“Will Smith opened a school with his wife Jada Pinkett that is run by Scientologists and all the children that go to that school, the intention is to make them Scientologists. A gay school would do the same thing.”

Homophobes say the funniest things, don't you agree? The above miracle is only a tiny droplet of the word vomit that comes spraying through the teeth of Dr Mark Walcott in the video above. The whole thing was apparently recorded by his (I'm guessing pretty disgusted) colleagues a little over a year ago at a staff meeting at Newham College in East London, where Dr Walcott is the head of dance and drama. If you can't be bothered listening to the entire 50-minute rant (though you should, because it's comedy gold), from what I gathered the conversation revolves around some teacher that Walcott believes to be gay and should therefore be fired.

Here are the best of his "zingers":

"Gay-ism or any sexual preference is subliminally taught and auto-suggested.”

“There’s a teacher who wants to teach dance but his gay-ism is so upfront that I was asked not to employ him, because it wouldn’t be good for our students. The students would rebel against him because he is SO GAY. He brings his gay-ism out in the classroom in his dance.”

“If you get someone from the Ku Klux Klan to run a school we can assume there will be racial influences. Sexual preference does become an ideology.”

MW: "There are people that don’t like black people, there are people that don’t like Pakistanism, and there’s no law against that.”
COLLEAGUE: "Well… I think that there is.”

“There’s gayphobia, but there’s gayphobia of people thinking everybody else is gayphobic.”

“I’ll give you a name of somebody I’d never have run a school: Elton John! Because his gay-ism is so liberal!”

And my personal favorite:
 
COLLEAGUE: "I think you’ve got some prejudices."
MW: "I have, and so have you.”
COLLEAGUE: "Well, I don’t think I have.”
MW: "Then you need to find some.”

According to Express.co.uk, the recording was initially turned over to some type of authority figure who proceeded to investigate the case for eight months, scratch their balls, and then do nothing. It was only after the above video appeared on YouTube, on November 17, that Walcott was finally suspended.

Who's gonna teach our kids some prejudice now?

Nazi camp ID-emblems in a 1936 German illustration. The pink triangle was used to identify homosexuals.

Gonna stay true to the insanity theme this week and direct your attention to former UKIP candidate and therefore veteran mentalist Julia Gasper, who also claims to be a doctor. (This is all getting very "Ross from Friends.") Recently, Gasper penned a paper titled Where Is the Evidence for a ‘Homocaust'? Which is such a brilliant headline I'm almost tempted to ask her if she can come up with a few more for this website.

Then again, maybe I won't, because Julia's article is a shameless disgrace that amounts to a denial that gays were targeted during the Holocaust:

“So far, and correct me on this if I am wrong"—YOU ARE WRONG, YOU ARE WRONG, STOP IT, STOP IT NOW—"I find that the individuals either cannot be identified, or were Jewish as well as homosexual (so they would have been sent to the death-camps for being Jewish) or that they were imprisoned rather than killed. That does not really support a conclusion that there was a holocaust of homosexuals comparable to that of the Jews, or even the gypsies who were also decimated."

Julia has in the past kindly suggested that gay people "stop complaining and start thanking straight people" because they are the reason they exist.

Not. Got. Good. Form.

Our last doctor of the week is Core Issues Trust founder Michael Davidson, who—on January 9 (diaries)—will be hosting a panel on the virtues of gay-to-straight conversion therapy! Pretty exciting, right? Also exhibiting herself in this freakfest is some Christian lady called Andrea Minichiello Williams (chief-exec of a thingy called Christian Concern and the Christian Legal Center).

The panellists will be addressing such questions and issues as: “Homosexual orientation and practice: what did Jesus say? Straight, gay, bisexual: what about ex-gay and post-gay? ‘Don’t want to be gay anymore? Sorry we’re not allowed to help you!’ Is that ethical?”

You booking the tickets or should I?

A gold star to Tom Daley whose coming out is hardly even news any more, but deserves the same salute that all sane and responsible gestures do. I was having dinner with a friend the other night, and she suggested that queer culture and its tactics are often old fashioned. It's about time, she said, that society actually treats sexuality as yet another human characteristic, like the fact that some people are blonde and some are not.

Actually, in 2014, I'd like to see so many people coming out that I get so bored of it that I don't want anyone to ever come out again. That's how wanting to suck genitals that look like your own will be normalized.

For the goss, Tom Daley's BF is Milk screenwriter Dustin Lance Black.

@elektrakotsoni

Thumbnail image by Marta Parszeniew (via)

See more of Esme's work on her blog.

The human race is a larcenous, duplicitous one, isn’t it? Our ingenuity in the fine art of deluding knows few limits. To honor that ineffable nature of our being, we present December’s edition of VICE magazine: The Skammerz Ishu. Pick up a copy at one of these fine locations (it’s a steal) or muster the courage to subscribe here (do it already), and you can download the iPad version, which includes extras not available in print or online, here.

You won’t need to look any further than the cover to illustrate how scams, swindles, rackets, and grifts can take on unimagined forms. Artist Mishka Henner pulled a fast one on the very people who make their living off Nigerian-prince-style email scams by “scam-baiting” one particularly dedicated con man to create the image that graces our cover. Over the course of four months of correspondence, Mishka’s associate, Condo Rice, convinced the would-be trickster, who claimed to have lost treasure of the Gaddafi regime, into producing the surreal image above. Excerpts from the absurd email exchange can be found in the magazine alongside loads of other tales of scams, including but not limited to:

Our Dishonest Planet: Stories of common hustles and cons from around the world.

Pulitzer Prize and Polk Award-winning journalist John L. Mitchell and Jack Chang's investigation into the death of Malcolm L. Shabazz, the grandson of Malcolm X, who was killed when a Mexico City bar scam went tragically awry earlier this year.

Former VICE editor Aaron Lake Smith's love song to the lost days of the Greyhound bus underworld, which looks back on years of riding with a forged Ameripass ticket.

“Sometimes We Taze Each Other, ” a short story by Adam Wilson, winner of the Paris Review’s Terry Southern Prize for Humor.

VICE's own Krishna Andavolu's look into the exploitative, horrific conditions endured by the (often undocumented) temp workers in the giant retail warehouses across America.

Amie Barrodale's rememberance of her years of scoring free nights at the nicest hotels in the world, which she managed by claiming to be a travel writer.

Previous issues of VICE:

The What Da Fug You Lookin' At Issue

The Holding Court Issue

The Guccione Archives Issue

TALIB KWELI
Gravitas
Self-released

I had a cool TA in college who helped reframe the way I thought about the world. He convinced me to express my disgust regarding the vague political issues I didn’t quite understand, like fracking, to anyone who would listen. In hindsight, I realize that guy only seemed smart because I was such a fumbling dickweed. I think I speak for all hip-hop fans when I say that Talib Kweli is the rapper version of that TA.
ART POPE
 

CHILDISH GAMBINO
Because the Internet
Glassnote

It’s weirdly satisfying to watch people you despise sink into the depths of soul-crushing depression. It reminds you that no matter how perfect some people appear to be, their insides are burning with the same ego-crushing emotional pain yours are. Take comedian, TV star, rapper, and generally attractive male human Donald Glover. He just made this conventionally good rap record, which is doubly satisfying as a concept album documenting Honest Don’s slow realization that he’s nothing more than a mangled soul trudging a forced march toward the icy, unforgiving embrace of death.
JILL ROSENSCHATZ
 

BEST COVER OF THE MONTH

SNOOP DOGG/DÂM-FUNK
7 Days of Funk
Stones Throw

Snoop probably abandoned his last givable fuck back in 2005 when he propositioned the owner of a weed dispensary to install a waterslide, which explains why the walking godhead who created an archetype for all West Coast gangster rap hasn’t rounded out the elder- statesman part of his career in a cringe-worthy attempt to become LA’s Jay-Z. Instead Snoop seems content jumping paws-first into quirky genre exercises, whether it’s DJing as Snoopadelic, making a reggae album with Diplo, or cooking up this dirty, synth-y funk album with Dâm-Funk, the last remaining standard-bearer for all things stank. They seem so perfect together I’m surprised they don’t have their own sitcom.
ERIC SUNDERPANTS
 

RICK ROSS
Mastermind
Def Jam

There are two facts about Rick Ross that are self-evident: one, his name is two first names; two, the man likes to eat. You might think it’s funny to make jokes about his heft or goofy name, but it turns out the joke’s on you: Rick Ross is actually two dudes trapped in one dude’s body. There’s Rick, who makes all the Rick Ross songs about shooting traitors with elephant guns, and then there’s Ross, who’s in charge of generating Rick Ross songs about blowjobs on yachts. This record is 40 percent Rick, 60 percent Ross, and 100 percent ass-fuck crazy town.
SE7EN SISTERZ
 

E-40
The Block Brochure: Welcome to the Soil, Vol. 4–6
Heavy on the Grind Entertainment

E-40 was spawned from a time I like to call the Era of the Microsoft Zune (a.k.a. the late 90s/early 2000s) and has somehow managed to keep persuading people to give him money to make unmemorable music. The one thing he got correct is the realization that the days when a rapper was supposed to release one perfect album every couple of years are as dead as Eazy-E, which I guess is why he’s taken to annually releasing triple albums with 45 songs on them. It’s not like they’re completely awful or anything, but this record has a standard deviation of approximately zilch minus nil. If the E-40 of the 90s could have invented a time machine instead of coining indispensible phrases like “Captain Save a Hoe,” he’d zap into the future and Tase his own ball bag.
A THOUSAND-YEAR-OLD MAN 

TOURIST
Patterns EP
Method

Liking music should never be easy. That’s why the recent EDM thing has been so frustrating. People used to be willing to go to prison in the fight for their dumb right to take drugs and listen to shitty music. EDM has taken it full circle by turning wasteoids dancing to bad music into the fabric of an entire industry. But wait, what? This is “real” dance music and not “EDM”? Either way, it sounds like a toilet flushing to these old ears. And, oh great, now it’s clogged and there’s shit-water all over the floor.
SAD PUNK
 

WEST NORWOOD CASSETTE LIBRARY
8 Track Cartridge
Hypercolour

This record has songs with names like “Acid Jazz,” “Vibrations,” “Innervisions,” “Bubble” (mmm, this one’s kind of cute, actually), “Roots,” “Body Rock,” “Time Loops,” and “We Have to Live in the Future.” Too bad there’s no panacea for being permanently monged out.
GENETTE
 

DREXCIYA
Journey of the Deep Sea Dweller
Clone

I love it when defunct techno artists pop out of the grave with Really Fucking Important reissues because I get to watch my DJ friends splooge themselves with glee. Even if it’s Drexciya, one of the weirdest outfits to come out of Detroit’s 90s techno scene (they claim to be the offspring of African slaves who were expelled from an America-bound ship). And up until this point their shit has been virtually impossible to find; when this drops, my friends are going to get so excited they’ll be swimming in a pool of cum, gurgling (and gargling), “Hallelujah, bitches!”
YOKO FOUR LOKO
 

LEE BANNON
Alternate/Endings
Ninja Tune

We’ve been down with Lee since he was fucking around with all those New York high school-age rappers orbiting the Pro Era crew. Then a few months back he released a one-song EP, which basically makes him rap game Jack Nance. His current stuff is a bit too trappy for my taste, but you can tell he’s into some deep shit here. My gut tells me he’ll always make time to lay down a trippy sonic mattress for some rando struggle rapper who needs a place to crash.
SLY BRICK
 

WORST COVER OF THE MONTH

KRTS
The Foreigner
Project: Mooncircle

Dear Berlin,
America would like to apologize for the following: flooding you with deadbeat “artists,” turning Berghain into Disneyland, snorting all your good speed, and all the American knob-diddlers who’ve decided your city is where every DJ needs to be. Like this guy, who was so touched by your beauty while riding the U-Bahn after raving for 14 hours, he decided to cut an entire EP about his super unique, awesome expat experience. Actually, let’s be real. It’s your fault for handing out visas like supermarket coupons.
Love,
DORK BREATH

DISFIGURING THE GODDESS
Deprive
Decomp

Remember Joose? That 24-ounce blackout in a can that fueled your first toejob sesh? That stuff was banned a few years ago during the malt-liquor wars of 2010 because its ingredients included sewage runoff and liquid AIDS (not really, but basically). But even after it was banned in New York, I could always count on my buddy Todd to have a couple cans hidden in the vegetable drawer of his fridge. I’d ride my bike over to his house, and we’d knock a couple back as an eye-opener, along with whoever had crashed in his backyard the night before. I miss those quiet moments—the sun soft and golden just like in a car commercial—as the buzz kicked in like a retarded donkey with three legs. Then Todd would fire up his massive PA system as loud as it would go, aim it at the neighbors, and put on grindy pig core like this just to piss off the “whiny-ass chips next door.” I’m not sure if that counts as a good review, but I can recommend this record as great asshole repellent.
BLADE DETH
 

MASTODON
Live at Brixton
Warner Brothers

You know when an idea or concept is so foreign to you that you can’t wrap your head around it, no matter how hard you try? Like the fact that they call traffic lights “robots” in South Africa? Well, in that respect, Mastodon are Canadian milk in a bag. They’re so milk-in-a-bag you start to wonder if it’s all a big joke and everyone who downloaded this 97-minute performance is lying to themselves. Think about all the beautiful simpletons who attended this show in hopes of being canonized among their fellow man on a rock ’n’ roll album for all eternity. Then think about their greatest common denominator: the ability to be sold the same fucking album for ten years straight.
RONNY J. HOLMES
 

SNOWFLAKE
We All Grow Toward the Sea
Satellite Union

This is my buddy Dan’s band, and I like him because he’s a bald, card-carrying pinko who’ll smoke 15 Swisher Sweets in a night and rant about the “escalating incongruities between socialized production and private ownership of surplus.” He’s also a record producer, which means he’s a part-time nanny to the human babies who play in rock ’n’ roll bands. That’s how I met him. When he recorded my drumming, he used to pat me on the back and tell me I was the next Steve Shelley. Then, when I went for a smoke, it was Dan in there fixing all my fuck-ups and polishing my sonic ass nuggets into something halfway tolerable. What I didn’t know was that all the while he was recording his own art-pop stuff on the side, playing all the instruments and singing and handling the recording duties too. This flies in the face of that time-tested axiom that everyone in the music industry who does anything besides rock the fuck out isn’t worth his or her weight in fetid afterbirth.
BSHAP
 

TOY
Join the Dots
Heavenly

This stuff is OK. I listened to track four first, because that’s the power slot. It reminded me of that one song from White Knuckle Extreme: Best of BMX in 2002. Those were the golden days, back when everything was about poppy, good vibes and sponsorship money was flowing unimpeded. I mean, dudes still listened to Slayer—especially the old dudes who’d gritted out the dark days of the 90s—but it’s way easier think about why Jim Cielencki went bald so young when you’re watching him smith-grind to a Sarge track.
TED RAINES
 

MUSE
Live at Rome Olympic Stadium
Warner Brothers

There is no band on earth that thinks they’re more important and culturally significant than Muse, the poor man’s version of the poor man’s Radiohead (Coldplay). Yes, that’s correct: I am claiming, in writing, that Coldplay is better than another band, even though the superior band is led by a man who’s currently wearing a jacket with no fewer than seven front pockets and probably at least three epaulets and isn’t Michael Jackson.
GRACE HALEY
 

BOSTON
Life, Hope & Love
Frontiers

Boston’s new record has an ace in the hole most arena-rock comeback albums would get down on their knees and beg for: a depraved, disembodied, three-octave-spanning voice from beyond the grave. Maybe you don’t remember the time Boston’s old singer had a little thing for his fiancée’s sister, which turned into a really big and illegal thing when he hid a webcam in her room. After she found the camera, he ended up killing himself by sealing off his master bedroom, lighting two charcoal grills, and attaching a hose to his car’s exhaust pipe. Listening to his voice on this record is scarier than the realization that somewhere, Brad Delp is watching over us, limp, phantasmic penis in hand, singing “More Than a Feeling” while weeping and masturbating with a little noose. If that’s not rock ’n’ roll, I dunno what is.
JAMAICA PLANE
 

D.O.A.
Welcome to Chinatown (D.O.A. Live)
Sudden Death

D.O.A. are one of Canada’s prototypical hardcore bands, so it makes sense that their song titles here are so achingly punk they must be doing it on purpose. “That’s Why I’m an Atheist”; “Fuck You”; “I Hate You”; “Marijuana Motherfucker”; “I’m Right, You’re Wrong”; “Disco Sucks.” They are all on point and 100 percent correct. D.O.A. is great if you want to feel 15 and trapped in a sweaty, alcohol-free VFW hall that smells like ferret dick, but if you have a job and responsibilities this is going to really piss you off, because even though D.O.A. is breaking up, their lead singer will never not be named Joey Shithead.
FIN DIESEL

ATLANTEAN KODEX
The White Goddess
20 Buck Spin

Atlantean Kodex’s guitarist once described their music as “a trip through the dark underbelly of European folklore to a realm of fertility cults, fire-worship, and corn-demons.” On my planet, this sounds like God took a Renaissance faire sponsored by a German tampon company, turned it upside down, and shook it. It doesn’t matter though, because every song on this is really fucking long—except for the ambient Zelda soundtrack stuff on the interludes—which means you’ll never get through it anyway.
YUNG JESUS

GLOOM BALLOON
You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Disaster/Fix the Sunshine Pts. 1–7 (An Ode to Bill Doss)
Maximum Ames

Here’s the Behind the Music on this growler: some guy from an indie-pop band you’ve never heard of made some albums nobody cared about. Then he took a hiatus from music to make paintings and consider killing himself. Right as he was about to deepthroat a tailpipe, a friend of his burst in and rained on his suicide parade. Then he became a life coach and made this totally boring album influenced by both hip-hop and classical music (I’m not kidding, this stuff is in the press release). I’m pretty sure it’s meant to be “psychedelic” and “eclectic” and “life-affirming,” but once this record tanks he’ll probably end up offing himself anyway because death always finds a way.
SALLY
 

NICK CAVE & THE BAD SEEDS
Live from KCRW
Bad Seed Ltd.

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’ brilliantly titled fourth live album, Live from KCRW, is pretty much exactly what you’d expect: a record of good songs you already know played live at an awesome radio station. For maximum fun times, grab your boyfriend or girlfriend (none of this “partner” bullshit, please, this isn’t a fucking Western) and dance around the living room in slow motion.
SLEUTH LOOSELY
 

BRENDAN BENSON
You Were Right
Dine Alone

One of the challenges of populating VICE’s reviews section is we sometimes end up shining the spotlight on boring artists who suck. Earlier today, we were faced with the dilemma, “The dude from Raconteurs who isn’t Jack White has a new record. Do people care?” We sent out an office email, and the answer was “Who?” But we ended up reviewing it anyway because we consider telling you not to buy it to be a public service.
PROMETHAMPHETAMINE

PEP
My Baby and Me EP
Self-released

It’s impossible to find records to review for December because PR flacks don’t let bands put stuff out around the holidays because pedantic music critics are too busy focusing on year-end lists to give a single whitehead on an ass pimple about new records. So last month, when an email popped into my inbox with this album (which was made by the old drummer from the Starlight Girls), I was elated. Great, I thought. A record to review! I always sorta liked the Starlight Girls, and I’ve done too many bad reviews in this issue. So I put some Tiger Balm on my neck, threw this EP on, and immediately realized that nostalgic doo-wop is the sonic equivalent of a reverse colon explosion. On the bright side, I did come up with this joke that isn’t funny: I just farted in from the starlight, and boy is my asshole tired.
RENFIELD

MOAN
Think About Forgotten Days
Lightning

Next time I dook out another baby, I’m not going to allow him or her or shim to experience any natural sounds. I’m going to raise my spawn on a healthy diet of early Boredoms records, in hopes that the little bugger will end up at least partially like Shinji Masuko. He’s a Boredoms guitarist and guitar tech, but you probably know him as the guy who founded DMBQ, the best rock ’n’ roll band in the Land of the Rising Son. He’s also a porn journalist, and considering the ungodly shit the Japs are into, I imagine his brain is glazed with a permanent layer of filth. Now that he’s putting out another solo record of heavy dronage, I’d like to formally request that he shoot his man milk into my cooter so I can get started on my child’s education.
MARY-LYNNE CRUSHER

THEIR/THEY’RE/THERE
New Blood
Polyvinyl/Topshelf

I like the various Kinsella family bands as much as the next guy with horn-rimmed glasses, but it’s rare that you find a band name so horrific that it reflexively puckers up your anus, siphons feces out of your lower intestine, and the shit geyser somehow makes its way up your throat and is ejected out of your nose and ears. In other words, I didn’t listen to this, and neither should you.
JACOB VOORHEES

WORST ALBUM OF THE MONTH

BEEDEEGEE
SUM/ONE
4AD

The problem with solo projects is that there’s no one around to put the brakes on every bullshit idea you’ve got. That seems to be exactly what happened to Brian DeGraw from Gang Gang Dance, who recently moved to Woodstock to cram every half-baked idea he’s ever had (including beat-boxing) onto one intolerable record. Maybe this shit goes over well at the Ulster County farmers’ market, but to my ears, it’s a forgettable polyp in synth pop’s O-ring.
PHILIP “C” REILLY
 

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Christian Workout Power Pack
Capitol Christian Distribution

You were probably proud when you found the Desperate Bicycles’ Remorse Code LP in the dollar bin, but when I came across this gem I felt like fucking Friedrich Miescher. Get this: it’s specifically and explicitly a triple-disc collection made for Christian women aged 30 to 45 to help them break a sweat at the local YWCA. Plus, there are no digital downloads, it’s only available in Christian bookstores, and Christianity is a vicious celestial dictatorship that encourages ignorance, cruelty, and genocide.
AVRIL MEURSAULT
 

BRITNEY SPEARS
Britney Jean
RCA

Have you ever tried to kill a cockroach? First off, these little sharts have been around since dinosaurs were playing Twister in the Grand Canyon. What’s more is that they can live for almost a month without food, run up to three miles per hour, hold their breath for almost 40 minutes, and stay alive for a week without their fucking heads. Yeah, that’s right. Even if we lopped off Britney’s shaved head, we’d still have at least a week left of her very, very sad residency in Las Vegas, where every performance opens with another new song with the word bitch in the title.
METH ADDICT
 

BEST ALBUM OF THE MONTH

BARNETT + COLOCCIA
Retrieval
Blackest Ever Black

I’ve been weirdly dizzy for the past week, and this morning I finally got it together to see a doctor, who immediately diagnosed me with “an extreme form of pseudovertigo.” Aside from obsessively cataloguing every single drug I’ve taken in the past three months, and wondering if I’m personally responsible for the tunnel vision and heinous I’m-on-a-boat feeling I’ve been dealing with, I’ve also been basking in the cognitive dissonance that comes with diagnosing a condition with the prefix pseudo- as “extreme.” Is that even possible? Listening to this record, which sounds like an “extreme” version of a pseudo-Are You Afraid of the Dark? theme, I’m pretty sure it is. This music feels tailor-made for the moment when an ailment becomes so intolerable that the only prescription is to take your anger out on society at large. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to google how to get this damn Bacillus anthracis onto a postage stamp.
DUKUS P. TEKUM
 

XIU XIU
Nina
Graveface Recordings

Wow! An album of Nina Simone covers that obliterates all the profound and nuanced vocal work that makes me love Nina Simone, sucking her songs into a frilly vortex of Jamie Stewart’s depression profiteering! I haven’t thought about Xiu Xiu since high school (“I love the valley, OH!”), but I honestly thought this guy would be in jail by now for declaring jihad on fun. BARNEY STAHL

For three weeks, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian protesters have been flooding the streets of Kiev, occupying government buildings and taking over the city's Independence Square. Initially, the demonstrators were expressing discontent at President Viktor Yanukovych's decision to pull out of a deal that would bring Ukraine closer to joining the EU.

After an initial brutal police crackdown, the protests have grown in size and are now more about toppling the government and putting an end to corruption than the European Union. The police have tried and failed to clear the tent city that has sprung up in the Independence Square – also known as the Maidan – and the occupied city hall that has been dubbed the "Revolution HQ". Protesters remain in the streets, despite the below zero temperatures.

More from the protests in Kiev:

Police Tried and Failed to Clear Kiev's Independence Square

Ukrainian Protesters Toppled Kiev's Lenin Statue Last Night

Opposition Parties and Vitali Klitschko Are Calming Kiev's Protesters

All illustrations by Matt Freak City.

By now, everyone is well aware of “419” scams, also known as advance-fee fraud or Nigerian-email fraud. These are cons in which anonymous hustlers pose as corrupt African officials or exiled refugees looking to transfer Scrooge McDuck-ian heaps of cash into foreign accounts. They blanket thousands of email addresses with invitations, and the occasional gullible victim is tricked into forking over private banking information. There are a handful of variations, but most people with eyeballs and keyboards know to hit mark spam whenever they see anything of the sort sliming around their inbox.

In 2003, however, the con was less well known, and a friend of my father’s got seriously duped. When Laurent (his name has been changed at his request), then a 42-year-old salesman at a pharmaceutical company living on Réunion Island (a French territory in the Indian Ocean), received an offer to launder $1 million from a frozen Nigerian bank account into his own, it seemed to solve all of his money problems.

Instead, he wound up battered, bruised, and abandoned in a strange country. I spoke with him recently to find out what the hell happened.

About ten years ago, I was at home playing chess on my computer when an email from someone claiming to be the governor of Lagos, Nigeria, landed in my inbox. The subject line was URGENT, so I read it right away—actually, I read it a few times in a row. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

I don’t recall the exact wording of the email, but the gist of it was that the governor of Lagos West constituency, Bola Tinubu, had hidden around $1 million in a secret bank account to avoid taxes. The money had been stolen from public funds, the email continued, and the Tinubu family couldn’t use it because they were being closely monitored by the government.

They needed a foreigner to come to Lagos, take the money out of the account, and put it into a Swiss bank. That’s where I came in. Supposedly, if I sent $1,300 in cash to a Lagos address, they would get me a room in a luxury hotel, and I could come over and sign some documents that would be prepared by a lawyer, whose fees would run me another $1,300. I’d wind up with 5 percent of that $1 million, which sounded pretty fair to me.

I’d never received this type of message before. There were some grammar mistakes, but I figured that was because the man writing it wasn’t French. He probably spoke Hausa or Igbo, or one of the many other languages spoken in Nigeria. Also, Bola Tinubu really was a Nigerian politician who was governor of Lagos West—that was the only part of the message that wasn’t a lie.

I was in debt and desperately in need of money back then. I’d gone through a vicious series of hirings and firings and was once again in the hot seat at my job at a pharmaceutical company. The Nigerian deal sounded perfect. After I subtracted the cost of the plane ticket and the $2,600 I’d give to my Nigerian partners, I’d stand to make well over $40,000, which would have put my family’s finances back on track. Plus, I’d have a few days of vacation in Nigeria. I realize how stupid I must look now (and how obvious a rip-off this was), but back then, I knew the Nigerian ruling class was extremely corrupt. Even though I thought the situation described to me in the email could’ve been bullshit, it sounded likely, and I desperately had to provide for my family.

I spent a month vetting my Nigerian partners. We sent about ten emails back and forth before I was satisfied they were legit. Maybe I was trying to talk myself into it. I’m superstitious, so one night I told myself, All right, if I win a game of hearts with less than 15 points, I’ll do it. I’d never scored that low in my life, so when I landed at 11 points, I thought it was a sign and decided to buy a ticket.

I didn’t tell anyone about the trip, not even my wife—she didn’t know how bad our money situation had gotten. I only told one friend of mine, a guy I used to drink with. I felt like my secret was safe with him, plus I had to hit him up for plane fare.

I told my family and friends I was going to Nigeria to negotiate a contract to sell insulin pumps, which was plausible given my job. My friends celebrated my new status, and my wife was so proud of my promotion that I almost believed my own lie. I mailed the Nigerians $1,300 in cash and boarded a plane to Lagos.

I landed at Murtala Muhammed International Airport in late April, where I got my tourist visa in exchange for 10,000 nairas (around $50). The beginning of the trip went according to plan. As I left the airport, two big guys in suits and ties, their fingers covered in gold rings, were waiting for me with a sign with my name on it. They took me to my four-star hotel in a black sedan—my partners really had booked a room there for a night.

“We’ll see you tomorrow,” one of them told me. “You’ll have to bring the other half of the money in cash. You’ll receive an envelope with $50,000 an hour after the lawyer leaves you to finalize the process. We’ll be with you while you wait for him to come back. We hope you’ll enjoy your stay in Nigeria, sir.”

Sir! Naturally, I believed more than ever that it was all real and I was a really important person.

That night I went out to dinner at a fancy restaurant downtown, where I met a Dutch engineer who worked for an oil company. After a few minutes of conversation, he told me, “You know, organized crime is very active in this area. Sometimes people are robbed, beaten, and kidnapped for money—especially Europeans.”

By this point I’d already spent a lot of money getting to Nigeria and decided to ignore what, in hindsight, was a big flashing WARNING sign. For me, the only thing that was important was getting my hands on the money as fast as possible. After I left my companion, I went to the hotel’s ATM, withdrew the $1,300 I’d need to complete the deal, and went up to my room.

That night, I received two calls from my Nigerian partners confirming our meeting the next day and a third call from a deep-voiced Ivorian man who introduced himself as the lawyer and stressed the importance of the $1,300.

“This money will allow us to finalize the money transfer and all the transactions,” he told me in French with a strong African accent. I didn’t really understand everything he was talking about, but I told him I’d bring the money.

The next morning I received another phone call, this one telling me that we’d be meeting in the business district near the hotel. I wasn’t afraid at all; it’s crowded down there and they’d have no chance to do anything shady.

A man escorted me out of the hotel and toward the same car that had brought me from the airport, but when he handed me some legal documents in the parking lot I had my first big, stomach-plunging doubt. These allegedly authentic documents signed by Nigerian government officials were obvious fakes. They were badly printed, with grammar and spelling mistakes everywhere.

I got in the car. There were four guys inside, all in suits. The ten-minute drive was completely silent, and ended in a tiny alley. All of a sudden I felt acid bubbling up inside my stomach—my doubts, which had been there all along, were suddenly confirmed. I knew exactly what was going to happen.

“Give us everything you have,” one of the guys told me.

I refused at first and said that I would go to the police. They didn’t like that, and three of the goons immediately jumped me and beat me unconscious. It didn’t take long.


I woke up in an empty room with bruises all over my face and body. I assumed they were going to kill me. After 15 minutes or so, one of them came in and said, “Look, we don’t want to hurt you—the only thing we want is your money. But if you go to the cops to complain about anything, we’ll kill you with our own hands. We’ll slit your damn throat. Got it?”

I nodded.

They dragged me to the car by the arms, drove for about 20 minutes into the middle of nowhere, and kicked me out. I stood up and brushed myself off. I was alive and had the clothes I was wearing, but no wallet and no passport. Besides some trees and a few small houses on the horizon, I was surrounded by dirt and a burning hot asphalt road extending into the distance.

I walked to a bus station, begged my way onto one headed back to the city center, and picked up my bag and my last few euros from the room. I wasn’t booked for a second night in the fancy hotel, so I had to take a room in a flophouse primarily occupied by prostitutes and their johns. The sounds of gasps and moans kept me up all night.

In the morning, I looked at myself in the mirror for a little while. My swollen face was covered in bruises that ran the gamut from light blue to sickly crimson. I went to the French Embassy to fill out an application for an emergency passport. While I was waiting for the bureaucratic wheels to turn, I begged locals to let me stay with them. A few agreed, and I spent four days going from one apartment to another, sleeping wherever I could. I think the way my face looked made it apparent to everyone what had happened to me.

I didn’t want to go home to Réunion Island; I couldn’t face the people there. Instead, I changed my return flight destination and went to my father’s house in the suburbs of Paris to spend some time alone. From there, I called my family, who were incredibly worried. Having them on the phone was as pleasing as it was uncomfortable and painful—I had to lie to my wife about what had happened in Nigeria and why I was in Paris. The way I told it, my business trip had gone fine, but there were problems with my father. “I have to stay here with my dad,” I told her. “He’s in really bad shape, I need to stay by his side in case something happens to his heart.”

I stayed near Paris for about a month to gather my thoughts and wait for the bruises to fade. I worked from France over the internet for the pharmaceutical company and took a part-time gig to recoup the money I’d lost during this misadventure, plus enough cash for a plane ticket back to Réunion. The only job I was able to find was as a gravedigger, so I worked in a cemetery for three weeks.

I was back on the island in early June and talked about what had happened to me as little as possible—I’m sure it looked incredibly strange, but there was nothing else I could do. Every now and then I look at my emails with the Nigerians, and I see dozens of things that don’t make sense and get furious at myself for being such an idiot. Eventually, I deleted those conversations, either out of a sense of pride or to hide them from my wife, I’m still not sure which.

I still get some emails like the one that led me on that misguided mission, but now I delete them right away, without even taking the time to read what’s inside. Today, I’m divorced from my wife, who still doesn’t know what happened to me in Nigeria. Until now, I’ve never spoken about it.

All illustrations by Matt Freak City.

Girl Eats Food is back for Season Two. In the first episode, anti-chef Jo Fuertes-Knight explores the growing trend of people using raw chocolate to "align the heart chakra" and go on an "inwards journey".

After a Chocolate Ecstasy tour involving pizza-flavoured truffles, Jo hijacks a chocolate convention at London Olympia. There are women there who wear clothes made out of chocolate.



The next day, she joins a shamanic cacao ceremony round the back of the IMAX in her quest to get high off chocolate sent from a cacao shaman in Guatemala, called Keith.


Previous Girl Eats Food exploits:

Sizzurped Cherry Pork

English Breakfast Cupcakes

Cornershop Cocktails

Image by Courtney Nicholas

In this age of social media, self-promotion is the name of the game. We all have our little avatars, our little pictures and texts that we put out into the electronic world, that we hope get “liked.” Walt Whitman too was a self promoter, a performer, a purveyor of self.

“I exist as I am, that is enough,” says Whitman in the 1855 version of “Song of Myself,”

If no other in the world be aware I sit content

And if each and all be aware I sit content (“Song of Myself,” 46)

These enlightened sentiments are typical of Whitman in thisr first edition of Leaves of Grass, but these renunciations of investment in fame are not wholly true. Whitman’s actions show that he decidedly did care if readers were aware of him.  After the initial publication of Leaves of Grass, a run of 800 copies, he wrote at least three anonymous reviews, both touting and criticizing but ultimately publicizing in the boldest kind of language his own work.  The following quote from an articlehe  he wrote for the United States Review in 1855 called “Walt Whitman and his Poems” shows another view Whitman had of himself:

Who then is that insolent unknown?  Who is it, praising himself as if others were not fit to do it, and coming rough and unbidden among writers to unsettle what was settled, and to revolutionize in fact our modern civilizations? . . . You have come in good time, Walt Whitman!  In opinions, in manners, in costumes, in books, in the aims and occupancy of life, in associates, in poems.  (“Walt Whitman and his Poems,” Whitman)

The praise in the reviews is qualified, Whitman holds just short of extolling himself as the greatest poet that ever lived,

His scope of life is the amplest of any yet in philosophy.  He is the true spiritualist.  He recognizes no annihilation or death or loss of identity.  He is the largest lover and sympathizer that has appeared in literature. (“Walt Whitman and his Poems,” Whitman)

Citing Whitman’s self-promotion isn’t a judgment of his intentions, he was hardly alone with his desire to sell books. What is interesting is the way the persona he developed in the poems of Leaves of Grass was also used for his self-promotion and the promotion of the book outside of the poems. The 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass and the self-reviews create a nexus of texts that often overlap in style and content, but were ostensibly created and distributed for very different reasons: the book for artistic edification and the reviews to sell books. But these distinct projects are complicated by their similarities: so much of Whitman’s poetry is concerned with defining his persona and promoting the work, while the reviews are strangely poetic, to the point that they could be mistaken for passages from the poetry. This confusion becomes rich by the different contexts the similar material is presented in.  The different contexts color the content’s significance while at the same time leveling out the different fields so that poetry becomes promotion and promotion becomes poetry.

When the third edition of Leaves of Grass was released in 1860, Whitman appended the anonymous reviews that he wrote at the end of the book and called them “Imprints.”  These reviews that Whitman wrote are a kind of self-promotion that is usually laughed off as a quirky tangent of the Whitmanesque spirit of excess and glorious ego worship, which constitutes much of the poetry itself.  Works such as “Song of Myself,” and in fact much of the reviews that Whitman wrote about himself, are surprisingly similar in content and even style – often to the extent of being ridiculously obvious—to the poetry.  But the fact that the similar content is found both in poems attributed to Whitman and anonymous reviews changes the significance of the content.

In 2001 moviegoers Omar Rezec and Anne Belknap sued Sony pictures because a review of the late Heath Ledger vehicle A Knight’s Tale was revealed to be a fake. The film was publicized as “a winner” by a reviewer named David Manning from The Ridgefield Press.  Upon inspection, Newsweek reporter John Horn revealed that journalist David Manning never worked at The Ridgefield Press and in fact Manning did not exist.  Plaintiffs Omar Rezec and Anne Belknap sued Sony because they claimed to have seen the film based on the review.  If they hadn’t read that “Heath Ledger was this year’s hottest new star,” they would not have seen the film and they wanted not just their $12 back but all the money that Sony made from their false reviews.  The fabricated Manning had reviewed other Sony films like Hollow Man (“one hell of a scary ride”)and The Animal (“another winner”) and his quotes were prominently displayed on the movies’ posters. It was revealed that David Manning was the creation of Sony marketing executive Mathew Cramer who attributed the fake critics’ quotes to The Ridgefield Press because he had grown up in Ridgefield, Connecticut.  Sony attempted to defend their false mouthpiece as free speech but they were eventually forced to pay the state of Connecticut $326,000 for falsely attributing the quotes and settled an additional suit on the behalf of film fans for $1.5 million.

‘The studio was in the business of marketing films, and the advertisements were meant to reach potential moviegoers,’ Justices Vain Spencer and Robert Milano noted in their majority decision.  ‘The fact that the films were noncommercial speech did not mean that the label also applied to the advertisements.’

Sony could have easily made the claim in their own voice that A Knight’s Tale was the best movie of the year, but it would have lacked the legitimizing power of having an outside critic say such a thing.  Los Angeles Justice Reuben Ortega remarked about the trial: "no longer will people be seen lurching like mindless zombies toward the movie theatre, compelled by a puff piece. What a noble and overwhelming undertaking." 

This anachronistic example of a studio’s self promotion under false pretense highlights the difference between statements made within a creative work and statements made about a creative work.  There are many differences between a Heath Ledger film at the turn of the century and a book of 19th-century poems, but the realms of creative work and publicity have retained many elements that link Whitman’s self promotion to Sony’s self-promotion.  It could be argued that Whitman’s reviews were an effort to teach readers how to approach the poetry with a wild new style and unconventional content, but often that is what a film review does if the movie is unconventional or difficult to follow in conventional ways.  There are miles of distance between the reviews that Whitman wrote about Leaves of Grass – intricate and engaged with the specifics of the work and the author – and the generic blurb about A Knight’s Tale, but regardless of the amount of detailed and applied criticism in either piece they are both aiming to sell more of their product by impersonating figures of critical authority.  The litigation against Sony sounds silly, as if anyone really bought tickets to the film because they read that Ledger gave the performance of the year, but the fact that litigation was taken shows that in this age deceptive promotion as commercial speech is not tolerated, at least not when its duplicity is blatantly revealed.  The same kind of promotion looks different in a fictional context because a space is created between the artist and the art, so that the self-promoting persona within the work is given slack to be flawed.  We allow our fictional characters to be flawed and arrogant as long as they are charming or intelligent, which we don’t as commonly allow in the realm ostensible non-fiction.  Just look at Tom Cruise’s couch jumping scene on the Oprah show – a place that requires special kinds of performance that are very structured and planned, but are produced to make them seem non-fictional—and you will see behavior that would have be applauded in a film like Jerry Maguire, where expression of exuberate emotion makes audiences happy.  But because Cruise acted this way on a talk show he looks like he is out of control, or crazy, or phony.  Whitman’s self promotion within the poems of Leaves of Grass and in the self-reviews are in many ways similar, but the two contexts make the contents read very differently. 

Whitman had no shame in promoting his own work, either within the work or in anonymous reviews, but his methods are different in each form.  “Song of Myself” can be seen as one long promotion of Whitman’s new poetic work; it is an extended advertisement for the kind of writer he was and the kind of audience he was aiming for.  Unlike the self-promotion in the anonymous articles, the self-promotion in the poem justifies itself by inclusion of the audience in the poet’s lauding of himself: 

I celebrate myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you . . .

 (“Song of Myself”)

This is akin to today’s rappers whose lyrics entail claims of a superior style and being better than all the other MCs. Proclamations of genius are not uncommon; Kanye West, said recently on a talk show, "For me to say I wasn’t a genius, I would just be lying to you and to myself." The claims for greatness of style and lyrics become part of the work, thus in a self-reflexive way, part if not all of the substance of the lyrics are about the superiority of their very style and the lyrics themselves. Whitman tempers his claims of superiority within “Song of Myself” by simultaneously pumping up his persona and dissolving it into the people: he is the rapper with the barbaric yawp that isn’t afraid to contradict himself and shrink to the material below the readers’ boot soles. But, despite the proclamations of humility, the overall universally inclusive spirit, and the predominantly outward focus in “Song of Myself,” the poet remains at the center of the piece. The poem “Song of Myself” defines its poet by repeatedly declaring at length, in catalogues and clusters of subjects, what the poet is made of, what he believes in, how he carries himself and the kinds of people that he relates to.  Like a rapper whose lyrics describe who he is, what he’s interested in and his own superiority, “Song of myself” is a poem of self-promotion.  In contemporary rap there are generic expectations of flaunting of achievement and wealth, recounting of humble beginnings that lead through struggle to success, and also competition.  Whitman does not call out any of his poetic competitors within his poems, and thus Whitman’s nineteenth century hip-hop is possibly less beligerent than his twentieth and twenty-first century counterparts, but his radical break from traditional poetic style and his promotion of that style is tantamount to a challenge to all poetic competitors.

In some of the anonymous reviews, Whitman not only explains his work but he pits himself against his great contemporaries from Europe.  Whitman’s long line and free verse patterning has become one of the most influential styles of the past one hundred years.  But at its inception Whitman felt the need to distinguish it from the popular kinds of blank verse that poets like Alfred Lord Tennyson used.  From one of his other reviews of his own work, “An English and an American Poet,”

The best of the school of poets at present received in Great Britain and America is Alfred Tennyson.  He is the bard of ennui and of the aristocracy . . .

Poetry, to Tennyson and his British and American elves is a gentleman of the first degree, boating, fishing, and shooting genteelly through nature, admiring the ladies, and talking to them in company with that elaborate half-choked deference that is to be made up by the terrible license of men among themselves.  The spirit of the burnished society of upper-class England fills this writer and his effusions from top to toe . . . The models are same both to the poet and the parlors.

Listen to the regularity of the control of Tennyson’s pentameter lines from the opening of his short poem “Ulysses,”

                                It little profits that an idle king,

  By this still hearth, among these barren crags,

  Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole

  Unequal laws unto a savage race,

  That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

And the long and irregular line of Whitman’s opening to “Song of Myself”:

I loafe and invite my soul,

I lean and loafe at my ease . . . . observing a spear of summer grass.

Houses and roof perfumes . . . . the shelves are crowded with perfumes,

I breathe the fragrance myself, and know it and like it,

The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.

The atmosphere is not a perfume . . . . it has no taste of the distillation . . . . it is odorless...

Here, the new style that Whitman is pushing is expansive.  It uses the repetition of “loafer” and “perfume” to give the lines design, but there is no regular lineation as there is in the Tennyson.  Both the substance of the poem and the style in which it is delivered are meant to carve out a new space for Whitman in the world of poetry.

As unabashed as Whitman is about exposing himself in “Song of Myself,” both by praising and humbling himself, he elevates himself and his work to revolutionary and canonical status in his reviews of himself.  In his book The Frenzy of Renown, Leo Brady outlines the shift in the concept of fame from a posthumous consecration to something that can be achieved in one’s own life.  Living celebrities are allowed, “to stand out of the crowd, but with the crowd’s approval; in its turn, the audience picks out its own dear individuality in the qualities of its heroes.” Whitman’s attempts at self-definition as a poet both above and of the crowd are akin to Brady’s idea of the permissive sphere of fame:

In the face of fragmenting social demands, fame creates its own etiquette, allowing the famous to be themselves in a way no one else can afford to be, and to be accepted into a mystic community of other famous people, a psychic city of mutual respect for each other’s individual nature.  The celebration of true fame as a personal justification . . .”  (The Frenzy of Renown, 7)

Whitman didn’t care about exposing himself as a self-reviewer, if anyone was paying attention, but it also shows what a piece of self-promotion Leaves of Grass is.  Like a rapper proclaiming his greatness, Whitman is shouting about his innovations, his place in the world of letters, and thus much of the substance of the work is about the greatness of the work. 

More James Franco on VICE:

Who doesn't love attending a holiday party? It is an excuse to drink sugary punch at an inappropriate time of day, give lingering hugs to attractive people in cashmere—that would otherwise seem creepy any other time of year—and most importantly, to imbibe in boatloads of salty, fatty treats. I've read in many prestigious medical journals that it is physically impossible for your body to absorb fat while the Jackson 5 Christmas Album is playing on a repetitive loop. 

Since we can all agree that these parties are fun, why don't you be selfless and giving, and offer to throw one? It's really not as scary as you might think. With little to no planning, a strict budget, and about a half an hour's worth of grocery shopping—including a booze run—I threw this holiday party together in an afternoon. Give it a whirl. It ain't the Ritz, but I doubt you'll hear any complaints. Just keep little Michael crooning, "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus," really loud.

Happy Holidays,

xx Julia

Carrot Fritters

By Artist and Chef, Julia Ziegler Haynes

Ingredients

1 large bag of carrots, peeled and ends trimmed, then grated

2 bunches of scallions, cleaned and chopped

1 tsp. salt

1/2 tsp. pepper

1 egg, beaten

1/3-1/2 cup flour

1/4 cup vegetable or olive oil, for frying

1 cup Greek yogurt

1 tsp. cayenne/paprika/hot sauce of your choice for garnish

Cilantro or parsley for garnish

Directions

1. Combine all of the ingredients (except flour) in a mixing bowl. The carrots will sweat a bit from being salted, so I always add flour last. Sprinkle in 1/4 cup of flour at first, and stir to incorporate. You are aiming for a consistency that will hold the ingredients together, not too wet, but not too dry. Add more flour if the batter feels excessively drippy. These aren't fussy.  

2. Meanwhile, pour 1/4 cup vegetable or olive oil to coat the skillet and heat over medium-high heat until the oil is rippling. Form fritters like a patty in your hand, fry until brown and crispy (about 3-4 minutes per side) and let them rest on paper towels to collect excess grease. 

3. Top with spiced Greek yogurt, freshly picked herbs, and a sprinkle of cayenne or hot sauce (optional) and serve immediately. You can also leave plain until party time, and quickly reheat on a cookie sheet in a 400 degrees F oven for 5 minutes, then top with garnishes. 

Whiskey, Cider and Rosemary Punch

Ingredients

1 bottle of cheap whiskey

1 gallon of cider

Orange slices and sprigs of rosemary, for garnish

Directions

1. The night before—or earlier in the day—fill a rounded Tupperware container or pint-sized plastic takeout container halfway with water. Add rosemary sprigs and place in freezer. When frozen, fill with water the rest of the way.

2. Shortly before guests arrive, add the ice cube, whiskey, cider, and orange slices to a punch bowl. Stir, and top with rosemary to garnish.

Grapefruit and Beer Punch

Ingredients

1 jug of grapefruit juice

3 or 4 tall boys of Coors Original

Citrus and mint, to garnish

Citrus ice cube

Directions

1. The night before—or earlier in the day—fill a rounded Tupperware container or pint-sized plastic takeout container halfway with water. Add citrus slices and place in freezer. When frozen, fill with water the rest of the way. 

2. In a punch bowl, add all ingredients and stir. Top with citrus slices and mint.

The crinkled tarp is not too reassuring. Photos by the author.

In response to recent controversy around GE-Hitachi’s uranium processing plant in the heart of Toronto, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission held a rare meeting this week to allow the public to voice their concerns about this factory and its presence in the middle of a densely populated residential area. Although the factory processes 53% of the uranium used in Canadian reactors, local residents and elected officials told the commission that they were kept in the dark about what the factory does. As the meeting progressed, many speakers shifted their attention from the GE-Hitachi uranium plant in particular to the Canadian nuclear industry at large. They condemned the commission for setting pathetic nuclear safety standards, directly enabling the proliferation of nuclear weapons around the world, and helping to create a vast legacy of radioactive waste that will inevitably outlast, or destroy, humanity.

It was a depressing scene, appropriately set at a Holiday Inn far from the uranium plant itself. Nothing was at stake for GE-Hitachi at this meeting. Back in 2010, with most Torontonians unaware of the uranium plant, the CNSC granted the facility a decade long extension on its operating license. Providing speakers with only an illusion of participation, the commission agreed to listen to their concerns while having explicitly stated that they will not reconsider GE-Hitachi’s license. Those who had applied in advance, and were approved by the commission to speak, were given ten minutes each to make their opinions known and to ask questions.

The speakers brought with them hundreds of questions. So when GE-Hitachi and the CNSC inevitably failed to address most concerns, activists shouted at the commission and demanded answers from the back of the meeting room. After two days of fairly consistent heckling, the CNSC’s curmudgeonly old president, Michael Binder, grew increasingly annoyed. He repeatedly told speakers to “hurry up” or to “get to the point,” even cutting some presentations short of their allotted ten-minute length. When Kristin Scansen, a Nehithaw Cree woman from the uranium-mined Key Lake region of northern Saskatchewan and a student of Indigenous Governance at the University of Victoria, refused to relinquish her seat with her questions unanswered, Binder shut down the meeting entirely. The last two speakers on the agenda, residents from downtown Toronto, delivered their prepared speeches to an emptied boardroom, while representatives of GE-Hitachi and the CNSC were conspicuously absent.

During GE-Hitachi’s presentation they argued that for fifty-eight years their facility has operated safely, posing no risk to the surrounding communities. Its air, water, and soil emissions are far below the CNSC’s prescribed limits for an industrially zoned nuclear facility. The company assured the commission that even catastrophic accidents, like the derailment of a train into the plant, or an accident involving a truck carrying either uranium dioxide or uranium pellets, have been accounted for in their emergency response plan—a document that they have made available on their website in the interest of transparency, despite the fact that it is partially redacted. The company also combatted claims that they have not diligently informed the public about this facility—they have placed ads in various newspapers, sent out flyers, built a new website, and even held an open house which about thirty people attended.

But in contrast to GE’s claims of extensive community outreach, resident after resident testified that they were shocked when they found out what the facility does—either through a door-to-door campaign led by local activists or through articles in Toronto’s weekly NOW Magazine. Andrew Cash, the elected Member of Parliament for Toronto’s Davenport riding, told the commission that he first heard about the facility in the Toronto Star. Calling the company’s public information program “a failure for the better part of fifty years,” Cash told the commission that “too many people still don’t know what this factory does… This factory is literally surrounded by residential streets, houses, low rise townhouses, low income high rises, and soon a huge development of new towers, townhouses and mixed use units which will house well over 4,000 new residents… there is no other facility like this in any other urban area of the country.”

One by one, armed with books, reports, and pertinent stacks of paper, veteran anti-nuclear activists confronted CNSC staff like old adversaries—some of them speaking before the board for the third, fifth, or seventh time. Many pointed out that although the GE-Hitachi plant is meeting the commission’s approved safe limits for emissions, these limits are dangerously relaxed. In what is perhaps the most alarming example of this tendency, GE-Hitachi is permitted, for example, to output up to 9,000 kilograms of uranium per year into the sewer system. Although the company actually outputs only a fraction of this amount, less than 3 kilograms a year, the prescribed “safe” limit is clearly ridiculous. As one speaker, Dr. Gordon Edwards of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, told the commission, their “use of the word ‘safe’ is misleading and not scientific. You can claim that the levels of exposure are within current limits, but you cannot say that they are safe.”

Another presentation used simple math to show that the CNSC’s prescribed limit for acceptable background radiation will lead, through accumulation in the environment over time, to the certain extinction of the entire human species. Representing the International Institute of Concern for Public Health, Gord Albright told the commissioners that “whenever we add radiation to the environment people die who would not otherwise have died. By your safe standards, supposedly, which is 1 milliSievert per year, is based on one additional cancer per 20,000 people… Over 20,000 years, one excess cancer per 20,000 people represents the average population of the earth over that period of time. This is a number of additional deaths that dwarfs all the human slaughter that has ever taken place in the world, including all the wars that have ever been fought… Just because these people have not yet been born, and have no voice, does not mean that they don’t matter.”

A CNSC staffer, Patsy Thompson, refuted Albright’s claim that radiation exposure can lead to cancer. “We have done a study of more than 40,000 Canadian nuclear workers who had been exposed to several Sieverts of dose over a very long period, and that study shows that there is no relationship between cancer death and radiation exposure,” she said. “There is no relationship between cancer mortality and tritium exposure.”

Being told his time was up, Albright was visibly distressed. He grabbed the microphone once more, and after apologizing for speaking out of turn, he interjected that “it’s beyond credibility to claim that exposure to radiation causes no additional cancer as Patsy Thompson is. There is absolutely no scientific basis for this. There is no basis of experience, no basis of logic. It reflects on CNSC’s scientific credibility that they allow statements like this to continue to be made in their name.”

But it was the last speech to the CNSC, by a furious Kristin Scansen, which did the most to dispel the atmosphere of “bullshit,” “lies,” and “propaganda” that consistently saturated the meeting, to borrow her own words. She took issue with the CNSC’s sustained denial that Canada, as a signatory of a non-proliferation agreement, has anything to do with the spread of nuclear weaponry worldwide, reminding the board that “while Canada may have claimed its commitment to a nuclear weapons free world, we know very well that India began its nuclear warhead program after receiving a gift of Canadian technology in the 1970s.” This tendency is ongoing—as recently as 2006, the CNSC approved SRB’s sale of radioactive tritium, an essential component in building hydrogen bombs, to Iran. GE is no saint either—a current manufacturer of drones, they led the world in sales of nuclear weapons systems until a consumer boycott forced them to stop.

She attacked GE-Hitachi for claiming that its “natural uranium,” or powdered uranium dioxide, was not dangerous, reminding the company that “the Denesuline men, who carried sacks of your beloved ‘natural uranium’ at the world’s first uranium mine in Port Radium, Northwest Territories, died horrible, painful deaths by cancer and bone cirrhosis, a condition where bone tissue dies and bones collapse.”

She condemned GE-Hitachi and the CNSC’s denial that the uranium plant in Toronto produces any nuclear waste, and the seemingly haphazard Canadian plan for dealing with radioactive waste by burying it forever in deep underground repositories. “We have no way of knowing that the surrounding rock will not crack and expose ecosystems to uncontainable, extremely deadly, radioactivity,” she said. “I am against the continued operation of the uranium processing facility in the city of Toronto because it is a key cog in the machine that creates low, medium, and high level nuclear waste that humanity has absolutely no clue what to do with but is currently seeking to situate on Indigenous territories.”

And finally, before demanding to know more about a toxic spill that happened just weeks ago near her home in Saskatchewan, she concluded her speech by relating the perilous nuclear pillage of Canada to a broader, stubborn colonial attitude. In a human appeal that was undoubtedly missed by the nuclear bureaucrats, she told the board that their “ancestors signed treaties with my ancestors, the basic tenets of which are that we would accept you as family and you would have the great privilege of residing on our territories, with us as our relations. Cousins, in exchange, you agreed not to damage or exploit the land. Undermining the integrity of other living things is a right that no group of humans can possess, because as I have learned, it is not a right the Creator gave to us or to anyone, so we could not give it to you. It is this teaching that enabled my people to survive in partnership with the land, water, and animals for tens of thousands of years. And it is because you lack these teachings that you continue to put your own families, communities, stakeholders, and a nation at great risk. Over the course of this meeting I have heard Toronto residents express to you passionately that the GE-Hitachi uranium processing facility should not be located so closely to a residential region in Toronto… this processing facility should not be located in the City of Toronto because it should not be located anywhere at all. The nuclear industry does not belong anywhere in Canada, nor does it belong anywhere in the world.”

Thumbnail image via Flickr User soulchristmas

Welcome to another edition of This Week in Racism. I’ll be ranking news stories on a scale of 1 to RACIST, with “1” being the least racist and “RACIST” being the most racist.

-Fox News host (and serial abuser of the letter "Y"), Megyn Kelly, wants to remind the world that this season of giving known as Christmas is a strictly whites-only affair. Kelly went off on a tirade during a segment of her show where she and a panel of guests debated the merits of an article on Slate from Aisha Harris that posits that Santa Claus should no longer be depicted as white because it alienates non-white children. In place of a white Santa, Harris suggested that Santa Claus be depicted as a penguin. Harris seems to think that all kids love penguins. I hate to break it to you lady, but there was at least one kid who wasn't so fond of penguins growing up. Let's just say I saw Batman Returns one too many times and it kinda ruined the whole species for me.

I can think of at another figure that really is universally revered by children who would make way more sense as a Santa Claus. He already dresses all in red. He's also a fictional character with awesome superpowers and not some dumb, aquatic bird.

Photo via Flickr User Ryan J. Quick

Merry Christmas, motherfuckers! Every kid gets an ass-kicking in their stocking this year. Plus, under the helmet, the Mighty Morphin Santa Ranger could be any ethnicity. He might even be... gay. Not saying he is. Just saying he might be. This should make everyone happy. Except women. Sorry, this Santa is definitely all man.

Now, since conservative pundits can never not take an opportunity to wag their finger in disgust at the "liberal war on Christmas," Megyn Kelly felt the need to respond to Penguingate 2013 and state for the record that Santa Claus has always been white, and should always be white because he was an historical figure. She's right that there was a real St. Nicholas, who was a 4th century Greek bishop famous for his generosity. The parts about the flying sled, midget slaves building toy trains, and grotesque obesity are, at this juncture, not verified. 

If you're curious as to when the "reason for the season" gets invoked, don't get it twisted. This is fucking Fox News, people. I'm pretty sure Megyn Kelly has a "Jesus is My Co-Anchor" sticker on her Mercedes. Just as an aside, she said ol' JC was definitely white. The Bible––a book whose fire and brimstone lunatic final chapter makes it about as credible a historical document as the movie Air Bud––doesn't even bother telling people what Jesus looked like. They don't even say if he was fat, tall, short, ugly, or handsome. Besides that, what are the odds that the evolution of humanity in the Middle East was such that people with fair skin survived in larger numbers than those with darker skin? This was way before SPF-15, and if Jesus was walking around in scorching temperatures as much as people said he did, I'd be real surprised if he looked anything like the drawings of him from the Middle Ages. The artists who drew Jesus were––shockingly––people that never actually met him. 

In response to this controversy, Kelly was noticeably absent from her show last night, but Politico reports that she'll be back tonight to address her critics. Outside of making out with Taye Diggs on an original copy of the New Testament, I'm pretty sure there's no way her critics are going to forgive her. Also, one last note for her: kids don't watch Fox News, so stop saying, "hey kids," and feigning like you are speaking directly to a pre-pubescent audience. The only children who watch Fox News Channel can't find their remote. 7

-I'm sure you've all been wondering if I watched the Saturday Night Live sketch cleverly called, "White Christmas." In the above video, a black Christmas movie is reimagined with an all-white cast. For those of you who are perturbed, perplexed, flummoxed, disturbed, or generally "cheesed off" about this sketch's racial politics, allow me to explain the joke:

You see, there are a lot of holiday films this year that feature predominantly black casts. Black Nativity (someone just gave up when trying to come up with a title for that movie), Best Man Holiday, and Madea's Christmas have or will come out in the span of a few months. If you add prestige Oscar-bait dramas like 12 Years a Slave, Fruitvale Station, Lee Daniels' The Butler, and Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom to that list, it's like a Million Man March of black movies on the screen. The holiday comedies share one common element that this sketch aims to mock––things black people like. A lot of white people think dancing to R&B music, black men in drag, and slang terms they don't understare are corny. It's screaming, "would you tolerate all these horrible jokes and all this blatant pandering if the cast was nothing but white folks?" In theory, this is a knowing satire.

Problem is, this entire premise wouldn't exist if it weren't for TV shows like Saturday Night Live sporting a dearth of black cast members. Also, the number of large budget feature films focusing on themes of interest to minorities (not just black people, but also Asians, Hispanics, and First Nations people) is so small that I can probably name all of them in a half-hour. Finally, dumb movies that black people like are no better or worse than all the horrible, schmaltzy crap that features predominantly white casts. By the way, most of those movies star Paul Rudd. 5

-Real Housewives of Beverly Hills "star" Brandi Glanville is catching flack for racist comments toward fellow housewife Joyce Giraud on Monday's installment of the series. Glanville tried to force Giraud to swim during a very special episode of the show set in Palm Springs. Giraud told Glanville she can't swim, which caused Glanville to say the following:

"You're a black person... It was a joke, and my black friends would have laughed crazy because they don't go in the pool because they will [mess up] their weaves … All my black friends can't swim." 

Giraud, who is Puerto Rican, responded, "Yes, I'm black. What's your problem? Puerto Ricans are black, they're Indian and they're Spanish, so I am a mix of three cultures, and I am very proud to represent all three." For the record, I can't swim, but it's not because of my weave. RACIST

The Most Racist Tweets of the Week:

The Dodgers act like 12 year olds, and then their beaner fans kill people!

— Andrew Arentson (@arenty_) October 16, 2013

NIGGERS & NIGGER LOVERS only make threats on twitter & prank phone calls to my uncles house but won't say or do anything in person.

— Nigger Hanger (@NiggerHanger1) December 13, 2013

SANTA HATES NIGGERS pic.twitter.com/KALHYx6L8c

— Dr. WhitePower (@THERACISTDOCTOR) December 13, 2013

I've been chink eyed for the past two days now I'm concerned.

— Vincent Speakman (@VinNotSoDiezel) December 13, 2013

Since I can't live in Hitler's Germany, I'll do my best to make my community a #NS community.

— James (@ANP_Jaiden) December 2, 2013

#Redskins Park is a winter wonderland http://t.co/j8QqNdDAQP pic.twitter.com/8sjryKWdQv

— Washington Redskins (@Redskins) December 10, 2013

@dave_schilling

An image of the cobalt container (courtesy of the National Commission on Nuclear Safety and Safeguards of Mexico's Energy Secretary)

Last Monday morning, in the town of Tepojaco, north of Mexico City, six truck-jacking bandits got really, really unlucky. Hoping to grab themselves a truck and a load of whatever it is that Mexican truck robbers like robbing from trucks, they pulled a driver and his buddy from their cab at gunpoint, beat them, nicked their Volkswagen Worker pickup, and hit the road.

It didn’t work out. Hours after the incident, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s nuclear energy watchdog, announced the truck had been carrying pellets of cobalt-60—a highly dangerous radioactive material used for cancer treatment. The stuff had depleted and was on its way from Tijuana in the north to a waste storage center in the capital. The robbers had allegedly stolen cargo that would turn their faces into a seeping red mess of blisters (or possibly kill them slowly) if they so much as copped a peek inside its protective casing. As is usual for incidents of this type, the theft had triggered an alert at the IAEA’s headquarters in Vienna, Austria.

As with any publicized loss of radioactive material, the theft got rolling news channels (especially in the US), fretting over the danger of a “dirty bomb”—a theoretical weapon, made by mixing radioactive stuff with normal explosives—popping up. Despite the fact that no dirty bomb has ever been detonated and that if one were used it might not even be that bad, visions of al Qaeda militants snidely smuggling the cobalt into the country spread.

The heist, however, was much less exciting that that. Despite the widely televised warnings not to mess with the cobalt, the estúpidos let curiosity get the better of them, cracking open the radiation-proof casing, and taking a look inside. The IAEA then warned, “It would probably be fatal to be close to this amount of unshielded radioactive material for a period in the range of a few minutes to an hour.” Shortly after, the six turned up, probably looking pretty sheepish, at a hospital in central Mexico. Police cordoned off the facility and arrested them.

Some sought after "yellowcake" uranium (image via)

The Mexican incident got a lot of attention. But perhaps the most surprising part of the story is that these things happen much more often than you would think. In the past year, the IAEA has counted 24 cases of theft or loss of nuclear stuff, mostly in ex-Soviet Union countries. In the 19 years before that, there were about 1,700 similar incidents. Most involved plutonium and uranium, and, like smuggling weed on the ferry back from Amsterdam, you can be sure far more gets through than gets nabbed by cops. Unlike the Mexican robbers, it seems the Eastern European nuke smugglers know exactly what they’re after.

The question, then, is why? According to the IAEA, criminals will steal and smuggle radioactive material for one of two reasons: either for the “malevolent use of stolen nuclear materials for terrorism or blackmail,” or for the development of a “military program of a State striving for possession of nuclear weapons.” Obviously, neither is good.

Take North Korea. The pariah state needs a steady flow of uranium (and probably plutonium) to keep its controversial nuclear program rolling, and according to one analyst, seems to get its gear from a complex network of smugglers around the world. The UN, claimed Mark Hibbs of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace earlier this year, are watching ports from the UAE to Malaysia, the Cayman Islands, and Turkey for signs of nuclear material and equipment smuggling by North Korea. Back in 2009, rumors surfaced that a North Korean delegation had been sniffing around old uranium mines deep in the Congolese jungle, not far from Shinkolobwe, the site of an old US-built uranium mine.

These WikiLeaks cables show how much the US and other countries worry about the issue, referring to radiation sensors installed by US agencies along borders all over the world. Known as the “Second Line of Defence,” according to one cable, each time a border-mounted detector goes off, US diplomats in the country in question are hauled from their beds and asked to investigate. According to another, the alarms have gone off at least 500 times in the last few years. In Eastern European states like Georgia, where gangsters hawking nuclear material is more common than you might think (last year, undercover cops scored some weapons-grade uranium near the Turkish border), the detectors are highly valued, despite frequent false alarms. Not content with quietly monitoring the world’s borders, the US is planning to buy drones able to monitor radiation levels around smuggling routes.

Moldova is another hotspot. In 2010, police seized four pounds of “yellowcake” uranium in the capital Chişinau. They took it off four smugglers with big plans to make $11 million from a sale to a dodgy regime for military purposes (see above video). In June this year, the IAEA announced a 2011 police raid in Chişinau—they nabbed a guy on “a leafy street in the center of the capital,” seizing “several grams of highly-enriched uranium”—a potential building block for a bomb. At the time, the IAEA’s security boss Khammar Mrabit was surprised at the crooks’ level of technical knowledge, expressing concern at the “growing lengths to which some criminals are prepared to go in order to trade in nuclear and other radioactive materials, using shielded containers to evade detection systems.”

Governments are often directly implicated in these jobs. You might not have read about it, but last month in Hamburg, Germany, four men were banged up for smuggling reactor parts to Iran for use in the Islamic Republic's “heavy water” plant in Arak, a crucial part of its nuclear program. By working with Iranian front companies in Azerbaijan and Turkey, they’d tricked the German authorities into thinking the parts were for benign programs in those territories.

US spies tipped off the Germans, who found hundreds of incriminating documents at properties in Hamburg, Oldenburg, and Weimar, along with the contents of a suitably shady-sounding email address used in the dealings: ghost18273@hotmail.com. It now turns out that Iran was secretly negotiating with the US and others over nukes at exactly that time, so it’s interesting that the flow seemed to continue even while agreements were underway to pause development at Arak.

Meanwhile in Mexico, specialists have just finished using a robot to move the canister of cobalt from the cornfield where the truck thieves dumped it. A farmer has been admitted to hospital with signs of radiation sickness. Next time you jack a van, check there’s something useful inside. Next time you’re passing through Moldova, watch out for moustached men with weird-looking packages who still use hotmail.

@alexchitty

The Lords of Fun is an unfunded, unsolicited, and somewhat unintentional fraternity of folks thirsty for kicks who took a road trip from Richmond, Virginia to the Outer Banks using the FBM bikes tour bus and a dozen motorbikes. Our goal was to hit up a bunch of skateparks, campsites, dirt dragstrips, and what have you. But we ended up getting trapped in a tidewater suburban nightmare—the roads were flooded, rain and winds all but made moto travel impossible, the drags got canceled, and... Well, you get the idea. We still managed to make tuna fish out of tuna shit, just nothing like we initially pictured as we first rolled out of town... London-based filmmaker Fraser Byrne was there to film the haphazard cross-country journey. You can get a peek into our absurd odyssey in Fraser's short documentary above, which is affectionately titled Beat Ass: On the Road with the Lords of Fun. 

After checking out the film, peep some of these photos from our trip. They were shot by Korey Kryder.

Images of Kindred via his (now defunct) Facebook

Accused child molester and pastor of what appears to be a made-up church in Minnesota, Jacoby Kindred, has created a public relations disaster for himself by opening his deranged mouth. 

I don't want anyone to get away with child molestation, but here's a tip anyway: When a reporter gets you on the phone about the accusations you're facing, do not say, “These are not really kids." There are documents that will prove you wrong, and they're not hard to get. Also steer clear of, "They have the mind of the adult." That's a lot like the first one, but it has the added problem of making you sound like a maniac.

That's how Jacoby Kindred answered his accusations when journalists called him yesterday to ask about the teenage girls who say he's been raping them for years. After those two misfires, he said, "I never did anything like that," an old-fashioned denial, which is what any lawyer would prescribe for the situation. Unfortunately, he then blurted out the too-revealing, "Anyone can make up anything when you sit there long enough and you rehearse it." Then, believe it or not, he dug himself deeper into that hole.

As of yesterday, Kindred was a fugitive. There is a warrant out for his arrest on two counts of first-degree criminal sexual conduct spanning almost a decade. According to the complaint, two young girls, the daughters of a woman to whom Kindred ministered closely for about nine years, were six and seven when he first molested them. He told them they had the Devil in them, and that he could remove him, apparently by putting other things inside of them.

The abuse in the report was carried out in locations ranging from inside a house to a Target parking lot. He also, according to their accounts, had a bargain in which he would drive one of the girls to her boyfriend's house, where her mother forbade her from going, in exchange for sex.

Jacoby "Preacherman" Kindred, as he calls himself, claims to be the pastor of something called One Accord Ministries, which he told the press didn't have a building address. It is a registered business in his town of Maplewood, Minnesota, however, and the address listed is the same as the address on his (now removed) Facebook profile's "about" section. It looks like this:

Image via Google Street View

Kindred left his Facebook up, complete with phone numbers, until moments before this article was published. He had apparently stopped answering phone calls from strange numbers though. Since the profile featured pictures, videos, and other information about the life of a fugitive on the lam, it was apparently receiving heavy traffic, and when it when it down, it was transforming into a thriving community for discussing Kindred's actions with him in detail:

Most likely, the availabilty of his phone number via Facebook, and him making the mistake of picking up, facilitated his unfiltered interview with Twincities.com yesterday. After his denial, he ranted about Minnesota being a "ladies' state," and said that, "All a woman has to do (in Minnesota) is make an accusation, true or false, and the man's going to be in trouble."  

He signed off by saying, "And I’m gone. Get your warrants, do what you gotta do, no DNA, none of that. You weren’t there, nobody was there!"

As of today, there still hasn't been any word on whether or not Kindred ever returned from the out-of-town funeral he said he was attending on Thursday. 

@MikeLeePearl

Video by the author. Photo by Jade Katz.

A few weeks ago, Lower East Side legend Clayton Patterson introduced my friend Jade Katz and me to Axel, a blood artist and jewelry designer. For years, Axel has been using his own blood as paint to create art. He learned the skill at Salvador Dalí's dinner parties, where guests played rounds of exquisite corpse. The game taught Axel that he could paint with his own blood, and he's used his blood as paint ever since. His work has earned him the reputation of being a (literal) bloody genius, and he showed us why when he gave us a private tour of his latest show at Art on A. 

@RedAlurk

For three weeks, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian protesters have been flooding the streets of Kiev, occupying government buildings and taking over the city's Independence Square. Initially, the demonstrators were expressing discontent at President Viktor Yanukovych's decision to pull out of a deal that would bring Ukraine closer to joining the EU.

After an initial brutal police crackdown, the protests have grown in size and are now more about toppling the government and putting an end to corruption than joining the European Union. The police have tried and failed to clear the tent city that has sprung up in the Independence Square – also known as the Maidan – and the occupied city hall that has been dubbed the "Revolution HQ". Protesters remain in the streets, despite the below zero temperatures.

More from the protests in Kiev:

Police Tried and Failed to Clear Kiev's Independence Square

Ukrainian Protesters Toppled Kiev's Lenin Statue Last Night

Opposition Parties and Vitali Klitschko Are Calming Kiev's Protesters

Image by the author.

Egypt is rarely predictable, so it wasn't surprising to see snow in the desert this weekend. 

By Friday morning, social media had gone mad with photos of an Egyptian winter wonderland. Pictures from Madinaty and New Cairo on the eastern outskirts of the city showed white stuff frosted on cars and swanky apartments. @GalalAmrG tweeted a camel in the snow. One meme joked, “God bless Sisi, he transformed our country into a European one in two months,” and a popular satirist, who tweets as @KarlRemarks, tweeted, “It's snowing in the desert. I think God is dropping hints that the Arab Spring is over.” At the same time, a government official told OnTV news channel that this cold snap had nothing to do with global warming.

This is the first time many Cairenes have seen snow. The British newspaper the Mirror claimed this was Cairo's first snowfall in 112 years, but the Egyptian Meteorological Authority later denied this claim. Either way, it's been ages since Egypt has had snow.

In the middle of Cairo, the weather treated people to day-long rain and flurries of hail stones, and the streets turned into mush and puddles—in the posh Garden City, cars navigated through inches-deep rivers, as streets next to the Nile River flooded in Zamalek, a high-end neighborhood in the middle of the city. 

But away from all the excitement of snow-frosted neighborhoods—most of the winter wonderland pictures came from upper middle class satellite towns—the unusual climate made people's lives more difficult, weathering the existing cracks in Egyptian society. As internet chattered on about whether pictures of pyramids covered in snow would surface, many Egyptians suffered. 

Some activists worried the snow would worsen conditions in Egypt. Sara Bergamaschi, co-founder of the Sina Network, has been working with her organization to improve refugees' conditions inside Egypt during a time when both locals and authorities are turning their backs on them. She thought the snow would only create more problems. 

“This is bad news for us,” she said. “We all know that the Syrian crisis in the Middle East has worsened, but in Egypt too, it has gotten worse. This weather will only amplify the risks refugees are already exposed to.” 

In the midst of Cairo's first winter in years, the authorities released Syrians and Palestinians who had been held in inhumane conditions for weeks.  “When the cold weather came, they were released and basically just left on the streets,” Sara said. “We don't know why some of them were held, and some let go. The situation is blurry.”

Children and the homeless have also been negatively affected. Nelly Ali, a human rights lecturer and activist for children's rights based in London, said, “These really are dangerous months.”

“You would be forgiven for thinking that blankets were the number one requirement during the winter. What we actually have gapping shortage of is first aid and burn cream,” she said, noting that street children are building fires to stave off the cold and end up hurting themselves. “This is also a time when children are offering sexual favors in return for shelter, warmth, and food,” Nelly said before telling the story of a young girl with Parkinson's disease who became pregnant this way.

“There are many things that we can do. The first is to realize that every one of us has a responsibility to alleviate the suffering that others are enduring.”

Meanwhile, life in Egypt trundles on. Yesterday, Al Jazeera reported that two demonstrators died, cops arrested 54 activists, and three policemen were injured during anti-military protests. The government has announced the dates for a nationwide constitutional referendum in January, and the specter of Egypt's third revolutionary anniversary is now firmly on the horizon. Unrest is guaranteed, and tidy conclusions are thin on the ground.

@TomWRollins