All photos by Noah Friedman-Rudovsky. Noah Friedman-Rudovsky also contributed reporting to this article.

F or a while, the residents of Manitoba Colony thought demons were raping the town’s women. There was no other explanation. No way of explaining how a woman could wake up with blood and semen stains smeared across her sheets and no memory of the previous night. No way of explaining how another went to sleep clothed, only to wake up naked and covered by dirty fingerprints all over her body. No way to understand how another could dream of a man forcing himself onto her in a field—and then wake up the next morning with grass in her hair.

For Sara Guenter, the mystery was the rope. She would sometimes wake up in her bed with small pieces of it tied tightly to her wrists or ankles, the skin beneath an aching blue. Earlier this year, I visited Sara at her home, simple concrete painted to look like brick, in Manitoba Colony, Bolivia. Mennonites are similar to the Amish in their rejection of modernity and technology, and Manitoba Colony, like all ultraconservative Mennonite communities, is a collective attempt to retreat as far as possible from the nonbelieving world. A slight breeze of soy and sorghum came off the nearby fields as Sara told me how, in addition to the eerie rope, on those mornings after she’d been raped she would also wake to stained sheets, thunderous headaches, and paralyzing lethargy.

Her two daughters, 17 and 18 years old, squatted silently along a wall behind her and shot me fierce blue-eyed stares. The evil had penetrated the household, Sara said. Five years ago, her daughters also began waking up with dirty sheets and complaints of pain “down below.”

The family tried locking the door; some nights, Sara did everything she could to keep herself awake. On a few occasions, a loyal Bolivian worker from the neighboring city of Santa Cruz would stay the night to stand guard. But inevitably, when their one-story home—set back and isolated from the dirt road—was not being watched, the rapes continued. (Manitobans aren’t connected to the power grid, so at night the community is submerged in total darkness.) “It happened so many times, I lost count,” Sara said in her native Low German, the only language she speaks, like most women in the community.

In the beginning, the family had no idea that they weren’t the only ones being attacked, and so they kept it to themselves. Then Sara started telling her sisters. When rumors spread, “no one believed her,” said Peter Fehr, Sara’s neighbor at the time of the incidents. “We thought she was making it up to hide an affair.” The family’s pleas for help to the council of church ministers, the group of men who govern the 2,500-member colony, were fruitless—even as the tales multiplied. Throughout the community, people were waking to the same telltale morning signs: ripped pajamas, blood and semen on the bed, head-thumping stupor. Some women remembered brief moments of terror: for an instant they would wake to a man or men on top of them but couldn’t summon the strength to yell or fight back. Then, fade to black. 

Some called it “wild female imagination.” Others said it was a plague from God. “We only knew that something strange was happening in the night,” Abraham Wall Enns, Manitoba Colony’s civic leader at the time, said. “But we didn’t know who was doing it, so how could we stop it?” 

No one knew what to do, and so no one did anything at all. After a while, Sara just accepted those nights as a horrific fact of life. On the following mornings, her family would rise despite the head pain, strip the beds, and get on with their days.

Then, one night in June 2009, two men were caught trying to enter a neighbor’s home. The two ratted out a few friends and, falling like a house of cards, a group of nine Manitoba men, ages 19 to 43, eventually confessed that they had been raping Colony families since 2005. To incapacitate their victims and any possible witnesses, the men used a spray created by a veterinarian from a neighboring Mennonite community that he had adapted from a chemical used to anesthetize cows. According to their initial confessions (which they later recanted), the rapists admitted to—sometimes in groups, sometimes alone—hiding outside bedroom windows at night, spraying the substance through the screens to drug entire families, and then crawling inside. 

But it wasn’t until their trial, which took place almost two years later, in 2011, that the full scope of their crimes came to light. The transcripts read like a horror movie script: Victims ranged in age from three to 65 (the youngest had a broken hymen, purportedly from finger penetration). The girls and women were married, single, residents, visitors, the mentally infirm. Though it’s never discussed and was not part of the legal case, residents privately told me that men and boys were raped, too. 

In August 2011, the veterinarian who’d supplied the anesthetic spray was sentenced to 12 years in prison, and the rapists were each sentenced to 25 years (five years shy of Bolivia’s maximum penalty). Officially, there were 130 victims—at least one person from more than half of all Manitoba Colony households. But not all those raped were included in the legal case, and it’s believed the true number of victims is much, much higher. 

In the wake of the crimes, women were not offered therapy or counseling. There was little attempt to dig deeper into the incidents beyond the confessions. And in the years since the men were nabbed, there has never been a colony-wide discussion about the events. Rather, a code of silence descended following the guilty verdict. 

“That’s all behind us now,” Civic Leader Wall told me on my recent trip there. “We’d rather forget than have it be at the forefront of our minds.” Aside from interactions with the occasional visiting journalist, no one talks about it anymore.

But over the course of a nine-month investigation, including an 11-day stay in Manitoba, I discovered that the crimes are far from over. In addition to lingering psychological trauma, there’s evidence of widespread and ongoing sexual abuse, including rampant molestation and incest. There’s also evidence that—despite the fact that the initial perpetrators are in jail—the rapes by drugging continue to happen.

The demons, it turns out, are still out there.

Eight Mennonite men are serving sentences in prison for the rapes of more than 130 women in Manitoba Colony. One of the alleged rapists escaped and now resides in Paraguay. 

A

t first glance, life for Manitoba’s residents seems an idyllic existence, enviable by new-age off-the-gridders: families live off the land, solar panels light homes, windmills power potable water wells. When one family suffers a death, the rest take turns cooking meals for the grieving. The richer families subsidize schoolhouse maintenance and teachers’ salaries. Mornings begin with homemade bread, marmalade, and milk still warm from the cows outside. At dusk, children play tag in the yard as their parents sway in rockers and watch the sunset. 

Not all Mennonites live in sheltered worlds. There are 1.7 million of them in 83 different countries. From community to community, their relationships to the modern world vary considerably. Some eschew modernity entirely; others live in insular worlds but allow cars, TVs, cell phones, and varied dress. Many live among, and are virtually indistinguishable from, the rest of society.

The religion was formed as an offshoot of the Protestant Reformation in 1520s Europe, by a Catholic priest named Menno Simons. Church leaders lashed out against Simons’s encouragement of adult baptism, pacifism, and his belief that only by leading a simple life could one get to heaven. Threatened by the new doctrine, the Protestant and Catholic churches began persecuting his followers throughout Central and Western Europe. Most Mennonites—as Simons’s followers came to be known—refused to fight because of their vow of nonviolence, and so they fled to Russia where they were given settlements to live unbothered by the rest of society.

But by the 1870s, persecution began in Russia, too, so the group next sought refuge in Canada, welcomed by a government in need of pioneer settlers. On arrival, many Mennonites began adopting modern dress, language, and other aspects of contemporary life. A small group, however, continued to believe that they would only be allowed into heaven if they lived in the ways of their forefathers, and they were appalled to see their fellow followers so easily seduced by the new world. This group, known as the “Old Colonists,” abandoned Canada in the 1920s, in part because the government demanded school lessons be taught in English, and hinted at standardizing a country-wide curriculum. (Even today, Old Colony schooling is taught in German, is strictly Bible-based, and ends at 13 for boys and 12 for girls.)

The Old Colonists migrated to Paraguay and Mexico, where there was ample farmland, little technology, and most importantly, promises by the respective national governments to let them live as they wished. But in the 1960s, when Mexico introduced its own educational reform that threatened to limit Mennonite autonomy, another migration began. Old Colonies subsequently sprouted up in more remote parts of the Americas, with a heavy concentration in Bolivia and Belize. 

Today, there are about 350,000 Old Colonists worldwide, and Bolivia is home to more than 60,000 of them. Manitoba Colony, which was formed in 1991, looks like a relic of the old world dropped in the middle of the new: a pale-skinned, blue-eyed island of order amid the sea of chaos that is South America’s most impoverished and indigenous country. The colony thrives economically off its members’ supreme work ethic, ample fertile fields, and collective milk factory.

Manitoba has emerged as the ultimate safe haven for Old Colony true believers. Other colonies in Bolivia have loosened their codes, but Manitobans fervently reject cars, and all of their tractors have steel tires, as owning any mechanized vehicle with rubber tires is seen as a cardinal sin because it enables easy contact with the outside world. Men are forbidden from growing facial hair and don denim overalls except in church, where they wear slacks. Girls and women wear identically tied intricate braids, and you’d be hard pressed to find a dress with a length or sleeve that varies more than a few millimeters from the preordained design. For Manitoba residents, these aren’t arbitrary rules: they form the one path to salvation and colonists obey because, they believe, their souls depend on it.

As all Old Colonists desire, Manitoba has been left to its own devices. Except in the case of murder, the Bolivian government does not obligate community leaders to report any crime. Police have virtually no jurisdiction inside the community, nor do state or municipal authorities. The colonists maintain law and order through a de facto government of nine ministers and a ruling bishop, all of whom are elected for life. Beyond being mandated by the Bolivian government to ensure that all residents have a state identity card, Manitoba functions almost as its own sovereign nation.

Abraham Wall Enns (center) with his family. Abraham was the chief civic leader of Manitoba Colony, Bolivia, during the time of the rapes. 

I

  covered the Manitoba rape trial in 2011 for Time. Haunted ever since my first visits to the Colony, I wanted to know how the victims were faring. I also wondered if the heinous crimes perpetrated on its residents were an anomaly, or if they had exposed deeper cracks in the community. Is it possible that the insular world of the Old Colonies, rather than fostering peaceful coexistence unmoored by the trappings of modern society, is perhaps fomenting its own demise? I was compelled to go back and find out.

I arrived late on a moonlit Friday night in January. I was greeted by the warm smiles of Abraham and Margarita Wall Enns who were standing on the porch of their small home, set back from the road by a manicured and tree-lined driveway. Though notoriously reclusive, Old Colonists are kind to outsiders who don’t seem to threaten their way of life, and that’s how I’d arrived there: I had met Abraham, a freckled, six-foot-tall leader in the community, in 2011, and he said that I should stay with him and his family if I ever came back. Now I was here, hoping to see Old Colony life up close while interviewing residents about the rapes and their aftermath.

Inside the spotless house, Margarita showed me to my bedroom, next to the two other rooms in which her nine children were already sleeping. “We had this installed for security,” she said, grabbing a three-inch-thick steel door at the bottom of the stairs. There had apparently been some robberies (blamed on Bolivians) recently. “Sleep well,” she told me before bolting shut the door that separated me and her family from the rest of the world.

The next morning, I rose before dawn with the rest of the household. On any given day, the two eldest daughters—Liz, 22, and Gertrude, 18—spend the majority of their time washing dishes and clothes, preparing meals, milking the cows, and keeping a spotless home. I did my best not to screw up as I helped with the chores. I was exhausted by lunchtime.

Housework is outside the domain of Abraham and the six Wall boys; it’s possible they’ll go through their entire lives without ever clearing their own plates. They work the fields, but since this was the farming off-season, the older ones assembled tractor equipment their father imports from China, while the youngest pair climbed the barn posts and played with pet parakeets. Abraham allows the boys to kick around a soccer ball and practice Spanish by reading the occasional newspaper delivered weekly from Santa Cruz; however,
any other organized activity, be it competitive sport, dance,
or music, could jeopardize their eternal salvation and is
strictly forbidden. 

The Walls told me that luckily no one within their family fell victim to the rapists, but like everyone else in the community they knew all about it. One day, Liz agreed to accompany me on my interviews with rape victims in the community. A curious and quick young woman who learned Spanish from the family’s Bolivian cook, she was happy for an excuse to get out of the house and socialize. 

We set out in a horse-drawn buggy along dirt roads. During the ride, Liz told me about her memories during the time of the scandal. As far as she knows, the perpetrators never entered her home. When I asked her if she was ever scared, she said no. “I didn’t believe it,” she told me. “So I only got scared once they confessed. Then it became real.” 

When I asked Liz whether she thought the rapes could have been stopped earlier if these women had been taken seriously, she just wrinkled her eyebrows. Hadn’t the Colony given the rapists liberty to attack for four years, in part, because people had blamed the crimes on “wild female imagination”? She didn’t reply, but seemed lost in thought as she steered us along the dirt road.

We pulled into the pebbled courtyard of a large house, and I went inside for an interview while Liz waited outside in the buggy. In a dark living room, I spoke with Helena Martens, a middle-aged mother of 11 children, and her husband. She sat on a couch and they kept the window shades drawn as we talked about what had happened to her nearly five years ago.

Sometime in 2008, Helena told me, she had heard a hissing sound as she settled into bed. She smelled a strange odor too, but after her husband made sure the gas canister in the kitchen wasn’t leaking, they fell asleep. She vividly recalls waking up in the middle of the night to “a man on top of me and others in the room, but I couldn’t raise my arms in defense.” She quickly slipped back into a dead sleep and then the next morning her head throbbed and her sheets were soiled.

The rapists attacked her several more times over the next few years. Helena suffered from various medical complications during this period, including an operation related to her uterus. (Sex and reproductive health is such a taboo for conservative Mennonites that most women are never taught the correct names for intimate body parts, which inhibited certain descriptions of what took place during the attacks and in their aftermath.) One morning she woke in such pain that “I thought I was going to die,” she said.

Helena, like the other rape victims in Manitoba, was never offered the chance to speak with a professional therapist, even though she said she would if given the opportunity. “Why would they need counseling if they weren’t even awake when it happened?” Manitoba Colony Bishop Johan Neurdorf, the community’s highest authority, had told a visitor back in 2009 after the perpetrators were caught.

Other victims I interviewed—those who awoke during the rapes, as well as those with no memory of the night—said that they would also have liked to speak with a therapist about their experiences but that doing so would be nearly impossible because there are no Low German-speaking sexual-trauma recovery experts in Bolivia. 

All of the women I spoke with were unaware that the greater Mennonite world, particularly progressive groups in Canada and the US, had offered to send Low German counselors to Manitoba. Of course, this meant that they also had no clue that it was the men in the colony who had rejected these offers. After centuries of tension with their less-traditional brethren, Old Colonist leadership regularly block any attempts at direct contact with their members initiated by these groups. They saw the offer for psychological support from afar as yet another thinly veiled attempt to encourage the abandonment of their old ways.

The leadership’s refusal likely had other underlying reasons, too, such as not wanting these women’s emotional trauma to stir things up or draw too much attention to the community. I had already been told that a woman’s role in an Old Colony was to obey and submit to her husband’s command. A local minister explained to me that girls are schooled a year less than boys because females have no need to learn math or bookkeeping, which is taught during the extra boys-only term. Women can neither be ministers nor vote to elect them. They also can’t legally represent themselves, as the rape case made painfully apparent. Even the plaintiffs in the trial were five men—a selected group of victims’ husbands or fathers—rather than the women themselves.

But while it was tempting to accept the black-and-white gender roles in Manitoba, my visit also revealed shades of gray. I saw men and women share decision-making in their homes. At extended family gatherings on Sundays, the women-only kitchens felt full with big personalities and loud laughter, while men sat solemnly outside discussing the drought. And I spent long afternoons with confident and engaged young women such as Liz and her friends, who, like their peers anywhere, see each other when they can to vent about the annoying things their parents do and get updates on who broke who’s heart last week. 

When it came to the rapes, these times of strong female bonding—and the safe space provided by such a segregated daily routine—offered comfort. Victims told me they leaned on their sisters or cousins, especially as they tried to adjust back to regular life in the wake of the trial.

Those under the age of 18 named in the lawsuit were brought in for psychological assessment as mandated by Bolivian law, and court documents note that every one of these young girls showed signs of posttraumatic stress and was recommended for long-term counseling—but not one has received any form of therapy since their evaluations. Unlike adult women who found at least some solace with their sisters or cousins, many young girls may not have even had a chance to speak with anyone about their experiences after their government-mandated assessments. 

In Helena’s living room, she told me how her daughter was also raped, but the two have never spoken about it, and the girl, now 18, doesn’t even know that her mom is also a rape survivor. In Old Colonies, rapes bring shame upon the victim; survivors are stained, and throughout the community other parents of the youngest victims told me that it was all better left unspoken. 

“She was too young” to talk about it, the father of another victim, who was 11 when she was raped, told me. He and his wife never explained to the girl why she woke with pain one morning, bleeding so much she had to be taken to the hospital. She was whisked through subsequent medical visits with nurses who didn’t speak her language and was never once told that she had been raped. “It was better she just not know,” her father said.

All the victims I interviewed said the rapes crossed their minds almost daily. In addition to confiding in friends, they have coped by falling back on faith. Helena, for example—though her clutched arms and pained swaying seemed to belie it—told me she’d found peace and insisted, “I have forgiven the men who raped me.”

She wasn’t alone. I heard the same thing from victims, parents, sisters, brothers. Some even said that if the convicted rapists would only admit their crimes—as they did initially—and ask penance from God, the colony would request that the judge dismiss their sentences.

I was perplexed. How could there be unanimous acceptance of such flagrant and premeditated crimes?

It wasn’t until I spoke with Minister Juan Fehr, dressed as all ministers in the community do, entirely in black with high black boots, that I understood. “God chooses His people with tests of fire,” he told me. “In order to go to heaven you must forgive those who have wronged you.” The minister said that he trusts that most of the victims came to forgiveness on their own. But if one woman didn’t want to forgive, he said, she would have been visited by Bishop Neurdorf, Manitoba’s highest authority, and “he would have simply explained to her that if she didn’t forgive, then God wouldn’t forgive her.”

One of the youngest victims to speak with prosecutors was as young as 11 during the time of the rapes. Most of the victims have had almost no psychological counseling, and according to experts, are probably suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

M

anitoba’s leaders encourage residents to forgive incest, too. It’s a lesson that Agnes Klassen learned in a painful way. On a muggy Tuesday, the mother of two met me outside her two-room house off a highway in eastern Bolivia, approximately 40 miles from her former home in Manitoba Colony that she left in 2009. She wore her hair in a ponytail and was sweating in jeans and a T-shirt.

I wasn’t there to talk with her about the rapes, but once inside her house, the subject inevitably came up. “One morning I woke up with headaches and there was dirt in our bed,” she said, referring to when she lived in Manitoba, as if remembering an item she had left off a shopping list. She had never thought much about that morning since and wasn’t included in the lawsuit because she saw no reason to come forward after the perpetrators were nabbed. 

Instead, I had come to talk to Agnes about other painful parts of her past—namely incest—the origins of which aren’t even clear. “They kind of mesh together,” she said of her earliest childhood memories, which include being fondled by several of her eight older brothers. “I don’t know when [the incest] started.”

One of 15 children, growing up in the Old Colony of Riva Palacios (her family moved to neighboring Manitoba Colony when she was eight), Agnes said the abuse would happen in the barn, in the fields, or in the siblings’ shared bedroom. She didn’t realize it was inappropriate behavior until the age of ten, when she was given a stern beating after her father found her brother fondling her. “My mother could never find the words to tell me that I was being wronged or that it was not my fault,” she recalled. 

After that, the molestation continued but Agnes was too scared to go to anyone for help. When she was 13 and one of her brothers tried to rape her, Agnes warily notified her mom. She wasn’t beaten this time, and for a while her mom did her best to keep the two apart. But the brother eventually found her alone and raped her. 

The sibling assaults became increasingly commonplace, but there was nowhere for Agnes to turn. Old Colonies have no police force. Ministers deal with wrongdoing directly but because youth are not technically members of the church until they are baptized (often in their early 20s), bad behavior is handled inside the home. 

Seeking help outside the colony would have never entered Agnes’s mind: from her first day on earth, she, like all Old Colony children, was taught that the outside world holds evil. And even if someone managed to reach out, there is virtually no way for a child or woman to contact or communicate with the surrounding non–Low German world. 

“I just learned to live with it,” Agnes said haltingly. She apologized for her stops and starts, for her tears. It was the first time she had ever fully told her story. She said the incest stopped when boys began courting Agnes, and she filed it away in her mind as a thing of the past. 

But when she got married, moved into her own house in Manitoba, and gave birth to two daughters, family members began molesting her children during visits. “It was starting to happen to them, too,” she told me, her eyes following the movements of her two young platinum-blond girls darting past the windows as they played outside. One day, her eldest daughter, not yet four at the time, told Agnes that the girls’ grandpa had asked her to put her hands down his pants. Agnes said that her father never molested her or her sisters, but that he allegedly routinely abused his grandchildren until Agnes fled Manitoba with her daughters (and still allegedly abuses her nieces, who remain in the Colony). Another day, she caught her nephew fondling her youngest daughter. “It happens all the time,” she said. “It’s not just my family.”

Indeed, for a long time now there has been a muffled yet heated discussion in the international Mennonite community about whether Old Colonies have a rampant incest problem. Some defend the Old Colonists, insisting that sexual abuse happens everywhere and that its occurrence in places like Manitoba only proves that any society, no matter how upright, is susceptible to social ills.  

But others, like Erna Friessen, a Canadian-Mennonite woman who introduced me to Agnes, insist, “The scope of sexual violence within Old Colonies is really huge.” Erna and her husband helped found Casa Mariposa (Butterfly House), a shelter for abused Old Colony women and girls. Located near the town of Pailon in the heart of Bolivian Old Colony territory, they have a continuous influx of Low German-speaking missionaries ready to help, but the number of women who have made it there are few. Aside from the challenges of making women aware of this space and convincing them that it’s in their best interest to seek help, Erna told me that “coming to Casa Mariposa often means leaving their families and the only world they’ve ever known.”

While Erna admits that exact figures are impossible to calculate due to the insular nature of these communities, she is adamant that rates of sexual abuse are higher in the Old Colonies than in the US, for example, where one in four women will be sexually abused before the age of 18. Erna’s whole life has been among these groups—she was born on a Mennonite Colony in Paraguay, raised in Canada, and has spent the past eight years in Bolivia. Of all the Old Colony women she has met over the years, she says, “more have been victims of abuse than not.” She considers the Colonies “a breeding ground for sexual abuse,” in part because most Old Colony women grow up believing they must accept it. “The first step is always to get them to recognize that they have been wronged. It happened to them, it happened to their mom and their grandmother, so they’ve always been told [to] just deal with it.”

Others who work on the issue of abuse in the Old Colonies are hesitant to pinpoint incidence rates, but say that the way abuse is experienced within an Old Colony makes it a more acute problem than in other places in the world. “These girls or women have no way out,” said Eve Isaak, a mental health clinician and addictions and bereavement counselor who caters to Old Colony Mennonite communities in Canada, US, Bolivia, and Mexico. “In any other society, by elementary school a child knows that if they are being abused they can, at least in theory, go to the police or a teacher or some other authority. But who can these girls go to?” 

Though it wasn’t by design, Old Colony churches have become the de facto state. “Old Colonists’ migration can be understood not just as a movement away from society’s ills, but also toward countries that allow the Colonists to live as they choose,” said Helmut Isaak, Eve’s husband who is a pastor and Anabaptist history and theology professor at CEMTA, a seminary in Asuncion, Paraguay. He explains that before Old Colonists migrate to a new country, they send delegations to negotiate terms with the governments to allow them virtual autonomy, particularly in the area of religious law enforcement.

In fact, the serial rapes stand as one of the only times that a Bolivian Old Colony has sought outside intervention regarding an internal matter. Manitoba residents told me that they handed the gang over to the cops in 2009 because victims’ husbands and fathers were so enraged, it’s likely the accused would have been lynched. (One man who was believed to be involved and caught on a neighboring colony, was lynched and later died from his wounds.)

The Old Colony leaders I spoke with denied that their communities have an ongoing sexual abuse problem and insisted that incidents are dealt with internally when they arise. “[Incest] almost never happens here,” Minister Jacob Fehr told me one evening as we chatted on his porch at dusk. He said that in his 19 years as a minister, Manitoba had only one case of incestuous rape (father to daughter). Another minister denied that even this episode had happened.

“They forgive a ton of gross stuff that happens in families all the time,” said Abraham Peters, father of the youngest convicted rapist, Abraham Peters Dyck, who is currently in Palmasola Prison, just outside Santa Cruz. “Brothers with sisters, fathers with daughters.” He told me that he believes his son and the entire gang were framed to cover up widespread incest in Manitoba Colony. Abraham senior still lives in Manitoba; he considered leaving in the period immediately following his son’s arrest because of hostility from the rest of the community. But uprooting his family of 12 proved too difficult, so he stayed put and says that over the years and despite his perspective on his son’s incarceration, he has been accepted back into the fold of Colony life.

Agnes thinks the two crimes are flipsides of the same coin. “The rapes, the abuse, it’s all intertwined,” she said. “What made the rapes different is that they didn’t come from within the family and that’s why the Ministers took the actions they did.”

Of course, leaders do attempt to correct bad behavior. Take the case of Agnes’s father: at some point, his fondling of his granddaughters was called out by church leaders. As procedure dictates, he went before the ministers and bishop, who asked him to confess. He did, and was “excommunicated,” or temporarily expelled from the church for a week, after which he was offered a chance to return based on a promise that he would never do it again. 

“Of course it continued after that,” Agnes said of her father. “He just learned to hide it better.” She told me she doesn’t have faith “in anyone who after one week says they have turned their life around,” before adding, “I have no faith in a system that permits that.” 

Younger perpetrators have it even easier; according to Agnes, the brother who raped her admitted his sins when he was baptized and was immediately expunged in the eyes of God. He now lives in the neighboring Old Colony, Riva Palacios, with young daughters of his own.

Once an abuser has been excommunicated and readmitted, church leadership assumes the matter has been put to rest. If an abuser flagrantly continues his behavior and refuses to repent, he is once again excommunicated and this time permanently shunned. Leaders instruct the rest of the colony to isolate the family; the general store will refuse to sell to anyone in the household, kids will be banned from school. Eventually the family has no choice but to leave. This, of course, also means that the victims leave with their abusers.

Yet it wasn’t sexual abuse that finally prompted Agnes and her family to abandon Manitoba, which they did in 2009. Instead, her husband had bought a motorcycle, after which he was excommunicated and the family shunned. When the couple’s toddler drowned to death in a cow trough, the community leaders wouldn’t even let her husband attend his own son’s funeral. That’s when they left Manitoba for good. In the end, driving a motorcycle was apparently a larger affront to the Colony’s leadership than anything Agnes, her daughters, or the rest of the women in the community had suffered.

 Keeping a colony like Manitoba together is getting harder and harder in modern times. Agnes and her family aren’t the only ones who’ve fled. In fact, the nearby city of Santa Cruz is populated by Mennonite families who have become fed up with the Old Colony way of life—and the situation may be reaching a crisis point.

Johan Weiber, leaning on his pickup truck, is the de facto leader of a dissident group of Mennonites in Manitoba.

"W

e no longer want to be a part of this,” a young father named Johan Weiber told me one day when I visited him at his home in Manitoba. Johan and his family were one of 13 others still living in the colony but who had officially left the Old Colony’s church. For months, they’d been saying they wanted to leave—they even owned vehicles—but Manitoba Colony leaders refused to compensate them for the land they wanted to abandon. Now, instead, they’d decided to build their own dissident church inside Manitoba.

“We are [leaving the Old Colony church and starting our own] because we have read the truth,” Johan said. By “truth,” he meant the Bible. “They tell us not to read the Bible because if we do, we realize things like, in no place does it say a women’s hair has to be braided like that,” he told me, leaning on his white pickup truck as his ponytailed daughter played in the yard. 

Curious about the specifics of religious instruction at Manitoba, one Sunday I attended a service at one of the colony’s three nondescript brick churches. I soon realized that the solemn 90-minute ceremony is not a priority. Heads of households might go two or three times a month, but many go even less frequently. 

For children, the core school curriculum is based on selected Bible readings, but aside from a silent 20-second prayer before and after meals, there is no specified time or requirement for prayer or Bible studies in the adult Old Colony world. 

“Many [people have] lost their biblical literacy,” said Helmut Isaak, the Mennonite historian. He explained that over time, as Mennonites stopped having to constantly defend their faith against persecutors, other more practical concerns took precedent. “In order to survive, they needed to spend their time working.”

This has created a crucial power disparity: the small cadre of church leaders have became the sole interpreters of the Bible on Old Colonies, and because the Bible is seen as the law, leaders use this control over the scripture to instill order and obedience. 

Ministers deny this charge: “We encourage all our members to know what is written in the holy book,” Minister Jacob Fehr told me one evening. But residents admit in quiet that Bible-study classes are discouraged and Bibles are written in High German, a language that most adults barely remember after their limited schooling, while Low German versions are sometimes banned. On some Old Colonies, members face excommunication for delving too deeply into the scripture. 

This is why Johan Weiber was such a threatening presence—he terrified the leadership and community at large. He also reminded them of the troubled past of the Old Colonies. “This is exactly what happened in Mexico and that’s why we came [to Bolivia],” said Peter Knelsen, a 60-year-old Manitoba resident who arrived from Mexico as a teenager with his parents. It wasn’t just the Mexican government that was threatening Old Colonies with reform, but also an evangelical movement from within that sought to “change our way of life,” said Peter, who explained that in his colony in Mexico dissenters tried to build their own church, too.

For more than 40 years, Bolivian Old Colonists had escaped such an internal rift. But with Johan Weiber’s attempt to build his own church—he also wanted land in Manitoba on which to farm and build his own independent school—Peter and others spoke of an impending “apocalypse.” Tensions nearly exploded in June, after my visit, when Johan’s group actually broke ground on their church. Soon after construction commenced, over 100 Manitoba men descended on the site and took it apart, piece-by-piece. “I think it’s going to be really hard to maintain the colony intact,” Peter told me.

If this rift continues to widen and the crisis comes to a head, Manitobans already know what to do. Centuries ago, the original Mennonites in Europe, faced with persecution, had a choice: fight or flight. Given their vow of pacifism, they fled—and they have been doing so ever since. 

Manitoba leaders say they hope it doesn’t come to that. In part, this is probably because Bolivia is one of the last countries left that will let them live on their own terms. So for now, Minister Jacob Fehr says he prays. “We just want [Weiber’s group] to leave the colony,” he said. “We just want to be left alone.” 

Heinrich Knelsen Kalssen, one of the rapists, is led out of the courtroom by police in Santa Cruz, Bolivia.

O

n my last day in Manitoba, I got a shock.

“You know that it’s still happening, right?” a woman said to me, as we drank ice water alongside her home. There were no men around. I hoped something was lost in translation, but my Low German translator assured me it wasn’t. “The rapes with the spray—they are still going on,” she said. 

I peppered her with questions: Had it happened to her? Did she know who was doing it? Did everyone know it was going on? 

No, she said, they hadn’t returned to her house, but to a cousin’s—recently. She said she had a good guess about who was doing it but wouldn’t give me any names. And she believed that, yes, most people in Manitoba Colony knew that the imprisonment of the original rapists hadn’t put an end to the serial crimes.

As if in a strange time warp, after dozens of interviews with people telling me everything was fine now, I didn’t know if this was gossip, rumor, lies, or—worse—the truth. I spent the rest of the day frantically trying to get confirmation. I revisited many families who I had previously interviewed, and the majority admitted, a bit sheepishly, that yes, they had heard the rumors and that, yes, they assumed they were probably true.

“It’s definitely not as frequent,” said one young man later that day whose wife had been raped during the first series of incidents before 2009. “[The rapists] are being much more careful than before, but it still goes on.” He told me he had his suspicions about the perpetrators’ identities as well, but didn’t want to give any more details.

On a subsequent reporting trip by Noah Friedman-Rudovsky, the photographer for this article, five people went on record—including three Manitobans as well as a local prosecutor and a journalist—and confirmed that they had heard the rapes are continuing.

Those I spoke with said they have no way to stop the alleged attacks. There is still no police force in the area, and there never will be any proactive element or investigatory force that can look into accusations of crimes. Anyone is free in the colonies to report somebody else to the Ministers, but crimes are addressed on the honor system: if a perpetrator is not ready to admit his sins, the question is whether the victim or accuser will be believed… and women in Manitoba already know how that goes. 

The only defense, residents told me, is to install better locks or bars on the windows, or big steel doors like the one I slept behind each night during my trip. “We can’t put in streetlights or video cameras,” the husband of a victim of the rapes told me—two technologies not allowed. For it to stop, they believe they must, as before, catch someone in the act. “So we will just have to wait,” he said.

That last day, before leaving Manitoba, I returned to visit Sara, the woman who woke up with rope around her wrists nearly five years ago. She said she’d also heard the rumors of ongoing rapes, and breathed a heavy sigh. She and her family had moved to a new house after the gang of nine was captured in 2009. The old house held too many demon-filled memories. She said she felt badly if others were now living her past horrors, but she didn’t know what could be done. After all, her time on earth, like that of all her fellow Mennonites, was meant for suffering. Before I left, she offered what she considered words of solace: “Maybe this is God’s plan.” 

Editor's Note: Abuse and rape victims’ names have been changed at their request.

For a closer look at the ongoing scandal in Manitoba Colony, check out our documentary, The Ghost Rapes of Bolivia, airing this month on VICE.com.

More from VICE:

What Kids Say - What Is Rape? 

I Got Raped, Then My Problems Started  

One Rape, Please (to Go)  

Just before the city of Detroit filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection on July 18, Whole Foods opened a relatively low-priced version of their store in Midtown Detroit, the area around Wayne State University. Midtown is Detroit’s neighborhood with fixies and really small dogs, so it’s only natural that, like Williamsburg, Silver Lake, San Francisco's Mission district, and their ilk, despite Midtown’s relative affluence, the poor are just a few blocks away. Having a Whole Foods there is a “game changer,” according to Mayor Dave Bing, and “Detroit’s 112th grocery store,” according to those who regularly buy food there.

But excuse me. You’re one full paragraph into a story with “Detroit” in the headline, and there hasn’t been any rubble porn. Here you go:

To their credit, Whole Foods hired about 100 Detroiters to open the store. They go out of their way to get a lot of their products from within Detroit, and they really want you to notice:

There are also a lot of messages about how they’re “proud to be here,” which sort of comes off as overcompensating in an “Ooh a gay wedding! Fun!” kind of way. This is apparently one of three experimental, low-income Whole Foods specially designed for distressed locations where media coverage is assured. The other two are going to be in New Orleans and Chicago’s South Side. I’m guessing these are going to form their “Proud to be Here” trifecta.

If it weren’t for all the “Proud to Be Here,” signs, you would never know you were in Detroit, what with a nationally recognizable retail outpost and fully renovated parking lot. It forms a fully branded corporate oasis in the middle of a city where the walls have street art where most cities would have advertisements.

A slightly higher-end grocery store is only the start of a whole yuppie renaissance for the Motor City, but what that future really holds is anyone's guess. I hung around the parking lot and asked some of the patrons what they want next for the city (besides another Whole Foods).

Colin, resident of Midtown

“Light rail. I don’t make very much money, and it’s hard to keep my car going. The People Mover really only takes you to places that you can easily walk to anyway. Plus it’s very expensive on minimum wage to continuously fix your shitty car, because you can’t afford a nicer car, because you work for minimum wage...”

Andre, resident of Midtown

“The Pistons in Detroit. I love Auburn Hills, but they’re the Detroit Pistons. We have the Lions here. We have the Tigers here. It would be a great move to also have the Pistons actually in Detroit. It would also bring jobs to the city. That would be a huge benefit.”

Cynthia, resident of Lafayette Park

“Security. Because I actually haven't been feeling that as much lately. Well… I just got mugged. At gunpoint. It was the first time I've actually encountered that, so now I can kinda see a different side of things. I'm trying to erase that. I never wanted to be that skeptical person but, now it's kind of eerie, and I'm, like, scared.” 

Roger, resident of Midtown

“Jobs. And more police on the streets.”

Alissa, resident of Midtown

“Garbage cans. This area is nice because of the Whole Foods. The rest of the time people just throw their shit everywhere.”

Zach, resident of Midtown

“To see everyone in government fired. There’s a lot of shitty management going on. I’d like to see a restructuring of the whole thing, based on the same principles, but new people. In this article could you title me ‘local malcontent'?’”

George, Resident of Midtown

“Development at Tiger Stadium [which was mostly demolished in 2008].”

While this guy, George, was answering my question, a huge guy who never stopped looking at his feet came up and asked both of us if we wanted anything to eat or drink. I thought he was working security at Whole Foods for a second. Then he said he just got out of the hospital, and he wanted us to let him use his Starbucks account to get us some food at the Starbucks that was right behind me at the time. Both of us said we had just eaten. I realized after he walked away that it was a convoluted way of asking if we’d trade some cash for a Starbucks card. Sometimes I’m too thick for subtle panhandling.

Site of old Tiger Stadium, 2011. Photo by Flickr User wyliepoon

“They’ve been trying to figure out what to do with that leftover corner of Tiger Stadium forever,” George continued. “I’d like to see some land developers come in and develop more than just downtown. There’s so much empty space now that could be used for something better.”

I know George’s sentiment doesn’t sound very original if you’ve been following the whole Detroit story from afar, but when you spend time wandering around this huge, half empty city, most of it feels like a perfectly good, unused shed in someone’s backyard. It’ll be really good for something, someday. It’s probably got a lot of spiders in it though.

The US Capitol as photographed by Flickr user Robert Hensley.

The 113th United States Congress got together at the beginning of this year to start the difficult task of governing the Most Powerful Nation of All Time. The Senate and the House of Representatives were tasked with writing new laws that would help solve the myriad problems facing the USA and negotiating compromises between the two parties, both of which controlled a chamber of Congress and therefore couldn’t do anything without the other. It was a difficult task, but of course the people elected these men and women for their superior wisdom, and they were therefore the lawmakers best suited to move the country forward.

Ha ha, no, just kidding. The 113th Congress is, by almost any objective standard, the worst Congress of all time. So far, it’s even more unpopular and inefficient than the 112th Congress, which was the least liked and least productive of all time until the 113th came along. When it comes to all the big stuff that really matters (immigration reform, getting the House and Senate together on a budget bill), lawmakers haven’t done shit all year.

Now, like a stoned college student going on vacation after failing his finals, Congress is leaving a mess behind while it takes off for its August recess. (Lawmakers need a vacation after their exhausting three-day workweeks.) When it comes back, it will have to do something quickly to stop the federal government from shutting down and defaulting on its debts. It’ll probably try to pass a temporary measure known as a continuing resolution to keep everything running, but even that might be difficult thanks to the deep divides not just between Democrats and Republicans, but between far-right Tea Partiers, who won’t vote for anything but a repeal of Obamacare, and the rest of the GOP. We’ve reached the point where getting these guys to agree that the government should exist at all is a tall order.

While our esteemed legislators have failed to enact any major legislation so far this year, it’s not fair to say that they’ve done nothing. Both chambers have been voting on bills and even passing them—it's just that the state of gridlock means that pratically nothing of substance has gotten accomplished in the seven months the current Congress has been in office. For a closer look, here's a summary of the 22 bills that have turned into law this year: 

One Law Let the Government Function for a Little While Longer
HR 325, a.k.a. the No Budget, No Pay Act was passed in February and temporarily raised the debt ceiling until May. It also suspended the salaries of members of Congress until they worked out a budget for 2014. The idea was to force legislators to come to an agreement over what the government should pay for, but of course that hasn’t happened yet and we’re now facing exactly the same problem we were when HR 325 went into effect.

One Law Was a Routine Spending Bill
HR 933 allocated funds to the Department of Defense, the Department of Agriculture, and some other agencies. There were also some provisions in there that were extremely beneficial to infamous agribusiness giant Monsanto. The good news is that all those pro-Monsanto bits will expire, along with the rest of HR 933, in September, at which point Congress will have to get its act together enough to pass more spending bills. Which is bad news.

Two Laws Were Devoted to Renaming Stuff
Thanks to HR 2289 and HR 2383, respectively, a section of the tax code is now called the Kay Bailey Hutchison Spousal IRA and a bridge in St. Louis is named after baseball star Stan Musial. Woooo.

Without the hard work of Congress, this bridge would be called something totally different. Screenshot via

Two Laws Awarded Medals to People or Things
Congress took time off from naming things to give Congressional Gold Medals to the First Special Service Force (a group of American and Canadian volunteers) for their service during World War II and to the little girls who were murdered in a 1963 anti-Civil Rights bombing of a church. Good stuff, no doubt, but laws that renamed things or awarded medals made up a whopping 18 percent of all the laws passed so far by the 113th.

One Law Was Renewed the Violence Against Women Act
It took more than a year, but Congress finally renewed the Violence Against Women Act. It was pretty much a no-brainer, but even passing a reauthorization of an existing piece of legislation was a fucking adventure—House Republicans had a problem with how non-Native Americans would get treated on reservations, or something.

One Law Concerned the Response of the Federal Government to Health Crises
Thanks to HR 307, the Secretary of Health and Human Services will have to “submit the National Health Security Strategy to the relevant congressional committees in 2014.” Also, the strategy’s “preparedness goals” have been revised. Fuck yes.  

Two Laws Involved Hydropower in Utah
HR 251 and HR 254 “give Utahns more of a say over the resources and entities affecting our state,” according to Orrin Hatch, who sponsored the bills in the Senate. Apparently some stuff that was operated by the federal government will now be run by the South Utah Valley Electric Service District.

Orrin Hatch helped pass some legislation involving hydropower in Utah that I honestly don't really 100 percent understand. Photo via Flickr user Gage Skidmore 

Two Laws Were Responses to Superstorm Sandy
Congress overcame the normal state of total gridlock to increase National Flood Insurance funds and allow agencies to spend more on disaster assistance, which is sort of the minimum response from a government a few months after a devastating storm hits the country’s most densely populated area.

One Law Was a Rewording of a Previously Struck Down Law
Last year, the Supreme Court took a look at the Stolen Valor Act of 2005, which made it illegal to lie about having a military medal. This was fantastically unconstitutional—lying is covered by the First Amendment in most situations—and it got struck down. So Congress went back to its drawing board and reworded the law, making it illegal to profit from lying about military medals. As we all know, this was a pressing problem in the US.

The Remaining Nine Laws Were Even Less Important than Those Above:

- HR 588 allows the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund to acknowledge donor contributions, which will make fundraising easier.

-  HR 1151 is devoted to telling the Secretary of State to please try and let Taiwan attend the next International Civil Aviation Organization Assembly as an observer.

- HR 1071 modifies the specs for gold and silver coins made to commemorate the Baseball Hall of Fame.

- S 716 is a minor tweak to rules about financial disclosure for members of Congress.

- HR 1246 specifies what happens in case the Washington DC CFO dies or resigns (the deputy CFO takes over).

- HR 475 adds seasonal flu vaccines to the list of taxable vaccines.

- S 622 reauthorizes the FDA to collect fees related to reviewing and approving drugs for animals.

- HR 1765 allows the FAA to move some money around so they can keep paying workers, including air traffic controllers.

- S 982 (a.k.a. the Freedom to Fish Act) stops the Army Corps of Engineers from blocking fishing access on part of the Cumberland River in Tennessee and Kentucky.

It’s true that for a faction of the GOP, not getting stuff done is the whole point, and some House Republicans will probably spend their August recess bragging about how they saved America from destruction at the hands of immigration reform. But even the wackiest wackjob in Congress wants something—that’s one of the reasons they all ran for office in the first place. Some of their wants conflict with the agendas of other lawmakers, so they have to negotiate with each other and come to a mutually unsatisfying agreement. That’s how the American political system works. That’s the only way it can work. Except it’s not working at all right now, except when it comes to commemorative coins and fishing in Kentucky.   

@HCheadle

More about Congress:

Forget Gun Control, Let’s Ban the Senate

PIPA Supporters Violate Copyright Laws Too

America’s Congress Is Cracking Up

Several miles outside central Sofia, in an industrial park in the Izgrev District, the Museum of Socialist Art occupies a blocky modern low-rise that could pass for a progressive high school in any American suburb, garnished on one side by a garden where much of the local sculptural residue of bygone Communist regimes—the Stalinist reign of Georgi Dimitrov from 1946 to 1949; the less stifling, more prosperous era of Todor Zhivkov, first party secretary from 1954 to 1989—has migrated from more imperious altitudes in the hub of the Bulgarian capital.

Marooned in this far-off scruff of greenery, the old order’s monuments to its ideals and protagonists retain the patina of immutable, hortatory literal-mindedness characteristic of the Soviet period’s official art and literature. Now, though, they appear less frighteningly exalting of a pushy idea than like fragments of a nightmare drained of nocturnal menace, planted in glassy sunlight like an assortment of lawn elves mixed in with massive fantasy figures who, so we’re told, once upon a time were real and walked the Earth.

Like the indoor exhibit of socialist realist posters celebrating factory openings and heroically met agricultural quotas, the sculpture garden features depictions of many nameless humans incarnating ideological rectitude and civic virtue—The Award Winning Builder, Head of a Worker, Machine Operator, Women from the Farm, Participants in the Uprising, etc.—grouped near, or around, charismatic, historically legible individuals. The relatively liberal Zhivkov is somewhat mingily represented, as is the first Communist prime minister, Vassil Kolarov, whereas the hard-liner Dimitrov is amply depicted in granite, bronze, and marble likenesses, of various sizes. There are busts and statues of Hristo Karpachev, Poet of the Revolution; Dr. Mara Maleeva-Zhivkova, Zhivkov’s wife (“she loved the people”); and Tsvaytko Radoynov, a colonel in the NKVD who worked in the Bulgarian communist underground during the Second War, was captured and executed by firing squad, and posthumously promoted to general.

No Bulgarian, however, appears anywhere as often—in museum or garden—as Stalin. Busts and full figures of the Red Tsar far outnumber the many of Lenin, who, despite an unusually ugly, gigantic rendering in stone (many of these statues, and almost all the posters, are actually gorgeous, contrary to reputation) looming over a whole quadrant of garden in a stance resembling a lunging grizzly bear, unavoidably evokes John the Baptist vis-a-vis his ubiquitous successor.

It occurs to me that I have never seen a sculpture of Adolf Hitler dating from the Third Reich. The only plastic representations I can think of at all, off-hand, are the Hitler dolls and marionettes in Syberberg’s film Hitler: A Film from Germany, and Maurizio Cattelan’s “Praying Hitler,” which were made decades after the Primate of Linz ate the gun in his bunker. Portraits of Hitler were everywhere in the Reich, of course, from classroom walls to postage stamps. Once, he was even pictured as a Teutonic knight in armor, mounted on a horse. Perhaps it was forbidden to make a three-dimensional effigy of Hitler, as it must be to fashion one less than 30 feet tall of Kim Jong-il in North Korea. On top of everything else, Hitler was neurotically superstitious, and probably feared the voodoo power of the replica. Effigies can be pricked with pins, cursed, sexually assaulted, ripped to pieces, incinerated, or decapitated in the privacy of a citizen’s home, where until recently the fact that there is no privacy in a citizen’s home eluded collective awareness, which in turn inhibited privacy invaders from acting too directly or drastically on the objects of their surveillance for fear of giving the game away. In Stalin’s case, an endless profusion of sculpted Stalins planted from Moscow to Vladivostock served the cosmetic function of smoothing out his smallpox craters and filling out his withered arm.

Aside from an old woman inside the museum who resembles a wary crow pecking the ground cover in a graveyard, her embittered, devout expression leading me to suppose that she is, in every sense, an old Communist, everybody I meet here (the man in the sentry box at the front of the drive, the woman collecting the entrance fee, the lady who runs the video exhibits and the souvenir concession) signals, in one way or other, that they perceive this museum’s horde “ironically.” The Communist period, for them, survives here as an increasingly weightless novelty of recollection, yet one worth preserving, as it is, after all, history.

It’s the intelligent thing, to have museums like this. I’m convinced almost any revolution, uprising, or military victory that begins by toppling the absurd statues and glorifying kitsch commemorating the once-adored is likely to end with the worship of someone or something even worse, or devolve into chaos and savagery—as in Cambodia with the Khmer Rouge, Iraq after Saddam Hussein, Afghanistan after the Taliban demolished the Baniyan Buddhas, and China when the emperor burned all existing books and built the Great Wall, the most overreaching monument to human stupidity ever erected. Tomorrow’s monsters always insist on changing everything that reminds people of the day before. The French have it right; there is still a Stalingrad metro station in Paris, and myriad other place names belonging to people who landed on the wrong side of history, and to events that embarrassed the state, like the plaque in front of Brasserie Lipp where Medhi Ben Barka was kidnapped.

*

I leave Sophia on Deathtrip National Airlines and land an hour later in Bucharest, where I draw cash from an airport ATM and, distracted by someone I decide is a dangerous maniac talking to invisible people in a belligerent voice, forget my card in the machine and get into a taxi.

Within seconds, I glean that the driver is a dubious piece of work, asking “casual” questions he’d ask gullible, anxious, miserably horny tourists with lots of money: am I here on vacation? Business? What am I going to do in Bucharest? He reveals that the city is full of easily available, clean, and respectable whores. I’m not going to shut this asshole up by telling him I like men, first of all because it’s none of his business, and second because he’d just offer me his brother or, god forbid, himself. He’s about 35, clearly eats too much, and has a greasy film all over his skin that seems also to coat his grubby clothing. He delivers me to the wrong hotel, despite having entered the address in his GPS and consulting some crony on his cell phone, and insists it’s the right hotel that just has a different name over the entrance. This after inquiring whether I would be interested in an erotic massage and being told that I don’t need a pimp. He becomes enraged at my use of the word “pimp,” though that is unmistakably what he is. “It’s legal in Romania,” he grumbles. “Not a pimp.” OK, a ponce, a procurer, a pander, a whore-monger, a man who lives off the earnings of women: take your pick. I know he’s deliberately driven to the wrong address, but fail to deduce that he does so to avoid the right hotel’s security camera, as he plans to rip me off for a startling amount of Romanian New Leus, seeing that I have them confused with Bulgarian Levs and am so impatient to get away from him that I fail to consult the currency converter on my phone. He has the negative aura of a human oil slick. I pay him quickly and roll my luggage into the lobby of what I know is not my hotel. Luckily, the staff is nice; they fetch another cab.

When the second driver pulls up to the correct hotel, miles away, and shows me the fare on his meter, I realize the oil slick took me for a truly audacious ride, and, while paying the new fare, discover an empty flap in my wallet where the bank card is normally tucked. A disaster scenario briefly unfolds in my head. I only know three people in Bucharest well enough to have their current phone numbers, and seriously doubt that any of them has the price of however many hotel nights I will need to fix this sudden pennilessness. But I’ve trained myself over the years to process panic-inducing situations like this as welcome material for a novel, in case I ever write another one, so walk into the peculiarly situated but very nice Hotel Vila Arte, and quite calmly explain to the woman at the desk that I have, at the moment, only cash, and only enough cash to cover a single night. After a flash of visible skepticism, she tells me not to worry and to relax in a little parlor off the lobby while they make up my room. It would be very funny indeed to end up a clochard in the gutters of Bucharest after the life I’ve had, but I’m not going to think about that. I didn’t bring American Express, which I’m told will crawl over broken glass at the summit of K-2 to replace a lost or stolen card, or take any other credit cards on this trip: it becomes too tempting to buy things I couldn’t afford when I was younger and certainly don’t need now, when the end always seems unavoidably in plain sight.

I’ve had some dealings with my regular bank over the phone from Havana, and know that its “toll-free from outside the US and Canada” line is not a working number, and never has been. I call instead the number you’re charged for, am put on hold for 12 minutes, then learn that the bank will send a replacement card by regular air mail but not express overnight delivery. This will take five or six days. Not good enough. By the clock it’s too early to call the branch office, where I’m pretty sure I can talk someone I know into sending a new card by next day UPS. I find that I have a Chase debit card in my wallet, for my other checking account, which has, I think, $25 in it. I could call someone in New York and have them deposit money in the Chase account. But I don’t have checks for that account, or the number written anywhere, so call the allegedly toll-free number on that card, hoping to easily get the account number. I am told by a man on the other end of the line whom I picture as tall, nondescript, 27 years of age, with medium-length, straw-colored hair, wearing a muted check blazer, a pale blue shirt, and teal corderoy trousers, that I will need to answer a few security questions.

I realize that I picture every male voice I hear when I call places like a bank as issuing from exactly the same blandly affable person, wearing exactly the same imaginary clothing. And that I somehow assume this person was a fan of the Jerry Seinfeld show and follows baseball without fanaticism, rents instead of owns, drives a Prius, dates a woman finishing a Master’s in marketing for the 21^st century at an inferior college, and has occasional problems sustaining an erection with her, or comes prematurely. Once a month or so, he hooks up with a pre-op transsexual prostitute in the skanky part of whatever city he lives in. I realize too that I have not used my Chase account in over a year and have undoubtedly forgotten how I answered any security questions, and say so.

“Oh, no, these aren’t answers you’ve given us,” he tells me. “They’re questions based on publicly accessible information about you that we have at the bank.”

“Oh.”

“All right, first question. I’m going to read you five addresses, and want you to tell me if you’ve ever been associated with any of these addresses. 15 Buckingham Road. 94 Chestnut Avenue. 109 St. Mark’s Place. 43 Thalia Massie Drive. Finally, 12 Winterville Road. Have you ever been associated with any of these?”

“Not that I know of. Why exactly is this a security question? St. Mark’s Place is close to where I live in New York, but—well, wait. I just remembered. I lived in a little apartment on St. Mark’s Place for three months in 1978.”

“That’s correct!”

“What do you mean, ‘that’s correct’—why the fuck do you know where I lived for three months, 35 years ago? I didn’t even have an account at Chase Bank in 1978. I didn’t have any bank account in 1978. It wasn’t even called the Chase Bank in 1978; it was the Chemical Bank, Chase Bank was Chase Manhattan. They merged. Which, come to think of it, I only opened an account at Chemical Bank in 1980, when I was living somewhere else.”

“Well, that’s the information I have here.”

“But why do you have it? Where did the bank get the information, who did they get it from? Is David Rockefeller listening to this call, by any chance?”

“Forgive me, sir, but that’s a little like asking why is the sky blue, at my end of this. I have no idea why the bank has this information… public records of some kind or other—”

“No, but wait, I’m not anybody—I don’t have a trillion dollars on deposit at Chase Bank, I’m not a drug kingpin, or a spy, I’m just some little person with a checking account at your bank. Why do you have all this kind of detailed, private information about me? You know something, I’ve been writing a memoir for three years, and really, you should write it for me, you know more about me than I do.”

The man in the checked blazer giggled. This reminded me that people who work on Maggie’s Farm, so to speak, do not own the farm, and find its inner workings just as mysterious and probably as obnoxious as I do.

“Are you ready for the next question?”

To crop this to a forgivable length, the next question cited five corporations, all with acronymic names, and asked if I had ever had dealings with any of them. It seemed safe to say that I hadn’t, since I’d never heard of them, and never worked for a corporation, for that matter, though I supposed that somehow, anyone who ever works at all actually works for some corporation, somewhere, that owns or controls the non-corporations they may have worked for at one time or another—and further supposed that I was having dealings that very minute with some surveillance company owned by, say, WXY Corp, or SBRQ Corporation, or one of the others Mr. Pleasant Ordinary was reeling off the names of.

I’ve forgotten what the final question was about, only that it was equally invasive, structured around a harvest of data mining, and the kind of query that should be illegal, and isn’t, like the obnoxious “recommendations” from Amazon.com based on our previous purchases; the very special selection of movies urged on us by Netflix after we’ve used the site precisely once to watch one episode of Breaking Bad; and the digital profiling that occurs automatically whenever we order a pizza, buy a roll of film, check in at the airport, or do anything else that obliges us to identify ourselves. This story does not have a happy ending, simply because it doesn’t have any ending, but just continues, as if we each had a personal Stasi officer assigned to monitor our existence. However, the episode itself ended painlessly enough, with someone in New York putting cash in the Chase account, no doubt becoming himself an object of the surveillance connected to me, quite aside but not apart from the already existing surveillance connected to him.

"He ain’t no Sheik, that’s no great physique, and Lord knows he ain’t got the smarts…"

- Chicago, the musical

We’ve all heard about it, read about it, and some have even seen it. I refer, of course, to former congressman Anthony Weiner’s penis, an object of limited curiosity for those of us amply acquainted with male genitalia, and of even less interest to those familiar with Anthony Weiner’s overall physical envelope and personality, yet for a considerable time an organ of rapt, though possibly feigned, fascination to a woman named Sydney Leathers—which seems not only improbable, but an almost unforgiveable lapse in taste on the part of Ms. Leathers, who has launched herself in specialty cinema, and will soon essay a sin queen in a whalebone corset for one of the higher end adult entertainment ventures.

Judging from the white-cotton-veiled intimation of Weiner’s virile member featured several months ago in the New York Post, the artifact in question is what Norman Mailer, describing his own equipment, once characterized as “an average Jewish prick.” For the record, I am wholly in favor of anyone wishing to promote his or her genitals of whatever dimensions on Facebook or Instagram being able to do so, and don’t find mildly quirky sexual impulses like Weiner’s, or really any sexual quirks that don’t involve involuntary pain, or murder, or cruelty to animals, at all abnormal or reprehensible. But given what Weiner has claimed to be his career ambitions, putting his cock online after getting caught doing it once already indicates not only lamentably poor judgment but sufficient idiocy to exclude him from the kind of public employment that involves decisions about other people’s money, the placement and timing of urban construction projects and street repairs, zoning enforcement, noise abatement, police deployment, and a host of other responsibilities far too boring for most of us to even contemplate, but necessary in a grossly overpopulated world full of incompatible life forms. Unfortunately, the realm that would otherwise seem the most appropriate venue for Weiner’s self-realization, namely Vivid Entertainment, is one where his physical endowments would not be greatly in demand, and his inevitable next mea culpa will probably not create copious opportunities as a television talking head, since anything he has to say is bound to be interrupted by questions about his penis. In Croatia, I caught a half-hour TV interview with Dominique Strauss-Kahn in which an earnest discussion of world economic policy lurched suddenly into a barrage of questions about pimping. This sort of thing is vastly entertaining the first time, and box office poison forever after.

Weiner seems doomed to a season on Celebrity Apprentice, followed by his complete disappearance from public life, and some bucolic aftermath as an accountant in a small town in western New York. Or, perhaps, he could carve a new future growing hydroponic vegetables for sale at farmer’s markets, if he can resist raising cucumbers and zucchini squash. Weiner may be an asshole instead of a creep, but sometimes even an asshole flaunts his inability to control himself once too often.

Previously by Gary Indiana - A Few Days in Bulgaria

On Sunday, the grassroots organization Restore the Fourth rallied activists across the country for the second time this year to protest the National Security Agency’s dragnet-style surveillance programs and their violations of the Fourth Amendment. The protest was named 1984 Day, both a play on the date 8/4 and after George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel about oppression and surveillance.

Their first protest, which took place on the Fourth of July, was sparked after former NSA computer analyst Edward Snowden leaked top-secret NSA documents about the agency’s surveillance programs. Since then, polls have shown that few people believe there are adequate limits on NSA surveillance, Snowden has been granted asylum in Russia for one year, we’ve learned of the program XKeyscore, and it was revealed that members of Congress are getting much of their information about the aforementioned programs from the Guardian.

In San Francisco, protesters targeted Representative Nancy Pelosi for voting against the Amash Amendment, and heard from a variety of speakers, including Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. In New York, activists marched from Bryant Park to Columbus Circle, stopping to protest at the AT&T building on 53rd and 11th, as well as the NYPD precinct on 54th and 8th. I asked a few protesters about their signs, many of which included quotes from 1984.

VICE: Do you feel like we’re living in Orwell’s narrative in some ways?
Ms. Leivowitz: I don’t think we’re actually quite there yet, but we’re really close. And if we don’t stop the turn we’re going to be there. We’re extremely close in a number of ways.

How do we "stop the turn"?
Marches like this, getting in touch with our people in Congress, protesting to the president. He’s gone over and above going after whistleblowers and is certainly on board with the spying. We need to make our voices heard in as many ways as possible.

Do you think there is any level of spying necessary for National Security?
When there is something that happens where authorities have a reason to believe that someone is up to something, they can get a warrant and spy on them. But this is being done without a warrant and without any reason to suspect that each and every American is doing wrong. And for petty things where they don’t even check into, they just see something that triggers an alert and go after people for no sense of a reason.

VICE: What are your thoughts on the NSA surveillance program recently leaked?
Vincent: If it's national security, it’s national security, but don’t do a big dragnet on everybody. It’s as if they’re treating people guilty until proven innocent, as opposed to looking for the individual people who are actually suspicious.

Is surveillance that could potentially target terrorists OK?
Yes, but “terrorist” must be strictly defined. Not just anybody can be called a terrorist and then immediately surveyed.

How do you feel about the government’s response to whistleblowers?
I believe the truth should be free. They say that the truth sets you free… not in this case.

VICE: What was your view of Obama before this came about?
Cynthia: I supported him in his first go around and was bitterly disappointed with him before the first year of his term was over. You know, you look at him, and he’s a lawyer, so he understands the constitution. He was saying all the right things, but when he got into office he did all of the wrong things. I feel like it’s my duty to speak out even louder because I spoke out against Bush. He’s doing things to the next extreme. 

What about the notion of privacy in the modern age?
You know, they say roaches are more popular than Congress right now, but literally no one wants to do anything. There should be thousands of people out here. You know, it’s funny, I just had this argument with Brad Friedman, and he’s a journalist. He blames the mainstream media. I blame America, because in this day and age when everything is at your fingertips, what is alternative media? You guys do a great job, RT does a great job, there are so many other places to get your news, if you’re going to be a dunderhead and watch coverage of the royal baby for four hours, shame on you.

Isn’t that what the people want?
I think when people can’t afford their hamburger on a Friday night, that’s when you’re going to see people get involved. But for me, I’m a taxpayer, my taxes are going to drones, to these wars, I don’t understand how people don’t feel like its their duty to get out here and speak.

What do you think about Edward Snowden?
I think he’s a hero, and I think Bradley Manning’s a hero. Sometimes your conscience gets the better of you, and we need more men like that. Like this guy really needed this headache? To stay in this airport for how many months? Now he’s got a temporary stay with Russia. I don’t care why he did it; the American people need to know this stuff.

My husband and I didn’t agree on the Manning thing. My husband's a marine. I went down the first day they started the trial to the rally, and he had said to me, “I can’t support you.” And I said, "Whatever, I don't care, I don't need your support." Then he spent a night researching what Bradley Manning leaked. I was on the bus, and he texted me and said, “You’re right”.

VICE: What would you personally like to see happen?
Scott McGill: Absolute first step: it would be ideal if there could be legislation in place to make sure there is actual oversight with adversarial court hearings that actually means there’s somebody arguing on behalf of privacy rather than just security. That would be a good first step. It doesn’t matter so long as it’s transparent, there’s accountability and decisions aren’t made in a vacuum, away from where any of us can actually understand why a decision was made or that a decision was made.

Are you willing to trade civil liberties for national security?
I’m personally not, but I’m more open to the conversation. I’m personally not because I believe that the odds of a terrorist attack being the end of me versus a car accident. It's just a numbers game at that point, and I personally don’t think it’s worth trading the liberties for the security. Ben Franklin's quote [“Those who surrender freedom for security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one”] rings true to me. But a lot of people have different opinions on it, so we need to get to the point where we can have that conversation in public rather than right now where it's all in secret.

The forefathers purposefully wrote the Constitution where time wouldn’t be a factor in its validity. Do you think there are parts of the Constitution that might just simply be outdated? 
I don’t think the Constitution necessarily means that there can’t be these kinds of programs, but the Constitution guarantees that there will be actual specific warrants. And right now we don’t have that so it's very difficult. We're so far away from the Constitution simply because, in no other court could you offer a warrant for 10 million people. That doesn’t exist. There’s no warrant for 10 million people except in FISA courts.

VICE: How did you end up here?
Zachary Jospeh: I just showed up today walking through Central Park, seeing the signs about NSA, spying, and so on and so forth. I’m aware of what’s going on with Snowden leaking the documents, with information about the government spying on everybody.

Do you feel like it violates your constitutional rights?
Yes, technically it does, but it’s not anything new.

Do you think there is anything Americans can do? Do you think protests like this are useful?
Yeah, it’s definitely useful. The more people that pay more attention to it the better.

VICE: How was the turnout today compared to last time?
Ben Doernberg: I think there were more people last time, about 800. This time I’d say we had about 400. Still, you know, I think it’s been an extra month since all this has come out, and we didn’t have quite as much time to plan this time around. So honestly I’m still really encouraged, you know, if you had tried to get a rally together three months ago, of people against Fourth Amendment violations you might have had eight people. So, I think this is a sign people are still upset and things are still headed in the right direction.

Can you talk about XKeyScore?
XKeyscore is a new program that collects all internet activity and just stores it for a set amount of time. We don’t know if that’s three days, or a week, or a month, but the NSA is building this massive storage facility in Bluffingdale, Utah. If they can store all of your internet activity, all of your searches for a week, two years from now they might be able to store it for a month or a year. And I just don’t see anyway that that’s constitutional. They’re collecting your information without a warrant, without probable cause to prove you did anything wrong. So, it's unconstitutional and illegal. Members of Congress and other people have been very clear saying, “Look, no one is reading your emails, no ones got the content, its just metadata." Well, now it looks like that’s not true either.

I read today that Congress has been denied access to basic information about these programs and is unable to conduct any oversight.
It just goes to show that even though there’s a dispute over the validity about this type of surveillance, and that there are three independent branches of the federal government. Nothing is changing. It’s like well, the judiciary court is a secret court where there’s no representative of civil liberties, most of Congress doesn't even know about it, and clearly the executive branch... You know Obama came in as this candidate of transparency. Now, we clearly can’t trust him to defend our civil liberties.

Why the 1984 reference?
This was August 4 (8/4), so we called it 1984 Day because we wanted to bring attention to the fact that everyone is talking about, how are these programs working right now? But that’s missing the big picture, which is we’ve built the infrastructure for a surveillance state—and this sounds like a conspiracy-theorist-type thing to say—but if the NSA flipped a few buttons tomorrow they could just write down every single phone call, every single email, so the infrastructure is being built for Big Brother. We can’t rely on politicians who have lied to us, the NSA—which has also lied to us—to responsibly use that power. No government agency in history when given that kind of power has used it for the good of the people. Then you have a former Stasi colonel saying he would have loved to have these kinds of systems when he was working for the Stasi.

What’s next for Restore the Fourth?
Starting on August 5, which is when the Congressional recess begins, we’re going to be meeting with every member of Congress, every senator, and district-by-district, vote-by-vote turning things around. And I think we’re really close, and I think we’re going to do it. We’ll be setting up official meetings, going to town halls, there will be civil disobedience actions. We’re going to make sure that if members of Congress thought they weren’t going to have to answer for these votes, they will. And they’re going to have to answer in a big way.

Previously - Restore the Fourth Wants the NSA to Stop Lying and Spying

Franco Loja, head breeder for the Green House Seed Company, inspects a specimen of the marijuana strain called Limon Verde in the Cauca region of Colombia. All photos by Jackson Fager.

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ne afternoon this May, Arjan Roskam lounged on the deck of a 24-foot sport-fishing boat. He was speeding through a deep bay off the Caribbean coast of northwestern Colombia, keeping an eye on a line he’d cast a few minutes before. Arjan is 48 years old, well over six feet tall, and clean-shaven. He has the rough-hewn mien of a Dutchman, and possesses a piercing baritone that cuts through chatter like an oboe. He looks and sounds like a leader, one of those rare souls who was able to fulfill his destiny without compromising. He is the most recognizable and controversial figure in the business of marijuana, the self-styled and self-described “King of Cannabis.” 

I was traveling with Arjan through the mountains and jungles of Colombia, along with a crew of international pot growers he calls the “Strain Hunters.” We were searching for three exceptional but elusive varieties of marijuana that have remained genetically pure for decades. They have lyrical, almost mythic names that roll off the tongue: Limon Verde, Colombian Gold,  and  Punta Roja. The day before our jungle excursion, we’d found specimens of the latter two strains in a nearby marijuana grove maintained by paramilitary groups and local farmers. Arjan was elated. He had acquired the first two of the 200 or so landraces—strains of marijuana that have naturally developed in far-flung regions around the world—and he was hell-bent on getting them all.

Arjan and his breeders will grow thousands of plants from these landrace seeds, pick the strongest ones, and breed new commercial strains based on their exotic genetics. This is the first step in a long, intricate process that makes it possible for a local deliveryman to show up at your house with a backpack bouquet filled with varieties like Alaskan Ice, Bubba Kush, and White Widow. If you’ve ever been cornered by a bleary-eyed pot nerd at a party, you know that the reason we’re not all still smoking Thai stick and twiggy, seed-filled weed is because of the thousands of commercial breeders around the world mixing, cross-breeding, experimenting, and developing new flavors, effects, and qualities—all from what is essentially a common mountainside plant. 

From the water, the snowcapped foothills of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountain range loomed in the distance. It extends right up to the country’s Caribbean coast, and just over 26 miles inland. Two peaks (one named after Colombia’s colonial liberator Simón Bolívar) stand at about 19,000 feet. The topography is freakish and stunning. The temperate highland air and year-round equatorial sunshine of these mountains makes for one of the most fertile regions in the world to grow and harvest cannabis. During the 1960s and 70s, thousands of tons were exported from the very same 100-meter-deep bays we were cruising through. Smuggling boats followed a northern route via the Caribbean, onward toward the United States. It was a weed rush colloquially called the “Bonanza Marimbera,” and it transformed hundreds of peasant farmers into wealthy drug lords. The foundation of Santa Marta, the vibrant coastal city where we were staying, was literally built of drug money. 

A recent edition of El Tiempo, Colombia’s daily newspaper, had boasted “la marihuana vive una nueva bonanza”—heady times for growing and shipping weed from Colombia’s northern coast were back, as the demand for marijuana continues to grow exponentially. These days, however, Colombian growers aren’t producing much Colombian Gold. Instead, like the rest of the industry, they’ve shifted toward hybrids developed by breeders and growers in California, British Colombia, and Amsterdam—breeders like Arjan.

If cartels and other criminal organizations were the millionaires of last century’s drug booms, then pot breeders—horticultural nerds holed up in grow houses and labs across the world—may very well be the future billionaires of this one. Like Monsanto, or other agribusiness giants, massive companies could end up controlling the plant at its most basic level, which is why Arjan is so important to this business: he controls Amsterdam’s Green House Seed Company, one of the largest seed companies on the planet, which styles itself as “the most successful cannabis business in the world.” 

Green House claims to have won 38 Cannabis Cups, nearly twice as many as any other company. In the wake of legalization in US states like Colorado, and with the prospect of legalization in countries like Uruguay, Arjan is betting on a future where the demand for weed will evolve and mature, and he’s doing everything he can to ensure that he’ll be the one on top when the dominoes of criminalization tumble around the world. And he should be. The man is arguably is the best-positioned, legitimate drug dealer out there; he isn’t just selling drugs—he’s helping to build the culture of the industry.

As we fished and downed cans of beer on the boat in Santa Marta, sparking massive joints stuffed with hash and pungent bud, Arjan kept an eye on the ocean. Eventually one of his lines was pulled taut, and he grabbed the pole from its holster and commanded the seat at the stern to reel in his catch. Before long, a six-foot iridescent fish writhed on the white deck of the boat. We ate it for lunch. It was delicious.

Colombia’s Caribbean coast was a major area for marijuana smuggling in the 70s and early 80s.

A ccurately estimating the size of the global marijuana market (both legal and illegal) may be flat-out impossible—they range from 10 to 140 billion dollars per year. Arjan claims he owns 25 percent of the seed market, a smaller subset of the entire industry, but arguably its most crucial. And while this figure is extremely difficult to verify, industry sources I spoke with on background said that Arjan’s math isn’t too far off. Considering there are currently hundreds of seed companies worldwide, this is a fairly significant slice of the pie. And while Arjan also owns weed-selling coffee shops, a clothing line, and even a booze company that makes cannabis-flavored alcohol, his primary business is to create new varieties of marijuana to sell on the international market. This is a lucrative, and somewhat exclusive segment of the market. To unlock new flavor profiles and new body effects through the combination of cannabinoids and terpenoids (the lesser-known chemical in weed), an expert level of knowledge is essential. Breeding new lines is not genetic engineering per se, it’s just husbandry. But, like the modern wine industry, growing pot has become a valuable science that requires an artisan’s skill, knowledge, and sensibility. 

Franco Loja is Arjan’s gaunt, hyperactive head breeder and business partner. He’s 39 years old and previously served as a paratrooper in the Italian military. As he explained to me this spring, “The beauty of cannabis is in its variety. It’s not just one plant—it’s thousands of plants. Breeding plants is creating something new. You could compare the job to that of a Michelin-star chef creating new recipes. The ingredients are almost infinite to combine.”

Franco and Arjan’s business model relies on finding these rare plants, which, as I witnessed firsthand in the mountains, is easier said than done. Weed is still very much illegal in Colombia, and guerrilla factions, paramilitary groups, and other gun-toting bands of frightening humans usually control the areas where it is best grown. Arjan’s name recognition and economic clout open doors, but he still has to travel through these remote, militarized zones. This requires arduous journeys in trucks or on foot, journeys that Green House’s competitors are, frankly, too timid or too cash-strapped to embark upon. 

At a seaside restaurant inside Tayrona National Park near the city of Santa Marta, Arjan told me about one of his life’s most pivotal moments, which underlines his unwavering belief in the plant. “When I was 17,” he told me, “I went to Thailand. In the north of Thailand, I was hiking and I met a very old man who at that time was curing heroin patients with marijuana. I stayed there for a week, and at that time, I thought the guy was really crazy. But the more I stayed, the more I learned from him, and the moment I went away, he gave me some seeds and told me to remember one thing: in the future, those seeds could overthrow governments.”

Magic beans from a mysterious stranger. It’s a Jack and the Beanstalk story. Who exactly plays the giant in Arjan’s life is unclear. It could be the beast of illegality, or lobbying pressure wielded by the industries that control other, regulated vices like tobacco, alcohol, and petroleum. Or it could be the insurmountable fact that, despite his leadership in the community of pot growers and business people, he’s never quite fit in.

Arjan Roskam dubbed himself the “King of Cannabis” and scours the world for rare marijuana.

A

rjan wasn’t always a magnate. He started growing in basements and apartments in and around Amsterdam nearly 30 years ago. “We were just pot growers enjoying our smoke,” Arjan reminisced. “After a few years, we figured out that we weren’t the only ones. There are 2 billion people who enjoy that smoke, and we were very lucky to jump on this wagon in the 80s. That wagon became a train, and the train became an airplane. That airplane is flying really fast now.”

“And really high,” added Franco.

“Yes,” Arjan said. “Really high.”

Arjan first found success in Holland, a country that decided decades before California that it was better to regulate the near-universal desire to get stoned than attempt to ban it. He started breeding new strains of weed under the Green House name in 1985, opening his first shop seven years later. He wasn’t the first to the game, but over the course of his career he leveraged his early adoption in the legal weed market into a form of self-appointed chairmanship. He often serves as the spokesperson for Amsterdam’s guild of coffee shops, and has polished the image of his company into an internationally recognized operation. “It’s very successful,” he said. “To give you an idea, just last year we sold over 400,000 packs of seeds. That makes us the number-one seed-seller in the world.”

And it looks as though Green House’s profile will continue to rise. As growing pot evolves from a clandestine pursuit into something any garden hobbyist can consider, a seed company’s image is more important than ever. This is what marketing hacks refer to as “brand equity,” and Arjan and Franco are busy building the equity of Green House Seed Company by bolstering its profile through the company’s online operations. 

The Green House has produced a handful of hour-long documentaries shot during strain-hunting trips they’ve taken to Malawi, Morocco, and India, among other far-flung locales, in search of the ultimate high. The videos, ambitious in their cinematic aspirations, have garnered several million views on YouTube. In them, Arjan comes off as the sociologically enlightened Arnold Schwarzenegger of weed, lending an ear to the sometimes-painful stories of peasant pot growers as he crisscrosses the globe in a tank top and cargo shorts. According to David Bienenstock, a former senior editor for High Times, Arjan has “adopted a modern marketing sensibility,” something that’s woefully missing in much of the nascent industry. The Dutchman has an American understanding of market forces, which makes it somewhat ironic that the American industry has shut him out, even as it has exploded over the past decade as states across the country have embraced legalization on various levels. Importing seeds remains illegal in the States.

“The game between illegal and legal in our industry forces us to stay sharp,” Franco told me. To combat this tension, Green House has heavily invested in research and development, “to keep flexible, to adapt to new laws, new regulations, new market demands, new repression, and new openings. We can’t afford to choose our own market strategy.”

Arjan knows how to grab what’s directly in front of him, a skill that has landed him a negative reputation with his competition. Some refer to him as a pretender, a businessman in the garb of a breeder; however, like any other industry, having vocal detractors could be interpreted as a sign of success. 

Breeders do not think of themselves as drug dealers, but as hyperskilled farmers, more akin to cheesemongers or vintners. There’s an unwritten understanding that your product ought to speak for itself, that the plant is above any one person. In 1999, Green House, alongside two other companies, was stripped of its Cannabis Cup in the Hash category following accusations of vote rigging. It’s a reputational wound that festers and further diminishes Arjan’s cred among the hermetic Amsterdam pot scene. But Arjan shrugs off such setbacks without fear. Even during moments when marijuana was highly illegal in most parts of the planet, he stamped his face directly on his product, knowing that weed would eventually blossom into a quasi-mainstream consumer product. It was a bold move, and one that’s indicative of a personality that continues to rub certain segments of the marijuana industry the wrong way.

Gato stretches out the floral, sweet hash he made from by dumping a bucket of THC crystals into a meat grinder.

T

hree days before my sit-down interview with Arjan and Franco, I was following Arjan through Colombia’s southwest Cauca region to scope out a massive grow operation headed up by a 35-year-old Colombian man named Alejandro Londono, better known as Gato, or “the Cat.” 

Gato isn’t as svelte as his nickname suggests, but his moniker is an apt descriptor of his spry business acumen. Raised in Miami, he cut his teeth growing in Mexico and Venezuela before founding and operating large-scale industrial operations in a handful of Central and South American nations. He is currently on the payroll of Uruguay’s government as an Official Legalization Advisor. It’s obvious that Gato looks up to Arjan and acts as his protégé, paying close attention when he speaks.

Our visit was less of a strain hunt, and more so a way for Gato to show off how well he’s done for himself since taking over the family business, a breeding and seed-sale operation he named Marimbero (a reference to the faded glory days of Colombian weed supremacy). The plantation is massive, with plants growing outdoors covered by acres of clear plastic sheeting draped over a lattice of bamboo poles that extend down the slope of a mountain. A quick calculation clued me in to the stakes: Gato and his head grower, a former assassin he met in prison, have 8,000 plants that yield 4,000 pounds of weed every harvest. Because of Colombia’s year-round stable weather, the operation produces three harvests a year, which roughly equates to six tons of weed.

Over the past few years, Gato’s father and two of his brothers were gunned down by rivals. “My two brothers got killed in the last three years by some fuckers in Medellín who think they are the kings of pot,” he said. “They think they control the business because they’re bandits, but they control the market through violence, not quality.” 

Quality is Gato’s chief mission. He tries to grow excellent pot because he loves it. It’s as simple as that. “Your hobby becomes your business automatically,” he said. “You don’t look for it. It’s like when you’re a good singer, and you become famous—you don’t ask for that shit. Some good singers hate fame, but that shit arrives. With grass, it’s the same. My daughter’s mom, she told me one day I had to choose between marijuana and her. I divorced her that day. How can you fucking complain about pot when you live like a rich hooker? You have everything you want. Everything in your fridge came from this pot.”

Later Gato took me on a tour of his storehouses, his drying and curing facilities, and the small indoor factory where he makes hash and other processed goods. At one point he shoved a bucketful of dried THC crystals into an industrial meat grinder, producing a flow of gooey, floral hash that looked like melted chocolate. He gushed about his particular strand of weed, named for one of his daughters. The blend is a deep, couch-locking hybrid called Nicole’s Kush, and while it hasn’t risen to the same popularity as some of Arjan’s varieties just yet (and can’t be found in the States), it is some truly primo shit. If things go right for Gato, his daughter’s namesake could be his breakout hybrid that will solidify his dominance in the industry.

Pay dirt. Arjan shows off the Punta Roja seeds he and his strain-hunting crew found near Santa Marta, Colombia.

A

rjan’s breakout hybrid was White Widow, named for the abundance of trichomes that give the plant a white tint. The blend is a legendary variety available around the world and has even been name-checked in episodes of Weeds. It gives the user an intense energetic euphoria and offers a spicy smoke with a sweet, buttery finish. It won the Cannabis Cup in 1995, which is part of the reason why the question of precisely who developed this particular strain is a major point of contention among the Amsterdam grower community. So much so that it has resulted in a fundamental rift that still divides opinion regarding Arjan’s motivations as a businessman and a human being.

The story behind the creation of White Widow is convoluted. Arjan claims a grower he worked with in the 80s named Ingemar was the progenitor of the strain, which Green House perfected over the next decade. But Arjan’s former business partner, an Australian named Scott Blakey, claims he invented it at Green House, and when he left the company in 1998 he took the first stabilized generation of plants with him to form a new company. These days, Scott is better known as “ShantiBaba,” and his company is called Mr. Nice Seed. ShantiBaba is merciless in his accusations against Arjan. According to Scott, Arjan doesn’t deserve credit for the discovery, or the numerous accolades that have been bestowed on White Widow. 

Part of the reason the White Widow debate has persisted all these years is because the weed market is largely deregulated. Patents and intellectual property aren’t yet applicable to the pot industry, so neither side has been able to take their grievances to court. It’s purely a battle of reputation and a clash of inflated personalities. Arjan rarely speaks about the accusations, but when he does, his language is vitriolic. In 2011, he composed an approximately 4,309-word post on International Cannagraphic’s online forum, lobbing ad hominem attacks on ShantiBaba that labeled him a huckster while simultaneously shoving sales figures in his face. “Green House represents up to 50 percent of the market in Holland, Spain, England, Italy, and in many more countries,”  he wrote. “In most shops it works like this: for every GH pack sold, one pack is sold from all other companies together. Just call any grow shop in Spain, or ask large distributors like Basil Bush or Plantasur, and you will have an idea of the volume of seeds we sell compared to Shantiblabla.”

T

he afternoon we found the Punta Roja landrace strain was exceptionally beautiful. We found our prize after hiking up into a modest grow operation in a valley a few hours outside of Santa Marta. The logistics of the trip were somewhat overwhelming, as we were shuttled from hotels to fields to conferences with local leaders, eventually arranging a meeting with our contacts on the side of a road. But once we were actually surrounded by what we had been seeking, both Arjan and Franco became amplified versions of themselves.

We surveyed a hundred or so plants that Arjan and Franco had identified as pure sativa based on their thin leaves and narrow bud structures. Franco explained the importance of internodal distance between the branches of the plant, how seeds must mature in their casings before they are plucked, how Punta Roja—or Red Dot—was given its name. When we came across a particularly superb phenotype, he was elated. Each of us couldn’t help but to plunge our hands into the raw, sticky buds that smelled of pine and sawgrass, overwhelmed by the thrill of discovering seeds that could be taken back to Amsterdam.

“This is original material that I can breed, that I can store in my library, that I can use to create new genetics, that are gonna win Cannabis Cups,” Franco said. “These are going to make people rich, put people in jail, change destinies and lives. And this is why I wake up with a smile every fucking day of my life.” His tawny face creased as he looked skyward and howled, “We got seeds, man!”

Arjan ran down the hill to rifle through the plant. He grabbed handfuls of tiny seeds, plucked any living plant material from them, and secured them into small plastic bags. He spoke wildly about the potential of the industry, prophesizing of a time in the near future when governments will limit the THC content of commercial marijuana. In that version of the future, flavor is more important than effect, and controlling rare, as-of-yet unincorporated genetic material gives the grower a huge leg up on the competition. 

The discovery of these seeds marks the beginning of Arjan’s real work. Once back in the lab, Franco and Arjan will plant the seeds, pick the best specimens, and replant their seeds. They’ll repeat this process many times over until they have it just right. Ultimately, they will grow upward of 10,000 plants from these seeds. They’ll attempt to stabilize different lines to optimize factors such as flowering time, mold and fungus resistance, and resin. Five years down the line, unique qualities inherent in the source strain could form the basis of an entirely new creation. 

Or not. But even if these specific source strains don’t pan out on a consumer level, Green House will still catalogue the mother plants and keep the line alive, while analyzing the cannabinoid and terpenoid properties. It’s possible that a pharmaceutical giant on the hunt for specific strands could knock on their door—in 2003, Bayer paid $40 million for the right to distribute Sativex, a marijuana-derived medicine designed to alleviate spasticity, overactive bladder, and other symptoms.

Arjan and his associates know very well that theirs is a risky business with no immediate reward. But betting on a world where marijuana is legally closer to wine than heroin has the potential of the most handsome of rewards, which include the priceless adventures that people like Arjan and Franco must embark on to collect their ultimate bounty. 

“We all know that in ten to 20 years everything will be legal,” Arjan said. “We’re just keeping all our options open and finding all the keys for the future. One of the keys is all the different landraces.”

This metric of success was proven during our time in Colombia; Arjan and his team found all three of the strains he had gone there to find. Though festooned with the regalia of his own personal mythos—his uncle, Peter, was a big-time potato farmer in Holland, another sign of his horticultural destiny—and the stigma of millions of dollars he’s made from a successful gray-market business, Arjan fancies himself a humble man.

“I still want to be alone with my plants in my room, smoke, that’s it… That’s my main thing, enjoying watching my plants grow,” Arjan said. “I’m a farmer.” Then he took a hit and reconsidered. “I’m a farmer with big ambitions.” 

For beautiful bud footage from the mountains of Colombia, watch Kings of Cannabis below:

More on weed:

The War on Weed: Still Expensive, Racist, and Failed  

I Just Want My Big Bag of Weed Back 

Exploring the Interior Designs of Los Angeles Weed Clinics  

A while back I was looking for a series of things to vandalize and post online for laughs. I started with photos from magazines and wrestling cards, and they were OK, but I wanted something a bit more unique. Then I discovered a few Chick tracts stored away in my drawer. For those of you who don’t know, a Chick tract is a tiny religious comic made by Jack Chick designed to scare you into becoming Christian. Jack has been cranking these things out since the early 70s, and you can find them in bus terminals and public bathrooms across the country.

The design of these tracts is pretty uniform, and perfect for fucking with. The first one I used was titled Who Killed the Dinosaurs? I posted it on my Tumblr and it got a pretty good response, so I kept going. I just used a little white acrylic paint pen, and sometimes markers, and Voilá! I’d have a new and improved tract.

For a good two months I was posting a few every day. People were asking me what I was going to do with all of them, and I had no idea. My buddy Greg has a clothing store called Mishka in LA (and NYC) and was opening a small gallery in the back. He asked me if I’d be up for doing an art show, and I told him I didn’t really have time to do anything new since I was in the middle of working on my book, Prison Pit V, but I did have about 80 of these Jack Chick tracts that I had ruined. Surprisingly, he thought it was a cool idea for a show, so that’s how the world’s fucking stupidest art show was born. Oh, and there’s also going to be a book collecting all the tracts coming out soon from Monster Worship.

@MrJohnnyRyan

More from Johnny:

Aromatherapy Cops

Start Spreading the Nuge

Spring Break!

Fake protesters marching in Los Angeles. 

Crowds on Demand, as the name suggests, is a company that will organize a crowd for you, on demand.  

The main two times this service is required are: A) you're an aspiring celebrity who wants to make it seem like people give a shit about you, so you hire some fake fans, or B) you believe in a cause and want to make it seem like people give a shit about it, so you hire some fake protesters. 

Unfortunately, I couldn't go along to see one of the company's fake fan events (as they're super secret,) so I went along to a fake protest they organized in Los Angeles, instead. While there, I sat down for a chat with their founder and CEO, Adam Swart.

Fake protesters raising tourists' awareness on Hollywood Blvd. 

VICE: So, what's this event that's happening now?
Adam Swart, Crowds on Demand: It's an event we're doing in coordination with a charity. We're trying to raise awareness about mental health issues. They want to raise a lot more awareness about mental health, which is an often overlooked issue when it comes to, uh, to policy. 

OK. Are they paying you for this?
They get a discount. We give charities discounts. 

How many people are protesting here?
About 20.

Are any of these guys real protesters or are they all provided by you?
They're all provided by me. 

Can I ask how much they're getting paid for this?
They get $15 an hour. 

If I wanted to do something like this and have 20 people protesting on my behalf, how much would that cost me?
Normally it would cost you a couple thousand dollars, but in this case we're doing it for less than that. 

Your company also provides fake fans for things, right?
Yes, we surround people with an entourage. Security guards, paparazzi, fans—all the trappings of celebrity. It's like the whole experience of being famous. You'll be walking down the Vegas Strip or the Hollywood Walk of Fame and everyone will think you're an A-lister. 

And who uses that service?
A lot of tourists will use it. People in the entertainment industry use it, people who are up-and-coming and want to increase hype for their name. 

How much does that cost?
It all depends, it starts at the low thousands, though. 

What would "the low thousands" provide me with?
A couple of photographers, five or six fans, and two security guards. A small entourage, but you don't need a large entourage to get attention.

A fake protester making an Amanda Bynes reference. When I asked one of the protesters if they knew what they were protesting for, he told me, "It's a day to ban guns, I think."

Anyway, back to this protest. What do the signs say?
"Purge Day USA." It's all about purging the mental health problems, like, think optimistically. It's a call for optimistic thinking and to sort of... purge your bad thoughts. 

But with these signs that just say "purge day, August 21st"—what exactly is that giving to people who just drive past? I wouldn't know what that sign meant if I saw it. I would think it was something to do with the movie The Purge. 
The goal, like with any sort of demonstration on the street, is to keep people's attention. So when they get home, maybe they tell their friends about it or they look it up on their computer. Just sort of spread the word about it. 

Do you think it diminishes the impact of real protest when it's possible to hire protesters?
I think when the cause is good, and you're demonstrating over meaningful issues... What's important is the awareness, not the means. 

Say a cause you don't agree with wanted to hire protesters. For instance, some kind of company who wanted to cause huge and terrible environmental damage offered you $50,000 to gather protesters to support their cause, would you do it?
I don't want to speculate hypothetically. I would look into each individual request and see whether it's worth being involved in... We have organized protests on behalf of private businesses before. But I don't want to speak in hypotheticals. 

@JLCT

More on stickin' it to the man:

New Laws Would Make Environmental Protest “Terrorism”  

All I'm Saying Is, Give Violence a Chance  

The Brother of a Turkish Protester Murdered by the Police Speaks Out

Mishka has been running streetwear for the past ten years. It’s become a staple brand for miscreants of all stripes—from skate punks and comics nerds to hip-hop heads and ghetto-goth kids. Which is probably why it’s impossible to walk the streets of New York City without catching a glimpse of the Brooklyn-based brand’s iconic bloodshot “Keep Watch” eyeball. And by the looks of their stellar Fall 2013 collection above, even after ten years of pumping out groundbreaking streetwear, the brand still hasn’t lost any of its eclectic, “fuck off” spirit

Mikhail Bortnik founded Mishka in 2003 as a line of graphic tees. But the brand has come a long way since then. Although T-shirts remain a staple in the collections, Mishka has evolved into a full ready-to-wear line, each season pushing the envelope with more unconventional patterns and graphics.

For the fall, the brand continues to pay homage to Bortnik’s love for comic and video-game art with the new Munchies print, resembling something out of Pac-Man. They’ve also created their own take on classic patterns like leopard and camo and applied them to styles Mishka fans like myself have been in love with for years.

I went to the Mishka warehouse and design studio in Greenpoint, to sit down with man behind the lookbook video, the creative director, Ray Smiling. Ray told me all about the concept of the new collection and how to look like Bill Cosby. Enjoy!

VICE: Wow, there is a lot going on in the lookbook video.
Ray: Yeah, as you can see it’s really loud patterns for Fall. For the video, we just wanted to play into that. If we are going to have loud patterns, let’s put loud patterns on loud patterns. People don’t necessarily have to wear it like that unless you really want to stand out in a crowd.

I see there is a lot of leopard and camo going on. What was the thought process behind that?
I would say there is a vague allusion to sub-Saharan Africa. Not necessarily, the textile patterns, but the various leopard and camouflage throughout it that are very prevalent. There is also a bit of a military vibe. It is sort of a weird allusion to African dictators, but not supporting them. If you put it all together, I that is what you would look like—at least that’s what my mother would say I look like.

What were those dancers doing in the video?
They’re flex dancers, which is a style that is regional to Brooklyn. I don’t think anyone even does it outside of Manhattan. It is a very contortionist style. It takes vague elements from krumping, and puts it all together. It is very explosive, but at the same time not that many people are aware of it. Krumping had the David LaChapelle movie, Rize, to put it into prominence and styles like Jerkin N’ Jukin have all had their time in the spotlight. But for flexing, the story has not been told yet.

So how did flex dancing relate to your vision for the video?
When I was thinking about the initial concept, I wanted something very kinetic, but masculine. I didn’t want a ballet influence. I was thinking of flex and its explosiveness. I had seen the trailer for Flex is King (http://streetdancebrooklyn.com/), which is a documentary about flexing that is coming out. So we reached out to the director.

So the style of dance paired well with the concept of loud patterns in the lookbook?
Exactly. 

This video is different from the ones that you’ve done in the past.
Yeah, we used to feature musicians that we worked with in the video, but now we want to include different artists and kind of make it something that can stand on its own.

Which items are you most excited about for fall?
I really like the Rio print, which is the one with the leopards.  As well as the King Jaffe pattern, which kind of looks like something Bill Cosby would wear, after he had two kids and smoked weed—but when you put it on, you can really rock it.

Are you guys going to make a women’s lookbook for this season too?
Yeah, we are going to keep that going for every season. Obviously the men’s lookbook is our main priority, but we are going to do women’s lookbooks to show how they can style. A lot of the times, it’s like, “Oh yeah that print is cool,” but maybe you’re not a girl who wears T-shirts constantly. It shows how you can very easily take a T-shirt apart and wear it. It should drop in September. I am planning it now. 

@EricaEuse

Buy cool-punk-nerd shit from Miskhka at their web store. 

Then read more about Mishka on VICE:

May Streetwear Keep You Forever Young 

Want to Help Hurricane Sandy Victims? Buy This Mishka T-Shirt

Over the past couple of weeks almost 2,000 inmates, including “hundreds of terrorists,” have escaped from prisons in Iraq, Libya, and Pakistan. The series of ultra-violent, highly organized attacks has the US scared, al Qaeda celebrating in Iraq, and a whole load of embassy staff with a week off.

The party started with a bang. On the evening of July 21, suicide car bombs near Baghdad Central Prison (formerly known as Abu Ghraib) detonated, blasting open the gates. Military-grade mortar and rocket attacks followed and suicide-vested militiamen streamed into the prison. The assault was highly coordinated—while the apparent jihadists started freeing their brothers from Iraq’s nastiest correctional facility, others set up positions on the road outside, shooting police and security forces as they arrived on the scene.

At least 500 prisoners escaped, most of them “convicted senior members of al Qaeda” who’d been looking at death sentences, according to the Iraqi government. At least 25 cops and prison guards were killed, along with ten prisoners and six militants. At almost exactly the same time north of Baghdad, a botched escape using similar tactics killed 16 prison guards.

Fast-forward six days to al-Kwafiya prison near Benghazi, Libya. On the afternoon of July 27, while protests raged nearby, some 1,200 prisoners, most of them held on “serious” charges, and some of them supporters of Gaddafi, the country’s former dictator, escaped. Details are vague, but it seems a riot in the prison, combined with an assault from outside, allowed the prison gates to be smashed open. There’s no confirmed link between al Qaeda and the breakout, but that hasn’t stopped Interpol from hinting at one. Only a handful of prisoners have been recaptured.

Two days later in Dera Ismail Khan, central Pakistan, Taliban fighters launched another violent prison raid, attacking the city’s main jail with assault weapons, rocket-propelled grenades and mortars. Like the Baghdad attack, the Dera breakout was sudden, ruthless, and professionally executed.

Video taken by the Taliban as they broke into Bannu city jail in 2012. 

The walls of the prison fell quickly, and fighters ran inside. One used a megaphone to call for specific prisoners by name, and after a gunfight that led into the early hours of the following day, 248 prisoners had been freed. None were high-level Taliban leaders, but at least 30 were “hardened” Taliban foot soldiers. The breakout was near identical to another last year, in which 400 prisoners were freed in the nearby city of Bannu.

To get the view of someone with experience on the ground, I got in touch with James “Sky” Skylar Gerrond, a former US Air Force officer who worked in Camp Bucca, a jail in southern Iraq, from 2006 to 2007. He’d described a violent breakout as his “worst nightmare” so I asked him why. “I'm afraid that it will have a horrific effect on the levels of violence in Iraq,” he said. “July was, officially, the deadliest month in the country since 2008. I'm afraid that we are at the base of an upward trend in Iraq and that as soon as the leadership base that was in Abu Ghraib gets reestablished, there will be a new wave of sectarian violence and score settling.”

Gerrond dealt with “several” breakout attempts during his time at Bucca, meaning there was “definitely a constant threat of a violent escape.” While “some of them were so simplistic that they were almost laughable," he said, "several were amazingly well thought out and meticulously coordinated.” Luckily for him, “brute force” attempts were rare, and tunnels were the preferred option.

So it’s been an excellent couple of weeks for Islamist militants. About 30 of those who escaped from Abu Ghraib were commanders with the “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant,” a particularly nasty Sunni group responsible for a spate of recent attacks across the country, and that has ambitions across the border in Syria. The Taliban who escaped in Pakistan look likely to regroup—after the Bannu mass breakout last year, attacks on government buildings, minorities, and police increased significantly.

It wouldn’t be the first time a jailbreak has bumped terrorist activity. In 2006, 23 suspected al Qaeda members tunnelled out of a prison in Yemen’s capital, Sana’a. Among them were founding members of the terrorist group “al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,” which has since become one of the most dangerous al Qaeda franchises—its projects include the 2009 “underwear bombing” attempt, and the fundamentalist zine Inspire. The recent escapes are much, much bigger than Yemen's in 2006.

The threat is being taken seriously. The escapes seem to be at least part of the reason behind the closure of US and British embassies and consulates across the Middle East and North Africa this weekend, and the continued closure of some of them for the rest of this week. While the US government’s stated reason for the security measures is an intercepted message between terrorist leaders plotting an attack, the apparent mass of recently released terrorist fighters has played a part. Today, the US State Department urged “citizens currently living in Yemen to depart immediately," citing an "extremely high" threat level.

The big question, though, is whether the prison breaks in Pakistan, Iraq, and perhaps Libya were planned together—as veteran terrorist-watcher Daniel Drezner writes: “I'm not a big fan of conspiracy theories… but I'm fully aware of 'the Rule of Three.'" Interpol would love to know—it wants help "to determine whether any of these recent events are coordinated or linked.” The global crime-busting organization also points out that August will see the anniversaries of terrorist attacks in India, Russia, and Indonesia, and of attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. It could be a bloody month.

Ayman al-Zawahiri. 

According to al Qaeda’s burbling nut-job “leader” Ayman al-Zawahiri, in an audio recording released last weekend (though recorded in June), the next, somewhat implausible, target is Guantanamo Bay: "We pledge to God that we will spare no effort to free all our prisoners,” the recording said, going on to list a number of Gitmo inmates.

The longer-term outlook is much more serious, especially in Iraq and perhaps even the unending nightmare of the Syrian civil war. Iraqi civilian deaths have spiked heavily in 2013, amid fears of a new civil war there, and the injection of new blood into the most violent factions is unlikely to end well. The situation in Syria seems to be exacerbating the Iraqi “destabilization,” and it’s highly likely that the flow of fighters, weapons, and ideology will increase in both directions. If it turns out the Pakistan and Libya breakouts were related to Iraq, al Qaeda may be much more connected and organized than anyone realized.

Follow Alex on Twitter: @alexchitty

More on al Qaeda:

I Ate Ice Cream with a Member of the Most Feared Jihadist Group in Syria

It Don't Gitmo Better Than This: Inside Guantanamo Bay

Al Qaeda Wants Africa

WATCH – VICE Meets Clive Stafford Smith: The British Lawyer Leading the Fight for the Guantanamo Hunger Strikers

Even before I got locked up, I enjoyed reading and watching prison-centric shit, 'cause like many people I’m fascinated by the subculture of the incarcerated. I’m not quite sure why so many people either sympathize with the so-called bad guys or simply get off on watching other humans suffer, but they definitely do. Now that I’ve done some time, I realize that prison-centric entertainment usually ratchets up the absurd and outlandish aspects to the point where I can’t even relate, 'cause my experiences were so drastically different than what’s on the tube. Luckily, there’s Netflix's new show, Orange Is the New Black, based on the experiences of a woman who did a little time, so not only do we get the ridiculous entertainment that we all crave, we also get some very realistic characters going through tribulations that I can relate to as an ex-con. Shame on me for stereotyping the sexes, but the fact that this show was created by a woman and is based on the experiences of a woman means we get a lot more feelings than we usually do with prison stories. This is a good thing, though, 'cause dudes go through the same emotions in jail. I’ve seen it many times, but you won’t see it too often on the screen in the same way Orange Is the New Black captures it.

It's a damn good show, and I know this because I’ve been told so by many people. It’s even getting more love than Arrested Development, at least in my very, very small circle of friends. That has actually been making me a touch paranoid, because I don't know if everyone I see on a day-to-day basis knows my status as an ex-con. One of my bosses said the other day, “Have you seen this new show, Orange Is the New Black? It’s really good... I think you’d like it.” I was like, Oh shit, he must know, but who cares? He actually enjoys the show, which is good, 'cause the show succeeds admirably in depicting at least a few fairly normal people who got locked up over some bullshit.

The show is based on Piper Kerman’s 2011 memoir, which was about how she got caught up laundering money while she was hooking up with a lesbian heroin queenpin, then got put in the clink-clink for it a decade later. There are a bunch of similarities between her story and mine, actually: we both were living upper-middle-class lives and attending elite colleges before we decided that money, drugs, and the freedom they afforded us was a way to escape our mundanity. I think her activities were more hands-off and lasted for a shorter time than mine did, and while I was caught in the act, she unfortunately got snitched on nearly a decade later. She also did her time and then actually finished parole like a good girl, whereas I have allowed myself to get sucked back into the abyss again and again for damn near a decade.

Point is, she was a bit of an anomaly when she was inside, just like me, which gives us a little different perspective on things. The life of the character based on her reminds me of my situation in some ways. I tried to remain anonymous for the most part, but once an inmate found out I was educated or went to college, they’d usually call me “College Boy” or some such shit.

It’s very tricky to condense years of jail and prison experiences down into an hour-long episode or even a 13-hour season, but Orange Is the New Black did a phenomenal job of keeping shit relevant and realistic. I’ll give you an example: there is a game that more street people love to play on more suburban folks like myself, and a scene in OITNB captured this fantastically in a scene when a couple in Poussay and the fat black chick run up on Piper and basically say, “Yo! Run yo’ shoes!” and then when Piper steps up stone-faced like, “WHAT?!? You better back off!” the street chicks crack up like, “Hahaha! Did you see her face?” People love playing this fake-aggressive game in prison, but it doesn’t always end so friendly. It can be dangerous to play too much in jail. I’ve seen some real dumb fights over dumb shit… The show doesn’t really capture the dumb fights, and I feel like women’s prisons might have a lot of dumb, hot-headed, catty fights, but maybe I’m just being a sexist asshole…

What I dig most is the character development and the fact that everyone seems real enough to identify with. For the most part, they’re humans first and prisoners second. You can see this through the backstories we get with a handful of them. The Tricia character played by Madeline Brewer nails a certain breed often found in jail—the lost soul who is clearly a good person but got dealt a bad hand, couldn’t deal with life, and turned to drugs and all that bad stuff. This is a very common story. The whole part with the guard Mendez abusing her I don’t know about though. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of COs are scumbags, and a bunch have been convicted of abusing inmates... But cartoonishly evil COs aren’t all that common.

Pennsyltucky, the Christian fundamentalist played by Taryn Manning, is fuckin’ awesome, but at the same time basically a cartoon character, just like Mendez. At times I find her performance brilliant, but then a second later it’s over-the-top clown stuff. I will say she does represent a very real contingent in prison. The religious freaks are there, they’re crazy as hell, and there are a lot of them. One thing I noticed is that while both Mendez and Pennsyltucky pull some fucked-up shit, they also make us laugh, and at times we almost feel bad for them. Like maybe no one in this system is really at fault, and everyone might be a victim of an unfortunate reality.

I wish I wrote for this series, or something like it. I actually contacted Piper Kerman when I was filming the documentary about my life a year ago—my idea was to interview her for the movie to show another person similar to me in this war-on-drugs world. She happens to live near my neighborhood in Brooklyn and was happy to meet me and discuss how to write a book and be a successful writer but (understandably) didn’t want to be part of our movie. I was excited to meet her and figure out the best way to follow in her footsteps, but then I got locked up on some bullshit for a few months and forgot about it. I couldn’t be happier now that the show based on her life is a success—she’s an example of someone who got thrown in prison for no damn reason and got back on her feet postincarceration. Most importantly, her story is providing the world with a respectful interpretation of what happens behind bars for a lot of us. Hopefully, it will change a lot of people’s perception of what prison in the USA is really all about, and I applaud the shit out of her.

Bert Burykill is the pseudonym of our prison correspondent, who has spent time in a number of prisons in New York State. He tweets here.

Previously: Some Advice for a Sex Offender on His Way to Prison

Jody Pendarvis is a kooky southern gentleman who has built a ramshackle UFO welcome center in his backyard in rural Bowman, South Carolina. If aliens happen to land around Bowman, they'll be greeted by Jody, who claims he'll be able to talk to them, and his homemade alien spacecraft full of clutter. We recently flew down to Bowman to meet Jody and see the welcome center for ourselves.

More documentaries about UFOs and outer space:

Valley of the UFOs

Open Source Outer Space

The Space Composer

At the end of June, while a bunch of people were losing their minds listening to music and stomping around Chicago, I too was surrounded by good vibes and thousands of revelers glued to a sound system somewhere. Only, that somewhere happened to be the Silk Road Festival in the soaring Hindu Kush mountains of Afghanistan's Bamyan province, far from the drug-induced spirituality of Union Park. Thousands of Afghans, having arrived throughout the day in a stream of aging pickups and Iranian motorbikes, had filled a meadow surrounded on all sides by soaring golden mountains. Their peaks formed a convenient natural amphitheater for the day’s performances.

The festival had opened the previous night with an exclusive gala evening attended by politicians and the crème de la crème of local society. One by one they gave their addresses to an unexcited crowd in a vast conference room. Soon, however, their talks gave way to what the audience had all been waiting for: live performances from a host of local and national musicians. The melodies of their damburas—a two-stringed instrument popular in Hazara folk music—loosened up the crowd, which was gradually coerced into a frenzy that culminated in explosive cheers as Adbul Hameed Sakhizada took to the stage.

Abdul is a national superstar and winner of the phenomenally popular TV show, The Voice of Afghanistan. His performance was so energetic that even some of the heavily armed guards patrolling the auditorium couldn't fight the urge to move, the one seated to my left smashing his Kalashnikov with worrying enthusiasm against the tiled floor.

Now in its fifth year, the three-day festival was started by the Bamyan Tourist Development Board with support from the Aga Khan Foundation. The aim of the festival is to celebrate and showcase the rich culture of the region following centuries of repression. As recently as 2001, some 6,000 Hazara were massacred by the Taliban after the occupiers had already outlawed much of their expressive music and dance.

And during the festival—as some 10,000 Afghans from across the region danced on the plains surrounding the sleepy town of Bamyan—the dark, repressive days of Taliban occupation couldn't seem further away.

The energy continued well into the evening, when the crowds began to dissipate back into the hills, leaving a select few to witness an intimate acoustic performance held in a legendary ruin on top of a steep hill. Named Gholghola, or the "City of Screams," after its inhabitants were massacred by Genghis Khan, the high-domed rooms that remain in the ruined city provided excellent acoustics for the hauntingly melancholic music.

Before culminating with the grand closing ceremony, the final day provided more demonstrations of the local culture, including bizarre interpretive dance and a game of tug of war. But by far the most memorable was Buzkashi—a game played on horseback in a field without boundaries, with the headless carcass of a goat in lieu of a ball. In our match, two teams of 20 had to drop the lifeless animal into a hole dug into the field. In retrospect, it was slightly less bougie than polo.

After the match, the crowd congregated in front of a large stage for the grand finale, which mostly involved dancing to more dambura jams until a power cut plunged the crowd into darkness. But before long, the ancient diesel generators kicked back in, and with them the boom of some Persian-inspired techno to finish the festival off for good.

Follow Maximilian on Twitter: @MTIClarke

More stories from Afghanistan:

The Best Online Sex Ads Posted from Military Bases in Afghanistan

Afghanistan's Game of Drones

Afghanistan's Great Wall of Bones

Afghanistan's Combat Sport Makes Peaceful Warriors

All photos and videos coutesy Marta Franco

At this point lucha libre, Mexico’s version of professional wrestling, is famous the world over—the superheroesque masks, the muscled men preening and acting out storylines in the ring, the acrobatic aerial maneuvers. But what’s not as well-known is that the sport isn’t exclusive to dudes. Luchadoras, masked female competitors, are becoming more and more prominent in Mexico, and not just as sexy sideshows. Journalist Marta Franco followed a handful of these women through Mexico City's pro wrestling scene and used the material she gathered to create her graduate-school thesis, "Las Luchadoras," a series of videos that documents and celebrates these women’s role in lucha libre as well as their difficulties acheiving the same recognition as men.

Mexican women have been invovled in pro wrestling since the 1940s, but they were barred from competing in the county's capital until 1986. At first, many entered the ring as eye candy (they were there to "blow kisses and show off" to the crowd, one luchadora told Marta) rather than actual competitors. It's only recently that the sport has allowed women to fight men. Yet there’s still widespread discrimination despite the efforts of luchadoras and their fans. I recently sat down with Marta in San Francisco to talk about her project and what place women occupy in lucha libre.

VICE: Where did you get the idea to do this story?
Marta Franco: I'm from Spain, and we don't have lucha libre or anything like that. Everybody knows the aesthetics—the masks—but it's not something I'd seen until I moved to San Francisco, to the Mission District, two years ago. A Mexican friend of mine told me there was a lucha libre show in the neighborhood, we went, and I loved it. At another wrestling event, I heard a woman in line telling some people about her friend, who was a wrestler and a woman. That's where I started thinking, A woman? Who are these women? Where are they? How do they fit in something that, at first sight, looks like such a macho world?'

Is it tough for women to get into lucha libre?
Women have been wrestling since the beginning of the 20th century, but female wrestling was forbidden in the capital city—it was considered immoral. So women had to tour around the country to wrestle. Then, from the 90s to the 2000s, it became more popular with women and [now] there are more girls trying to make a career in the ring. But they have to accept that no matter how hard they try, they're rarely going to be the headliner at the show. They're mostly on the independent circuit because it's hard to join the bigger companies in Mexico. There's only one all-female company and it's in Monterrey. 

An academic I talked to, Alejandro Torres, says that Mexican wrestling culture is connected to the larger Mexican culture—that what you see outside of the ring influences what you see inside the ring. Women have been fighting for more rights, for a place in society, and that has happened both in Mexican society and inside the ring. Many of [the luchadoras] train with men and there are women who fight men. Some fight exoticos—wrestlers who have a gay theme.

You find people who think women shouldn't wrestle or see them not as real wrestlers but as performers who are just there to look sexy. But at the same time you'll meet people who are totally supportive and believe they should have a bigger space in wrestling. Dark Angel is one interesting example. She's a Canadian woman who moved to Mexico to make a career in wrestling. She's a very good wrestler but she also takes good care of her image as a sexy wrestler. So that made it more attractive to girls. Women being sexy in the ring is controversial because people say they aren't real wrestlers. But there's another side to that—Dark Angel said she thinks she has more advantages than disadvantages because there are so few women. They have to compete less to find a space, so it's easier to get attention from coaches and promoters.

You chose to focus on three luchadoras in particular: Lola Gonzalez, Black Fury, and Big Mama. Why did you single them out?
I thought the stories of these three women were interesting for very different reasons. Lola Gonzalez is a superstar. She's been wrestling for decades, she's been all over the world, she's got thousands of fans, and she's a very humble person. She holds men on her shoulders and does these acrobatic jumps. And she was very sexy. She started when she was 14 and after decades she's still there. That in itself is crazy.

Black Fury is not even 18 years old, and she's already been wrestling for four years. She's a very normal girl. Her dad takes her to school and goes with her to practice and makes sure that nothing bad happens to her. He's very protective of her. But at the same time she does this super intense training and goes in the ring.

Then there’s Big Mama. She is way more overweight than any woman you'd [normally] see in a ring. You’d think she can't wrestle, that she doesn't have the body for it, but instead she's becoming famous—in part, thanks to that image.

Looking back, how has your perception of luche libre and luchadoras changed during the course of this project?
I started seeing it as a sport. People will say it's staged, everything is prepared and preplanned, but the way they perform is very physical. I mean, isn't gymnastics a sport? They hit each other really hard, they train really hard, and they suffer a lot. I didn't really appreciate that until I started this project. 

People may not be aware that they are there, but female Mexican wrestlers exist, have existed for many years, and are working very hard to see their work get taken seriously and get the same recognition men get. Women arrive at an arena with their sons and then put on their outfits and go to work. They come out of the ring sore and with bruises and then travel a couple hours back home. They do it because they love it.

@gregrthomas

More on wrestling:

Female Arm Wrestling Is the Future of Feminism

Everything You Wanted to Know About Gay Wrestling

Wrestlers of the Congo

I’ve seen a few things lately. They’re all mixed up in my mind. So I figured I should just try to get them all down on paper and share them with you:

Up until last weekend, Paul McCarthy and his son Damon had a show about Snow White called WS on display at the Park Avenue Armory in New York. It was only a portion of the McCarthys’ hostile takeover of the New York art world. Their recent oeuvre has also included a huge Koons-style dog balloon at Frieze, two shows at Hauser & Wirth—one with gorgeous sculptures continuing to mine the story of Snow White—and their portion of the Rebel show we did in 2011 at MOCA in LA in which Paul played a version of Nicholas Ray, and I played a version of James Dean (and then Paul got the porn star James Deen to play me playing James Dean, which I didn’t know about until later when I finally met James Deen at a party for the show and he told me three times that it was an honor playing my dick double… but more about him later).

While the WS at the Armory closed on Sunday, the McCarthys are never done with their work and have decided to take the massive project back to their Los Angeles studio and continue to work on it. If you didn’t get to see it, you lost out. It’s a wonderful immersion into a fantasy world of Snow White of our collective imagination, but twisted so that all the sexual and formative experiences of youth and familial upbringings are brought to the forefront with the type of grotesqueness indicative of Paul McCarthy’s work, in which Paul plays a composite character based on Walt Disney and his own father, and Snow White becomes a version of the Disney character mixed with McCarthy’s mother. The characters have parties with appropriations of the dwarves (dressed in UCLA and Yale sweatshirts), get drunk, frolic, and do strange sexual things to each other. At the center of the exhibition is the immense forest the cast performed in that is now presented as a sculpture.

The James Turrell show at the Guggenheim is a very different of exhibition but not wholly unrelated to the McCarthy’s brand of immersive experience. Turrell, along with his former teacher Bob Irwin, is one of the great sculptors of light, and he has transformed the rotunda of the museum into huge, shifting crevasse of color. This show along with the companion show at LACMA are presented in order to raise awareness about the Rodin Crater project, outside of Flagstaff, Arizona, that Turrell has been working on for decades—one of the last, unfinished works of the great land-art movement of the 60s and 70s. I went there not long ago. Like the Guggenheim and LACMA shows, it uses light and our relationship to space as a way to sculpt perception via natural light, with the sky itself becoming the piece.

There is a great one-man show at the Barrow Street Theater called Buyer and Cellar, a fictional take on the strange mall that Barbra Streisand has beneath her house in Malibu. This thing is right up my alley: Michael Urie from Ugly Betty plays both an out-of-work actor who mans the empty mall, as well as a strange version of Streisand who comes down to the mall in order to bargain with her new employee over her items in her store. The relationship (both sides played by Urie) develops into one where Babs feels her imaginary life is respected by her employee, so she can indulge her fantasies with him: they dress up, rehearse for a possible movie adaptation of Gypsy, and talk about their secret feelings—well, at least about Bab’s secret feelings. Finally, things start to fall apart when the out-of-work actor’s boyfriend (also played by Urie) deconstructs Streisand’s fantasy world in a brilliant exegesis of her films and career. Of course this has more to do with fame, fantasy, entertainment, and persona than it does with the actual Streisand, and that’s what elevates it above a witty take on the idea of the public persona.

All of the aforementioned pieces engage the audience in very direct ways. In a way, they’re all like the Mark Raommaneck video of Jay-Z rapping in a gallery to one person at a time. They are designed to pull the spectator into a private space with the work. The fourth wall is torn down, or at least blurred, the exception being that all the people in the Jay-Z video were established creative types. The McCarthy, Turrell, and the play are all designed to connect with any audience.

I also recently saw a few films. The new Woody Allen movie, his take on A Streetcar Named Desire, is off-the-charts awesome. Everyone is great, but, holy fuck Andrew Dice Clay and Bobby Conavalle as different sides of Stanley Kowalski types were visions. Conavalle is the sensitive version of Stanley, actually crying when his girlfriend might leave him for a new life with her sister, and Dice Clay's playing the lug trying to make good is perfection.

I took in Frances Ha and The Canyons as a double feature—two takes on creative types trying to make it. The Baumbach film was charming and well made. It made me love New York like old Woody Allen films make you love New York. The Canyons was probably made for the same amount of money, and it made me hate LA like reality shows make me hate LA. Schrader is one of my favorite commentators on film, his book The Transcendental Style is beyond great. And as a filmmaker he is always trying to push the envelope, but The Canyons... hmmm, what to say? Not much. I guess if you’re going to cast Jean-Claude Van Damme in a film, you want him to do some martial arts. Otherwise, why cast him? And if you’re going to cast a porn star, then show us a little porn. It’s a sad film, sad on a meta level, meaning, I’m sad for the people behind the film, but I guess it wants to be sad. Still, I think Schrader comes out on top because at least he’s trying to be innovative in an age when everything is changing. 

Forty percent of Canada's petrochemical industry is packed into a 15-square-mile area in Sarnia, Ontario, called the Chemical Valley. More than 60 chemical plants and oil refineries operate there 24/7. As a result of the Chemical Valley's emissions, in 2011 the World Health Organization gave Sarnia the title of the "worst air" in all of Canada. To further complicate things, the Chemical Valley circles a First Nations reserve called Aamjiwnaang where just under 1,000 people live. The people there have been consistently reporting adverse health effects that they blame on their proximity to the massive industry that surrounds them, but the Canadian government has not stepped in to do a proper health study.

We went to visit Aamjiwnaang—a place where their own cemetery shares a fence with a desulphurization plant—to check out the situation for ourselves.

Part one of The Chemical Valley will air tomorrow on VICE.com.

More environmental disasters:

TOXIC - Garbage Island

TOXIC - America's Water Crisis

TOXIC - Amazon

As the world’s population hurtles toward an estimated 9 billion by 2050, global food shortages are becoming a very real problem. In no sector is this more apparent than the meat industry. The UN's Food and Agricultural Organization estimates that around 70 percent of all agricultural land on Earth is currently used for meat production. It also predicts the demand for meat will increase by more than two thirds in the next 40 years as the middle classes grow in newly industrialized countries in Asia and South America.

Aside from awful humanitarian and animal cruelty issues, the meat industry is thought to have a significant effect on global warming since belching, farting livestock produce huge quantities of methane—a greenhouse gas 33 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. It’s obvious that the meat industry as we know it is unsustainable, but for the vast majority of us the prospect of turning vegetarian is pretty grim. Vegetables aren’t filling, Tofurkey tastes like wet Band-Aids, and the prospect of mass-farming insects to squish into Boca burgers makes me want to sew up my mouth and anus.

Fortunately, Professor Mark Post thinks he’s come up with a way for us to save the planet and gorge until we get the meat sweats. Unfortunately, it's not all that cost effective yet.

Professor Mark Post

By harvesting muscle tissue from a living cow, Professor Post is able to cut the tissue into individual muscle cells. Each cell can then yield up to one trillion more, which will then naturally join up to form new muscle tissue. Five years and approximately $384,000 after he started, Professor Post had created the world's most expensive burger patty, ready for an unveiling and tasting ceremony in London. As the world's media descended on the presentation in Hammersmith, I went along to see if “cultured beef” really was the savior the meat industry needs.

The tasting was taking place in Riverside Studios—the former home of Brittish shows Top of the Pops and Dr. Who. When I arrived I had to line up with the rest of the media in a corridor filled with portraits of famous comedians.

The one thing I learned from this experience is that journalists love puns. I heard, "Cultured beef? Is that beef that enjoys the opera? [relentless chortling]” about ten times before we even got into the tasting room. It was enough to make the portrait of Al Murray (perhaps the least funny man to have ever been given a TV show in England) holding a giant chicken seem like the best visual gag I’d ever seen.

The event kicked off with the above informational video, which was a sort of hybrid between the science videos you watch in school and a Shark Tank pitch. Despite that, you should probably give it a watch anyway as it explains the science of cultured beef in groovy, easy to understand graphics. Also, it means I don’t have to stretch into the depths of my tenth-grade biology knowledge to try to explain how people are growing edible meat in Petri dishes nowadays.

After the video, Professor Post took to the stage and unveiled the burger. This was it—the moment we’d all been waiting for. He pulled a burger-size Petri dish from a cooler, opened it up, and there it was: a $384,000 beef patty. I’d love to say that the true significance of this moment resonated with me, but the truth is I was sitting very far away and could barely see anything. Plus, as grand in scale as the patty's prospects might be, connecting to lab-grown mincemeat on an emotional level is pretty tough.

The tasting was presented by Nina Hossain from ITV London. Here she is interviewing Richard McGeown, the chef in charge of cooking the burger. You could tell he was a little nervous about ruining it. Which is understandable, considering the burger was—pound for pound—probably the most expensive piece of food ever cooked in the history of humanity. And burning a piece of meat that's worth the kind of money that could fund the building of 50 wells in Africa isn't going to look on your CV. 

Not that Nina did much to ease his stress levels. While he was trying to concentrate on the cooking she kept bombarding him with repetitive questions that nobody really needed to know the answers to, like, “Is it cooking like a normal burger?” and, “From a chef’s point of view, is there anything different about this burger?” (In case you do need to know the answers, they were "yes" and "no.") 

It took the burger slightly longer to cook than I was expecting. Maybe Richard was cooking it on a low heat to avoid burning it as 100 people stared intently at the frying pan in front of him. Or maybe I was just really, really hungry (I was).

Anyway, as the burger was sizzling away, we were introduced to the two special guests, who—along with Professor Post—would be eating and critiquing the first-ever cultured beef burger.

The first guest to dive in was Hanni Rutzler, a food and nutritional scientist. Hanni, while perfectly pleasant, was perhaps the worst possible candidate for this job. There were around 100 journalists hungrily waiting for quotes, and the best Hanni could come up with were, "It was hotter [temperature-wise] than I expected," and—when asked what it actually tasted like—"It's a bit like cake."  

By this stage, the assorted media weren't just hungry for words, but for a bite of the burger they were all there to write about. A writer from the Huffington Post asked if just one of the assembled journalists could try it and give their feedback, but unfortunately that notion was shot down as "unfair" to everyone else. A writer from the Times yelled, "I really don't mind!" But it was no use; the dream was over.  

It all rested on the second taster, Josh Schonwald. Josh is an author, so surely he could muster at least the beginnings of the description that the entire world’s press was gagging for. “I’d put it somewhere between Bunga Burger and McDonald's,” he said, forgetting that he was in London and nobody had a clue what Bunga Burger was. “But it’s hard because I don’t know how many burgers I’ve eaten in my life without ketchup.” 

Tasting over, it was time for the Q&A. Again, many of the questions related to a more accurate description of the taste, but all we got was, “It could use salt and pepper,” from Hanni. Meanwhile, Josh—in between shamelessly plugging his book, The Taste of Tomorrow—offered up, "I feel like the fat is missing. There's a leanness to it, but the bite is like a conventional burger."

Which, again, didn't really satisfy anyone in the audience.

After resigning ourselves to the fact that we were neither going to taste the burger nor get any real quotes on what it tasted like, the press instead started asking about the future of the science behind the patty. 

Professor Post said he could envision mass production of cultured beef within 20 years and that it should, in theory, be the same price or cheaper than regular beef. He also alleviated concerns over how safe the meat is to eat, stating that it’s genetically identical to beef found in a cow and that, yes, he would let his children eat it.

Probably the most astonishing fact of the day came when he was asked if he’d given any thought to a catchier name than “cultured beef.” He said they'd had a naming competition at Maastricht University, where the research was carried out, to see if anyone could come up with something better. Seven thousand people entered, but apparently not a single one of them was “satisfying.”

-

After the Q&A session I, along with a few others, rushed toward the stage to get an up-close look at the remainder of the burger, but by the time we got there it had already been whisked away by security goons, like Nicki Minaj being led away from a mob of paparazzi.

I may have witnessed a historical moment, but as I left the tasting room I couldn’t help but feel a little let down. The whole event was to find out if the taste of beef could be replicated in the lab, and thanks to the incompetence of the tasters that’s still something we don’t really know the answer to. If I'm honest, I was also disappointed that I hadn't been able to nab a bite of it myself. But it looks like I’ll just have to wait 20 years like everybody else.

Follow Matthew on Twitter: @matthewfrancey

All photos courtesy of Maastricht University.

More fun stuff about science:

The Weird Science of North Korea

'OMNI' Magazine Will Rise Again

The US Government Is Retiring Hundreds of Chimps from Biomedical Research

Photo by Flickr User Elvez40

Here at VICE, it’s not uncommon for us to write disparagingly about the city of Los Angeles. We actually do it pretty often. Probably because most of us are sitting in the rarefied air that is the borough of Brooklyn. Not I, sir. No, I live smack in the middle of the City of Angels. I consider myself grateful for the spectacular weather, plethora of career opportunities, and crippling body image issues this town has given me. Yes, I actually like it here. Some people happen not to see things my way though.

LA Weekly, home to some of the best back-page advertisements for medical marijuana I’ve ever seen, posted a venomous screed about the “12 Most Overrated Things in Los Angeles” written by an impetuous young lad by the name of Hillel Aron. One can forgive VICE its predilection for prodding LA since it’s really just some far-off Xanadu for the vast majority of our staff. Conversely, one would assume that a publication called “LA Weekly” would be more amenable to their ever-dwindling readership that makes a home in Los Angeles.

According to his website, Hillel is actually an LA native who attended USC film school and “successfully petitioned Encyclopedia Britannica to make their entry on Los Angeles less negative.” For the foreseeable future, he’ll now be known as “the guy Dave Schilling wrote the article about.”

Wait… I mean he’ll be known as “the guy who took a huge dump on LA and got his article to go viral.” Let’s assume Mr. Aron isn’t being cynical and trolling purely for attention. I mean, that’s crazy. No internet writer does that, ever, especially not for a miniscule list spread over three pages just for the sake of extra clicks. Instead, let us suppose that he is serious about all of this so that I might indulge in a rebuttal that will end up being twice as long as the article I am referencing.

Here are the 12 most overrated things in Los Angeles, according to LA Weekly, and my well-reasoned, passionate response to each one:

Photo by Flickr User alohavictoria

12) Living downtown

Downtown Los Angeles is a wacky place where young urban professionals rub shoulders with smelly hobos, but it’s also home to the most pre-war movie houses in the world, soon to have two of the nation’s top art museums, an architecturally significant concert hall, and a Hooters. Tell me how that’s overrated.

11) Bike lanes

“Hey L.A., if you really care about cyclists, maybe pave the fucking roads once in a while?” So, does this mean you don’t want bike lanes? Are you saying they’re stupid or that you want them? I don’t follow this logic at all. Please help.

10) Tupac

Mr. Aron astutely states that Tupac is “no Biggie.” Oh, a delicious pun! It’s such a good pun that I can totally forgive him for sacrificing making a coherent point on the subject! It’s nice that we can agree on one thing though, and that’s that Tupac is, in fact, not Notorious B.I.G. They were actually two different people the whole time.

9) The Magic Castle

Apparently, it’s “a country club for nerds.” Maybe it’s time nerds had a country club! They don’t even have a fraternity anymore, so let’s cut them some slack, OK?

Photo by Flickr User Scientology Media

8) Hating on Scientologists

“But are they really that much worse than other cult members, like Christians, Jews and Mormons? Last I checked, Scientologists hadn't started any major wars, genocides or mass slaughters. Yet.” I can cite numerous reasons why Scientology deserves our scorn, and I just did.

7) "Froyo"

“Yogurt is delicious. Ice cream is delicious. Did we really need the twain to meet? Is something being gained here?” Yes, in fact much is being gained. For starters, people love froyo. I love froyo. What? Carriages were great, as were locomotives. Does that mean the personal automobile is a stupid idea? Obviously, the multi-million dollar frozen yogurt industry would beg to differ. I mean, what you said was literally moronic.

6) Pour-over coffee

“Paying six dollars for a cup of coffee? Sounds like income redistribution to me. Thank you very much, President Obama.” It’s about time we got some “topical humor” in this article. Watch out, Joel Stein, Hillel Something Something is coming for you!

Photo by Flickr User ebbandflowphotography

5) Outdoor movie screenings

“Lying on the lawn is a fundamentally uncomfortable thing to do. Chairs were invented for a reason.” People bring chairs to these screenings! Also, since when is actual human contact “overrated”? Perhaps a better path for critique could have been pointing out how these outdoor movie screenings take place in a cemetery. That’s, like, actually weirder than lying down.

4) Improv comedy

OK, he has a point here…

3) Malibu Beach

"Malibu remains the go-to beach for nearly anyone living over the poverty line." Sounds awesome, bro.

Photo by Flickr User anniemack

2) Vin Scully

Ol’ Hilly claims that the Dodgers’ play-by-play announcer, “however charming, is still only slightly more captivating than the sound of a broken humidifier.” I don’t know about you, but one of my favorite games is “Kick the 85 year-old man in the dick before he dies,” so this statement appeals to me.

1) Pink's

“Their hot dogs taste like boiled shoe leather.” Sure, maybe that’s true, but put enough ketchup, mustard, relish, and onions on shoe leather and you’ve got yourself a meal.

@dave_schilling

For more on Los Angeles being the best place ever:

Big Motherfuckin' Boobies

I Went to an Abandoned Nazi Ranch

Exploring the Interior Designs of Los Angeles Weed Clinics

Click through to the next page for more images by Margaret Durow and Brigette Bloom.

More from our 2013 Photo Issue:

Manic Botanic

Place of the Inside Out

Terram Tenebrosam