The super special September issue of VICE was exclusively culled from the archives of Bob Guccione Sr.—the legendary magazine publisher who built a media empire that started with Penthouse. This portion of the issue features original paintings by Bob Guccione. 

For more previously unpublished documents visit the Guccione Archives Issue page. For even more unpublished archival material, please visit The Guccione Collection website, which is devoted to illuminating all the varied corners of Bob's legacy and creating new content in the spirit of the Guccione empire.

Colombian special forces. (Photo via)

I arrived in Soacha, a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of Bogota, on an overcast July afternoon. We had driven away from the city center and the building that dominates its skyline—a huge structure covered in LED lights that slowly change color; a gaudy beacon for Colombia's wealthy elite—and had pulled up on a residential side street.   

I was there with the NGO Justice for Colombia to hear about the country's 'false positives' scandal, which first broke five years ago and shows no sign of relenting any time soon. The scandal has its roots in the Colombian 50-year civil war between the government and the left-wing peasant insurgent group FARC. In the early 2000s, then-president Alvaro Uribe, out of an apparent concern for the army’s reputation, started putting pressure on soldiers to increase their kill figures.

According to media reports, soldiers were promised cash payments and more vacation time if they produced the bodies of dead FARC guerrillas—an accusation the government denies. In an effort to increase their quotas, soldiers allegedly started luring young, impoverished men away from their homes with the offer of work. Once away from their families, the soldiers executed the men, dressed them up in guerrilla uniforms, and presented them as combat kills. Many victims were dismembered and buried hundreds of miles away from their families.

The National Victims Movement protests against the state's "false positive" scandal. (Photo courtesy of Justice for Colombia)

When the scandal broke, the Colombian government insisted false positives were isolated incidents. By 2012, however, nearly 3,000 murders were recorded and, in 2007—the worst year for this type of killing—one in every five combat kills recorded was a false positive. In Soacha, 19 mothers lost their sons in the false positives scandal, and so far only one of them has seen the killers convicted, but his conviction was appealed and the main defendant, an army major, became a fugitive.

After parking up among the ownerless dogs and football-playing boys that seem ubiquitous in Bogota's suburbs, I was led up some steps to a little house set back from the street. Waiting for me were three women, smartly dressed, warm and hospitable. They shook my hand and sat me down. As I waited for the rest of my group to file in, I noticed school pictures on the wall of young boys in suits—the dead sons of the women I'd just met.

The house belongs to a woman named Luz Marina Bernal. She’s pint-sized, friendly but tough, warm but reserved. As she shared her story, she was joined by her surviving son, who loitered shyly behind her, and two women whose sons were also murdered so Colombian soldiers could fill their quotas. Luz Marina’s murdered son was called Fair Leonardo Bernal. He looks handsome in photos; well built with beautiful hazel eyes.

Luz Marina holding a photo of Fair Leonardo. (Photo courtesy of Justice for Colombia)

Fair Leonardo was 26 when he was murdered by the army, though his learning difficulties meant that he had the mental age of a five-year-old. Luz Marina describes him as a naïve boy, who always saw the best in everybody. She thinks it was his naivety that led the army to target him. “He would have trusted them,” she says.

At 1:30 PM on the afternoon of January 8, 2008, Fair Leonardo said goodbye to his mother, left the house, and was never seen alive again. His family alerted the authorities, but after the police offered spurious suggestions (“maybe he wanted to leave home”) for Fair Leonardo’s disappearance, it became apparent the family would have to start their own investigation. Luz Marina spent eight months searching for her son—even enlisting the help of homeless people in Soacha—but got nowhere.

In September, nine months after Luz Marina had last seen her son, she got a phone call from the forensics department of the local police station. She described to me how she was overcome with fear and pain after that phone call and the seemingly endless journey to the forensics department.

The woman she met there said to her, “Mrs. Marina, I need you to stay calm,” before showing her some photographs of her son. “Half his face was destroyed,” Luz Marina says. “They had shot him three times. I could see his jaw sticking out.” The woman at the forensics department told Luz Marina that her son had been found in the town of Ocaña in the Norte de Santander department of Colombia, hundreds of miles away from Soacha. Two weeks after her visit to the forensics department, Luz Marina traveled to Ocaña to bring her son home.

When she arrived to pick up her son’s body, Luz Marina met local authorities who told her that Fair Leonardo had died just four days after he had disappeared. The same authorities then asked Luz Marina if she was aware that her son was working for FARC. “My son couldn’t read or write,” says Luz. “I looked after him. If he died just four days after I last saw him, when was he working for FARC?”

Relatives of the false positive victims visit the site where their bodies were found. (Photo courtesy of Justice for Colombia) 

The authorities explained that Fair Leonardo had been shot in combat with the army. They said he had been trying to solicit money from people in Ocaña for protection. "He has learning difficulties," Luz says, "he can’t understand the value of money." The authorities told Luz Marina that they had proof of Fair Leonardo’s involvement with FARC, because he had been found with a gun in his hand. However, the gun had been placed in his right hand, and Fair Leonardo was left-handed.

Later, Luz Marina met a man who told her that the army paid him $200,000 COP (about $100) for her son’s body. Luz Marina has spent every penny she has trying to seek justice for her son. Five years after his death, she has only been able to bring half of his body home. Luz and her family continue to receive death threats for refusing to stay silent about the fate of their loved one. There are 27 suspects involved in Fair Leonardo’s case, and like 18 of the 19 Soacha boys who were murdered as part of the scandal, there has yet to be a single conviction.

Around the time of my visit to Luz Marina Bernal and her family, the Colombian government was about to introduce a bill to reform the justice system. The new bill could make it even more unlikely that Fair Leonardo’s killers will be brought to justice. If it passes, the bill will expand the reach of Colombia’s military courts, which could mean that false positive cases are tried in the secretive military justice system. This will effectively protect members of the army if they commit crimes that violate international law.

Later in the week, I asked the Attorney General about the implications of the reforms for false positive cases. They gave me vague reassurances that cases like Fair Leonardo’s are to be exempt from the military courts. But Amnesty International says "The armed forces’ continued control over the initial stages of criminal investigation [means that] the reform will make it easier for them to define human rights violations as legitimate acts of conflict, thereby making them subject to military jurisdiction."

As our bus drove out of Soacha, everyone around me was silent. It’s hard to know what to say about a mother who has found out that her son was murdered for the price of a pair of shoes. Driving back into central Bogota, that LED building hovered into view again, its clinical gleam lighting up the houses below.

Follow Ellie on Twitter: @MissEllieMae

More from Colombia:

The Colombia Government Is Killing Its Peasant Farmers for Their Land

Less Coca in Colombia Means Nothing for Your Supply

Colombia's Hidden Killers

Ania Lewiska

Ania Lewiska recently embarked on the noble quest to break the world record for the largest number of sexual partners in history. The fact that no such record even exists for her to break doesn't appear to bother the 21-year-old from Poland, who is aiming optimistically—and potentially absurdly—high, setting her desired target at 100,000 men. 

The ex-graphic designer has allotted 20 minutes to each man and is willing to double that time if the lucky guy isn't satisfied by the end of his allocated period. Which is considerate of her. If Ania manages to fulfill her dream without eating, sleeping, or wasting precious time on some form of genital reconstruction procedure, she'll be at it for an amazing 33,000 hours—or roughly three years and eight months.

That's a lot of time, a lot of dicks, and a lot of money spent circumnavigating the globe in the search for men to help her enter the Guinness Book of World Records. I wanted to know how she sees the project going, so I gave her a quick call to find out.

VICE: Hey, Ania. Can you explain what exactly this project is about?
Ania Lewiska: I plan on getting into the Guinness Book of World Records by sleeping with 100,000 men. The idea came about one night when I was out drinking with my friends. I mean, I love having fun and I love having sex, so I thought it’d be a nice thing to do. My marathon started in Poland a few weeks ago and now I’m ready to see the world. I’m in the Czech Republic right now.

How are you organizing all of this? Is there a manager involved?
I have a couple of people helping me with my marathon, yes.

The men don't have to pay for the pleasure of your company, right?
No, no—I’m not a prostitute.

But isn’t it quite pricey? Traveling around, paying for hotels... all that kind of stuff?
In Poland, the men have been splitting the hotel costs with me 50/50. The most expensive part is the travel, really. It costs quite a lot to reach so many men in all these different countries.

Yeah, that's not surprising. What do the hotels think of all these guys flooding in and out?
It’s not a problem—we’re very discreet. What goes on behind closed doors shouldn’t bother them.

Have you gotten any hassle for it?
I’ve had a fair share of death threats, especially from Muslim countries. People in Egypt seem to be pretty angry. I’m not sure I’ll be able to go there.

That's a shame. How many guys have you gotten through so far?
As of this morning, 424.

Wow, so you’ve still got a long way to go. Where should the other 99,576 men sign up?
Folks should go to my website and find all the info there. Don’t write to me on Facebook—my inbox is totally full. In the first couple of days after announcing this sex trip, I received thousands and thousands of messages from guys who wanted to hook up.

Well, thanks for letting us know. One last thing—do your parents know what you're up to?
My mother and I don’t talk and my father is dead.

Oh, OK. Your boyfriend?
No, no. I don’t have a boyfriend.

Thanks, Ania, and the best of luck with your marathon!

More sexy stuff:

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Recognizing Your Ex-Girlfriend in Porn Is Weird

Climactic Fashion - For Her

A week or so ago I wrote an article about how I believed Snapchat was, and I’m paraphrasing here, a piece of shit with no hope for the future. At the end of the article I was advised to publish my Snapchat username, so people could send me whatever they pleased in hopes of possibly changing my mind, confirming my beliefs, or to mock the article. I received dozens of Snaps from all over the world from crazy Snapchat-loving places as far as China, Australia, Fiji, and even my hometown of T dot O dot, aka Toronto, aka Big Patty’s house. Some of the Snaps I received were confusing, frightening, and occasionally hilarious. Here are my favourites from the bunch.

This was one of the first Snaps I received. At first I thought whatever was on the wall (which looks suspiciously like ejaculate) was flying into his mouth. It still might have. I don't know, I'm not a scientist. It was at this moment I realized that the next week was going to be a weird, erotic recipe of laughs. 

This young gentleman sent me a video of himself making noises that were comparable to the loveable 80s extraterrestrial known as ET. Upon receiving it and watching it with a blank face, I proceeded to put down my phone and walk calmly over to my front door to lock it. I feared the next Snap I received would be a video of myself sleeping.

This girl was sobbing her eyes out on Snapchat—and it was also the first thing she ever sent to me. I have no idea why she's crying, but if I had to speculate I'd say it has something to do with Doriots Locos tacos coming to Canada. It's one of my favourites because it made me laugh the hardest, but I hope she’s ok.

Pretty sure this was the end result of the first picture. You know damn well where that stain came from! Stop playing games and throw down some answers. Why would you send me this? Now I can't sleep without knowing the dramatic conclusion of whatever the hell is on your pants. 

Sure it's a bit creepy that a complete stranger wants to see my “ballz,” but they're polite enough to say please. They also appear to have spelled picture as piclure, but these things happen. I wonder if this sloppy digital red ink on a black background technique for virtual ball-harvesting has ever been successful on Snapchat?

Perhaps this person is sending this request out en masse and receiving dozens of temporary scrotum Snaps in return? I've been blowing it this entire time. Here I am complaining about Snapchat on the internet, when I could've just sent out messages that make me seem like I’m a stroke victim, asking for incriminating photos from my pals strangers alike. You live and you learn.

This is my new buddy Andres. Andres usually sends me pictures of his weed and weed paraphernalia. One time, unsolicited, he gave me a tour of his bong and pipe collection. Andres is also the only person who called me out for taking screenshots of his Snaps—which he was none to pleased about—but then proceeded to send me more pictures and video of weed related activities, anyway. I'm a big fan of Andres. He also appears to be affiliated with a crew called 'Y$N.' What does it mean? Young Money Ninjas? Youth Dollar Nunchucks? Let me know, Andres. Let me know.

It's pretty obvious that Snapchat is a great booty call application. You could just send something like this out to dozens of people and eagerly wait for a positive reply. You could deny it ever happened as well, in a worst-case scenario, since there’s no trace of it ever being sent or received. Unless of course the person you invited to your private sex party took a screenshot, like I just did. In which case yes, you're screwed if you try to deny it. But regardless, in 2013 nothing says you're down for a night of romance better than a sassy Snapchat booty call involving some sidewalk chalk art.

You start Monday. Don't worry about a resume or experience we got you. 
 

Well, this concludes my bizarre Snapchat experience. Thanks to everyone who bombarded my inbox with crap over the past week or two. We've shared some laughs, had a cry, and ultimately I'm flattered and weirded out at the same time. Thanks for continuing to be useless, Snapchat. We might miss you when you’re dead.



Pat Maloney is a writer for the web series Random at Best. His Snapchat username is: patmaloney1

Previously:

Snapchat Sucks if You're Not Receiving Nudes

North Carolina cop Randall Kerrick (left) shot and killed Jonathan A. Ferrell (right) early Saturday morning. The officer is now being charged with voluntary manslaughter.

Everyone who believes cops don’t get punished for their mistakes should be pleasantly surprised by the swiftness of the charge of voluntary manslaughter that have been slapped on North Carolina cop Randall Kerrick. That's appropriate given that the officer with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg police department shot and killed 24-year-old former Florida* A&M football player Jonathan A. Ferrell on Saturday morning.

Ferrell got in a nasty car accident around 2:30 AM and went looking for help (it's unclear whether he was injured or in shock). He ended up frantically banging on the door of a woman waiting for her husband to return from work—when she didn’t recognize the man outside, she called the police.

Three officers arrived on what they thought was a breaking and entering situation (which is a strange conclusion to come to if someone was knocking). Soon after they arrived, Ferrell “charged” the cops and they Tased him, apparently to no effect. Kerrick then fired repeatedly at the young man, though none of the other officers seem to have done so.

It's awful every time an unarmed person gets killed for no reason, but since Ferrell was black, you also have to wonder what part, if any, his race played in this. Would the homeowner have dialed 911 if it had been a white guy outside her door? Would Kerrick have drawn his gun on an unarmed white man?

Just about the only silver lining in this ugly situation is that at least the officer responsible didn’t walk free. Kerrick turned himself in on Saturday and was freed Sunday evening on $50,000 bond. The officers who were with him during the shooting are now on administrative leave, a common procedure in all police departments after the death of a suspect. If you can call Ferrell that.

Now on to this week’s other bad cops:

- After an encounter with the Tallahassee Police Department on August 10, Christina West wound up with a broken orbital bone in her face as well as a swollen nose and facial cuts. Now her lawyer is claiming she was a victim of police brutality—and surprisingly, the Florida state attorney seems to agree. Not that there’s a whole lot in dispute: West was arrested after drunkenly driving her car into a (thankfully empty) house, and during her arrest the cops smashed her face against the hood of their squad car and the pavement. The entire incident was captured on dashcam footage, which shows West being disagreeable and drunk and the cops being patient with her until, abruptly, they snap and manhandle her to the ground while she screams. (Her injuries were bad enough that when the officers brought West into custody, they were told to take her to a hospital instead.) The charges of battery on law enforcement officers have been dropped. Even though West was obnoxious, drunk, and could have killed someone, she didn’t deserve to have her face broken when she was already in custody. The moral of the story is, there’s a reason the police should be filmed while they're on duty.

- Speaking of the Tallahassee Police Department, it was recently reported that out of the 2,285 reports of officers using force documented between 2010 and 2012, the department ruled only three to be unjustified. Those numbers seem, um, a little hard to believe. But now that the video of West being bullied has gone viral, the chief of police is taken what is being called “early retirement” starting on October 5. Hopefully the new guy will make some changes.

- On Saturday, New York Police Department officers were pursuing an erratic man who was running through traffic near Times Square. When he supposedly reached towards his waistband, two NYPD cops opened fire, fearing he was going for a weapon—but they missed, hitting a 54-year-old woman in the knee and a 35-year-old woman in the butt. Neither were badly injured, and the disturbed man was also unhurt. He was found to have no weapon on him and was taken to Bellevue mental hospital for evaluation. It’s as happy an ending to a story that involves the police firing guns in crowds can have. 

- An 18-year-old student at Allatoona High School in Acworth, Georgia, was arrested for having a three-inch pocket knife in his car while on school property. On September 5, a classmate of Andrew Williams reported that his car had a weed smell coming from it. (Editor’s note: C’mon dude, why can’t you chill out about that shit?) A search by assistant principal Sam Sanford turned up nothing but eau de Mary Jane and that tiny blade. Williams, who said he kept the knife in his car in case he ever needed to cut his seatbelt off, was arrested by the school police for carrying a weapon in a school safety zone, a felony that carries two to ten years in prison. Hopefully a prosecutor or a judge will realize how ridiculous this is—the last thing we need is more children being arrested for minor infractions.

- On Thursday at 4 AM, a SWAT team entered a Savannah, Georgia, home searching for suspected gang member Jashavious Keel, but instead busted in on an innocent couple. Michael Hall and his wife describe hearing a “kaboom”—probably the sound of their door being turned to wood pulp and four of their windows being broken. They were screamed at and briefly cuffed before police realized Keel wasn’t in the home after a search. While nobody in the family had ever heard of Keel, the gang member put down their address as his place of residence in court documents, maybe to fool the police into going to the wrong house. The city or county government will be paying for the damage to the Halls’ house.

- On Friday, a family in Middletown, Delaware, filed suit in US district court over a SWAT raid they suffered last year. In a familiar-sounding story, Steve Tuppeny was in his garage early one October morning when a SWAT team appeared and demanded that he fall to the floor with his hands up. According to Tuppeny, cops refused to explain why they were there and pointed their guns at his wife Jennifer and their eight-year-old daughter, who had been asleep. The family was kept cuffed in the living room and offered only a business card with a number to call with any complaints. The suspect police sought hadn’t lived there in at least four years. The Wilmington police chief apologized the next day, but an outraged Tuppeny is still pretty pissed. “I’m lying on the garage floor at gunpoint and they are invading my home terrorizing my family,” he told the press last year. “This is America.” Sorry, Steve. SWAT raids are as American as apple pie and football at this point.

- As if that weren’t enough news about mistaken SWAT raids, in Toulminville, Alabama, Vincent White is considering a lawsuit against the cops who wrongly targeted his home based on the testimony of an informant back in February. White didn’t get the full-on SWAT treatment—officers even knocked!—but according to his complaint, they still came to door at 9 AM and made him lie down in handcuffs, which was a hardship for him since he’d had abdominal surgery two weeks before. Officials have brushed this one off with various “mistakes happen” excuses.

- Our Good Cop of the Week is Wyoming, Minnesota, officer Scott Booecker, whose story sounds like a particularly corny after-school special. The bike cop has mad BMX skills, yo, and footage of him doing tricks at a bike park has made him a viral video star. It’s pure feel-good local-news fluff, but Booecker and his chief, who approve of his 45-year-old officer showing off his talent, actually sound like exactly what we need more of. Booecker is engaging with the local community and showing a more human side of the police than those hit by SWAT raids ever see.

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

Previously: Even the EPA Is Using SWAT Teams Now

*Correction: Ferrell went to Florida A&M, not Texas A&M as was originally written.

Tourists on India's Andaman Islands are taken by the busload to watch the Jarawa tribe go about their daily lives. The Jarawa are treated like animals in a safari park, with large signs urging visitors not to feed them or give them clothing. Earlier this year, a crew from VICE Germany went to the Andaman Islands and brought back this fascinating, if a bit depressing, documentary.

Human Safari was produced with assistance from the non-profit Survival International. Learn more about supporting the campaign for the Jarawa here.

More travel videos:

Blood Sacrifice in Sumba

Takanakuy

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For a while, the residents of Manitoba Colony thought demons were raping the town’s women. There was no other explanation. No way of explaining how a woman could wake up with blood and semen stains smeared across her sheets and no memory of the previous night. No way of explaining how another went to sleep clothed, only to wake up naked and covered by dirty fingerprints all over her body. No way to understand how another could dream of a man forcing himself onto her in a field—and then wake up the next morning with grass in her hair.

For Sara Guenter, the mystery was the rope. She would sometimes wake up in her bed with small pieces of it tied tightly to her wrists or ankles, the skin beneath an aching blue. Earlier this year, I visited Sara at her home, simple concrete painted to look like brick, in Manitoba Colony, Bolivia. Mennonites are similar to the Amish in their rejection of modernity and technology, and Manitoba Colony, like all ultraconservative Mennonite communities, is a collective attempt to retreat as far as possible from the nonbelieving world. A slight breeze of soy and sorghum came off the nearby fields as Sara told me how, in addition to the eerie rope, on those mornings after she’d been raped she would also wake to stained sheets, thunderous headaches, and paralyzing lethargy.

Continue reading about the rapes at Manitoba Colony.

Maliibu Miitch is a 22-year-old Bronx native who is well on her way to becoming one of rap's most honest and inspirational success stories. In the past year, she has turned down multiple offers from record labels and noted names in order to start her own all-female label, Hood Foreign. So, we are super excited to premiere her debut EP, which also goes by the name Hood Foreign. Give it a listen on the VICE SoundCloud player below:

After bumping her banger, "Valid," all summer, we chatted with Maliibu about being on tour, boy bands, and some of the trials and tribulations that come with being a female MC in a predominantly male genre. Her outspoken nature makes it pretty clear that she subscribes to the tried and true hip-hop m.o. of giving zero fucks. Although it seems a bit aggresive, she assured us that she knows exactly what she wants and how she's going to get it. 

VICE: How did you come up with your name?
Maliibu Miitch: I was watching Paid in Full for the first time and I really liked Mekhi Phifer's character and his aura. So I just went by Miitch at first and added on Maliibu later cause it sounded good.

How do you feel about all this newfound attention?
It’s cool. I think I got used to it after social-networking on Myspace, Twitter, and Facebook. People started noticing me and from there it just basically heightened to where I am now.

How did you first start rapping?
My best friend Molly Mccoy got me into it. About three years ago she called me up one day and she started to freestyle to Gucci Mane's "Wasted." After I heard her freestyle, I told her I wanted to try rapping too. So, I started freestyling over the phone. She was really into it, so I just went with it.

Besides your friends, who else has influenced you?
It’s funny because growing up I didn’t listen to rap. I know I shouldn’t be saying this right now, but I listened to Spice Girls, ’N Sync, Backstreet Boys, Mandy Moore, and Christina Aguilera. It was weird because I was living in the Bronx and there was a lot of rap coming out of there then, but I wasn’t into it. I started listening to rap in middle school around the time that 50 Cent released "Wanksta."

Photo by Miyako Bellizzi

You turned down two major record labels and started Hood Foreign, which is generally unheard of in an industry that's saturated with people looking for their big break.
Well, I originally started it because I wanted to make a name for myself.  When I first started rapping, my name was built up around everyone else and I didn't like that. So, I just picked up and left that situation. I didn’t care who they were and I didn’t give a fuck how big they were, I just wanted to do it on my own. So, when I had those meetings with MGM and RCA, I felt like I wasn’t ready yet. I wanted to start my own thing, so I started Hood Foreign, the first female-only label. We have the A$AP boys and that’s all dudes, so I thought to myself, You know what? Why can’t there be girls rapping and singing about female empowerment? So that’s where that came from. I just wanted to have my own thing. Something that's built off my name and not someone else's.

How do you think women are represented in the hip-hop scene?
There’s a big misunderstanding because we’re supposed to rap about sex, be more sexy, and be more naked. My music is blunt and in your face and I want people to see that before people peg me as just another female rapper. I want to be an artist—that’s it.  I don’t want to be labeled as a rapper or a female rapper for that reason, I just want to be labeled as an artist in general.

When do you think you'll be truly successful?
Success will come to me when I'm able to move my mom, my sisters, and my brother out of the Bronx. That'll be a big accomplishment for me.

Is there anything you learned about yourself when you were recording Hood Foreign Mixtape?
I learned a lot actually. I vent a lot, and I used to vent in the wrong way. I would do something stupid or act on my emotions without thinking. A lot of things happened to me last year and that really affected me, and so that’s what I put into the album. On the EP, one of my favorite songs is “Face Down” because I got to vent and say everything I wanted to get off my chest. I learned how to channel my emotions into my music. I also think my stage presence has improved, because I never used to perform like I do now. Making Hood Foreign Mixtape gave me a lot of confidence.

Photo by Miyako Bellizzi

Is there anything in particular that you want your fans to take away from this album?
That I’m not going anywhere, and that it’s OK to be yourself. It’s OK to express how you really feel and not worry about someone coming down on you for it, or someone saying, “Hey, that’s not right.” To me, if I’m right, I’m right. If I say something, I think I'm right no matter what anyone else says, and that’s how my music is. I say some off-the-wall shit on Hood Foreign and that’s OK because it's how I felt. It’s cool to be yourself, and it's OK to say what you feel.

Who are your dream collaborators?
50 Cent, hands down. There are a lot of people I would like to work with, but I want to put myself out there first. Sometimes a rapper wants to jump on your song and they tell you that's it's gonna be big. I don’t want that. I want to promote myself until I'm in a good position where it would make sense to work with more established artists. 

Any words of advice for young rappers?
Take your time with it because you only get one shot. Take your time with your decisions, and make sure you have a strong team and come from an authentic scene. Don't be afraid to get creative and just run with it. Don't worry about what anyone else has to say as long as you believe in what you're doing and it feels right.

You can follow Maliibu Miitch on Twitter and buy Hood Foreign on iTunes. 

@jamiemanelis

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This story by Yuko Sakata was supposed to appear in the Guccione Archives Issue, but it didn't because that issue is all about Bob Guccione, and this story doesn't mention him at all. But Yuko has such a good, light, honest touch that we had to share this one with you. Yuko received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She's published one story prior to this, in the Missouri Review, and it won the Jeffrey E. Smith Editors' Prize. Yuko was born in New York, but she grew up in Osaka, Hong Kong, and Tokyo, and she's also a dancer, a choreographer, and a translator. Still, when we asked if we could interview her, she said she didn't really think anyone would want to read an interview with "a novice."

The illustration above is by Joana Avillez—you might remember her Eloise Moves to Brooklyn column. Joana was born, raised, and is still living in New York, and she has a BFA in painting from RISD and an MFA in the Illustration as Visual Essay program from SVA.

In a ground-floor cafe of a midtown office building, my friend and I sat next to the floor-to-ceiling window over some coffee. Not that there were any seats away from the windows; the sleek white café was encased in two stories of glass panels on three sides. I was not at all comfortable being on display like that, but Jay had his day job in the same building and this was the easiest place for us to meet. Pedestrians drifted past on the other side of the glass, some still wearing winter coats, some already in light jackets, uncertain of the in-between weather. 

My friend was trying to console me after an unpleasant breakup. He said he felt responsible, because he was the one who brought us together.

“No, you weren’t,” I said. “We met at Amy’s when she had that party. You weren’t even on the same continent then.” Jay was a musician, and in Portugal on a month-long residency at that time.

“But you wouldn’t have gotten together if you hadn’t both known me,” Jay said. “I was the catalyst.”

It was true that Jay had been the icebreaker in our conversation. But in general, Jay liked to claim responsibilities for things.

The boyfriend I had lived with for the past two years had just moved out, after we had a conversation about the possibility of marriage and family. That is, I wanted it to be a conversation, though it ended up being an argument. At first he tried to evade the topic through his artful digressions. When I persisted, he accused me of misleading him, claiming that early on we had confirmed our mutual disdain for the institution of marriage and for the idea of delivering any more children into this messed up world. I reminded him that I never had a strong feeling one way or the other about marriage, which was different from having a disdain for it. As for children, I had simply been undecided.

“It’s fine, I don’t mind not getting married,” I said. “But I’m now pretty sure I want a child. My parents are getting old.”

“What do your parents have to do with this?” he said. Then I saw fear in his eyes. “Don’t tell me you are pregnant.” 

“No, I’m not.”

“Because that’s just incredibly irresponsible. It’s so unfair. You can’t trap someone like that.”

“I’m not pregnant. I think you should leave.”

                                                                          ***

Voices filled the café; they mingled and became a single undecipherable hum somewhere above our heads. All the way up, close to the ceiling, the HVAC duct hovered like some predatory creature spying on us. I wondered if anyone ever went up there to clean it. I imagined fine dust particles making their way down the long distance, settling noiselessly on our shoulders.

“I knew a couple that recently got divorced,” Jay said, playing with his paper cup. He kept pinching its rim with his fingernails, and the cup now looked like something he had picked up from a trash can on the sidewalk. “They got divorced because the wife became a bodybuilder.

“She was this Central Asian woman. My friend was teaching English in Kyrgyzstan. They fell in love and got married so he could bring her back here. You know how it goes. They were really sweet together. She was pretty but a bit chubby and very timid, and my friend was always protective of her. Though maybe it was just the language thing that kept her so quiet.

“Anyway, after a year or so she started really getting into working out at the Y near their place. It must have been out of boredom at first—she didn’t have a job, hadn’t made many friends, and mostly stayed home by herself. My friend encouraged her, too. But within a few months she started working with a personal trainer, and she completely changed her diet according to the trainer’s advice. She quickly started to lose her curves. That’s when my friend realized she was bodybuilding. She went to the total extreme, working out most of her waking hours. Then she started preparing meals with carefully measured ingredients that included things like protein powder and twelve egg whites, and my friend had to start cooking his own meals separately.”

“Oh, boo-hoo,” I said. 

“But just listen.” Jay lifted his elegant index finger. “Soon she became this muscular bulk. My friend was busy running his own NGO, and of course he understood she had to find some passion of her own—she was still young. But bodybuilding? It became her sole passion. The first purpose she had ever found in her life. How could he tell her to stop training?

“Growing soft in the middle, getting sick, becoming grumpy, those were the things he could have dealt with. Those were the part of aging together he had expected. But her drastic transformation into something so completely different confused him. He didn’t know what to do. He went to some of her competitions and watched her showcase her body, glistening with oil. But he simply couldn’t understand. He could no longer touch her. He couldn’t sleep with her. He still wanted to think he loved her, because who wants to consider himself so superficial? But obviously this was a little more than that. He still loved the idea of her, but she was no longer there. So they got a divorce.”

A woman talking with the cashier let out a shrill laugh, as though competing with the hiss from the espresso machine.

“Why are you telling me this?” I cradled the paper cup in my hands even though it didn’t give me any warmth.

“I don’t know,” Jay said. “It seemed relevant when I started.”

On the other side of the glass panels, the city was turning bright amber. Warm sunset cast long shadows of passers-by on the pavement. I just then realized that people were walking with their umbrellas open, or running for cover. It looked as though they were shielding themselves from the sunlight.

The pedestrians looked skeptical even as they held their umbrellas. They squinted their eyes as they hurried westward into the sun toward the subway station. Some held their palms out to test if they really got wet. Strangers caught each other’s eyes and made funny faces. All these played out in silence on the other side of the divide from where I sat, like a pantomime. It was as if this was some sort of a prank, and they were all in on it together.

More fiction from VICE:

"Haricut" by Barry Gifford

"White Trash" by Jamie Renda

"The Number" by Amie Barrodale

Congolese soldiers pose after a successful advancement in Kibati. Photos by Simone Bazos

The Congolese army drove M23 rebels from positions overlooking the city of Goma last week, scoring its biggest victory since the uprising began 16 months ago. The rebels who had terrorized the area retreated after an offensive by the Congolese military and a new United Nations combat force. The fighting resulted in a meeting of the presidents of Congo and Rwanda last Thursday. They called for peace talks to resume within three days’ time between the Congolese government and the rebel movement that is widely believed to be backed by Rwanda.

Goma, a Congolese city bordering Rwanda, is the flashpoint at the heart of the conflict ravaging eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. The fighting between the Congolese army and the M23 rebels erupted two weeks ago. It marked a decisive turning point in the conflict, but once again, civilians were put in the direct line of fire. The city now faces bombed-out schools, a stalled economy, and a climate of fear.

After a week under attack, with blasts and falling bombs throughout the city, several civilians were killed and a 15-meter section of the UN barrier had been destroyed, with houses completely leveled by the explosions. Congolese victims and authorities were blaming neighboring Rwanda.

A man and his two children stand in the wreckage of a bombed-out house in the Majengo district of Goma

Rwandan Foreign Minister Louise Mushikiwabo reported that a total of 34 bombs and rockets had been fired into Rwanda, including one that struck a crowded marketplace, killing a woman and injuring her young child. Rwandan authorities immediately accused the Congolese military of direct involvement in the strikes.

Rumors spread like a bush fire through military and civilian populations, and it is hard to tell exact numbers, locations, and culprits. The facts are that after a week of bombings on both sides of the Rwandan-Congolese-border, seven Congolese and one Rwandan civilian are dead. As a result, tensions reached a climax one week ago, when Rwandan soldiers and tanks moved into position along their border, sparking fear of a full-on invasion.

Despite the fact that war between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo officially ended in 2004, Rwanda has been widely accused of fighting a proxy war through support of the M23 rebels in the North Kivu region, of which Goma is the capital. M23 is a relatively new rebel faction. It started when Tutsi soldiers defected from the Congolese army after ongoing disagreements with the local government. In the three and a half years since their inception, M23 has terrorized the local area, invading the city of Goma last November and holding the city hostage for two weeks.

A bombed-out car now serving as a drying rack for soldiers

Although the UN has its largest and most expensive peacekeeping force in the world stationed in Goma, they have previously been prohibited from engaging in tactical conflict with the rebels. However, after last November’s invasion of Goma, the UN issued the first ever mandate explicitly allowing the UN to use offensive force. The Intervention Brigade consists of 3,000 soldiers from nearby Tanzania, South Africa, and Malawi, as well as smaller contingents from India, Nicaragua, and other allied nations. The recent clashes have been the first time that the Intervention Brigade forces have been directly involved in ground combat. After a week of heavy fighting, the military backed by the UN forces successfully pushed M23 away from Goma.

The M23 rebels had to take heavy losses. Sources on the ground report scenes of abandoned M23 helmets and AK-47s on the roadside, indicating a rapid retreat.

In the days since the withdrawal of M23 troops last week, it has been relatively calm on both the Rwandan front line and in Goma. There is renewed hope that the long road to peace and rebuilding may finally start with the peace talks beginning within this week.

More from Congo:

The VICE Guide to Congo

Kony, M23, and the Real Rebels of Congo

A Chat with the Executive Secretary of Congo's Rampant M23 Rebels

It has come to our attention that certain sentences in the article that lived here bore a close resemblance to sentences on a reddit thread published before this piece appeared. For that reason, we have removed this article from VICE.com.

Photo via Flickr user Cory Doctorow

My friend Glenn would bring his PlayStation 2 over to my house after class during middle school. I think it was mostly because I had a TV in my room, and he didn’t—like all adolescents, we wanted to obsess over our passions in private. I remember never really knowing how the wires were supposed to attach to the back of the monitor and how we’d just keep guessing until it worked. Our afternoons revolved around Vice City, the second game in Rockstar’s rebirthing of the Grand Theft Auto franchise. You played as Tommy Vercetti, a scummy, greased-up coke dealer with a Hawaiian shirt and a lot of one-liners. One day Glenn had his sniper rifle pointed right at a cab driver’s face as my father walked in the room. Glenn pulled the trigger, replacing the cabbie’s head with a fountain of blood, and that was too much for my dad. No more bedroom GTA action for us.

Six years later I was one month away from my 18th birthday, which meant I was one month away from the right to purchase Grand Theft Auto IV. I couldn't stand to wait, though, so my brother and I hatched an elaborate plan. Our friend Alex was 18, so we signed up for the preorder under his name at the local Gamestop, pooled our cash, and sent him off with 60 of our hard-earned dollars. A copy of GTA IV was hand-delivered to us in an inconspicuous plastic bag a few hours later, like some kind of contraband. I remember watching my brother carefully slice off the cover art so the box wouldn’t arouse any parental suspicions. We played in shifts, our thumbs hovering over the pause button in case mom or dad made any unexpected visits. Nothing would stop us from experiencing the latest volume of the most important media franchise of our time.

For as long as I can remember—which is as long as Grand Theft Auto games have been coming out—the franchise has been surrounded by controversy. It’s a video game synonymous with the violent, satanic indulgences that have been blamed for school shootings and godless children. Disbarred Florida attorney Jack Thompson has dedicated his activist career to destroying the franchise and its creators (along with rap music and Howard Stern). New York politicians criticized GTA IV’s portrayal of their city, Mothers Against Drunk Driving hated that characters could get behind the wheel while shitfaced, and the Chicago Transit Authority refused to let ads for series appear on its property. You likely remember the hysterias caused by GTA—the crimes it got blamed for, the won't-somebody-think-of-the-children rhetoric. (You may also remember that some of the more important works of narrative art of the 20th century were the subject of outright bans, a la Ulysses and Lolita, but that's another story.) 

There was a moment, back in 2005, when modders uncovered the sex-simulating “Hot Coffee” minigame lodged deep in the code of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, where it seemed that GTA was about to crash and burn. San Andreas got slapped with the commercially nonviable “Adults Only” rating, and the Federal Trade Commission started investigating Rockstar’s parent company’s advertising practices. And the games did change, a bit—the company agreed to “clearly and prominently disclose on product packaging” any objectionable content, and when I killed a cab driver in GTA IV there was no fountain of blood, just an ugly lurch of the gun, a solemn stain of red on the windshield, and a limp body in the driver’s seat. The streets of Liberty City got a little less gleeful, the violence became a little more human. Storylines in GTA IV included a character's cousin’s taxi business getting burnt to the ground as we watch, a bank robbery going horribly, tragically wrong, and a revenge saga rooted in the atrocities of the Bosnian War.

Some said the franchisehad matured, that it was finally discarding the silly, crime-TV parodies of the earlier games and embracing something “serious.” But for my money, GTA has always been on the cutting edge. The plethora of longform, narrative-focused games we have today wouldn’t exist without Grand Theft Auto IV; the dynamic, open-world games wouldn’t exist without Grand Theft Auto III. Rockstar has always been the vanguard of innovation, and their marquee franchise exists to push boundaries. GTA stands as perhaps the one franchise most responsible for legitimizing video games as art on a mainstream platform.

If that sounds fanboyish, maybe that’s a consequence of growing up with these games—every single GTA release since at least the Vice City days was a watershed moment in my adolescence, like Christmas except my parents hated it. When I buy my copy of GTA V, I’ll still feel a twinge of disobedient sin.

Will this installment have the same wide-ranging effect as its predecessors? I don’t know. It’s hard to stay influential and groundbreaking for as long as the GTA franchise has. GTA V be the last major release exclusive to our current generation of consoles, and it’s entering a climate where games like The Last of Us, Bioshock: Infinite, and Far Cry 3 have borrowed some of GTA’s blueprints to amazing effect. Early reviews have stressed the game’s sheer ball-busting fucking awesomeness, but some have also pointed out that it’s retained the franchise’s streak of sneering misogyny, which more gamers are aware of these days.

On the other hand, the franchise has mostly outlasted its critics—hardly anyone seems eager to denounce GTA V as a brutal, child-corrupting monster. Even Fox News is publishing blog posts about how the games have “grown up.” Only the willfully ignorant think that 1) These games are for young kids; 2) You get “points” for having sex with prostitutes; or 3) The sheer scope of playable world and the level of detail aren’t amazing achievements in and of themselves. Even more importantly, I don’t live with my parents anymore. See you guys in a couple weeks.

@luke_winkie

More on video games:

'Grand Theft Auto V' Is Going to Destroy My Social Life

My Name Is Tom and I'm a Video Game Addict

Whoa, Dude, Are We Inside a Computer Right Now?

For a while, the residents of Manitoba Colony thought demons were raping the town’s women. There was no other explanation. No way of explaining how a woman could wake up with blood and semen stains smeared across her sheets and no memory of the previous night. No way of explaining how another went to sleep clothed, only to wake up naked and covered by dirty fingerprints all over her body. No way to understand how another could dream of a man forcing himself onto her in a field—and then wake up the next morning with grass in her hair.

For Sara Guenter, the mystery was the rope. She would sometimes wake up in her bed with small pieces of it tied tightly to her wrists or ankles, the skin beneath an aching blue. Earlier this year, I visited Sara at her home, simple concrete painted to look like brick, in Manitoba Colony, Bolivia. Mennonites are similar to the Amish in their rejection of modernity and technology, and Manitoba Colony, like all ultraconservative Mennonite communities, is a collective attempt to retreat as far as possible from the nonbelieving world. A slight breeze of soy and sorghum came off the nearby fields as Sara told me how, in addition to the eerie rope, on those mornings after she’d been raped she would also wake to stained sheets, thunderous headaches, and paralyzing lethargy.

Continue reading about the rapes at Manitoba Colony.

Lately, the Canadian government has been getting on the wrong side of the scientific community—what with their research budget cuts, poor environmental policies and Big Brother-level monitoring on scientists' interactions with the media. These restrictive, anti-research policies have turned Stephen Harper’s government into the number one enemy of the scientific community.

All of this tension came to a head in Toronto yesterday afternoon when about 250 people, many of them donning white lab coats, descended on Queen's Park to voice their disapproval in the sort of calm, organized rally you'd expect from a crowd made up of brainiacs with science degrees. The event, organized by the University of Toronto Faculty Association, University of Toronto Graduate Students Union (UTGSU), and citizen collective Scientists For the Right to Know, was part of a day of rallies in cities across Canada dubbed “Stand Up for Science.” The nation-wide effort was put together by not-for-profit Canadian organization Evidence for Democracy (E4D), who advocates for the government to make decisions based on sound science instead of “ideology or political convenience” and is against cuts to science funding and research censorship.

“The science in Canada is the lifeblood for the nation and it has been very difficult to find that this has been choked... We are not funding basic science to the degree that we used to,” president of Scientists For the Right to Know Margrit Eichler said. Eichler, a former sociology and equity professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, added that she hoped the rally would bring the issue to forefront of Canadian politics.

“We want this to be an election issue,” she said.

The rally kicked off just after noon, by anti-Harper protest fixtures the Toronto Raging Grannies, who sang a song decrying the Conservative government's politics. After a series of speeches from organizers and a message read on behalf of John Polanyi, the only living Canadian Nobel Prize winner, the group, made up of scientists, professors, students and self-described “concerned citizens” peacefully marched south down University Avenue chanting slogans like “Stand up for science!” and “What do we want? Basic research funding! When do we want it? Now!” while carrying signs and banners. Maybe not have been the catchiest slogan but, point taken.

Environmental chemistry PhD student Emma Mungall said she marched because, as a scientist and someone concerned about climate change, she couldn't stand to sit around idly as the government muzzled scientists and swept away inconvenient truths.

“Seeing Harper decimate Environmental Canada and the entire infrastructure of environmental science in Canada... It's this whole idea of scientists telling people what they want to believe. No one wants there to be terrible pollution, no one wants there to be rapid climate change that is going to cause a lot of problems, but these things need to be talked about,” Mungall said. “They need to be acted on now.”

The Canadian government can't say they don't deserve the growing internal and international backlash that's been gradually building. The Tories have been steadily chipping away at scientific advancement since they got their minority government in 2006, getting rid of the Office of the National Science Advisor (intended to offer expert scientific advice to the Prime Minister) and cutting five percent of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council's 2012 budget. They've also given Canada a bad rap on the environmental front, steadily nudging funds usually used for environmental research into studying the economy instead, pulling Canada out of the Kyoto Protocol, removing 98 per cent of lakes and rivers from protection against urban development and promoting Alberta's oil sands, a big Canadian money-maker, despite the pollution they cause.

“There's a growing trend in government to ignore evidence and basically proceed on the basis of ideology as opposed to evidence... There's a growing trend of research and funding deficit,” University of Toronto biochemistry professor John Glover said. “I personally know a lot of excellent scientists who are having very difficult time having their research funded. And I think this is a result of possibly having governments that... ignore science in favour of ideology.” 

Even the scientists themselves are on lockdown. Federally-funded scientists not allowed to speak to the press, no matter how mundane the subject, without explicit permission from the Prime Minister’s office—if they do, they face suspension without pay or could even be fired. Foreign scientists doing joint research with Canadian scientists are forced to sign non-disclosure agreements. Infamously, during the 2012 International Polar Year conference in Montreal, media handlers followed Environment Canada researchers around recording what they said to journalists.

And it's not only the “hard sciences” that have taken a blow—the social sciences have taken just as hard a hit. The federal government's elimination of the long-form census in 2010 left sociologists with data gaps for certain Canadian demographics, particularly for low-income communities, small towns and new immigrants, three groups who are unlikely to complete the now voluntary survey because of lack of interest or low English comprehension skills. Librarians and historians are also reeling from 215 job cuts at Library and Archives Canada, which is responsible for collecting Canadian documents and making the records accessible to the public.

“It's very troubling,” a librarian who did not want to be named said as she marched. “Closing down libraries is the first step to erasing and distorting history.”

The demonstrators walked until Elm Street, where they turned around and made their way back to Queen's Park. In a closing speech, Eichler thanked attendees for “taking a stand,” and promised more rallies would be coming before the end of the year.

Internal commissioner for the UTGSU and third-year history of education master's student Brad Evoy said he was happy with the turnout, and that it showed Canadians want something different from what the federal government does.

“I think our point came across fairly well,” Evoy said.  “Folks wish to see a return to evidence-based policy and funding for basic science that underlies all the policy and the kind of decisions that we need to make in this country.”


Previously:

Stephen Harper Needs to Stop Gagging Canadian Scientists

Michael Lodberg Olsen standing next to the Illegal! magazine van

Michael Lodberg Olsen is the bearded, benevolent guardian angel to Copenhagen's drug addicts. A couple of years ago, the Dane started driving a van around his home city offering heroin users a safe, sterile environment in which they could inject under the supervision of volunteers and trained nurses, rather than behind some bins in the park or in a shitty bedsit. Olsen's scheme initially met a fair amount of local opposition, but in the end, he managed to win many of his detractors over.

Michael's latest project, which he launched a couple of weeks ago, is Illegal! – a magazine that hard drug users can buy for 10 Danish krone and sell to the public for 30 krone (around £3.40). It's similar in some ways to the Big Issue, until you drill down and get to the mission statement. While the Big Issue was set up to feed homeless people and get them off the streets, Illegal!'s explicit aim is to help drug addicts – many of whom are homeless – raise money to buy more drugs.

Again, the scheme has attracted criticism – after all, much of the cash handed over will be going straight into the pockets of heroin dealers – but Michael has presented a case that's hard to argue with. Surely it's better that Copenhagen's drug addicts are earning their money selling magazines, than if they are – for example – robbing people, shoplifting or selling their bodies for sex?

Michael (left) and his colleague Thomas Paalsson

I flew to Copenhagen last week to meet Michael and some of his team at the back entrance to Copenhagen’s Central Station, an area notorious for drug dealing, prostitution and other forms of street crime. From the get-go, Thomas Paalsson – one of Michael’s colleagues – was keen to stress that the scheme isn’t just a form of glorified begging: “I think the main thing about making a magazine to sell instead of begging is that it becomes more dignified," he explained. "Our goal is to make a magazine that people will actually like, with high-quality articles and interesting graphics. If drug users have something that you really want, then they can sell the product with dignity."

The group behind Illegal! have been working with the city's drug users for over a decade, and these strong ties allow them to provide a deeper level of care than a standard social worker on placement. Thomas explained how, over time, that bond has helped the team tailor their latest harm-reduction service to the needs of the local population: “It’s important to remember that this project is only taking place in this part of Copenhagen – this whole project sprang from a local environment," he told me. "It is, of course, related to the much bigger picture, but it's a civil society project that came about to deal with a local problem."

Which doesn't necessarily mean that Mail headline writers won't soon have some new social outrage to wring their hands about. While Michael argued that the scheme would have to be adapted and redefined for other cities across the world, they remain excited about the prospect of introducing Illegal! to places like London and Berlin. "It would be interesting to move this to other capitals, because it’s in the capitals where things are starting to move, and where we have to move people on," Michael told me. "We personally can’t do anything about changing the laws, but we can do this project and have a real effect on people’s lives."

The front and back page spread of Illegal!

I called Danny Kushlick from drug policy foundation Transform to get his view on whether Illegal! could work in London.  

"The Copenhagen project is right at the cutting edge, and is indicative of a society that is more advanced and tolerant than we have in the UK," he told me. "Many Scandinavian countries have some of the highest levels of societal wellbeing in the world, and long histories of tolerance and openness with regard to sex and drugs. The UK does not, and I can't imagine it catching on soon here, unless the Big Issue editorial team undergoes a substantial change of heart."

When I asked Danny what obstacles he saw a London version of Illegal! facing, he responded: "Can you imagine what Boris would say? I would envisage comments such as, 'the deserving and undeserving homeless', and cries that this would 'taint London's image for tourists'."

So perhaps we'll have to wait a while before British authorities allow people to legally and explicitly solicit drug money in the street. However, in a promising development, Danish law enforcement – at least when they're off the record – seem to be backing the idea: "Today, two policemen came on bicycles, asked how the project was going and wished us luck," Michael told me. And many of Illegal!'s vendors have apparently come back to Michael after a day's work and reported that, rather than being targeted for an easy arrest, they have instead been left to sell their product in peace.

Rene

While I was chatting with Michael and Thomas, a group of schoolchildren approached us to ask what the project is about, and a steady stream of drug users checked back in to pick up more magazines. Rene, a long-time user, told me that he usually makes money by selling stolen meat – which is switching it up a bit from the more popular methods of robbery and prostitution, but is still clearly against the law.  

“The project is a good thing, because it allows me to earn some money to survive,” Rene explained, before telling me that he had been selling the magazine since it launched, along with 33 other vendors, all of whom are required to sign up to the scheme and wear an ID badge. When I asked what else needs to be done to help drug addicts, his tone changed – he switched back to his native tongue and he began to look distraught. “People need to listen to us,” Michael translated for me. “For people to have a connection with us, and not to ignore us."

Other than the financial reward, it's this exact issue that the Illegal! project aims to address. Rather than side-lining drug addicts, the magazine aims to create a bridge allowing users to engage with the general public. It forces the stigma and hang-ups that define the relationship between those two groups of society out into a space where they can be tackled head-on.

The Illegal! van.

"The point of this is to get things out into the open so that you can have people talking about drugs and really dealing with the problem," Thomas continued. "The War On Drugs hasn't made [drugs] disappear. The criminalisation of drug culture doesn't make people take fewer drugs – in fact, they're cheaper and they're everywhere."

With that, Rene took his re-up of magazines off to make some money, which he told me would be spent on "some rocks" once he'd finished his shift. After he left us, Michael made sure to make one point very clear: "These are strong people," he told me. "If I had to live the life that these people do, I wouldn't even last six months. It is incredibly tough."

Before leaving, I bought a copy of Illegal! from one of the users I'd had a brief chat with. After flicking through it, one particular article stood out – an anonymous letter from a drug user, perhaps one of the people I'd seen outside Copenhagen’s Central Station, calling for governments to change the way that they view drug users. “Come on," they wrote, "if you want to help us, do it through cooperation and decriminalise us!"

Follow Joseph on Twitter: @josephfcox

More stories about drugs:

I Dated a Mephedrone Addict for Two Very High Months

The Canadian Prison System Is Keeping Prisoners Doped Up On Methadone

This Drug Dealer Is in Hiding from Saudi Arabia's Religious Police

Cruising Through Cape Town's Slums with Elite Drug Cops

Photo via Flickr user Keith Allison

JR Smith isn't like you or me, because he's very good at basketball—so good, in fact, that he gets a lot of money to play the game for the New York Knicks. Last season he won the sixth man of the year award while burnishing his reputation for being TMZ fodder whenever he stepped off the court. In January, he crudely propositioned a high school student via Twitter with the line, “You trying to get the pipe?“; during the playoffs no less a personage than Rihanna said he partied too much. Previously, he tweeted a photo of “the girl with the biggest ass ever“ lying in his hotel bed (she turned out to be the on-again off-again girlfriend of rapper Joe Budden), and more seriously, back in 2009 he killed his friend in a car accident and spent 30 days in jail for reckless driving.

In a turn of events that came as a surprise to absolutely no one, Smith recently got suspended for five games for failing a drug test (the fourth such test he’s flunked) and violating the NBA’s substance abuse policy. Though what exactly he tested positive for hasn’t been publicly confirmed, the scuttlebutt is that they detected marijuana in his system.

It’s understandable that the league would want to keep its players away from performance enhancing drugs, but why shouldn’t Smith be allowed to smoke weed? He’s not in charge of the nation’s nukes; he just shoots a basketball in front of tens of thousands of people about 80 times a year. But many, many people have to deal with the same kind of intrusive testing he does. Actually, the fact that Smith has to worry about fucking up a drug test is one of the only things he has in common with the majority of non-NBA Americans.

If you’re applying for a job, odds are you’re going to have to take some type of drug test, and you may have to keep on taking them to maintain employment. A 2011 report from the Society for Human Resource Management said that 57 percent of businesses required all job candidates to pass drug tests, and another 10 percent tested candidates for selected positions.

The businesses that test range from those paying supremely talented athletes to kick and fling various balls to those paying teens and seniors minimum wage to wear khaki and stock the shelves of a mega-store squatting in some immense parking lot. Everyone except your steak-brained uncle who won’t stop forwarding you emails about Obama knows that the war on drugs is a bad idea by now—even televangelist Pat Robertson wants to legalize marijuana—but corporate America wants to keep their employees drug free, and as usual, it’s their vote that counts.

Take the case of Brandon Coats, a 33-year-old who used to work as a telephone operator for Dish Network in Colorado until he was fired for failing a drug test in 2010. This was a random test, just like the one that ensnared JR Smith—Dish didn’t consider him to be some kind of slack-jawed, drug-sucking fiend who needed to be monitored, he just got unlucky.

What makes this particularly unjust is Coats has had a prescription for medicinal marijuana since 2009 to deal with the effects of a car crash that left him partly paralyzed. He sued to get his job back but lost, and the court of appeals in Colorado (where, as you’re probably aware, pot is legal) recently upheld the ruling, stating, “For an activity to be lawful in Colorado, it must be permitted by, and not contrary to, both state and federal law.”

So when state law conflicts with rules set up by employers, business will trump government. Cool. Here’s how the Manufacturers Alliance for Productivity and Innovation, an organization for manufacturing executives, explains the confusing legal conflicts like this:

“The Colorado law—specifically Amendment 64 to Article 18 of the state constitution—prohibits employers from terminating employees for engaging in lawful activities (marijuana possession and use) off the employer’s premises during nonworking hours unless the employer’s decision relates to a bona fide occupational qualification, the employee’s specific duties, or the employer’s efforts to avoid a conflict of interest. However, the Colorado law expressly states that marijuana legalization does not affect the right of employers to maintain a drug-free workplace.” (Emphasis mine.)

The same rules generally apply in Washington, the other state to have fully legalized weed. In 2011, the state supreme court ruled against a woman working as a customer-service rep who was fired for failing a test even though she was taking medicinal marijuana to treat migraines, and even though she had told them she was taking marijuana.

The Office of National Drug Control Policy has argued for drug testing by saying, “The consequences of illicit drug use in America’s workforce include job-related accidents and injuries, absenteeism, health care costs, and lost productivity,” which may be true. But the system doesn’t go after those whose blood is 37 percent Glenfiddich, while it does target those who occasionally take a toke after a long day of listening me complain about my TV's satellite signal going down every time my neighbor barbecues. Nor does that argument address the reality that people can get fired for using legal drugs, now that marijuana is being decriminalized in many places across the country.

Beyond the ludicrousness of a company kicking an employee to the curb for using a legal, even medicinal substance, these tests might not even work. As Jacob Sullum wrote in the libertarian magazine Reason a decade ago:

“‘Despite beliefs to the contrary,’ concluded a comprehensive 1994 review of the scientific literature by the National Academy of Sciences, ‘the preventive effects of drug-testing programs have never been adequately demonstrated.’ While allowing for the possibility that drug testing could make sense for a particular employer, the academy's panel of experts cautioned that little was known about the impact of drug use on work performance. ‘The data obtained in worker population studies,’ it said, ‘do not provide clear evidence of the deleterious effects of drugs other than alcohol on safety and other job performance indicators.’” (Emphasis mine,)

Testing levels nationally have actually dropped over the last few years, from a high of 84 percent in 2006, but the next testing regime is on the horizon: Republicans in many state legislatures are trying (with a serious nudge from big pharma lobbyists) to push through bills written by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a conservative think tank, that would require drug tests for welfare and unemployment benefits recipients. One such measure was declared unconstitutional in Florida, and Utah’s testing program was a huge waste of resources, but that hasn’t stopped Republicans from advocating for these schemes.

This is in part because they may actually believe that folks receiving government assistance are lazy, shiftless addicts who should be punished harshly if their behavior deviates in any way from exacting standards that they, Republicans, demand. But it’s also likely in part because drug testing is a big business, and testing requirements for welfare would represent a massive influx of clients for the companies that operate the test.And, given the relative ease of flushing the traces serious drugs out of one’s system, it seems as if the goal isn’t catching more offenders or creating a drug-free workplace, but increasing the profits of the test makers.

JR Smith’s suspension was a just a throwaway offseason story. He’ll go back to the game and continue spraying 20-foot jumpers indiscriminately, because after all he is an enormously talented athlete who’s not easily replaced. If you fail a drug test at work, however, you’ll be fired or lose out on the chance at a job—if the GOP and ALEC get their way, you won’t even be able to receive unemployment. Marijuana should be decriminalized, but in the long run it may be more important to convince the people who sign the checks of millions of workers that smoking weed shouldn’t be a fireable offense.

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Clean Mountain Air

Most people don’t want to admit they eat at Golden Corral, despite the fact that it has an undeniably dazzling array of food—enough to satisfy the secret cravings and particularities of any sort of eater. Below, we’ve cataloged some plate arrangements put together by some of the most famous Golden Corral regulars.

Daniel Day-Lewis

Daniel Day-Lewis builds meals, structurally, beginning with children’s pizza. Released from the cashier, red plastic cup of Sierra Mist in hand, Day-Lewis refuses to sit at the table with his family until he overtakes the Pizza Korner of the buffet. Eyes glittering—pooling, perhaps—knees jigging up lightly in place almost like a cat kneading brainlessly and inappropriately on a doughy cat-dad’s belly as he lays tasteless pizza into log-cabin-honest foundations for ‘toppings’ in what he believes are avant-garde flavor profiles honed after decades of research at Golden Corral, or, sometimes, granted by God in moments of private epiphany.

John Kerry

John Kerry can’t help himself. Look at all this shit! This place is fun! John Kerry gets so worked up just standing near the troughs he can’t help but staring at all the choices, gape-mouthed, gripping his plate so hard sometimes it breaks in half. Then, once he gets his food, chosen impulsively but intuitively from the array using his fingers instead of the tongs, back at the table he finds it hard to even eat what he’s gathered. He sits and grins and waits and thinks and sits on his hands and rubs his sock-y feets together under the table. (“There will be no wearing of the shoes tonight, sir!” he tells his wife on the way to dinner. “You know, like Asia.”) What a feeling! What a world!

Danny DeVito

Danny DeVito, as it is well known, only eats beige or off-white foods. His young and inexperienced Buffet Runner was fired for including this irritatingly chalk-yellow egg center on his fourth plate and dismissed with a grand, magnanimous but unknown gesture, the sort upon which DeVito has built an empire.

Kanye West

Kanye West gets a plate of cake with ice cream and sits and watches that shit melt into a puddle. Once it has, he signals for the waiter to come over and get this fucking plate out of his face. Then he goes into the bathroom and washes his hands and face with the hottest water they’ve got while looking at himself in the bathroom mirror. Then he goes back out and does it again. Two hours, 17 cakes, and 80 gallons of ice cream later, he leaves a $30,000 tip in cash.

Cat Power

Chan Marshall of Cat Power scalps the awful and bland plaques of pastry off of the peach cobbler because they are the closest food equivalent she can find to the Void. She picks mournfully at the plaques until her date drops his fork and asks in a stern whisper why she must make her illnesses so ‘showy’ and ‘disruptive’ to everyone around her, which finally allows her to feel at home.

Willie Nelson

Willie Nelson can’t say why he feels compelled to pull over and go in any time he sees a sign for Golden Corral, but it’s become a problem. He’s missed doctors’ appointments, weddings, concerts… always suddenly finding himself instead seated there in the strange yellow light of a dining establishment where he doesn’t even care to eat. Once he’s seated, though, he finds he can’t bring himself to get up until they’re closing, pushed out again with an empty stomach into the edgeless night. It never fails that by the end of his stay he’s been offered dozens of refills on his water, resulting in new full glasses to match the ones he’s yet to drink, each of which Willie Nelson thanks his server kindly, while inside he’s all shrieking.

Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman is only interested in the cotton candy. His wife implores him to fill a plate with some actual dinner, a command he pretends to not understand. The zitty boy assigned to tend the dessert bar, whipping new paper cones around the cotton candy machine with powerful sloppiness, pretends to not hear Walt Whitman as he asks what else can be stuck into the machine and wound with this terrific gossamer netting.

Joel Osteen

Joel Osteen eats quietly, without utensils, facing a wall. His family waits outside in the minivan and will have to eat whatever they can find.

Martha Stewart

Martha Stewart eats alone at Golden Corral. She scoops clam chowder decorously into a tiny melamine bowl, then dumps the bowl upon her toast, fries, and red Jell-O and tops it with fried chicken livers. She knows the hot, cellulitey chowder will melt the Jell-O and only this, of all food combinations, will best mimic the slop she saw slipping down the tube her surgeon used during her last liposuction, a marbled pattern of whites and reds and pinks that she felt more proud of having created than anything else, more than any Perfect Lemon Rosemary Roasted Chicken or Winter Glitter Rick Rack Bunting she’s ever made, art made out of her very body, a pattern manifested wholly of her spirit made flesh, and which she hunts for again so painfully to replenish, to eat and keep in her, this one gorgeous thing.

R. Kelly

R. Kelly likes salad toppings. Just the ones that look clean, though, not like somebody’s ratty ass baby’s been digging around in it and whatnot. Beets are good as hell. R. Kelly likes seven peas only, which he counts out with a pair of gold tweezers he has made special with the date stamped on it whenever he goes to the buffet. Salad dressing must be applied sparingly, as that shit will fuck your abs up, but R. Kelly won’t even use what little appears on this plate because it expanded by chance into the sunflower seeds, and R. Kelly feels when two foods touch, that’s nasty. R. Kelly will hide the uneaten seeds in a napkin because he doesn’t want to be thought of as wasteful, or as a prude. The ham he doesn’t eat. R. Kelly takes the ham home in a bag and adds it to his ham collection.

David Lynch

David Lynch takes a blue plate. He puts the plate back. He picks the plate up again and looks at it with his reading glasses on. He puts the plate back and takes a red plate. He decides the red is right. He goes over to the steak station where a guy in a white coat asks him how he wants his steak cooked. David Lynch asks if he can just have a raw piece of the meat. The cook says that’s not allowed. David Lynch asks why that’s not allowed. The cook explains if a customer gets sick, that’s Golden Corral’s ass. I’m not going to eat the steak, David Lynch says. I just want to hold it. Come on, man, the cook says. What, haven’t you ever held a steak in public? David Lynch asks. He harrumphs and adjusts his tie. He asks loudly if there’s any justice in this world. No one answers. People are looking at him. David Lynch says OK he supposes he’ll just have to take the motherfucking steak cooked fucking all the way well done. He stands there staring hard at the side of the cook’s head waiting while the cook presses the steak hard against the grill to sear it extra, in spite. He plops the steak on David Lynch’s plate. David Lynch thanks the cook and walks with the steak held out before him over to the nearest trash can, drops the steak in it. He then walks and lingers for some time in front of the buffet area behind the other people dishing out their foods, watching who takes what. When the line clears, he steps up and takes a single taco salad shell out of a container full of shells, carefully selecting one well-buried underneath a pile of similar others, a very certain shell. He puts the shell on the steak plate still graced with the smatterings of meat juices. He carries the taco shell back to his table and sits with it pouting, whispering to the taco salad shell.

Axl Rose

Axl Rose trusts only corn and mini corn.

Previously by Blake Butler - If You Build the Code, Your Computer Will Write the Novel

@blakebutler

A man, his dog, and his watch. (Photo via)

Russian president/emperor Vladimir Putin is all about the big gesture, the one that lets you know exactly who's in charge. (Spoiler: Vladimir Putin is in charge.) When he’s not shirtlessly fishing, shirtlessly riding a horse through the Siberian wilds, or firing a crossbow at a whale from a motorboat (he kept his shirt on for that one), he’s passing through the provinces doling out luxury watches to delighted peasants. Or, when he's feeling more extravagant, simply throwing them in wet cement or lobbing them off bridges.

Putin officially only pulls in about $180,000 a year, which—shamefully—is less than what David Cameron, prime minister of "a small island to which no one pays any attention," makes. However, Putin's watch collection alone is valued at over $700,000, meaning those alleged ownership stakes in multiple oil and gas companies must be serving Vlad pretty well. 

The sweetest watch in his collection is this $500,000 number from A. Lange & Söhne, described by the company as a "peerless masterpiece," just like its celebrated Russian owner. Sitting next to that is the slightly less impressive $15,000 Breguet Marine and a number of Blancpains—throwaway pieces that go for around $12,000 a pop. The great shirtless one is also a fan of Patek Phillippe (particularly the white gold variety), whose suitably high-end Swiss advertising slogan is, “You never actually own a Patek Phillippe. You merely look after it for the next generation.” 

The message behind these watches is pretty obvious: in a country that reintroduced the term "oligarchy" to the wider world, Putin needs to remind his people that he is in charge; that if Russia is a mafia state, he is its capo di tutti capi.

He uses his watches as props in this pantomime, just as the Russian opposition uses them as a symbol of his corruption—the Russian United Democratic Party made this short video, which at 1:02 shows Putin throwing one of his expensive timepieces into wet cement. There it sits, waiting to be swallowed and eventually driven over. At other points in the video, Putin's shown deciding—seemingly on a whim—to give watches to strangers. The lucky serfs shown in the clip are the son of a shepherd and a metal worker; both received a Blancpain Aqualung, which retails at over $10,000. The shepherd’s boy was given the watch in an open display of patronage, while the metal worker just came right out and asked Putin for it. In the same way the Russian tsars gave Faberge eggs to their family members to indicate their power and wealth, Putin hands out watches. (By the way, Faberge eggs are still ridiculous status symbols for Russia's ruling class. The more things change, etc.)

Vlad looking beefy in one of his watches. (Photo via)

This is a perfect expression of the way the Russian president demonstrates his power. As the Bureau of Investigative Journalism outlined last year, Putin is believed to use luxury yachts, hangs out in a $550 million palace overlooking the Black Sea, and reportedly owns shares in three major oil and gas companies. The Russian political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky thinks Putin could be worth up to $70 billion, which would make him one of the richest people in the world. All of this is kept hidden slightly out of view, but Putin knows that wealth and power go hand in hand. So, while on the macro level he's carving up his country’s resources and sharing them with his cronies, on a micro level he's demonstrating his power by throwing away objects that are, to him, mere trinkets. “I am immensely wealthy, but wealth has no dominion over me,” is what he's not-so-subtly saying.

The use of wealth to impress, terrify, and reinforce power is as old as power or wealth (i.e., OLD). In his essay “The Praise of Folly,” written in 1509, the Dutch philosopher Desiderius Erasmus writes about noble houses that would use banquets to demonstrate their considerable wealth. Guests would be brought in front of a feast, but instead of sitting down to eat, they would watch as that banquet was destroyed in front of them. A second ton of food was then laid out and the guests would eat, possessed by the knowledge that their host was truly wealthy, because he could afford to just throw a bunch of food and wine away, and thus truly powerful. It was the culinary equivalent of chucking a watch in some cement.  

These small demonstrations often speak of larger things, the exercise of POWER, in the kind of all-caps-you-can’t-escape-these-structures way that Michel Foucault wrote about. A friend’s mother once described an encounter—which she insisted was true—with the mass-murdering Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. A Kenyan, she was working in a hotel in Nairobi in the 1970s when the then-leader rolled in with his entourage. During dinner, Amin beckoned to some waiters, who brought a number of cages over to his table. Amin opened his cage, which had a live monkey inside, picked up the animal, smashed its head against the table, and ate it.

This demonstration of small-scale savagery was indicative of the savagery Amin would inflict on his country as a whole. Putin hasn't got quite the same taste for animal cruelty as Amin, but his small demonstrations of power are matched by his larger ones. After all, if you are with him, you will be richly rewarded, but if you threaten him, you will—like his opponent Mikhail Khodorkovsky—be sent to prison indefinitely. The power dynamic is reinforced by everything Putin does. 

Some more sweet watch action in an uncomfortable three-way handshake from 2005 with Tayyip Erdogan and Silvio Berlusconi, who were then the heads of Turkey and Italy, respectively. (Photo via)

Running through all of this is the idea of patronage in its various expressions. If you look after your own people, you will remain in power, and if you show them that you are not to be messed with, you will stop them from rising against you. Of course, history has shown us that the "people" rulers look after don't tend to be the masses. In sixth-century France, the Merovingian dynasty was brought to an end because its rulers no longer had the wealth to pay their political supporters. They ran out of bribes. 

This sort of back-scratching deals go on today all over the world. The George W. Bush administration’s carve-up of Iraq and its ties to, among others, Halliburton, are large-scale examples of this, but these things begin on a small scale. The British prime minister’s personal patronage is clearly expressed by the fact that he or she can give and take away cabinet jobs at the drop of a hat. We think of this as entirely normal, but in fact it's a worrying concentration of power. It's a way of ensuring loyalty and good behavior among the ranks of those who are mutually invested in your authority.

In 2010, the price of building roads in Moscow was recently compared to the average price paid in Germany, and it turned out the Russian capital's roads cost nearly 17 times as much while being in much worse condition. A year later, Sergei Sobyanin, the then-mayor of Moscow, decided to repave some street and replace the asphalt, which reportedly gave off toxic gases when the sun came out, with brick. Fortunately, his wife Irina was involved in the brick business, meaning Sobyanin could reward her financially while also protecting his city from an almost certain spate of deaths caused by asphalt, the world's most commonly used road surface. 

There is another historical model of how to be a leader, but it's one that is generally ignored and often misrepresented. Cnut, the Danish king who ruled Britain and Scandinavia at the beginning of the 11th century, one day famously taught his fawning courtiers a lesson by taking his throne out onto the beach. The tide came in, as it does, and passed Cnut. When I was told this story in school, the teacher explained to us that this was the action of an arrogant king who thought he could turn back the tide, when in fact it was the exact opposite—Cnut was showing his people that there were limits to his power and that he should not be treated like a God.

Putin, who recently had a parody painting of him and Dmitry Medvedev wearing women’s underwear seized in a dawn raid, cannot tolerate the idea that his authority is limited or that he should ever act with any humility. He can give a peasant a watch, but he can’t give them any real power. His government’s recent decision to demonize homosexuality shows that he will continue to find new groups to oppress and new ways to express his power. In this, he is not alone among world leaders. It’s just a shame that he and so many of his fellow rulers aren’t more like Cnut. 

Follow Oscar on Twitter: @oscarrickettnow

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