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Cam'ron Is Still Harlem's Diplomat

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Photos by Brayden Olson

I met Cam'ron on a quiet, residential street in Harlem. He pulled up in a Bentley coupe riding shotgun, with his manager British behind the wheel and his fiancée Juju in the backseat. Together, we made a short walk to the intersection of 128th and Lenox. Within minutes Cam'ron had drawn a crowd of fans and well-wishers. A little boy came up to us and said “Do you know Marcus?” to which Cam’ron replied, “Yeah.” The little boy smiled and proudly said, “That’s my cousin.”

That’s the type of effect Cam’ron has in Harlem, but more importantly New York, where he’s the definitive rapper of the early 2000s—outshining both Jay Z and Nas on a street level. Realizing that it would be impossible to have an interview with Cam’ron on the streets of Harlem, we entered a building owned by one of his childhood friends to have a talk about his legacy, wearing pink, and whether or not Jay Z made him a millionaire. Here's what Harlem’s golden boy had to say.

VICE: I passed Rucker Park on the way here. You used to play basketball there right?
Cam'ron: Yeah, basketball is one of my passions. At one point I was in the top 25 for my age level.

Is that why you were hesitant to take the music route?
It’s not that I was necessarily hesitant about going the music route, it’s just that I didn’t take it seriously since basketball was a priority to me at the time.

So, what happened with that?
I suffered an injury at a junior college in Texas where I was being scouted, so I came back to New York.

Is that when music thing finally popped off for you?
When I got back, Ma$e was already signed to Bad Boy. I followed his lead and never went back to school. He introduced me to Big [The Notorious B.I.G.] and that’s when I got my first record deal.

You had a different flow on your first record, Confessions of Fire. It was a lot more aggressive and a lot more straight forward. How'd you transition into the "punchline flow" that we all know and love today.
Just time. Things change. You have to realize that I'm blessed to be around long enough for something like that to evolve. My rhyme style when I was just coming out happened to work for that time period. But you have to reinvent yourself. If I was doing the same thing to this day, I would be pretty boring by now. I make a conscious effort to reinvent myself every couple of years.

I remember the first time I'd heard anything like that was on your song "Wet Wipes," when you said "Lemme Hit / Sammy Sosa." Nowadays, it seems like a lot of rappers have taken that style, especially all of Cash Money's roster.
At the end of the day, it's like this: If you are a basketball player who's 12 years old looking up to players like LeBron James and Kevin Durant, when it's your time to shine, you will emulate them a little bit. I wouldn't say that rappers are biting me off. I just think they added their own spin on it. It's not like they owe me royalties or anything.

Are you used to people capitalizing off of your image? I've seen socks and T-shirts with your images emblazoned on them, and even zines that are based on you. Hell, I feel like Steve Jobs owes you money—he stole the glasses and turtleneck look that you rocked on the cover of the Horse and Carriage single.
The only official collaborations as far as clothing is concerned is the shirt I did for Alife and the socks. I have seen other things, like a T-shirt with a pink Range Rover on it that I didn't co-sign. By the end of the year, once I settle the various deals I have with people, everybody will know what's being put out by me and what's being bootlegged. 

I have to be honest with you, the streets are starving for a shoe. Your kicks would fly off the shelves. Maybe Timberland can put out their classic 6" butters in a Pink Panther flavor?
I should look into that.

I think the fact that you are so marketable is that you're one of the few rappers to bridge the gap from being just a rapper to being a pop culture icon. Let's put it this way: my mother knows who you are. You even became a meme. How'd that come to be?
It's probably because I talked to Bill O' Reilly and asked him if he was mad. It was nothing really. He was trying to come at me and I thought it was hilarious, so I made a joke out of it. It's a lot of things. But the simple fact is that I'm living my lifestyle and people are capitalizing on it financially or intellectually. I don't plan any of this, I just wake up in the morning being me.

What about the Anderson Cooper thing?
It was around the time of the "Stop Snitchin'" movement. Everybody was mad that I went on 60 Minutes and pretty much agreed with that rationale. But, you can't buy 60 Minutes-level publicity, you know what I mean? If you got an album or a movie coming out, you can't get on 60 Minutes. I took my opportunity to be on there to say something I felt strongly about.

What you said wasn't that crazy. You're selling albums to kids with street sensibilities and that's just the mind set.
People are shocked that I went on in the first place, but you have to understand that no one's going to be on 60 Minutes unless it's something miserably sad or something bad going on. So I don't regret what I said at all.

When did you become interested in acting and producing?
Dame came through for me again on that one. He put me in my first movie, Paid in Full. Growing up I watched other movies like Master P's I'm Bout it and Dame and Jay's Streets Is Watching and I just followed their blueprint. Then I executive produced, starred, and wrote Killa Season.

I have to ask—what was up with Jay Z name dropping you on Drake's "Pound Cake"? Jay came at that feature like he was the Queen of England and he knighted you with a million dollars. Did he really make you millions of dollars?
There's two sides to every coin, and I addressed it on my latest mixtape. He might not have meant it the way he meant it but it came across that way. For instance, if you name a guy like Lyor [Cohen]—this is the guy who gave him his deal, so yeah he probably made him money in the long run, but it's not like Lyor didn't already have a million dollars before he signed Jay.

Tell me about some of your lesser-known business ventures, like the Oh Boy fragrance and your porn company Dipsex.
Those were companies we had that we sold. Once you get a company up to a certain status, and somebody's willing to buy it, it makes sense for you to sell it. The Dipsex thing—that was my partner Big Joe's thing. I just co-signed it. You get to a certain point when you're not flipping keys, but you're flipping businesses. Funny story: BET isn't owned by anybody black but it's the "black" entertainment channel—it is what it is.

Do you still talk to the rest of Dipset? There seems to be a new beef every now and again.
We're all good. We're all on speaking terms. Everyone wants a Dipset album, but we don't want to cheat the people. We can go to the studio and make an album in a couple days, but it wouldn't be genuine. We wouldn't want to cheat people like that.

You can make an album in a couple days? 
I got 2,000 songs that have never been released. I got a studio at my house. If I wake up in the middle of the night, I can record a song. There's no time restraint on me in that respect. I can record whatever I want. I probably record 15 songs a week—not because I have to, but just because it comes so natural. It's second nature to me. By the time I walk back to my Bentley I'll think about eight or nine new rhymes.

One of my favorite rappers is Max B. When did you meet him and how'd you get affiliated with him?
Max B is from my building. We grew up in the same building. I lived on the fifth floor and he lived on the third floor and he signed with Jim [Jones]. Max B was so funny, I could never really take him seriously as a rapper cause this dude just makes me laugh all the time, but come to find out he's a really talented rapper. When he got on with Jim, they just did their thing. His name is Charlie Rambo, that's his nickname in the hood. 

Prolificacy has almost become a rite of passage among Harlem-bred rappers. Max B is releasing tapes from jail and you allegedly have 2,000 unreleased songs.
Me and Max, we write about where we're from. Don't get me wrong, it's also about being clever and having punch lines and coordinating your rhymes and words and what have you, but a lot of times I could stand out here in this neighborhood and within two days I'll have enough material for an album. The reason we're on the roof is because if we did this on the street, this interview wouldn't be finished untill midnight. And don't get me wrong, it's all love. If I stood outside the whole day, I'd see a hundred people I grew up with, and that's a hundred stories to write about.

Follow Cam'ron on Instagram and keep your eyes peeled for his latest project First of the Month—a series of webisodes and mixtapes that will be released simultaneously every month starting early next year.


The Internet Is a Giant Lie Factory

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The internet is a pretty shady place sometimes. Photo via Flickr user Julian Burgess.

November’s feel-good viral hit of the month was “Why I Make Terrible Decisions, or, poverty thoughts,” a blog post on Gawker’s Kinja platform that attempts to explain the thought processes of people trapped in life-crushing poverty. It’s a rambling, yet moving essay that touches on aspects of being poor that are not often considered while painting the portrait of a life in which every decision is tinged by exhaustion and lack of money:

“We will never feel hopeful. We will never get a vacation. Ever. We know that the very act of being poor guarantees that we will never not be poor. It doesn't give us much reason to improve ourselves. We don't apply for jobs because we know we can't afford to look nice enough to hold them.”

The author, Linda Walther Tirado, set up a crowdfunding page after her post blew up. She’s collected more than $60,000—enough to quit one of her jobs, get surgery to fix her fucked-up teeth (which she says have prevented her from getting desirable work), write a book, or build a nonprofit that would help people in poverty.

Except Linda, as tough as her life might be, isn’t trapped in a hopeless mire of destitution stretching back decades, as you might infer from the essay. She attended private school as a kid (partly on scholarship), worked in politics, and “spent some time bouncing in and out of [college].” Her post now has a disclaimer at the bottom that says, “Not all of this piece is about me. That is why I said that they were observations. And this piece is not all of me: that is why I said that they were random observations rather than complete ones.” She also claims on her GoFundMe page that we should understand that her piece “was taken out of context, that I never meant to say that all of these things were happening to me right now, or that I was still quite so abject.” It’s not clear what she means or what elements of her essay were actually about her, but the weirdness of the postscript disclaimer and the omitted facts (dude, maybe it’s a problem when people reading your work are confused about what has happened to you and what hasn’t?) has led to at least one writer accusing Linda of producing “poverty fan-fiction.”

No matter what percentage of Linda’s essay was true, the Facebook-friendly summary (“Woman in Dire Poverty Writes Beautifully About Her Personal Hell!”) falls apart when you look at it closely, which isn’t all that uncommon among stories that go viral. Most of the time, the things people are excited to share with their friends and “friends” on social networks are outright lies.

A story about people being assholes on airplanes that generated a lot of traffic for BuzzFeed before the guy behind it revealed it was a prank.

Look through your Facebook feed and chances are you’ll find a bunch of half-truths, conspiracies, and chain letter–quality hoaxes sharing space with links to reputable news stories. In the past month, I’ve come across links to an article about Chinese people eating soup made of human fetus (a retread of an old racist rumor), a story about how former Liberian president Charles Taylor was a CIA agent (this one was actually reported by the Boston Globe, but later pretty much completely retracted), and a tale of a lesbian ex-Marine waitress who got stiffed on a tip by a homophobic couple (the couple now claims they gave her an ample tip; it’s not clear who is lying or what is going on).

With the exception of that last story, it would have been pretty easy for the sharers to do a quick Google search and determine that the OMG or WTF item they were about to post was outdated or untrue. The whole point of the internet is that you have pretty much the sum total of human knowledge sitting at your fingertips! It takes TWO SECONDS to research the thing you are thinking about sharing and find out that the Daily Currant is a shitty satire site, or that there is no “Abortionplex,” or that those “legal notices” your friends are posting on Facebook don’t do anything—yet even journalists and others who should know better fall for this crap.

The problem is, you can look at the internet as a collection of random odds and ends that it is your job to curate—some of these things may be “truer” than others, but what’s really important is whether you love or hate them enough to post them to the social website of your choice. Objective truth is a myth anyway, right? There’s no reason to independently verify anything, and you don’t have time for that, since all you’re doing is clicking the “like” button and sending it into the internet. Voila, stuff like that viral fake MLK quote from two years ago is born.

Unwittingly posting some false information is forgivable, but when it happens over and over again on a large scale, it populates the internet with myths and rumors and makes it more difficult to wade through the murk in search of, for instance, what MLK actually said. And people's inclination toward blindly sharing whatever moves them at the moment has led to viral content being created, packaged, and spread without anyone ever questioning whether that content is full of lies.

A sample ViralNova post, which has photos and texted ripped from a Reddit post that is probably just some anonymous user tricking people for the lols.

You’ve likely come across one or more of ViralNova’s posts—the site, created and run by an entrepreneur who’s made a career of building traffic-magnet websites, republishes photos and stories from all over the web and gives them Facebook-friendly headlines like, “Half Way Through These Photos, I Could Barely Handle It. But I’m Glad I Made It to the End… Amazing.” As with similar viral sites like BuzzFeed or Upworthy, everything ViralNova puts out is mind-blowing or heartbreaking or jaw-dropping. “A constant barrage of emotional highs,” is how the Guardian’s Oliver Burkeman describes it. Burkeman also notes that a bunch of the site is basically just hoaxes adapted from chain letters, like this letter about a dog whose owner had to give him up before he was shipped to Iraq.

ViralNova explicitly does not give a shit about truth. “We aren’t a news source, we aren’t professional journalists, and we don’t care,” says the site’s about section. The people who share ViralNova’s content don’t care either. And when you’re trying to build some traffic for your website by making some viral hits of your own, you have to cater to the internet’s appetite for outrage and emotion—take the time to check something out and determine if it is BS and you’ll lose valuable clicks. As the Wall Street Journal wrote in an article about Neetzan Zimmerman, Gawker’s resident traffic machine, “When he can, Mr. Zimmerman tries to note when a story looks fishy and might harbor some ulterior motive. But telling the truth kills virality, reducing traffic.” You might say it’s the other way round: virality kills truth.

A "shocking report" that could have been easily disproved with a few minutes of research—but then you wouldn't get the traffic from this post.

Here's one more example: A few months ago, a couple people on my Facebook feed got alarmed by some news stories about Gilberton, Pennsylvania, a small town that was being “held hostage” by its chief of police, who was also the head of a right-wing militia. There was a “media blackout,” which explained why the major networks weren’t covering it, but nevertheless, residents were “asking the feds to intervene in fear of an armed revolt.”

None of that was true. The town’s only cop, Mark Kessler, had made some videos of him ranting about Obama and whatnot, the Gilberton city council suspended him for his inappropriate behavior, and Kessler’s supporters responded with a pro–gun rights rally. But that version of small-town drama wasn’t dramatic enough for the internet, so it was repackaged, with the details pulled from a conspiracy-minded website and laundered through enough semi-reputable blogs to fool some smart, but slightly credulous, people. All those articles about the phony siege of Gilberton are still online with no retraction notices—you can easily imagine them being stumbled upon again and revived by people who haven't read the pieces that contradict the original rumors.

There’s no easy fix to the continual waves of disinformation flooding social media. Facebook could add a “flag as untrue” or “flag as rumor” button next to things posted by users, but that would likely get abused like the old “flag as inappropriate” button was. Bloggers and editors could spend more time verifying their information—but even some books by big-time journalists aren’t properly fact-checked, so it’s a little too much to ask StrugglingWebsite.org to make sure everything it runs is 100 percent accurate. We all have to get a little more skeptical about the links we come across on a day-to-day basis, which means assuming everything is a lie unless it’s confirmed by multiple reputable sources. When something seems so outrageous and surprising that it couldn’t be real, it’s probably not.

@HCheadle

Drone Trains Won't Stop Wrecks

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Drone Trains Won't Stop Wrecks

Ibiza Looked Just As Fun Before the Rave Generation Arrived

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All photos by Derek Ridgers

Before the crap ecstasy and Paul Oakenfold, Ibiza was something else entirely: a sleepy Balearic island known for being the favored vacation destination of famous, wealthy hippies hoping to escape the exhausting stresses of making music for a living. There was, however, a short period of change between the boho years and the Ibiza Uncovered era—a span of time that last roughly from the mid-1970s until the late-80s.

During that time, instead of being overrun by tourists getting dressed up in their best pair of shorts to hurl $15 at a luminous bottle of drink in Pacha, Ibiza Town was full of beautiful European people wearing weird clothes and dancing around in open-air nightclubs. It was a bit like Berlin was in the 2000s but with glorious, blazing sunlight and sandy beaches rather than Arctic winds and stern Soviet architecture.

Photographer Derek Ridgers happened to be on a family holiday in Ibiza in 1983 when he came across all these European club kids, and fresh from photographing London's skinheads, he trained his camera upon them. For whatever reason, no publications would buy his photos at the time, so they'd been sitting around unseen for decades until he dug them out and put them on display this month as part of the ICA's "Ibiza: Moments in Love" exhibition.    

I gave Derek a call to chat about his pictures.

VICE: Hi Derek. So, were you part of Ibiza's early clubbing scene or just an observer?
Derek Ridgers: I was on a family vacation when I was 33 and I was always an observer. I’d been taking a lot of photos in London nightclubs—like Camden Palace and the Batcave—at the time, and when I went out to Ibiza in 1983 I saw that there was a similar thing happening on the streets of Ibiza Town.

What was it that you thought needed to be captured?
It was quite exceptional. It was like being in a nightclub in London, but on the streets of Ibiza. In the day it was no different to any vacation town in the Mediterranean, but at night there were a few streets that were just like open-air clubs. It wasn’t that I thought it needed capturing, it was just that I couldn’t stop myself from taking photos. It was a compulsion.

Did all the party artwork and flyers not affect the look of the place during the day? Or was it still all very hippie when you were there?
There were still a few old hippies hanging out in bars around Ibiza Town, but not as many as in other parts of the Mediterranean. The shops were selling real hippie-type clothing—you know, cheesecloth clothes, skirts, and tassels and things. The posters and artwork wasn’t something I noticed at the time; it’s only in retrospect that this kind of thing comes into sharp focus.

Do you think the culture got diluted by the British invasion in the late 80s and early 90s?
By 84 it had already started to get a little bit diluted, but I don’t necessarily think it was the English. In the early 80s, the European beautiful people would go to Ibiza in the early part of the summer and they’d be gone by the time the English were there on vacation. But it was the Europeans who were driving the scene that I photographed; there were more Spanish and Germans there than English.

Was ecstasy widespread when you were first taking photos there?
I don’t think so. This was a couple of years before it really hit the clubs. The first I ever heard of ecstasy was when Grace Jones told me about it when I photographed her in 84 or 85.

You'd photographed other youth movements before, like the skinheads in the late 70s and early 80s, for example. Did what was happening in Ibiza have the same kind of feel to it?
I don’t really know. It wasn’t really focused. It was focused in the sense that it was only around a few streets in the town, but it wasn’t really focused like the skinheads because it was all different types of looks. It wasn’t one specific look; there were, among others, some goths there and some [club kids] who looked like they’d just walked straight out of Camden Palace.

Was the club scene something you followed and photographed back in Britain?
Not really. I stopped following it when the whole rave scene started. Everything changed. I was looking for the "look-at-me" type of people who were happy to stand there posing and would go out to dress up. The change in the British rave scene wasn’t really something that I noticed immediately. The whole thing was very dark; it was in fields and warehouses and places like that, which would have been hard to photograph anyway. Some of these parties were in muddy fields, and people didn’t really dress up to go out any more.

That's a shame. Lastly, why has it taken you so long to exhibit these photos?
Before this exhibition, the photos had never even been seen. I tried to get them into The Face magazine at the time, but they said that English readers wouldn’t be interested in what’s happening in Ibiza. After that I just forgot about them and moved on to the next thing.

Derek's photography is part of the "Ibiza: Moments in Love" exhibition at the ICA, which is a look at the island in the 1980s through a collection of club posters, books, and photographs. The show is running from now until the January 26, 2014.

Click through to see more of Derek's Ibiza photographs

@Jak_TH

Tupac Lives

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H&M sweater; New Look sweater, American Apparel skirt; Hackett sweater, WE shirt; Bellerose sweater

PHOTOS BY MILAN BOONSTRA
STYLIST: OGÈNDA

Production: Daan Mol
Direction: Loes Koster
Hair and Make up: Christina Vila
Models: Richenny Ryfa Felicia, Christa Brouwer, Dean & Max Kenton

 

WeSC shirt, Sjaak Hullekes sweater, Topman trousers, Vans sneakers

 

Bellerose jacket, sweater and trousers, Converse sneakers, Herschell bag; WeSC jacket, Marc O'Polo sweater, WeSC t-shirt, Good Genes jeans, Converse shoes

 

Dockers jacket, Sjaak Hullekes shirt; American Apparel shirt; American Apparel shirt; American Apparel dress, H&M sweater

 

Stutterheim jacket, American Apparel sweater, Dockers trousers, Stetson hat, American Apparel boots

Romanians Are Fighting Fracking on Horseback

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Zîna Domnițean

Pungești is a small Romanian village right slap bang in the way of Chevron’s shale gas fracking operation. This hasn't pleased the locals, who protested against and actually managed to stall the mining operation back in October.

However, at 4 AM on Monday, Chevron's bulldozers returned to the scene, along with over 250 riot police. Catching the protesters while they slept, authorities raided their camp and now basically have the entire village under siege. Their tents have been stomped down by cops, and the locals are not allowed to leave their homes to get water from their wells or feed their livestock. According to the authorities, it was for the villagers' own safety that they were forced to stay indoors while Chevron security and installation teams rode roughshod across their farmland creating a fenced perimeter around their exploration ground.

Presumably it was also for safety reasons that 21 people—both activists and locals—were beaten up and another 80 dispersed by riot police in the middle of the night. Authorities, including Prime Minister Victor Ponta, are denying anything untoward happened, but the demonstrators have already acquired medical certificates proving that their ribs are broken. Zîna Domnițean was one of the activists who was attacked and subsequently accused of vandalizing a police car. I called her up to find out what really went down in Pungești on Monday morning.

VICE: Hi, Zîna. What the hell happened?
Zîna Domnițean:
On Sunday evening, we got some calls warning us that the riot police would try to raid our camp in the morning, so we were on alert. At four in the morning, we got a call from some guys in Lipovăț—a neighboring village where Chevron was keeping their installations. We drank our coffees, charged our phones. We knew that—according to the law—the police aren't supposed to intervene before 6 AM, but at 5 AM they were already in the village. We sounded the alarm and the villagers started running toward the camp, but the village was already overwhelmed with riot police. They were either beating people, or blocking their doors so they couldn’t exit their homes “for their own safety.”

Did you manage to get any of this on video?

No, they took advantage of the darkness and the lack of electrical lighting. Besides, they sabotaged our cameras. They would stick flashlights in them, but we couldn't film anything clearly anyway because we don't have infrared cameras. They do.

How did you end up in front of the riot police?
Some of the locals sat down in front of the first van, which was guarding the Chevron trucks. Me and other women sat on our knees in front of it. I could see the fully armored police coming in the reflection of the car's headlights. As I hung on to the car's fender, a policeman forced my hands off it and threw me to the ground.

Is that when they hit you?
Yes, me and one more guy got stomped on with boots, shields, and batons. After that, they pulled me up by my shoulders and carried me to their van. I lost consciousness, because I couldn't breathe. They pulled my clothes over my face, and got to suffocating me with a Romanian flag that was around my neck. As soon as I came to, I had a panic attack. I kicked and screamed, and they told me that's when I broke the rear window of the police van.

So they basically strangled you with the Romanian flag on Great Union Day?

They hung on to the flag, to keep me immobilized. I stood there for an hour and a half. Then they took me to their precinct in the city of Vaslui, where they charged me and had me make statements. Normal police took over and they photographed the bruises on my legs. The ones on my stomach aren't that visible. I want to get the 21 people they beat up to get medical proof of the beatings and file complaints.

What are they charging you with?
Damaging state property and blocking a public road. They say they have it on film. We weren't blocking the road, just the part of it where the police cars were—any other car could have passed on the other lane. I think there were about 800 cops against 30 activists and 100 villagers. The rest couldn't make it past the police blockade.

Did any individual police talk to you?

I asked them why they arrested me. I told them they were obliged to show me their IDs. When they refused to do this, I called the normal police but they made fun of me. In the heat of the moment, I also called them traitors.

How are things now?
It feels like an Orwellian dictatorship. The villagers can't take their animals to the watering hole. They are told that this is because some very large tractors are working the fields and we can't pass for our own safety. Meanwhile, Chevron's private security forces are driving all over the people's farms in their SUVs.

Is the camp still intact?

The whole thing falls under violation of private property, but nobody intervened. The people's tents, which were on private land belonging to one of the protesters, were destroyed. A local bar where the protesters charged their phones and were given warm beverages was also closed down by the police.

Twenty people are still in the camp. Until 10 PM on Tuesday, people couldn't get in—not even the press. We weren't allowed to bring them food and they weren't allowed out. Some of them are old. Now the police are letting us pass but ID us every time, even though they know who we are. They also check our cars to see what we are bringing.

What are the Chevron employees doing now?

They finished setting up the large fences and an access bridge. A large truck came, but we don't know what was in it. Two hundred riot police are still in the area. Our information is that another 300 are occupying a fire station in Ivanesti, a neighboring village about 6 miles from Pungesti.

What are you going to do next?
We are calling for people around the country to come here and fight with us. But this is not just a physical fight, because we know that we are outnumbered. Chevron's land was actually given to them by the mayor who didn't even own it in the first place. At the beginning of his term, he just wrote off the village’s land as his own. But he doesn't have any documents for it. We went to court about this as well as their building permit. We are waiting for the trial to start, but the authorities keep stalling.

Thanks, Zîna.

Jonathan Mannion's Captured Some of Hip-Hop's Most Iconic Images

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Jonathan Mannion's Captured Some of Hip-Hop's Most Iconic Images

This Nova Scotian Politician Didn’t Realize Blackface is Offensive

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A bunch of Dutch people in blackface and on rollerblades because... it's Christmas? via Flickr.

Joachim Stroink, a Liberal member of the legislature in Nova Scotia, got a fancy new racism scandal in his Christmas stocking this year. At a Dutch holiday event last weekend, the Nova Scotian politician sat on the lap of a man posing as the always controversial Zwarte Piet—the Netherlands’ confusingly racist, blackface holiday character who is Santa’s slave. Stroink smiled for the camera. Then, to solidify a social media and political backlash, this supergenius tweeted the photo with the following caption: “Giving some love to Zwarte Piet and Sinterklass [sic] thank you to the Dutch community for putting this event on.”

Before we go any further, if you’re not familiar with Zwarte Piet, he’s a huge part of Dutch Christmas (despite being so obviously racist).  The Zwarte Piet character has become increasingly controversial in the Netherlands over the past few years—because generally people don’t want to celebrate slavery and minstrel shows with their eggnog and mistletoe.

According to Dutch folklore, Zwarte Piet’s job is to hide in the chimneys of homes all around the world to eavesdrop and figure out whether kids are good or bad—which sounds like a really awful job. Around 1850, books with drawings of “Black Peter” popularized the character as Sinterklaas’ servant, who may have been an actual black servant in the Netherlands. However, some Dutch defenders of the tradition say he isn’t of African descent—the black face paint is soot from chimneys. Yeah, right. Good one.

Zwarte Piet is clearly causing controversy the world over. In October, the organizer of Amsterdam’s Sinterklaas celebration said it was too late to change the costumes of the nearly 500 Zwarte Piets marching with Sinterklaas this year—but that he would discuss the matter with protesters in January.

"In a gradual way we can change things about Zwarte Piet,” he said. “I can personally see us giving 100 of the 500 Piets a different look to begin with." The city’s mayor solicited objections to Black Pete as part of consultations on licensing the celebration.

After receiving complaints from Dutch groups, the United Nations authored a report in September calling for an end to the tradition. As the debate over the character has intensified, people of African descent in the Netherlands reported greater racial abuse and ridicule, the UN said. UN investigators themselves were subjected to threats and insults following the recommendation.


Joachim couldn't be happier. via Twitter.

So one would have to assume that Joachim Stroink was not aware of the international controversy surrounding Zwarte Piete when he posted a photo of himself “giving some love” to the deeply racist holiday figure on Twitter.

On Monday morning, Stroink funneled interview requests through the unlucky Liberal public relations department, but as the controversy grew throughout the day, the party called a press conference. Stroink, who had met earlier with the minister of African Nova Scotian Affairs, gave a teary-eyed response to criticism.

“I do acknowledge that the whole blackface culture… there is no place for that in Nova Scotia, nor in our [Dutch] culture as well. There was no malicious intent whatsoever. This is a Dutch tradition that I grew up with and never ever in my deepest heart ever thought that this would be portrayed in this manner.”

In an earlier Facebook post he wrote: “As a child growing up and celebrating the Sinterklaas and Zwarte Pete tradition, the blackface did not lead me to think less of my African N.S. neighbours and friends, and as such I was not sensitive to the potential to offend through my participation.”

Irvine Carvery, who ran for the Conservatives in the recent NS election, wasn’t alone in thinking the MLA should know better. “I was shocked first of all to see him in that particular position with someone in blackface. I just figured that living in Nova Scotia he would have automatically understood the implications of that kind of dress and that kind of gesture. …I don’t know why he would not be aware of this concern of blackface.”

Joachim represents a district in the heart of Halifax, Irvine said, and should be aware of the unfortunate string of racist incidents in Nova Scotia that make this scandal that much more offensive.

Earlier this year two employees of a Halifax furniture store filed human rights complaints, alleging that they were being discriminated against for their race. In one case an employee said his coworker hung a black statue in effigy. After the second employee complained, her car was spray painted with the N-word.

Then there’s the ongoing case against the province from a group who alleges abuse at the former Nova Scotia Home for Coloured Children, but the RCMP initially said it wouldn’t charge any of the more than 40 people implicated, sparking further allegations of racism.

As if that wasn’t enough, in 2010, two brothers burned a cross on the lawn of an interracial couple in Windsor, NS, and shouted racial slurs.

So clearly, Nova Scotia is no stranger to shocking racial scandals. Nova Scotia didn’t elect its first black MLA until 1993, and it was only in 2010 that Halifax apologized for expropriating the community of Africville in the 1960s.

Born in Africville, Irvine helped push for the apology and settlement. He’s sure Joachim isn’t racist, while adding the MLA needs to be more sensitive to these things. The blackface caricature is racist, he said, and it’s not an isolated incident in Nova Scotia. It shows the province still has a long way to go.

“It’s time for the white community to take ownership of this problem and deal with their problem. It’s not our issue, it’s their issue.”

Stroink wasn’t available for a brief interview Tuesday, and the Liberal communications office did not respond to questions about the photo. Minister of African Nova Scotian Affairs Tony Ince was not available for comment. Irvine noticed a significant number of online commenters in NS media who were claiming the blackface objections were an example of political correctness gone too far. He’s concerned this incident will be forgotten and won’t result in a broader discussion, which he appears to be correct about.

 

@HilaryBeaumont
 

Previously:

Don't Have People in Blackface at Your Birthday Party

Why Are People Surprised by Racist Halloween Costumes?

I Wore Blackface in Quebec and Everybody Loved It


Reverend Billy Talen Faces a Year in Prison for Protesting in a Chase Bank

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Photo courtesy of Billy Talen.

At 1 PM on September 12, performance artist Reverend Billy Talen and his Stop Shopping Choir walked into a JP Morgan Chase asset management bank on 52nd Street. and Park Avenue in Manhattan. Forty-five minutes later Bill and his musical director, Nehemiah Luckett, were getting handcuffed on an F-train subway platform by the NYPD with charges of rioting, menacing, and disorderly conduct. Now, Billy and Nehemiah are facing a year in prison.

In the complaint filed by the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, the bank's manager, Robert Bongiorno, said he saw “the defendants, along with approximately eight other people, [were] running about the bank while wearing frog masks.” The frog people jumped on furniture and “repeatedly ran up to the faces of the bank's employees and customers while screaming, in sum and substance, 'WE ARE COMING FOR YOU!'”

Robert—who was reached by phone but refused to comment for this article—thought the bank was being robbed and, according to the DA, feared for his safety. He also told authorities that he “observed at least one customer or employee inside of the bank break into tears.”

There are more than a few things Reverend Bill wants to clear up. For one, his choir was not wearing masks. Bill's legal council had advised against the choir covering their faces inside a bank. Those were toad-shaped hats over the choir's heads—the Golden Headed Toad of Central America, to be exact, which was last sighted in the cloud forests of Costa Rica in 1989. Climate changes in the toad's habitat are thought to have led to its extinction. The Golden Heads showed-up from beyond the grave at the exclusive Chase branch to warn the financial giant and the wealthy private investors that the midtown branch caters to that they (and all of us along with them) are next if they don't change their wicked ways.

Chase is a leading investor in greenhouse gas-emitting industries. The bank, for instance, lent or underwrote more than $8 billion toward coal extraction since 2005. Reverend Billy foresees a climapocalypse, a doomsday sponsored by the likes of JP Morgan and other backers of fossil-fuels, which are igniting an uptick in heatwaves, droughts, rising oceans, and storms like Haiyan.

“We could just see people putting money into the fossil-fuel cartel from those desks,” Bill told me, this week as he fried eggs and sausage in a generous dousing of hot sauce at his apartment in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn. Although he wasn't wearing his trademark white polyester suit and preacher's collar, he occasionally lapsed into the hemistich speaking rhythm of his alter-ego, “a reversed-out Jimmy Swaggart,” as Bill put it.

In his youth, Bill tried his hand at Hollywood, but eventually became disgusted with the whole aspiring movie star scene. He moved to San Francisco and, in the late 90s, arrived in New York during the height of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's reign. He came up with the Reverend character at a time when Starbucks were proliferating, Walmart was clawing at the gates of the city, and Disney had just opened a flagship shop in Times Square.

“We were anti-consumerists,” Bill recalled of himself and the crowd he ran with back then, many of whom would eventually form the Stop Shopping Choir. “We were fighting the destruction of neighborhoods by chain stores and sweatshops union busting. We championed community gardens very early on and farmers' markets. We helped keep Walmart out of New York.”

Spalding Gray was a huge fan.“'Don't ever stop preaching!'” Bill said the late, great monologist told him. “'Even if there's nobody around. Preach to the supermodels on the billboards.'”

What started as pure satire, an evangelist exorcising Mickey Mouse from Times Square, became serious after 9/11. People from all walks of life began approaching the Reverend looking for spiritual guidance. In one instance, when the scent of the collapsed World Trade Center still hovered in New York's air, Bill was in costume, riding his bike over the Williamsburg Bridge when, before he knew it, he found himself with a girl crying in his arms. “I said to myself, 'Well, let's see. I'm an older person. I'm wearing this collar, which I bought for five bucks, but I'll just console people as best I can. That's all a religious person is. They might say that God gave them this calling. But that's all just... We know what that is.”

After delivering thousands of sermons, Bill said he's learned, “You can tell a joke in the middle of a prayer and it doesn't make the prayer less powerful. A joke is not the same thing as disrespect.”

He described what transpired in the Chase lobby as an “Earth invasion”—figuratively speaking. Nobody was harmed or physically threatened. “We told everybody in there we were conducting a protest and it would be over in 15 minutes. We didn’t want anybody to be upset. People are so mesmerized by consumerism, when the choreography is broken, they don't know that to do. We've had soul's saved on the spot and people run into the bathroom crying. It's all over the place.”

Billy's attorney, Wylie Stecklow of the Wylie Law firm, described the charges as an “outrageous” attack on his clients' “expressive political activity.”

Wylie explained that, by law, police cannot arrest a subject on misdemeanor charges, in Bill's case what would have amounted to trespassing, unless they catch the suspect in the act. They can, however, make criminal arrests without having witnessed the crime in question. Wylie believes the New York Police Department trumped up the charges in order to apprehend Bill and his choir director on the F train platform after the fact. And because Chase disapproves of the content of Bills' message, they are pressing ahead with the charges.


Photo by Peter Rugh.

“You have a bank that is telling people, 'We don't enjoy your speech, so we are going to criminalize it,'” he said. “'We are going to take your very innocent speech and say that we fear for our safety.'”

Bill's been arrested dozens of times before for civil disobedience, but three nights is the longest he's ever been locked up. He has a three-year-old, so he's not exactly eager to go to go away for a year, but he's ready to take the case to trial if need be. “This our Pussy Riot at the high alter moment,” he told me.

When, they're not jumping on the tables at banks, you'll find Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir leading revivals in theaters. Reverend Billy's quest for redemption is a recurring plot-line in their stage performances.

“I'm the best known person in the Church of Stop Shopping,” said Billy. “I'm also a white, heterosexual male. Our story is that I'm failing all the time. I'm a failed prophet. I need the choir to come to my aid.”

Right now, however, Billy's put his faith in the general public, asking them to be his salvation. He's launched a petition drive demanding the charges against him and his colleague, Nehemiah Luckett, be dropped. The letter to the DA has gathered more than 10,000 endorsements ahead of an evidentiary hearing, slated for December 9. The Reverend wants us to take climate change seriously, lest the human race go the way of the Golden Headed Toad. But, in the meantime, he's praying Chase and the DA's office will learn to a take joke.

@JohnReedsTomb

A Chat with Our UK News Editor in Kiev

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Protesters in Kiev (photo: Konstantin Chernichkin)

As temperatures plummet in Ukraine, the political temperature is getting decidedly hot. Since Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych refused to sign a deal bringing his country closer to the EU, the streets of Kiev have been awash with angry, bulldozer-riding protesters who want the country to head in a more Western direction. The backdrop is a geo-political tussle between the EU and Putin’s Russia—each wanting the Ukraine to come under its sphere of influence rather than the other's. Yanukovych survived a vote of no confidence in Parliament yesterday, which didn’t really seem like it would calm things down very much. VICE UK's News Editor, Henry Langston, is on the ground in Kiev, so we called him to see if he could tell us what’s going on.

VICE: Hey, pal. How are you?
Henry: Cold.

I bet. What’s the atmosphere like in Kiev?
As soon as we arrived we could tell that there was the possibility of revolution in the air—hundreds of thousands of people on the streets. They set up around the Maidan Square and the surrounding areas so the cops can’t actually get into the direct center of the city. No vehicles can get in, which means that our taxi couldn’t get in. We had to drag our bags through half the city to the center of Kiev. As you go down Institutskaya Street—which is one of the main streets—there are a number of government buildings that have been occupied. The mint, where they print the money, has been closed off and occupied by the workers. So has the city hall and access to other government buildings.

How are they managing to keep the cops at bay?
People are manning these barricades 24/7. They’ve put loads of water on the ground so it’s really icy, so if cops try and run at the barricade they’ll fall over. If they tried to ram the barricades with vehicles, they’d crash.

Mykola Azarov, Prime Minister of the Ukraine, reacts to the vote (photo: Konstantin Chernichkin)

What was the reaction to Yanukovych surviving the vote of no confidence?
As soon as we found out about it we went and followed the protesters as they marched from Maidan Square to the parliament building, where they collected more protesters. We’re talking thousands and thousands of people. Then there was an agreement that they would head toward the residency of the president to blockade it from pretty much every entrance. But the cops had already secured the area and made sure no one could get in or out, so people headed elsewhere. There was lots of talk of revolution and lots of talk of strikes.

So what happens now?
It feels a bit like limbo now. They can’t force an election and the legal options to force out the government have run out, so how do they bring down the government? Through a violent revolution, or other means? Mass demos, camping out until the government is under so much pressure they have to resign? The problem is that it’s getting colder day-by-day—we’ve been here for two days and they’re saying that it’s the coldest day so far. What people are worried about is if it gets so cold and the first snow comes, it will force people off the streets. I imagine that the government is banking on that. If enough people stay out in the streets on strike, then the government could be in trouble.

Vitali Klitschko makes a speech to Parliament (photo: Konstantin Chernichkin)

So all the processes to change things that don’t involve sitting in the cold with a placard or striking are exhausted?
There are people saying that there is a legal way of calling a referendum to force an election. But lawyers are trying to figure out whether or not they could do that—it’s not something they can just suddenly do. There won’t be an election tomorrow, but if there was, a poll put Vitali Klitschko—the boxer who’s part of the opposition Udar party—ahead of Yanukovych, the president.

(Photo by Henry Langston)

What kind of people are protesting?
You’ve got a large mix of politics here from what we can gather. A lot of liberal middle class, and working and lower-class people as well. What we understand as left and right is a bit skewed here. It’s a patriotic country, everyone is flying Ukrainian flags and singing the national anthem together. You’ve got the Svoboda—which is the nationalist party—here with punks and anarchists and all these pensioners. It’s mostly people from the Ukrainian-speaking center and west of the country, rather than the Russian-speaking east, on the streets. But we’ve met pro-Russian people from the west, too.

What’s it like in the occupied zone?
I think they occupied the city hall on Sunday. It’s about five minutes from the square and it’s a huge Soviet-style building. There’s a massive line of people waiting to go inside. The graffiti on the walls outside of it reads: "Revolution HQ" in Ukrainian. Inside it’s completely occupied, people are handing out food, free drinks, medical aid for people who might have been injured or camping out and gotten ill. There are places for people to sleep; if it’s too cold to sleep in their tents people can come inside. Inside they have barricades because they’re prepared for some sort of attack on the building. Within the barricades there are soup kitchens. It’s like a more useful, non-lame Occupy.

Police block the way to Parliament (photo: Konstantin Chernichkin)

What’s the noise from Russia?
This is embarrassing as much for Putin as it is for Yanukovych. Thousands of Ukrainians are coming out and saying “no” to Russia, Those on the streets want to move away from Russian influence, and more toward Europe. It looks bad for Putin—he’s saying it’s a pogrom, but who’s it a pogrom against? It’s very peaceful. The violence that we saw on Sunday with the bulldozer and the guys attacking the lines of cops seemed like a small minority. We haven't seen anything like that since. People here are saying there were agent provocateurs at work from the government, there are incriminating videos of some guys who were attacking the cops being seen later on behind police lines chatting to the cops, but it’s far too early to say just yet.

It seems a bit weird that people are protesting to join the EU. People here [in England] seem either to hate it or not feel too strongly either way about it.
A lot of people here are upset about living conditions—it’s not a very cheap place to live. People aren’t happy with the way things are now and they see becoming part of a wider Europe as something that is achievable and would improve their lives.

Anything else we need to know?
There’s an air of not being sure what’s going to happen next. Everyone sort of shrugs their shoulders when you ask them questions. There is a fear that the government will grow tired of things and come and evict the Square and clash with the protesters. There’s so much international pressure on the government here after what happened on Saturday and Sunday, so it seems unlikely that they’d come in heavy-handed. The government might be happy to just wait it out and hope that people leave. Who knows, the protesters might force themselves into more government buildings, smash through the police lines, like the revolution in 2004. People are chanting “revolution,” they definitely want a change of government and they don’t want to wait for the next election in 2015. It’s unpredictable, for sure.

Thanks, Henry.

Follow Henry on Twitter for on the ground updates: @HenryLangston

Thai Prison Fights

Seven Iranians Are Hunger Striking at the US Embassy in London

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Signs outside the Iranian hunger strike at the US Embassy.

For three months, six women and one man have been sitting outside the US embassy in London and starving themselves in the cold. The group—who are all middle-aged British residents—are subsisting on nothing but water and sugar lumps to protest against the killing of 52 residents and the alleged kidnapping of seven others at Camp Ashraf, Iraq on September 1.

In case you're not particularly well versed in the minutiae of the world's many refugee camps, Ashraf was home to over 3,000 exiled Iranian dissidents. It also acted as the headquarters of MEK, a leftist organization that wants to overthrow Iran's government. The camp was seized by US forces after their invasion of Iraq in 2003 and eventually handed back to the Iraqi security forces in 2009. Since then, tensions between MEK and the Iraqi government have resulted in several outbreaks of deadly violence. In 2012, most of the camp's residents were relocated to Camp Liberty, a former US military base on the outskirts of Baghdad. Around 100 stayed at the old camp to sell off property and goods that had been accumulated over the years, and 52 of them were killed at the beginning of September.

Some of the hunger strikers camped outside the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square.

The hunger strikers allege that this massacre was carried out by the Iraqi security forces and demand that the USA and the UN guarantee protection for the remaining Iranian dissidents in Camp Liberty. They claim that those left in Iraq don't have proper access to food or medicine and say they will be persecuted if they are deported back to Iran. The Iraqi government naturally disputes the group's claims. Haider al-Akaili, a member of the Iraqi committee investigating the incident at the behest of the UN, has said the he believes the attack should be blamed on an "unknown militant group".

According to Amnesty International, "Video footage and photographs showed that many of the 52 had been shot in the head, some while handcuffed. Eyewitnesses from the camp said they had seen the seven people in handcuffs being beaten, thrown to the ground, and then taken away in a white minibus." That report goes on to say that seven hostages "were transferred under tight security to an unofficial detention facility in the former al-Muthana airport in central Baghdad at the end of September," and that "unconfirmed reports have suggested that they are in the custody of the Iraqi authorities."

Last Thursday, on the 89th day of their protest, I went to Grosvenor Square in central London to speak to the hunger strikers. I found their tarpaulin tent in front of the embassy's gates and was greeted and questioned by two men before I was granted permission to speak to the protesters.

Faizaneh Majidi (left) and Susan Alijani.

"We are all victims of the regime of Iran—we have all lost family in Iran," said Faizaneh Majidi. As I spoke to her and Susan Alijani, they showed me photos of relatives who they say have been executed in Iran and took me through each of their stories.

"My brother was 16 years old [when he was executed], and my aunties and my uncles were executed from 1981 to 1997," said Faizaneh. "Three of my relatives are in Camp Liberty now, and these people are innocent; they are intellectuals and academics and they have sacrificed themselves for democracy and for freedom. That’s why they are represented by the Iranian resistance. When I first heard of the attack on September 1, I thought, I can't stay at home. I can't think or do anything. I just thought, We have to do something."

When I asked what it would take for them to call off their hunger strike, they listed their demands. First, Susan told me, they want the seven hostages to be released. Secondly, they want "blue helmets"—UN peacekeepers—to be deployed at Camp Liberty to protect the remaining Iranian dissidents. "If we die, the US is responsible, because they have broken their promises," said Faizaneh.

Touran Ranjbar.

As I spoke with to the pair for about 30 minutes, they seemed to grow weaker by the second and I felt like my questions were draining what little energy they had. I was starting to feel pretty uncomfortable for making two clearly exhausted protesters talk at length about their deceased relatives, so I left them to speak to Touran Ranjbar, who explained that she had been admitted to a hospital the previous night because her health was deteriorating.

"I’ve got pain in all of my body," she told me, "in my heart, my eyes. My blood pressure and blood sugar levels jump up and down. I’m dizzy and I’ve got headaches. One of the 52 who died was my childhood friend and over 3,000 people’s lives are in danger at Camp Liberty." At Camp Liberty she said, "they can't get water, they can't get medicine, and they can't get food—nothing. They don’t get it to them; that’s why we're here.

"We don’t want to die, we don’t want to be hungry, and we don’t want to sleep on the street in cold weather, but our hands are tied," she said. "This is the only way and they have put us in this situation. I choose to die, so at least I can save the others' lives. This my choice."

Fatima Abdi and her husband.

I spoke to Fatima Abdi and her husband next, with their friend translating their stories for me. Fatima explained that she was protesting because her cousins had been executed in Iran and she fears that the dissidents in Iraq will meet the same fate if they are sent back. "One cousin was 16 and the other was only 13," she said. I asked what their crimes had been and Fatima explained that they'd been detained and executed after being caught in possession of anti-government literature.

Fatima’s husband said that he had been detained in an Iranian jail from 1981 to 1988, where he was beaten and tortured; today he suffers from various disabilities as a result. He was subjected to two mock executions—he'd be blindfolded, then told he was going to be shot, then a gun was fired next to his head.

When I asked what his charges were, he said he didn't know, but remembers that he too was in possession of anti-establishment literature. He says he also witnessed the bodies of political prisoners who'd been executed being loaded onto trailers and towed away.

Though today there is a lot of noise about Iran's "moderation," political executions are still common in the country, and it's no huge stretch to suggest that dissidents would be prosecuted if they were found to have anti-government literature today.
.

Though Iraq is continuing to investigate the massacre at Camp Ashraf, the protesters are demanding that an independent investigation be launched on the grounds that a government probe into deaths that may have been caused by the government isn't likely to be impartial.

The hunger strikers told me that various members of UK Parliament have visited them, but so far no one from the embassy or the UN has come out to hear their demands. And as the days drag on and their conditions worsen, it's hard not to wonder if they will have to be hospitalized—or worse—before anyone agrees to investigate the deaths of their comrades at Camp Ashraf.

Follow Murray on Twitter: @murrayonly

More stories about Iran and its dissidents:

Are Israeli Spies Coercing Iranian Dissidents into Becoming Hitmen?

Looking at Modern-Day Iran Through the Eyes of an Exile

Is Iran's New President Capable of Talking His Way to Peace with Israel?

Activists Shut Down a Line 9 Construction Site in Toronto

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At about 5 AM yesterday, a group of activists associated with Rising Tide along with Aamjiwnaang and Sarnia Against Pipelines snuck onto a construction site near Toronto’s picturesque Don River, where a section of Enbridge’s Line 9 pipeline is being replaced. Erecting a blockade of barrels and wooden skids, with some activists locking their bodies to Enbridge’s equipment, the group succeeded in shutting down construction for the day. While Enbridge sent its forty workers home early, activists remained on the site for twelve hours, in some cases locked to barrels, bulldozers and trucks. Those risking arrest represented an eclectic mixture of people: a seasoned activist, a student, a young mother, and two Anglican priests.

The activists argued that the pipeline is altogether illegal because First Nations along its route have not been meaningfully consulted by either Enbridge or the Canadian government, meaning that the pipeline is in violation of section 35 of the Canadian constitution. Amanda Lickers, a Haudenosaunee woman who participated in the National Energy Board hearings for Line 9 and acted as spokesperson for the protesters, explained that “all of the band councils that intervened in the NEB process clearly stated that they have not been consulted. Enbridge is trying to say that by their standards, by making a couple of phone calls and having some info sessions, that they’re consulting with First Nations. This is not the reality. What is the reality is that of the seventeen First Nations communities across the line, most of them haven’t even heard about it. I personally did outreach to each one of those communities and contacted their band offices, and in some communities my phone call was the first time that they had even heard about the reversal project.” Lickers also added that, while modern band councils are a colonial invention, a product of the Indian Act, the traditional systems of governance for the Haudenosaunee communities along the line are actually still intact—but similarly, “they have not been consulted.”

The protesters accused Enbridge of beginning construction for the Line 9 reversal project before the project has even been approved by the National Energy Board. Meghan, a protester locked into a barrel at the entrance of the work site, said “I believe this is what it takes to stop these pipelines from happening. We went through the NEB process, Rising Tide did, and regardless of this process Enbridge has gone ahead and has started construction on the proposal which has not yet been approved.” Andrea Budgey, an Anglican priest who had her head secured to a bulldozer with a bicycle lock, similarly told me beginning construction was “a demonstration of bad faith, I think, on the company’s part.”

When an Enbridge spokesperson, Michelle Wasylyshen, arrived on the scene, she repeatedly denied that the ongoing construction has anything to do with Line 9 or the Line 9 reversal project. “The work that’s going now is separate from the Line 9 work. Its preventative maintenance work,” she said. So I asked what pipeline was being worked on and she openly contradicted herself: “This is our Line 9 pipeline.”

Wasylyshen said that the ongoing construction “is separate from the reversal, it doesn’t have anything to do with the reversal.” But when I asked her whether or not this maintenance work is necessary for the reversal to take place, she declined to comment. When I asked why Enbridge is repairing Line 9 before the reversal is approved, having said publicly that they will put the pipeline out of service if the NEB doesn’t allow the reversal, she declined once again to comment.

Throughout the day, as a number of residents stopped by to talk to the protesters about what they were doing, it became clear that many people living close to Line 9 were hearing about the pipeline for the first time. Pawel Thommee, whose house is “about five hundred metres” from the pipeline, told me that he thought the construction was for a water main until he encountered the barricade. “The community was not informed about any kind of danger, and I’ve just learned fifteen minutes ago about it… We didn’t get letters, we didn’t get leaflets, we didn’t get anything. What Enbridge does is they jump over the community,” he said. Another resident, whose home is directly next door to the pipeline, told me that Enbridge made no effort to inform him or his neighbours about what has been going on—he had only heard about the pipeline because he takes an active interest in reading the news.

When I asked Enbridge’s spokesperson about why the community wasn’t informed, she explained that Enbridge has held a number of open houses and has done “extensive outreach to the neighbours in the immediate vicinity.” When I told her that the outreach clearly didn’t work, as I kept meeting new people who had never heard about Line 9, she replied “if you have found somebody that we haven’t engaged with, perhaps they don’t recall the engagement, perhaps they weren’t home when we went to their home, perhaps they didn’t attend our community information session.” She then invited me, as if it was my own personal responsibility, to put these people in touch with Enbridge so that they could be told what Enbridge is doing. “If you have their name, number, or want to point them out with me, we are here to talk to anyone and everyone,” she said.

I asked if Enbridge had made any effort to inform everyone living throughout the Greater Toronto Area about the Line 9 pipeline reversal—after all, as Meghan, one of the women locked down at entrance to the work site said: “Line 9 runs along dozens of major tributaries that lead directly into Lake Ontario, right into the drinking supply of the entire GTA.” The spokesperson confirmed that “absolutely, we did that. In Toronto, specifically on June 6th, we had two open houses.” I asked how many people attended these events and she replied that “at one we had 50, and at the other we had I believe about 40 or 30” – a remarkable 0.0015% of the Greater Toronto Area’s population.

As the day went on, Twitter supporters ordered a pizza to the construction site, and some neighbours who were already aware of the line stopped by with warm drinks and snacks to support those who were locked down. Police and Enbridge took a light handed approach, negotiating with protesters to allow a single worker onto the site to make sure the equipment was undamaged. The protest concluded peacefully at the end of the work day. No arrests were made.

And while this action lasted only a day, protesters suggested that actions like these will become increasingly common among environmentalist groups across the country. “Line 9 is part of a larger struggle, the struggle to shut down the tar sands. It’s going to be the Energy East, it’s going to be all tar sands pipelines. It’s got to be rail, that entire paradigm. We need to start valuing human life instead of the dollar, or capital,” Amanda Lickers said.

With her arm in a barrel, weighed down with concrete, Meghan calmly explained that “this kind of action is going to need to take place more and more as we see processes like these, like the NEB’s, not always facilitating direct democracy.”


Previously:

What Parts of Toronto Are Being Put at Risk By Enbridge's Line 9?

A Meth Pipe Shattered Inside a North Dakota Woman's Vagina

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Meth pipe image via

What started as your plain old, run-of-the-mill car accident resulted in a woman being arrested while pieces of glass from a shattered meth pipe were stuck up her vagina. In North Dakota, 26-year-old Jeana Marie Smart rear-ended another driver on the road. When law enforcement officers responded to the scene, Jeana was arrested “after a warrant check revealed that she had failed to appear in court on a pending narcotics and drug paraphernalia case," according to the police report.

The officer transporting her, Michael Benton, spotted blood on the backseat of his patrol car. Being the curious man that he is, he decided to inquire about the red stain as opposed to just doing what most people would do, which is naturally assume that it's menstrual blood and not bring it up because that's a really awkward conversation to have.

Benton wrote in his report: “When I asked Smart about this, she said she was on her period. As we walked to the booking area, blood was dripping from Smart's crotch area onto her legs and the floor.” After a few more moments of what I can only imagine is agonizing pain, Jeana finally admitted that she had a pipe up her hoo-ha. Not only that, but a capped syringe as well. I can't imagine being the person that has to yank those out. “Anything else in there? A lighter? Spoon perhaps? Never ending series of handkerchiefs? A partridge in a pear tree?” Ha, that's a holiday joke. Tis the season!

Actually, I'd like to award Jeana for her quick thinking. If I had drug paraphernalia on me while driving, and there's already a warrant out for my arrest because I didn't show up to court to face charges for owning drug paraphernalia, then maybe I would have stuck the thing up my vagina too. I've probably had way worse things in my vagina (shout out to my ex-boyfriends). You know what? She would have gotten away with it too if it wasn't for the whole pipe being made of glass thing. So maybe Jeana Smart was being kind of smart after all. Maybe.

This story ends the way all stories about glass meth pipes breaking inside vaginas end, though. Jeana was sent to a hospital for all the glass to be completely removed. Once she was cleared, she went back to jail, was booked, and her bail was set at $2,000. She has since been released from custody, and her preliminary hearing is set for January 3.

What's the moral of the story here? Is it as simple as don't do drugs, or is there something extra special we can learn from all this? Don't stick glass objects up any body cavities? Maybe we need a new sort of D.A.R.E program specifically targeted towards educating the youth on the dangers of glass inside your private parts. This story coupled with the infamous “1 Man 1 Jar” (NSFW! NSFW!) video would really set the record straight. I highly recommend viewing the video. Especially if you want your day to be ruined.

via Smoking Gun

@JustAboutGlad

 

Being the House Band for a Comedy Show Is Easy for LA Font

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Being the House Band for a Comedy Show Is Easy for LA Font

The CEO of Archie Comics Thinks White Men Are "Not a Protected Class"

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Photo by Flickr User Joelk75

Back in 2011, Co-CEO of Archie Comics Jonathon Goldwater tried to oust fellow co-CEO, Nancy Silberkleit, claiming she was “unstable and threatening to run the company into the ground," with sexual harassment charges and bullying thrown in for good measure. This, after she assumed the position of co-CEO with a 50% stake in 2008 following the death of her husband, Michael Silberkleit, Chairman of Archie Comic Publication.

That lawsuit ended with an injunction in November ordering her to stop “harassing, yelling, or abusing” employees of Archie Comics, which sounds like an insane thing to have to legally order someone to stop doing, yet by the following January, Nancy found herself in court again after contacting employees, claiming that she herself was being “the one being harassed and abused.” This time, federal judge Shirley Kornreich decreed in no uncertain terms, “She is not to do anything for Archie Comics Productions.” Not being allowed on the premises meant that an intermediary was chosen to represent her interests in the company. The intermediary filed suit in less than a year, saying that she had become “unhinged” and should be permanently removed from the company. Nancy responded claiming sexual harassment.

Now, five employees, including President Mike Pellerito and Editor-in-Chief Victor Gorelick, are suing Nancy for gender discrimination and intimidation to the tune of $32.5 million. They allege that the co-CEO rarely called her male employees by their given name, preferring to refer to them as simply “Penis," and yelling “Penis! Penis! Penis! Penis!” while pointing at the men during meetings, like a baby having just learned the word, or a teenager who never actually understood the rules to the Penis Game. Also included are allegations that she would stalk and intimidate her employees, pulling such stunts as arriving at the corporate offices flanked by Hell's Angels, or frequently asking around if anyone knew where her late husband kept his revolver and ammunition. Nancy claims that the accusations are “absurd." It's not absurd because she didn’t do these bizarre, humiliating things, but because “white men aren’t members of a protected class." She's implying that you can pretty much do anything to white men and it’s no big deal.

Nancy, you fucking idiot.

There is a certain willful ignorance at play when somebody makes the claim that it isn’t possible to be sexist or racist towards white men. It stems from the correct identification of us as the historical “oppressors," and works on the theory that overcoming an oppressor means defeating them, and potentially oppressing them a little bit too. But the purpose of an integrated society is to not simply overcome the “oppressors," but rather to overcome “oppression” itself. Singling out white men for special treatment? I’ve heard of a few gentlemen in white robes who are fond of that idea too.

If she had taken half a second to look up what is actually a “protected class”, she’d have learned that all races and all genders are included, and further research would’ve shown that white is indeed a race and male is a gender. In the eyes of corporate business, nicknaming your employees “Penis” is akin to referring to the women in your office as “Pussy Lips."

What I’m saying is that now might be a good time to stock up on Archie comics, because as Justice Kornreich put it, “[I]f, in fact, Ms. Silberkleit stays, the company will probably be destroyed, which she doesn’t seem to care.” When asked if she would consider leaving, Nancy told reporters, "That hasn't even crossed my mind."

Nancy, who was an art teacher before her husband’s death, is also running for mayor of Rye, New York. Go figure.

@jules_su

A British Man Is Going to Prison for Having Fish Porn on His Phone

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Image via

A man in the UK is awaiting sentencing this month for having fish porn, which is illegal in the UK. Outside of using it as a tired, slippery-slope argument against gay marriage, sex with animals doesn't get much discussion in the US. Meanwhile in other countries, public figures do occasionally pop up and ask whether these subjects are up for debate yet.

The fish porn fan in the UK is Shannon Johanson of Wade Meadow Court, in Northampton, UK, and he sounds like a real piece of work. In 2011, at the age of eighteen, he slashed a guy's arm with a knife, and chased him through the streets in his underwear. Now he's twenty, and back in June, he was busted for having eight blunts, and when they booked him, they found "grossly offensive" animal porn on his Blackberry. 


Johanson's neighbohood, via Google Street View

His beast porn collection sounds like it included three videos: two of women having sex with dogs, and one of a woman "performing a sex act" with a dead fish, which I assume means masturbating with it. Then in November, Johanson was charged with possessing extreme pornographic images and possession of a Class B drug, and he threw himself at the mercy of the court.

Now he's a repeat felon, awaiting sentencing at some point in December, and despite the previous wrap for assault, he didn't do anything this time that would be illegal in, say, Colorado. I checked.

But in the UK, the law they're using to bust Mr. Johanson is pretty new. The 2008 Criminal Justice and Immigration Act bans something called "extreme porn," which interestingly enough, doesn't cover the relatively tame stuff you can see at extremeporn.com. The UK defines "extreme porn" as: 

"grossly offensive, disgusting, or otherwise of an obscene character" and "it portrays, in an explicit and realistic way, any of the following—(a) an act which threatens a person’s life, (b) an act which results, or is likely to result, in serious injury to a person’s anus, breasts, or genitals, (c) an act which involves sexual interference with a human corpse, or (d) a person performing an act of intercourse or oral sex with an animal (whether dead or alive), and a reasonable person looking at the image would think that any such person or animal was real."

So in the UK, could I watch the following clip from the award winning Thai film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives? Would a "reasonable person" feel that that catfish is really going down on that lady?

Every so often, should we re-ask ourselves where we stand politically on human-animal sex? And can we do so (please) without comparing it to any other pressing civil rights debate? 

In a 2010 TV interview, the philosopher Peter Singer said he knew women who enjoy having dogs perform oral sex on them, saying, "The dog is free to do it or walk away. There’s no dominance over the dog. That seems to me harmless." Then all the other guests on the show got grossed out, and talked about how weird it was without weighing in on whether or not it's wrong. Granted, the dead fish on Johanson's phone couldn't consent to anything, but I don't think that's the point.

Singer's 2001 article "Heavy Petting" goes a bit further, saying:

"The vehemence with which this prohibition continues to be held, its persistence while other non-reproductive sexual acts have become acceptable, suggests that there is another powerful force at work: our desire to differentiate ourselves, erotically and in every other way, from animals."

Singer said on the talk show that psychiatrists who encounter a patient in personal turmoil over their sexual encounters with animals have sometimes given them a copy of his article, and that after reading it, they've been able to forgive themselves. 

But are people who let their dogs go down on them actually criminals? They probably are if they're in Singer's native Australia. In the UK, very much so. In the US, yes, even in Colorado. In France, Belgium, Italy, Portugal, Holland and Russia, though, it's no big deal.

The UK's extreme pornography ban has been used to go after non-zoophiles, as well. In some cases, people have been prosecuted for having consensual images of acts that are legal to perform, like fisting, or putting long needles into your own urethra, but illegal to look at in photos.  

Johanson wasn't able to weasel out of a conviction on the basis of the law's in consistencies like others have. He will receive a maximum of three years in prison, even without the drug charge. If he's sentenced to two or more, he'll be added to the UK's sex and violent offender registry.

@mikeleepearl

 

Jihad Selfies: These British Extremists in Syria Love Social Media

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After being publicly sacked by al Qaeda leader Aymann al-Zawahiri and accidentally beheading a fighter from one of their main allies in Syria, it’s fair to say the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS)’s PR campaign has suffered in recent weeks. So, like any half decent group of militant extremists, they obviously want to address this slip. Unfortunately, a traditional media outreach is very difficult for them, given ISIS’s policy of kidnapping journalists. So they've turned, like many before them, to social media.

Over the past few weeks, foreign fighters from ISIS and their subgroup the Muhajireen Brigade have been busy uploading selfies across Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, in an effort to publicize their cause and win more recruits to the Syrian jihad. They offer a bizarre and fascinating look inside Syria’s most feared and least understood militant groups.

On paper, the Muhajireen Brigade are separate to ISIS, but they're considered by some analysts to be a front group for the larger jihadist outfit. The social media evidence seems to support this view.

This picture shows British fighter Ibrahim al-Mazwagi in battle with Omar Shishani, a Georgian Chechen who formerly led the Muhajireen Brigade, and is now ISIS’s military commander in Northern Syria.

Al-Mazwagi was killed in battle in February, aged 21. This is a collage made to honor him as a martyr, along with his friend and fellow casualty, Abu Qudama.

Above are two other recent British martyrs, Choukri Ellekhlifi, 22, and Mohammed el-Araj, 23. The pair are shown here at a jihadist internet café in Atmeh, a Syrian border town that is now firmly under ISIS control. After they died, another British fighter wrote this glowing tribute to el-Araj on Facebook:

“This brother need no introduction. Those who knew him knew he was always working for his deen! He had the best manners, he came with a brother, and left this world with the brother! They where tight and where both at the top of their classes and within a month where graduated as commandos and started teaching others! They both got married and left their wives within a week an went fi sabilillah coz they cud not sit around whilst the ummah was in this state! They were harsh towards the disbelievers and humble towards those who breathed la illaha illa llah, they didn't bother arguing with a Muslim even if they where in the right! Wollahi they stood out from amongst those who are the best of us in jihaad! May Allah the all mighty, the all wise, the magnificent, the ruler over all, the king of all kings accept all their efforts, forgive them their sins, allow us to reunite with them, keep firm those whom they left behind, keep us all steadfast upon the haqq and to earn HIS Allah swt pleasures until HE the Supreme looks at us and smiles! Peace and blessing be to the best of man kind our beloved muhammed s.a.w, his family and the sahaba r.a.

My brother philistini who beat us to the finish line! We soon come insha ALLAH ta'la.”

The high casualty rate suffered by British and other foreign jihadists—referred to in the martyr tributes below—at least partially refutes claims by the relatively secular FSA rebels that ISIS and their allies rarely, if ever, fight the regime:

 

Accusations that ISIS prefer fighting other rebels to fighting the regime seem to have stung the group, who have responded by releasing ever-more-intense combat footage from their official Vimeo account.

But at the same time, British-linked social media accounts refer to fighting the FSA group Ghuraba al-Sham, who had earned themselves a poor reputation among Syrian civilians for extortion, looting, and banditry.

This photo shows gold claimed to have been captured from the "criminals" after ISIS’s recent successful assault on Ghuraba al-Sham. ISIS later executed the group’s commanders, as seen in this disturbing video.

The Atmeh internet café crops up frequently in social media posts, and indicates the relative normality of jihadist life far from the frontlines. In a clear recruiting drive, British fighters frequently refer to Syria’s “Five-Star jihad” and urge their compatriots at home to join them while they still can.

One British Facebook account mocks the travel warning given by the police to those suspected of planning to travel to Syria: 

“What the police give to those whom they think might be traveling to Syria lool they gimme joke!!... It means right now they can't really do squat... Hence the word 'interest' lol.”

The same account then mocks the ease with which foreign jihadists can cross the Turkish border into Syria:

“Who thinks they can jump that???... Subhan'ALLAH... 1 hour flight from Istanbul, 30min drive from hatai and bing bang boom ur in!!”

Another British jihadist Tumblr account states that Turkish border guards facilitated their illegal entry into Syria, despite Turkey’s recent denials of support for jihadist groups (the bracketed notes are his own):

“a huge army vehicle from the Turkish army appeared from the border we were about to cross. On top of it was a machine gun with a soldier in control of it and two more men inside. A few of the brothers thought this was it, that we were going to attain martyrdom or be arrested, strangely enough my heart felt at ease and content. They commanded us to get out of the car and asked us to open our luggage. They asked us were we jaysh al-hur [Free Syrian Army] but we replied no we are here for sadaqah and we weren’t lying as we had no intentions of being anything to do with jaysh al-hur (free Syrian army) as many among them are murtadūn (apostates).

The commander was debating between whether to send us back or let us through the border but as soon as our driver told them we was British, they smiled and were inspired by our presence. The sad thing was to see they had love for the deen (religion/straight path) but they had sworn allegiance to the tawagheet (tyrant rulers). After searching our luggage and taking a pair of our gloves as a gift (they gave us no choice) they let us go on our way. Our happiness wasnt hidden, it gleamed from our faces so much that it brought smiles to theirs but they made the vehicle we were in turn around and leave, leaving us to travel through the border on foot.”

Once inside Syria, life seems pretty good for Britain’s jihadists on tour, with food supplies from home...

Infantilising treats from the West...

And a number of baller villas they get to live in:

There's a strange sense of the traditional boy's bachelor party to this life. And much like their vacationing peers, British jihadists don't have to stomach any foreign muck like tabbouleh or hummus. Instead, they get pizza...

And kebabs:

As one fighter notes of the lads-on-tour vibe:

“We be living nice AL-HAMDULILLAH! Uploaded a few pics of my house showing u how Allah has provided for us in the blessed land of shaam! Note this is only my house which is a one bed room.. Others have 5+ bedrooms with swimming pools etc. 

Again AL-HAMDULILLAH for the ONE who has provided for us out here as HE knows I like a little bit of Dunya with my deen lol”

But it's not all junk food and sweets. They also train with a wide range of weapons in the olive groves around Atmeh...

Show off their personal hardware...

And generally make the most of being young, carefree and on jihad:

“we got Internet, phones, cheese burgers lol pizza, markets, schools for children, classes for adults, shariah courts and all sorts!”

Though, as with any group of young men living together, sometimes banter can veer into straight-up bullying:

“Sad u got grown men coming to jihad fronting an acting like they big stuff.. Wollahi ur a joke! I pity u and feel sad for ur wife!"

A common location in social media posts is a large villa on a hilltop overlooking Atmeh, with the black ISIS flag fluttering atop it, which appears to be the home from home for British fighters. It's here that they work out...

And chillax in their pool.

Such a distinctive location can easily be tracked down via satellite imagery, which suggests that the jihadists either have a very poor sense of information security or absolutely no fear of being bombed by the regime or monitored by Western intelligence services.

Recent reports indicate that, stung by Western criticism, the Turkish government has increasingly begun to restrict access to Syria for foreign jihadists, which means that the best days of the "5 Star jihad" may already be over.

Despite this, the calls for fresh recruits make the place sound about as tempting as a gig joining in in Syria's carnage could ever sound:

“To the brothers: What are you waiting for? There are plenty of weapons here waiting for you to come and play with them. Plenty of food as a sheep gets slaughtered regularly depending on how many brothers are around, there are plenty of women here waiting to get married ;) waiting to bare the offspring of the army of Imam Mehdi by the will of Allah and there is honour for the Muslims here.

"To the sisters: What are you waiting for? Your husbands clothes need washing! (I’m joking) but seriously what are you waiting for? You may wear your veils without being harassed, no woman is harmed here and if she is there is a harsh penalty as the woman’s honour is not to be tampered with whatsoever, there are plenty of mujahideen desiring to get married who have some of the most loving and softest characters I have ever witnessed even though they are lions in the battlefield, there are orphans here waiting for mothers to love them the way their parents would have. Come to the land of honour. You are needed here.

"We don’t just need men and money. We need communities. We are building the Islamic state. Join us as it is becoming extremely difficult to enter through the borders.”

But one by one, social media accounts are going silent, presumably as their owners are killed. But for now, young Brits are still fighting and living in Syria, uploading their exploits to an audience of envious friends and curious journalists back home. As British fighter Abu Qa’Qaa notes on his Tumblr about the recent media storm over young volunteers in Syria:

“Britain posting our pictures in newspapers. They don’t realise it inspires more to come jihad and don’t worry, we never wish to come back. :)”

@arisroussinos

Do Wearable Computers Need a Car Mode?

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Do Wearable Computers Need a Car Mode?

Everyone in This Wheelchair Sports Camp Is Stoned and Making Beats

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Photo by Adrian Diubaldo

Kalyn Heffernan is 42 inches tall, has been diagnosed with a brittle bone disease, is confined to a wheelchair, smokes lots of weed, and won’t hesitate to publicly shame anyone who gets on her bad side with a brutal rap track. Kalyn is the emcee and driving force of Denver’s Wheelchair Sports Camp, a hip-hop group that mixes classic beats with jazz and avant-garde sound experiments. The group formed while Kalyn was in college, with just her rapping and a DJ supplying the beats, but has evolved into a shifting lineup that sometimes features drums, a saxophone, and even a sitar.

Her music deals with social inequalities relating to handicap people, as well as getting blazed as fuck and how much cops suck. On her song, “This Bitch…” Kalyn attacks problems with healthcare, and on “Party Song” she taunts, “rock, let the midget hit it/cops on my jock, make ‘em, cough/cus I’m sicker with it.” More recently, she’s started to make beats for rapping Haitians who were displaced by the 2010 earthquake, and called out Goodwill for paying handicap people less than minimum wage.

Photo by Adrian Diublado

VICE: Hello, Kalyn. What is your writing process?
Kalyn:
I’m a pretty slow writer. Sometimes I write faster, but more than not I have to sit down... well, I’m always sitting down, but I just have to go at it.

You used to sneak backstage at shows and meet people like Xzibit, Ludacris, Erykah Badu, and Busta Rhymes. How did you do it?
It was pretty easy. I would play the wheelchair card and say “oh, so and so” told me to come back here. I was a pretty good scam artist back then. I think, because of my disability and because of my advantages, that I’ve been able to milk the sysem. I could get backstage to almost any concert.

Were the artists friendly?
Actually, Xzibit is a really cool guy. Erykha Badu was cool. There are few people who have been dickeads. Now I’m kind of bummed that I didn’t sit through concerts instead of being more concerned with sneaking backstage.

Photo by Robin Walker

Who were the dicks?
Busta Rhymes was a dickhead. He was just rude. Maybe he had a bad show, but that’s really been the only guy who was not a very nice person. Shit, I think even Kanye was cooler than Busta Rhymes.

So Kanye was cool?
I think I rapped for him and hoped to get signed. He was real nice and introduced me to his manger. He wasn’t a jerk by any means. Erykah Badu went out of her way to be nice—so did Cee Lo and Eminem.

How much do you want the audience to focus on the fact that you are disabled when you perform?
I think that’s up to every person. I didn’t get into hip-hop to be a disabled rapper; I got into hip-hop because it's my thing. The name "Wheelchair Sports Camp" was definitely sarcastic, but also kind of marketed on the fact that I’m totally comfortable in my wheelchair. Still, I don’t want to be like, “oh, first cripple rapper right here!” or, “best short rapper!” Hip-hop is a bigger focus for me.

Have you ever faced any adversity in the music scene because of your needs?
No, I’m pretty lucky. I have a lot of support in Denver. I have always been pretty well supported by good people. I’m not really a shy person, so I wouldn’t allow myself to be treated too differently.

Photo by Jennah Black

How did you almost get arrested in Denton, Texas?
It was our first big, out of state trip. We played a great show and had a really great time. There were actual graffiti artists traveling with us and also some wannabes, like us. A lot of us are kind of interested in graffiti, but we aren’t good. A few of us went tagging after the show and the person we were staying with, his roommate called the cops on us.

Half of the crew was in the apartment with the person who called the cops and the other half was causing a little scene. We bounced and got pulled over and went to jail. I didn’t. I got a ticket. The cops acted like, “Don’t think you won’t get arrested because you’re in a wheelchair,” and then I didn’t get arrested because I was in a wheelchair.

Why did the guy rat you out?
I don’t know. He didn’t agree with what we were doing.

How did you get involved with producing music for homeless Haitians?
A good friend of mine is a professor and a local musician. After the earthquake happened, his band and mine played a benefit show. He went to Haiti soon after to help with sustainability. He realized that the infrastructure wasn’t even ready for that and that everyone in the tent city was rapping. He brought a guitar and would play it and everyone would rap over it. He went back with recording material, some of my beats, and some stock instrumentals, and he brought back hundreds of sessions that were recorded in this tent city. I started remixing them and would just use their vocals and build the beat around them. We’ve got like ten songs done, but there are so many more. They’ll freestyle for like ten minutes straight. The energy and the cadence and the flow is just so dope. It’s been one of the most inspiring projects. I’m trying to get to Haiti so I can meet some of these rappers I’ve been producing.

You recently got into a bit of a Twitter tiff with Goodwill.
I’ve always been critical of how so many disabled people get shitty fucking jobs when they are capable. Every disabled person I know is good at something. Why does every disabled person have to be the cart attendant? I’ve always been critical of employment practices and disability wage.

Goodwill pays less than minimum wage to people with disabilities. I sent them a message. I was surprised that they responded and the way that they responded was pretty blatant. There has been some momentum going on to put pressure on Goodwill. Some of these Goodwill people are making 22 cents an hour because they are super disabled and it is so ridiculous.

There are people next to them with a stopwatch gauging their effectiveness. It’s so fucked up. I don’t think that there is any good story to it. The way that they responded was basically, Hey, we only do that to a small number of our disabled employees. Oh, like that makes it any better. Those employees must be really crippled—like deaf and blind. It’s so fucking frustrating. The more that I’ve gotten into rap, the more I’m this disabled advocate. I have to be. I feel like I’m more connected to people in the disabled community because of hip-hop, not the other way around.

Is it true that someone once wrote a dis record aimed at you called “Fuck Handicap People”?
It was something like that. It was actually the guy who started the band with me. He has pretty bad substance abuse issues. We tried to make it work for as long as we could, but it blew up because of the substance abuse issues. It was a bad breakup, like every breakup.

Did you battle back?
Of course I battled back. I took him out.

wheelchairsportscamp.co/

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