering, just a day of kind of getting a sense of the mood of people and what they’re thinking—and we met people when we were just asking questions who thought that Christians were about to be put in concentration camps and that abortion is a plot from Satan. I mean, they were like shaking they were so upset. A lot of fanatical people. And we met a lot of people who were pro-choice but timid about it.

This has been a city that the Christian fascists have worked on for years. It culminated in Dr. Tiller’s assassination. This is a city that has had a culture of violent demonization and harassment of women in clinics and doctors, actually for two decades now. I do want to say that, the same day we were in the mall and other days when we were out and around, we did meet women who’d had their abortions from Dr. Tiller. A lot of people who remembered him and had a lot of love for him too. One group of friends that we met at a technical school, they were in their late twenties and three of them had had abortions, one of them from Dr. Tiller, and none of them had told each other these stories before, because there’s so much shame and silence about abortions. Only when we were there, one of them spoke about it, then the other one did, then the other one did, and the next thing you know, you had a whole dynamic that took hold. So in that microcosm, that was some of the work that we were fighting to do on a bigger scale.

To me that was one of the interesting things about the locations selected for the Freedom Ride campaign, because these places were in Middle America and the Deep South, where a lot of “socially proper” behavior is expected of you. As frank and forward as you guys are with your message, did that frighten off these more timid people?
Texas! That was a place you could have said the same thing about a month and a half ago. You could have said, “You can’t say this there.” But you see what’s been suppressed, what’s beneath the surface. We know there’s a reservoir of millions and millions of people who really, if they understand what this battle is about—right now most people think it’s about babies or most people think it’s about late-term abortions; most people don’t understand how extreme the anti-abortion movement is. The whole anti-abortion movement is against birth control. They’re against abortion in all circumstances. When that became more clarified in Texas with that law, you saw the silent reservoir, which has been on the defensive for years, because major politicians like Bill Clinton have said “We should make abortion rare,” as if there’s something wrong with it. Hillary called it “tragic.” Major pro-choice organizations like NARAL took abortion out of their name. Even though we’re pro-choice, even in the beginning it was a defensive maneuver to stop saying the word “abortion.” So there’s been a lot of defensiveness cultivated for years by the Democratic party. When that fight became clear about how extreme it was, you saw that reservoir move. That’s who we’re trying to speak to. But also to change the terms so that we’re back on the moral, political offensive. We have right on our side; we have morality on our side. Forcing women to have children against their will is immoral, and it shouldn’t be allowed to posture as if it is.

Were your demonstrations always met with vicious anti-abortion counter-protests?
It is very striking to me—and we don’t know fully what to make of this—but the anti-abortion people seemed to have really hidden from us this whole trip. And I mean actively, because, in North Dakota, we were scheduled to debate them on local TV, and we arrived for the debate and they didn’t show up. Even the reporter was surprised. When we announced to the press that we were going to do a protest at Operation Rescue’s headquarters and their fake pregnancy crisis center that they have in Wichita, and normally, they are there every day. We went into their offices and talked with them the day before. They had the schedule that they were going to be there. We showed up for the protest the next day and they had closed their offices and shuddered them, even though it was their business hours. Down in Jackson they got a permit to be outside the clinic the day we were having our protest. When the protest happened, like one or two of them showed up. Normally we see them; they’re at the clinic every day! We see them at all of these places. For whatever reason, they made a decision that they didn’t want to be confronted by people who were not defensive about abortion. That’s all I can gather. It’s easier for them if they’re harassing women who are already feeling vulnerable, when they’re protesting people who don’t want to say the word or who maybe feel like it’s tragic or something else. I don’t expect that they’ll always ignore us, but this round anyway, it seemed like they made a decision that they didn’t want to counter-protest people who were unequivocal, the way this Freedom Ride was.

That’s so surprising to me, as a Southerner. I would expect the opposition to be vitriolic and very present.
We did have a couple lone people, but when we went to Little Rock, there was a woman who really was vitriolic and threatening. She tweeted the home address of the person who had volunteered to house us, which really, if you’re an anti-abortion fanatic, you don’t do that for any other reason except to incite physical violence against somebody in their home. If you send that out to a whole bunch of people who believe they’re on a mission from God to stop what they believe is baby-killing or sinning or whatever, you don’t put out that address, the address of where the Freedom Ride is staying, unless you’re trying to incite violence. So that did happen, and we took it very seriously, both for our safety and our host as well. I’ve been at clinics many times over twenty years and seen the anti-abortion forces and the pro-choice forces face off. I’ve been involved in it all. But I’ve never seen them systematically steer clear so consistently as they did on this trip.

They’re still very active. As soon as we left Wichita, they’ve been out at the clinic, they’ve been pressing for the clinic to be re-zoned and closed down. They’ve been very, very active everywhere across the country. I can’t read their minds and it’s not like they’re one big machine that thinks the same way, but all I can deduce is that, in a more or less organized fashion, they chose not to be facing off with people who were really unapologetic about abortion, who are really unapologetic about calling them Christian fascists and women haters and we’re not mincing words about what kind of women-enslavers they are. Usually they protest and they’re used to be people—even in Texas, even in the halls of power—people seeking “common ground.” That’s what Obama has done, that’s what a lot of the Democrats have done. Even Wendy Davis—she filibustered, but then afterwards when she gave her pre-election speech, she said, “I want to make clear I will work with Republicans, I will reach across the aisle” about a week ago. She made a great effort to say “I’m interested in many other things, not just abortion.”

Has there been any negative backlash about the name “Freedom Ride” and its reference to the Civil Rights movement, considering it was a landmark protest of a very different nature?
People have said a few things. There’s nobody that we’ve reached out to, who is a major voice out there fighting in a major way in the civil rights battles [of today] who we have reached out to who has taken issue with us. There are a number who have supported it very deeply. I don’t want to misstate it—there have been people who have raised criticism, but they’re not people that I know of who have been active, either in the past or today. They’re sort of people sitting on the sidelines, taking issue, as people will do with anything.

There’s a number of people who have supported it. There are two major reasons why we drew the analogy. One is because the stakes for women really are as serious. If women are forced to have children against their will, their lives are foreclosed. Their futures are determined for them. Their dreams are extinguished, or they never flourished to begin with, because when you grow up in a world where every woman you know is dropping out of school, having a child, getting trapped in an abusive marriage, having a child every time they get pregnant. If you see that, it’s not that your dreams are extinguished, it’s that your dreams don’t even flourish in the first place. You grow up a little girl in that environment, it’s like trying to grow a plant underneath a rock. You don’t dream that big. There are women who go to desperate measures—8,000 women died every year when abortion was illegal. So the stakes for women really are as serious.

There were a number of people we connected with, black people throughout the South, who went out of their way to state how important they thought it was that we took up the mantle of the Freedom Ride. A lot of this is because there has been, for decades, an attempt by the anti-abortion movement to claim the mantle of Civil Rights, just like they’re trying to claim the mantle of the Holocaust—right now, they terrorized the Holocaust museum in Albuquerque, insisting that they install an exhibit on fetuses. So a number of people, including one of the doctors who flies into Jackson, and he grew up in Alabama, when he spoke at one of our events, he made a point of speaking very deeply of how much he understood the significance of the Freedom Rides, the original ones, and how grateful he was that somebody was doing an abortion rights freedom ride, and how it was appropriately named. There were a number of people including Davey D, who is a hip-hop radio host who had us on in New York before we left, and a number of people around the clinic down in Jackson who made a point of speaking on the power of that connection.

Was there a single image of a moment that you experienced on this tour that resonated with you?
Man, there’s a lot of them. I have to be honest. One of them was when I was in the clinic in Jackson, and we’d been there escorting, talking with the patients (some of them). I was talking to [clinic director] Shannon, she was telling me the stories of the different women, and how angry she was at the people who’ve harassed them, and then—it was very heavy—she discussed what it would mean if the clinic were closed down. Then I asked her, given everything that she has to go through, why does she do what she does, given the harassment and the burdens that she has to deal with every day and all of this, and her face, I swear, it went from being so pissed off and actually living in the hardship of the women she’s telling the stories of, and suddenly her face just lit up. She said how much she loved what she does for a living. It’s not just one image, the same kind of expression happened again.

That, and the people hulahooping out from of the Jackson clinic. The escorts had so much defiance, and our younger volunteers were doing this with them. They were trying to make this experience of walking through this phalanx of people screaming at them, calling them murderers, telling them lies about what an abortion was like, calling it slaughter; they told our volunteers they should kill themselves. So when women come through they not only escort, but they try to make it festive and celebratory entrance, so they kind of ridicule the anti-abortion crowd, so they’re out there escorting, but they’re hula-hooping, and playing music, and they’re telling jokes. But the images of them hula-hooping will stick with me.

More about abortion:

Irish Women Are Buying Abortion Pills Advertised on Streetlamps

Phony Abortion Clinics in Canada Are Scaring Women with Lies

Kenya's Slum Abortions Pit God Against Death

We're big fans of Rochambeau, because their men's clothes are kind of fancy, but still have a rugged edge. When we see their gear, we imagine ourselves sipping an espresso with a wavy-haired mixed girl in a French-ass cafe one minute, and cracking a bottle over the head of a fuckboy for mispronouncing the brand's name the next. Phonetically speaking, that's "Ro-sham-bo," dirt bag. The word is the French term for rock-paper-scissors, or Eric Cartman for kicking someone in the nuts. Either way, the brand's right up our alley with the high-minded concepts behind its collections and the balance it strikes between being refined and ready for the street.

The Kingdom video above is a perfect representation of the brand's aesthetic. It was shot using garments from Rochambeau's stellar fall/winter 2013 collection, which we highlighted during the last fashion week this past spring. We hit up the brand's designers and founders, Joshua Cooper and Laurence Chandler, to get some insight on the collection and the Kingdom video they graciously let us premiere. Here's what they had to say:

"We worked closely with our family at All: Expanded to capture the essence of the warrior/hunter for our fall 2013 Rochambeau man. We shot it with a high speed Phantom camera to highlight the detail through out the collection—from the embroidery of the lion on the crewneck to the pony detailing on the duster. Movement and agility were dominant in the collections development and the film captures this."

So there it is. Rochambeau's fall/winter gear is hitting the shelves of fancy, prohibitively expensive stores that are nowhere near you. But don't fret, their shit is online, too. Do what you must to cop it, just don't hurt anybody. Also, check back with VICE on Sunday for pics and a review of their latest spring/summer 2014 collection, which is being presented during Milk Made Fashion Week in NYC.

Kingdom Credits:

Created by All: Expanded
Director: Duncan Winecoff
Cinematography by Stuart Winecoff and Jake Saner
Styling: Nicholas Grasa
Assistant: Marcus Harmon
Music: Alexander Dadras

More fashion from VICE:

Don't Do This at NYFW

If you live in San Francisco and like photography, topless girls, or having a good time, you have only one place to be tonight: Sandy Kim, who takes great photos in the process of documenting the kind of carefree life your parents always worried you'd have, is having an art show at the Ever Gold Gallery. She'll be showing all new work, much of which features the aformentioned topless girls (and some dudes, for you girls and you, ahem, San Francisco men). Sandy's been taking photos for the magazine for awhile, so she has our stamp of approval. If you need more encouragement, take a gander at these images she sent us that serve as a preview of the show. C'mon, San Francisco! It'll be fun!

Opening for Sandy Kim
September 5, 7-10 PM
Ever Gold Gallery
441 O’Farrell St
San Francisco, CA, 94102
evergoldgallery.com
(415) 796-3676

More of Sandy's work:

Pretty Kool-A

Old Friends

Take the Lights Down Already

Federal courthouse in Dallas, Texas, where Barrett Brown's hearing was held. Photo by Ryan Smith.

One month ago, Barrett Brown's legal counsel Charles Swift and Ahmed Ghappour filed for a continuance, insisting that in order to diligently examine the two terabytes of electronic evidence in the US government's case, more time was required. In response, the prosecution immediately filed in opposition. In addition to claiming that Brown was given adequate time to prepare his defense, a media gag order was requested. Specifically, the government asked the court to instruct Brown and his counsel to refrain from making “any statement to members of any television, radio, newspaper, magazine, internet (included, but not limited to, bloggers), or any other media organization about this case, other than matters of public record.”

I was inside the Dallas, Texas, courtroom yesterday when Judge Sam Lindsay ruled in favor of the prosecution's motion and a gag order immediately went into effect. In the eyes of the court, the prosecution had successfully argued that any extrajudicial statements made by the defendant, his attorneys, or the Government, to members of the press could unfairly impact Barrett Brown's opportunity for a fair trial.

The only witness that took the stand during the hearing was FBI Agent Robert Smith. His role was to provide the prosecution with details about the defendant's interactions with the press. Smith seemed like an odd choice for this topic given his involvement with other aspects of the case. In October 2012, Barrett Brown was indicted for threatening Agent Smith by name in a YouTube video. The title of the video is "Why I'm Going to Destroy FBI Agent Robert Smith." Barrett published the rant online after his mother, Karen McCutchin, was targeted and harassed by federal agents, including Agent Smith. For months, the FBI threatened to arrest and indict her on obstruction charges for allegedly hiding one of Barrett's laptops. Clearly angered by the FBI's actions, in the video Barrett says, "I know what’s legal; I know what’s been done to me... And if it’s legal when it’s done to me, it’s going to be legal when it’s done to FBI Agent Robert Smith—who is a criminal." Following the release of the video last year, Agent Smith and the FBI raided Barrett's home (again) and he's been locked up ever since. The charges related to the video were never brought up in the hearing. Instead, Smith testified that he had listened to audio recordings of the personal calls made by Barrett in jail to journalists, filmmakers, and supporters.

These conversations were introduced by US Attorney Candina Heath as exhibit 1, however, the government chose not to play any of the actual recordings during the proceedings. Instead, the government asked Agent Smith to provide the court with his assessment of these conversations on a call-by-call basis. To begin, the names of the people on the recordings were read aloud and then, one by one, some of the content from these conversations were picked apart by Smith.

Barrett Brown's contact list read like a who's who of investigative journalism. It included Guardian journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ed Pilkington, filmmaker Vivien Weisman, activist Gregg Housh, the late Michael Hastings, and VICE editor Patrick McGuire. In what became a routine, the prosecutor would ask Agent Smith if he recalled listening to a conversation between Barrett and a specific reporter. Smith would often shuffle through the papers in front of him and then recite certain details.

When discussing a VICE interview published earlier this year titled “We Spoke to Barrett Brown From Prison,” Agent Smith responded to simple questions like, “Did Barrett Brown call Patrick McGuire?” and “Was the interview in a Q & A format?” He remembered one of the questions asked if Barrett was the spokesman for Anonymous. But the actual question read: “A lot of people say that you’re the spokesperson for Anonymous. What do you say to that?” Barrett's response to the question wasn't even hinted at. The only criticism Smith offered was over phrasing in the article, which he suggested was “leading.” At no point in time did Agent Smith or the government's prosecutor provide any evidence that the interview had an effect on the public whatsoever. For this reporter, recognizing the government's logic was easy: If a media gag order should exist, then this article should not.

Agent Smith continued to be led by the prosecution from one story to the next, never fulfilling the requirement of a deduction based on evidence. Instead, a half-hour phone conversation between Barrett and a member of the press was reduced to a 60 second supposition.

In March, Glenn Greenwald published an article titled “The persecution of Barrett Brown – and how to fight it.” The author draws parallels between prosecutorial overreach in the case of Aaron Swartz and that of Barrett Brown. Keep in mind, Barrett is facing a 45-year sentence under one indictment that alleges he shared a link to illegally obtained, hacked information. In contrast, the individual actually found guilty of hacking the data is serving a sentence of ten years. As an attorney who litigated civil rights and constitutional cases for a decade, Greenwald is in some position to offer his opinion in this instance. Instead, the government prosecutor deferred to the opinion of Robert Smith, a law enforcement officer, who claimed that Greenwald was merely trying to “capitalize” on the events surrounding Aaron Swartz suicide.

Several attempts were also made to discredit the nature of supporter Kevin Gallagher's relationship with Barrett Brown. Without saying as much, the prosecution seemed to infer every action was a conspiracy. When Kevin offered Barrett advice about his public image, he was teaching him how to manipulate the press. When he arranged interviews for Barrett, he was trying to control public opinion. If Kevin recommended to a journalist that he read a previously published article, he was trying to control the message. When Barrett's mother was facing jail time and he asked for help publicizing her case, it was evidence of... something.

Barrett Brown's father (left) walking with attorney Charles Swift (right) and a member of defense team. Photo by Ryan Smith.

At one point in the testimony of Agent Smith, the government asked about a conversation that took place with filmmaker Vivien Weisman. The prosecutor inquired if any potential crimes were mentioned that Barrett Brown is not currently being charged with, such as drug use or an Anonymous hack other than the information stolen from Stratfor Global Intelligence. The defense was quick to object to the relevance of the question. The prosecutor responded that the conversation was prejudicial to Barrett's defense as it was being discussed with a member of the press. Defense counsel Charles Swift was quick to point out that in fact the government was responsible for disseminating this information—they had just entered the conversation into public record by discussing these potential crimes in front of the press.

The irony of this media gag hearing suddenly became apparent. The government spent over an hour listing the details of personal phone conversations that took place between Barrett and the press. They argued the content of these calls might lead to the prejudicial treatment of Barrett during his trial. Some of the details of these discussions had never before been published by the media. And the government just spent an hour reading them off in front of five members of the press, none of whom had ever received a personal phone call with Barrett Brown from prison.

The word “irony” actually came out of Judge Lindsay's mouth just before he asked the plaintiffs to approach the bench. They remained whispering there for 20 minutes. The only audible statement to those sitting in the front row of the courtroom gallery during that time from Judge Lindsay was, “I assume they're press. They're all writing.”

From that moment on, nearly all discussions between Barrett's defense team and the prosecution took place at the judge's bench. The acoustics of the room weren't always conducive to their need for privacy, however, and it wasn't long before observers understood that a gag order was the inevitable outcome. To Judge Lindsay's credit, he appeared eager to find an amenable solution between the two parties.

During a 20-minute recess the attorneys struggled, sometimes loudly, to find a compromise in the language of the court order that would restrict both side's access to the media. At this juncture it was clear that Barrett's attorney's had two demands they were unwilling to break over. They couldn't afford to lose the help of Gallagher, director of freebarrettbrown.org, who organizes fundraising activities for their defense; and they were adamant about protecting Barrett's right to publish his work in the press while incarcerated—even if he couldn't write about his trial or the charges against him.

Once both sides agreed to the language in the order, which was scribbled on a yellow steno notepad, it was accepted by the court and quickly transferred into print. Barrett's attorney signed it, the US attorney signed it, and the judge finalized it. Any hope of capturing a statement from either side about this trial is now gone.

The execution of the prosecutor's case was weak. For hours, the topic was communication between Barrett Brown and the media and yet, despite claiming to have evidence supporting the necessity of a gag order, in my opinion, none was presented. The first two pieces of evidence the government offered up at the start of the proceedings were a CD containing selected telephone calls made by Barrett and a DVD containing audio and video from various news agencies (full list of exhibits here). No video or audio was ever played. Instead, the government's argument rested on the opinions of one man; an FBI agent who harassed and targeted Barrett and his family.

The Freedom of the Press Foundation released the following statement to VICE:

“It's ironic and disturbing that in a case where press freedom is at stake, the defendant and his lawyers have been barred from talking to the press. The prosecution asked for a gag order in part because they said articles about Brown's case contained inaccuracies, but pointed to no articles to prove their point. Seemingly, the problem was the articles were too accurate, and therefore making the prosecution's case look bad. The fact remains, Brown is being prosecuted for conduct that is central to journalism, and the charges related to linking should be thrown out immediately.”

Kevin Gallagher, director of FreeBarrettBrown.org, also provided VICE with a statement:

“This is an outrage, and the judge's decision only increases the media profile of the case. It's the Streisand effect in action. The government has just done more for this case than I could do in a whole year. Now more people will be wondering why a journalist has been gagged in America. The government's case is unpopular and it's against the public interest to further punish Barrett Brown. They should drop the charges already. Moreover, I am dismayed that Barrett's First Amendment rights have been trampled on. This country is doomed."

The defense was granted a continuance and Barrett will remain in jail. Below are the details of his upcoming court appearances.

- On April 28, 2014, he faces charges of conspiracy to make publically available restricted personal information of an employee of the United States, retaliation against a federal law enforcement officer, and making internet threats.

- On May 19, 2014, he faces charges of trafficking in stolen authentication features, aggravated identity theft and access device fraud. As part of a separate indictment included in this trial, he faces two charges of obstruction: concealment of evidence and corruptly concealing evidence

Barrett Brown currently faces up to 105 years in prison.

More on Barrett Brown:

Why Is Barrett Brown Facing 100 Years in Prison?

We Spoke to Barrett Brown from Prison

Reading 'Born Again' in Jail

@dellcam

Femen members practising their protest techniques in their Paris HQ.

The topless feminist activists of Femen have had a rough few months. Since we made a film about them earlier this year, three activists were jailed in Tunisia, their Paris headquarters was burned down, and three core members were kidnapped and beaten up in Kiev. To top it off, Ukraine Is Not a Brothel—a new film by Australian filmmaker Kitty Green—reveals that a self-proclaimed patriarch, Victor Svyatski, is the mastermind behind this Ukrainian feminist movement fighting to crush the patriarchy. Which is a little paradoxical.

When I call leading Femen member Inna Shevchenko, who is currently in Venice to talk about the film, she seems surprisingly unconcerned about the impact it will have upon the group's future. “I'm not worried because the film is talking about our past. In the end, Victor was destroyed—he was kicked out of the movement more than a year ago. The future of Femen—and what I have built together with the activists all over the world who have joined us during this last year—is all based on our own ideas and wishes to fight patriarchy and oppression.”

Inna was always aware that this inconvenient truth would eventually be exposed. “We allowed Kitty to shoot the film, so I knew it would show the history of the movement and how Victor took the role of leader.” However, she denies that Victor founded the movement. “Femen was created and organized by a union of women," she says. "It was a woman who came up with the idea of topless activism.”

Victor Svyatski, the former patriarchal leader of Femen.

So how did Victor take the role of leader? And why would he, when he calls himself a patriarch, want to be the leader of a feminist movement attempting to crush the patriarchy? According to Inna, his personal ambition was not political or feminist, but simply to be in a position of leadership.

“When I joined Femen, he was already there," Inna told me. "And if you wanted to be part of the movement, you had to accept that that’s how it was. We wanted to fight it, but we didn’t know how to undo him. This is the curse of our movement; that we were born in a patriarchal society where men think women are subordinate, and because he is a man—this is how it happens in all families, and in society—he thought he could lead us by being menacing. Since the beginning, I saw it as a huge problem, but I didn’t want to break up the movement. When I left for France, sawing down the cross [Inna and others cut down a cross in Kiev in protest against the prosecution of Pussy Riot] was one of the reasons, but it was also to realize this secret plan of building the real Femen without him. Maybe I wouldn’t have had this wish if I didn’t have so much hate and anger against him.”

When asked what Victor brought to the group, Inna explains that he was trying to dictate how they should behave and what they should do during the demonstrations. “I can’t deny that we sometimes took his advice, but other suggestions we just ignored. He was an enabler because he brought us much more anger. He identified our enemy for us: his face. Our enemy is global patriarchy, but he showed us—in a practical model—what a patriarch was. And now we are here at the festival to talk about that.”
 
Inna is tasked not only with convincing the press, but also all the newer recruits, like the Femen activists we filmed in Paris, who have probably never even met the guy. Pauline Hillier—one of the French Femen members who spent a month in a Tunisian jail after a topless protest to raise awareness about ex-member Amina’s trial—only recently found out about Svyatski’s involvement.

Inna Shevchenko.

“Of course I was shocked," she told me. "We were only told about the content of the film and this revelation about Victor a few days ago.” Pauline assures me that the international branches have never spoken to Victor Svyatski about any decisions or actions: “As far as we knew, he was just an activist within Femen and we were not at all in contact with him, so at first it was incredibly hard and emotional for us to find out that male oppression could infiltrate the strongest and most radical of the feminist movements. But instead of being embarrassed or feeling that our movement was founded on questionable grounds, we consider it a lesson for how vigilant you have to be of the different forms of oppression patriarchy can take. Femen managed to free itself from his control, and when Inna moved to Paris and started up the French Femen HQ, that really marked a new start for the movement.”

Pauline joined Femen in December of 2012 because she was attracted to the idea of street feminism that puts thoughts into action. To her, Femen represents a more accessible way to be a feminist, in a younger, more dynamic, more courageous way. “I have been part of the very core of Femen for almost a year, and I have never encountered or had any interaction with this guy, which proves that he was never part of our decisions. I am proud of every action I have participated in and none of them were orchestrated by anyone other than the girls involved in the action. We refuse to let our combat be stolen by these stories that belong to the past of the movement.”

Femen activists annoying a load of fascists in Paris.

Green’s film suggests that Victor Svyatski’s involvement in Femen was to 'get girls.' But surely he could have found easier ways of getting laid? There’s undeniably something sinister about the existence of a behind-the-scenes, Charlie's Angels figure pulling the strings, particularly as he was treating some of the girls badly. But whatever his true intentions were, and even if he was a key operator whose ideas are still picked up by new recruits who don't necessarily know who he is, it's unfair to dismiss the entire movement.

Femen has clearly evolved and taken on a life of its own, expanding into new countries and establishing new leadership as it goes, some of whom have never even heard of the shadowy patriarch who was there pulling the strings in the beginning. And sure, the news of Svyatski's role as an early publicist and puppet master is a disappointing revelation. But would you dismiss the entirety of the punk movement just because it was invented by Malcolm McLaren?

More stories about Femen:

I Spent the Weekend Watching Topless Feminists Piss Off Neo-Nazis

We Spoke to Femen About Their Topless Tunisian Protest

Femen Are Being Attacked by Nazis and Sent to Prison

WATCH – Femen - Sextremism in Paris

New York Fashion Week is a peculiar happening filled with angry PR people, overworked baristas, poor people masquerading as the rich, and rich people masquerading as the poor. Basically, it's a mindfuck that can't be described by words, so instead here are some pictures. Keep up with this column throughout the week for more NYFW photo updates!

KYE
Thursday, September 4, 2013

SHADES OF GREY
Thursday, September 4, 2013

THIRD FLOOR
Thursday, September 4, 2013

ØDD
Thursday, September 4, 2013

VFILES (SAM MCLONDON, STEVEN TAI, GYPSY SPORT, AMMERMAN SCHLOSBERG)
Thursday, September 4, 2013

Conor Lamb is a freelance photographer who hails from the Midwest where he studied lightning and photography. He's exhausted from all the shitty parties he used to document when night-life photography was still a thing. He has a penchant for shooting hip-hop artists, and he's covered fashion stuff for us in the past. He has a Joy Division tattoo and according to a very good source he and his girlfriend like to dress up as juggalos. His work can be found here.

Want more NYFW? Check these out:

Dont Do This at NYFW

I Almost Died Trying to See En Noir, But You Don't Have To

Lele Saveri Saw Some Weird Stuff Last Week at NYFW

Photos by Greg Gallinger.

On any given afternoon, the crossroads of Winnipeg’s Higgins Avenue and Main Street is a hub of activity. Dozens of people mul­­l about, sitting or sleeping in the shade of buildings, trees, bus shelters, and benches. Some are residents of nearby North Main or Point Douglas neighbourhoods, others are temporary residents of the nearby Salvation Army or Siloam Mission shelters, or the Main Street Project’s Bell Hotel. Still others are homeless, spending their days and nights on the street.

While some of Winnipeg’s homeless choose to numb the pain of their lives with alcohol, prescription drugs, or narcotics, a growing number are choosing to abuse what many consider the dirtiest, most damaging substance you can ingest into your system. These people are solvent abusers.

Winnipeg’s solvent abuse problem is longstanding. But it was recently brought to national attention during the inquiry into Brian Sinclair’s death. Sinclair died in September 2008, after waiting over 34 hours in Winnipeg’s Health Sciences Centre emergency room for treatment of a blocked urinary catheter.

Sinclair was a double amputee who was bound to a wheelchair and deemed mentally incompetent. Like many of those who spend their days at Higgins and Main, he was homeless, and a solvent abuser, a point that was raised in the inquiry into his death by Dr. Marc Del Bigio, a well respected neuropatholist who examined Sinclair’s brain during the autopsy.

According to a 2011 Street Health Report, 6.3 per cent of homeless respondents admitted to regularly abusing solvents, a number three times higher than reported levels in Toronto. However, the report admits that “there’s a lot of stigma attached to sniffing or using solvents and inhalants, meaning the actual number of people using them is likely to be higher than reported.” Since the report was issued, those numbers have been on the rise.

“The problem is getting worse,” admits Sean Gaudet, longtime pastor at Lighthouse Mission, just south of Higgins on Main Street. Lighthouse offers drop in services, hot meals and coffee to many of the area’s homeless residents, and is one of the only homeless service providers who do not maintain a strict “sobriety” policy. As a result, Gaudet estimates that of the 200 or so people Lighthouse serve each day, “between 40 and 50” are solvent abusers, or “sniffers.”

“The sniffer population in the Point Douglas area can vary from around 90 to a couple hundred people a day,” Gaudet explained. “But they’re spread out. It’s not just concentrated in my area.”

Empty plastic bottles and discarded rags were strewn across every corner and littered the green space around the corner of Higgins and Main, just north of the Lighthouse. It is not uncommon to see solvents being very openly used in this neighbourhood throughout the afternoon and into the evening. And it is, unfortunately, not unheard of for sniffers to be dangerously oblivious to their own personal safety, walking into oncoming traffic, or passing out in the freezing winters on the sidewalks.

A solvent user in Winnipeg.

Michael Foster is the program director at Main Street Project’s, where he has been working with Main Street’s homeless population for over eight years. Foster does not believe that solvent abuse is that much different, in principal, from other addictions.

“It’s just a matter of which substance one is introduced to,” he told me over the phone. “They’re quick action, they’re relatively cheap, and I think people use them as a coping mechanism, just like they would use any other substance.”

Why-Why (a street name) is a friendly man from the remote community of Barrens River, Manitoba. He has been living on the streets of Winnipeg for the past seven years, after moving south in 1998, and agrees with Foster’s opinion on how solvent abusers get into it. Why-Why mostly uses alcohol to cope with his problems—though he is currently struggling to clean up—but he was a recreational solvent user since he was “about ten.”

“I don’t really remember exactly [when I first used],” he explained in a Tim Horton’s on Portage Avenue, citing years of alcohol abuse and frequent solvent use as a child for his hazy memory. “The people I knew would do it. It’s there. You’ll try it.”

Users often describe a euphoric high, sometimes hallucinatory, which lasts between five and fifteen minutes.

“It was good,” Why-Why recalled, citing boredom and isolation of his hometown for much of his solvent use. “You see visions, hallucinate. That was what I liked, the hallucinations. It was something that was funny. Something entertaining.”

“The feeling I didn’t like was the feeling after coming down,” Why-Why said. “The bad headaches.”

Why-Why claims he hasn’t used solvents in years. However, he recalls “when I was out on Main Street, there’s a lot of people I knew there doing it. Sniffing everyday, all day long.

Solvent abuse is a way for people—most of whom are in incredibly dire situations—to briefly escape from loss, trauma, and pain. The side effects are unsurprisingly awful—including major brain damage and massive harm to one’s bodily and cognitive functions.

“The harm that it does is so quick and so significant,” said Foster. “There are a lot of folks we’ve been working with for years who we’ve watched their physical and cognitive capacities die. And they’re wonderful people, with skills and wonderful pieces of their personalities. Those things slowly start to fade away, and their capacity to do the things they love fades away.”

Distributing solvents is only punishable by a municipal infraction, just like a parking ticket. There are no federal or provincial laws barring it, either. With no real risks to a solvent dealer plying his or her trade at the corner of Higgins and Main, the problem is not going anywhere anytime soon.

“There is a way to do something about it,” Pastor Gaudet believes. “But all three levels of government don’t see this as a problem. They see [solvent abuse] as a scab. They see it as toilet paper on their feet.”

“They don’t care,” agreed Why-Why, shaking his head over a Triple-Triple. “They just don’t care.”

More about Winnipeg:

The Rise and Fall of the Winnipeg Rock Machine

Taking the Pulse of Winnipeg: Canada's Murder Capital

We Spoke to Winnipeg's Only Relevant Fashion Blogger

VICE's Lil Bub & Friendz is the award-winning, heartwarming story of the internet’s favourite cat and her sensational rise to international fame, starring Lil Bub, Grumpy Cat, Nyan Cat, Keyboard Cat, Scumbag Steve and the internet.

Underpinned by a classic "boy and his dog" story (only this time it's a cat), Lil Bub & Friendz chronicles Lil Bub’s journey to stardom, the world of “cat people” through the first-ever Internet Cat Video Film Festival and the virality of YouTube videos and memes fuelling the world's obsession with cats.

Lil Bub & Friendz premiered worldwide at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival, winning Best Feature Film in the Tribeca Online Festival.

Lil Bub & Friendz is directed and produced by Andy Capper and Juliette Eisner.

Visit VICE.com/en_uk/lilbub for Parts 1 - 4 this week!

Click here for the Trailer
Click here for a Sneak Peek
Click here for the Teaser
For more information on Lil Bub & Friendz, Lil Bub's Lil Book, and Lil Bub's Big Show, visit goodjob.lilbub.com

A Syrian soldier aiming an AK-47 while wearing a chemical warfare mask. (Photo via)

Chemical warfare is actually pretty rare. When Syrian government forces allegedly attacked rebels in Ghouta with nerve agents last month, it was the first major recorded use of chemical warfare in a quarter of a century. The previous time was the bombing of Halabja, Iraq, by Saddam Hussein in 1988, which killed roughly 5,000 people. Before that, chemical weapons only really saw the light of day in the Iran-Iraq war, the Yemeni civil war, and both World Wars. 

However, as little as they've been used in the grand scheme of things, their deployment in Syria wasn't a huge surprise. The civil war-torn country is one of only seven nations in the world that still refuses to sign the Chemical Weapons Convention, which outlaws the production, stockpiling, and use of chemical weapons. And while everyone else was getting rid of their reserves, establishing their use as a "red line for the world," Assad and his regime kept themselves busy loading up on precursor chemicals and building one of the largest chemical weapons arsenals in the world.     

One of the main problems with chemical weapons is that in relative terms they're incredibly easy to make. Mustard gas and chlorine could probably be whipped up by some of Walter White’s more attentive students, and even the ingredients for Sarin aren’t too difficult to obtain, although actually making the stuff is trickier. Pretty much any country with a laboratory and a competent chemist can get hold of all the toxic gases and nerve agents they want, though. So, considering the number of abjectly immoral, lawless, and evil people in the world, why aren’t they used more?

The answer is that, today, they're not a particularly effective way of killing people. Chemical warfare came of age in the First World War, in many ways the ideal environment for it to thrive—soldiers back then were sitting ducks, massed together in low-lying trenches, static targets for weeks or months at a time. The technology of death was rapidly improving too; chlorine gas was quickly surpassed by phosgene and later mustard gas, each horrible in its own way. Chlorine reacted with water in the lungs to form hydrochloric acid, while mustard gas damaged membranes and inflicted terrible chemical burns across the skin. Advances in chemistry were matched by improvements in ballistics and flight, allowing chemical munitions to be accurately targeted and deployed for the first time. Chemical weapons had the potential to reshape the battlefield.

That was the theory at least, and at the Battle of Loos in September 1915 the British tested it for the first time. Under the command of General Sir Douglas Haig, 5,500 cylinders holding 150 tons of chlorine were deployed in front of the front line. Clouds of poisonous gas were produced… only to promptly drift back over the British left flank when the winds changed. In spite of that snag, the attack had a largely positive impact from a British perspective; the Germans had no real experience with defending against gas attacks and it shook them up. If the British had kept enough men in reserve, they could have gained significant ground, assuming those men weren't among those who were inadvertently gassed. It was considered a success—sort of. 

The Battle of Loos highlighted a number of problems that still exist today, as Omar Lamrani at the Stratfor think tank explained to me. “Chemical weapons are very difficult to use effectively," he said. "Ideal conditions and perfect handling are necessary for the weapons to inflict the maximum damage they are potentially capable of.” Even the slightest change in wind, dampness, or sunlight can hugely affect their potency. Some forms of mustard gas freeze at 58 degrees, and I’m not sure applying a decorative frosting to your enemies will get you very far in a war.


Installing 5,500 gas cylinders ahead of your front line isn’t exactly a piece of cake, either. “Perfect delivery methods are also difficult to enact," Lamrani told me, "given that the most common means of delivery—artillery, rockets, bombs, missiles—often destroy a significant percentage of the chemical agent." And if your troops are on the same battlefield, there’s a real risk of exposing them, too.

When Saddam Hussein dropped chemical weapons on Halabja in 1988, he had the advantage of an air force, but even then it took hours of bombing runs to build up a large enough concentration of gas on the ground. That might be feasible when you’re bombing your own civilians, but it’s not a good strategy against anyone with decent anti-aircraft weapons.

Then, of course, there are the counter-measures. Civilian gas masks are actually pretty useless, but modern armies are relatively well equipped to deal with chemical attacks, and have been since the First World War. The main problem is the cumbersome protection required—both for those targeted by the weapons and those doing the targeting—which can severely restrict mobility and situational awareness. In the words of the official British history of World War I, "gas achieved but local success, nothing decisive; it made war uncomfortable, to no purpose".

So why do regimes bother with the stuff? “Arsenals of chemical weapons, such as Syria’s, are primarily acquired for deterrence purposes against an outside force,” said Lamrani. “They often act as the equivalent of a ’poor man's nuke.’ Given the massive potential for collateral damage, they are often resorted to by a regime in desperate situations or in cases when territory has already been effectively seized by an opposing force.”

In other words, chemical weapons are instruments of fear. When Hussein bombed Halabja, his intention wasn’t to seize the town, but to eradicate it. Once the residents had died or fled, the land was razed and soil and ground water were contaminated for years after. Similarly, Assad’s attack on Ghouta wasn’t a decisive strike against rebel forces, but an act of indiscriminate terror inflicted on a rebel-held suburb by a desperate and cowardly ruler sensing his own mortality.

“Chemical weapons are primarily a psychological weapon," explained Lamrani. “Some of the nerve agents are not visible and do not have an odor, so—as you can imagine—one can feel quite defenseless against such a weapon.” Still, acts of terror will always be limited as a tool to control people. “No general civilian population has ever been completely pacified through the use of chemical weapons alone.”

The city of Halabja was completely destroyed by Saddam’s forces, but by the following year a huddle of shacks had appeared—“sheds with tarp roofs," wrote the New York Times. Soon, the huts were replaced with more permanent structures, and now several thousand homes stand on the site of Halabja Taza, a.k.a. New Halabja. The city lives on, while Saddam lies dead and buried. The odds are that Ghouta will outlive Assad, too—another testament to the resilience of people and the ultimate futility of chemical warfare.

Follow Martin on Twitter: @mjrobbins

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

Previously: Are You "Quirky" and "Interesting"? This Bullshit Dating Website Could Be for You!

Cry-Baby #1: Samuel Drew

screencaps via WCTI12, via Reddit

The incident: A dog got in a man's way while he was walking over a bridge. 

The appropriate response: Stepping around or over it, depending on the size of the dog.

The actual response: He picked up the dog and threw it off the bridge. 

Last Saturday, 36-year-old Samuel Drew was walking in New Bern, North Carolina.

As he was walking across the town's Alfred A. Cunningham drawbridge, two dogs started following him. 

According to New Bern Police, Samuel picked up one of the dogs (a hound mix, pictured above) and threw it off the side of the bridge. It fell 20 feet into the water. 

A couple who were in their boat spotted Samuel throwing the dog into the water, and were able to save it.

Police say that Drew tried to throw a second dog, a pit bull, off the bridge as well, but was unable to catch it before being stopped by police.  

The hound and the pit bull were both taken in by animal control.

When asked why he'd thrown the dog by a reporter from WCTI12 News, Samuel said, "Because it got in the way."

Samuel is currently being held on a $5,000 secure bond. If convicted, he faces up to ten years in prison. 

The Wu-Tang Clan is 20 years old. And unlike other musicians who've made it to the double-decade mark, they've never had to rely on endlessly repackaging greatest hits albums or playing matinee shows in theaters to keep the dream alive. That might be because they're the greatest hip-hop group of all time, as well as the fact that there's not much point in releasing compilations when you've got eight members pumping out new albums every year. They're still packing venues in the same way they did when 36 Chambers was released.

Earlier this summer they completed the final leg of their 20th anniversary tour in London, and I arranged to meet with them in the lobby of a Shepherd's Bush hotel. When I showed up, all eight members were milling around, and I sat down with U-God and Ghostface Killah to talk about politics, poverty, the past, and pussy. 

U-God

VICE: Let's start with the hard-hitting questions: What do you think of Obama, globally and domestically?
Ghostface Killah: George Bush wouldn’t do the things he’s doing. Obama’s just a puppet—he’s a puppet in a chair. The gay marriage law—you think it’s fucked up? When he’s gone, they’ll blame it on him: the black president. He’s gonna be known as the first motherfucking black president [who] killed Osama and Gaddafi. Some of these guys were good; they were taking care of their country. People just voted him in because he's black. They don’t even know why they were voting for him—whether he was right or wrong.

What do you think of the gay rap scene?
I can’t knock gay rap, or retarded rap... whatever. Do what you do; I don’t really listen to it. I don’t really pay that no attention. Like I said, it’s not my cup of tea—to each his own. At the end of the day, we all people.

U-God, you recently mentioned that Kanye’s ego was getting stratospheric.
U-God: That’s what I say when I mean out of control [laughs]. His circle probably ain’t telling him shit. Like, “Nigga, no." Come back home, dog. Come back home, Kanye. Don’t be going space-cadet, man, because there’s nothing out there. We gonna lose niggas. Space is a vacuum.

Ghostface Killah

What's your opinion on the gay rap scene?
Personally, I don’t give a fuck if you’re gay. That’s your business. That’s your sexual preference. But don’t come over here and make me gay—you ain't gonna force something on me, see? But if you cool, you talented, and you gay? We can rock, nigga! We can drink, we can smoke, we can laugh. But don’t try and bring that shit over here. I like titties. I like titties. I like titties. I like two pair, I like four pair of titties at one time.

[Method Man walks by and sits a few yards across the lobby.]

He stinking out my bathroom. He just laid a big old turd in my toilet. No one dumps in my fuckin’ toilet. This guy’s doing dumps in my fucking toilet.

[Method Man shouts, "pathological" in our direction.]

U-God: No, I’m not. Don’t believe a word he’s saying—he’s the one lying.
Method Man: He’s a pathological liar. His tongue is on steroids. By the time he was 15, he'd had every woman in our neighborhood. Playboy. They like his light eyes and brown skin.

Any ladies in London?
U-God: He [Method Man] gets more pussy than everybody, talking all that shit.

Method Man

OK, let's get down to business. Tell me about the track on your new album Keynote Speaker, “The Room Keeps Spinning.”
I was fucked up. It was one of them nights when I was just, "Whoa, what the fuck is going on?" I think it was molly or some shit she gave me—some type of fucking shit. After I put it on my tongue, I couldn’t move—I was feeling like a vegetable. The first verse is about my girl drunk driving.

So it was a chaotic time in your life?
Well, without chaos you’ve got nothing to write about. Fuck you gonna write about if you’re staying at home not doin' shit? You can have snobbery all day—all day with butlers and maids—but what the fuck you gonna write about? It’s not gonna happen.

What do you guys think of cloud rap?
Ghostface: I give it to them—let them have they fun. When I was 18, 19, I had my fun.

They’re more into the purple drank kind of fun than I'd imagine you were.
Yeah! They more into party mode, they not so into lyrics. Like, we had lyrics—they into party mode. We had, “I grew up on the crime side / the New York Times side / staying alive was no jive.” You know, “C.R.E.A.M” and all that. It’s different lyrics, different times.

You think they haven’t seen poverty like you guys?
No, it’s just it changes. Everyone’s seen poverty—well, most have. Maybe they don’t have to go through the poverty that we went through. Now, I can buy my kids the new Jordans—we got it like that. But for our generation of kids, our mothers—they really didn’t have it like that.

U-God

Going back to those kind of times, U-God, how did you end up joining the Clan?
U-God: It was through Cappadonna. It was a weird situation, because I met RZA and, as time went on, we got close. But as a crew we didn’t have no beats, so we had to supplement beats with beatboxing.

How about your rhymes?
I was dibbling and dabbling, and RZA gave me my first couple of beats to take home, just to try out. And I killed them shits. Me, Meth, and Deck; the name of the songs were, “I Get Down for My Crown,” “Let Me Put My Two Cents In,” and a couple of others. We started spreading them around our group, they started spreading around the hood and it was like, “Yo!”—it had its own legs.

But the funny thing about it was that, at school, people would say, “Aw, you ain’t no Big Daddy Kane, you ain’t no Public Enemy, no EPMD." They didn’t know that we would become super-legendary.

Why weren’t you a big part of Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)?
I got locked up [during the recording]. I got myself in the situation when I could have been a snitch and gone the fuck home, or I could have gone to jail. And I went to jail. My life could have been a lot different, know what I mean? I stuck to my morals, I did my time and came home. It was typical shit that black people in the hood get locked up for, which was drugs and guns. I ain’t got no rapes, no robberies.

I remember for "Da Mystery of Chessboxin," RZA snatched me up and said, “You gotta rhyme on this!” And the next thing I know, I got locked up. Then that was it.

Ghostface onstage

Do you remember where you wrote your verse for that?
No, but I know RZA orginally wanted it for another beat. But he wanted me to throw that verse on this beat. The rhymes I say right now—I don’t know where they come from. God just comes and gives me the words.

What happened to the old scene, when shit used to happen like ODB turning up at the Hammerstein Ballroom concert when the police were looking for him?
We were just coming out of the streets and just growing up. ODB was ODB—that’s that fly shit! There’s no more of that shit going on. It’s boring now; the game is boring. It’s just beef, it’s corny. There's no antics. There’s no great shit anywhere. Everybody’s just driving cars and eating Grey Poupon. It’s just snobby now—everybody’s all uppity and puppety. There’s no grimy, gritty shit goin’ on. Everything’s just got so Disney World.

Finally, throughout the years you've been together, people have tried to classify the overall Wu-Tang sound. What would you say to those people? 
It’s hard to talk about the Wu-Tang style as a collective style. The thing about us is that everybody brings their own style, their own word play—Raekwon, Ghostface, whoever... When we on a posse cut, it’s power. This new album, Keynote Speaker, is my Illmatic. I love Nas, so with this album I’m trying to hold my flag up; the “W”—the “W” will keep flying. One of my boys might get wounded, but they not getting past my line, over my dead body. It’s not happening. Sergeant Hawkins is talking.

U-God's new album, Keynote Speaker, is out now.

See more of Verena's work on her website.

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A protest in Seattle, Washington, held in solidarity with the prison inmates hunger striking against inhumane conditions. The strike recently ended after two months. Photo by Fickr user Debra Sweet

For the last two months, prison inmates over in California have been on a hunger strike in an attempt to get some fuckin’ reforms happening, especially when it came to solitary confinement. They just gave in without their demands being met, but the fact that so many dudes—there were 30,000 strikers at one point—were willing to starve themselves to protest solitary confinement should show you just how cruel and unusual that shit is. Being cut off from all human contact and spending day after day or year after year in a tiny box makes you crazy—literally, academics say it “can cause severe psychiatric harm”—and the UN considers it to be torture.

People think that the only guys who get put in solitary, a.k.a. Special Housing Units (SHUs), are real dangerous mega-violent assholes, but a lot of heads end up there for drug violations or other minor, nonviolent shit—I’ve seen COs toss inmates in the box just because they disobeyed orders. So it goes without saying that I fully back any movement that aims to get rid of these soul-sucking, life-crushing, money-making tools for torture. The reason SHUs exist is they give prison guards an efficient tool for keeping prisoners in line. I’ve been told by COs that almost ALL inmates snitch on anyone thy can to get reduce timed in the box after they fucked up. I gotta say, people aren’t gettin’ cut up like they used to in New York State prisons, maybe partly thanks to the threat of solitary, but it’s not worth it.

When I was in prison, I saw a couple guys try hunger strikes and it was always kind of half-assed and embarrassing—a few times I even witnessed the “striker” sneak a snack behind closed doors. A staged protest like that might be nothing more than pretentious, overdramatic bullshit done for the sake of the striker’s mental self-image and for the chance to get his name in a fancy newspaper as a freedom fighter. There’s a lotta unjust treatment that happens every day in the stinkin’ clink-clink, but my policy was to roll with the punches, keep to myself, and stir the pot as little as possible. I would never even think of hunger striking.

But say my ass was stuck in solitary confinement for a couple years and I was desperate, had nothing to lose, and the food sucked anyway—then, I bet, I’d be down for a fuckin’ hunger strike like I was the original old-skool Hunger Artist Christian Bale Machinist Ghandi-ass motherfuzzy. That was probably where the guys who started the strike in California’s Pelican Bay SHU were at. By the time the strike ended, the LA Times reported, “nearly ten protesters a day were collapsing or otherwise required medical care.” There were just 100 guys left at that point, but those dudes were pretty fucking hardcore. Prisons are so intrinsically secretive in all sorts of ways, so it’s hard to know what happened during the strike, but according to this Mother Jones article explaining the strike at least one prisoner lost 50 pounds in 35 days, and a couple weeks ago a judge ruled that inmates could be force-fed if they were close to death, which probably means the guys in charge were worried about that happening. 

The four leaders of the strike identified by the media definitely fit the criteria of guys with nothing to lose. They’re locked up for life (all for doing some heinous gang-related murder shit) and have suffered in the SHU for at least a decade. The fact that these guys are all so murderous means that it’s hard for anyone to give ‘em sympathy—as in, “Yeah, I bet they have it rough in there, but not as rough as the people they killed,” etc.—but that obscures the fact that most SHU inmates aren’t in there for shanking everyone in sight. And is it really OK to torture anyone, even if he’s the worst of the worst? I dunno, that sounds like a question for a priest or somebody.

In my experience the prison authorities have a funny way of taking inmate grievances and flipping them on us as punishment for us having the gall to politely ask for reform. A good example was the inmate that complained about a CO kicking in the door to the bathroom stall he was masturbating in. The inmate was obviously embarrassed, and he took the proper official course of action and requested there be some locks on the doors, or even just a directive that says the COs can’t knock down whatever door they please anytime they want. But the result was they just took away our bathroom doors completely and we had to do our business in the open. There are a smattering of examples like that where we complained and the powers-that-be were just like, “See? Ya seen what you done forced us to do with your silly ungrateful complaining?”

I commend these strikers in their efforts to seek reform through prisoner solidarity. There are some hearings planned in California to take a look at solitary confinement and maximum-security prisons in general, and at least a couple state legislators are open to reform, so maybe these guys really did accomplish something, even though it probably sounded totally crazy when they started their strike: “Yeah, if me and my buddies organize and starve ourselves, the guards who hate us are gonna give us what we want.”

But on the really real, one of these guys has been in the SHU since 1992 so I really have NO IDEA what he goes through. He is basically an alien life form at this point. No doubt that much box time will make a guy a little delusional. And, shit, maybe they decided that the worst that could happen was that they’d die, and that wouldn’t be so bad given what they’d already been through. It’s sad that inmates have so little power and voice that all they can do is not eat. There’s no way to win when you’re locked up. It’s sad, but true... Maybe it’s time for another Attica?

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

Previously: Phone Calls from Jail Are Criminally Expensive

A demonstration at the Midtown Manhattan offices of one of Walmart's board members.

Protests erupted at Walmart outlets across the country on Thursday, mounted by workers and their supporters who are demanding America's largest employer provide a living wage. In Los Angeles, Denver, Dallas, Chicago, Orlando, the District of Columbia, and elsewhere coast to coast, Walmart entrances were clotted with men and women in the bright green T-shirts of Our Walmart, a campaign to improve working conditions at the mega-chain and at its suppliers.

Walmart employees—or as the company refers to them, associates—complain of low take-home pay, unaffordable healthcare, unpredictable hours, bullying, and discrimination from management at the retailer, which retains 1.3 million Americans on its payroll. Six members of the Walton family, decedents of Walmart founder Samuel Walton and owners of a near majority stake in the corporation, together have a net worth surpassing that of over 40 percent of American families combined. Walmart took in $16 billion last year alone, but the company's smiley face insignia has become a symbol of exploitation to many who stock its shelves and man its registers.

“If people knew what is going on behind close doors,” said Lucus Handy, a former associate in the customer service department at a Walmart superstore in Fort Dodge, Iowa, “they would force Walmart to change.”

Explaining why he decided to join Our Walmart, Handy said that when his supervisor found out he was gay, she let it be known she didn't like homosexuals. “She would order me around, saying things like, 'Get over here rainbow.'” When he complained to upper management, Handy said he was demoted. “They moved me from customer service where I was working 40-hours a week and making $10.25 an hour to the pharmacy department where I was working 35 hours a week at $8.50 an hour.”

Even before his demotion Handy could barely afford his Walmart health insurance and when his wages and hours were cut he had to do without it. “Just to go to the emergency room with Walmart insurance cost me $300. I don't have that kind of cash lying around. I need to buy food, to pay rent.”

Once management got wind that Handy was talking mutiny to his co-workers he was given the ax. Our Walmart claims approximately 100 workers like Handy have been either reprimanded or let go in retaliation for their workplace organizing since the campaign began to snowball last fall when it smacked the company's box stores with strikes on Black Friday—the busiest shopping day of the year—that November.

At Fifth Avenue and 52^nd in Manhattan on Thursday, Handy and other laid off associates arrived at the offices of Christopher Williams, the CEO of Williams Capital Group, who sits on Walmart's Board of Directors and runs a blog called The Black Socialite in his spare time. In their hands the former associates carried a petition with 200,000 signatures demanding that their jobs be reinstated.

Susan Gulick was among them. “I've worked as a baker, a fork-lift operator, and all kinds of retail jobs,” she said. A New Yorker born and raised, Gulick headed south after the recession looking for employment and eventually took a job as an associate at a superstore in North Carolina. She worked there for about a year until she was terminated. “Working for Walmart was the worst job I ever had,” she said. “The pay is lousy. The treatment is horrific. They try to break people. They treat them like objects. They told us to acknowledge customers when they are at least ten feet away, but our supervisors would just walk right by us. I would sit in my car unable to drive home when I got off cause I couldn't stop crying.”

“I was fired for speaking out, for being an activist,” Gulick claimed. She’s in her her mid-50s, and worries she won't be able to find another job. She wants to go back to Walmart, but wants things to change there as well. Barred from entering the premises of Williams's Midtown office building by security and the New York Police Department, she and Handy sat down at the entrance and were escorted away in handcuffs.

Meanwhile, Walmart sought to protect its public image. “It's just a show,” said Dan Fogleman, reached by phone, with the company's public relation's wing. “With very few exceptions the cast members don't work at Walmart nor are they affiliated with Walmart in anyway.” Fogleman blames the row on the The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) and claims that in many cases the union is “paying their own people or asking people from other organizations to show up and take part in these made for TV demonstrations. Many of them actually work for competitors.”

When pressed whether he was inferring that Our Walmart was an effort by the retailer's revivals to undercut their profits, Fogleman said he would declined to speculate.

As for the UFCW, they say their aim isn't to unionize Walmart's workforce, but that they are helping to underwrite Our Walmart in order to raise the working conditions in the industry overall. While Fogleman contends that Walmart pays wages that are competitive and consistent with the retail industry, as the industry's largest employer, Walmart essentially sets that standard.

The UFCW is also weary of what might happen should Walmart associates unionize, since there would be nothing to prevent Walmart from promptly shutting down a UFCW store and opening a non-union operation across the street with a fresh workforce. Nonetheless, former associates Lucas Handy and Susan Gulick confided that along with getting their jobs back they would actually like to be in a union.

“Walmart claims to have this open door policy,” said Handy. “But the door closes behind you in that back office and it's just you and the manager. If we had a union we'd have someone to take our grievances to. We'd have some protection.”

Thursday's rallies come on the heels of job actions by employees at Burger King, Dairy Queen, McDonald's, Wendy's, and other fast food outlets who went on strike last week for a union and $15 an hour. These rebellions at Walmart and in the fast food industry represent growing discontent among those locked-out of America's supposed economic recovery. Fifty-eight percent of jobs created since the recession began in 2008 pay wages at or just above the legal minimum and funds for the food stamps that these workers depend on are currently on the congressional chopping block.

“The rightwing talks about family values,” said John Cronan, with the Restaurant Opportunities Center, who took part in the Our Walmart rally at Williams's office on Thursday. “Being able to support a family on a living wage. That's family values.”

Cronan has been organizing for a union at Capital Bar and Grille restaurants in New York and Walmart's CEO, William Simon, is on the Board of Directors at Darden, which owns the Capital Grille chain. Cronan, however, says he is motivated to support the Walmart workers in more than “an-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend attitude. He looks at Our Walmart as part of one and the same effort by low-wage to raise themselves up against forces pushing them down.

“It's not the same economy where my father, who didn't have a high school degree, could get a railroad union job and retire this year with a pension,” he said. “It's an economy where you got people getting out of high school or college and going straight into dead-end jobs. It's not only about the money. It's about respect. It's about challenging the mentality of profit over people.”

Fired Walmart associate Susan Gulick agreed. “We want respect and decent pay and we don't want to be rundown. When you see your co-workers, who work full-time shopping at Walmart with food stamps, you know something is wrong, something's got to give.”

@JohnReedsTomb

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