I am a firm believer that there’s a joke to lighten the mood of any situation, no matter how grim. Many would disagree with me, but I say fuck 'em. Crying is easy. Wallowing in sorrow is even easier. True mental fortitude is when you can look at an awful situation and laugh in its ugly face.

When my wife was pushing out our first born on 9/11 as they read the names of the World Trade deceased and she screamed to shut the TV off, I pretended I was an airplane crashing into her vagina to make her laugh.

When the shitty kid before that kid died in my wife’s stomach, I told her she didn’t want that kid anyway because he was too lazy, that if he didn’t want to grow on his own, how the hell was he going to ever get a job or do anything on his own? If that kid would have lived he’d end up 40 years old living with us and I’d still be using the pillow as a silencer over my wife’s face at age 70!

On April 15, 2013 two bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon. I immediately texted all my friends in the Boston area and apologized for what, “Those motherfucking Yankees fans did.”

Some people with a bug up their ass would find such talk inappropriate, but I know from experience that I have always been thanked for bringing a bit of levity to awful situations.

Last October my home state of New Jersey was decimated by Hurricane Sandy. The assessed damage is $70 billion, of which the government has offered very little. If that’s not laughable, I don’t know what is.

Knowing that financially there wasn’t much I could do to help, my partner and I in NJ Skateshop started collecting warm clothes from people in the skate industry to distribute to those in need. Fifteen-hour days of delivering clothes turned into weeks, and the daily dose of sadness and destruction really started to take its toll on my mental well-being. I had forgotten how to laugh entirely.

And then I received a donation box of clothes from a stripper in Vegas, and I collapsed in joy and laughter. Just as winter was setting in and temperatures were drastically dropping and most people were still without heat, a sexy saint with impeccable comedic timing sent us a box of string bikinis and used thongs. It was the best gift ever and exactly what all of us on the delivery crew needed at that very moment. Thank you, funny Vegas stripper, whoever you are.

That said, I am not so far removed that I can’t relate to and feel true sorrow for what the people of Oklahoma are going through after the rash of heartless tornadoes mangled their world. But the only thing I can really offer, other than donating some money and clothes, is the gift of laughter.

And so I flew to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, last weekend for the Exxotica Porn Expo to ask some of the top adult-film stars what sexual act they’d be willing to donate to my fictitious auction to help raise money for the victims of the Oklahoma tornadoes. If the comical responses of these porn stars don’t help raise spirits, then I fear we, as a country, might be beyond saving.

Watch the video at the top of the page or on YouTube. 

More stupid can be found at Chrisnieratko.com or @Nieratko.

Also, check these out from Chris:

Meet the ATL Twins - Part 1

Battle of the Butthole Tattoos

Fat, Sick, and Nearly Divorced

Everyone just learned, to no great surprise, that the National Security Agency can pretty much grab phone records of anyone it wants without a warrant. In all likelihood, that's just the tip of the surveillance-state iceberg—if it really, really thinks it should, the government can go through your email, watch you with satellites, and track every website you visit. You are an open book as far as America's spy agencies are concerned—the question is, do they want to read you? There's no way to find out what information, exactly, the government is interested in gathering, so we decided to walk around New York City and ask people if they thought they were being watched. Hope you guys have nothing to hide!

VICE: Do you think the government is watching you right now?
Will, former thief: Most definitely.

Why do you think so?
In order to keep order, I feel like the government needs to know exactly what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. I mean, there are cameras everywhere.

Have you done anything you don’t want them to see?
Of course, everybody has. When it comes to scratching together something, or stealing something.

Have you stolen anything recently?
Not recently. I’ve got guap.

Emily, bartender, comedian, teacher: I don’t know if they are watching me in particular. I think that if they wanted to they probably could.

Do you think they watch people in general?
I do.

How do they do it?
I’m pretty sure there are tons and tons of security cameras used for protection against terrorists. And I’m pretty sure if the government accused anyone of being a terrorist, they could use that footage or get any footage they would want to have.

So where are the cameras?
Uh, I don’t know. They exist. That’s how they get footage that they get from the bombings in Boston. I don’t know where it is, or who’s in charge, but it does exist.

Does it worry you?
No. I feel like I live pretty much above reproach. I’m not really breaking any laws. I don’t think I need to be worrying about those kind of things.

Do you think the government is watching you right now?
Ben: Possibly. It’s interesting because I actually work in Connecticut. I ride my bike back and forth to work. There were satellite pictures taken of me on my bycicle on the street.

So why do you think they’re watching you?
That’s kind of irrelevant. They just might be watching.

So what you're saying is, when the shit hits the fan, we’re all screwed.
Hey man, you’ve got to watch yourself out there.

Do you think the government is watching you right now?
Other Ben: Right this moment, at this site? Yeah, probably.

How come?
It’s a busy intersection. There’s probably cameras. Something like that.

Why do you think they’re watching you?
Not me specifically, right? Not me specifically. But everybody around me, the whole overview? Yes.

Why do you think they’re watching?
What happened in Boston recently, for example. I don’t know. I guess I agree with it. It’s always tough to accept something like that. It’s a necessary evil.

Mind if I snap a photo of you?
Sorry, man. That would be contributing to the whole thing, you know?

Clinton, UPS driver: Of course they are.

Really? How do you think they’re doing it, any why are they doing it?
The eye. [Points up] Someone is always watching you. That satellite. Believe me. Government’s always watching.

That satellite can see us from here?
It can see everything. I’m telling you. Now, the way they’re tracking everything, and finding out what’s going on and narrowing it down. The government may not be watching, but somebody out there is watching. And it all pins down to one thing.

What’s that one thing?
Somebody’s watching! Somebody’s watching, man. Somewhere.

More on surveillance:

Is Anyone Really Surprised the NSA Is Currently Spying on Millions of Americans?

How Are We Supposed to Know What the Government Does?

The Department of Justice Secretly Spied on the Associated Press

The author, hanging out in the probably-safe-to-stand-in LA River. Photos by Nate Miller

A few days after the LA River got reopened for recreation on Memorial Day, people in LA started RSVPing to an event getting advertised on Facebook called the “LA River Regatta Club’s Maiden Voyage!” It was a confusing week. Finding out about an ostensibly navigable river in the middle of Los Angeles was like discovering an awesome place for carne asada tacos in China—so counterintuitive it must be true. Damned if anyone had any clue how to get to the river, or whether the storm channel from Terminator 2: Judgement Day even qualified as a river, but if there was going to be a party on a riverboat in LA, that wasn’t as shocking as there simply being a river in the first place.

When I saw the boat on the ad, and noticed that “RIVER REVELRY” was one of the listed activities, my mind filled with tantalizing possibilities. Would there be a big Huck Finn–style log raft? Would I be cruising down the river drinking a mint julep from the open bar while looking up at the US Bank Tower? Would gambling be legal on the river? Damn the cost! A $20 donation to something called the LA River Revitalization Corporation (whatever that is) is a pittance on the historic night of LA’s first party barge.

As it happened, getting people to make their $20 donation in advance was a pretty shrewd move, and one that would help me understand what “revitalizing” the Los Angeles River actually involves.

The Party

I must have looked like Chevy Chase in Vacation finding out Walley World was closed when I drove by the event and saw people kind of milling around a warehouse nowhere near any rivers. I was a little too on time, so it was empty. It can’t feel good for a party’s hosts when one of the first paying guests shows up with a facial expression that says, “My mistake. I thought something fun was supposed to be happening.” Still, the “lite bites,” "Berlin ping-pong," and “open bar” parts of the flyer weren’t lies.

Over the course of the night, the party got crowded at least. I talked to a group of young women who turned out to all be lawyers, you know, educated folk, but their questions were the same as mine: “What does LA want with a river?” “What’s an LA River Revitalization Corporation?” “Where are the boats?” The lawyers didn’t actually want me to mention that they thought there were going to be boats, but what are they going to do, sue me?

Four lawyers who thought this was supposed to be a boat party

But what about the actual river?

Near a projector screen showing old-timey footage of the river when it was more river-ish, Miranda Rodriguez, the corporation’s events coordinator, explained that the name of the party wasn’t a lie but an inside joke. “Of course there isn’t actually going to be a rowing competition,” she said. There actually was a rowing competition in 1990, and it was called the LA River Regatta.

When the LA Times wrote about the regatta back then, the paper asked, “Who's responsible if [the racers] drown or become sick by accidentally ingesting the water? The answer is somewhat murky, although it will probably become clearer as studies are done and hearings are held.” There apparently have been enough studies and hearings in the past 23 years, because part of the river is now open to the public. 

Omar Brownson, the head of the four-year-old LA River Revitalization Corporation was also at the party, and he made a mercifully short appeal for donations to his organization shortly after our hosts played a commercial for the brewery whose beer everyone was drinking.

Afterward, I elbowed my way over and bugged him with my dumb questions. He had just been in Washington, DC, he said, going over schematics with the Army Corp of Engineers. They were going to start building a bridge in July, and the federal government was allocating $1 billion to the project, he said. Omar didn’t seem eager to answer my questions about water quality, but he was excited about improvements along the banks that would bring in businesses and investements.

“They’re going to get rid of the concrete on the sides?” I asked.

“They’ll never get rid of the concrete,” he said.

I guess the bridge is always going to look like a storm channel, but at least there will be one more bridge.

Is it safe?

Earlier this month a volunteer group conducted its annual clean-up-the-river event, which takes care of what debris can be lifted out by hand. You’d still have to dodge the odd shopping cart if you brought a boat in and started rowing around, which would look like this:

Debris aside, those who enter the river should know that at the river’s start, there’s a public works facility in Van Nuys called the Tillman Water Reclamation Plant that pumps 60 million gallons of former sewage into the river every day. You should also know about the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, a few miles from the Tillman sewage plant. In 2007 the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board found that the SSFL was letting “chromium, dioxin, lead, mercury and other pollutants,” flow right into an LA river tributary. Cleaning up that particular problem is expected to take until 2017.

The safety page of the city’s official river recreation site is all about vests, helmets, and the buddy system, which suggests to me that they’re not worried about someone getting sick from the water. If they’re not worried, then I’m not either.

I went down to the river a few days after the Regatta Club’s “Maiden Voyage,” and legally splashed around in the questionable water. You can too. Just find your way to a bike path that runs along the river and look for a break in the railing with "RIVER ACCESS” painted under it, mind the red lines that demarcate where on the embankment you’re allowed to stand, then climb down and enjoy the city’s natural beauty. 

The water’s warm, almost piss warm, but still refreshing on a summer’s day, and it flows pretty fast. It’s no wonder they only encourage people to launch kayaks and rafts. An inner tube would be great, but I doubt the city would like seeing you floating in their river with a beer resting on your belly.

As I was drying off, there were some guys setting up fishing gear. They said it was the first time they’d fished down there.

“If you catch anything, are you going to eat it?” I asked.

“You’re allowed to. We probably won’t though, because...” and then he just kind of trailed off and made a face.

@MikeLeePearl

More local stuff from LA:

America's Worst Housing Project Is Getting Gentrified

Los Angeles Is a Paradise

Religion Is Taking Over Los Angeles

The most popular sport in the West African country of Senegal isn’t soccer—it’s laamb, combining Greco-Roman wrestling moves with eclectic pre-fight rituals and dances. Laamb’s appeal has skyrocketed as the nation’s economy has plunged (the average income for Senegalese workers is about $3 a day), and the top stars are the Michael Jordans of their country. In this segment filmed for VICE on HBO, Thomas Morton meets with a shaman who bathes him in a series of potions to give him an edge in his upcoming laamb match.

Watch more at the VICE show page and check out VICE on HBO every Friday at 11 PM.

Henry Molaison after his high school graduation.

In 1953 Henry Molaison, a sufferer of severe epilepsy, underwent experimental brain surgery that saved his life and robbed him of it at the same time. While the removal of bits of Henry’s brain (the hippocampi and parts of both amygdala) cured his condition, it also left him with a sort of amnesia, the likes of which neuroscience had never seen: every 30 seconds his memory was completely erased. Molaison became the first sacrificial martyr in the study of human memory. Although as a subject he was responsible for 60 years of breakthroughs in neuroscience, as a person he was reduced to clawing at facts that swirled around his conscious. After his father passed away, he carried a note in his pocket that read "Dad’s dead."

Dr. Suzanne Corkin met Henry in 1962 when she was only a medical school graduate. Having become his lead investigator in 1982, she spent the next 46 years of her life working with him. I gave Dr. Corkin a call to try to understand what not being able to remember a parent's death must feel like.


VICE: Hi Dr. Corkin. In your book, Permanent Present Tense, you make a beautiful analogy which to me sums up Henry’s condition sublimely. You write that "information collects in the hotel lobby of Henry’s brain but can’t check into any of the rooms." Could you expand on this for me?


Dr. Suzanne Corkin: This is what inspired the title of my book, and that means basically that he was always living in the moment. He couldn’t tell you what he had done earlier that day, or the day before, or the month before. Once you distracted him, he couldn’t remember what he’d just been talking to you about.



I'm gonna try an analogy myself. It sounds like the closest experience we would have to Henry’s condition would be walking into a room and immediately forgetting our reason for doing so. Was this a constant frustration for Henry?
Well, he got used to that. He lived in very familiar surroundings after his operation. He lived with his parents and spent a lot of time in that house. So he got used to walking from one room to another without really knowing why. Presumably if he had to go to the bathroom he knew why he walked to the bathroom. He didn’t know where things were kept. He helped with yard work and he didn’t know where the tools were commonly kept.



Did he often watch the same films over and over?


Oh sure, he could read the same magazines over and over too.



What about music, were there any particular melodies that got stuck in his mind?
There was. I actually tested this formally. I made up a test where I went to the library and found the top ten tunes on the Hit Parade every year from 1926 (that's when he was born) and recorded them. 

When I played them to him, and he recognized some of them... it wasn’t a complete failure. The controls did more but you’ve got to remember that he didn’t have much of a social life as a teenager because of his epilepsy.

Did he ever guess?
He wasn’t a confabulator but on occasion he did guess. When I asked him whom we had fought in the Gulf War, for example, he said, Mexico and Cuba. Obviously he had the wrong Gulf but he was able to fall back on his intellect. He made intelligent guesses, he didn’t make things up.



Did he ever lie?
Not that I know of. He had cataract surgery though, and after that he didn’t wear glasses any more. One time we asked him where his glasses were and he said, "Oh, somebody must have stole them." It wasn’t a lie, because he didn’t know. All he knew was he wore glasses, so if his glasses weren’t there, he had to give an explanation for that. 



How did he remain aware that his parents had passed away?
He didn’t. I think it just took him a long time of not seeing them to understand that they were gone.

The hippocampus—the part of Henry's brain that was excised in surgery, and ultimately caused his amnesia.

What was Henry’s relationship like with the other sex?


Well, he was certainly always very polite, to the point of being chivalrous. I have several pictures of him with a woman named Maude, from I think it’s 1946. One is of the two of them standing together on the beach and they have their arms around each other. The other picture was of Maude in a pinup-like pose and on the back it reads, "To Henry, Love Maude."

I also have letters from two friends of his who were in the service during WWII. They talked a lot about dames, babes, going out, getting married, and all of those kinds of things. So it was part of his conversation, but I don’t honestly know the extent to which these are true.



Did he ever mention girls after the operation?
No. We asked him about girlfriends, and he never mentioned Maude, which is very interesting.



There’s a spiritual aphorism that many religions aspire to, and it’s about forgetting the past and not worrying about the future. They preach that living in the present can bring an enlightened sense of peace. Do you think Henry unwittingly achieved this?


I don’t know that I can go out on a limb far enough to say he was having "zen" moments. A lot of people describe him as a very gentle person. I think he was that way preoperatively too. His father was also the "spoke-when-spoken-to" kind of person, so it's hard to figure out how much of it is just genetic personality and how much was caused by him having his amygdalas removed, which used to be done to prisoners to tame them.

When he came to the clinical research center, he would have meals and we would test him, but sometimes he would have downtime when there was nothing special for him to do. The nurses put his chair out in the hall and he would sit there so that the people going by could say, "Hi, Henry." He enjoyed this little extra stimulation. He was perfectly happy to sit there in the now, not asking, “What am I going to do next?” “When is dinner?” “May I have a glass of water?” He just sat there and enjoyed the scenery, the traffic of people walking by him in this little research center. It’s hard to determine whether that was to do with the memory, it was multifactorial. He was a happy person, he was not depressed.



How did Henry perceive you?


About 20 years after the first day we met, he started saying that he recognized me.


What did Henry provide to the field of study in human memory?


His dedication to research brought about an epiphany in the science of memory. 
First of all, he was living proof that you could be an intelligent person and still have a horrible memory. His IQ was consistently above average. This tells us that memory is processed by specialized brain circuits—that memory is compartmentalized.



The second thing Henry showed, was the ability to store new memories is localized to a specific part of the brain and this is the inner part of the temporal lobes. Before Henry, we didn’t understand that the hippocampus and the surrounding cortex are essential for the establishment of long-term memory. His third contribution was the discovery that there are different kinds of memory with different addresses in the brain. We know now that there are several different kinds of memory that are preserved in amnesia. 



Didn't they leave a small part of the hippocampi, where the flickers of memory function as a ghost of his memory?


No, the telephone lines going in were cut. The area of the brain that supplies information to the hippocampus was virtually all removed, there was only tiny little scraps left behind. For all practical purposes, on a day-to-day basis, he remembered nothing. Every now and then, there’d be these little scraps that came out and we’d fall off our chairs in surprise and excitement, but day after day this guy didn’t remember anything.



Memory forms a narrative of a person’s past, an identity. Did Henry lose that after the surgery?


That’s a complicated question. As you know, scholars ranging from philosophers to neuroscientists have argued that an individual who lacks the capacity to remember also lacks an identity.



So did Henry Molaison have a sense of self? The answer is yes, he did. It was just less complete than yours or mine. Our notion of self is that it’s a composite of memories from the past and the present, and our plans for the future. And when we look at Henry’s access to these time periods, we find it was patchy. So, he has rich representation covering the period of his birth, which was from 1926 right up to when he had his operation in 1953, he could tell us what he did for fun like roller-skating, banjo-playing, and target practice.

However the qualities of these preoperative memories were severely compromised in that he didn’t have any episodic autobiographical memories. He couldn’t remember anything that happened at a specific time or place as a unique episode.

Years after his operation he had selective insights and fragments of information, so he did have a sense of his identity. He knew that he had an operation and he also had the feeling that the procedure had only been tried on a few people before him, and that during the operation something went wrong. He knew this and was able to articulate it, but above all else he knew that he had a terrible memory. An interesting corollary of this was that he couldn’t record any new information, so his body image was outdated. He described himself as thin but heavy, and he was unaware he had grey hair. 



Could he configure an image of the future?


No, he couldn’t construct an agenda. One of his constant little things were these little monologues. One of them was about how he wanted to be a brain surgeon.



Aw.
But he believed he couldn’t, because he wore glasses. He thought they’d be dirty so he couldn’t see properly, or the nurse would wipe his brow and dislodge his glasses, or blood would spurt up in his glasses. If this happened, and his vision was impaired, he might make a mistake and harm someone. He would talk about the kind of things he might do to them, he had a real conscience and he didn’t want to do anything like that to someone else. The interesting thing was that he didn’t have a plan B. He actually had no plans. When I asked him what he’d do tomorrow, he said whatever’s beneficial, full stop. He couldn’t create a future and he was never able to chase his dreams because he didn’t have any.

Follow James on Twitter: @Bainosorus

More strange life stories:

The Imposter Who Had Over 500 Different Identities

I Shot My DIck Off In 'Nam

An Interview With a Mexican Coke Dealer

Cry-Baby #1: Aaron Butler

Photo via/Story via

The incident: The Boy Scouts decided to start letting gay kids be scouts. 

The appropriate response: Nothing. 

The actual response: Aaron Butler, a scout leader in Roseau MN, quit his position as a scout leader and forced his son to leave the Scouts, too.

Aaron and his son Evan both left the Scouts last week. In an interview with NBC News about it, Aaron said that he hadn't explained to his son why they were leaving, but admitted that it was due to the Boy Scouts of America's recent decision to stop discriminating against homosexual children: "They say it—'On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law; to help other people at all times; to keep [myself] physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight'—If the BSA cannot honor their own law, then how can I stay with an organization that just does not care anymore?”

Aaron said that his son Evan was disappointed that they "had to leave" the Scouts, saying: “He cried for about 10 minutes because I told him that the Boy Scouts were not honoring their own law,"

Eight-year-old Evan also spoke to NBC, and said he felt "pretty bad" about it, as he was going to miss the camp-outs, archery, and slingshot activities. When asked if he understood why his parents had made him quit, he responded: “It was between honoring God, and not honoring God. And [not] honoring God got more votes.”

Aaron also expressed regret, saying: “It was something that we all enjoyed, we loved every week of it.”

Cunt. 

Cry-Baby #2: Andrew Joseph Lobban

via Reddit

The incident: Three guys pranked one of their coworkers and caught it on video. 

The appropriate response: Laughing/being embarrassed, depending on how seriously you take yourself. 

The actual response: Andrew Joseph Lobban, the subject of the video, allegedly murdered all three of them. 

31-year-old Andrew worked as a bouncer at AJ's Nightclub in Ocala, Florida along with Benjamin Larz Howard, Jerry Lamar Bynes, and Josue Santiago, who were all in their 20s. 

Shortly after midnight on Sunday, the four of them were leaving the club when Andrew allegedly shot all three of them. Two of them died at the scene from gunshot wounds to the head. The third victim was pronounced dead in hospital. 

Andrew was arrested by police shortly after. During his interview, he admitted to the killings, saying that he did it because the three deceased had been "teasing" him over a video. 

According to police, the video in question showed the three victims with Andrew at a gun range. The three deceased rigged a gun so that it would misfire, then handed it to Andrew, who tried (and failed) to shoot it. 

This, apparently, embarrassed him so deeply that he killed all three of them, to show that he does, in fact, know how to fire a gun. 

Andrew is being held in jail on suspicion of three counts of felony murder. Bail has not been set. 

Which of these awful, awful people is the bigger cry-baby? Let us know in this poll right here:

Previously: A woman who called the police over stolen Pop Tarts vs. A guy who threatened to blow up a spelling mistake

Winner: The Crazy Pop Tart bitch!!!

@JLCT

You might recognize the name James Harvey—his comics have frequently appeared on this site. James has recently taken on a bizarrely ambitious project, which he is calling Bartkira. He is having the entire 2,000 plus pages of the manga Akira redrawn with Simpsons characters in the place of series’ familiar protagonists. For example, Bart is Kaneda and Milhouse is Tetsuo. 

Each cartoonist gets to pick a set of six pages to redraw and those pages will be added to the book. It is a pretty crazy undertaking considering the source material for this parody is one of the longest running comics ever and it seems to be begging for a cease and desist order from either the Simpsons or Akira. 

Anyway, I wanted to ask James why he was making such a cool and stupid project. 

VICE: So James what’s this Bartkira thing about? When'd you get the idea?
James Harvey: The first guy to do a Bartkira drawing was Ryan Humphries, a UK artist. He redrew these pages that showed the moment Akira destroys Neo-Tokyo, but redrawing Akira as Bart and the Colonel as Homer. His drawings were simplistic and quickly rendered, totally at odds with the super-detailed, maximalist approach that we associate with artists like Kastuhiro Otomo. But the power and the energy of Otomo's compositions and layouts survived intact.

Something I heard recently is that a group of German sociologists did an expansive study into art and literature and concluded that the amount of major ambitious works of art being undertaken has sharply declined. I don't know how you'd prove that, but then again it seems like a bit of a no-brainer—how many novels like War and Peace were written last year? Or in the last 100 years? As the speed of communication increases, the speed of art increases too. A lot of my favorite cartoonists are making these haiku-like micro-comics designed for a Twitter and Tumblr audience. None of the cartoonists I know are undertaking major epic works like the ones we grew up on—like Akira, which is a shame, to me.

Thats a long answer I thought you were the creator of Bartkira. Tell me about what the fuck you are doing.
So I realized that I could take Ryan's idea and just plant it like a seed to let everyone know what it feels like to work on an ambitious, large-scale work of art. And let them see for themselves that it's something they're totally capable of, even if they never thought they could.

There are artists, who've never made a comic before, are making beautiful work for Bartkira—even though their drawings are simple and rough. There is so much about pacing and composition from Otomo's page, and it's rubbing off on them. They're seeing that they have it in them to create these brilliant comics too.

I'm hoping that the people who worked on Bartkira who'd never thought about creating comics before will be inspired to create their own. The project is going to be like a fungus that scatters its spores far and wide.

How many pages do you have completed and how many remain?
Right now we've got a couple of hundred pages in the can, and oh, about 2,000 that I'm waiting on. We're pretty far from the deadline, though. Even if everyone drops out before then I'll just push to get the first volume completed.

Right at the beginning I thought, Even if we only get 70 participants we'll have enough to complete the first volume. And that'd be enough to satisfy me in terms of completing the experiment, but the actual number of participants was more like 700.

So there's a plan to publish this? How are you going to publish this thing that infringes on two major copyrights?
[Laughs] Good question. Right now, the only plan is to distribute it peer-to-peer via torrent sites. Beyond the legality issues, we're talking about 2,400 color pages. It'd be massively expensive to produce.

Maybe bongo comics will pick it up. Matt Groening seems like a cool guy.
I'm wondering if it'd be possible to get Matt to write a foreword. He once commented on something else I did, a while back.

Simpsons 9/11?
Yeah. When I was in college I drew a really crude picture of the Simpsons crying over the destruction of the world trade center and put it on Ebay and tried to sell it as an original Matt Groening. He commented on it in a magazine in England, saying “Definitely wasn't me. For one thing, I know how to spell Simpsons correctly. And that stuff in the description about the smudges on the drawing being caused by my tears didn’t happen.”

Amazing! Can I still contribute to Bartkira? How can others contribute to it?
Yeah, I asked if you wanted to contribute when I started. But you said, “I want $100 a page, American.”

I know! I still do!
All the slots are filled up, but if you want to get involved email with a link to your portfolio, and I'll consider you in case anyone drops out. You can still go ahead and draw fanart or pages from the Akira Club book, though.

Where can I see the so far completed pages?
Have a look on the Bartkira tumblr tag. there's a couple of unofficial websites that are dedicated to collating all the finished work for the project so far, but I have not checked them out. Right now, the only official copy of Bartkira is on my hard drive.

Can you send it to me?
Sure. I want $100 a page, American.

@NicholasGazin

More comics stuff:

Weirdo Club

Retarder

Nick Gazin's Comic Book Love-In #87

Photos by Clare O'Kane

I saw Insane Clown Posse perform at the Oakland Metro Opera House recently and believe it or not, I had a good fucking time. It was nice to be around people going crazy and having fun without preening or being concerned with worrying about whether they were having the right kind of fun or if they were being judged. Everyone was getting wasted, dancing, and socializing. It was a refreshing change compared to the shows I usually go to, where apathetic people trying their best to avoid talking to one another. 

Holy shit, I thought to myself, maybe I can be a Juggalo. Then Violent J announced to his minions, “Last night there was way more titties in the crowd. You ladies got to step it up. Show some titties.” Well, let me think this over some more.

But my flirtation with the thought of becoming a Juggalo, however brief, got me thinking—were there "ordinary" people like me who had taken the leap and gone all the way down with the clown? Surely not all Juggalos fit the mean-spirited stereotype of rednecks who huff glue in between shifts at shitty convenience marts and cut loose by flashing their saggy, pierced bodies at strangers for bottles of Faygo. There are likely millions of Juggalos, after all—some of them must be prosperous, white-collar types who've never stepped into a trailer park in their lives. Where were those Juggalos?

As I surveyed the sea of tattoos, clown makeup, and baggy jeans, as if on cue, I caught the eye of a tall African-American gentleman wearing a V-neck shirt and skinny jeans who was clearly digging the concert. I had to talk to him, and ask him what he was doing there—maybe he could explain Juggalo-dom to me. 

His name is Jamal and he's a self-proclaimed "black hipster Juggalo." He agreed to let me interview him, despite the potential embarrassment associated with letting the world know that he attends events where people spray soda on each other for fun.

@JustAboutGlad

For more on Juggalos:

We Interviewed Insane Clown Posse

In the Land of the Juggalos

Meet the Girls Who Are Terrorizing Juggalos with Their Perfect Asses

I'm in an open relationship. In plain English, this means the person spooning me to sleep at night is not always my loving boyfriend of four years. Which is cool, because sometimes I'll get a text message saying, "Going home with X, love you," so we're both on the same page. It began when we were making it work long distance, and started mainly because it seemed to make more sense than cheating on each other and pretending that lying was a nice thing to do.

However, it's turned out to be super fun and brought us closer together in ways I wouldn't have expected. I now also feel like some kind of next-level sex genius because we've both learned, through trial and error, exactly what we want from each other—both in fun sex ways and in the more boring intimacy-and-trust ways. Sometimes I even use words and phrases like "partner" and "make love" now. Admitting it makes me feel like a pan-flute hippie nightmare, but who the fuck are you, Rutger Hauer?

Now, I know what you’re thinking (if you're one of my very good friends who I've told about this): "Don’t a bunch of London-based polyamorists hate you because of that thing you wrote that time?" Yes, they do. But my guy and I are doing a different thing to polyamory, anyway. Being full-on poly is about loving and dating numerous people and, honestly, who has the time to be in love with more than one person? This is more about being kind of slutty, as a couple—happily partnered sluts. There are lots of problems to the open relationship model, but only as many as with any other form of dating.

Of the issues we face as a pair, I’d say the most annoying one is knowing that, after divulging our relationship choices, it is the only thing that people want to talk about for the rest of the night. Just questions and stories and, "I had an ex who was in an open relationship for a bit, his name was Jason and it didn't work out, but here's an hour of stories about how that time in his life was for him emotionally..."

As much as I give zero fucks about the love-lives of complete strangers, here are things you should never say to people who are in an open relationship.

"DON'T YOU GET JEALOUS?"
The answer is: Yes, of course. Everything we have ever been taught about relationships is based on this body-ownership model, which is like, "With this ring, I thee neuter. Never look at another human again in a sexy way, ESPECIALLY not the really hot ones. Only me. Even though we will both get old and gross."

So it takes some getting used to not to be plunged into uncontrollable bouts of misery after hearing that your "partner" went to town on some other lady. But if you were asked to explain why your significant other was so important to you, would you say, “Mainly because we never touch other people”? Or would you list all the real, human qualities that attracted you to them in the first place? Jealousy happens in any relationship—monogamous, monogamish, or non-monog—and any type of romantic involvement could benefit from both parties trying to rise above possessiveness and insecurity. So one big WHATEVER to this. 

"BUT DOES THAT REALLY WORK?"
Imagine someone told you they were dating a guy in the traditional way and that they were very happy and his name was Trevor and she was super into him. And then, midway through her anecdote about a cute thing Trevor did at their second anniversary dinner, you're like, "Cool story, but are you sure you're not just lying to yourselves and each other about being happy? Sounds like maybe everything you care about isn't actually real."

See—when you put it like that, you're a dickhead.

"THAT'S, LIKE, OBVIOUSLY AMAZING FOR YOU GUYS, BUT I COULD NEVER DO THAT"
This one is the most annoying to me, because it's so aggressively passive-aggressive. I get that my relationship set up is confusing and maybe a bit scary (because it’s different and change is hard), but I’m not asking you to prise open your relationship. I’m not even asking you whether or not you would be interested in doing something like this. We’re doing it, sure, but this isn't some kind of large-scale conversion project.

We’re just… literally doing it. Getting all condescending about how it’s sooo cute that we’re doing something different, but reasserting that it’s definitely not something you would ever do yourself, is just you being a real square and quietly policing the status quo, whether you’re aware that’s what you’re doing or not. So stop it, please.

"... YOU WANNA FUCK?"
A sometimes-fun, sometimes-weird thing about being a semi-open perv is that some of your friends (and many strangers) see you as a safe space to work out their own sex stuff. It’s hard to fault people for this, and I feel like I can’t accurately judge how I feel about it because—surprise surprise—I tend to be a great deal more sympathetic to the pervsperimentation invites of people I find attractive.

On the one hand, there are the strangers who presume that a chick in an open relationship is just DTF whoever is around and get accordingly up in your business, and that’s gross. On the other, there are interesting, in-depth chats with other humans about their own preferences and secret interests. And then there are the “Hey, wouldn’t it be weird if we all just made out right now?"s. Those are fun.

–

In summary, anyone who’s been single at a family wedding, or gay in a conservative household, or going through a break-up among friends who all seem to be in the throes of coupled bliss, knows that being defined by relationship status or sexual preference is boring and reductive. At the very least, it makes for bad conversation. If you want to have a big chat about relationship politics some time, that’s great, but I don’t always want to talk about it. Take me out for a coffee or, better yet, anything alcoholic, and we’ll get to it, OK? Until then, let’s talk shit on that dude’s ridiculously intricate facial hair. It’ll be more fun for both of us.

Follow Monica on Twitter: @monicaheisey

More stuff about relationships:

Five Tips for Ruining an Interracial Relationship

Exploring Polyamory with a Bunch of Horny Nerds

How to Flip a Girl Over for Doggy Style

Last year VICE commissioned photographer and videographer Robert King to document the civil war that has been ravaging Syria for the past two years. Largely based on Aleppo, Robert's footage of the violent conflict that continues to unfold in the region is perhaps one of the most thorough and brutally honest documents of a war that is increasingly destabilizing the Middle East as it spills over into neighboring Turkey and Lebanon. This full-length version of Ground Zero: Syria combines all six parts of our series to offer a startling glimpse into a chaotic war with no clear end in sight.

Watch the seventh part of the Ground Zero - Syria series, "Snipers of Aleppo."

If you read that and thought, Why yes, I do want to perform in porn, this is for you. If not, please feel free to read along for potential entertainment value. Or, put the computer down, and go do whatever it is that people do on Fridays.

For those of you still interested, the first step to performing is deciding what kind of porn you want to do. See, porn isn't just people with big boobs and giant schlongs in silly setups involving offices and pizza deliverymen. It also isn't just people who are accepting of all body types/sexual orientations and strive to be as ethical as possible. Nor is it all high-gloss features, intense BDSM scenes, or content made by supposed amateurs. Before I started working in hardcore porn, I thought it was all like John Stagliano’s The Fashionistas. Stagliano shoots a very different sort of product than Digital Playground does, and while my decision to sign with DP worked out very well for me, I did spend the first few movies confused by the differences. If there is an idea in your head of the kind of porn you want to do, examine it and figure out specifically what excites or inspires you. Use it to get a more clear idea of your motivations and the level of involvement you want to have in the adult industry.

Once you’ve narrowed down what kind of scenes you want to do and what kind of performer you want to be, I recommend taking a minute to rethink the decision of actually doing it. Especially if you're just looking to live out one specific fantasy, make quick cash, or have a few months of adventure, consider whether the porn industry is the right choice for you. Unless the whole of civilization as we know it is destroyed, any nude or sexually explicit images will remain available on the internet in some way forever. Decide whether the chance to have sex with that one particular performer or have that professionally videotaped gang bang is worth the potential that every single person you know now or ever will know in the future will see it. Your parents will find out. Your employers will find out. Your friends, acquaintances, and the people you have romantic relationships with will find out. I call this Murphy's Law of Scandalous Behavior. If you are unable to come to terms with this, you should probably refrain from engaging in sexual activities in public or on camera… including sending racy cell phone pictures (even via Snapchat.)

If your goal is a full-on career that you envision as peaking with success on the level of Jesse Jane, Ron Jeremy, or Jenna Jameson, get ready for a reality check. Very few performers achieve that level of name recognition or long-term financial viability. Stardom is not guaranteed, even for performers who check all of the most widely marketable boxes. Hundreds of thousands of dollars will not rain down from the sky just because you show up in Southern California with a willingness to take your clothes off. Unproven rumors of a Teen Mom's paycheck aside, no performer gets paid six figures for a movie.

Remember that short of holding a gun to your head, nobody can force you to engage in a sex act that you do not want to perform, or with partners you do not want to perform those acts with. I would recommend avoiding people who threaten others with guns. The decisions about what sort of work you accept bookings for are yours and yours alone, regardless of what pressures agents, producers, or directors may try to use on you. If you only want to work with ten people or even one person, you have the right to set that boundary. You can set your rates at whatever amount you deem appropriate. You can perform exclusively in romantic girl-girl scenes (as long as you have the necessary genitals for that genre) and you can also refuse all scenes involving fewer than six penises. It is up to you to decide what you are comfortable with and how far out of your comfort zone you are willing to go in order to get more work. For the most part directors and producers want performers to be happy about the sex acts they are performing and the people they are working with. This usually has less to do with morals and more to do with the way that genuine enjoyment of a scene is believed to result in a better and therefore more profitable product.

That said, the higher your rates and the more boundaries you have, the less frequently you will work. Consider keeping your day job for a while. Put your checks in the bank instead of up your nose or in your closet. With a few months' worth of living expenses in savings or a secondary income, you will be less likely to be tempted into doing something that you may later regret purely for the money. Make sure you have up-to-date vaccinations for hepatitis and HPV. You should probably get a tetanus booster while you’re at the doctor’s office too. The adult industry does manage the risk of STI transmission through testing, barriers, or a combination of both, but there is still a risk. There is no such thing as completely safe sex. This risk is another thing you should come to terms with before entering the adult industry as a performer.

Even if porn is just an adventure for you, remember that it is a job. You will frequently be expected to show up on set appropriately groomed and showered before 9 AM with a valid STI test and at least one form of ID. A big-budget-feature shoot can last for multiple weeks, with three or four 24-hour days in a row. However little sleep you're able to get on one of these projects, the crew will usually have had far less. Being late or not showing up keeps everyone on set longer than necessary and can cost the company you're working for money in overtime for the crew and location.

Many scenes being shot now involve some kind of dialogue to set up why the sex is happening. You will need to be able to memorize and deliver at least a couple of lines of this dialogue, preferably in a somewhat convincing manner. You will probably need to learn how to walk into a shot and onto the bright green (or orange or pink or sometimes nonbright black) piece of tape that marks where you're supposed to end up without obviously looking at the floor. You may need to have sex for extended periods in positions or on surfaces that are uncomfortable, occasionally while wearing special-effects makeup, body paint, a wig, or a silly hat on your head. For female performers, the ability to confidently run over gravel in ill-fitting platform heels somehow turns into a job skill, as does pretending you aren't freezing in skimpy outfits or sweltering in five layers of wardrobe. If something goes awry with lights, the camera, or one of the performers a scene may take far longer to shoot than the runtime of the finished product. The same sex scene may be repeated for a still camera, softcore footage, or both.

Still want to do porn now that you know we aren't all millionaires and it takes actual work? I completely understand that. I find the physically demanding and constantly changing nature of the job extremely fun.

Most recognizable performers have done at least one interview where they've explained how they got into the porn industry or got their first booking, and many post the contact information for their agent in their Twitter bio. There are a handful of licensed adult agencies and most of them are listed on the LATATA website. The individual agency websites usually have a contact page for potential new talent. Additionally, companies like Burning Angel, Kink, and Pink & White (the makers of Crash Pad) have application pages for people specifically interested in performing for their sites. Some of the homosexual male-oriented companies like Titan Men and Channel 1 Releasing have these pages as well.

If you're reading this, I feel like it's safe to assume you have internet access. Use it to do some research. If you can’t figure out the basics from here, you’ll probably be the annoying one who can't show up on time with the proper documentation, is incapable of remembering lines, and somehow manages to lose half of their wardrobe during lunch break. Personally, I have no interest in metaphorically holding the hand of someone who is likely to make everyone else’s job harder than it needs to be. Unless that person is Scarlett Johansson. I would put up with just about any amount of bullshit from Scarlett Johansson. So: take everything you've learned, evaluate it, and then go and have fun. Or don't have fun. I'm sure there's at least a small market for that as well.

@Stoya

Previously - Stoya on Peeking Behind the Porn Curtain

Photo via Flickr user Todd Huffman

A couple months ago, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg expressed an unpopular view while hosting his regular Friday-morning radio program. “You wait, in five years, the technology is getting better, they’ll be cameras everyplace… whether you like it or not,” he said while discussing surveillance drones. “We're going to have more visibility and less privacy. I don't see how you stop that. And it's not a question of whether I think it's good or bad.”

Elsewhere, Bloomberg’s made it clear that he thinks the expansion of the surveillance state is a very good thing, and that as cops and spy agencies acquire more and more power to watch us, “our laws and our interpretation of the Constitution… have to change.” You can disagree with Bloomberg’s preference for nanny-state policies that limit personal freedoms in favor of what he thinks is the public good, but on the subject of privacy, it’s hard to argue he’s 100 percent wrong. The idea that there’s a private sphere and a public one and that the government rarely intrudes on the former is hopelessly outdated—the question we should be asking ourselves isn’t how do we stop surveillance, it’s how do we live with it.

That’s obvious from recent revelations that have emerged in the past two days. First, on Wednesday night the Guardian reported that the shadowy National Security Agency has unfettered access to Americans’ phone records—though they apparently don’t listen in on your calls, they can find out, with barely any effort, who you called, how long you talked for, and where you were when you made that call. That’s not a mistake or an illegal overreach on the NSA's part. This type of indiscriminate intelligence gathering has quietly been going on for years. “A massive surveillance net over all people,” is how Glenn Greenwald, the primary author of the Guardian article, described the government’s goal in an interview with CNN.

More of that net became visible less than 24 hours later, when the Washington Post revealed that the NSA and the FBI have been freely “extracting audio, video, photographs, emails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time” directly from the servers of major tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Skype, and AOL through a classified program called PRISM. In other words, your every twitch and keystroke online can be seen by the government. “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as your type,” according to the anonymous intelligence officer who leaked the existence of PRISM to the Post after “firsthand experience with these systems, and horror at their capabilities.”

Calling these methods Orwellian doesn’t even do them justice—in 1984, the tools Big Brother used for watching citizens mainly consisted of two-way televisions in people’s houses. Quaint, right?

If the government gathering all that data makes you mad as hell and you just can’t take it anymore, join the club: progressive organizations that have been railing against a national security state for years were circulating petitions and calling this a “scandal” even before news of PRISM broke; politicians from both sides of the aisle (mainly senators Rand Paul and Ron Wyden) have been speaking out against surveillance for some time. Justin Amash, a libertarian Republican Congressman from Michigan, is demanding that the FBI and NSA answer questions about their data-gathering processes, and the editorial board of the New York Times was enraged, writing, “The administration has now lost all credibility. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it.”

In National Review Online, libertarian technology and privacy expert Julian Sanchez noted that the stage for this large-scale data mining was set by the Supreme Court in the 70s when it ruled that “simply by making use of technologies and services that generate records about our activities held by businesses, we abandoned any expectation that the government would not scrutinize those records.” In the same piece, Sanchez predicts that the US will no longer tolerate such flagrantly unnecessary surveillance. “The government may find it has hit the limit of the American people’s credulity here,” he concludes.

I hope he’s right about that. But no matter how outraged the internet gets, no matter how many much invective is aimed at the NSA by intelligent, rightfully pissed-off op-ed writers, I can’t imagine the tumorous, security-obsessed bureaucracies that have been growing inside the government for years are going anywhere. Congress has voted multiple times, along bipartisan lines, to give the federal government broad powers of surveillance while also letting what exactly those powers were remain secret. I don’t think any elected official lost his or her seat over those votes. Blame Obama if you need a figurehead, but as Alex Pareene of Salon wrote yesterday, the Republicans have had chances to oppose him on government surveillance—they didn’t.

Even some pundits are OK with surveillance on a large level. Writing about the collection of phone records, Andrew Sullivan said, “This kind of technology is one of the US’ only competitive advantages against jihadists. Yes, its abuses could be terrible. But so could the consequences of its absence.” That’s a line that has been repeated many times, and will probably get tossed around for years to come: if the government can’t spy on everyone all the time, here comes another 9/11. Historically, it’s been incredibly difficult politically to decrease the scope and budget of the federal government, and even more so when the government can claim it’s acting in the interests of “national security.”

Say there’s no hope of voting the surveillance state out of office. That leaves, to quote Bloomberg, the question of how we live with it. There are some ways to attempt to hide your activities online, and you could always purchase private encryption software to protect your communications. For instance, Seecrypt is a cell phone app that encrypts your texts and calls; the startup Silent Circle is also working on technology that would allow you to hide information from prying eyes.

But the legal right to encrypt files is notoriously undefined. And given what we know about the NSA’s ability to ferret out data when it wants to, it’s hard to imagine that there’s a private service out there that could really protect you from the being monitored by the government if it truly wanted to find out what you are doing.      

Most people probably won’t go through the time-consuming steps of encrypting texts and masking their IP addresses. They’ve already accepted that the concept of privacy is dead. After all, when you broadcast your location and your opinions publicly on social media, who really cares if some top-secret operative in a cave in Utah can watch your ideas form as you type? “I have nothing to hide,” you can say. “My life’s already an open book because I’m basically a law-abiding, virtuous person. Only criminals fear surveillance.” It’s not a bad way to live, actually. Once you shrug off the techno-Panopticon we live inside, you’re free to do pretty much whatever you like—argue about Mad Men plot points on Twitter, sext, make a video of your dog adorably trying to eat a fly that racks up millions of YouTube views. If any scary cyberagents are watching you, you can rest comfortably in the knowledge that they’re bored.

If privacy isn’t something we value—or, more realistically, if we accept that it’s a thing of the past—how about at least trying for transparency? The government can watch us if it wishes, but currently we can’t watch the government. The activities of our intelligence agencies are so secret, even their budgets are hidden from public view, making it impossible for us to scrutinize their efficiency the same way other government departments are scrutinized. There’s an entire universe of classified documents, directives, and programs that we know nothing about. The only way these activities come into the light of day is when they’re leaked by officials who are (take your pick) either acting courageously as whistleblowers or have an axe to grind with their superiors. All of what we know about PRISM and the NSA’s access to our phone records comes from such officials—in all likelihood, those leakers are going to be investigated and, if they’re found out, prosecuted.

Bloomberg is right. We’ve gone too far down this road to smash the cameras and restore a world where privacy and personal secrets are possible. But there should be some way to find out how we’re being watched other than occasional illegal leaks. The government is gazing into us all the time. We need a way to gaze back.

@HCheadle      

More on the surveillance state:

Is Anyone Really Surprised the NSA Is Currently Spying on Millions of Americans?

How Are We Supposed to Know What the Government Does?

The Department of Justice Secretly Spied on the Associated Press

What is the sound of 1 million yuan flapping?

While most nouveau riche happily spend their new money on shit the old money has already deemed acceptable, China's spoiled young princelings aren't content with horses, sports cars, and insanely tacky watches alone. In tribute to the intrepid bootleggers who've propped up their country's market economy, China's rich have taken arguably the worst bird of all time, the pigeon, and slapped a Louis Vuitton logo on it. Racing pigeons are the new thoroughbreds here, with birds auctioned for hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece and races netting millions for the championship flock. Which sucks for the old timers, whose balcony-bred birds don't stand a chance against these million-dollar superflocks. And which just sucks in general because, well, pigeons. Fucking pigeons.

In April 2011, Bahraini human rights activist Maryam Al-Khawaja, then 23 years old, was in the United States when her phone rang. Back in Bahrain, a government crackdown on the massive prodemocracy uprising was proceeding at a ferocious pace. On the line was Nabeel Rajab, the president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights. “Maryam,” he said. “I need you to write this down, it’s very important.” Maryam grabbed a pen and paper while Rajab launched into a graphic description of a man who had just been arrested and tortured by the county’s security forces. His jawbone was broken and his face so disfigured that his friends were unable to recognize him. Maryam wrote down every detail.

“Oh,” Rajab said at the end of the call, “And write that his name is Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja.” The tortured man was Maryam’s father.

Maryam’s family had staked everything on the struggle for democracy in Bahrain for as long as she could remember. She had learned to be tough in moments like this one.

She turned to her laptop, opened her email, and wrote an urgent news release about her father’s torture as if he were any other political prisoner. “As a human rights defender, we depersonalize the cases,” she said.

Several hours later, a wave of guilt came over her, a feeling that she had not done enough for her father, or for the human rights cause. She wept  and went into what she remembers as a trance, for two hours, before snapping back into Human Rights Defender mode and going back to work.

Even in the larger sweep of the Arab revolutions that began in 2011, the story of Bahrain, a small island kingdom in the Persian Gulf, is one of the hardest to stomach. After the uprising there in April 2011, the Obama administration issued mild criticisms of the monarchy, but in the end stood by the government in spite of the government’s violent crackdown. America’s hesitation to pressure the regime stemmed from two geostrategic factors: a need for a stable base for the massive US Fifth Fleet, which is docked in Bahrain, and the close strategic ties with Saudi Arabia.

The uprising in Bahrain began as a peaceful revolt against the Khalifa family monarchy (who have ruled since 1783), with as many as 300,000 people out of a population of just 1.3 million joining the largest marches. Within a month, the government, with the help of Saudi troops, moved to crush the uprising in a clampdown characterized by the one-two punch of stamping out public demonstrations and widespread and systematic detainment and torture of antimonarchy activists.

Maryam is the scion of one of Bahrain’s preeminent dissident families. Her father has been an outspoken prodemocracy activist since the 1970s. Her sister Zainab is famous for an iconic photo of her standing in front of a line of police cars. Zainab is also currently in prison, and in late March she announced a hunger strike in a letter quoting Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy. She called off the hunger strike, however, after learning that her father was striking in solidarity with her. After his arrest and beating in April, he was sentenced to life in prison.

I met Maryam in May in a café on the ground floor of a hip Manhattan hotel with fake graffiti on the walls and indie rock on the overhead speakers. Maryam, dressed in a brown suit and black head scarf, sat with straight posture while she explained to me how, when she has to write news releases about her imprisoned father and sister, she compartmentalizes her emotions.

“I always remind myself how important it is to get the news out there, to make sure people are aware of it,” she said in between sips of black tea. “At the end of the day whether I cry about it or not isn’t going to make a difference.”

Maryam is Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja’s youngest daughter. She was born in Syria in 1987 and grew up in Denmark, where her family received political asylum. After her father had participated in student activism in London in the late 1970s, the monarchy refused to renew Abdulhadi’s passport and asked him to return to the country. Fellow students who returned were detained and tortured, so he chose a life of exile.

During his years in Denmark, Abdulhadi worked with a network of Bahraini exiles demanding human rights in their home country. The family was allowed to return to Bahrain in 2001 following a period of political openness at the beginning of the reign of Emir Hamad, the crown prince of the Khalifa family dynasty who succeeded his father in 1999.

Back in his home country, Al-Khawaja resumed his fight for human rights and for the prodemocracy protest movement, but the brief window of glasnost was closing. In 2005, after the security forces broke up a labor protest, Abdulhadi returned home from the hospital with deep red marks on his back, the product of a brutal beating meted out by police. By then, Hamad had declared himself not simply emir, but king.

In high school, Maryam joined numerous protests, but grew disillusioned by the time she reached college. “I used to continuously ask my dad why he was doing what he was doing,” she recalled. “What was the point? They would call for a protest and only 20 people would show up and they’d get beaten and no one would talk about it.”

At university, she avoided politics. She worked and studied, participating in campus clubs, bowling and playing on the women’s basketball team. “My main concern was which restaurant was I going to go to with my friends,” she remembered.

In the fall of 2009 she began a Fulbright scholarship in the US that included a semester at Brown. She returned to Bahrain in the spring and began applying to public-relations jobs, but she received only one interview. Her interviewer looked at her CV and asked, “You’re Maryam Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja? Isn’t your father in and out of prison? I hope you’re not expecting too many callbacks.”

Unable to find work due to the stigma of her family’s activism, she joined the family business and began volunteering, and later worked full-time for the Bahrain Center for Human Rights documenting abuses and writing reports. Shortly after she began work, the regime launched a new wave of political repression, arresting some 500 people between August and December of 2010.

In September, she received word that her name was coming up during interrogations. The authorities were asking detainees about her work with the center. Concerned that a warrant would soon be issued for her arrest, she left the country.

In February, after Egyptians and Tunisians managed to topple their dictators through popular protests, Bahraini activists readied for their own uprising.

Maryam called her father in early February to say she was planning to come home before the protest planned for February 14. Even after Tunisia and Egypt, Abdulhadi was pessimistic about the prospects for an uprising in Bahrain. “You know, you might come here and only five people go out,” he said. “That’s fine,” she said. “I just want to make sure I’m there if that does happen.” They agreed she would come home for two weeks, and leave again if nothing of consequence took place.

The protests began at dawn. Maryam drove to the village of Deraz with a group of foreign journalists. Almost as soon as the demonstrators took to the streets, riot police began firing at the crowds with tear gas and birdshot. She was shocked: it was the first time she had seen the police react with such violence in plain view of the international press.

In the evening, Maryam drove to the Salmaniya Medical Complex, where she moved through the corridors, taking notes and photos of wounded demonstrators. A crowd had gathered at the doors of the intensive care unit. She elbowed her way through the crowd and spoke to a doctor who recognized her family’s name and admitted her to the room.

Inside the ICU, doctors were attempting revive a 21-year-old welder named Ali Mushaima. He had been shot at close range with birdshot, leaving a pattern of pockmarks on his back. Maryam stood over him and photographed his limp body.

The doctors realized their attempts at resuscitation were helpless. One stepped out of the ICU and announced that Mushaima had died. He was the first martyr of the uprising.

“And that’s when the chants changed,” Maryam said. “They changed from ‘We demand a constitutional monarchy, we demand a constitution, we demand this and that,’ into Ash-shab yureed isqat an-nizam!,’” The people demand the fall of the regime.

By seven the next morning, thousands of people massed at the gates of the hospital, prepared to carry Mushaima’s body to the cemetery. Riot police in white cars approached on the road leading to the medical complex. Facing them, Maryam’s father was at the front of the procession. Maryam and Zaynab were at the gates of the hospital. Before the march could even begin, the riot police opened fire with teargas and shotguns. Maryam grabbed her sister by the arm and hurried her inside.

Later that day, the mourners managed to reach Jidhafs cemetery, where they buried Mushaima. From there they marched the 15 minutes to Pearl Square in Manama, where they set up a protest camp, launching a revolution in earnest.

In early March, with the uprising at its peak, Maryam traveled to Geneva to testify about the government’s rights abuses. She didn’t want to leave Bahrain, but her father convinced her it was important for the world to know what was happening in their country.

She had planned on a two-week trip, but on March 14, a thousand Saudi troops in armored vehicles crossed into the country to provide reinforcement for the monarchy, and the next day, the crackdown began. On March 16, tanks rolled into Pearl Square, expelling the protest camp. Two days later the government demolished the iconic pearl statue at the center of the roundabout. Maryam knew she could not risk returning home.

***

A year after Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja’s imprisonment, he went on hunger strike for 110 days. The next time Maryam saw him was in January 2013, when she returned to Bahrain for the first time since the uprising. International pressure ensured her entry and kept her out of police custody.

She was apprehensive about visiting her father, concerned that the torture had broken him, that he would be a different person. She was permitted to visit her him twice, 20 minutes each time, in a small cabin in the prison complex. He sat on one side of a table, she on the other, while a guard stood watch in the corner. He was thinner from the hunger strike. His face was a different shape; his jaw moved in a peculiar way, but he was still the same man.

“They had been able to break his body physically but they hadn’t been able to break his spirit at all,” she said. “That gave me a new push of energy to see that despite everything he had been through, they hadn’t been able to get to him.”

The crackdown ended the initial uprising, but it also hardened the determination of thousands of Bahrainis who demanded their civil rights. In April 2013, tens of thousands of protesters blocked a highway ahead of the Formula 1 Grand Prix in Bahrain. A handful of villages hold demonstrations against the government every single day.

Throughout her visit to Bahrain in January, Maryam kept hearing people say the word sumoud, meaning "steadfastness," "perseverance." Long used by Palestinians, and by Arab democracy movements, it is a word that marks long struggle. “You say it as hello. You say it as goodbye. You say it as ‘How are you.’” To Maryam, it had become the most commonly spoken word in Bahrain.

On Friday, May 31, Turkish riot police fired tear gas and pepper spray into a peaceful protest held to save Gezi Park, one of the last green areas in central Istanbul. This set off the biggest civil uprising in the history of the Turkish Republic, calling for Prime Minister Erdogan’s resignation. The unrest has spread like wildfire to more than 60 cities where protests are still ongoing. We landed in Istanbul the day it all kicked off.

Read more about the uprising in Istanbul:

Occupiers Faced Down Cops in Istanbul's Taksim Square

Turkey Is Waging an Invisible War Against Its Dissidents

Turkey's Weekend of Street War, Jubilation, and Bulldozer Joyrides

I’ve gotten a lot of complaints in the last few weeks from my loyal readers. Some of you out there seem to think that I’ve been remiss in my duties as the foremost expert on racism. That’s totally fine. I accept your judgment.  I love all of you equally. I even love those of you who say, “Dave Schilling is a total piece of shit with no brain cells to his name” or “I bet Dave Schilling has a really small dick.” I honestly love you folks, too.

[AUTHOR’S NOTE: My penis is the normal size, OK?]

The complaint I’ve gotten most in my time writing this column is that I never highlight instances of minorities being racist toward white people, a.k.a. “reverse racism.” Somehow, I’m a bigot for “ignoring” all the multitude of stories in the world about roving gangs of black teenagers menacing old grannies in the suburbs, or all the black police officers beating up defenseless white guys in tank tops. Please feel free to send these mythical unicorn stories to me on Twitter. I look forward to the motherload of responses I’m sure to get.

In the meantime, I have decided to answer your prayers and dedicate this week’s column to the men and women single-handedly keeping the ridiculous notion of reverse racism alive. I will be ranking news stories on a scale from 1 to REVERSE RACIST, with 1 being the least reverse racist and REVERSE RACIST being the most reverse racist.

-I understand grief. I’ve had loved ones died. I’ve had my heart broken. I saw After Earth. Under no circumstances would I get violent, though. To be honest, I considered karate chopping the usher after I got out of After Earth, but I realized no one made me buy a ticket. I perpetrated that on myself.

I feel terrible for the mother of a girl who was brutally shot at a graduation party in Providence, Rhode Island. Violence, especially violence perpetrated against a child, is abhorrent. The response to that grief shouldn’t be to hurl rocks at a reporter, encourage your dogs to bite said reporter, or brandish a baseball bat in her general direction. The last thing you should do is call that reporter a “white bitch” as you chase her off your property, especially if she was just there to inform you that your child’s attacker had been found.

Yes, the local news media are tragedy-mongers and feed off of personal misery, but you just dropped an even juicier story right in their laps. “Crazy, fat, black racist throws rocks at cute white lady! News at 11!” Admit it, you’d watch that. 8

Photo by Flickr User MegRobertsonNY

-Folks, if you haven’t noticed yet, MSNBC shit-disturber Martin Bashir is of Indian decent. I’m sure you haven’t noticed, because you are upstanding, color-blind individuals. You don’t even see race! Good for you! Anyway, Martin, despite seemingly being an enlightened ethnic minority, felt that the current probe into the IRS scandal was not just a politically motivated attack on President Obama. He thinks that this whole thing is a case of dog-whistle racism.

On the Wednesday edition of his show, Bashir said the following:

"This afternoon, we welcome the latest phrase in the lexicon of Republican attacks on the president: IRS." Three letters that sound so innocent, but we know what you mean." 

Actually, we don’t know what you mean. Are you seriously saying that a scandal that involves a government agency specifically targeting political enemies of the Democratic Party is actually about… race baiting? When someone like Martin Bashir makes a ridiculous statement like this, he invites conservatives everywhere to dismiss legitimate accusations of racism toward Barack Obama as “hysteria” or playing the "race card.” Martin Bashir, you are actually playing the race card. It's perfectly acceptable to play the race card during a game of "Rock, Paper, Scissors, Race Card" but not here. Not now. Also, the race card beats everything except scissors. 6

-Someone not named Ann Coulter receives this week’s Ann Coulter Award for Excellence in Racism for a lifetime of insane ramblings that prove that the old adage “even black people can be racist” is absolutely true. Bishop E. W. Jackson, candidate for lieutenant governor of Virginia, has amassed a truly magnificent collection of mind-bogglingly inane campaign positions. He has claimed that President Obama has a “Muslim perspective” (which shouldn’t be an insult, but you know he meant it as such), referred to gay rights as “icky,” and railed against that scourge of American life, yoga, stating that it leads directly to Satanic possession.

"The purpose of such meditation is to empty oneself. [Satan] is happy to invade the empty vacuum of your soul and possess it. Beware of systems of spirituality which tell you to empty yourself. You will end up filled with something you probably do not want."

I can’t stand most yoga enthusiasts or people who wear stretchy pants to the grocery store, so I’m glad I finally have a good reason, but hating yoga isn’t racist or reverse racist. It’s just weird. What is reverse racist is E. W. Jackson trying his damnedest to compare Planned Parenthood to the KKK.

You know how Planned Parenthood has an explicit hatred of minorities, right? Planned Parenthood isn’t an organization that offers women assistance with their reproductive choices. They just plain hate “colored folk” and are engaged in a terrorist campaign against them. Yeah… OK. Next thing you’ll tell me is that Hugh Jackman isn’t gay. You not only insult the people who work hard for a cause they happen to believe in, you also diminish the very real threat of the KKK's hatred. You are actively working against the cause of persecuted peoples everywhere. Nice going, dude. REVERSE RACIST

@YesYoureRacist’s 10 Most Racist Retweets of the Week [all grammar sic'd]:

10. @_phildone: “im not racist but i dont like pakis”

9. @TheAsianCreeper: “I'm not racist but that border jumping monkey called me a ch*nk and is damn lucky I didn't kill him”

8. @EimearDavis1: “im scared of black people#NotJokin#NotRacist”

7. @duramaxpride: “I'm not racist but black people are so f*cking loud.”

6. @GavinLancello: “I am not racist but i just never met a black person i like”

5. @morgynfildes: “I'm not racist, but f*ck Arabs! There so damn mean -.-”

4. @The_Bieb_: “I'm not racist but most black people are ignorant as hell.”

3. @chelseleann: “I'm not racist but I'm pretty sure god said keep colors apart and stay with your own kind”

2. @JayOneBang: “Im not racist.... BUT..... sometimes you just cant trust black people”

1. @rangerwomen: OBAMA SEQUESTRATION NO FIREWORKS CANCEL U SHOULD CANCEL VACAIONS AND CONCERT STOP LIVIN NI**ER RICH ON OUR DIME

Last Week in Racism: Sending Racist Emails About Michelle Obama is Not a Good Idea

@dave_schilling