Photos by Dave Schilling and Grant Pardee

This week, I went to see a free Backstreet Boys concert of at an outdoor mall in Los Angeles called the Grove. That means I saw five 45-year-old men make hundreds of women cry outside of a bookstore. 

I can tell you that the event was more enjoyable than I anticipated. Seeing the Backstreet Boys at the Grove is a sublime experience. It was reminiscent of what is must have been like to see the Beatles' rooftop concert in 1969, except surrounded by chain restaurants. Where else could you see an actual cheesecake factory singing directly in front of the Cheesecake Factory?

I arrived two hours prior to showtime to discover a long line snaking around the block. We were told later that the audience count was 10,000 people, although by my count it was closer to the mid-9,000s. The demographic of the crowd was surprising. A Backstreet Boys concert in 2013 is sort of like a comic book convention: there are long lines of grown adults waiting for something that you'd think would be exclusively for children.

These women were the front of the line. They'd been waiting there for 11 hours. You'd think Brian Littrell's wife would be able to get backstage passes or something. 

This is a picture of a diehard fan who was so diehard she brought a copy of a Backstreet Boys compact disc with her to the show, perhaps because she doesn't understand how live performance works. Or maybe she just wanted to be prepared in case there was an unprecedented audio disaster and the show couldn't go on without a copy of the group's Greatest Hits: Chapter One and then they would pop that bad boy in and all just enjoy the songs from the CD.

This picture is just for the evidence of how many people were accompanied by a Hot-N-Ready pizza box from the Little Caesar's across the street. If there's one thing Americans love more than idol worship, it's farting.

Unfortunately for all of the patient people waiting in line, the event staff at the Grove were determined to prove how unsuitable an outdoor shopping center is for large-scale live performance. Judging by the amount of space allotted for the crowd, the venue must have anticipated a crowd closer to 100 people than 10,000.

The staff attempted to keep fans off of the sidewalks by erecting large black curtains to prevent enjoyment from those vantage points. Well, this may not be a free country anymore, but this was supposed to be a free Backstreet Boys concert. "Mister Fire Marshall, sir," the crowd's actions seemed to say, "tear down this curtain."

Eventually, the power of the people won and we watched the concert from the sidewalk in front of the movie theater as God intended: through the lenses of our iPhones. 

Settling in, I asked the people around me to tell me about their favorite Backstreet Boy so I could better understand who these individuals were. There's Brian, the talented one; Kevin, the old one; Nick, the one with the younger brother; AJ, the badboy; and Howie, the one nobody seemed to mention without prodding. Nobody likes Howie. Why did they prefer the Backstreet Boys over N'Sync? The consensus seemed to be that, besides Justin Timberlake, everybody else in N'Sync was boring or untalented compared to the Backstreet Boys. Nobody liked my idea for a Howie/Chris Kirkpatrick power duo.

The show began with a screening of the group's latest music video, in which the 9/11 attacks make a surprising cameo. The song is called "In a World Like This" and alternates between the group singing on a California hillside and random couples sadly embracing in the wake of tragedy. The subtext: "See what happens when you keep the Backstreet Boys out?"

Next was the opening act, a 19-year-old girl who we were told has many subscribers on YouTube. She lip-synched in an outfit that reminded me of Ace Ventura in the mental hospital. She seemed like a nice girl who probably has a good perspective on herself and the world. Haha, just kidding, she's a 19-year-old YouTube star opening for the Backstreet Boys, she is probably the meanest person on earth.

At the conclusion of her performance, the host came out and reminded us that she got her start on YouTube.com. The host literally said the following words: "So, all of you dads out there, that's why you should sign your daughters up for a YouTube account." This is the culture we built for ourselves.

Finally, it was time for the main event. The host made a big deal of it being the five original members. Of course, if it were the true original lineup, they would have also had Lou Pearlman, but he is in jail. So just the original performers had to suffice. The Backstreet Boys took the stage and the crowd erupted. They began with a song nobody knew, but they delivered it strongly.

They sang acapella, which I was told they do frequently to prove they have actual vocal talent and aren't lip-synching. They harmonized pleasantly and danced skillfully. They spoke a lot about the new album and reminded us of their other dates in Southern California where you could pay to see them. They sang eight songs and only two of them were "the hits." They exited the stage without an encore. Yet nobody left disappointed.

Walking out, I spotted badboy AJ hiding in a corner smoking a cigarette. I tried to approach him to get an autograph or picture for my friend, but he was already booking it back inside with his bodyguard. So I jogged after him. I was able to get his attention on the other end of the hall but ended up stonewalled by their security. I came away empty-handed, but for a moment I experienced that feeling of being 12 again. I guess you could say, I gave all I had to give. See, I had wanted it that way, but he was larger than life, and now I know the meaning of being lonely. Maybe someday they'll quit playing games with my heart long enough to see the shape of my heart, and that shape is a square Hot-N-Ready pizza box.

@grantpa

More on washed-up music acts:

It's 2013, Who Still Listens to Limp Bizkit?

A Self-Proclaimed "Black, Hipster Juggalo" Explains Himself

Ace of Base's Secret Nazi Past

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.

 -I want all Asian girls to know I love them. I am a huge fan of your culture, your intense need to emotionally abuse your children in order to ensure their future success, and your food! To show you how much I care, I have decided to post this video that expresses all of my deep, complex, thoughtful emotions on your proud traditions:

Don’t you feel better about yourselves now?

Oh… wait. You don’t like this song? You don’t want someone to “tofu all over you”? What about the part that references your “slanted eyes”? Still bad? Huh…

What if I said this song was satirical? Would that help?

No?

OK, I guess this video is actually pretty RACIST

-Everyone always tells me, “Dave, NFL players are not racist. How could they be? They spend so much time hanging out with people of different ethnicities. By definition, they are totally accepting of all the colors of the rainbow.” It’s totally true that NFL players are saints who can do no wrong… unless they are drunk at a country music concert. In which case, they will want to “fight every ni**er” they see.

Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver Riley Cooper felt that insatiable urge to say the N-word at, of all places, a Kenny Chesney concert. The irony of his comment is that the security guard he'd just tried to assault was probably the only black person for 100 miles. 

Cooper apologized, which makes him a real-life “accidental racist,” I guess.

When a public figure is caught saying something racist, their first instinct is always to say they are “disgusted with themselves.” They’re all like, “I am ashamed!” Usually, I’m ashamed when I take the last slice of pizza without asking. At least I got a slice of delicious pizza out of the bargain. Not sure what Riley Cooper got by saying the N-word, other than a nice, fat suspension, and probably also a shit ton of pranks at his expense after practice. Riley, promise me you won’t ask your teammates why there are eyeholes cut in your nice, clean, white towel. Just accept it. RACIST

-Charles Rangel, congressman and person who likes to say crazy things, decided to go off on the Tea Party, which is sort of like complaining about how Eminem lyrics are ruining society. We get it. More troubling is his need to refer to them as “crackers.” A “cracker” is a bland, salted delivery device for cheese. A member of the Tea Party is surely salty. Some of them are quite bland. A delivery device for cheese? Surely you jest! 6

Photo by Flickr User GageSkidmore

-Crazy ratchet female and twerk-master, Ann Coulter receives this week’s Ann Coulter Award for Excellence in Racism for yet again making race relations in America all about her neverending grudge against anyone who dares say a nice thing about a Democrat. Coulter’s shrill, obnoxious chum Bill O’Reilly had the audacity to claim that Robert Kennedy did more work than anyone to advance the cause of civil rights in America.

Perhaps O’Reilly was being hyperbolic with his statement, but is that enough for Coulter to ignore the countless racist southern officials Kennedy prosecuted, his decision to enforce the federal order integrating the University of Mississippi, and his many speeches demanding equal opportunity for African-Americans? Coulter actually claimed that Kennedy “did nothing” to integrate the University of Mississippi, which is just a flat-out lie. She even cites the letter Kennedy sent to school enforcing the court ruling. Of course, Kennedy is a huge pussy for not integrating until the court ruled, even though that’s how our government works. Ann Coulter loves claiming that anyone expressing the opinion that racism still exists is tearing the country apart, while also simultaneously telling us all how 50 percent of the electorate is evil and stupid. Let's not forget about how patronizing it is for a bunch of white people to fight over which group of white people was the first to acknowledge the basic humanity of black people.

Oh, and I also literally peed my pants when Coulter said the following: “Americans don't read anymore. You watch cable news and fill your heads with nonsense history and false facts.” God, the irony is burning my eyeballs 8

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

10. @BKSEIS: I'm not racist but the black ghetto people on Maury make me want too shoot myself

9. @ashmillihar: Not racist but these be*ners are making it impossible not to be

8. @OhDearNikki: I swear im not racist but Asian people cannot fucking drive! Come on man we all know

7. @loganstax: I'm no racist but minorities have way too much pride, our president is black... you're not the underdogs anymore quit acting like it

6. @kanyebeeson: ni**er literally means ignorant. In the dictionary

5. @nuuuut: I'm not a racist but hate being surrounded by Korean people

4. @HarderByNature: I'm not a racist...but the moment I found out she was down for the brown, she ceased to be hot.

3. @AmberKaplan: I'm not racist but my mom is so I'm entitled to be racist when it comes to being attracted to guys

2. @SouthsPrincess: I'm not racist but me and all my friends and family were raised not to mix races.

1. @ChunkTC: I'm not a racist but the media makes you think racism is still a big issue. They want you to believe it is.

Last Week in Racism: Ann Coulter Lists Her Favorite "Black Heroes"

@dave_schilling

Screenshot of Tommy Swerdlow from The House Itself trailer.

You’ve probably never heard of the screenwriter Tommy Swerdlow, but if your childhood overlapped with the 1990s, he was likely a part of it. With his writing partner Michael Goldberg, he penned classics Cool Runnings, Little Giants, and Snow Dogs. This week on Reddit, he announced that he did all of that while high on heroin.

Tommy’s gotten sober since he made the world fall in love with Jamaican bobsledders and chubby football-playing kids; his addiction forced him to have open-heart surgery in 2007. Since then, he’s recorded an album, Twenty Years, with his ex-wife and their band Sad Girl and shot a short film inspired by his drug years. He’s now adapting it into a feature called The House Itself with some of his friends from AA. For the next 13 days, they’re raising money on Indiegogo. I called Tommy to talk about their movie, how heroin helped him lead a productive work life, and why he stopped writing children's movies.

The trailer for The House Itself.

VICE: How did you become a screenwriter?
Tommy Swerdlow: I came to LA on my 21st birthday [in 1983]. I was an actor in New York, and I had always been a poet. I got a bunch of leads in movies that fell through. Finally, I just got a little fed up with it. I wrote this two-character play called the Grabelski Concertos, which was the first full-length thing I'd ever written. My actor friend Freddy brought in his friend to direct it, Michael Goldberg, who ended up being my writing partner on all those movies. Michael was not a writer, but we started writing together, and then we wrote a movie about my family. An agent named Jay Maloney, who ended up committing suicide, read the story, loved it, and got us out there.

Were you already using?
I quit acting in about '88 or '89. I was strung out from '89 on. I went to rehab and came out in '90. I was living in a weekly room. I was using as the career took off. And it was unusual. It made no sense, of course. My career allowed my drug use to go on and gave me the illusion that I could function that way.

How did you end up writing family movies? It doesn’t seem like you set out to do that.
We went in to meet on Cool Runnings. The guy who now does the Despicable Me movies, Chris Meledandri, was Cool Runnings executive producer Dawn Steel's right man at that point, and he worked the script with us. I started off writing Sanka having sex with snow bunnies and smoking pot, you know what I mean? Fucking the Scandinavian ski team and smoking spliffs. And Chris would just move it a little bit here, a little bit here, and he slowly—without ever taking any of my passion away—just moved it into this family G-rated movie. And then because of Cool Runnings, we became known as guys who could deliver this family entertainment.

Did Michael Eisner or Steven Spielberg know you were an addict when they hired you?
Never. The only person who knew was my partner. Nobody was ever sanctioning it. Anyone who found out wanted me immediately to go get help.

How did you manage to use and stay productive?
The people I know who smoke pot have a lot harder time than I did. I had a partner who took on the responsibilities of being a social mouthpiece, and I was allowed to sit there with the blank page a few hours a day, and he would take them home and do the notes. I was free from adult responsibility of what it really means to be a screenwriter.

Did drugs destroy your love for screenwriting?
No. What happened was my partner got very sick. In 2000, he got cancer, and could no longer work. He didn't die, but he got very sick. And that was depressing. I started making music with my wife then.

So that’s why you weren’t working?
I did a bunch of TV pilots, but none of them made it. Michael and I tried to get back together and did a gig on that Nim's Island movie. They really didn't like our script, but they paid us. And I kept using. I made a record which I think is great with my band Sad Girl, but that was not paying me. I was doing the occasional TV work, making a little money here and there. Then in 2007 I got incredibly sick [from using].

I couldn't stop—I went to 25 rehab centers, and I was unwilling to go through the pain of withdrawal. I wasn't even that bad of a drug addict. I was a bad detoxer. I got so sick I had to have open-heart surgery. It was endocarditis, which is where a valve next to the heart valve is inflamed [and is indirectly caused by heroin use].

Many addicts return to using after hospitalization. How did you stay sober after surgery?
It was so traumatic that I had to get off. It was over. Fate had done for me what I couldn't do for myself. I started going to meetings. It was a level of consequences that were so severe that it finally got my attention.

What made you and your AA buddies decide to make the short film you’re now trying to turn into a feature film?
I had two friends in this Thursday night meeting that we have, Blake and my good friend TJ. I got this idea to write a short little movie. I just have this idea in my head that Blake would start off robbing someone going, "I'll do it, I'll do it.” It came out really well.

It’s a wonderful thing, because we have no romantic ideas about what that life is. The movie is about three guys doing their job from sunup to sundown. They have no money, and they can't get what they need, and they are willing to do whatever they can to get it. There will be no drugs in the movie. There won't be any needles. It’s all about longing and love and this place of desire and three little boys who can't grow up. It’s Waiting for Godot, except we try to go get Godot.

Has this experience helped you understand why you had turned to drugs?
In retrospect, I think all human beings long for some kind of structure in their lives. Drug addiction allowed me to be sneaky and have incredible structure. I have to wake up and do this. I have to get this. There is always a ticking clock. It’s always going through my system. It tells me what to do at all times. It’s a devil structure, but it’s still a structure, and I must have structure, so now I'm trying to structure myself by going to meetings and making movies. I am an unstructured creative sort of visceral person who must turn to the dark, if I can't structure myself to the light.

@mitchsunderland 

More about drug recovery:

The author gender-bending with her kitty Rosa.

Gender-bending fashion is hot. I embraced this attraction as a young girl who dressed as Peter Pan and Robin Hood instead of as Wendy or Maid Marian. Once, I refused to remove my Peter Pan costume when I was hanging out with my kitty Rosa. You may remember Rosa from my last column as the wild cat that fled our feeble human shelter and survived Hurricane Marilyn like a true jungle mammal. I picked Rosa out when I was three from the St. Thomas Humane Society. She was just a kitten but she hunted, prowled, and never stayed indoors. She was one bad bitch, a true wild island child. 

That’s why the island bush surrounding our house was Rosa’s home. On my left forearm is tattooed the Tennessee Williams quote A prayer for the wild of heart that are kept in cages. For Rosa, indoors was a cage. Despite repeated attempts to move her into our new house after the hurricane, she would always manage to slip out of our open Caribbean home, which was designed to allow for a breeze to enter and combat the equator heat. After too many “rescue” attempts to count, one time she ran away to the bush; we were never able to find her again. I was sad, but it was the life she wanted. 

Today I own an orange tabby named Mama Cat, a New Yorker teen mom. It’s very rare for orange tabbies to be female, and she too is a wild one—albeit a wild one grateful for her captivity in my Lower East Side studio apartment. (I think she was tired of eating rats and having sex with male cats and their barbed penises out in the street.) I love that damn cat, although she did send me to the hospital once.

The author in the hospital because of pussy poison.

Last Christmas, I returned early to the city for work, while my friends and loved ones were still out of town. I had gotten a cat sitter; my absence for the holiday was the first time Mama Cat had been alone since I got her—that pissed her off. Alone in my apartment, I was testing out my new sketch book my mother bought me for Christmas by drawing Mama Cat, when that fucking feline jumped up and bit me, injecting cat venom into my arm. I yelled at her, washed it off, put some Neosporin and a Band-Aid on it, and went to sleep. The next day my arm was so red and swollen it hurt to type. By bedtime, I couldn’t even hold up a toothbrush. I immediately had a Category 5 panic attack and went to the emergency room. I thought I was just being a crazy hypochondriac and they would give me a few antibiotics to pop and send me home. I was wrong.

I spent the next 36 hours in a hospital bed hooked up to an IV of antibiotics and received multiple shots for whatever possible pussy poison Mama Cat had punctured my skin with. I whined to the nurse that I had Klonopin in my purse and asked her to hand me one.

The nurse asked, “Why do you want a Klonopin? Are you feeling anxious?” Judgmental bitch, a few tattoos and everyone has a substance abuse problem, huh? Oh damnit, I guess I am in recovery. My apologies. Anyways, I said, “I’M ALL ALONE IN THE HOSPITAL, BECAUSE MY CAT BIT ME, AND NO ONE IS EVEN IN TOWN TO FEED HER. YES, I AM ANXIOUS!” I started crying and then they believed I was indeed a crazy cat lady and gave me my Klonopin. 

Portrait of Mama Cat as a New Yorker teen mom.

Mama Cat has not sent me or anyone else to the hospital since, and if she ever tries to pounce, I spray her with a water gun or yell threats to make kitty nuggets out of her. Some of you may agree with my dad’s belief that “maybe it’s time for a new cat.” But I love that wild fucker, and I am keeping her.

Some might say I should keep her in a cage, but I know what it’s like to be a wild child. I originally got the Tennessee Williams tattoo as a prayer for myself. As I become healthier and stronger, I see the tattoo as a prayer for others—from those living in refugee camps to those unable to safely express their sexuality. And of course, to all the pretty pussycats of the world curled up in a cage waiting for some nice human to come along and adopt them. 

@TheBowieCat

Previously -- Hurricanes and Projectile Vomiting Painkillers 

A circumcision ceremony via WikiCommons.

In 2006, Paul Tinari was granted $12,000 by the government of British Columbia to have foreskin restoration surgery. When he was eight years old and boarded at a church-run school in Montreal, Paul was forcefully held down on a desk and circumcised, because a priest had reason to believe Paul had—God forbid—masturbated. Paul is Métis, and his story is another seriously disturbing instance of church abuse in the era of residential schools. Paul claims the practice was routine and could have happened to thousands of young First Nations boys trapped in the system—though that is impossible to confirm, especially given the Canadian government’s lack of transparency regarding the residential schools issue. We talked to Paul over the phone about what he went through, why it may have occurred, and his outspoken opinions in support of the anti-circumcision movement.

VICE: Can you tell me what happened to you?
Paul: Sure. My mother was widowed very young, so she put me into this boarding school in Outremont in Montreal. It was run by the church. It was actually a convent, but the priests had access to it. Now it turns out, I read many years later, that one of the nuns made a formal complaint she was getting regularly raped by the priests. So when I heard that story, I decided to come forward with my story that I’d kept hidden for all these years. That was the impetus that got me to go public with my story.

Your circumcision took place in Montreal?
Yes. Essentially what happened was there was another boy there who didn’t like me at all so he decided to set me up. He told one of the priests he’d seen me masturbating. And this was a known evil, something you should never do. It wasn’t true, but he told the priest that.

You were only eight years old?
I was about eight, yes. I didn’t know anything about masturbating. I was totally innocent. Anyway, so late, late one night—we slept in a big dormitory with all the other boys—the priest came in and really roughly pulled me out of bed. He brought me down the stairs, he brought me down the hall, and he brought me to this room where there was this bearded guy. I didn’t know what was going on. It took me a long time to figure out what role these people played. It turns out that the guy with the beard who was wearing a beanie and a black suit was a mohel. A Jewish circumciser.

They pulled my pajamas down and then tried to pin me down to the desk, but of course it’s easier to do that to a baby than an eight year old. I fought back. I kicked one of the priests who was holding me down in the nose, and their response to that was to actually break my arm and break my nose. So I had a broken arm and a broken nose—which I still have to this day. He pinned me down, the guy put a clamp on my penis, and they performed the circumcision right there on the desk with no anaesthetic, no disinfectant, no nothing.

So as a result of this I had very serious infections for many, many weeks and months afterwards. Matter of fact, I had a chronic infection for the rest of my life until I had corrective surgery. He took so much skin off that I wasn’t able to have an erection without great pain.

Jesus.
Yeah. It was horrible. That’s how I went through my life until my 40s, when I had corrective surgery. I’m one of the few people who’s qualified to speak to what’s it like to be intact, then circumcised, then intact again. For any man who’s circumcised and says there’s no difference, he doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. Since I’ve had restoration surgery my sex life has improved 1,000 percent. There’s no comparison. It’s like going from black and white vision to color vision.

The Catholic Church—in Montreal in particular—has a history of withholding documents, pertaining to their role in the residential school system, from the Truth and Reconcilliation Commission. Do you think this kind of punishment was being done on a broader scale? You must not have been the only one.
I was told that if I told anybody or if I talked to any of those boys that I would go to hell, and in those days I believed that. But I do believe that several of the other boys were treated the same way even though we never discussed it among ourselves. We were in fear. I don’t know if you know what it’s like to live in total fear every day.

And the people who did this to you, do you think they believed in the religiosity of it? Did they think they were really doing God’s good work or was this based in something more sadistic?
What you have to do is go back to the Middle Ages and look at the witch burnings. It’s hard for us in our present, modern world to get into the mindset that existed at that time, but you have to realize that the witch burnings were not an act of hate. They were an act of love. The compassion for the person, because they considered the body the mortal flesh to be disposable and all that mattered was saving a person’s soul.

So if these guys thought they were doing right—the priest and the mohel—do you think they should be held criminally responsible?
Of course. Regardless of their religious beliefs. I was an underage minor, and my mother never gave consent, and I didn’t give consent. So today, we teach kids to say no to adults who are touching them inappropriately, right? Well, I said no, and no one listened.

Can you get into the industry of circumcision a bit?
If there was no profit to be made in circumcision it would have been abandoned long ago. But Dr. Kellogg [the man who invented Corn Flakes because he thought "bland foods" could "curb passions" and allegedly thought circumcision could "cure" masturbation] realized he was making a fortune circumcising children—the parents were paying him to circumcise their children to prevent masturbation. Basically, all the original doctors to perform circumcisions in the United States were trained by Dr. Kellogg. And you’ve got to realize he knew what he was doing. He was inducing sexual dysfunction because not only did he think that masturbation was evil but he also thought that sex itself was degrading. He advocated celibacy that sex was unhealthy as something evil, so he believed that rendering the penis dysfunctional was a good thing.

Do you have any idea if he was circumcised?
No idea. He probably circumcised himself. The guy was crazy enough to do that. So anyways, the industry grew up and discovered that foreskin is highly useful stuff. So there’s a multi-billion dollar industry driving continued circumcision.

What kind of products are we talking about? It’s blowing my mind that there’s a commercial market for foreskins.
Foreskins obtained from circumcisions are used by biochemical and anatomical researchers to study skin. It’s used to make skin for burn patients, for skin grafts. It’s used for anti-aging skin cream. It goes on and on. There’s one doctor in Vancouver who boasts about having performed over 35,000 circumcisions and he’s charging about $200-$400 at a time [it can be up to $1,000 in Ontario]. Do the math about how much he’s earned. He’s earned millions.

Follow Dave on Twitter: @ddner

Previously by Dave Dean -- The Canadian Government Is Withholding Documents Concerning the Torture of Children

The Mahal started with a roll of photos from summer 2012 in New York City. Between the outdoor drawing sessions and the air-conditioned cinemas, summertime is the most exciting time to mess around in NYC. In honor of this summer's encroaching end, I decided to share another summer roll. Thanks for checking out the photos. See you next week!

@RedAlurk

Previously -- We Spoke to Wilsonman About the Night NYPD Officers Attacked Him

Image courtesy of the author's father.

Amanda Bynes’s reign of Twitter terror ended two weeks ago when authorities placed her on a 5150 psych hold for setting a fire in the driveway of an old lady rocking a bowl cut. Doctors have allegedly diagnosed her with schizophrenia, which would explain her proclivity for twerking on gym machines, calling Degrassi star Aubrey Graham ugly, and flitting around New York in a menagerie of tragic wigs. But this hasn't stopped a faction of the internet from believing Amanda is actually a victim of monarch mind control, an Illuminati practice widely used by the Walt Disney Corporation and Teen Nick to monetize and sexualize young starlets.

Supposedly developed in its current form by the C.l.A. to subdue American citizens, monarch mind control is being used by the Hollywood industrial complex to micro-manage child stars. The monarch mind control victims are called kittens and the executives and managers that control them are known as handlers. Supposedly, the handlers take a precocious kitten, such as an All That era Amanda Bynes, and subject her to mental and sexual abuse until her personality fractures and separates like a horcrux, making her unquestioning and compliant. The handlers then conclude the abuse with a weird Adams Family Values summer camp punishment, where the kitten watches The Wizard of Oz over and over again till submitting to her handlers gives her true happiness. After she turns 18, the handlers repeat these steps to transform her from a manageable performer into a highly profitable object of fantasy.

Usually—and rather shockingly—this goes off without a hitch. But in some cases, the young performer can’t stand the confusing transition from tween star to men’s magazine cover girl and starts to malfunction like the robot she has essentially become. This, of course, resembles the 2007 meltdown of Britney Spears. 

Did Disney Channel mind control techniques turn Britney Spears into a bald, cockney maid?

Like Amanda, Britney shaved her head and dressed oddly. (Where Amanda rocked an Alvin Ailey shirt and blue wig to court, Britney decided shoes at gas stations were malarkey.) Britney was eventually placed on a 5150 hold in 2008 and has been under a conservatorship ever since, which isn't that different than having a handler. Amanda's mother hopes to place her daughter under a similar conservatorship. When these parallel lives are held against each other, monarch mind control seems legit. 

The problem is once you pick up the monarch mind control hammer, everything begins to look like a nail.

For instance, researching monarch mind control made me worry about Mariah Carey. I remembered Mariah's spectacular Glitter breakdown, where she pushed an ice cream cart around the TRL set, striped off her t-shirt, and repeated Carson Daly’s name like a sexy automaton. I easily traced Mariah's meltdown to Mimi's first attempt at emancipation—her divorce from “handler” Tommy Mottola. Mariah has been open about Tommy abusing her and controlling her career, but she didn't return to happiness till she was “safe” in the loving arms of her husband Nick Cannon, the chairman of Teen Nick.

"You're my therapy," Mariah said to Carson Daily.

But this theory falls apart when you realize almost all of Hollywood’s supposed kittens are female. For example, many conspiracy bloggers have accused Katy Perry, who hasn’t had a public meltdown, of being a kitten without questioning if the Illuminati practice was behind Justin Bieber’s summer of pissing in buckets and spitting on fans. 

But this isn't surprising. Conspiracy theorists rarely see that male celebrities suffer too. In the 2000s, beefcake R&B god D’Angelo had a public break from sanity, staggering around Richmond suburbs and asking cops for sex because of the sexual objectification stemming from the sexy video for “How Does It Feel.” Yet the conspiracy theorists never considered D’Angelo as a monarch mind control victim. His breakdown’s pubic account is taken at face value because he is a man, although Hollywood handlers sexually exploited D'Angelo as they mistreated Britney Spears and Amanda Bynes.

Monarch mind control theorists claim they want to expose an Illuminati dystopia of shadowy handlers, but they’re really claiming that every successful Hollywood starlet—regardless if she has or hasn't been placed under a 5150 hold—is managed by a powerful male handler. After all, what would be a more attractive theory to a bunch of male nerds sitting behind computers than the idea that all powerful women are actually passive, mind-controlled sexbots? 

There’s the real conspiracy. 

@The_Sample_Life

Previously -- I Catfished Hundreds of Boys to Understand the Male Sex

Bradley Manning (photo via) and Edward Snowden (photo via)

The US government's pursuit of those who break rank to expose its secrets has emerged as the dominant narrative of this decade's war for information. Bradley Manning recently learned of the consequences of leaking troves of sensitive documents. Edward Snowden, meanwhile, is still in Russia in a self-imposed exile (he supposedly left the Moscow airport he'd been holed up in for over a month last week, after being granted asylum in the country). With their cases dominating the headlines, I thought I'd speak to a trio of high-profile whistleblowers who know all about the repercussions of speaking truth to power.

DR MARK WHITACRE

Dr Mark Whitacre. (Photo by Jacob Willis of Bauman Photographers)

Mark Whitacre was on the fast-track to corporate stardom. At 32, he was fourth in line for the throne at a 30,000 employee-strong Fortune 500 company. There was a big problem, though. His company, ADM, was swindling billions annually in an international price-fixing scheme.

In the early 1990s, he became a whistleblower after his wife said that, if he didn’t tell the authorities, she would. He wore a wire to work every day for three years, documenting the fraud perpetrated at the company’s highest levels. But Whitacre was no saint; he would be thrown in jail after he lost his whistleblower immunity when it was revealed he had embezzled $9 million.

VICE: What led to your decision to become a whistleblower?
Dr Mark Whitacre: My wife began to notice changes in me. I became obsessed with the corporate jet and the money. She could tell something was weighing heavily on me. This one time, she had me really open up, and that’s when I told her about price fixing, where we formed an international cartel. She forced me to come forward. In my case, I would say my wife was probably the whistleblower more than me.

I read something about you having to wear a wire for three years. What was that experience like?
It was very uncomfortable. It’s the longest duration in US history for anyone to wear a wire. No one’s ever worn a wire every day for three years.

Why did they make you do that?
Some of the price-fixing discussion would come up every day at work. It may only come up three times, and it’d only be 15 minutes each time, and you had to have a wire on to capture that.

Did you feel remorse or doubt when you were blowing the whistle of your colleagues and the folks who paid you?
Yeah, I was conflicted, very much so. It was a very troubling time—dark days during those three years.

Did anyone catch you with the wire?
No. The FBI told me all the time, “Look, these guys could kill you if they catch you with the wire.” They told me that every day. I’d meet with them, they’d shave my chest, tape the microphone to my chest, and tell me that. 

My understanding is that you went to jail for embezzlement, and it was connected to your time at the company. What happened?
Yeah, after wearing a wire for about two years, my wife came out to me when I was blowing leaves in the driveway in the rain at 2AM with a shirt and tie on. That’s how gone I was, psychologically. She told me I needed to find God, and I said, “Who needs God? I’m going to be president of the 55th largest company in America.” She said, “You still think you’re going to be president? Once they find out you’re an informant, they’ll fire you.” That’s when I decided that I was going to pay myself three years severance, $9 million to myself. Before that, myself and three colleagues had already embezzled a couple hundred thousand dollars on an investment we lost. The company never turned me in, and then—all of sudden—the day they learned I was an informant they went to the FBI.

So you admit to the embezzling?
Oh yeah. I realized my wife was right, that I was going to lose my job, and that job had millions in stock options. It was two to three million dollars a year with the total compensation. I realised I wasn't going to be president and that it would be very difficult to get a job as a whistleblower. In corporate America in the 90s, whistleblowers were hated. It was easier to get a job as a felon than as a whistleblower.

Has that changed?
Yes, it has changed some because of Enron and WorldCom, but in the 90s you would never get another job if you were exposed as a corporate whistleblower. Never.

What do you make of Snowden? Do you see parallels or share any commonality with what’s going on with him?
No, I really don’t. I don’t see any. I think, from the heart, he was really wanting to do the right thing. Whistleblowers are usually, in lots of cases, young and naive, like I was. If there are any parallels it would be that I was in my early 30s and he was 29.

Do you think he did the right thing?
I think what he did was what was on his heart. I don’t really know enough details to say whether he did the right thing or not. I really don’t. From his heart, he thought he was doing the right thing. One big difference is my wife forced me to turn myself in and he did all that on his own, so there’s a huge difference there.

What about Bradley Manning? Do you feel like he did the right thing?
I don’t really know enough about that case. I’ve seen it from the surface. I don’t really know enough of it.

Well, getting back to Snowden, he lifted the veil on a massive surveillance program run by the US government that appears to infringe on personal liberties. Would you say what Snowden did was a good thing?
I’m not sure I want to comment on that. I don’t know all the details. I really don’t. I’m really close to the government. I do a lot of events for the FBI now. I was the keynote speaker at the FBI academy last year, and I work very closely with the FBI. So I really would rather not comment either way, because I think there’s two sides to that story—I really do.

What would be the flip side? Would you want the FBI or the NSA reading your personal emails?
No, I would not.
 

GARY AGUIRRE

Gary Aguirre. (Photo courtesy of Gary Aguirre)

Gary Aguirre was a staff attorney at the US Securities and Exchange Commission during an investigation of an insider trader case throughout the mid-00s. He wanted to subpoena John Mack, a powerful Wall Street executive, but was dissuaded from doing so by a supervisor who said Mack had too much political juice to be trifled with.

Aguirre complained about the preferential treatment given to Mack and was fired. He would go on to send several US Senators a memo about his firing and the alleged preferential treatment. He would ultimately be vindicated: A subsequent US Senate investigation would find that the firing was illegal. The outfit at the centre of the case, Pequot Capital, would settle the insider trading charges with the SEC for $28 million. He has emerged as a major critic of the cosy relationship between SEC and the Wall Street folk who nuked the world’s economy back in 2008. Aguirre now represents whistleblowers in court.

VICE: Institutions often resist change or reform. Do you find there’s often retaliation against whistleblowers?
Gary Aguirre: Yes. Where the whistleblower collides with the practice of an agency is generally when the agency has departed from its mission. For example, engaging in discriminatory practices in enforcing the law. An obvious example is the wink-wink Wall Street gets from the SEC and the Department of Justice. Someone who speaks out against that is going to collide with a policy decision within the agency that is really in conflict with the agency’s mission. In the case of the SEC, they were created after the 1929 crash to keep a vigilant eye on Wall Street.

And when they’re giving Wall Street a pass on causing the financial crisis, that’s really the opposite extreme. So when someone speaks out against that and is punished for it, that is illegal, but unfortunately it’s pretty common. With some organisations and government agencies, which are designed to exercise oversight over an industry, the individuals rotate in and out of the industry at the upper echelon of the agency. So there tends to be leniency at the upper ends of the agency. It’s not just the securities industry, it happens in the energy industry as well.

A perfect example is Robert Khuzami, who was enforcement director at the SEC and he rotates out of the SEC into a $5 million a year job with a law firm that represents people engaged in insider trading.

It sounds pretty incestuous.
Extremely incestuous. That’s how agencies eventually become ineffectual.

So does that speak to the need for whistleblowers within the SEC?
Absolutely. The whistleblower is the antidote to the revolving door. And that’s where they come into conflict. Individuals in agencies have their eye on the next job and they don’t want to offend anyone within the industry—within, for example, Wall Street banks. If they’re going to leap out from the head of the Division of Enforcement to a law firm that represents the banks, it’s not a career-enhancing step to provoke the banks while you’re still at the SEC.

So has anything changed since your situation? You often hear the complaint that no one has been thrown in jail because of the 2008 meltdown. Has anything changed since you went through what you had to go through?
Now the SEC gets that they weren’t doing anything about insider trading. There’s been this crackdown on insider trading for the last seven years, and that's attributable to the US Senate’s thrashing of the SEC. But they’ve completely ignored the players that created the financial crisis, which is a fraud of infinitely more serious impact on the markets. I don’t think insider trading is going to cause the capital markets to collapse. But the financial fraud leading up to the 2008 crisis nearly pushed the country into the void.

What do you make of Edward Snowden? Did he do the right thing?
That’s a tough one for me because I have to defend people who the government has put in their crosshairs, so basically my practice involves protecting whistleblowers within the law. And Snowden is really outside my bailiwick. In one sense, if I pontificated on my own views about Snowden, that could somehow come back, I think, and be used to harm the clients who I’m trying to effectively represent.

Does he have a legal leg to stand on for his actions?
You know, I haven’t tried to analyse it from a legal standpoint. In the case where they charged—who’s the other high-profile whistleblower?

Bradley Manning.
Yeah, where they’ve charged him with aiding and abetting the enemy, I mean, my gut feeling is that that's a bit of a reach. I think you have to distinguish between constructing a legal argument to defend a whistleblower, which is what I do, and pontificating about the ethics and morality and whether it’s needed. I have my own views on that, and I would say I’m not unsympathetic to people who take risks to divulge information that is troublesome about the way our government operates, but would I actually make an argument to defend that?

I don’t know that there is a legal argument to defend them on the basis of whistleblowing. Particularly in view of recent cases of our Supreme Court, where a district attorney claimed that he was exercising free speech in his whistleblowing—well, the Supreme Court shot him down. So one potential claim a whistleblower might make is that they’re really asserting their First Amendment rights. Now, that’s not going to fly with the Supreme Court. I wouldn’t want to pontificate; there’s probably a lawyer out there right now trying to figure out how to design a defence for both Manning and Snowden, and I sure wouldn’t want anyone citing Aguirre saying, “That’s a groundless defence.”

Okay. Thanks, Gary.
 

DR JEFFREY WIGAND

Dr. Jeffrey Wigand was vice president of research and development for Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation during the late 1980s and early 1990s. After he left the company, he cooperated with federal investigators who were looking into the health effects of nicotine in tobacco products. In 1995, he became the highest-ranking major former tobacco executive to talk about the public health effects of smoking. He consequently received multiple death threats. 

So what led to your decision to become a whistleblower?
Dr Jeffrey Wigand: I had spent 20-plus years in the healthcare industry. And I was to supposed to develop a quote, unquote “safer” cigarette, when there’s no such animal as a safe cigarette or tobacco product. I was paid very well. I was working for the world’s second largest tobacco company. What I learned during my experience with the company was just how fraudulent—fraudulent being a legal term—the company was. The products were intended to kill the user. To me, that was both a legal and moral issue. I tried to resolve it internally and got censored for doing it. When harm is becoming part of what the product does and the user has no knowledge because the industry is always telling the opposite of what is really going on, I felt like I had an obligation to tell the truth.

Was there any specific tipping point?
I don’t know if I would say that. I had an epiphany of reason. I had a hierarchy of values. What do I do with the information I know? Do I put my family at risk? The company had been using a sweetener that is generally associated with rat poison in its products. In 1955, the Food and Drug Administration had banned it as being toxic. The company continued to use it in spite of the law that said it wasn’t allowed to be used. I saw lawyers change the minutes of meetings. We were coached on what we could say outside of the company versus the internal daily mantra.

A cynic might look at your situation and say you have a PhD, so surely you knew when you took the job that tobacco is harmful for you. If you had such a moral outrage, why take the job in the first place?
It’s not a moral outrage when you find fraud. I went to the company in good faith and tried to use my medical and scientific background to make a safer product. The cynic doesn’t bother me. I’ll deal with the cynic.

How did becoming a whistleblower change your life?
Considerably. Death threats, not being able to get employment, bodyguards.

Was that because you were receiving death threats?
Yes. The last one I got was on November the 14th of last year.

So this is an on-going problem?
Whenever I do anything against the industry, someone feels like I’m doing the industry harm by sharing the truth.

How did it change anything in terms of tobacco regulation?
Look at the whole European framework convention for tobacco control. It started at the World Health Organisation partially from disclosures I made, as well as litigation. I started the whole process. Look at the packaging in the UK. Look at the packaging in Australia, New Zealand. Look at the smoke-free environment in Italy, Malta. There has been change. Is the change instantaneous? No.

What about in the US? What kind of change came about there?
The industry was sued by states for fraud. They’ve changed their advertising--no more Joe Camel and Marlboro Man. Two years ago the federal court also sanctioned them for fraud and there has been litigation action, which has fostered social and political change. Is it happening as fast as we would have liked? No.

Edward Snowden is dominating the headlines recently. Do you see parallels or similarities between him and yourself?
I have a problem with what Snowden did.

Why?
Why? Because he has exposed harm. This was sanctioned by the government. Why didn’t he stay here and fight the battle? Why did he go to China? Why did he go to Russia? Why didn’t he try to face the charge and make the change as other people have done?

The counter-argument to that is that the NSA is an organisation you don’t really want to mess with, and that if he had stayed in the US he would have faced a serious reprisal and possibly not received a fair trial.
I don’t know. I would expect that justice would be served. I mean, other whistleblowers have not tried to [flee] internationally. I have a problem with that.

So you don’t have a problem with the fact that he leaked the things he did, you have a problem with the fact that he ran?
He has to face the music. We all did. I did. Why did he leave the country? I don’t know what he’s been doing.

Do you think it’s realistic for him to fear for his freedom after exposing this huge surveillance program run by a clandestine and powerful organisation?
I think he has some narcissistic tendencies. Similar thing with Manning. He exposed Afghan informants or collaborators with the US government. That’s basically saying, "They deserve to die.” I’m not quite sure I share that view.

You bring up Manning. He’s been in military jail. Snowden obviously thought a similar fate awaited him.
I haven’t seen the good that comes out of this yet. I haven’t seen it. How is it going to change things and save lives?

What about the fact that Snowden has exposed a massive surveillance program that appears to violate several tenets of the US Constitution, to say nothing of international law? Isn’t that a significant enough starting point for change?
I don’t know. Has it changed the NSA?

I suppose time will tell.
Yes, it will. But right now all it’s created is a massive controversy, diplomatic issues. If he wanted to ring the bell, be a Paul Revere. Why did he run? From my point of view, did I change the health outcomes for millions of people? Yes. Have I done the right thing legally and morally? Yes. Am I sure about Snowden and Manning? No, I’m not sure.

Follow Danny on Twitter: @DMacCash

More stuff about whistleblowers:

Julian Assange Talked to VICE About Bradley Manning and Political Payback

Zimbabwe Has Its Own Anti-Mugabe Whistleblower

This Is a Defining Year for WikiLeaks

Photo via Wiki Commons.

I don’t really talk to anyone from high school. Shortly after I graduated and moved to Philly, my mom moved away from the northern New Jersey town where I lived from 10th through 12th grade. I never went back, save for a couple of stop-throughs to reminisce with old blazing buddies. Before long, high school evaporated from my memory and with it went a few choice stories that I wish I remembered better. The other day, a kid from my high school who had seen the BHO episode of the Weediquette Show reminded me about some field trip shenanigans that I had completely forgotten about. I hit up my old friend Tal, who was in on the caper with me, and he helped me fill in some of the blanks. Here’s what happened. (By the way, this is the first time I’m using someone’s real name on Weediquette. Tal insisted.)

Our junior year, Tal and I were both in a marketing class taught by a man called Pena, who emanated the stench of business failure and peered at his students through TV lawyer glasses. Relegated to teaching fuckhead high school kids the five P's of marketing, one of the rays of sunshine in Pena’s existence was a marketing competition/conference called DECA. At these summits, hordes of tainty boys and girls gather to compete in marketing-related disciplines, attend workshops led by reject clones of Tony Robbins, and—if I remember correctly—watch a magic show. That year, the DECA competition was held in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. It was an overnight trip, and we weren’t allowed to choose our room buddies.

I breathed a sigh of relief when Pena paired me with Tal. I knew that Tal was a head and that we’d be able to enjoy the luxury of our hotel in our favorite state of intoxication. I had been dreading the trip, because everyone in that class sucked. There were a handful of douchy popular kids living out the peaks of their lives—some goon ass jocks and waify cheerleaders, who got a pass from Pena even though they were idiots, and an uptight square we’ll call P.J. He didn’t seem like a bad dude, but P.J.’s crime was being a teacher’s pet. He was studious, active in school activities, and was always wearing a shirt with a collar—it all made him seem like a big narc. I avoided talking to this kid and paid him no mind until Pena opened his big puppet mouth and said, “We’re short on space so P.J. is gonna room with you two.” Tal and I were severely disappointed, as I’m sure P.J. was as well. It’s safe to say that our behavior and reputations were pretty much on the opposite end of the spectrum from his, and there was no way he wanted to deal with a couple of wastoids. P.J. would most definitely rat on us at the drop of a hat. Tal and I stood in the hallway outside the classroom and assessed the situation. “Don’t worry man,” he said, rallying our pep. “I’m bringing some weed, and we are gonna smoke and chill. It’ll be fine.” I trusted him. 

The day of the field trip came, and as the classroom bustled with kids and luggage, Tal walked in and gave me the “Yes I have marijuana” nod. I gave him the “That is fantastic, let’s smoke it” grin, and we headed to the buses. Tal said that we would have to wait until we saw the room to fully hash out the blaze plan, so we spent the ride lamenting our misfortune. Arriving at our destination, we went into the lobby and met P.J., who was already wearing his I.D. lanyard. As soon as we got to the room, Tal began auditing the room. “I have to pee,” he mechanically stated, and then he went into the bathroom. Minutes later, we were smoking a cigarette in front of the building as Tal broke it down: “I left a packed bowl in the corner of the bathroom. You go in there, stuff the door, smoke half of it, and then take a shower so the smell goes away. Then leave it right where it was and come out. Then I’ll go in, smoke the rest of it, and take a shower as well.” It seemed reasonable. We went back up to the room, where P.J. was sitting on the bed looking at some very organized notes. Like Tal, I mechanically said, “I am going to take a shower,” setting phase one into motion. Inside, I found the bowl, pulled out a lighter, and smoked what I estimated to be about half of it in big, bold hits that I exhaled toward the vent as best I could. (This was high school, mind you, so I was still getting really, really high off small amounts of weed.) My stonedness decided that I didn’t want to take a shower, so I waited a couple of minutes and emerged from the bathroom.  Being dry as a bone and in the same clothes, it was obvious to Tal that I hadn’t done my part to eliminate the smell. He gave me wide eyes, which prompted me to jump right back to the plan and say, “That was a great shower.” Tal closed his eyes and looked down, and P.J., still shuffling through his papers, looked up, and let out, "Okaaaay." 

Tal hustled into the bathroom to finish the deed and clean up the aftermath for both of us. Now it was the narc and me. I threw my dry towel onto the bed and took a seat at the desk. “Whatcha doin’?” I dumbly asked P.J. He began explaining the basic tenets of a competition that we were both supposed to be prepared for and noticed when I stopped paying attention. He paused, and I looked back at him. P.J. put aside his papers and said, “I’m not stupid, man. I know you guys are smoking pot in the bathroom.” I laughed a little before turning grim. “Do you give a shit?” I asked. “No, I don’t care. I just don’t want to get in trouble. But really, it’s fine. I don’t mind if you guys do it. I’ve smoked pot before. I won’t smoke any right now, but really, it’s cool.” 

I was flabbergasted. In my blazed excitement, I confessed to P.J. how Tal and I were certain that he would be a dick about it and that I would never have guessed in a million years that such a tool would have been open to weed. He laughed and told me how he himself wouldn’t expect anyone to guess either, based on his general demeanor. Even though he was our polar opposite, P.J. was just a dude, and in that moment I learned not to judge a book by its cover. I must have learned that lesson at an earlier point in my life as well, but that instance escapes me now. In that moment, P.J. shattered a stereotype for me, and what he said next ground it into dust. 

When we heard the shower finally go on, P.J. said, “So, Tal doesn’t know that I know that you guys are smoking in there.  Maybe we should fuck with him a little.” I was immediately so down. “Just follow my lead,” P.J. said.

Tal came out of the bathroom, showered and red-eyed. Avoiding eye contact with P.J., he took a seat on the bed and popped on the TV. After a couple of minutes, he had a look of accomplishment on his face. As far as he knew, we had committed the perfect crime. A few minutes into whatever we were watching, P.J. began sniffing. I don’t remember if he was a theater kid, but for this prank, dude was killing it. “Do you guys smell that?” he said. Tal’s eyes darted to meet mine, and he curtly uttered, "No." P.J. continued sniffing. “I smelled pot once, it kind of smells like that.” Still sniffing, his nose led him out of his chair and towards the locked door between our room and the one next door. He breathed in deeply at the door and turned around to face us. “I think they’re smoking pot next door. Do you think we should tell Pena?” 

Tal leapt up. “Nah, man. It’s not really any of our business, right? Let’s not have this turn into a whole thing. We gotta go to sleep and be ready for tomorrow.” P.J. was defiant. “No. This is wrong. We need to tell someone. I mean, it’s illegal! I’m gonna go tell Pena,” he said as he headed for the door. Tal put his hands out and painfully let out, "Okay." He pathetically moved towards P.J., his hands nearly coming together, and said, “We smoked in the bathroom man, that’s where the smell is coming from. Don’t bring Pena in here, he’ll totally know. You gotta give us a break, man!” 

That was when I completely lost it. I had stayed quiet the whole time, allowing P.J. to set up the scenario, but I just couldn’t take it anymore. P.J. started laughing too, and a totally punked Tal eventually joined us. “I don’t give a shit,” said P.J. “He doesn’t give a shit, man!” I echoed. Tal looked like he was going to collapse into jelly. “Oh my god dude, I thought you were a total narc! Fuck me!”

After that, we all just kicked it. Tal and I may have even smoked more in the bathroom—this time sparing the theatrics of a full shower for every few hits. We didn’t become homeboys with P.J. or anything, but we definitely weren’t as dismissive of him. Since then, I’ve smoked with plenty of un-down-seeming nerds, but P.J. was the first, and for that I thank him.

Tal made a few notes on the incident, and I think they give things a little more perspective, although I don’t think he remembered that I was privy to the prank the whole time:

I guess the most important part of the story is to explain what kind of person P.J. is. How straight edge, and what a class president type of guy he was. Not to mention how neither us were friends with him. We thought we were being so slick smoking weed with the shower on, as if it didn't smell like a skunk in there. He tricked us so well. It was so not part of his personality. He did an amazing job at taking two kids who he was probably somewhat intimidated by and really wrapped us around his finger. That was his chance to grab these two "cool" kids by the balls and really turn it into a power play for him. He could have ruined our lives at that moment. He truly did a flawless job tricking us, and the relief that we felt when he explained to us that he didn't care and he was just joking was something that will remain memorable for the rest of our lives.

And check out Tal's standup!

@ImYourKid

Previously – I Quit Smoking Weed to Study for the LSAT

Collection of Shea Spencer

Click to enlarge.

More from our 2013 Photo Issue:

The Eagle and the Rat

Place of the Inside Out

Terram Tenebrosam

Robert Mugabe, the Zimbabwean-hero-cum-tireless-dictator, is undoubtedly toasting the gods after claiming a 61 percent majority in last week's presidential elections. And the cherry on the top of his seventh consecutive win was that his Zanu-PF party also emerged victorious, winning 160 out of a possible 210 parliamentary seats.

The election process was deemed free and fair by observers from both the African Union (AU) and the Southern African Development Committee (SADC). But the main opposition party, MDC-T, are crying foul play, with leader Morgan Tsvangirai labeling the elections “a huge farce” and the results “null and void.”

Tsvangirai's party accuse Zanu-PF of rigging the votes and intimidating people into electing Mugabe for another five-year term. A large section of the public also believe this, a local domestic worker telling me, “My friends in Masvingo, they have said that they voted Zanu-PF. They were too scared of what might happen to them if they don’t. They don’t want the violence we saw last time.”

Now, anyone who wasn't too scared to vote against the 33-year regime of corruption and devastation is feeling robbed of their democratic rights. The list of rigging tactics seems to be endless, and Tsvangirai has compiled a pretty strong case, which he is preparing to take to court to fight for a re-election. His doubts about Mugabe's "win" are shared by many members of the international and domestic communities.

Below are just a few examples of the flaws and accusations being brought forward by the UK, the US, the MDC-T, anonymous Zimbabwean Facebook whistleblower Baba Jukwa and the people of Mugabe's country.

UNCONVINCING PROPORTIONS


The main problem is that the scale of the results are completely off-balance. Mugabe’s 61 percent majority (up from 43 percent in 2008) is not only suspiciously huge, but also conveniently exempts him from a run-off election, like the one we saw in 2008. Zanu-PF’s victory also gives them a two-thirds majority, which is the amount needed to amend the constitution that was only voted in a few months shy of this election.

The individual area results are similarly dubious. The Manicaland and Matabeleland provinces are prominent MDC strongholds, yet both voted favorably for Zanu-PF. But who knows—maybe the Matabele people have just decided it's finally time to forgive Mugabe for slaughtering them by the thousands in the Gukurahundi massacres of the 1980s.

VIOLENCE AND INTIMIDATION
Intimidation strategies are Mugabe’s forte—and, considering he’s been working that angle since his first election in 1980, he’s had plenty of time to master the craft. This election was no different. Both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have confirmed large-scale intimidation, contradicting the “free and peaceful” assessment put forward by the AU and SADC.

A website allowed Zimbabweans to report any discrepancies, which—with 710 entries, including "Man displaying gun to voters" and "War veterans forcing people to vote for Mugabe"—seems to suggest that intimidation isn't merely a figment of Tsvangirai's imagination. Not that Zanu-PF have been keeping their winning tactic much of a secret, displaying slogans like, “Zanu-PF can torture you anytime, the youths can beat you,” and, “If they oppose, we cut off their hands. If they oppose, we cut off their head.”

Speakers at rallies are even telling the people that supporting MDC is a one-way ticket to hell.

THE VOTERS’ ROLL DEBACLE
Firstly, a widespread rumour suggests that Zanu-PF brought in an Israeli company called NIKUV to help manipulate the voters’ roll. This was in order to increase the number of registered Zanu-PF supporters and involved duplications and the inclusion of plenty of dead people, with as many as 63 constituencies showing more registered voters than inhabitants.

Then the voters’ roll wasn’t released until the day before the elections, which breached the Electoral Act. Even then it was only available as a hard copy, making it basically impossible to get hold of. Consequently, as many as one million people ended up unable to find their names on the voters’ roll in the wards in which they had registered – also a result of an intentionally complicated registration process.

One voter told me, “I registered, but when I went to vote they told me my name was not there, that I couldn’t vote. So instead I went to the Zanu-PF headquarters and told them my problem. Because I went there, they thought I was wanting to vote for them, so they gave me a slip and told me to go back and that it was OK—that I could vote. So I did, but when I got inside, I voted MDC.”

DILUTING THE MDC VOTES
There is video evidence of Zanu-PF youths being bused in from undisclosed rural areas to dilute the vote in MDC strongholds. Tendai Biti, the MDC Secretary General, saw this happen and raised the alarm, but the bus driver refused to answer his questions. Biti then approached a member of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, who said he didn’t have the “authority” to do anything about it. Which kind of makes you wonder who exactly does have the authority to do anything about it.   

ASSISTING THE ILLITERATE
Many people in Zimbabwe’s rural areas don’t know how to read or write, which makes handling a ballot paper a tricky business. These people are entitled to an objective assistant when entering the voting booth, but in Zimbabwe "objective" means something more along the lines of "devious", meaning voters are often duped by Zanu-PF assistants. This year, in one area of Mashonaland Central (an area notorious for violence in the 2008 elections), it’s estimated that 10,500 of 17,000 voters were “assisted.”

Understandably, Zimbabwe's citizens are a little confused by the election results. One member of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission even resigned over the way the elections were handled. And unlike 2008, when Zanu-PF supporters swarmed the streets to celebrate, there was not a single reveler to be found as I drove around Harare.

In a press conference this weekend, MDC-T threatened to take their feelings of injustice to the streets, which left Harare city centre crawling with police. Baba Jukwa has also been encouraging the people to stand up for themselves, suggesting that violence may be the only way to overthrow Zanu-PF.

He has called to “make Zimbabwe ungovernable” through a “people-driven revolution.” He’s also assured the masses that the security service will be on their side this time, and that he’s just “waiting for the call from Tsvangirai, Welshman [president of the Movement for Democratic Change] and Dabengwa [president of the Zimbabwe African People's Union] to go on the streets and show the world what we want."

More Mugabe:

Robert Mugabe Is Having a Tantrum Again  

Zimbabwe Has Its Own Anti-Mugabe Whistleblower  

Totalitarian Pleasantries  

The VICE Podcast Show is a weekly discussion which delves inside the minds of some of the most interesting, creative, and bizarre people within the VICE universe. This week, Reihan Salam speaks with Michael Wahid Hanna, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and leading expert on affairs in Egypt and the Middle East. Following the ousting of Morsi, Hanna traces the history and mission of Egypt's key players in an attempt to shed some light on the new wave of violence and bloodshed erupting in the streets of Egypt.

Here is just the audio from this week's discussion:

Previously on the podcast we spoke with Jeremy Refn about Only God Forgives.

More about Egypt:

Watch: Egypt After Morsi

Read: The Egyptian Army Massacred 51 Pro-Morsi Supporters

Is the UK's austerity program really such a terrible thing? Sure, in times of crisis people do tend to smash each other in the head more often, underestimate the value of their own lives, and end up cast adrift in a hellish world of drugs, mental illness, and homelessness. Then again—and sorry to pull rank here, but I'm from fucking Greece, so I know—austerity also helps strip the pointless bullshit from people's lives. No more taxis. No more expensive hangover pizzas. No more white peacocks for your garden. No more diamond slippers... these things don't seem quite so important when you're preoccupied with figuring out where tonight's dinner is going to come from.

Si Barber is a Norfolk-based photographer who, for the past six or so years, has been sensitive enough to the hilarity of life in credit crunched Britain to photograph it honestly. I don't know if that means anything coming from a foreigner, but browsing through his The Big Society project I'm met with images of the Britain I dreamed of as a kid and came to love as an adult—the wonderfully fucked-up loner of Europe.

I spoke to Si about his work.

VICE: Hi, Si. So you've been working on your Big Society project for a while now, right?
I am always working on The Big Society. When I started it in 2007, I could just spend a couple of hundred dollars on diesel, accommodation, and food, and run off to Scotland for the weekend—it would all just be absorbed within my business, which is commission-based photography. Now that times have gotten a bit harder, I try to get as much out of a shoot as possible. I’ll go off and do two or three things at the same time.

Do you ever get involved in a project you absolutely hate?
I don’t hate any of them, but I do find the imagination of some of the people who commission work fairly limited. I also work quite a lot for broadsheet newspapers, and they have a limited view on what constitutes a good picture. They might ask for a bit of side-lighting, for example, which is a little bit old hat.

What I like about your pictures is their simplicity. It seems like you just point your camera at something interesting and take a picture that makes sense.
Is there a particular image that stands out to you?

The Flower Queens

I really like the photo of the Flower Queens. The Barbie memorial, too.
There’s a sort of underlying sadness in both those pictures. The Flower Queens one is particularly interesting because this year's parade was the last parade ever. It takes place in Spalding, Lincolnshire, which is a very rural area and a center for the flower industry—if somebody buys you flowers from a gas station in England, they’re probably from Lincolnshire. Anyway, the parade used to be funded by the local council and the local businesses, but nobody has any money now. They’ve also had a lot of immigration coming in from Eastern Europe, so there’s a sort of tension. Not of the physical violence kind, but a cultural tension, which makes the place quite interesting.

What about the crucified Barbie?
That was up in Cumbria on a road called the A66, which is locally known as quite a dangerous one. There are loads of accidents but the saddest thing is that the councils clear away the memorials once they are set up. Officially, they’re regarded as a form of advertising, which I think is quite sad, really. Then again, they really look cheap. “Sorry you’re dead but this five-dollar trinket is all I can spend on you.” But that's just my opinion, I wouldn’t want to degrade anyone’s memory. In any case, I find them interesting. They stay up there for a few days and then they disappear as if they’d never existed at all.

Road accident memorial, on the A66, Cumbria.

What’s your favorite photo?
I think it's the one of the Claudia Schiffer poster that's been covered up with a painted on hijab. I saw it in Oldham in Manchester, an area with a large Muslim population, and what I like most about it is the bus in the background. To me, this is a very traditional English symbol—I think it creates a certain tension in the picture, which I enjoy.

One thing I have noticed about your pictures is that a lot of them are devoted to army life. What’s that about?
I grew up as a military child. My dad was in the Royal Air Force and the thing that always strikes me about the military is that they have this sort of front where everything is orderly, but behind the scenes it’s a total disaster. For example, the rates of the divorce of people in the military are absolutely huge—it’s over 50 percent.

The body of Private James Grigg is conveyed into Stradbrook Church, Suffolk. The 21-year-old became the 257th member of the British forces to die in Afghanistan when he was killed by an explosion in Musa Qala.

A level of patriotism runs throughout your photos. To me, it seems bittersweet, as if they are saying, "England's great, England’s funny, and England’s fucked up."
You’re absolutely right. When times are tough you tend to see surges of patriotism. Like with Thatcher and the Falklands. My dad was involved in the war—I was 14 when that war kicked off. At the time nobody knew where the Falklands was, people thought it was near Scotland. After Thatcher won it back, it became this huge part of England and Englishness. Which is all completely manufactured, really.

Royal Wedding celebrations.

You mentioned you started working on The Big Society in 2007. What came first, the idea for the project or the photos of Britain in recession shock?
I was walking around Cambridge and I went down a street and there was a big line of people standing outside a Northern Rock branch. They were lining up to get their money out because the bank had gone bankrupt. It was the first bank to go bust in this country in 150 years. It struck me then that there was something afoot, because there wasn’t much in the papers about the crash at the time. I started taking a few photos here and there, and as the credit crunch came on, I started doing more. The difference was then that I didn’t have to go and find subjects, they tended to appear in my way more and more frequently.

Would you say a bad economy contributes to absurd behavior?
Absolutely. The ironic thing is that the best pictures happen in bad economies. I started the project in 2007 and I was going all over the country back then looking for subjects. But what I’m interested in is not the big picture—not the riots and stuff like that—what I care about are the smaller things. I want to photograph the roadside memorial, not the accident. When you look at the picture of the accident you get the shock of seeing somebody injured, whereas with the memorial you get a look at the pathetic nature of life. I don’t mean that life is pathetic, but putting together this memorial with a couple bits of wood can give you an idea of the fragility of life more than anything else.

See more of Si's work here.

Follow Elektra on Twitter: @elektrakotsoni

More:

The Soul of UK Garage, As Photographed by Ewen Spencer

The English Way

Austerity's Drug of Choice

A fawn not unlike the one killed by authorities in Wisconsin because it was in an animal shelter instead of a wildlife reserve. Photo via Flickr user Martin Unrue

Two weeks ago, a 13-person armed raid consisting of nine Wisconsin Department of Natural Resource (DNR) agents and four sheriff’s deputies served a search warrant on an animal shelter in order to seize and exterminate a contraband baby deer named Giggles. The abandoned fawn had been brought by a concerned family to the St. Francis Society shelter in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and stayed for about two weeks (the plan was to take Giggles to a wildlife reserve, a move that would have happened the day after the raid). But housing wildlife is illegal in Wisconsin due to concerns over diseases, and soon enough two anonymous busybodies called in a tip about the deer. The authorities reacted to the threat by immediately mobilizing (they even used aerial photos to track and confirm the existence of Giggles) and came to the shelter looking “like a SWAT team,” according to a shelter employee.

The law itself may seem cruel to Bambi fans, or coldly sensible to those worried about people keeping potentially disease-carrying wild animals as pets, but the issue isn’t the law so much as the bizarre method of enforcement—instead of taking Giggles to a reserve, the DNR  sedated her, put her in a “body bag” and took her elsewhere to be killed.

Local news station WISN interviewed Jennifer Niemeyer, a supervisor for the DNR, who dismissed the idea that the cops should have talked to the shelter before they used force, comparing it to warning drug dealers before a raid. “They don't call [drug offenders] and ask them to voluntarily surrender their marijuana or whatever drug that they have before they show up,” she said. No, they don’t. But they might start considering it.

Though SWAT-like tactics are most often used in narcotics cases, aggressive police raids (which don’t always involve SWAT teams) are now used more and more frequently for nonviolent lawbreaking. Examples range from FDA feeling the need to go guns-out while fighting the scourge of raw milk, to SWAT teams ostensibly checking liquor licenses at bars and strip clubs before searching employees and patrons for drugs, to a raid targeting Gibson Guitars after the company bought wood that wasn’t finished properly before being exported from India, to IRS agents training with assault rifles. Law enforcement agencies of all stripes can’t seem to get their heads around the notion that while their jobs might sometimes involve using guns and battering rams just like TV cops, they don’t always need to use force. For instance, they could try knocking politely on a door or making a phone call before they raid an animal shelter and kill a baby deer.

Now on to the rest of this week’s bad cops:

- A Santa Ana, California, police officer fatally shot a combative 22-year-old homeless man on Tuesday afternoon after he refused the officer’s commands to get down on the ground. Hans Kevin Arellano, who had been convicted of one robbery and wanted in connection with another, was allegedly causing some kind of disturbance at a shopping center. When the unnamed officer—who had arrived as backup—demanded he lie on the ground, Hans responded with, “What are you going to do about it, bitch?” according to a witness who filmed the exchange. The female officer then shot him once in the chest, even though she was carrying a Taser she could have used instead. The incident is being investigated.

- Speaking of Tasers and stun guns, it’s mostly good news that two dozen Bergen County, New Jersey, police officers are now authorized to carry stun guns (purchased, naturally, with drug forfeiture money). The weapons are even equipped with cameras that police can’t turn off, ensuring that uses of force are recorded and maximizing accountability. On the other hand, Tasers can kill, and cops in other places have been a little too eager to use them, leading to abuse in some cases.

- A legally blind man filed a lawsuit last week against local police chief Andy Rodriguez and another officer in Shoshoni, Wyoming. L.J. Faith’s lawyer claims his constitutional rights were violated, and Faith says that after they came to investigate complaints over his pet cats, cops tasered and arrested him because he “used strong language” and told them to get lost. The kicker? “Chief Rodriguez also accidentally Tasered himself and his partner during the incident.”

- On Tuesday, the DEA settled with 25-year-old Daniel Chong for $4.1 million more than a year after an April 2012 case where Daniel was placed in a holding cell and completely forgotten about for five days. Daniel, who was never charged with a crime and was supposed to be released after being picked up during a raid at his friend’s house, drank his own urine, hallucinated, and thought he would die during his horrific ordeal.

- Juan Taverna, a sheriff’s deputy in Orange County, California, is accused of making five people sick in September, 2012, after he pulled over a 19-year-old for a traffic violation. Juan let the kid go, but not before Taverna put pepper spray on a pizza sitting in the backseat of his car, which pretty much ruined the pizza party the kid was going to after the spray got them sick. Taverna faces up a year in jail over this bizarre incident, and is being arraigned in court today.

- Two different instances of Texas state troopers intrusively searching women’s body cavities after they were pulled over for minor crimes including speeding and littering were shocking enough, but now civil liberties advocates and others are worrying that they are not unique, and are in fact standard policy (written or unwritten). A long piece in the New York Daily News mentions other women coming forward to report they were treated similarly after seeing the disturbing dashcam videos.

- An Indianapolis policeman named "Community Police Support Officer of the Year" in May might not be such a great guy. Local news station WISH obtained video last week showing officer T. Michael Wilson attacking and arresting a man and his employee who had asked management at the hotel where they were staying to call police to report a robbery in the employee’s room. More off-putting than the incident itself (which happened in September) is the difference between what the footage shows and what Wilson put into his police report from that night, which falsely claims that the arrestees were acting violent. In reality, Wilson threw 60-year-old Brian Hudkins to the ground with little provocation and arrested him and his employee, who claims he tried to film the confrontation and was then threatened with a Taser. The video also shows Wilson throwing Hudkins down in the parking lot after he was handcuffed. Hudkins is now suing the police department for $700,000.

- A cop watcher in Illinois is unsure if he’ll be charged and face up to 15 years in prison under the state’s draconian anti-wiretapping law—one of the strictest in the country, though it’s only occasionally enforced—for recording a police officer without permission. The law was ruled unconstitutional by a state circuit court, but it’s still on the books in Morgan County, where Randy Newingham filmed a cop without consent on Wednesday.

- Police in Starkville, Mississippi, are spending time and resources investigating whoever was behind two parody Twitter accounts pretending to be Starkville aldermen. (The crime allegedly committed here is “illegal impersonation.”) Wait until these cops find out about @__MICHAELJ0RDAN.

- Our Good Cops of the Week are the ones pointed out by journalist Radley Balko in his piece on cops who object to the militarization of their profession. Most of the cops mentioned are retired, and Balko suggests that it might be the older cops who are indeed more skittish about what has happened to law enforcement. One anonymous former officer wrote in an email that some young cops are “acting out, at least to some degree, video game fantasies about being a badass,” and added, “American policing really needs to return to a more traditional role of cops keeping the peace; getting out of police cars, talking to people, and not being prone to overreaction with the use of firearms, Tasers, or pepper spray.” Amen.

Previously: DEA Raids Legal Dispensaries in Washington Again

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

These days, you can call someone a cum bubble that was sharted out of a dead hooker’s crusty asshole and chances are you’ll walk away with a high five. But call someone the N-word, and you’ll be dropped faster than Paula Deen’s hottest potato. Racism really is the last taboo—and that’s a good thing. In fact, earlier this month, Slate examined the waxing and waning power of profanities over time and concluded that cuss words related to religion (“damn,” “hell”) and body functions (“dick,” “shit”) are losing their shock value, while racial slurs are becoming more and more provocative. In other words, as we become more secular, immune to gore, and open to freaky porn, we’re also becoming less OK with bigotry. Again, this is a very good thing.  

Yet, extremist lunacy has gotten louder, fouler, and more dangerous. According to a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center, hate groups have been surging in numbers for the last decade. And a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal study found that race relations in post-Trayvon America are far worse than in 2009, when Obama’s ascendance caused us all to buy into that “hopey-changey” stuff.

As the number of racist hate groups has continued to climb, so have the vile internet underbellies where these bigots let their views run wild. Professor Gazi Islam from the Grenoble Ecole de Management, who has studied online communities extensively, said he would characterize these forums as "low constraint" spaces where “people with like-minded opinions could express sentiments that would otherwise be counter-normative.”

By “counter-normative,” Professor Islam really means, “so fucking offensive, it’s actually funny.” Take Chimpout.com for example. Chimpout’s slogan is, “A black plague is descending upon civilization. That plague is called the nigger.” Its mission is to “provide up to the minute nigger facts and news stories that are either covered up or buried by the mainstream media.” And it accomplishes this goal through posting new stories about black guys who steal 300 gallons of cooking oil, and photo-shopping nooses on Cuba Gooding, Jr. and Ice Cube. There’s even an entire thread called "Movie Posters Niggerized," where scores of classic films are turned into KKK propaganda. Even The Help—which is about a white journalist exposing racism in the 60s—isn’t spared. Its tagline is ironically altered from “change begins with a whisper” to “change begins with a noose.”  

Chimpout is so ridiculous, it almost seems like the entire thing was written by people only pretending to be racist in order to ridicule how insane they really sound. But Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, insists that self-deprecation is not a factor. “They’re incapable of looking at themselves in the mirror. They’re deadly serious about evil multi-cultural elites and the literal genocide of the white race,” he said.

Given how outrageous the comments and images are on these sites, I asked Mark if these communities are just as isolated online as they are in the real world. Unfortunately, his answer was… not really. “It’s not so much that you’d see a Klansman integrated in society. But you do see their propaganda making their way into the mainstream,” Mark explained. “For example, the Arizona-based American Border Patrol group floated a conspiracy theory that Mexico has a secret plan to invade and conquer the American Southwest. That idea jumped to the Minutemen Projected, then was presented by Lou Dobbs on CNN as a fact.”

The vitriol only continues with Vanguard News Network, one of the internet’s most extreme anti-Semitic communities. VNN’s slogan is “No Jews. Just Right,” and it makes Stormfront—the internet’s first hate site and the most well-known white nationalist group—look like Pinterest. While Stormfront has women-only threads dedicated to whether you should epilate, shave, or wax your hoo-ha, VNN’s founder, the infamous neo-Nazi Alex Linder, is going around telling people to exterminate Jews like cockroaches. Linder is so extreme, he even declared that “if you have any White sentiment, your job is changing your church, not special-pleading for your science-fiction hero among White men.” Then he banned all Christians from joining.

Even though dropping in on sites like VNN, Stormfront, and Chimpout was a stomach-turning endeavor on every click, I never saw commenters try to organize acts of violence offline. Not on any of the public threads, at least. That’s because forum members know that the Constitution only protects their xenophobic and intolerant “opinions” up until the point that they meet the legal definition of a threat—then, the police are allowed to step in. And according to Mark Potok, this happens very rarely. Organizations like United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute have programs in place that aim to increase the capacity of law enforcement to report discriminatory behaviors, but the First Amendment makes censoring these commenters very tricky. Meanwhile, across the pond, France is collecting anti-Semitic account names from Twitter. But who’d want to be like those cheese-eating surrender monkeys anyway?

The Armpit of the Internet is a biweekly column exploring the most odorous and crust-ridden corners of cyber culture.

Previously: Leg Warmer Porn Is Gross

Wanna hear a racist joke? Michelle can tell you many: @MichelleLHOOQ