Alex Ohanian standing in front of Lorde Ford.

Alexis Ohanian is a lot taller than I expected him to be, because for whatever reason I presume internet innovators to be of average or below average height—and whether it was deliberate or the result of some cosmic, happy accident, he also wears upvote-orange and downvote-blue checkered shirts.Ohanian, a co-founder of Reddit who’s also a notable internet freedom activist, stopped by the University of Waterloo last Friday as part of his 77-stop university and college campus tour. Ohanian is traveling the continent to speak with students, while promoting his new book about how the internet can change the world without the help of existing powers: Without Their Permission. Besides telling his back story and offering advice during his hour-long talk, Alexis also made an effort to appeal to the crowd by describing Waterloo as a cutting-edge place for research and startups (which is why it's one of his few Canadian stops), making a Rob Ford joke, and poking fun at the University of Toronto. I got a few minutes to sit down and talk with him about open internet, the TPP, Reddit and Aaron Swartz after he got off stage and just before he started signing books.

VICE: You've been very outspoken about internet freedom. But it feels like every couple of months, a new country or a new alliance is trying to pass a bill that will somehow censor the web. The newest iteration of that is the TPP—a twelve-country alliance to enforce American intellectual property ideals. What do you think about the TPP?
Alexis: It's ridiculous. The Trans-Pacific Partnership basically wants to strong-arm absurd intellectual property requirements among, what? A dozen nations? And it's all done behind closed-doors, without any public discussion, without any anything. It has the potential to stifle freedom of speech, it has the potential to curb innovation... Something as global and powerful as the open internet getting ham-fisted by undemocratic treatment, like we’re seeing from these closed-door meetings, is incredibly infuriating.

Wikileaks got a hold of one of the early drafts and the EFF has a really good download on all the things that are wrong with it. But it's not gonna go away. SOPA/PIPA was a very, very successful defeat thanks to millions of people who got together and called their reps and centers. ACTA in Europe was another amazing example... But until we have enough people in power who understand this technology, this is going to be an issue, because until then, the lobbyists will still win.

Do you think the TPP is the biggest threat to the open internet right now?
That's a big one. Unless I've been living under a bus for the last few days, it looks like whatever ruling we're going to get on net neutrality is going to be depressing in some way, shape or form. The Internet works because, technologically, all things are created equal, and cable companies want to make our Internet work like our cable TV because they can make more money from it. But from a technological standpoint, it makes no sense whatsoever and it breaks the free market of ideas that is the Internet. Like when Yahoo's default search and Google costs $10 more a month...

Yet right now, there's a stay-at-home dad in Pennsylvania working an [“anonymized”] search engine called Duck Duck Go, which is building a viable competitor to Google. I want to live in a world where a stay-at-home dad in Valley Forge, PA, can build a viable competitor to one of the most powerful companies in the world because that's where innovation comes from and that's a great world because we get better stuff out of it. And all that is under threat if we lose net neutrality.

How many hours do you spend on Reddit, and what's your favourite subreddit?
I try not to spend more than an hour a day… The MyLittleWarHammer subreddit is amazing even though I'm not a part of that community, so I don't understand it. ChangeMyView is one of my favourite new ones. It's a community of people spinning things they feel about the world. Like, “The drinking age should be 15, change my view.” And then other people submit the best arguments against their viewpoint to sort of win them over. So it's essentially kind of a debate forum, so yeah, it's very intriguing. And then there's always /r/corgi. Those dogs… I can't believe that they exist, they're amazing.

Corgis: how do they work? via Flickr.

Does the size and influence of Reddit ever scare you?
Yeah… I can assure you that Steve and I started this thing in a little apartment just trying to live—we wanted to live like college students as long as we could. The goal was to make something people want, then figure out the rest later. To see where it's at now... To see there are entire communities like /r/Mexico… Almost all of it's in Spanish, and they talk about everything from sports to politics to funny jokes that people who are part of the /r/Mexico community think are funny—to see that entire ecosystem evolve from a platform that just started with two kids in an apartment is unbelievable.

We’re still figuring out this whole social media thing, right? From my perspective, it's still hard to take notice of it, to really take account of it all, because we're still in the middle of it. We're still figuring it all out.

There's been a couple of controversial subreddits, some of them have been banned, and we were just talking about an open internet. Do you think openness and censorship—like removing controversial subreddits—are compatible?
Oh, absolutely. I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive. Like I said, all things are created equal. You have the openness to innovate without permission. If you have a good idea, you post it up there. That does not ignore law. There's a common misconception that the internet is a lawless place—it's anything but. There are laws that we have written that punish bad behaviour, which is what laws are supposed to do.

Where's the line for you?
The line for me? The line for me is the U.S., the way that we've handled things has always been: “If it is legal according to U.S. law, then it is okay.” Maybe offensive, and it sucks [to read offensive content, but if it’s legal we’re okay with it]. I mean, there are subreddits full of people denying the Armenian Genocide, and I hate seeing them. Those are my relatives who died and they're denying it, but that's the decision we made. And I've seen various cross-nations… France is trying to pass a law to make it illegal to deny the genocide, which I'm not actually even a big fan of because I don't... Whatever, it's a personal thing. But yeah, it's in accord with a U.S. law.

Aaron Swartz, another Reddit co-founder, was a major activist in the fight against SOPA and PIPA, and he was certainly a fan of keeping the net neutral… Were you in contact with Aaron shortly before his death?
No. I hadn't spoken to him in years, unfortunately.

What impact did his death have on you then, if any?
It wasn't the first time suicide had been a part of my life... Nothing about it ever makes sense… We’ll see what happens with Aaron's Law [a reform of the computer fraud and abuse act proposed in Aaron’s name]. To see something like Aaron's Law pass is something that is real, that is a clear impact. It's not just” “Hey, more people are talking about this or thinking about this issue.” It's like: “Look, we actually did something as a result.” I’m forever the entrepreneur; I want to be more results-driven because I want to be able to see that this is successful.

When did you lose touch with Aaron? Was it when he left Reddit?
Probably the month or so after? It was clear that he hadn't really been interested in working for a while. He was working on a book about child development and a bunch of other things, and we went our separate ways. I get caught up in life stuff and I'm never the most proactive with any of the people around me—we worked together for a few months but we had never been that close, and, you know. We moved. Life happened.

Previously:

Reddit Saved This Girl from Her Abusive Boyfriend

Aaron Swartz's Tragic Battle with Copyright

It's like a bad Chuck Norris joke come to life, but a 24-year-old mother in England was filmed hitting her pregnant belly with a hammer to prove that her unborn son was “hard."

Heather Thorpe was reported to have said, “My baby’s hard as anything—just watch this.” It was then that her boyfriend at the time—Sean Hanlon—filmed her taking a hammer from his tool box, exposing her eight-month pregnant belly, and striking herself twice.

Sean was obviously shocked, but not shocked enough to stop her from doing it or show the video to police until Thorpe accused him of domestic violence a couple months later. He took the video to the police in an effort to defend himself, but refused to press charges. In their eyes, no offense had been committed. He spoke on the incident saying,“I asked her what the hell she was doing but she just told me to stop over-reacting. Jonathon was born and he was OK.” He added, “I couldn’t believe it when the police didn’t press charges. I also sent the video to social services who have been sending someone round to see her regularly, but anyone can put an act on in front of them.”

Yes, a social worker has been paying visits to Heather and her now one-year-old son, Jonathon (not a typo). What did they have to say about all this? Well in a report they wrote, “On a scale of 1-10 (1 being the softest, 10 being the hardest)... the blows are around 5 or 6." So that must mean that anything under a 7.5 does not count as child abuse. Picture it in terms of those strongman tower games at carnivals; the ones where you have a mallet and have to hit the base as hard as you can for a puck inside the tower to hit a bell all the way up top. Heather Thorpe didn't manage to ring the bell, meaning she doesn't get to go to jail. Rather she only had enough strength to hit somewhere in the middle, meaning maybe she got a small stuffed animal.

The strangest part of all this is that perhaps Heather is right. Her son might be some sort of super-baby. The Daily Mail writes, “Mr. Hanlon released the video over a year after the event took place because a local paper ran a story last week about how Jonathon was a precocious 'superkid,' quoting Miss Thorpe claiming he could walk, talk, and read at the age of one.” Not only that, but Heather and Jonathon also made headlines months before when she gave birth to him “almost instantly in her parents' lounge." She was in labor for only five minutes, and out came Jonathon, hard as a rock. She also bragged to her social worker that at six-weeks-old, Jonathon could do the “V-sign” with his fingers on command. Don't be fooled, that does not stand for “victory," it stands for “vengeance”. As in, “Mess with me and I will seek vengeance.” 

Now before expectant mothers ditch the Mozart CDs and spark some belly-punching craze in an effort to make their infants smarter, know that Jonathon was lucky to be born in healthy condition. Sean Hanlon also says that Heather would punch herself during pregnancy because, “she wanted the baby to come out." Heather, is obviously pretty crazy (and pretty weak if she could only muster a 6 on the "baby smashing scale"). I urge all new parents to stick to standard nurturing practices, such as loving and kissing your baby. Cradle them, and provide them with a calm, nonviolent environment. Sure, your baby might seem like a total weak sissy for the first few years of its life, but give them some time.

@JustAboutGlad

Image courtesy of Miracoli

Italy’s former prime minister is a sex criminal, 42 percent of its young people are unemployed, and the country is currently going through its longest recession in 60 years. It would take a miracle to set Italy right, and that’s exactly what the country’s newest tabloid deals in. Miracoli (“Miracles”) is a 52-page weekly magazine full of stories about men healed by Lourdes’s water, nuns turning holy bread into meat in their mouths, and Italian celebrities revealing how saints / Mary /a pope saved or changed their lives. (Each issue also features a centerfold of a saint and a related prayer.) It first hit stands at the end of June and doesn’t have a website, but circulation is already at more than 70,000, which is remarkable in an era when print’s death rattle is louder than ever. I talked to Daniele Urso, Miracoli’s editor-in-chief, to find out more about Italians’ apparently bottomless spiritual appetites.

VICE: Why a magazine about miracles?
Daniele Urso: We thought it was hard to find a magazine that talks about hope. As a journalist, I acknowledge the fact that it’s easier to run bad news, and for this reason, we thought talking about miracles and people’s positive and marvelous experiences would be a suitable way to match an editorial project with a human need. The country’s [economic] crisis is one of many factors contributing to the rebirth of religious devotion.

Has there been any reaction from the Catholic Church?
The Church is ignoring us. We are getting great reactions from priests who are far from the higher spheres of the Vatican.

Do Italians have a favorite saint?
There’s a lot of devotion to Mary—she is usually the first one people refer to. Father Pio [a 20th-century Italian saint famous for bearing the stigmata who was accused of being a fraud] has a similar status. He is the religious figure of the moment because of his modernity and controversial status.

What about Jesus or God?
Mary is a mother, a pitiful character easy to relate to for our readers, who are mostly women—wives and mothers. The saints are human beings like us, and for that reason it is also easy to empathize with them. Jesus and God are seen as entities far from us, and God in particular can be frightening at times.

More from this issue:

Deep-Fried America on a Stick

The Act of Puking

Black-Gold Blues

For whatever reason the public perception of skateboarding seems to have changed over the last decade. Skaters on TV aren't obnoxious, glue-huffing wasters any more; they're admirable young men building community skateparks on Google ads. But the sport, or the culture that goes hand-in-hand with the sport, at least, did used to be seen as more of a threat to all things wholesome. 

One country where this held especially true was communist East Germany in the 1980s—also known as the German Democratic Republic, or GDR—before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Skateboarding was American, therefore subversive and dangerous, so the Stasi began monitoring the skating community to keep tabs on any potential troublemakers or ringleaders. The perceived danger quickly made its way into the state media. A news clip from the time instructs viewers that it is "our duty to protect our children and youths from [skateboarding]," meaning skaters were demonized and left to smuggle Californian-made boards over the border if they wanted to skate anything more advanced than a plank of wood attached to some rollerskate wheels.         

German filmmaker Marten Persiel made a "hybrid documentary" about the history of skating in the GDR called This Ain't California, which was released last year in Germany and gets its international cinematic release next month. The film was criticized on its release for its liberal use of reconstructions and the fact its lead character never actually existed, but Marten told me, "all the things that happen in the film are true stories." He simply amalgamated them to create a lead character who he could hang the narrative from. And in a "hybrid documentary," that doesn't seem like too big of a deal.

I spoke to Marten about his film, skateboard smuggling, and hugely successful punk bands made up entirely of secret service agents.

VICE: Hey Marten. Why did you want to tell this story?
Marten Persiel: I'd been living abroad for a while and become quite detached from the German part of me. So I came up with the idea of making a comedy about everything that's kind of dorky about Germans—like their lack of style and how they can't dance—and obviously the more East German people are, the more dorky they get. Skateboarding has been the only real line going through my life, so the idea was to make a film about German dudes on a skateboard. I thought it was an original idea, but after I researched it I realized that there really was a skateboarding scene in East Germany.

There was a bit of controversy after the film was originally released about your use of reconstructions—how you combined stories from various real people to create new characters. How do you respond to that?
I think the controversy was mainly because, if you’re a filmmaker—or if you have a film that doesn’t go to festivals—you’re going to have to slog it either through the documentary section or the fiction section. Those are basically the only two doors in, and I like to compare it to a public toilet in a train station. You have to piss, and you either go in the ladies' or gents'. If you’re a hermaphrodite, you’re stuck. And no matter what you do, someone’s going to get pissed off with you. That’s basically what happened with our project.

Photo by Harald Schmidt 

Your film is a hermaphrodite?
Yeah, basically. Because it’s a true story told with slightly constructed characters. It’s very much a documentary in that it's a true story and there are interviews and photos and everything. But it’s also got a fictional aspect, because although everything that happens is a true story, I put it together using tools of the fictional movie-making—reconstructing characters and all. Really, the problem that we had was basically that documentary filmmakers felt the purity of their trade was diluted by our film.

The thing that fascinated me most in the film was the GDR state's opposition to skateboarding. Where did that come from?
It’s a story you have to tell in three parts. Firstly, it was regarded as an American thing, and therefore subversive and not wanted. Then it was regarded as a new sport that, if it was going to be in the Olympic games, they would have to start training people for. Then they realized that skateboarders are very hard to organize and basically don’t collaborate, so they went back to their original attitude of not liking skateboarding. There's a bit in the film where a newsreader says that skateboarding creates amorality and egocentric individualism. And that’s really skateboarding, isn’t it? It is egotistical in the sense that you do exactly what you want.

And that didn't quite chime with the GDR.
Exactly. That’s not in line with any totalitarian system. No totalitarian system is going to be into things that further individualism.

Do you think that played into the state trying to turn the skaters into an Olympic team? Reining them in a bit with sponsorships and training schedules and that kind of thing?
Yes and no. That was more like a reaction to the fact that they couldn’t stop the popularity. It was too late to stop that, so they had to take a share of it and be seen as the winners of this trend. They did the same with music; one of the most popular punk bands consisted almost purely of secret agents.

Wow. Do you remember what they were called?
No, but I remember they hyped that band and made them really popular, basically to infiltrate and control this alternative music scene. There are so many cool stories about that kind of thing that, obviously, I was tempted to put in my film. But I decided not to because I really wanted to keep it to the main story.

Cool, you can tell me instead.
One story that British readers might relate to is about Rammstein. In the 90s, they presented themselves in a neo-fascist, neo-Nazi kind of aesthetic. I hated that kind of thing when I was a teenager because I was an anti-fascist, punky guy, so they were the enemy. But when I was researching, I found out that in East Germany, they were a punk band without any of the fascist stuff. More punk in the way you and I know it, imitating the British punks. But then the wall came down, and when you're coming from socialism and you want to be a rebel, the last thing you want to be is left wing. So they completely reinvented themselves because they realized the only way to keep pissing people off was to dress like neo-Nazis.

How much access to Western music did East German kids have back then?
It’s kind the same as it is now, in that you have Germany and you have Berlin, and they're really two different universes. If you were living in the East or in Dresden or in the country, you were really, really cut off from getting your hands on even a single tape of Western pop music. Whereas, if you were living in East Berlin, like the guys I’m talking about in the film, you could actually receive Western television and be visited by Western Berliners. There was a sort of underground trade where people from the West would pack tapes and hide them and take them over to the East and sell them for a lot of money. Long story short: if you were in East Berlin, it was possible to get stuff. But anywhere else in the East, forget about it.

And people smuggled boards over the border as well, right? Titus and John Haak are the two smugglers in your film.
Yeah, Titus is the guy in the West. He’s still around and he’s basically the godfather of German skateboarding in the West. And John Haak could travel because his father was Finnish and Finland had a special diplomatic agreement with both sides. So he could go back and forth whenever he liked. The way he did it was to put some pornography on the top of the bag, so the border guards would get the gist, take the porn mags and not search any more.

And this was still going on after the GDR started making skateboards?
Yeah, but the Eastern skateboards were terrible. They had the rollerskate stopper at the front. It was a really bad design.

Do you think it had something to do with wanting the American products still as well? There's a bit in the film that mentions how skaters used to paint American brand names onto their own clothes.
Yeah. In the film, I tried to portray it as a kind of war paint—like native Indian tribal symbols. The 1980s were a time when you could be a rocker and find rocker friends anywhere in the world. This kind of tribal behavior was new, but also very strong in the 80s—wearing the colors of your posse.

I imagine that all hit East Germany a bit later on as well, so when they got it they went all out.
Oh yeah. I'm from that generation—I grew on the western side—and we were all pretty good when they were just starting to learn ollies and do a bit of trick skating.

It was heel flips on one side and handstands on the other?
Yeah, that’s a good way of putting it. It was two different attitudes—heel flips were a new style of skateboarding, and handstands were really much more to do with the freestyle skating of the 70s.

Yeah. I don't want to give any spoilers away, but your film kind of culminates with the secret police monitoring the All-German Skateboard Championships—where West German skaters came to compete in the East. You spoke to an ex-secret service agent for the film—did he say why they were monitoring skaters, exactly? 
Yeah, they were trying to gather intelligence for the sake of gathering intelligence. It's like the NSA scandal; if they actually had a case to solve and they already had everyone on file, it would make it a lot easier. It was like Mossad in Israel—a small country with a huge secret service. So they would gather intelligence, and when they identified who the leader and the opinion-makers were, they tried to infiltrate the whole scene. They weren't interested in arresting people from the scene—they were more interested in keeping tabs on what was happening at all times.

Lastly, how did things change after the wall came down? Did skaters integrate or just move on to something new?
Some of them integrated and carried on skating, because they were in, like, their early 20s, the right age, so they just adapted to the real world, to the Western world. But a lot of it was lost. A lot of people stopped skateboarding and a lot of the spirit was lost. That was the special thing about skateboarding in the East as a whole: it was hard to do and it gave you enough enemies to rub against. It filled the teenagers' lives with an energy and an extravagance. For a lot of young people and teenagers, when that has gone, the thrill is gone as well.

Because there's nothing left to rail against.
Yeah. And that’s what sucks about the X-Games, when everything is Olympic and stuff, it's only half the fun. It's much more fun if it’s illegal.

Click through to see more photos of skateboarding in the GDR.

Follow Jamie on Twitter: @jamie_clifton

More skating:

A Decade of Photos from London's Southbank Skate Park

Tony Hawk's Son Sucks at Being a Lazy Rich Kid

The Trials and Tribulations of Building a Skatepark in India

Photos by the author.

Enbridge’s 38-year-old Line 9 oil pipeline runs from Montreal to Sarnia, crossing many waterways and communities along its 639-kilometre route. The company has applied to transport highly toxic diluted bitumen—or dilbit—from Alberta’s tar sands through the pipeline and to reverse its flow, a move which pipeline expert Richard Kuprewicz has said would increase the line’s risk of rupturing to “over 90 percent.”

I decided to check out the pipeline first hand to see where it passes through the city of Toronto and what kind of damage a spill could unleash. Enbridge has dubbed Toronto a “high consequence area,” meaning that if the pipeline ruptured within city limits, the company would respond within four hours. Starting at one of the city’s major waterways, and following a bike lane that runs along the pipeline route, I saw about 13 kilometres of Line 9—approximately 2% of its overall route.

Other communities have learned the hard way that a dilbit spill is a lot more dangerous and difficult to clean up than a conventional, liquid oil spill. The diluted bitumen mixture contains both light and heavy materials—diluents and bitumen—which separate in the event of a spill. The diluents—a toxic mixture that often includes hydrogen sulphide, benzene, toluene, xylene, n-hexane, natural gas, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons—evaporate into the air, putting those nearby at risk of potentially lethal toxic exposure “without necessarily any warning odour being sensed.” These airborne toxins are also highly flammable, and increase “the risk that an oil spill will explode if it comes into contact with high heat, sparks, static electricity or lightning.”After the diluents evaporate, the tar sands bitumen remains behind. If the spill occurs into a body of water, the bitumen sinks and becomes almost impossible to recover.  

With all that in mind, I began where Line 9 is buried directly beneath the Don River, which runs throughout Toronto’s east end and drains into Lake Ontario. A spill in this location, or into the Humber and Rouge Rivers within the GTA that Line 9 also crosses, has the potential to poison Lake Ontario, which is unfortunately Toronto’s main water supply, and to spread dilbit throughout the city’s central and southern regions.

Although Enbridge’s reversal proposal has not yet been approved by the National Energy Board, I was surprised to find that the Don River crossing is already a major Enbridge construction site. In an effort to downplay the scope of the Line 9 reversal, which Enbridge framed in their indefensible application as a few parking lot and pump station upgrades in which “no new line pipe would be installed,” the company applied separately to the NEB to repair a section of the line that was collapsing due to river-bank erosion. This repair is what’s now underway. When I visited the site, a piece of the old, decommissioned pipe had been excavated and was in plain sight. It was surrounded by signs that read: “Danger: Radiation.”

This repair is a clear sign of Enbridge’s hubris. The company has already said that they will decommission Line 9 if the reversal is not approved. And despite waves of resistance and widespread disapproval among people along the pipeline route, Enbridge is acting as though approval is certain, sinking thousands of dollars into pipeline repairs that are necessary for the reversal project to go forward.

I followed Enbridge’s warning signs along the buried pipe, finding that the route was also marked with anti-Line 9 graffiti. The first part of the route was overwhelmingly residential, lined with rows of houses and blocks of high-rise apartments. Four houses on one block, directly across the street from the pipeline, were up for sale. In this residential corridor there was also a public park, a community playground, and a middle school. In the event of a spill, these areas would certainly need to be evacuated.

After a short while I reached Yonge Street, where Line 9 is buried within a few feet of the entrance to one of Toronto’s busiest subway stations—a door in the subway station seems to allow the pipeline to be reached from within. At this same intersection, the line passed under a York Region Transit bus terminal and a massive commuter parking lot, each surrounded by high-rise office buildings.

Further west, the line runs within metres of playgrounds and parks, a baseball diamond, a retirement home, an Alzheimer’s patients’ home, a church, and another residential corridor. Further still, it passed by a community centre, a BMX park, a fire station, a stadium, more schools, and a number of cemeteries. At G Lord Ross Park—a flood control dam and reservoir that Line 9 crosses through—someone was fishing. I stopped for lunch, a block from the line, in a plaza full of small businesses and still surrounded by high-rise offices.

The next stretch was largely industrial, with the pipeline right-of-way surrounded on both sides by massive, rusted tanks that store gasoline, diesel, propane, ethanol, and jet fuel – many of which were part of a Suncor complex. Recalling a testimony given to the National Energy Board by Équiterre, which warned that “a Line 9B spill and explosion in the Montreal-East petrochemical complex has the potential to create a major explosion, by setting off a domino effect in an area with highly explosive facilities,” I was alarmed to see the pipe come within metres of similar facilities in Toronto.

Immediately after the petro-chemical corridor, which ended at Shell’s Keele terminal, was a fire station that Line 9 passes directly beneath. In a testimony given to the National Energy Board by concerned students from the nearby York University, the board members were told that the fire fighters at this station didn’t know that the pipeline existed until the students came to ask them about their emergency response plan.

Further west, near Jane and Finch, I passed by some more high rises and a shopping mall. The ride ended at Highway 400, a six-lane highway that Line 9 passes directly beneath.

This is but a glimpse of who and what Line 9 threatens. Nothing mentioned in this article is more than a block away from the pipeline, and I wasn’t able to explore Finch Avenue, the major road one block south of the pipe. But a quick tour of Finch, in Google maps, adds countless causes for concern: Finch is lined with homes, townhouses, low and high rise apartments, offices, churches, schools, community centres, small and large businesses, major industrial facilities, parks, daycares, a nature conservation area, retirement homes, government buildings, specialized medical facilities, two major hospitals, and construction sites for new retail and office complexes, condos, and a new subway extension. Line 9 puts this all at risk.

Previously:

Enbridge's Last Word on the Line 9 Reversal Is Totally Unsatisfactory

How Activists Shut Down the Enbridge Line 9 Pipeline Hearings

Enbridge's Line 9 Pipeline Could Be Catastrophic for Ontario and Quebec

They even make this pun in Romania.

“Do you think they're about to have sex?” one of the activists whispers. I'm in Transylvania, in central Romania, crouched in the bushes with a bunch of hardcore anti-frackers in balaclavas, spying on a car that's crept to a halt close to where we are hiding. “No, it must be the cops, you can see the light from the mobile phone,” another one says. Time to move on.

It has been over an hour since the group started trashing equipment owned by the gas exploration company Prospectiuni, playing a game of cat and mouse with the security teams and police vehicles that are now sweeping the hilltops looking for us. Another light tears around the bend on the road and the shout goes through the team to hide. I throw myself down in the cool, damp grass of a Transylvanian meadow. It's going to be a long night.

A village gathers to complain about fracking.

In recent weeks, the sleepy Saxon communities and protected forests of Sibiu county in Transylvania have become the battleground of a new war, one that has pitted gas exploration companies, the Romanian government, and international investment firms against a small band of environmental activists. The activists, who have come here from across Romania, are working side by side with local farmers to resist the gas and oil exploration they claim is taking place illegally on their land.

The Romanian gas company Romgaz has had a long-stated desire to explore the low-lying hills of Transylvania, but it's only this month that it has started exploration in earnest. Thirty-four-ton seismic testing trucks—used by drilling companies to create artificial earthquakes in order to see what's under the groud—soon growled along the muddy tracks to the villages accompanied by cohorts of security guards and busloads of workers.

Today the villages and fields are laced with strips of ribbon, which stretch like spaghetti across the ancient landscape of beech forests, beehives, and the harvested stubs of cornfields. The ribbons indicate where the companies plan to lay their cables and plant the explosives for the seismic fracking tests. Locals told me that they awoke to find ribbons being laid across their land, with some even attached to their garden fences.

All the seismic tests are taking place inside Romania’s largest EU Natura 2000 site, which is strange, given that the stated aim of the Natura 2000 program is "to assure the long-term survival of Europe's most valuable and threatened species and habitats." These remote communities now resemble a territory occupied by a hostile army. When I arrive in one village, I watch as a team of workers prepares a hole with dynamite a few yards from the village soccer pitch. On the high street, private security jeeps are parked up at a crossroads, black uniformed men filming and following our every move.

Ripping up seismic wires.

My guide for the day, community activist Hans Hedrich, says such intimidation tactics are typical for Romania. “You must understand that in Romania, people are still afraid to speak out. All this security makes it seem as though the people have no right to object to what is going on. You could easily be forgiven for forgetting that this is the 21st century, and that we are within a democratic country and in the EU,” he says, exasperated.

At the end of the road an elderly orthodox priest ushers me inside nervously, asking not to be identified. “They told me not to talk with you,” he says. “The bishops say it is not the role of a priest to get involved in community affairs.” He pauses, a flash in his eyes, almost thinking aloud, “We thought they had come to rebuild the playground—then the earthquake happened, shaking the houses here, causing cracks and breaking ornaments inside the houses. The people were scared. Nobody asked us permission, they didn't even tell us what they were doing.” He is interrupted by the shrill ringtone of his mobile. Fifteen minutes later, he returns to the kitchen, having been told again by his superiors to keep quiet. The interview is over. “They know you are here,” he says, showing us the door.

By nightfall, over a mile's worth of cables has been ripped up.

We keep moving out of the village, following the ribbons and the intermittent booming sounds of controlled explosions echoing through the valleys. Away from the security guards, a woman speaks up, “They are thieves,” she hisses. Her neighbor comes over, begging for answers. “We’ve heard the land will be poisoned, is this true? We live from this land, we don’t have salaries!”

At the top of a hill I find a giant geological lab on wheels, antennae dangling from the top and men poring over electrical equipment inside. A small, portly man introduces himself as is Gheorghe Daianu, a seismologist and director of operations for Prospectiuni, the exploration company that has been subcontracted for 40 million euros ($54 million) to carry out tests in the region. Daianu condemns the protests against his work, calling opponents of gas exploration “neo-fascists.” He is insistent that the company has permission to be on every square foot of land where the tests are taking place, a claim he says can be backed up with paperwork, before he orders us to leave the area.

I head to the nearby village of Mosna, to the home of farmer Willy Schuster and his wife Lavinia, who've invited me to stay while covering the next day's anti-fracking protests. Chickens cluck, fires roar, and cheese is made in the kitchen as a dozen activists begin to arrive from across the country, checking Facebook and charging their cameras for the following day. This will be the first protest against gas exploration in Transylvania, they explain, urging me to get an early night's sleep. But first I have another appointment to keep.

Taking a break from cutting wires at midnight.

Later on, after arriving at a pre-arranged location under cover of darkness, I'm bundled into the back of a rusty van. Soon I find myself in the midst of a dozen men and women in balaclavas. The driver turns to greet me. “Don't worry about our get-away vehicle," she says. "It's super quick, it's only got 350,000 kilometers [217,000 miles] on the odometer." She laughs out loud as the door slams shut, and we head off into the frosty night. Minutes later, I am led out to the roadside, scurrying into the undergrowth with half a dozen activists, all armed with pliers and wire cutters. As soon as the headlights go around bend, the team begins their work, snipping the orange seismic wires and slicing through any electrical converter or generator box they come across.

Activists stand off with the police.

Every so often a shout goes up, and the team is sent diving for cover as the headlights of suspected security vehicles sweep across from the road. The evening is spent scrambling around the remote hills beneath the light of a full moon, clawing through scratchy thorn bushes, woodland clearings, and boggy streams. Beneath the balaclavas, the team gradually opens up to me. “Several months ago none of us knew each other, but now we are united,” says one. “We are so angry about the way our country is being run. 2013 must be the year that Romania wakes up, that citizens begin to have a say in what is happening to our country. Things like fracking have to stop, we cannot accept the destruction of our future."

At 7 AM the next morning I'm drinking coffee with Willy in his farmhouse kitchen when a convoy of gas trucks rolls past his window en route to his fields. He runs out of the door and chases after them, apoplectic with rage. I arrive on the scene just in time to see workers from the exploration company filing out of their company coach and spreading across his wintry fields. Willy screams at them to go away, impounding a company pickup and refusing to let it go until the police come to file a criminal complaint. As the morning unfolds, streams of security trucks are chased, kicked, and turned away from Willy's land. “I am terrified for my children,” he sobs, waving a flimsy branch at the assembled security forces facing him down on the muddy track. “I am fighting for their future.” A man more accustomed to milking cows than fighting multinational corporations, he is nonetheless standing up to the gas companies, and people are following his lead in growing numbers.

An activist stands triumphantly with the ripped-up wires.

Southern Transylvania’s rolling hills are one of many locations that Romania is scouring for homegrown deposits of natural gas and oil in the same way that a broke man might scavenge down the back of a sofa for lunch money. According to energy extraction advocates, any potential find would prove to be a treasure trove for the country's government. Victor Ponta, the Romanian prime minister, laid out his argument in a statement to journalists back in June: "Do we want to have gas—first of all to stop importing from Russia—do we want to have it cheap, and do we want to make the Romanian industry competitive and, of course, to have lower expenses for the people? Then we must have gas,” he explained. "If not, if we import it from Russia, it will be expensive."

This paved the way for an expansion by fossil fuel companies into the hills of Europe's second poorest nation. But Ponta’s government faces an unexpectedly tough battle to meet their domestic resource ambitions. In recent weeks, the controversial Canadian-owned gold mine in Rosia Montana has been put on hold, forced into submission by waves of protests that have brought tens of thousands of Romanians out on to the streets of their cities. And in the latest public showdown, communities deeply fearful of the damage that they believe fracking may cause have chased a rig operated by Chevron away from a test site.

With almost 4 million peasant farmers in the country reliant on clean air, water, and soil for their livelihood, a considerable number of Romania's anti-fracking civil disobedients have sprung from the country’s rural heartland. I speak to Hettie, a 26-year-old activist from the nearby city of Brasov, as she blocks the road to Willy’s land. “If villagers see us doing it, they will do it too. We have to give people the courage to do this at any time,” she tells me.

Faced with an increasingly galvanized opposition, the government is preparing to fight back. A “law of expropriation” currently being drafted in Romanian parliament will potentially allow multinational companies to take over privately-owned land if it is felt that it is in the “national interest.” At present, the law is focused primarily on mining, but many observers expect it to be extended to energy development projects in the near future, adding legal muscle to stifle local opposition, however vocal it may be.

The standoff in Willy’s field is rapidly escalating into a community affair. Half a dozen security cars remain blocked, prevented from moving forward by a growing throng of local residents, who have by joined by Roma kids on bicycles and a young woman riding a horse. A farmer appears in an orchard on the other side of the valley where minutes earlier gas workers had been busy rolling up electrical wiring. He spits angrily, wiping his wrinkled forehead in frustration and sucking on a cigarette. “Of course they have no permission to be here, but what can I do?” he asks.

Hans, my activist guide, claims that half a dozen laws are being breached by Prospectiuni in their exploration operations, including ones that restrict testing being carried out too close to homes and others related to permits and trespassing. “The real problem here is that villagers simply don't know their rights,” he says. Prospectiuni and Romgaz both turned down an opportunity to comment on claims of illegality, but in a statement on their website the CEO of Prospectiuni said, “Occasionally we still make mistakes, but they are not ill-intentioned, however we try to have active environmental permits and town planning certificates.”

Locals speak out against fracking.

By late afternoon, volunteers are dishing out potato soup, Transylvanian cakes, and hot tea to the anti-frackers outside a 600-year-old medieval church. Elderly ladies in headscarves and traditional dress are rubbing shoulders with pierced activists and men in balaclavas. The crowd marches to the road to tear out more seismic wires in full view of the policemen, who stand watching. Residents who had been too scared to talk the day before now stand outside their houses, cheering and clapping on the protesters in delight. “Honestly, I feel sorry for them,” one of the officers tells me, as they stand by and allow the protesters to rip out a mile of bright orange cable, dragging it through the dust on their way back to the village. “What the company is doing here, well, it is just wrong. Actually, it's illegal,” he whispers.

Follow Jim on Twitter: @Jim_Wickens

More on fracking:

Fracking Gave Me Gonorrhea

Romanian Villagers Managed to Keep Fracking Out of Their Backyard

Canadian Cops Ambused a First Nations Anti-Fracking Protest

Photograph courtesy of Deborah Esquenazi

Last Monday, a group of San Antonio women were released from prison, their sentences vacated, after serving fourteen years for heinous sex crimes.

Way back in 1994, Liz Ramirez, Cassie Rivera, Kristie Mayhugh, and Anna Vasquez were accused of committing repeated gang-rapes of two of Liz’s nieces, then ages seven and nine, after the children spent a week in Ramirez’s care. All of the women cooperated with authorities, confident it was a misunderstanding. None of them considered any plea deals that may have circumvented prison time, believing, however naively, that their proclaimed innocence would prevail.

The key evidence in the case rested not only on the claims of two very young girls, but on scientific testimony from a dubious pediatrician, Dr. Nancy Kellogg, who examined the girls and purported to find abrasions on one of their hymens that were, she asserted, a result of the assault. Dr. Kellogg also suggested in her medical memos that she believed the circumstances of the assault to be in accordance with something like—oh, I don’t know—maybe a Satanic ritual? As if singling these women out for their unnatural sexual orientations wasn’t enough, the prosecution felt like tacking on some old-fashioned pat racism for good measure. Everybody knows that a group of Latinas = brujas!

By 1997, Ramirez was behind bars, beginning a 37 1/2 year sentence for being the “ringleader.” Her friends, Rivera, Mayhugh, and Vasquez were convicted after a failed appeal attempt in 1998.  They wrote to several advocacy and interest groups, none of whom felt like going to bat for them. Finally, a Canadian research scientist-cum-survivalist, Darrell Otto, caught wind of their case and brought it to the attention of the National Center for Reason and Justice, an advocacy group with a mission to discern pedophilia hysteria and false accusations from the real thing. The NCRJ, helmed by board member Debbie Nathan (whom you may recognize from her books, investigative journalism, or expert contributions to the chilling 2003 documentary Capturing the Friedmans), sought legal services on the local level from the Innocence Project of Texas.

Stephanie Martinez, one of the accusers who is now a twenty-five-year-old woman, recanted her testimony to attorneys at the Innocent Project in August of 2012. Also through the Innocence Project’s work, Anna Vasquez was paroled in the fall of 2012 after accepting severely limiting conditions that required her to register and live under sex offender status. The organization has since pushed a bill through the Texas ledge that allows for a writ of habeus corpus on “junk science” techniques used to falsely incriminate—the old hymen-photo trick being one of them, largely debunked in a 2007 American Academy of Pediatrics study.

The irony that a state so vehemently protective of its right to capital punishment being the same to advance an unprecedented call for scientific review of evidence in long-decided criminal cases is lost on no one.

Last Wednesday, the now-free women appeared at a press conference in downtown San Antonio, backed by their Innocence Project attorneys and Debbie Nathan from the NCRJ. They were downright radiant—posing for pictures and embracing each other with an obvious bonhomie unweathered by time spent behind bars, totally incommunicado. A moment before sitting at the table before cameras, Kristie Mayhugh performed a quick lipstick-check on Cassie Rivera’s scarlet pout.

When each of the women went around the table sharing their thank yous, Vasquez, arguably the most heroically composed of the group, choked back tears acknowledging Otto, the researcher who first took notice of their case, “Without him we wouldn’t be here today.” Liz Ramirez continued by actually thanking the media in recognition that the exposure of their plight helped fast-track their release.

They also spoke of their unerring loyalty to one another—for over a decade none has done anything to undermine the unified innocence of the group. Even on Monday, the night of their release, Cassie Rivera revealed that there was a six-hour clerical delay on her release—she was cleared to go on one charge but not the other. She offered kindly to let the others leave while she waited on her paperwork, but according to Rivera, “They all refused.” Instead, they emerged hand-in-hand from the courthouse all at once.

But the fight isn’t exactly over yet. Liz Ramirez spoke movingly of their desire for total exoneration, saying “We never committed a crime; we don’t want to live that life.” The attorneys of the Innocent Project also mentioned that total exoneration—which, in Texas, comes with a financial reward from the state—is the next phase of their process, starting even as early as today. When asked about the length of time it will undoubtedly take to clear their names, Ramirez, tearing up, leaned forward and said, “I’ve been locked up sixteen years—if I have to wait my whole life for it, I will.”

Confronted by the inevitable question of who they would blame for the mishandling of justice, Kristie Mayhugh shook her head and offered, “We don’t blame anybody.” This simple assertion is, for a furious and vengeful person like myself, almost impossible to believe. Additionally, their teary-eyed appreciation of the media that saved them seems so...optimistic. As an on-again, off-again resident of nearby Austin, a supposed white-liberal mecca, we never heard much of anything about the egregious injustices of the San Antonio Four in our news outlets. Deborah Esquinazi, a supporter and filmmaker currently making a documentary about the case, admitted when she first heard about the San Antonio Four she pitched the story to KUT, the local NPR affiliate, with no success.

Eventually I buttonholed Debbie Nathan, who spent many years in Texas as a reporter, about this oversight. In her prepared remarks, Nathan noted how these women were vilified not only for their sexual orientation, but as “low-income people of color—also easy targets for our culture’s growing anxieties.” Seems to me the release of the wrongly accused San Antonio Four would have been expedited years ago with the power of wealthy, white Austin blasting the cause. (More over, I was living in Arkansas at the time, and can tell you firsthand how fast Damien Echols stepped out of prison after Eddie Vedder and Johnny Depp came to town.) Love for the gays, sure, we’ve got that covered, but, when it comes back to the issue of race, “Who would care about poor people of color if you live in Austin?” she said. Not many of us, apparently.

Though Darrell Otto, the original facilitator of justice from the Great White North, long ago posted on his San Antonio Four advocacy website, “Four Lives Lost,” an entry titled “Journalistic Apathy.” It’s dated from March 2009, about a year after he took it upon himself to get the NCRJ involved with the women’s cause. He declares, “Coverage of this case by the Texas media was scant.” And concludes, with a disgust that presciently rivals my own, “The Texas media completely failed these four women in terms of questioning the charges brought against them. When the media have too much faith in the system, and fail to exercise a healthy level of skepticism, innocent people are convicted.” 

The Book Report is a series that promises to deliver exactly what it promises: reports on books by the people who’ve read them. Catch evenings of live, in-person Book Reports that will remind you of the third grade in the best possible way with hosts Leigh Stein and Sasha Fletcher every month at  The Gallery at Le Poisson Rouge on Bleecker Street in New York. The next one is December 10, and you should go.

Image by Alex Cook

Very premium literary masterwork Super Sad True Love Story begins in Italy, a beautiful place I have never seen, which is good way to start novel because it says, Reader, I have seen beautiful things and now I will tell you about them.

I learned a lot about Italian romance in this story. For example, in Italy, a woman with name of Eunice can be object of sexual desire. Also, in Italy, eating rabbit is prelude to semiconsensual oral sex. Most important thing I learn is this: I never knew what super sad, true love was until I meet Mr. Gary Shteyngart himself.

“I hear New York writer interviewed on NPR,” Mother told me, when I was home in Chicago. “He is Jewish and teaches at Columbia University?”

“Mr. Gary Shteyngart?” I inquired, hopefully.

“Very funny man. Have you met him?”

“No,” I said, thinking how ridiculous it would be to become proximal with famous writer.

Three days later, I appear at Moby Awards event for best book trailer, and find out that trailer is not cart designed for hauling potatoes, but short film in which Mr. James Franco acts like casual person. At event, I am wearing large hat to draw attention to my premium head and attract my premium husband.

Then, out of corner of my eyeball, I see short, nearsighted man in dark suit. Mr. Shteyngart! I chant his name, loudly, inside of my head. The lips of people are moving, but I do not hear. I watch as he wins gold whale statue for Mr. James Franco’s performance in short film. I do not understand, but I applaud profusely, with my hands, as well as my soul.

Encore! I yell loudly to myself.

Before I can be courageous and say “Mazel tov” to famous writer Mr. Shteyngart, my good friend, who has very abundant breasts, has been drawn by gravitational force to his balding head. “You? Are writer?” I hear her say. “What have you written?”

This love story is super sad because, unlike my friend, I have not thought to seduce Jewish man by playing the accordion of his neuroses.

By now, I am drunk on amore and chardonnay. I follow group of very attractive native English speakers through Brooklyn streets to Melville House office. No one tells me I am not allowed at after party, so I proceed to attend after party.

“This chardonnay,” I say to someone. “It is free and there is more of it?”

Soon, my good friend is writing information on paper and putting paper inside her magnificent brassiere. Mr. Shteyngart is going to blurb her book, but I want him to blow his blurb all over my heart. He is laughing and drinking wine from bottle like champion fighter. Then I remember that I am not Korean. My name is not Eunice.No one will ever be in super sad, true love with me.

But then I hear imaginary voice of Mr. Shteyngart in my ear, quoting his own literary masterwork: “Do not throw away your heart,” he says. “Keep your heart. Your heart is all that matters... Throw away your ancestors!... Throw away your shyness and the anger that lies just a few inches beneath... Accept the truth! And if there is more than one truth, then learn to do the difficult work—learn to choose. You are good enough, you are HUMAN ENOUGH, to choose!” 

Taking one deep breath, I choose to impress famous writer with my command of Russian language.

“Mr. Shteyngart,” I say, “ya sabatchki lublu.”

“What the fuck?” someone says.

“She says she likes little dogs,” Mr. Shteyngart tells him, correctly.

My heart floods with the warm blood that comes from victory. I am a speaker of his language. We belong together. In a shtetl. In Fiddler on the Roof. In Broadway revival.

My favorite part of superlative novel by Mr. Shteyngart is when narrator and his beloved lock eyes and he sends telepathic message to say, “Soon you will be home and in my arms and the world will reconfigure itself around you and there will be enough compassion for you to feel scared by how much I care for you.”

This is emotions I feel for my fantasy husband Mr. Gary Shteyngart.

Every day I am working to increase my breast size to his preference.

Using online currency method, I understand that Super Sad True Love Story costs 704 rubles. Even if it costs 704 of my bones, I will buy. Two thumbs up. Hallelujah. Thank you and good night and ciao and do svidaniya.

                                                                          *

Leigh Stein is the author of the novel The Fallback Plan and a book of poems, Dispatch from the Future, both released from Melville House in 2012.

More from The Book Report on VICE

'Macbeth': In the Context of Ghosts by Sasha Fletcher

For the past decade, New Zealanders Joanne and Gareth Morgan have been living the semiretired lifestyle of their dreams, traveling around the world on motorcycles alongside a few of their closest friends. They’ve traversed all seven continents on their bikes, with routes as varied as Venice to Beijing, Florida to northern Alaska, and South Africa to London, just to name a few. Gareth funds his own trips, many of which he uses to pursue philanthropic endeavors, particularly in the social-investment space. He is able to do so with money he’s made as an economist and investment manager—one who has earned the reputation for criticizing unethical practices in New Zealand’s financial-services industry.

In late August, the Morgans embarked on their most ambitious journey yet, at least physically. The real journey began years ago, when they decided they wanted to ride the Baekdudaegan, a mountain range that stretches the length of North and South Korea’s shared peninsula. After countless hours of negotiation and coordination with both governments, they were granted permission. It was, the Morgans believe, the first time anyone’s ever traveled through both countries like that since the partitioning of Korea in 1945. By making the trip they hoped to demonstrate how Koreans can come together over what they have in common. To symbolize this, the Morgans took some stones from Paektu, a holy mountain in the North, and brought them to Hallasan, a similarly sacred peak in the South.

Joanne and Gareth shot the entirety of their trip, the footage from which they have graciously allowed us to cut into a short film, which will air next Tuesday on VICE.com.

Read more about riding the Baekdudaegan.

On the afternoon of Sunday, August 25, Huber Ballesteros was snatched by police and arrested as he ate his lunch in the Colombian capital of Bogota. Two days later he was charged with “rebellion” and “financing terrorism” at the Attorney General’s office, and denied bail. At the moment, he’s languishing in Colombia’s notoriously squalid prison, La Picota, without a trial date.

Ballesteros is one of Colombia’s most prominent social justice activists and a key personality in the country’s newest grassroots peacebuilding movement, the Patriotic March. Two weeks prior to his arrest he had helped organize nationwide strikes against the appropriation of rural peasants' land by multinational corporations, but the Attorney General has strenuously denied the two had anything to do with each other.

Ballesteros is currently housed in a maximum-security wing, which means he's cut off from daylight. He's supposed to share his cell with just three other men, but if new prisoners turn up they just get packed in, with many ending up sleeping on the floor. Food rations are also dwindling—not that it makes a great deal of difference to Huber; he’s diabetic and the prison won’t cater to his diet. And the constant, pervasive smell of rotting meat does little to stimulate appetites, anyway.

Healthcare is always a problem in La Picota, but the overcrowding makes it even worse. Terminally ill HIV-positive patients are rarely seen by a doctor, and when they are the extent of their treatment is being handed an Ibuprofen or paracetamol and sent on their way. Last year Mariela Kohon, director of the NGO Justice for Colombia, visited La Picota and met a prisoner who had sliced off a chunk of his own face because he was being denied the necessary healthcare to remove a tumor. 

Yet, perhaps the strangest part of Huber’s imprisonment is that he has to share a cell with a paramilitary convicted for taking part in one of Colombia's many massacres—massacres being one of the main societal issues that activists like Huber are protesting against. Cramming paramilitaries in with people who spend their lives campaigning against paramilitaries can, of course, create friction. Guards are supposed to keep an eye on prisoners to prevent altercations, but tensions regularly spill over, and less than two weeks ago a paramilitary detained at La Picota stabbed another prisoner.

Campesinos [peasant farmers] protesting in Catatumbo

That said, Huber finding himself incarcerated in a filthy, ill-equipped jail is a relatively benign fate compared to other activists and trade unionists in Colombia. So far this year, 25 other members of the Patriotic March have been murdered, and 16 trade unionists have been assassinated—four of whom were shot during protests in Catatumbo near the Venezuelan border. These figures add to a death toll that is already eye-watering: almost 3,000 trade unionists have been murdered since 1986, earning Colombia the dubious and unwanted accolade of "the most dangerous country in the world to be a trade unionist."

To understand why this is happening, you must examine the roots of Colombia’s raging civil war. The conflict revolves mainly around land: the campesinos have it; multinational companies want it. As Colombia’s neoliberal government is only too pleased to satisfy the desires of the multinationals, a pattern emerges: first the army arrives on a patch of land and attempts to intimidate the campesinos into leaving. If that doesn’t work, right-wing paramilitaries arrive and take out anyone brave enough to stay, leaving the land free for multinationals to begin stripping for resources.

According to the UN’s 2012 report, close to 20,000 people have been "disappeared" in Colombia by right-wing paramilitaries. These groups are often presented as criminal gangs that operate separately from the state, but the reality on the ground isn't so clear cut. When I met campesinos in the southwestern Colombian department of Cauca, they told me paramilitaries and the army took over their community soccer field and played a game together. In 2006, following a supposed demobilization of paramilitaries, Amnesty International said, "There is strong evidence of continued links between paramilitaries and the security forces."

The climate that this is taking place in is, according to a Bloomberg report, the second most unequal country in the world. Multinational companies own up to 75 percent of the land in some regions, and nearly 10 percent of the country’s population is displaced. Mass privatization in sectors like education and healthcare magnify the country’s soaring inequalities and any opposition to the situation is violently oppressed—even the country’s opposition senators travel around in bulletproof cars with armed bodyguards.

Remarkably, given the evidence of collusion between security forces and paramilitaries in slaughtering peasants, the US and UK still provide Colombia with military aid. According to Amnesty International, "Despite overwhelming evidence of continued failure to protect human rights the State Department has continued to certify Colombia as fit to receive aid. The US has continued a policy of throwing 'fuel on the fire' of already widespread human rights violations, collusion with illegal paramilitary groups and near total impunity." As for Britain, Justice for Colombia says they provide "highly secretive assistance to the Colombian security forces. Among those who have benefited are Colombian military units that have been involved in the torture and murder of trade unionists and other innocent people. Even more concerning is that there are no strings attached to the assistance—so even when Colombian soldiers kill people, the aid keeps flowing."

The US and Britain are also part of free trade agreements with Colombia, which stifles the ability of campesinos to make a decent living from the crops they farm because they can’t compete with cheap foreign imports. As Jonathan Glennie wrote in the Guardian recently: "Potatoes and onions were selling for a pittance, and [campesinos] were desperately trying to avoid the temptation to grow coca, which—though often the only option if people want to put food on the table, send their kids to school or make improvements to their homes—brings the threat of violence.” Opposition to the US agreement was the catalyst for a series of strikes across Colombia in August.

Roberto Cortes

But strikes and protests rarely seem to make any kind of difference, and so the conflict rolls on. Four days ago, 53-year-old peasant leader Roberto Cortes was assassinated in front of his son by two gunmen on a motorbike. A passerby drove him to the hospital, where he later died from blood loss and respiratory problems. A day earlier, Sergio Ulcue Perdomo, a peasant leader from Cauca department, was assassinated. The killers entered the shelter where he was living with other families and shot him in front of them. Two weeks before that, 37-year-old Cesar Garcia, a community leader and opponent of mass mining, returned home to his farm and was shot in the head in front of his wife and 8-year-old son. Police said that unfortunately they couldn’t attend the scene because they were out at a local festival.

Meanwhile, Huber Ballesteros is building a library in prison so he can keep active. Yesterday, I read a letter he had written from prison: “In these moments, we are brought together by the struggle of the working class," he wrote. "Sooner or later, we will transform this world. It is worth any sacrifice—freedom or death, if that is necessary.”

Photos courtesy of Justice For Colombia

Follow Ellie on Twitter: @MissEllieMae

All photos by Rafael Di Celio

Writer's Block is a bimonthly column that takes a low-brow approach to profiling various street bombers and modern-day vandals with a mixture of stories, off-the-cuff interviews, and never-before-seen pictures.

I met PIXOTE at a bar in the Lower East Side a few days after a mutual friend introduced us. He’s one of the few pixação writers in New York City. Pixação is a Brazilian graffiti style characterized by bigger-the-better characters and letters made up of what looks like cryptic wingdings, Nordic runes, and cave paintings. This style of graffiti was birthed in the sprawling, dilapidated metropolises of Brazil. With SABIO, a fellow Brazilian expat, PIXOTE created TWD, a NYC-based graffiti crew with members worldwide. It's an acronym for Til' We Die. It also stands for The Warrior's Dream, or whatever else you can jigsaw together when you're shooting the shit.

We headed downstairs to a private dinner party that’s held weekly for friends of the bar, and well, friends of friends. We couldn’t move in the crowded basement, so we decided to get some fresh air upstairs. That’s when PIXOTE got a call from SABE, an established writer from Manhattan. SABE told him about this warehouse he cased on the East River that’s only accessible by shimmying a quarter mile on a two-foot ledge made of decrepit wood, riddled with barbed wire and stray nails. He hung up, turned to me and said, “Perfect.”

As we made our way into Brooklyn I had a minute to pick his brain about his crew, his style, and his ambitions as a writer.

VICE: What is TWD?
PIXOTE: It's a graffiti crew and a movement. Every member is a graffiti writer and an artist across the board. We share and strive for a similar aesthetic across mediums like music, fine art, film, and design. We're all very diverse. We actually had an exhibition at Art Basel together. We called it "The Warrior's Dream" and it was comprised of installations, drawings, paintings, zines, and posters. It was a collective work by all of us. We took a street thing and brought it to the galleries. The Warrior's Dream represents having a goal or mission and trying to conquer it no matter what. Nothing was given to me. I've had to fight everyday since the day I got here.

When did you leave Brazil and where did you live when you got to the States?

I got here in 1994, just me and my mother, and I've been supporting us ever since. When I was younger I was exposed to a lot of violence in Brazil, so my mother wanted to show me a different life and new opportunities. We left Rio and never looked back. We moved around a lot, I lived in a couple different Manhattan neighborhoods, but I would say that the Lower East Side is the one that shaped me the most.



Did you have a hard time assimilating?

When I first got here, my english was poor, but I was a musician so music seemed like the natural route. There was a guy named Supla, who's also Brazilian, who played in a couple hardcore bands, most notably Psycho69. When I was 16 or 17, I started playing guitar with him in a hardcore band that I won't mention, but it was a pretty experimental band that mixed Brazilian elements, like bossa nova, and merged them with punk rock. I played at places like CBGB's alongside bands like Agnostic Front and Cro-Mags. I became really close with the hardcore scene at the time.

That was a golden era for downtown Manhattan. What else were you involved in?
Skateboarding. It’ll always be a very important part of my life. Around the time that Kids [the 1992 Larry Clark film] came out I remember skating with some of the original Zoo York and Supreme riders. Harold (Hunter) was family to me. I remember he used to live around the corner from me on 14th Street and Avenue C. We would skate all day then he would always come sleepover at my crib, and my mother would make us food. I remember going to parties with Harold and Leonardo DiCaprio around that time—it was wild.

Is this around the time that you started writing graffiti? It seems like it's the natural youth sub-culture progression.
I've been catching tags since I was ten or so, but this was around the time I started to get more serious about it. When I was in Rio I didn't even know about pieces, throw-ups, and all that shit. In Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo the pixação culture has always been there, and even though they vary from each city, the name of the game was tags. Just tags. In Rio, the tags are mostly logos but in Sao Paulo you have this Viking feel and they each developed their own distinct style that doesn't exist anywhere else in the world—similar to how Philly has it's own style. I respect that. I remember going to Sao Paulo with my dad on buses and looking up at 20-story buildings that had giant tags on them. In Brazil, the more elevation you get the more respect you get, so that's why size is an important thing to me. To put this in perspective, the writers who hit the clock in Rio had to climb onto a small ledge 15-stories high just to catch a tag. Every time I'm that high, I'm one step away from sure death, so I repeat various mantras to keep myself from losing it.

What kinds of mantras? Are you a spiritual person?

My mother is a very spiritual person and she instilled some of those superstitions in me. I'm very into Candomblé. It's an Afro-Brazilian religion that stemmed from the African Diaspora similar to Santería. It involves a lot of soulful elements like trances and sacrifices imparted to you by your Orisha, which is kind of like a spirit god. According to various gurus and shamans I've seen over the years, the personal deity who looks after me is Ogun. Ogun is a warrior who carries a machete and clears the field for harvest.

Sounds like a nod to "The Warrior's Dream."
Yeah, I guess it is. I will always be Brazilian, so whether it's religion or graffiti, I'll stick to my roots, because it's all I have.

New York has a very close-minded view of what graffiti should look like. Has that affected your creative process at all?

Due to the recent surge of newer writers who are using a similar style to pixação, I think they're commodifying it and that sort of bothers me because I'm skeptical of their authenticity. New York does have a very close-minded view of what graffiti should be, so when I first started getting up people were dismissive because they didn't understand where I was coming from. Now that I'm a bit more established, I've started to gain the respect of writers and crews that have a strict New York-centric graffiti mentality. 

Anything else you want to say?

Until we die, we're keeping The Warrior's Dream alive. Shout outs to SABIO, ERASMO, FRESH, PILCHI, and SYE5. 

Follow PIXOTE on Instagram and Twitter.

Previously - 'Graffiti's 'Ikonik Figure''

Image from Flickr, via USFWS/Southeast

Back when Adam and Eve were letting it all hang out in the Garden of Eden, a dastardly serpent convinced Eve to eat the forbidden fruit by telling her, “your eyes will be opened,” by its sweet, sweet taste. A recent study suggests it wasn’t the apple that helped Eve—or whatever ancient humanoid you consider to have been our forebearer—to open her eyes, but that very slithering seducer that may indeed be responsible for what—and how—humans see.

Anthropologist and behavioral ecologist Dr. Lynn Isbell of the University of California, Davis, author of The Fruit, the Tree, and the Serpent, has long argued the Snake Detection Theory of brain development, which posits that the need to avoid slithering predators was responsible for the evolution of keen eyesight in our primate ancestors.

Ophidians, the group of squamate reptiles including snakes, first appeared more than 110 million years ago, when dinosaurs still ruled the earth. In the eons since, they have hardly changed basic form: they have inhabited the same long, scaly, coldblooded bodies since the humid, tropical climate of the Cretaceous era, when terrifying monsters like the 40-foot, 2,000 pound Titanoboa roamed the earth. That dude died out (Thank GOD), but snakes are still around, doing what they do—they now wiggle around every continent on Earth except for Antarctica, where it’s too cold for them to survive.

Millions of years before they started producing fast-acting venom, snakes used their coils to suffocate their prey. When our nocturnal pre-primate ancestors left their burrows and began to inhabit trees and bushes around 100 million years ago, those squeezer snakes were our only real predator—birds of prey and large cats didn’t start feeding on mammals until millions of years later. In order to survive, animals needed to quickly identify snakes and get the hell away, before taking the time to make a conscious decision to escape. Natural selection for fast reactors resulted in a huge leap in visual acuity, the theory goes, making possible vast improvements in depth perception; increased ability to see colors; and perhaps the development of early forms of communication via pointing, i.e. making someone else look at the important thing you’re seeing. That development possibly spurred the evolution of deadly venom in snakes as well, as new techniques were needed to attack mammals that had gotten so much better at evading the hug of death.

Psychologists have long documented the fact that humans and primates see snakes faster than we see other things, like spiders or flowers, and that this perception bias is probably responsible for our ancient and cross-cultural phobia of snakes (thank you, Eve). This month, Isbell, along with neuroscientists in Japan and Brazil, announced new evidence for the Snake Detection Theory. For their study, published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they monitored the brains of two rhesus macaque monkeys raised in captivity, neither of which had ever had a recorded encounter with snakes. The monkeys were shown four kinds of pictures: macaque faces that were either agitated or neutral; primate hands; abstract shapes like circles or squares; and both coiled and uncoiled snakes. By monitoring the electrical pulses in the monkey brains, they found that a greater percentage of the neurons in the pulvinar, which takes up 40 percent of the thalamus in humans and primates and is related to optical attention and eye movement, reacted strongly to snakes than to the other visual cues. The neurons that were “snake-best” fired 25 milliseconds faster than the neurons that were “shape-best” and 15 milliseconds faster to the “angry face-best.”

I spoke to Dr. Isbell about innate versus learned fear, having dinosaurs on the brain, and future experiments that may provide even more evidence for the Snake Detection Theory.

VICE: How does the speed and intensity of the firing neurons correlate to the fear of snakes that is pretty widespread among humans?
Dr. Lynn Isbell: We didn’t examine fear. What we did do was look at the first step in the process of registering fear, and the common phenomenon that people have experienced where they see a snake, and somehow, before they even know what they are doing, they manage to evade it. The pulvinar has connections to another brain structure, the superior colliculus, that, when you stimulate, causes animals to dart or freeze or otherwise react through movement.

In order to experience fear the brain has to somehow get the image into the brain. So for primates that would be through visual detection, since we’re so dependent on vision. We’re trying to understand how the brain incorporates that vision, that image of the object in front of it. In this case, that is the image of a snake. Once the brain picks that up, then the question is what does it do with it after that. For some it might go to fear. In others it might not. We don’t all have fear of snakes.  

A lot of people get confused about innate fear and learned fear and I want to point out that I don’t really like the word “innate.” When we talk about “innate,” we mean that in our study, we found a mechanism that enables us to avoid snakes quickly. Other scientists have shown that primates have an ability to learn to fear snakes very quickly. And that makes sense. Because we’re social animals and we learn from others around us. So if we observed somebody expressing fear of a snake when we are very young, we’re more likely to express those fears ourselves. If we don’t see that happening we don’t necessarily learn that fear. But it does appear that we have an easier time acquiring fear of snakes than fear of other things that might be deadlier, like cars. But we didn’t evolve around cars—the selection pressure hasn’t been around long enough to give us “car phobia,” for instance. It seems that we are evolutionarily prepared to be able to fear snakes quickly. That’s the distinction.

So, you’ve established that there’s a special place where snakes dominate our brain.
There’s at least one special place. The rest of the brain hasn’t been examined. It wasn’t just guessing that made us look at the pulvinar. The pulvinar has been known to be involved with directing attention to important objects in the environment. So that seemed to be a good place to look for these neurons that are highly sensitive to snakes.

Both snakes and our pre-mammalian ancestors were around at the time of the dinosaurs. Do you think that there are neurons in our brains that are dedicated to recognizing T. Rex?
The difference between dinosaurs and snakes is that dinosaurs aren’t around any more. So whatever visual cues animals might have used to detect them wouldn’t necessarily be helpful to them now. Because dinosaurs disappeared 65 million years ago. Snakes have pretty much looked the same as they have since they started eating mammals. So cues for detecting snakes have always been there and still are.

This recent experiment is just the first step in providing evidence for your theory. What’s next?
One of the most obvious questions that people have raised as a result of this recent study was OK, maybe you can detect snakes very quickly, but what about other predators? Why not compare the reaction to snakes with what happens in the brain when primates see large cats and birds of prey? My argument is that if snakes are largely responsible for the visual system of primates, then they should have a special place in the primate brain. So primates ought to be able to detect them more quickly than they could detect leopards or eagles. My guess is that there actually is a special place in the primate brain—where the neurons will be faster acting, with a stronger response to snakes. That’s because snakes are not a threat when they are far away. We probably wouldn’t even see them then, and they are only a problem when they are close up. But when other predators are as close as a snake, you’re already dead. So there would be no selection favoring animals that could respond to those predators with the same urgency that mammals respond to snakes, with short latencies and quick responses. There would be stronger selection for animals to see cats and eagles from farther away when they could do something about it. I’m not saying that there won’t be neurons that fire in response to big cats. I’m sure there will be. Just as there are neurons that fire to when primates recognize other primate faces, these things are all important in the lives of animals, of prey animals. I just think that the behavior of the neurons might be a little bit different.

@roseolm

More snakes and science:

Killers of Serpents

Why Do Insects Have Gay Sex

Sorry Religions, Human Consciousness Is Just a Consequence of Evolution 

Hungarian polymath Atilla Grandpierre is a freethinking genius in an increasingly conformist world. An eight-year hiatus notwithstanding, he’s been fronting the psychedelic-punk powerhouse VHK since 1975. VHK is short for Vágtázó Halottkémek, which translates from the Hungarian as “Galloping Coroners.” Banned for nearly a decade during the communist era, the group's ritualistic improvisations, eastern folk digressions, and thundering double percussionists—including a guy bashing away at a gigantic set of pagan tympani dubbed "cattle drums"—conjure up the charge of a thousand celestial barbarians.

The title of Júlia Nagy's recent documentary about the band, Akik Móresre Tanították a Halált ("The Ones Who Taught Death a Lesson"), is uncannily accurate: At 62, Atilla exhibits the vigor of a performer half his age. Decked out in robes and war paint, he howls with profound fury and joy while whipping himself into a shamanistic frenzy. Comparatively speaking, something like Gogol Bordello seems about as intense as a middle-school production of Fiddler on the Roof. 

In addition to leading a second ensemble, the neotraditional Vágtázó Csodaszarvas ("Galloping Wonder Stag"), Atilla makes his living as a respected astrophysicist, academic, and historian. He's the author of numerous books and essays detailing weighty subjects such as "The Nature of the Universe and the Ultimate Organizational Principal." Cineastes might recognize his face as well, thanks to a turn in Gábor Bódy's final film, 1983's Kutya Éji Dala ("Dog's Night Song"), an allegory concerning a priest who disturbs the order of a Magyar village.

Equally impressive is the vitality of Veled Haraptat Csillagot! ("Bite the Stars!"), VHK's first all-new LP since 1999. Licensed for wider release through Finland's Ektro Records, the the album intersperses apocalyptic stomps with sensuous mood pieces and Central European melancholia, the latter presumably sown by the sudden demise of longtime member Endre "Boli" Balatoni in 2012. Following a summer crammed full of musical and intellectual pursuits, I spoke to Atilla in Budapest to chat about rock, existence, and the cosmos.

VICE: First off, VHK doesn’t play political songs, so I’m confused—why did the Hungarian Communists ban you guys?
Atilla Grandpierre: Sometimes policemen told me that our lyrics were so positive that they made people uncontrollable. My lyrics and movements onstage presented a powerful alternative to the official ideology: How to feel and behave freely in an era of repression. We had our first rehearsals in 1975 and our first concert in 1976. After 20 minutes, the concert was interrupted by the organizers—they were afraid we were emanating uncontrollable energies into the audience. We had our second concert, which was already a big event at a countryside level, in 1978. Again, after 20 minutes, the concert was interrupted because the organizers were afraid about the allegedly "violent consequences." After that, the party leader of the university who permitted our concert was fired. I think from that time on, we were forbidden. It lasted until 1986, the time of perestroika.

What was the wildest VHK gig?
It is very hard to say. Once in 1993, on the main stage of the Budapest Sziget Festival, our band received an unfavorable afternoon slot and a short set time of 30 minutes. After our concert, the 10,000 people in our audience did not want to hear the next band. The audience liked us so much that anything afterwards wouldn't have made sense. The organizers tried to reason with the audience repeatedly, but the atmosphere was so heated that they were afraid they'd suffer injuries; people were throwing objects towards them. The mood and shouting of the name "VHK! VHK!" was like a revolution and it lasted for 60 minutes! Another occasion occurred after a performance in Munich. The audience was clapping continuously; they could not stop. After 10 or 20 minutes, they started to separate the wooden floorboards of the stage and make rhythmic noises with them, hitting the remaining parts of the podium. Overwhelmed, they experienced stronger and stronger phases of ecstasy. Parts of chairs were flying in the air. The shouting of the thousand people there became like a hurricane. They started to peel the wallpaper from the walls and throw pieces of it into the crowd. It became so dense, like rain or snow. Somebody directed the wind machine into this whirling crowd full of paper. The girls were screaming, the boys were on the rampage. The hall was largely destroyed by the Bavarian youth who were celebrating in ecstatic, wild waves of joy.

VHK

How did VHK get back together?
I never wanted to stop playing music with VHK. Moreover, the decades-old friendship between most members has remained. After VHK disbanded in 2000, I created the group of my childhood dreams, Vágtázó Csodaszarvas, with ten virtuosos playing the wildly magical music of eternity on ancient acoustic instruments. This band is equally important for me, enjoying the same status as VHK. Yet the atmosphere, style, and friendship of VHK urged me to reunite the band as soon as it was possible. We found a suitable new drummer in 2008 and started again. Playing with VHK, I realized that these friends and this music are much more valuable than I thought in the 1990s. Suffering badly and missing them transformed my attitude profoundly, and I came out stronger and clearer from those trouble-filled years. When we reunited, we returned to the eternal, fresh energies that characterized VHK in the early 80s. VHK has a surplus of common experiences and spiritual coherence of inspirations that makes playing together a shockingly liberating experience. I feel as if we are enjoying a rebirth. I think we are now closer to the fire than at the end of 90s. Everybody's eyes are shining brightly when we meet in the rehearsal room.

Was there some impulse to play aggressive rock music again?
According to my opinion, we never played "aggressive rock music." What we played is, I think, one of the wildest, most genuine and original music of the world, sometimes categorized as "shaman punk." Actually, this music is born instinctively, from the deepest, creative, cosmic instinct of collective unconsciousness or genetic memories. It comes from the depths of our inner universe, where musical inspirations live and wait for interested people's attention—from the world of truth-seeking, beauty-seeking intuition and from the intuitive perception of the dynamic and creative forces of the living universe. When I was 17, in 1968, my classmates and I tried to make a kind of avant-garde musical experience at a friend's flat. After two hours of trying in vain, suddenly I felt a need to stand up from my chair and run full-speed ahead. I ran into a big cupboard and started to hit its wooden doors more and more forcefully until I became so excited that I lost my consciousness of the outer environment. The inner world became stronger and brighter, and a strange music erupted from me. After I "returned" to the room, my friends told me that they didn't know that a muezzin lives inside of me. Me neither. The song was something like an Eastern prayer to immortality, to the stars. I was completely surprised. I would never think that such a music could come out from me. It is true that our music has a hypnotizing, elementary power. It is because it accesses the power of nature existing in the life of the cosmos.

Do you consider yourself a mystic or a shaman?
No. I try to become a healthy human being, in the full sense—to discover human nature, to discover life and its meaning. All such things, I think, are very normal. Actually, music is an enormously valuable experience in exploring life's potential and full blossoming, therefore I am in a kind of metamorphosis when I am onstage, transforming myself into a more complete form of life.

Is improvisation still important to VHK?
Improvisation is not the correct word to describe our music. At our best, we are in touch with life-completing, primordial powers and our attempt is to hand over the control of our musical activities to these powers. Fortunately, this wonder happens at almost every one of our concerts since we are open and ready and filled with galvanizing enthusiasm for such a music. I do not want to leave the stage without such a transmutation of my life; therefore, I mobilize all my hidden, stored energies. In everyday life, these are generally used in cases of extreme danger. But most of my daily activities are in line with these cosmic spiritual powers: writing books, articles, presenting talks, performing concerts, trying to live the most wonderful life I am able to. And this goal leads towards the abode where the highest and fullest life lives: to the living universe.

You changed the spelling of your name from "Attila" to "Atilla." Why?
Hungarian is a phonetic language, written the way it sounds. In Hungary, we say "Atilla," with a short "t" and a long "l." The officially preferred version is the other spelling, with a double "t," which is never pronounced like that. I realized this only in 2007, when an ancient Fifth Century coin was found with Greek inscriptions of the name of Attila the Hun, which was written by the Greeks as "Atilla." I realized that this writing is the correct one. I returned to that spelling in my unofficial life. As an astrophysicist, I retained the Latin version in order to keep consistent with my earlier research. My name is important to me; it is something personal and it has continuity with Attila the Hun. Actually, I wrote a book about the Huns in light of the most recent archeological, genetic, anthropological, musicological, and scientific evidence about them. It sheds new light on their ancient cosmology, their worldview, and their motivations for deciding how to shape history and why. It seems that very few researchers were concerned with real facts. The spirit of ecstatic, full-hearted Hun music was so overwhelming that in ancient China, it was forbidden. The Chinese authorities were afraid all Chinese people would, in their souls, become Huns. New computer-based research indicates the fundamental, reviving, and inspiring effects of Hun music on Chinese folk music. All these new facts argue strongly that the heavily pondered dogmas about the barbarian Attila and the Huns require serious revision.

Does your professional life influence VHK?
I am working at the Konkoly Observatory of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences as a senior research fellow. Remarkably, my research led me to discover the creative powers of solar activity, to study theoretical biology and astrobiology, and to explore the creative aspects of the living cosmos that is the basis of my music. I recently published a new theory about the origin of life on Earth, proving that the first cell did not develop from inanimate matter but from a more inclusive cosmic life form, mediated by the quantum vacuum. In this respect, my Book of the Living Universe is of profound importance to mankind. One of my daily activities is to find a suitable translator and to publish it in English. My work is the first to connect theoretical biology with quantum physics. I am convinced that the next big scientific revolution will extend theoretical physics, in a suitably generalized form, into theoretical biology. My research indicates that the universe has a deeper layer beyond the quantum physical one, and that life starts from that deeper layer of reality. In my scientific work, one of the main and overarching results is that the universe as a whole has a fundamentally biological nature. We know that all's well that ends well. This means that I have wonderful news for you: The whole gigantic universe is a living being.

Social media is sort of awkward territory for people involved in healthcare. I get it: sometimes I forget that people aren’t interested in gangrene as much as I am. Sometimes I’ll post something on Twitter about dick-eating bacteria and lose 20 followers. I can only imagine the kind of isolation ER surgeons experience when they share with civilians the traumatic shit they see—which would explain why doctors are only surrounded by other doctors.

Naturally, a new social media app will cure that “loneliness.” I found out about it when my doctor friend texted me the other day, “Have you heard about Figure1? It’s FOR YOU.” The last time I had seen him, he was studying for an endocrinology exam and I wouldn’t stop bugging him about baby testicles or what it was like to peel off his cadaver’s face.

Whether doctors are “adrenaline junkies” or “sadists,” human suffering is a reality! Our bodies are extremely vulnerable/versatile/resilient, and I’m glad that there is now a service (it’s almost exactly like Instagram) to document the fucked up things that nurses, technicians, surgeons, and physicians get to deal with on a daily basis.

I can’t share screenshots, so I’m going to explain to you—via illustrations and comments and my personal experience—a breakdown of my top five favorites. Let’s take a look:

NUMBER 1

Here is a visual of a mangled-up hand. There is a pinkie. The thumb looks like it’s mashed into the hand. The middle finger has been ripped off, and is hanging by some tendons. They’ve cleaned it up pretty nicely though. All of the blood for the most part has dried onto the skin. The hand is on a towel- limp and fucked up, but overall, it looks pretty salvageable.  

Who posted this? A registered nurse. The little red star indicates 339 favorites on this photo. “Patient put hand through a tablesaw at work.” That’s it. That’s all the caption says.

NUMBER 2

Next we have the comments from another power saw injury. I’ll explain the injury first: Sitting on a cotton-drop cloth, the arm is delicately resting in white fluorescence. The bone has been separated between the hand and the wrist. Some muscle is gone, blood is flowing out of the arteries. He’s losing a lot of blood—will he be OK? I think so. They might just have to cut off his arm, or something. Then some professionals share their thoughts:

✓NocturnalDocsays (that checkmark signifies that he or she is a verified physician)

“100 percent extensor pollicis tendon laceration, and radical artery severed.”

There are 265 favorites. Six comments below:

issmithWhat did you do with this?

sdpca Amputation?

✓NocturnalDoc The tendon can be repaired primarily or delayed. If good collateral flow from the ulnar artery can be demonstrated (blood supply to the hand is redundant), the radial artery can be ligated. Some hand surgeons or micro vascular surgeons would repair the artery instead.

I take this to mean that basically, “We’re passing him along. He’s fine.”

LjashlineIs it all venous and soft tissues? No bone involvement?

I’m laughing really hard at: “No bone involvement.”

✓NocturnalDocVein, artery, nerve, and tendon all injured. The bone was not injured.

This arm looks like needs a fucking ass-patch or something—it looks rough. His arm is for sure going to look weird forever.

NUMBER 3

Another person uploaded a picture of some very disgusting, old dying feet. There’s a wheelchair over in the background.

There are lots of rules for uploading, so that’s nice. Administrators have to approve the photo to protect patient identities.

I digress. What the fuck is this disgusting foot exactly? It’s “Necrosis from pressors.” Flesh-eating bacteria just munchin’ away.

NUMBER 4

Next up is an X-RAY. There is an image of a spine with some hips, and a giant loopy wire hanging out in the middle, horizontally.

ollytangPsych patient who ingested her bra wires among other things.

mphard Were they able to get it out endoscopically or did they have to open her up?

ollytang I’m not sure, just referred it to surgeons and let them decide. You can also see the IVC filter… hope the surgeons didn’t think it was a foreign body as well.

Wow, this woman swallowed an IVC filter because she thought it was a “foreign body”— is that what that means?

Some other people debate about what the curled image actually is. People in medicine are just like you, just like us, they still argue in comments sections about unimportant details and completely miss the point of what’s going on. “Is it the bra wire or the IVC filter?”

imsrsly Prob the ivc filter. But anything can curl with a psych patient.

Ha! “Anything can curl with a psych patient.” Is that a joke? I actually can’t tell.

freaxie I’ve been an inpatient in psych wards in the US and they remove your bra wires from any bra you bring or you must forfeit the bra for the duration of your stay. lots of girls just bring sports bras after repeat stays.

Ooooouuufffff. What does “freaxie” do for a living? Now we have a real open dialogue.   

“freaxie” is a “medical student” and she has one upload of an—arm? With the hashtag #ringworm next to it. The arm is glowing blue. I think maybe this user’s just here for the action. At first I thought, “Oh, it’s so nice that people with a history of mental illness can still succeed in medicine.” It’s great to get this perspective, anyway. I hope she is actually in med school and that is actually ringworm and I’m just being an asshole. 

NUMBER 5

Last but not least is this beautiful fucking orthopedic hardware. It says “surgical repair with orthopedic hardware failure.”

How did it fail, you might ask?

“Lateral malleuolus was fractured beneath hardware upon sectioning. 2 gaping necrotic wounds on both the lateral and medial malleolus. Patient is young. Anterior/post tibial arteries show no conclusion or #Atherosclerosis.”

(Blah, blah, blah.)

Now people are asking how this happened. The user iheartautopsy says, “Lemme see if I can find anything else out today.”

You know what Figure 1? I wish we could see the timing. I wish we could see when people are posting these. But is that too much information to give away or something?

iheartautopsy“Youz will like this…Hx of diabetes. Noticed a problem at surgery site. Thought it would “take care of itself.” Several weeks later noticed a smell. Came in the get smell checked Doctors unwrapped to find gaping uclerations!”

Now everyone is freaking out about diabetes.

A nurse says, “Oh my Lord!”

Personally, I am interested in this fucking orthopedic hardware. It just looks like screws and metal, kind of in the shape of the bone. It’s kind of old school. It was a good try. If I was a surgeon I’d probably just it chop off right away. I’d be like, “Oh, your foot’s getting eaten up? Let’s get it rid of it, you don’t need that.”

Or I would figure out a way to counteract this fucking crazy flesh-eating bacteria. Why would you try to repair the bone? Was this patient not taking their antibiotics? So many mysteries.

I could spend an eternity on this app. I just wish I had the ability to follow different users. But the mystery can be nice. I just clicked on a random username and found a knife impalement. I wonder why someone stabbed this woman in the stomach. But guess what? It didn’t penetrate the peritoneum!!!

Access to this kind of discussion is really incredible. Everyone is learning. There are so many stories, on so many different levels. It’ll be nice when people start using it all over the world. Overall, I’m excited to see a place where people with passions other than music, fashion, food, or porn can get together and get nasty. Yum!!!

@karacrabb

Here's what typhoid looks like. Put it under a kaleidoscope to see a superbug. via Flickr.

There are all kinds of potentially world-ending disasters that stain our collective unconscious these days: super storms, nuclear war, or a violent alien invasion—but perhaps the most downright terrifying possibility is the proliferation of a bacterial superbug that’s resistant to antibiotics. Part of that terror is because the likelihood of something like this happening is far from impossible, and the Canadian government isn’t doing anything to prepare us, just in case.

For decades, scientists the world over have been warning about what will happen to us when antibiotics stop working and bacteria that is resilient to our medications starts to spread. We should have listened. Now all the talk is that we are already in a “post-antibiotic era,” which according to Dr. Margaret Chan, the Director General of the World Health Organization, means that we’re facing: “…an end to modern medicine as we know it. Things as common as strep throat or a child’s scratched knee could once again kill.”

Since the forties, doctors have been able to slice us open and fix us up with antibiotics. Health issues like organ transplants, chemotherapy, gonorrhea, skin infections, tuberculosis, childbirth, and even tattoos will soon (if not already) become life threatening unless we fight off these killer bacteria that threaten our use of antibiotics. Nowadays, we throw antibiotics at anything and everything from the tiny paper cut you put Polysporin on, to the generic antibiotic you’re given while you wait for your blood tests to come back. This cure-all approach to antibiotics is great for the longevity of bacteria, and terrible for the longevity of, well, us.

According to the Chief Public Health Officer’s 2013 Report on the State of Public Health in Canada, which was released earlier this month, more than 200,000 people get infected every year while receiving healthcare, and at least 8,000 people die—making it a leading cause of death in Canada. Some hospital-acquired infections (HAI) come from viruses or fungi, but a growing number of cases are attributed to superbugs that can’t be cured by any antibiotics. One of those pesky superbugs is the deadly clostridium difficile (aka “c. difficile”), which can cause a gruesome amount of diaherea that has resulted in fatal colon inflammation in past cases. Instances of c difficile have increased threefold in Canada since 1997, according to the Chief Public Health Officer’s report.

A World Health Organization 2011 report on high-income countries says Canada has the second highest rate of HAIs at 11.6 per cent—second only to New Zealand at 12.0 per cent. Meanwhile, Germany has the lowest at 3.6 per cent. To put things into perspective, being in the same ballpark as New Zealand is not at all comforting, given that a kiwi gentleman died from a superbug resistant to every antibiotic just last week. Super!

If we want to put up a fight against this imminent threat, our government needs to do a better job at getting accurate information out there. Currently, Canada’s only surveillance program for in-hospital infections is called the Canadian Integrated Program Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance (CIPARS). That organization receives information from provincial healthcare bodies and the Canadian Nosocomial Infection Surveillance Program (CNISP), which collects data from 54 hospitals nation-wide. They reported, for example, that there were just 154 cases of the “nightmare bacteria” called carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) between 2010-2012 in this country. That’s positive information in comparison with the US who had 9,300 infections leading to 600 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

But when you think about it, 54 hospitals is hardly an accurate assessment of our huge country—and not every hospital provides information to the province. According to Bruce Gamage, President of the not-for-profit Community and Hospital Infection Control Association Canada (CHICA), that’s a funding issue. He told me that although accurate data collecting on a federal scale is not in place, new programs are being launched.

Why is it taking so long? Gamage says: “Well, you live in Canada, I live in Canada, we know that things take a long time to move forward. The organizations that have an interest in this need to make sure that the government is hearing them and the public needs to be aware of these issues to let the government know.” Canada may be a slow-moving machine, but I surely don’t want my cause of death to be “bureaucratic” once the superbug apocalypse hits. There’s no need to add “lack of monitoring” to our list of superbug-related problems.

Doctors and patients need to know if what they’re prescribing can actually help eradicate a bug, or if it’s just increasing our exposure and reducing the general effectiveness of antibiotics. For instance, according to Gamage, 30-50 percent of people in the community are prescribed antibiotics for viral infections, and we know that antibiotics don’t work for viruses. In total, 50 percent of antibiotics are prescribed unnecessarily and the number is even higher when preschool children get prescriptions according to the Canadian Committee on Antibiotic Resistance (CCAR).

In a PostMedia News article last week, Dr. Mark Joffe, President of the Association of Medical Microbiology and Infectious Disease Control (AMMI), took on Public Health and CIPARS with complaints that they are not providing information quickly enough for doctors to prescribe the right antibiotics. A quick peruse of the federal website shows that the latest “annual report” from CIPARS was released back in 2009, and you even have to contact them to get your hands on it. After calling CIPARS, I was able to obtain a more recent report from 2011 which we've uploaded here. Unfortunately, Canada trails behind Europe and the US for health information transparency, as Dr. Lynora Saxinger, chair of AMMI explained in the PostMedia story: “I can get better access to data from tiny European countries like Estonia on their resistance than I can on trends in Canada.” Saxinger blames the Harper government’s “muzzling” and “gagging” of federal researchers for the snail-like data release.

A spokesperson for Public Health told me that it takes a while to “validate, analyze and interpret the data” and although the information is not on the PHAC website he sent me a shortened copy. He couldn’t tell me why the data is not on the website, but Gamage from CHICA thinks it is because of a 2010 court-mandate to make all Federal website data accessible to all Canadians—including visually impaired ones. The switch was supposed to take a maximum of 15 months to implement, but it has yet to be completed. Oh, bureaucracy.

Even worse than doctors overprescribing antibiotics without knowing if they work are the copious amounts of antibiotics we find in our meat. Of the up to 200,000 tons of antibiotics manufactured annually, up to 80 percent are fed or injected into livestock, according to a generally cited 2010 report from the US Food and Drug Administration, that although disputed, was proven correct by Politifact. Fattening up our meat gives bacteria a fighting chance to kill antibiotics, and has been linked to childhood obesity and inflammatory illnesses like heart disease, type II diabetes, and cancer.

The European Union was wise to eliminate the use of antibiotics for non-medical use back in 2006, and the US has at least issued a “guidance for industry,” which asks really super nicely if farmers could maybe possibly consider not using antibiotics in livestock—but Canada is far behind. Here, there is a “loophole” that allows farmers to buy antibiotics for their animals without having to file a prescription. Organizations like CHICA and the Ontario Medical Association have been pushing for legislation to mandate farmers to go to the veterinarian for prescriptions to no avail. Public Health couldn’t comment on what’s taking our government officials so long to tighten that loophole up.

One way to crack down on the overuse of antibiotics and raise money for surveillance could be a sort of carbon tax, or a “Pigouvian tax,” which could tax all use of antibiotics worldwide. But that wouldn’t be good for the consumer as Gamage explained: “I think that would be difficult to be putting the cost on the users because you are actually affecting the most vulnerable people when they need these drugs.”

But keep your head up, because it might not be all doom and gloom. New research out of Ontario’s McMaster University has offered a glimmer of hope with a new study on compounds that could attack the bacteria’s ability to produce the vitamins and amino acids it needs to survive. But, new drugs take funding, which is hard to come by when drug companies are hesitant to dish out the billions of dollars it costs to research and develop new antibiotics. They know by now there isn’t much money in a drug that you only use for five to seven days, compared with something that can be used long term for chronic illnesses like diabetes or heart disease.

If that doesn’t work, another approach scientists have suggested would be a return to some medicine of years’ past, such as serums and bacteriophages. But if you ask me, you can save your leeches and snake oils. Just kill me now before the superbug apocalypse destroys us all.

Follow Joel on Twitter: @JoelBalsam

Previously:

A New Line of Antibiotics is Coming to the Rescue

The US and UK Have Largely Ignored Antibiotic Resistance

Superbugs are Overpowering Antibiotics Even Faster than CDC Expected

Mary Rose Short, 24, protests at the University of New Mexico in favor of Albuquerque’s late-term abortion ban last week. Photo courtesy survivors.la

Three months ago, dozens of pro-life activists—most of them teenagers—arrived unannounced in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Armed with images of fully developed, dismembered fetuses and a sign christening Albuquerque as “America’s Auschwitz,” they set up camp in front of the city’s modest Holocaust and Intolerance Museum and demanded a new exhibit to commemorate the victims of what they call “the silent holocaust,” or “the American genocide”—or the roughly 50 million abortions performed in the United States since the Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade ruling in 1973.

But what they really wanted was much less symbolic: A municipal referendum that would make Albuquerque the first city in the country to ban late-term abortions.

Doing so, critics believe, is the first step toward severely limiting abortion access in America.

One week ago, the young activists quietly returned. Their goal was to turn out residents to vote on a citywide late-term abortion ban. The group was small, made up of just six devoted members of Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust, a California-based anti-abortion group that travels the country rallying young people to the pro-life movement. In the days leading up to the vote, the “Survivors” attempted to energize the local grassroots, crisscrossing the New Mexico desert in a gold church van to canvass voters, pass out fliers describing so-called "fetal pain," and organize “prayer walks”—an unconventional get-out-the-vote strategy that involves walking in the street and asking God to “provide clarity over the ballot.”

“The Survivors are like the Marines,” said Lauren Handy, a 19-year-old Survivors intern. “We’re the first ones to come and the last ones to leave.”

In the end, though, their efforts fell short. By Tuesday evening, Albuquerque residents had rejected the measure, voting 55 percent to 44 percent against a proposed ordinance that would have prevented women from seeking abortions after 20 weeks.

It’s a big disappointment for the pro-life movement, which has embraced 20-week bans as a way of taking advantage of public discomfort over later abortion. Based on the disputed medical claim that a fetus can feel pain after 20 weeks, thirteen states have banned abortions after that point, and Republicans in Congress have introduced similar federal legislation. Had the Albuquerque referendum passed, it would have opened up new avenues for anti-abortion groups to pursue restrictions at the local level—an attractive prospect in blue states like New Mexico, where the Democratic-controlled legislature has repeatedly buried new abortion laws.

But while Albuquerque voters may have prevented a city-by-city epidemic fixed on wiping out abortion clinics, both sides warn that the seal has been broken. The referendum was an early testing ground, a chance for the pro-life movement to practice its new strategy—and another stark reminder, some believe, that the left is on defense when it comes to reproductive rights.

“We'll be back," Cheryl Sullenger, senior policy advisor for the Wichita-based anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, said after the vote tallies were in Tuesday night. "We learned a lot from this campaign, and we look forward to another try that will better reflect the true feeling of the voters on this subject.”

***

In many ways, the Albuquerque referendum was a glimpse into the depths of the pro-life psyche. And at the center, the id so to speak, are the Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust. Founded in 1998 by former leaders of Operation Rescue, the organization is essentially a training camp for emerging pro-life organizers, equipping young (Christian) militants with activism tools and leaflets, and then sending them out “on tour” to win over new recruits. As the name suggests, the group is based on the idea that anyone born after the Roe vs. Wade ruling in 1973 has “survived” legal abortion.

"Abortion is real for us, because our generation has not known a time when it was illegal to kill babies,” Kristina Garza, the Survivors 26-year-old outreach director, tells me. It’s a few days before the Albuquerque vote, and Garza is riding shotgun in my rental car while I attempt to tail the Survivors van on Interstate 40. They’re looking for a good spot for “overpass cupping,” another pro-life campaign quirk that involves spelling out slogans with plastic cups in the chainlink fence over the highway. “It’s a good way for the team to blow off steam at the end of the night,” Garza says.

It turns out that in spite of their creepy name and holocaust museum theatrics, the Survivors are more like earnest camp counselors than hardened foot soldiers in the abortion wars. “This is the most alive I have ever felt, and the most appreciated for being alive,” Lauren Handy tells me.

Before she found the pro-life movement, Handy says, “I was in a dark place.” The Survivors gave her a sense of purpose, and a passion for “sidewalk counseling,” the pro-life term for convincing women outside of clinics not to have an abortion. “If you think your child is going to have a bad life, there is something deeply hurting you — I can empathize with that,” she says. “Before I was bitter, but now I am blessed for having had that suffering. I found a place where I am best used."

“Overpass cupping” above Interstate 40 before Albuquerque’s vote on a municipal late-term abortion ban Tuesday. Image: Grace Wyler.

In the car, Garza fast-talks me through her conversion to the pro-life movement. “For me, it’s really about social justice—I was targeted before I was born,” she says. “My mom was told to abort me because she was a Latina woman. There was no husband in sight, my dad was overseas, and the doctors immediately gave her a referral to an abortion clinic.”

As a 26-year-old Mexican-American woman from California’s Inland Empire, Garza doesn’t fit the conventional mold of an anti-abortion crusader, that is, white and old. In fact, virtually all of the pro-life organizers leading the Albuquerque campaigns were women under 35, and at least four of those women are Hispanic. They are part of a fresher, younger—and, in the case of Survivors, more militant— generation of pro-lifers that has taken the helm of the movement in recent years. And unlike their 1980s counterparts, though, these kids don’t want to blockade clinics or go to jail—the goal, Garza tells me, is to make the system work for them.

“Our generation lives with the reality that anyone of us could have been on the line,” she says, turning to face me in her seat. “It was legal to kill us. We had a target on our backs.” 

Tara Shaver, 29, in the office at Project Defending Life, an anti-abortion pregnancy crisis center across the street from Planned Parenthood in Albuquerque, N.M. Image: Grace Wyler.

In an apparent testament to the Survivors’ training, the Albuquerque referendum was driven by two of the group’s former interns, Bud and Tara Shaver. Self-described “Christian missionaries,” the Shavers were members of Operation Rescue in 2009, arriving in Wichita, Kansas, on the day that late-term abortion doctor George Tiller was murdered in his church. After his death, two of the physicians who had worked at his clinic moved to Albuquerque to practice at Southwestern Women’s Options, making it one of just a few abortion clinics in the country to practice late-term abortions. The Shavers soon followed. Since 2010, the Shavers have engaged in what Tara calls “prayerful witness” at Southwestern Women’s Options, launching investigations into Tiller’s former colleagues, and routinely circling the clinic in a “Truth Truck” emblazoned with images of a dismembered fetus.

Although their initial plan was not to pursue a ballot initiative, when the option was suggested by other pro-life activists, the Shavers, and their friends in Wichita, went with it. It was a surprising foray into campaign politics for Operation Rescue, a de facto opposition research arm of the pro-life movement that primarily targets abortion clinics and doctors through investigations, rather than referendums. But while Tuesday’s results definitely showed the limits of Operation Rescue’s appeal—it turns out voters who hate the Truth Truck, or the fetal pain trick-or-treat fliers—it also opened up a new strategy that could help Operation Rescue shut down specific clinics at the local level, by taking their case straight to the voters.

Of course, abortion opponents have never had a lot of luck at the ballot box. Personhood amendments have been struck down in Colorado and Mississippi, and South Dakota voters rejected a categorical abortion ban twice. But the movement has never lacked activists with the single-minded faith to try again. “Once you start, you can’t stop—everything else seems totally worthless,” explains Mary Rose Short, a 24-year-old California native who has been on the road with the Survivors for two years. “Indulging yourself after this seems incredibly selfish.”

Does she have any plans for the future?

“Sometimes we joke about the crazy things we're going to do when abortion ends," Short says. "I might go to nursing school.”