Tired of reading the same sensationalist news about how dangerous and crazy the suburbs have become, we took a camera down to the now-infamous Husby.

At first we drove around Husby, Jakobsberg, Akalla and Tensta, which were all eerily quiet. We spotted a few random people with their hoods drawn up, but the suburbs were pretty much deserted.

Some evidence of the previous night's violence had been left behind in the form of burnt-out cars.

After a couple of hours, we spotted a massive cloud of smoke on the horizon. It took us some time to find it, but eventually we traced the ominous plume to a parking lot in the centre of the suburb Rinkeby.

Gathered around five burning cars were a few hundred local residents. As we joined the crowd watching firefighters trying to put out the fire, some kids approached us asking why we had come to take photos.

"This isn't funny at all," one of them told me.

"I want to find out why this is happening and who's doing this," I explained.

"Well, whatever you do, please don't write any headlines about this being riots, because it's not."

I asked again if he had any idea of who might be doing this. His friends started laughing.

"This is just a continuation of the stuff that happened in Husby. I don't think that someone who lives in Rinkeby did this."

As they left, some other kids approached us. They also told me not to write anything negative about what I say, because the locals would never set each other's cars on fire. I asked them how they felt about the situation.

"The fire's pretty cool. But it's obviously so fucking awful at the same time," one of them told me.

Then I met Max (not his real name), a 16-year-old who lives in the neighbouring suburb Tensta. He told me he was playing football in a field nearby when he saw smoke in the sky.

"I don't like that this is happening because my friends hate the police, and I really would like to become a policeman when I grow up," he said, "but it feels like I might not be able to because of this." Next to him was an 11-year-old who lives in Rinkeby. He told me that this was the fourth time he’d stood watching cars burn.

"I mean it happens all the time, it's just now – for some reason – that the newspapers write about it."

A female police officer was trying to keep people away from the fire. Suddenly, a man started shouting at her. She told him that whatever he'd just said (which we didn't hear), he shouldn't have, because it was illegal. This did not calm the man down.

"You fucking Swedish whore!" he shouted, as others tried to chill him out.

"I'm here to protect people from the fire!" she replied, but still the guy went on acting like a dickhead, and some locals  had to drag him off.

I went to the policewoman and asked her if this kind of thing happens a lot.

"All the time," she said, looking as if she was about to burst into tears.

"So why aren't you arresting him?" I asked.

"I think he's pretty sick and doesn't feel very well. So we have to let go of that kind of thing. Especially now, when all of Stockholm is burning."

She told me she had been working non-stop since the trouble flared, and that she was getting pretty tired of it now.

"We're here to help and protect people, and then this kind of thing happens where one man is acting stupid. It makes you kind of tired."

When the fire had been put out, people gathered around the car wrecks. I asked some kids if they had seen anything or knew who might have done this. One of them told me that it was initially one car that was burning, and then it spread to the other ones. His friend interrupted him: "Don't know anything, don't see anything, don't hear anything." And so they left.

We were taking more photos when a woman approached us shouting that we should not take any photos of people in the area because they'd already taken so much shit from the media. She told us that the arson had nothing to do with riots.

People left minutes after the cars had been doused. As we went back to our car, hoping it would still be where we left it and not on fire, an older woman asked the kids out loud: "Is everything fine now?" Some teenage girls replied: "Everything has always been fine. This is nothing compared to other countries."

We got into the car, but just as we were about to leave we heard that a school in Tensta was on fire.

We arrived at the same time as some other reporters. A cop told us to be careful as the hills around the school were a perfect place for people to throw stones from. It was dark by now and the police were dressed in riot outfits. We watched as the firemen broke into the school and put the fire out. It was a bit difficult to breathe.

Suddenly all the other journalists had left. They were all equipped with police radios. We were following developments on Twitter and via online forums. It started to get late and as we went to the car we found out that the arson had now spread to the Southern suburb Älvsjö. Apparently there was a library on fire.

As we drove along the highway a fire truck passed us. We followed it into Hagsätra where two cars were on fire. We read rumours online that firefighters had been advised not to put out burning cars as it was no longer safe for them. The firefighters waited, giving us a chance to get up close to the cars. Local residents surrounded the fire and were confused because no one came to put it out. A man had brought his own fire-extinguisher. He looked really upset, but didn't feel like talking to us. We started feeling uncomfortable, like our presence and our camera were provoking people there, so we decided to leave and drive to Älvsjö instead.

Firefighters were busy finishing off their soaking of a building that housed both a library and a police station. The windows of the neighbouring bank had been smashed as well.

As we jumped into the car, the police were questioning a couple of guys in front of us. Police had confiscated two baseball bats. It was after midnight now, and as we left we spotted at least ten police vans at a parking lot. We got out of the car and found out that two people had been arrested for the library/police station fire.

The next burning thing we were destined to spend the night gazing at so it was an elementary school in the North West suburb, Kista. It took us some time to get there and we almost hit both a deer and a fox on the way. We read online that two of the school kids' turtles had died in the fire.

When we arrived the fire was under control. A few local residents were looking on with disgust. A fireman told us that this was his first fire that evening as he had just begun his shift. A guy living next to the school explained to us how tired he was of all this. "This isn't about some guy being shot by police. This isn't about suburban kids rioting. This is just a few people picking on people who are already suffering."

It was almost 3AM now, and we decided to head home. We spotted some smoke on the horizon but were unable to locate where its source. The streets were empty. The highway was dark. We had seen so much in a few hours, but the riots, and trouble-making suburban kids, must either have been one step ahead of us, or maybe there were no riots at all, just a couple of bored and prolific arsonists. 

More recent unrest:

We Photographed a Drunk EDL Hate Mob Attacking Police

Murderous Fanatics and EDL Idiots Brought Darkness to Woolwich Last Night

My Week with Hungary's Far-Right

Last week, I spoke to activist and libertarian talk show host Adam Kokesh. Less than 24 hours later he was taken into custody by federal agents.

Kokesh is a former Iraq War veteran. In 2007, he was issued a general discharge from the US Marine Corp after being photographed by the Washington Post while attending an Iraq Veterans Against the War protest in his uniform. The resulting incident made the papers and the national commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars publicly backed Kokesh, then accused the Marine Corps of trying to silence and punish members of the military for exercising their constitutional rights. This would be the first in a series of controversies surrounding Adam and his politics.

Adam's latest agenda is probably his most controversial to date. A couple of weeks ago on his talk show Adam vs The Man, Kokesh announced his plans to celebrate Independence Day by marching into the nation's capital with 10,000 followers, all of whom would be armed with loaded firearms.

Adam and I talked on the phone for nearly a half hour about, among other things, his protest, privacy and security, and his Jeffersonian values. While his motivations aren't always clear, one thing was obvious: Adam Kokesh does not like the US Government. It's not that he hates the people running the government, but he believes government has invalidated itself by betraying the principles from which it was founded. At times Kokesh sounded downright anarchistic, but overall he was more empowered by the idea that government should belong to the governed.

The day after our conversation, Adam was arrested at "Smoke Down Prohibition," a public protest for the legalisation of marijuana that takes place every month in Philadelphia. Basically, large groups of people gather in public and simultaneously spark up joints or smoke bowls of weed to protest the fact that it's illegal to do so. Also, they get high. It's not complicated. Before last Saturday, no arrests had ever been made at one of these events, despite the fact that police were always present and laws were broken every time.

There are several videos on YouTube that document the moments before and during Adam's arrest. In one of the clearest videos, Adam isn't sparking up. He continues talking into the microphone while everyone else is flicking their Bics. Within seconds, the police move in and Adam yells, “Lock arms, we’re going to make it difficult for the police here.” That didn't work out so well.

Moments later, Adam is being dragged away from the crowd by police. He doesn't appear to be committing any crime in the video. In fact, the only charges against him are for events that transpired after he was engaged by the officers: assault on a federal police officer, impeding the duties of a federal police officer, and resisting arrest. Almost immediately after being grabbed by the officers Adam's hands go up into the air, palms up, signalling that he has officially surrendered and isn't resisting arrest. No assault of any kind appears to take place.

According to Lucas Jewell, Adam's podcast manager, the arrest is in direct response to the upcoming Independence Day march, not the Smoke Down Prohibition demonstration. "They walked by a big black guy with dreads smoking a blunt and snatched Adam when he hadn't done anything illegal." The fact that Adam was originally taken to a local jail but then picked up by agents and transferred to a Federal detention facility has only fuelled this theory. 

Kokesh went before a judge at 1:30 PM Monday and was reportedly silent the entire time. According to Jewell via the Adam Kokesh Facebook page, another hearing was scheduled for this Thursday. Jewell writes: "The reason for the detention hearing is because Adam will not speak on if he owns fire arms [sic] or his address."

It's unclear if Adam will be released in time to conduct his march on DC, if it will be cancelled, or whether the arrest will inadvertently cause even more people to show up on July 4 with loaded weapons slung over their shoulders. If the arrest was indeed a preemptive strike by law enforcement attempting to stop the open carry march before it took place, the tactic of targeting Kokesh in public might very well backfire.

Here's part of my telephone interview with Adam Kokesh from Friday, May 17.

VICE: Hi Adam, thanks for talking with me. How many people have signed up to join your open carry march?
Adam:The total is over 4,000 now, so we're well on our way to meeting our goal of 10,000. There are a lot of people who have signed up by e-mail who said they're going to be organising buses. So I think with all of the support we've gotten outside of Facebook we're close to 10,000 already.

Is your protest specifically just about the 2nd Amendment or is there a broader theme behind your armed march?
It's definitely broader than that. While the 2nd amendment is an important part of how we are able to keep government in check – at least the founders intended it that way – this is really more about fundamentally altering our relationship with government and making sure that the government fears the people and not the other way around.

You allude to a famous Jefferson quote often. He said, “When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.” What exactly does that mean to you?
The people have to live in such a state that their rights are privileges because they know the government can take them away at any time; I think that's the state of fear of government that a lot of people live in today. When that's the case it's because rights are threatened. When you fear someone else it's because they are a threat to you peacefully exercising your rights. Human beings are capable of ruling their own lives and shouldn't have other people exercising authority over them in any way. But, in a situation where the government truly exists at the pleasure of the people, then the government should constantly be in fear of the people and should acknowledge that at any time anybody in government can lose their job, or, as the founders said in reference to the declaration, the people have the right to alter or abolish said government.

How do you feel about these recent public comments by President Obama: "Unfortunately you've grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that's at the root of all of our problems... They'll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices."
Well, in a way, everything he said is perfectly true because the government is not a separate entity as a product of the will of the people. In the other sense, when he says that the people who say "tyranny is around the corner," it's true that they're lying. In any sense that you'd be able to define it, tyranny is already here. If the government is corrosive and only sustainable by assertively violating your rights, I would say that it already is. I think those saying tyranny is around the corner are really the one's that are saying there is some hope left in the political system or if you just do what we say, we're going to be able to fix this or if we just believe in the conservative hype we'll be able to vote our way to liberty.

In the sense that Obama meant it, of course it was absurd that he was saying "don't worry, everything is OK." It's an insult to the intelligence of his audience to suggest they don't know better.

Some people say the notion that the 2nd Amendment is in jeopardy is just a weapon of mass distraction; that gun control is just the next divisive topic to help Democrats and Republicans continue to appear different on the issues now that the polls have shifted on gay marriage. Do you agree with that?
I think most Republicans don't have any credibility when it comes to claiming that they're different from Democrats. The gun control debate is a little more significant than the gay marriage debate. I understand it could be a distraction from the real exploitation that the federal government represents but it's so much more fundamentally important because it deals with the nature of government as a violent monopoly. If you challenge that monopoly they don't like it. There's often a negative reaction and they arrest people illegally, as we've seen in Ohio, in Texas, and events all over the country where people are openly carrying legally and end up getting arrested, accosted, and sometimes assaulted by police officers. So, we're using the gun control to speak to something that goes a lot deeper.

Do you think gun control arguments politicise tragic events such as the Newtown shooting or are the debates necessary?
I think it's necessary to quell the knee-jerk reaction of those who would turn to government to attempt to solve problems, but that's why those conversations happen. Whenever there is a tragedy the government seeks to exploit it. You know, never let a good crisis go to waste. So, I think it's important that we fight back and resist that when there is such a tragedy and this is one way of doing it.

While we're on the topic of politics and guns, do you think the tens of millions of dollars spent by groups like the NRA place the value of the money above our influence as individual citizens on the political process?
I think, really, the problem of money's influence on politics isn't the money that is used to communicate ideas for whatever reason. The problem is that people are willing to vote without thinking. In a sense, voting is an act of aggression because you are saying that if I happen to have the majority when I cast this ballot, it's legitimate for the government to force my will on you; to name a leader for you that has certain policies that you may or may not agree with. To impose a tax on you or pass a law that is going to be forced on you. As long as people believe that somehow voting is appropriate as a way to organise society through force, then we're going to have a problem with influence from various places that are going to try to effect how people vote and who the guns of government are pointed at. I think that's a much deeper problem.

Is privacy the civil rights issue of our generation?
That's a good question. I think it's a very important issue as we see our lives fundamentally altered by technology. I think, in a way, technology provides great mechanisms of accountability. I'm not against surveillance, in a sense. I'm looking forward to having a camera mounted in my contact lens. It's really just a matter of who's controlling it, who is doing what with that data, and who is accessing it for what purposes. But I think privacy is going to become something that we're also empowered by technologically to create for ourselves if we need to. The problem is when you have this technology in the hands of government.

The information we're talking about when we talk about privacy... we're talking about the NSA recording every single digital phone call that takes place in the United States. Every single one. And we found that out unequivocally after the Boston bombing when it was revealed that the FBI was going to “find these conversations.” And you're like... there it is. The question is, who controls this information? Should it be a gang of violent thugs in our government? Absolutely not. But should we have that record? Should it exist? I think so.

It was recently revealed that the Justice Department obtained the telephone records of journalists working at the Associated Press. You're a member of the media, you have your own show. Do you feel this is an all-out assault on the 1st Amendment?
Do I think it's an assault against the 1st Amendment or is it just more intimidation? I don't know, because when I heard about that story and it was the Associated Press that was being targeted, I was definitely surprised. What happened to the AP is not unique to journalists, it's the entire American public. I think we all are threatened by this and we should be worried if it turns out that the government is targeting and influencing journalists – I think that the record is clear now that they have. Is it an assault on the 1st Amendment? The 1st Amendment is a bunch of words on paper. The assault is on individuals and their privacy. All of these transgressions just demonstrate how illegitimate this government is. If there is such a thing as legitimate government, this is not it.

Going back to your protest on July 4th, if the police chief does amass a police presence on the Arlington Memorial Bridge to prevent your demonstration from entering DC, how will you react?
If there is a line drawn then we will march up to that line and we will request permission to pass. If denied, then we'll take our grounds for a lawsuit with us and turn around peacefully.

Thanks for taking the time, Adam.

Follow Dell on Twitter: @dellcam

For more about government:

Why I'm Anti-Big Government, and Why Taxes Should Be Made Illegal

Helping the Malaysian Government Find Gays on Grindr

DAVID BOWIE STILL GOT IT

David Bowie is one of those people who you’d imagine would look amazing wearing anything – a rubber ring, some gloves and some toothpaste, for example. But apparently as a gawky 17-year-old boy, things were different. Bowie was allegedly the founder of The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-Haired Men, (it’s not exactly as cool as S.C.U.M is it?) complaining “It’s not nice when people call you darling and that.” Still, people kept calling him darling, and he stopped minding so much, and now the V&A are exhibiting his stage costumes alongside a retrospective of his career including handwritten lyrics, drawings, photos, his instruments and set designs. It opens today and as with almost all V&A exhibits, it’s looks great.

MARY BENSON

We love Mary Benson and her glitterball jackets, so we caught up with her to discuss the latest collection. Rave totally isn't dead.

VICE: What inspired this collection?
Mary Benson: I was influenced by Pre-Rapaelites and the illuminated decorations of stained glass windows. I wanted to use these in my print designs using holographics, metallics neons and pastel colours and just mess it up make it a bit mad really have fun with it. I really wanted to make a jacket with Yorkshire on the back. I've been wanting one for ages and it worked with this collection because of the scrolls. The whole idea is to have them personalised so people can order one with their name on - or can just rep where they are from!!

Who would you like to see wearing your clothes?
Kelis, Gwen Stefani, Mariah!! would be ace to make a christening outfit for Kanye and his new baby. But might not be appropriate actually!!

So... What are the metallic bits made of?
Secret recipe!! !!

What song best sums up this collection?
100%..... Mariah Carey ft. O.D.B - Fantasy
Listened to this tune about 300 times while making the collection! Still not sick of it!

Thanks Mary!

ABERCROMBIE & FITCH LOVE TOPLESS MODELS (OBVIOUSLY)

Abercrombie are celebrating, or have been for a while now, the array of hunks they travel all over the world to collect. You may know them as the horribly embarassing ever smiling guys that smell like the inside of a West End club toilet, but apparently being selected as a "Greeter" is actually something of a big deal, in the tiny, irrelevant circles that Abercrombie and Fitch move in, anyway. Scooping up dull, smiley, ripped guys from SU bars and fraternity vs. sorority beach volleyball games (or whatever they do), they’ve created a web series delving into the lives of their floor and door models. If you want to laugh and feel a bit sick at the same time, watch the vid. It's a bank holiday, I bet you watch this hungover on Monday, it's like 100 cruel and hilarious treats, blended into one short video.

ALL SAINTS MADE A FILM ABOUT NASHVILLE

AllSaints Film - New Music City from AllSaints on Vimeo.

This week All Saints launched New Music City, a documentary about the Nashville music scene, produced with none other than Kings of Leon, in conjunction with their independent record label Serpents and Snakes. The film (watch it, then I won't have to describe it, dumbs) features exclusive footage from the All Saints stage at SWSX, which will make you wish even more that you'd been there. To celebrate, the Earlham Street branch of the store is playing host to a whole bunch of cinema seats ripped straight out of a theatre in NAshville (Buffalo 66 style) and has been screening the film around the clock since its launch of Tuesday. All of the film releases can be viewed here.

Follow Bertie on Twitter: @BertieBrandes

Previously – Pristine Trainers Won't Fare Well in Your Disgusting Handbag

George came into my life five years ago, during a trip to Coney Island shortly after I had moved to New York. I was 18, painfully awkward, and having trouble making friends – especially with people my own age. He approached me on the boardwalk and asked me to help bury him in the sand. 

Living on a disability pension, George is ill and has a huge scar on the side of his body from surgery. He is in constant pain, but for whatever reason, the pressure of being buried in the sand or walked on gives him temporary relief. After I dug him out of the sand, I followed him back to his apartment, and we’ve hung out together ever since: taking pictures, getting wheatgrass shots, going to the park, stuff like that.

Obviously, George has a lot of problems to overcome on a daily basis, but he is also capable of an incredible lightness. Like many other friends I met during this transient period in my life, I haven’t seen him in a while, but every so often, mostly on holidays, he’ll call just to say hi.

Like looking at pictures? Check these out:

Portland, Oregon, Is a Paradise

Patrick O'Dell's Skateboard High School

Syria's Refugees Are Wedged Between Hells

I had forgotten how much I love airports. Their soothing non-placeness. Where you can accidentally spend 50 pounds because it isn't real, it's an interzone. The way they always feel like someone you've met before but you can't quite remember their name. Like somebody you maybe even once loved, before they were put through a witness protection programme and a surgeon removed all identifying features from their face. Their face is a clear plastic mask now. I like it there. It's 8.30PM and there is one man in Pret a Manger, slowly paying by credit card for something cold. He has nice grey hair. Oh look, it's George Lamb.

The man on my row of the plane is smart, chiselled, says he goes to university in America, but lives with his brother in West London. He's carrying a hardback book, a baseball cap, a transatlantic accent and a future. The woman is a singer with some meetings to attend, she says. She says she met Rihanna's A&R once and didn't even know it was him, can you believe it, I can't believe it, can you believe it. She just listens to Bob Marley all day to make it all OK. "He was a Aquarius too, just like me. What are you, a Libra?"

He says he's a Virgo. She warns him not to be self-deprecating as Virgoans can really risk letting themselves down like that. He smiles his million-dollar smile and promises to try. Then the plane starts swaying as if we're starting the descent early. "What's wrong?" she says, taking his hand again, she just met him, what time is it, she's grabbing his watch, why are we going down early she wants to know this isn't the right time. "We're just experiencing a bit of turbulence," announces the captain. "Is everything OK?" she asks the man again. "Is everything OK?" she asks again, like a toddler. He doesn't answer her this time. "Is everything OK?" she asks other people on the plane. Yes, they nod. "Can I have some more wine?" she asks a passing steward. "Not now, no," they say.

For someone with so much faith in the stars, this girl is quite frightened of the sky.

Finally the man speaks again. "I hate Chris Brown," he says. "Oh, that's because he's poison! Sheer poison!" she replies. "Just like my boyfriend!" she says. Then the turbulence comes back. She reaches for his hand again but he has folded his arms so she pushes her hand down hard into her own thigh.

"I so need the toilet," she says later, "but I would never ever go to that toilet for a million pounds." I've never met a germophobe who was happy. It takes lot of energy to constantly remind yourself that danger lurks all around in the form of microscopic bacteria, invisible to the naked eye. Out to get your fingers and buttocks and kidneys at every turn. The unseen illnesses of everybody else. It exhausts me even to think about it. Germs are my friends.

"I really like Haim at the moment," she says. "They're three girls, on basses," she says, and mimes strumming a bass. "I'm a singer but I grew up listening to cheesy R&B, it's in my blood. And house music."

"House music's quite hard to do, isn't it?" asks the man whose life will never, ever go wrong. "House music is the easiest thing in the world to do!" she says. "You just take a line and sing it five times. So you go, 'I've been waiting all night so that you love me, so that you need me, so that you love me, so that you need me, so that you love me, so that you need me,' that's it, five times. Now you know how to sing house music!"

Outside the window, I look at the clouds, the sky is bleeding red like a raspberry ripple. I had forgotten the cast of casualties that populate Ibiza. I only ever remember the good bits but then you come back and here they are on the plane. Scared people, like her. Old ravers with sleeveless T-shirts, big beefy Ibeefa arms, tattoos that speak of legends past, civilisations already conquered. Their nostrils are on assisted living. Their suntans have got other families of suntans to support. Their freckles have joined the dots. The men's beer guts are kept in check by the constant threat of nudity, while their wives' eyebrows are committing bigamy. The beat keeps them going like a pacemaker. Maybe I'm an old raver now, too. The men in the row in front of us seem a bit smarter, bit more on the ball. One of them is putting his reading glasses on, having borrowed a book from his friend. The book is Rod Stewart's autobiography. Oh look, the man is Fatboy Slim.

The next night, I'm on the battlements of an old fort in Ibiza Town. It's 7PM and the sun is still warm but wait, is that the moon over there, as thin as an outline of paper? The vodka limon is sweet, tell yourself the sweetness comes from the fruit trees that cluster all round the island, and not a chemical lab. Down the hill in the white houses that all pile onto the hill, a woman is holding a baby like a bag of rubbish being taken out. She's talking happily to a policeman. Evening sunshine makes you rich.

Where I'm standing, the warm-up DJs are playing endless house. Endless, endless, house. Electric bongos, that's how it sounds. Repetitive beats that only tease out a vague glimpse of melody every ten minutes or so, just to remind you that pleasures less hard-won than this exist. They call us the generation of instant gratification but this kind of house music makes you wait so long that when the tune finally comes in, it's like the singer's decided to fake an orgasm just to move things along a bit. Like the girl on the plane said, the same thing sung five times. It reminds me a bit of a British man I once met in Hong Kong who said he'd been living on a beach in Thailand with a prostitute for a month.

He said the first time it's alright, then you buy them some food, rent a beach hut for the month, move them in with you. The second night they do it with a bit more feeling and you buy them some more food. You smoke some weed together and each day they do it a bit more, you know. "You know!" He was working on a construction site in Hong Kong, on one of the new shining towers of finance that was going up. The palaces of international banking, scaffolding made from bamboo, workers used to fall from it and die all the time until they banned it. He was saving up on this building job for a few months and then he'd be back to Thailand, back to the beach, hiring another girl and smoking some more weed, once more with feeling.

The girl on the plane got led away at the airport by a man who said he felt responsible for her because he was in the same industry. He said he wanted to look after her. He had a nice smile. I hope she was OK.

Follow Sophie on Twitter: @heawood

Previously – I Went to the Top of the Shard and Felt Feelings

NEWS

The Wizard of the Saddle Rides Again

Is a Park in Memphis, Tennessee, the Epitome of Racism in Modern America? The KKK Say It’s Just History, Many Others Disagree  

By Rocco Castoro

A cross-lighting ceremony that took place near Tupelo, Mississippi, in late March following a Ku Klux Klan rally in Memphis, Tennessee, that was organized to protest the renaming of three parks in the city built in honor of the Confederacy. It is a “cross lighting,” not “cross burning,” because these Klansmen “do not burn, but light the cross to signify that Christ is the light of the world.” Photo by Robert King.

I

n the middle of an unkempt park in Memphis, Tennessee, stands an oversize bronze statue of a Confederate lieutenant general astride his mount. Its subject, Nathan Bedford Forrest, is considered by some to be one of the most infamous and powerful racists in American history. The first official leader of the Ku Klux Klan, some historians allege that Lieutenant General Forrest’s most heinous act was ordering his troops to slaughter hundreds of surrendered soldiers at 1864’s Battle of Fort Pillow, more than half of whom were African American. Others celebrate him as the physical manifestation of the South’s ethos during the Civil War and beyond: a rebel hero who relentlessly campaigned for his cause until it became untenable; he never gave up, even after his death.

Unveiled in 1905, the Memphis News-Scimitar reported that the masterfully sculpted monument to Nathan Bedford Forrest (or NBF) would “stand for ages as the emblem of a standard of virtue.” And today it seems the newspaper’s prophecy was correct, except for perhaps the “virtue” part. As of 2013, “that devil Forrest,” as he was infamously nicknamed by Union General William T. Sherman, is still sprinting across a Tennessee ridge on his stallion, kicking up dust in a city with historically tense racial relations. 

Pink granite tiles and modest bronze headstones that look like plaques skirt the sculpture. General Forrest and his wife, Mary Ann Montgomery, are buried underneath. NBF’s more celebrated moniker, at least in some circles, is the “Wizard of the Saddle,” a nickname he earned for his wondrous equestrian talents in battle, and one that calls to mind the highest modern-day rank of the KKK—the Imperial Wizard. 

The latest controversy surrounding the park and statue came to a head in early February, when the Memphis City Council unanimously voted to change the name of Forrest Park to Health Sciences Park (at least temporarily; a special commission is still in the process of deciding its final name as of press time), in line with the downtown medical-student facilities of the University of Tennessee that surround it. Two other Memphis parks—Confederate Park and Jefferson Davis Park, named after the president of the Confederacy—were also renamed by the City Council, with the reasoning that they were publicly funded reminders of an era that could be considered offensive and unwelcoming to the majority of the city’s residents, 63 percent of whom are African American according to the 2010 census. 

Shortly after the City Council’s decision, a man identifying himself as Exalted Cyclops Edward announced that his chapter of the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan was planning a massive rally to protest the renaming of the three parks. “It’s not going to be 20 or 30,” he told local NBC affiliate WMC-TV. “It’s going to be thousands of Klansmen from the whole United States coming to Memphis, Tennessee.” Later  in the month the city granted the Loyal White Knights a permit for a public rally to be held March 30 on the steps of the county courthouse in downtown Memphis, one day before Easter and five days before the 45th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination at the Lorraine Motel.  

It was an eerily familiar scenario for Memphians. On January 17, 1998, around 50 members of the KKK held a rally at the very same courthouse in what they claimed was an attempt to protect their “heritage” in the lead-up to MLK Day and that year’s 30th anniversary of his assassination. Outnumbered by counterprotesters, the Klan’s vitriolic screeds incited a small riot that resulted in looting and the ill-prepared police force teargassing the entire crowd. 

One Memphian and self-proclaimed member of the Grape Street Crips seemed to take the Klan’s threats to return to his city very seriously. Following the announcement of the planned rally, 20-year-old DaJuan Horton posted a video on YouTube in which he states that he’s organizing a consortium of local gangs—some rivals—to unify and show their discontent on the day of the rally. Local and national media suddenly became very interested in the impending event, whipping a diverse cross-section of the city into a frenzy.

“They gonna come to Memphis, Tennessee… where Martin Luther King got gunned down,” DaJuan says in the video. “You’re going to come here and rally deep—really, really deep, in my language, just to talk? No, it’s not gonna happen like that. When you come to Memphis, Tennessee, we’re gonna rally right across from you, and it’s gonna be Young Mob, Crips, Bloods, GDs, Vice Lords, Goon Squad… I’m getting on the phone with them daily. I’m talking to the big guys, the big kahunas. I’m talking to the Bill Gates of the gang wars. You come to Memphis, we’re going to be waiting on you. It’s versatile down here. We got every gang you can think of; we’ve got the fucking Mob down here. Bring your ass on.” 

Had the City Council’s decision to rename the park sparked a potential showdown with what many law enforcement agencies consider America’s oldest terrorist organization and a mega-alliance of the country’s most violent gangs? Or was the Klan struggling to retain relevancy in an era when race relations have progressed so much that the US has elected a black president twice over? I traveled to Memphis about a week before the rally to meet everyone involved and find out. 

Continue reading on page two.

(Thanks Charlie for the tip-off)

The incident: Some kids threw some water balloons.

The appropriate response: Nothin'

The actual response: A mini riot broke out and 8 people were arrested. 

Last Thursday, school officials at Enloe High School in Raleigh, North Carolina heard rumours that students were planning a prank.

As a precaution they alerted local police, who sent several officers to wait on campus in case anything happened. 

The prank turned out to be a group of 16 and 17-year-old students having a water balloon fight. 

The police, heroically, stepped in to break up the fun by violently throwing several teens to the ground. 

A 15-year-old student named Jahbriel Morris, who was not one of the kids throwing water balloons, had to be treated in hospital for cuts and bruises that he received as a result of being thrown to the floor by a police officer, who then smashed his head into the ground "at least two times".

Kevin Hines, the father of a student at the school, arrived to pick his son up and witnessed the officer slamming Jahbriel to the ground. When he attempted to intervene, he was asked to leave the property. When he instead tried to go to the principal's office to talk with him, he was arrested for second-degree trespassing. 

He's not the only one who was arrested. A total of 7 water-balloon-throwing students were taken in by police and charged. 6 of them with disorderly conduct, and 1 with assault and battery for throwing a water balloon at a security guard. 

There were rumours on Twitter that the balloons may have contained urine or bleach, but a school spokesperson said that, from what they could tell, they only contained water. 

Everyone who was arrested is currently out on bail. 

:(

Cry-Baby #2: Gary Cole

(story via/image via)

The incident: A man came up with the idea for taco shells made of Doritos before Taco Bell started selling them. 

The appropriate response: Nothing. Every single stoned person ever has also had that idea. 

The actual response: He is suing Taco Bell.

Gary Cole, who has been an inmate of Colorado's ADX Florence prison since 1997, claims that he had the idea for Doritos Locos Tacos in 2006, several years before Taco Bell started selling them.

Gary is part of the way through a 25-year sentence he was given for “delaying interstate commerce, conspiring to do so, and using and carrying a firearm in relation to a crime of violence" – I don't know what that means, but it sounds pretty bad. 

He claims that, back in 2006, he sent a notified letter to his lawyer containing several ideas for a brand he invented called "Divas and Ballers." These ideas included "hot sauce, body oil, clothing line, and shoes and accessories." But also, crucially, “Tacos shells of all flavours (made of Doritos).”

In his complaint to the court, Gary, who is representing himself (oh dear), claims that the letter must have been stolen through the US Postal Service and submitted to Taco Bell. 

Gary contacted the FBI, and also sent a Freedom of Information Act request to Taco Bell, asking to be sent any documents relating to the invention of their Doritos Locos Taco shells. Taco Bell didn't respond to the request, because they're a fucking fast food chain and why would they?

Gary didn't specify the amount of money he wanted in his complaint, but did ask the court to place “a lean and moratorium on Taco Bell, Frito Lays, Pepsi Co, Yum Brands, et al. for the fraudulent and concealment, theft, lying, and covering up, to violate patent and trademark, invention and United States Constitutional Rights, to steal the taco shells made of Doritos of all flavors" (all sic, obv.)

Holy shit people must get bored in prison. 

Which of this lot do you think is the bigger cry-baby? Don't keep that shit to yourself, tell us about it in this poll right here:

Previously: A guy who destroyed his neighbourhood Vs. some guys who arrested a kid for mooning.

Winner: The guys who hate mooning!!!

Follow Jamie on Twitter: @JLCT

It’s been a while since anything besides people and their weapons seemed dangerous in America. There’s a lot of attention – and a great deal of money – spent on determining where the next physical threat is, and how that threat is going to kill us, but when it comes to protecting our minds from dirty things our stance is about as liberal as it gets. Profanity, outside of mildly offending someone’s taste, seems nearly impossible. Compared to places where you can be killed for speaking out or using sacrilegious images, this freedom is a good thing, right?

I’m not so sure.

I kind of miss the idea of cultural lines that one can’t step over. One of my most memorable high school experiences was getting a permission slip signed by my parents so I could listen to an audiotape of Allen Ginsberg reading “America.” Our teacher warned us it included vulgar language and homosexuality and drugs. Something about having to break a permissive barrier to gain access to that material grabbed my teenage attention more than any of the other stuff we were made to read that year – much of which I’ve long forgotten even the most basic elements of.

But “America” stands out in my mind. And not even because I think it’s a particularly great poem, but because in some way I felt being allowed to hear it was a privilege. Before then, my reading had been waning. I was a voracious book-face child until somewhere during middle or high school, when I became terribly bored with what I was assigned. But even my 16-year-old brain could tell there was something much more volatile under the surface of “America.” From there I set off on my own, first to Burroughs and Henry Miller, and eventually to Joyce, McCarthy, etc. It took a sort of brain bomb to get me going, but once I’d started I couldn’t stop.

Looking over a list of the banned and challenged books in US history, it’s impossible to argue that some of our most important works weren’t at one point considered wrong:

Moby Dick – Banned from English classes in Texas in 1851 because it “conflicted with community values.” Plus, think of how many kids in school must be making dick jokes every time it’s taught.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Called “trash and suitable only for the slums.” Not to mention depicted race in a way that many people today wish they could forget.

The Great Gatsby – Teachers fired for teaching it; labelled “anti-white” and “obscene”; “blasphemous and undermines morality.”

The Grapes of Wrath – Pissed off a buttload of Christians because it contains the phrase “god damn.”

Ulysses – Burned and banned for more than a decade, despite how the so-called “sexy” scenes in the book are so disfigured by their own language most readers wouldn’t be able to know what’s going on.

A Clockwork Orange – One bookseller in Utah was actually arrested for selling the book, then forced to relocate his store to another city even after the charges were dropped.

The list goes on and on, including books like The Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Lord of the Flies, Catch-22, Brave New World, Animal Farm, As I Lay Dying, Beloved, Invisible Man, Native Son, Slaughterhouse Five, The Jungle, Naked Lunch, The Naked and the Dead, Tropic of Cancer… Oh just go here.

It’s hard to imagine an American lit class today without those titles, right? They’ve all become so central to our literary understanding that looking back one can’t understand why they’d been called sick. And while all are important works and well constructed and important, I also can’t help but wonder if a part – even a large part – of why these books were and continue to be touted has to do with their censorship and the interest built around what could cause such a reaction, as well as the acts of preservation spurred by their suppression.

These books don’t seem dangerous now because they’ve been accepted – we have fought for them, made them ours. A thing once called profane is now a benchmark; and that’s good. It keeps us moving. It makes us aware of where we are.

So why shouldn’t we ban more stuff? How much music did the RIAA end up selling because people wanted what the cops considered bullshit? You know you never would have heard about 2 Live Crew if it weren’t for all the old ladies trying to smash it. If there’s any way weird art and fucked up text can find a glory hole into a growing young person’s brain, it’s through authority figures telling them they can’t have it. That approach works wonders compared to trying to convince anyone anything is worth their time.

I guess what I’m getting at here is that there has never been a better time to start censoring art in America. As you can see by the works listed above, the stuff we ban doesn’t even have to actually be profane – most anything could offend someone somewhere given the proper context and fuel. Make people afraid of what William Vollmann is going to say next; what damage to reality Ben Marcus has up his brain-sleeve; how hard Kelly Link is going to screw our idea of what we are. Let’s make someone scared about a sentence or a song or an image composed by someone who never leaves the house or might want to actually hurt another person. Even if it doesn’t change anything, it’d be fun to watch people burning inert objects in the streets again, screaming about God. 

Follow Blake on Twitter: @blakebutler

Previously – Tupac, Neck Braces and Suicide: An Interview with Harmony Korine

Over the course of the past week, rioters from the largely immigrant suburb of Husby, in Stockholm, have been beating on police officers, hurling rocks through windows and setting cars ablaze. The riots have been linked to the May 13 shooting of a 69-year-old man who had locked himself in his Husby apartment and waved a machete at police when they tried to calm him down. Swedish police fired a shot in an attempt to chill him out, but when the man continued to threaten them with the knife, they shot him to death. At the time of writing, it’s not entirely clear if kids have just realised that setting cars on fire gets them attention, or if they’re actually mad at the whole system in general. The scary part is that the riots have moved from Stockholm to the southern parts of Sweden, like Malmö, where two cars were set on fire on Wednesday.

Riots have also continued to emerge in a total of 15 Stockholm suburbs and police are worried that the situation is only going to get worse. What with all the violence and rebellion going on, we had a poke around in Sweden to try and work out how the public were feeling.
 

Andersson, 25, Photographer: Stockholm is really fucking segregated, and it’s been getting worse in the last five years. It's a good thing that Husby is burning.

How would you feel if your car was set on fire?
I wouldn't care if it was for the right cause.
 

Sumaya, 21, Massage-therapist: Riots? I just got back from Spain yesterday so I don't really know what's been going on.

Kids are pissed off in Husby because police has allegedly killed a man, so they are rioting and setting cars on fire.
Oh yeah, I heard about the cars. I understand that they're angry, but it's not the best way for the kids to get their voices heard.




Diego, 30, Singer: It's probably not the best way to express your feelings, but I do understand them.

What do you think will happen now?
I think it's going to calm down in a few days.

What do you think will happen to the people involved?
Well, that depends on what they've been up to. I think the rioters are barking up the wrong tree. But I really do understand them in a way.




Lisa, 17, Student: I don't really know that much about this.

Really? You too? *skip to after having explained*
Well, it’s wrong that civilians’ property gets destroyed, but still, I can see why they are pissed off.




David, 36, Waiter: I lived in London during the riots there, and I hated it. I think it’s fucking terrible.

Do you think the same thing will happen in Stockholm as it did in London?
Gosh, I really hope it won't. Riots like these are disgusting.




Manna, 27, Cook: Such a boring question! It’s a good thing, I was a riot kid in my teens.

Are you going to join the riots if they continue?
No, I'm not a teenager anymore.

Keep the spirit alive.

Previously – What's the Strangest Thing You've Seen Someone Do in Public?

Punk rock was never meant to gain municipal recognition, but with time it often occurs that what was once rebellion becomes part of the establishment. Joe Strummer of the Clash has been no stranger to public acknowledgement, and yesterday the city of Granada, Spain, named a plaza in his honour.

Sitting in the Plaza de Carmen waiting for my contact from the Granada City Council to take me to the plaque unveiling what is now known as Placeta de Joe Strummer, I thought about how much dissension there was once in Portland, Oregon, when they tried to rename a street after the renowned Latino American civil rights activist Caesar Chavez. In Granada, memorialising Strummer seemed to meet with no opposition – in fact, it was being viewed as a moment of great importance.

Prior to his death in 2002, Strummer was a frequent visitor to Granada. He first came in the 1970s with Slits drummer Palmolive, his girlfriend at the time. He would later immortalise the city in the classic 1979 song "Spanish Bombs" in which he referred to the city as his corazon and paid homage to the famous Granadino poet Frederico Garcia Lorca. Over the years he could be spotted rollicking through the Albayzin neighborhood. His daughters said they would join their father on his all night pub crawls as he worked his way from bar to bar collecting a Pied Piper crew of drinking companions. The idea for the tribute to Strummer dates back from late 2011 when local residents launched a Facebook campaign trying to lobby the city to name a square after him. In the end thousands of residents and a number of local political groups – including conservative city council members working in tandem with socialist unions – petitioned to make it so, and Placeta de Strummer became a reality.

Placeta de Strummer is situated in a quiet neighbourhood called the Realejo, just outside the red walls of the Alhambra castle. It is a smallish, dirt-covered square with a few pine trees and a drinking fountain carved in stone. There is a breathtaking view of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Just below this vista there is a large mural depicting Strummer's face – it was in this little square where his family and friends along with hundreds of residents and fans gathered to say a few words and have a bit of fun in his honour.

The evening began with a speech by Marcia Farquhar, a friend of Strummer's. She spoke about how much the "extraordinary leader of lost boys and lost girls" loved Granada and Spain. This was followed by a few words from his widow Lucinda Garland, who reiterated his appreciation for the city and its people. Looking on were his daughters Jazz and Lola, as well as Richard Dudanski of Strummer's pre-Clash band the 101ers and Public Image Ltd. 

Following the unveiling of the plaque, there was music and revelry. The air filled with the undeniable scent of marijuana and bottles of wine circulated through the crowd as it was regaled by a Clash cover band made up of members from the Spanish band 091 (for whom Strummer had produced an album and worked with extensively), his old backup band the Mescaleros, and Jem Finer of the Pogues.

A slew of Clash classics rang out into the night, including "Spanish Bombs", "London Calling" and "Guns of Brixton.” Passersby were drawn into the festivity as smiling neighbours looked on from windows and balconies. Undoubtedly the celebrations were loud, but things are always loud in Granada – perhaps that's one of the reasons Strummer was drawn here in the first place.

It is an interesting moment for one of the great chiefs of punk music to garner such a recognition in Spain. Street demonstrations have been rocking the country on a regular basis, and youth unemployment has reached an insufferable nadir. Benefits are being steadily cut to the lower-classes, people are being turned out of their homes, and a number of provinces are renewing their calls for independence – could there be a more fertile atmosphere for the sound of rebellion?

Read more:

Let's All Argue About Punk Rock

Karachi's Best Hip Hop Has Barely Been Heard

Is This Really What Rock and Roll Has Become?

On a Tuesday night, the Music Hall theatre in Beverly Hills was seemingly empty. I arrived an hour early for the 10 PM screening of Leviathan. I walked in thinking it was a poetic documentary about the lives of deep-sea fishermen.

Before the movie I sat in the lobby and read Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter. At some point, a huge crowd of Israeli women filed in and overpowered the Daft Punk emanating from my headphones. Must have been a special screening. It was then I noticed a poster for the LA Jewish Film Festival depicting a bunch of director’s chairs arranged like the Star of David. Underneath it read a different kind of star.

My companion arrived at 10. We entered the all-but-empty theatre and sat in the back because I always sit in the back. The film started with an appropriately weighty epigraph from the Book of Job, something about the hoary deep. I was already sold.

I’m the biggest Moby Dick fan ever, and here was a movie that relies on biblical-level pretensions while capturing the fishing life with an unblinking gaze. It’s modern-day Melville, at least the non-narrative chapters that relate the whaling life through non-fictional accounts and facts.

One of the most salient aspects of the film was its camerawork. I haven’t looked into how they filmed it, but it seems as if they attached a bunch of small GoPro cameras to every part of the ship – including the heads of fishermen, the underwater nets, and possibly even seagulls (my guess is they didn’t actually do this, but it sure seems like it). It begins in darkness and then gradually transitions into a frenetic exploration of the environment, both above and below the water, and above and below deck. The early shots must have been shot by a camera attached to one of the fishermen, because the frame jolts around with quick, deliberate movements as their nets are pulled aboard.  

Then we see the haul. It’s enormous and grotesque and beautiful. And the precision and routinised ease with which the fishermen start arranging and slicing and beheading the fish is mesmerising. This is a slaughterhouse of the sea, but strangely not as instant-vegetarian-inducing as watching a cattle abattoir or sausage factory in action; it’s less The Jungle and more the mesmeric presentation of Ahab and his mythical crew. Notice the cigarettes. One man lights two at a time and passes one off to his facially scarred friend. They let the things sway and dangle as they slice and rip, slice and rip. They grab the slippery, bug-eyed things in the bin, and then slice and chop, and let the heads fall shock-eyed on the deck.

Later we see these large-eyed mothers on the floor of the ship – just the heads – as the sea rages through a gutter hole in the background. We sit with these heads as the boat rocks and shifts in the intense surf and the heads carom about and then sit and stare, a lifeless oracle, somehow easier to look at because it’s a fish’s head, a cat’s plaything. Then they are shifted back through the gutter hole and returned to the wild sea.

Dead fish. More romantic than dead cow. Is that because we’re more desensitised to seeing dead fish? Some restaurants serve them whole, and some “vegetarians” (pescetarians?) are OK with eating fish. Dead fish are somehow not as threatening or disgusting as other dead things that we eat; little swimming bundles of food plucked from the ocean, the unseen vastness. But on witnessing how immense these devices are, these manmade leviathans that pull their prey from the sea by the shipload, one can only wonder: How many more are left? How can it be?

There are some shots (connected to a crane?) that plunge underwater before being pulled high into the air above a flock of seagulls. I mean, WTF? How? How did the film’s makers achieve this poetry? Because, if anything, this movie exemplifies the art of poetry without words, the art of poetry through images, the art taking real life and framing it and juxtaposing it in such a way that it becomes greater than fiction. It holds up a mirror to nature, but this mirror came from a funhouse and in its distortions reveals a deeper truth.             

My companion said she got seasick from watching all the shaking, sea-rocking stuff. I, on the other hand, want to go back and ride it again. Leviathan is where documentary filmmaking can go if they aspire to art. So many forms are consumed by the television these days, to see a bunch of truckers travel over ice-covered roads or a family of hunters doing their thing and being funny to boot is de rigeur on any given night. But only as a movie – a film – takes the care to do this sort of baby work, the important minutiae. In this case it feels as majestic, or as horrible, as something out of the Bible. A document becomes an epic.

This is life. Man versus nature. Man’s machines. Man’s mastery of the planet. Man’s destruction of the planet. Man’s ushering in of the apocalypse. But it is also beautiful. I used to wonder how the greatness and horror of Moby Dick might ever be recaptured on film or otherwise, chiefly because whaling is now considered among the worst environmental crimes on the planet. Well, here it is: man, mastering the seas and the world, doing horrible things, brave things, impossible things. Because we are man. We need to survive. And conquer.

Photos courtesy of James Franco.

Follow James on Twitter: @JamesFrancoTV

Previously – Gatsby

More film stuff from VICE:

North Korean Film Madness

I Was an Accidental Nigerian Film Star

Behind the Debauchery

My school joined the game fairly late when it came to sexual education. It wasn't until we were 18 that our PSE teacher decided we probably ought to know how to protect ourselves against herpes and children, so bought some condoms and bananas from the Spar and set us to work. 

But schools in Illinois are even more useless. Until now, teachers have been allowed to offer lessons from the Mean Girls school of sex-ed ("Don't have sex, 'cos you will get pregnant and die"), classes covering both abstinence and safe sex or no sex-ed at all. But that’s all set to change when Governor Pat Quinn passes a new law insisting that schools either teach their students about birth control or avoid teaching sex-ed all together.

The thing is, how much do we really learn in sex-ed? We've all already heard about blowjobs, anal and condoms by the time a qualified adult deigns it appropriate to talk to us about them, and I'm not saying those lessons aren't important, but what's more important is when and how they're handled so that kids actually pick up some useful tips. I wanted to find out how useful sex-ed had been for some strangers who I'll probably never see again, so I asked them all a question: What did you learn from sex-ed?

Maria, 25, administrator: That sex is hilarious.

Do you still find sex funny?
No, but our teacher was really embarrassed about talking to a bunch of 12-year-old girls about it.

What did he do?
He laughed a lot. He had problems taking the lids off his pens and he dropped things everywhere. We made lots of jokes about premature ejaculation in front of him.

That’s really mean.
We were so mean. But he was rubbish.

Do you feel bad now?
Not really.

Cool.

Megan, 21, student: Condoms, condoms, condoms.

VICE: Yeah, they’re quite important.
Nicole, 21, student: No, they’re very important.
Megan: Sex-ed feels like it was so long ago. We had sex-ed when we were 12.

That’s pretty young.
We’re American, and they do it pretty young in the States.

Sex?
No, dummy! Sex-ed!

Oh.

John, 35, railway worker: This is a wind up, isn’t it?

Nope.
I learned how to play volleyball naked on the beach.

I think you’re lying.
I’m not! They showed a video of a family playing naked volleyball on the beach.

Why?
That’s sex education, isn’t it?

I don’t think so.
It was in 1985.

I’ll take your word for it.

Kim (left) and Cady.

Cady, 25, store manager: Wear protection – always wear protection.
Kim, 24, sales assistant: That’s a very important lesson.

It is.
Cady: I remember the videos being really weird.

How so?
They were quite graphic.
Kim: Condoms were very important back then.

They’re still important now.
True. We got to learn how to put them on with a banana – the proper way.

Alex, 25, accountant: My sex education classes were no good. I can barely remember anything.

What would have made them better?
Sex education ought to happen in the bedroom, not in the classroom. You learn a lot more about it that way. Everything should be practical.

That might get awkward at school.
It depends how liberal your school is.

That’s true.

Previously - What's the Stupidest Thing You've Done In a Car?

Martin Robbins is a writer and talker who blogs about weird and wonderful things for the Guardian and New Statesman. Here Be Dragons is a new column that explores denial, conflict and mystery at the wild fringes of science and human understanding. Find him on Twitter @mjrobbins, or email tips and feedback to martin@mjrobbins.net.

We were stood in front of a small bookcase filled with hundreds of little vials, each identical in shape but with myriad different labels, like "Arsenic" and "Belladonna". Each vial contained perhaps a thimbleful of tiny, white sugar pills, identical to those you’d find in the homeopathy section of Boots.

“It looks a bit like my mum’s spice rack,” I ventured.

“That’s pretty stupid,” Didi Ananda Ruchira, homeopath and Yogic nun, replied.

Homeopathy is a bogus system of medicine that relies on the assumption that “like cures like”. In the words of Britain’s Society of Homeopaths, “drinking too much coffee can cause sleeplessness and agitation, so when made into a homeopathic medicine, it could be used to treat people with these symptoms". It sounds a bit like the logic behind vaccines, if that logic had been concocted at a time when we knew nothing about germs or the immune system.

To get from the substance to the "cure", you have to go through a process of dilution and "succussion". A homeopath would take the coffee, dilute it to one part in a hundred of water, then hit the remedy against a firm object to shake it up. The exact technique here is unclear. One of Britain’s leading homeopaths, giving evidence to a House of Commons select committee investigating the subject, told MPs that succussion “has not been fully investigated. You have to shake it vigorously, but exactly how much you have to shake it – no [we don't know]. If you just gently stir it, it does not work."

After repeating this process 30 or so times, you end up with a bottle of thoroughly shaken water, which – in the words of the British Homeopathic Association – is “often diluted to the point where there may be no molecules of original substance left”. This water is poured over pills made of sugar that act as the delivery mechanism. The result? Your new insomnia cure is a tiny sugar pill, splashed with water that once contained traces of coffee. Weirdly, this performs no better in rigorous trials than a placebo.

In Britain, homeopathy seems eccentric and harmless, used by the kind of people who might also think they have a spirit guardian watching over them, or keep a counter-top zen garden on their desk at work. In countries like Kenya, where real medical help is often unavailable or too difficult to reach, these unproven alternatives are being used as frontline medicine. Whatever their situation, whether they live in carefully distressed boho townhouses in Holland Park, or iron-topped wooden shacks in the slums of Nairobi, homeopathy’s customers all share one common trait: they're putting their bodily ailments in the hands of something that's been repeatedly proved as ineffective. Though clearly the consequences have the potential to be far more dire if you're a refugee with a life-threatening illness than a bored hippie mum trying to inject some joie de vivre back into her life.

Didi, myself and filmmaker Michael Story were standing in a small outhouse on the edge of her homeopathic compound, a collection of dusty sheds and tall trees in the garden of a sprawling bungalow. Nestled in a leafy, well-heeled suburb in western Nairobi, the site serves as clinic, research station and college, teaching homeopathy to small classes of perhaps a dozen students at a time. It is also the HQ for her aid organisation, Abha Light, which is dedicated to spreading homeopathy across Kenya and the African continent.

At the time of my visit, Didi’s operation was in disarray as they prepared to move to new premises, pushed out by the rapid growth of Nairobi’s booming city centre. She seemed on edge. Dressed from head to toe in bright orange, she stalked from shed to shed like an angry satsuma, irritably dismissing my queries. “Try that again.” “That’s a stupid question.” “That’s also a bad question.”

My first interview with Didi was off to a poor start, but despite her impatience, she seemed eager to show off. I gestured again toward the bookcase and the scores of meticulously labelled vials that represented her entire stock.

Perched at the top, a small bust of Samuel Hahnemann, a German physician, surveyed the scene. Hahnemann invented homeopathy in the late 18th century as an alternative to mainstream medicine. Given that the medicine of the time – common practices included blood-letting – was about as likely to kill you as cure you, it was a pretty low bar to reach. “How many days’ supply do you have here?” I asked.

“That’s another stupid question. Ask me it again.”

I waved my arms around a bit, confused.

“Ask me it differently," she said. "Don’t say ‘days’.”

“Okay.” It was far too hot to argue. “How much supply do you have here?” I asked, gesturing at the shelves.

“With this, we can treat millions of people,” she declared. “For years.”

In for a penny...

- - -

Sometime in the late 90s, a middle-aged American woman named Barbara Lynn equipped herself with a diploma from the British Institute of Homeopathy, donned the bright orange robes of a Yogic nun, changed her name to Sister Didi Ananda Ruchira and moved to Nairobi to help the disadvantaged – for a fee.

“To me, it was quite providential in the cosmic flow to find myself here,” she told Rachael Mutinda – an Abha Light graduate – in an interview for the website hpathy.com. “My newly developed skills now had a focus – to popularise homeopathy and natural medicine as a solution to affordable health care in Kenya and, by extension, Africa.”

By the end of the 90s, Didi's work in the slums of Nairobi had become lucrative enough that she could establish a permanent clinic, renting office space in the Kariobangi district. Before long it became apparent that the impact one woman could have was limited, and in 2000 she started training others, like Mutinda. “If I could learn it, then others could too!”

The Abha Light Foundation spread quickly across Kenya. A second clinic opened across town, then a major treatment facility and laboratory in Kibwezi. By the time of my visit, the foundation claimed to have spawned 20 health centres, treating hundreds of patients each, while two dozen mobile clinics rattled their way across the dusty villages of rural Kenya distributing sugar pills to the masses.

Graduates from Didi's Abha Light Foundation receiving their diplomas.

Even more surprising was the source of Didi’s academic credibility. The Diploma in Homeopathy she hands out to graduates is issued by the Centre for Homeopathic Education, a British institution that works in partnership with the University of Middlesex. At around two thousand dollars, the courses cost roughly 18 months’ salary for the average Kenyan. The CHE have yet to respond to my request for comment, while Middlesex University told me that while they validate the CHE's BSc Homeopathy degree, they have no involvement in the Kenyan diploma or Abha Light's projects.

“This one little box represents 300 medicines.” Didi was showing me her field medical kit, more vials of pills packed into an A4 box folder. “In a kit like this, we could go out in a mobile clinic and treat many, many diseases at one time, which is why we promote it here.”

“What are the most common things you treat?” I asked.

She paused for a long time, as if deciding how much to tell me. “What are the most common diseases? Well, here in Africa, people come to us with a lot of infectious diseases… and, er, parasite diseases, like amoebic dysentery, rotavirus. Malaria. Typhoid.”

In the early days, Didi had limited her ambitions to a spot of homeopathic first aid, but the challenge of Africa’s biggest killers became an irresistible lure. That, combined with her near total denial of the idea that homeopathy might have limits, led to MalariX, a homeopathic treatment for malaria. It consisted of the same tiny pills as the rest – drop one in a bottle of water, bang the bottle ten times against your palm and you’re good to go.

Even leading homeopaths think this is crazy. It’s one thing to peddle quack remedies for little Xanthe’s sniffles in Islington, quite another to claim you can treat serious tropical diseases in Africa. Peter Fisher, director of the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital, was emphatic in telling the BBC: “There is absolutely no reason to think that homeopathy works to prevent malaria, and you won't find that in any textbook or journal of homeopathy.” According to Fisher, suggestions from homeopaths to the contrary could mean that “people will get malaria, people may even die of malaria”.

Every medicine needs its testing ground, and Abha Light found an ideal place to test MalariX. Joining forces with the ironically named Real Medicine Foundation, the medicine was dispensed in Kiryandongo, one of Uganda’s largest refugee settlements. Thousands of displaced people from Somalia, Southern Sudan, DR Congo and beyond had arrived at the site, only to be used as guinea pigs for a range of pseudo-remedies. According to the RMF’s video, even refugees with advanced cerebral malaria were treated with these sugar pills.

We arrived in Kiryandongo a week later, but found the MalariX project abandoned after an intervention by the Ugandan health minister, Dr Stephen Mallinga. Mallinga is a physician as well as a politician and had launched a major crackdown on the alternative medicine industry, shutting down bogus aid projects and driving reflexologists from the streets of Kampala. The refugee settlement’s "innovative" approach to healthcare had not escaped his attention. “We had 20 acupuncturists, too,” an RMF guide ruefully told me, “but we had to let them all go.”

The prospects for patients with typhoid and malaria who are given what is basically just "magic" water instead of real medicines would be grim in the West. In the slums of Nairobi, the consequences of Didi’s supreme belief in the mystical powers of homeopathy were beyond grim, yet her patients were so desperate, and so lacking in real medicine, they would try anything they could afford. “Africa is ripe for homeopathy,” she told Rachael Mutinda. On that last point at least, Didi was right.

Follow Martin on Twitter: @mjrobbins

More stories from Kenya:

Kenya's Slums Are Crazy for Obama

Kenya Finally Decided to Take War Crimes Seriously

Quality Time with Kenya's Secessionists

The Mungiki, the Taliban and Me

If you've never seen Kyle Platts' work before, I feel truly for you. Kyle draws complicated death-rods, grotesquely mutilated hamsters and shockingly revealing portraits of Adele, then puts them all in comics together. Oh, and zits – he’s great at drawing zits. One of his comic book secrets (that I probably shouldn't be divulging) is to take an everyday theme and set it in space.

All things considered, he’s quite a strange guy. But as an illustrator myself, I can confidently state that Megaskull, Kyle’s debut book for the Nobrow gallery, contains some of the best cartoons ever of all time. Another fun fact: he also recently got really healthy, which is great because that means he’ll live longer and create more stuff for us to gawp at. And if you want to gawp at any of that stuff IRL, some of his work is currently being shown at the VICE illustration exhibition. 

Kyle’s work has recently become more computerised, but that shouldn't worry any diehard fans of the disgusting – the zits and pubes are still hanging around, they're just tidied up, smoothened out and coloured more uniformly. I spoke to Kyle about all of that stuff, as well as one of my favourite characters of his, Dicknose Van Boobenchin.

Dicknose Van Boobenchin.

VICE: Hey Kyle, can you explain Dicknose Van Boobenchin to everybody? He was a seminal creation.
Kyle Platts: First of all, this character only exists in a few comics I did at college. Even though he's been met with a positive response from those who have seen him, I didn’t think he was accessible enough a character to place in Megaskull. To describe his appearance, I'd say that he consistently has Tudor-esque hair, but always wears a hat of some sort. He has a broken dick for a nose and huge bosoms for a chin.     

He was one of my favourite characters. Is there any chance he'll come back for one last show?
Actually, yeah, I'd like to make him a regular character, but I need to find the appropriate narrative to introduce him. Maybe he'll infiltrate al-Qaeda sleeper cells, or maybe he'll jump 17 school buses on a Turbo Segway. I might save him for a comic that has a macabre tone and needs the life-affirming zest of a giant pair of tits wearing a Tudor wig, wheezing through a broken dick nose.

One of my favourite comics you’ve ever done was “Insane Hamster Deaths”, where various hamsters died in various insane ways. What inspired that one?
I only ever had one hamster when I was young, and one morning I found him floating in a bucket of water, dead. I deduced that in the night he had broken out of his cage, run along the kitchen worktop and fallen into the mop bucket. Around the house, the feeling was that it was a freak accident, but some said suicide. Later in life, I found that many of my friend’s hamsters had also died in amusing circumstances, so I collated them all and put them in the book. All the "Insane Hamster Deaths" scenarios are based on true events.

Do you think it's only pet hamsters that die in weird ways?
I think it’s only hamsters, yeah. Unlike a hamster, no one would put a cat in a freezer to cool it down on a hot day, to then find it frozen and put it in a microwave to revive it, only for it to explode.

Yeah, good point. I never had any pets and now I’m glad. What have you been working on since you finished Megaskull?
Editorial briefs, mostly. I had my illustrated biographies column in Computer Arts, which ran for a good while.

The T-shirt you did for 1ina100 was nuts – why did you want to print the graphic on the inside of the shirt?
Well, that decision was reached after a long creative process, but if I had the chance to do it again I'd just print the fucker on the outside. 

How often are you asked to change something by the people who commissioned you?
I got asked to change a magazine cover once because a character’s chin looked like huge hairy balls, which isn't always appropriate.  

True. Your work has been changing a fair bit recently, can you explain why that is?
I took a trip to Berlin last year and I was really inspired by the graphic style of work people were doing there. I became interested in the idea of setting certain restraints and rules within the composition to give it more of a uniformity. Also, I found that a graphic style lends itself well to humour.    

What are you working on at the moment?
I’m currently working on another project with Nobrow, and I can’t really say any more about that at the moment. Alongside that, there are a couple of other things. I had some work in the Pick Me Up illustration show, and there's a great new skate company called Blast, which is going to launch this year. It’s going to be super well art directed and there are some illustration heavyweights involved with it. I was asked by them to create comics that are to be given away with each board. I'm stoked on that project.

That sounds great. Thanks, Kyle!

Follow Kyle on Twitter and visit his website to see more of his work.

Follow Sam on Twitter: @sptsam

Read some comics on VICE:

The Future of Southbank

Retarder

The Chicken Dinner Guy

Each year, more than 30 million people flow between the US and Mexico through the San Ysidro Port of Entry, the busiest land-border crossing in the world. Situated between San Diego and Tijuana, at one time the area around San Ysidro was a prime spot to cross illegally into the US. But in 1994, Operation Gatekeeper expanded the border wall and increased the number of checkpoints. With the more recent addition of unmanned drone patrols along the border, Tijuana has become one of the most fortified border points in the Americas. Border crossers have been forced to turn to alternative sites of crossing, such as the Sonoran Desert, where hundreds of people die each year.

About 40 percent of Mexican immigrants deported from the US are sent back through Tijuana. Many of the deported border crossers have established a makeshift shantytown inside a dry, concrete riverbed where the Tijuana River once flowed – called El Bordo.

In years past, local nonprofits and shelters offered humanitarian aid to immigrants attempting to cross into the US, but today they primarily care for the deportees who have been booted back to Mexico. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (better known as ICE) reported a record 409,849 immigrants deported from the States in 2012, and a recent report published by Social Scientists on Immigration Policy states that, based on the current rates of deportation, more than two million people will have been deported by the Obama administration by 2014, more than under any president in American history. 

El Bordo roughly translates as “the border” or, more grimly, “the ditch.” In the 1960s, the area around the Tijuana River was a frontier town where would-be immigrants would congregate to meet polleros (“human smugglers”), who would transport them into the US for a fee. 

Micaela Saucedo runs the Casa Refugio Elvira shelter, located a block away from the dry river, and has assisted border crossers and deportees for more than 30 years. “In the 60s, it was very easy to cross. In those years, it was a different world.” Micaela led me to a public square where several hundred homeless deportees were milling about, waiting for the free meal that local humanitarian organisations dish out every day. “The deportees stay here [in Tijuana] because they think crossing again will be easy,” Micaela said, “but they don’t realise that the border is now completely secured. It’s very hard to cross.” 

Later Micaela gave me a tour of El Bordo – an inhospitable concrete embankment filled with a sea of tents. The elegant Las Americas mall in San Diego is visible just over the border fence. 

“Gallo!” Micaela shouted. A man emerged from a hole, crowing like a rooster. Delfino Lopez, a.k.a. El Gallo, a man in his early 30s who wore a hat with a fighting cock embroidered on it, is one of the estimated 3,000 people who reside in El Bordo year-round. Like many of his fellow inhabitants, Gallo previously resided in the US. He crossed the border illegally in 2005 and worked in construction for six years, sending most of his money to his wife and kids in Puebla. 

Two years ago, Gallo’s landlord called ICE on him, and he was deported. He hasn’t seen his family since and told me he refuses to do so until he’s capable of providing for them. He tried to return to the US several times but was unsuccessful. He said the only way he knew how to make money was to return to el otro lado. “I don’t want to return as a defeated person,” he added. 

Gallo welcomed me inside his improvised dwelling – a five-by-ten-foot minibunker, called a ñongo, that he dug out some time ago. It’s one of 300 along the concrete riverbed, with the rest of the deportees living in tents or inside the sewers. I crawled through a hatch fashioned out of the casing of an old TV. He told me it was safe because the dirt walls had been reinforced with recycled materials like wood, plastic tarps, and sandbags, but I couldn’t imagine sleeping in what is essentially a hole in the ground. Or, more pessimistically, a ready-made grave. Nevertheless, Gallo said, if constructed properly there are benefits to living in a subterranean abode – “the roof doesn’t leak and people can walk on top of it without it collapsing.” Still, that doesn’t mean he’s completely protected.

“I’m afraid of the cops,” Gallo said. “They come, and they burn everything. They think we are all drug addicts and thieves.” 

“The first time they came in, they brought a bulldozer and destroyed houses here and then set them on fire,” Micaela added. “The second time, they got here and spread gasoline, not even checking if people were inside or not. Some people were burned. Then a third time the same thing happened.”

We walked the embankment’s perimeter, stopping at an overturned cooler. Micaela knocked, and moments later, Avimael “El Cocho” Martinez emerged from his hole, inviting us inside. His “Cochotunnel,” as he calls it, was much larger than Gallo’s and, he said, could accommodate as many as 16 guests. Cocho came to El Bordo two years ago after being deported, and like many of his neighbours, he still yearns for his former life in the States.  

“I was in the US for a long time,” Cocho said. “I wanted the American dream. My family is OK, but most of my belongings are still there. I left my family and my work. I used to own my own business, an auto-body shop.” His eyes welled up while reminiscing about his former home; the luxuries of having a TV, laundry room, kitchen, and guest room. “We used to eat like regular people. This place is awful. It’s really impossible to compare. There I had happiness, good memories. Here I have sadness. This is a place full of vices. I try to stay away from them.” 

Gallo and Cocho aren’t exceptions in El Bordo – many of the residents have worked in the US and even have children who are American citizens. Many were deported for infractions like drunk driving or domestic violence. 

According to Victor Clark Alfaro, director of the Binational Center for Human Rights in Tijuana, Mexicans deported from the US fall into three loose categories: those apprehended while trying to cross the border illegally; deportees who once lived in the US and had normal lives but were deported; and former inmates sent home from overcrowded US prisons.

All of this becomes even more troubling when you consider that Mexicans living illegally in the United States have become vital to the American economy, providing cheap labour for farms, factories, restaurants, and other industries. They are also essential to the Mexican economy. Remittances sent from the US represent Mexico’s second-largest revenue source after oil. 

A homeless man showers in El Bordo, the border wall separating the US and Mexico stands behind him.

“The Mexican state has a huge responsibility to provide immigrants with free food, shelter, give them IDs, and help them find work,” Victor said. “They should provide orientation about the services that the city offers. Last year, migrants sent $24 billion to Mexico, so it would only be fair, when those immigrants become deportees, that the state should give back.”

Finding work is nearly impossible for the majority of those living in El Bordo, so they come to rely on nonprofits and religious organisations for basic necessities. The most established of these organisations is the Padre Chava soup kitchen, located directly across the street from El Bordo. The kitchen serves breakfast to more than 1,000 people daily. 

Father Ernesto Hernández, the priest who oversees the soup kitchen, said that deportees can go from having respectable, comfortable lives in the States to being broke and homeless in as little as ten days. He explained that recent deportees usually spend their last few dollars on cheap hotels or shelters while trying to find work. Most are unsuccessful and wind up living on the streets where the police harass them until they end up in El Bordo. 

“A lot of the people that have been deported were in the US for a long time,” Father Ernesto said. “They have a family, wife and kids there. Once they are deported, they decide to stay here to feel a bit closer to their families [in the US].” 

Father Ernesto introduced us to Joaquin, a man in his late 30s. He said that he had lived in the US undocumented for 22 years before he was deported in 2012 for expired license-plate tags on his truck. His wife, eight brothers, parents, and four kids (two of whom are American citizens) remain in California, where Joaquin ran a welding business. Joaquin hopes that after filing his 2012 taxes in the US (made possible by “borrowing” a friend’s Social Security number) his refund will cover the $3,000 coyote fee to get him back to the US. 

Tijuana’s economy has changed drastically over the last decade. In the early 2000s, the main tourist thoroughfare, Revolución Avenue, was packed with underage gringos getting drunk and buying Viagra and Xanax over the counter at pharmacies. The debauchery came to an abrupt halt in 2006, when the Sinaloa cartel declared war on the Tijuana cartel and local police forces. In 2008 alone, there were at least 844 murders in the city. While the official death toll dwindled slightly over the next two years, the violence continued unabated. The killings have subsided in recent years, partially because of the increased presence of police and the Mexican army, and partially because the Sinaloa cartel has largely forced their enemies out of town. Restaurants are now reopening, the bar scene is booming, and the locals have reclaimed Revolución Avenue for themselves. Ruidoson, Tijuana’s brand of electronic music, is rising to prominence, and the local Baja Med cuisine is gaining international attention. Today, Tijuana is once again fun, vibrant, and for the most part, safe. 

To better understand the situation on the border, I arranged to ride along with Tijuana Police Subdirector Armando Rascón on a scheduled patrol of Zona Norte, sandwiched between the tourist center and El Bordo. Zona Norte is where most of the migrant shelters are located, along with many houses that serve as heroin-shooting dens and the red-light district, which is full of cheap hotels, brothels, and massive strip clubs.

“The problem at El Bordo is serious, and it’s growing,” Armando said. “The people that live there are not worried about eating. In the morning, they eat at the Padre Chava soup kitchen, then at 4 PM, a Christian group feeds them, and then Americans feed them again at night. These people are worried about getting money to buy their drugs because most of them are addicts. And that’s why they go snatch a purse, or steal whatever they can.” 

Armando continued, explaining the strategy of local law enforcement. “We go and destroy everything they build. But as soon as we destroy it, they build it back again. It’s like a game.” I asked him about Micaela’s allegations that the police sometimes torched the El Bordo encampments, and he assured us that his officers would never engage in such brutal tactics, claiming that the residents had started the fires accidentally while cooking food outside or burning tires. Most of the occupiers of El Bordo I spoke with, however, said that they are terrified of the police, and many told me that they have been abused and beaten up by officers, and some said they’ve had their homes bulldozed or burned down. 

As we continued along the canal, Armando pointed out the giant sewage tunnels and said that many deportees live inside of them in total darkness. “All we want is for these people to stay in El Bordo,” Armando said. “We don’t want them to rob our tourists. We have to take care of the people that cross the border legally into the US, and those that come back into Mexico… Our job is to provide security for all the citizens of Tijuana, protect the tourists and businesses in our city. And the way to show we are doing our work is with operatives and removing people from the streets.”

Cocho peers out from his “Cochotunnel.”

When I asked him about potential solutions to the growing migrant problem in El Bordo, he said, “We would have to start with the US sending the deportees by plane to the rest of the country, instead of sending everyone through here. In the downtown area, 86 percent of the crimes are related to the people that live in El Bordo… At the same time this is a problem that has to be solved from a social perspective, and not just by putting people in jail.”

The Mexican federal government has a program to help repatriated deportees, but it is not nearly enough. The program provides a free phone call, some food and medical attention, and a temporary ID (often not recognised by cops and potential employers), but beyond that, there’s nothing else given to help them get reestablished in Mexico.

It’s painfully apparent that many of the residents of El Bordo are addicted to hard drugs like heroin and meth, which only reinforces the local police’s perceptions of the embankment’s displaced residents. A dose of heroin can be bought for as little as $2, and most users I spoke with said they shot up at least three or four times per day. Many of these addicts support their addiction by collecting scrap metal, and the police said they resort to robbery and other criminal activity to fund their habits. 

Dr. Remedios Lozada, coordinator of the HIV and STD program at the Baja California health ministry, has organised a needle-exchange program in El Bordo with the goal of reducing the risk of HIV and hepatitis infection. “All of them are addicted to some substance,” she said of its residents. “Ninety percent of them do intravenous drugs like heroin. Those who don’t shoot up at least smoke meth.” Due to lack of funds, the program can only manage to conduct the exchanges every few weeks. 

I accompanied Dr. Remedios to one of the exchanges. She drove me to an encampment near the river surrounded by tall bushes. We parked the car, and I watched as approximately 30 men staggered up the concrete ramp and approached a table that volunteer organisers had set up to exchange needles. Each man was clutching an assortment of used needles, and some even had syringes wedged behind their ears. Moments after receiving their clean needles, each began cooking up heroin – or chiva (“goat”) as they call it – in plastic spoons. They then proceeded to shoot into their necks, legs, and between their fingers, right in front of the volunteer table. 

I approached a man after he finished injecting his dose. He told me he had been recently deported from a prison in the US. I asked him if he thought he was better off living in jail or El Bordo, and he replied that at least jail had provided him with basic sustenance and a roof over his head.  

Our next stop was a bridge where around 100 people – including a few women – had gathered below. The volunteers set up their table and doled out clean needles and condoms. Ten minutes later, a guy wearing brand-new shoes and a black hoodie appeared. Our driver discreetly told us that he was a wholesale heroin supplier, dropping off a fresh batch for the local dealer. We decided it was time to leave.

Watch our new documentary about Mexican deportees living in El Bordo on VICE.com later this month.

Read more from our World Hates You Issue:

This Is What Winning Looks Like

A Long Way From Home

Getting Wet

Those reports were later confirmed, but far-right Islamophobes the English Defence League didn't need confirmation, just speculation, to spur them into descending onto Woolwich in their frenzied, drunken hordes. What exactly they were hoping to achieve is unclear – the two alleged killers had already been shot by police and taken to hospital – but it seems they were there to exploit a soldier's death and make wild generalisations about British Muslims all being extremists who want to behead people in public.

The fascist mob gathered at a local pub, where they listened to some rambling hate rhetoric from their leader Tommy Robinson, before trying to march through the streets, being stopped by police, throwing bottles at the police, being kettled by the police, then sent home having accomplished absolutely nothing.

I was there to take photographs of 60 to a hundred angry, confused men. 

Follow Tom on Twitter (@tomjohnsonuk) and see more of his work here

Find full coverage of yesterday's events in Woolwich here.

Something like 70 percent of the internet is people going, “Hey, did you see this cute/funny/sad/tragic/OMG/WTF/fail thing?” and passing around the meme du jour – a wacky crime story from Florida, an amazing photo of natural phenomenon that just has to be seen to be believed, a fake video of an eagle snatching a kid in a park, a cat that looks like something other than a cat. Yesterday, the hot, clickable content being viewed, blogged, reblogged, shared, and no doubt monetised was a Tumblr called OkCupid Juggalos.

Juggalos, of course, are diehard fans of the crypto-Christian rap duo Insane Clown Posse, and OkCupid is a really popular free online dating site. Combine the two things, and you get awkward, posturing selfies of men and women with painted faces and poorly done tattoos, coupled with their ungrammatical statements about being “chill”, loving Faygo and being “crazy”. Hilarious.

The site is part of a subgenre of Tumblrs devoted to pointing out people, usually men, who have bizarre OkCupid profiles that sometimes make them sound like psychopaths or rapists. (It’s such a popular trope that OkCupid Juggalos isn’t even the only Tumblr devoted to Juggalos on OkCupid.) OkCupid Goldmine documents a grab bag of creeps and weirdos; Okc_ebooks gets gullible users to respond to messages that are actually gibberish tweets from bot/poet @Horse_ebooks; the creator of OkCupid Enemies sought out people who weren’t good matches for him or her to find freakish profiles (that one’s apparently now defunct); Fedoras of OKC targets the usually nerdy, Reddit-using, neck-bearded gamer types who think they look good in fedoras; and Nice Guys of OkCupid (also defunct) went after dudes who claimed to be “nice guys” but were clearly entitled, misogynistic dicks who had some fucked-up thoughts about women.

That last one sparked a mini debate in feminist corners of the internet – is it really OK to publicly mock these guys, who are usually socially awkward and unsuccessful in love as it is? The argument made by Hugo Schwyzer on Jezebel was that it’s fine, since “mockery, in this instance, isn't so much about being cruel as it is about publicly rejecting the Nice Guys' sense of entitlement to both sex and sympathy”. So as long as you can come up with a good enough reason to be an asshole on the internet – it’s not about the individual guys you’re shaming, it’s about societal misogyny, or something – you’re in the clear.

But as Ally Fogg wrote in response to Hugo, as detestable as the “archetype” of the Nice Guy misogynist is, “archetypes don’t have to pluck up the courage to join a dating site and then go through the awkward steps of creating a clumsy profile... Archetypes don’t suffer if their fragile self-esteem is kicked into the dirt and trampled on. People do.”

That’s what makes me feel crappy when I scroll through Tumblrs like these. The idea of a socially awkward dude whose main social outlet is the internet putting on a stupid hat because he thinks it will help him get a date is funny. But shitting on this guy because he’s into My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and has both a gun collection and a knife collection is just laughing at him because he’s different. Haha, his values are weird, he must be a loser. What makes it worse is that many of these people are young men who might have had rocky, awkward adolescences and are still learning how to connect romantically with others. Amid the genuinely disturbed dudes who are openly sexist and racist are people like this guy, from Fedoras of OKC:
Screenshot via Fedoras of OKC

He’s a kid who is trying his best to look good. Yeah, the tie with skulls on it and the cartoonish hat aren’t great, but he’s putting himself out there. Putting together an online dating profile that makes you look attractive and not like all the other fish in the vast, horny sea is pretty goddamn hard. Taking a screenshot and pointing and laughing is easy.

It’s even easier when your victims are already one of the most hated subcultures in America. Juggalos are obsessed with a rap group most people regard as a shitty punchline; they’re considered a “gang” by the FBI, even though they organise charity activities and prayer groups. They have their own slang and soda preference and identify themselves – proudly, in spite of all the scorn – by painting their faces. And when they’re looking for love online, they don’t hide the fact that they’re down with the clown.

As McBain would say, “That’s the joke.”

If they didn’t have their faces painted and weren’t posing like extras in a low-budget remake of The Warriors – that is, if they weren’t openly celebrating the culture and music that’s important to them – the OkCupid Juggalos would be regarded as portraits of loneliness and need, and they wouldn’t be nearly as clickable. Some examples (the text overlaid on the photos was lifted from the Juggalos' profiles by the person running the Tumblr):

Screenshot via OkCupid Juggalos

Is it funny that he has acne? Or that he is letting people he might want to date know about a potentially unattractive feature? Maybe it’s supposed to be humorous that he might be painting his face because he’s embarrassed about his scars?

Screenshot via OkCupid Juggalos

Haha, this guy gets panic attacks and tends to get emotionally attached to people he likes! He probably has a tough time dating! LOL

Screenshot via OkCupid Juggalos

The only explanation for this one being on the Tumblr is that the guy is making a weird face – surely no one thinks it's funny he's passionate about finding homes for animals, right?

Screenshot via OkCupid Juggalos

Here’s a nod to the lineage from which OkCupid Juggalos comes – this entry lets the audience bask in the satisfaction of knowing that both Nice Guys and Juggalos are worthy of derision. I guess you’re supposed to ignore the sadness of a guy who hasn’t been in a “successful relationship” trying to connect with someone online.

Screenshot via OkCupid Juggalos

This kid is clearly young, not conventionally attractive and, if what he wrote isn’t a joke, a McDonald’s employee – but he’s got a nice, self-deprecating sense of humor about his situation. If the point of putting this on Tumblr is what I think it is – Ha! Look at this dumb guy! He works at McDonald’s! – it’s shockingly mean. The humour is based on him being different, and one of the things that makes him different is that he doesn’t have much money.

“Juggalos tend to be poor and uneducated, from economically depressed small towns and broken homes,” Nathan Rabin noted in the AV Club last year. It’s not considered kosher, even by asshole-on-the-internet standards, to make fun of someone for not having enough money or being born into circumstances that would make being head fry cook something worth bragging about in a half-kidding way. But if the target is a Juggalo? Apparently it’s open season on just straight-up giggling at his or her vulnerabilities and poverty and cultural differences.  

Fortunately, there’s room on the internet for all of us. No doubt Juggalos will find other Juggalos and fall in love and have baby Juggalos no matter how much snarky scorn gets tossed their way. In other words, they don’t want to date you either, asshole.  

Follow Harry on Twitter: @HCheadle

More on Juggalos:

Meet the Girls Who Are Terrorising Juggalos with Their Perfect Asses

Logging on to the Dark Carnival

We Interviewed Insane Clown Posse

Longtime VICE contributors and honey bunnies Janicza Bravo and Brett Gelman are responsible for the Hair Trilogy of VICE magazine columns entitled Toupee, Combover, and Rat Tail, respectively. And not only are they dark comedic geniuses and human beings par excellence, they are also very talented filmmakers. Case in point: Janicza’s new short film Gregory Go Boom, starring Michael Cera as a wheelchair-bound dorkface who just wants to fire BB guns into the Salton Sea with his older degenerate brother (who is, of course, played by Brett), lose his virginity, and generally have some fun in his life for once. It’s absurdly funny and slightly depressing (just like modern life), and you can watch the whole fuckin’ thing below. A couple weeks back I chatted with J&B over baba ghanous and margaritas about the new film and why they did such a thing.

VICE: People won’t really get this question until they see the end of the movie, but Gregory Go Boom… did the idea start with the title?
Janicza Bravo: Yeah, it started with the title. Well, no, it started with Brett and I going out to dinner with Brett’s uncle around two years ago.

What sort of uncle are we talking about here?
Janicza: He’s a really cool uncle.

Does he look like Brett?
Janicza: Yeah, he does. He’s handsome, really tan, little, really strong body.

That sounds nice.
Brett Gelman: He likes to have a good time.
Janicza: White hair.
Brett: A very positive man.

Janicza: Very positive. We were waiting to have dinner with him and before he got there, there was a man sitting next to us who was in a wheelchair and who was, like, obsessively staring at his phone. He was in one of those really fancy electric wheelchairs that could probably do fine on a highway or something like that. Anyway, he kept looking at his phone and eventually Brett’s uncle comes, we’re having dinner with him and I’m kind of infatuated with... it just seemed like the guy in the wheelchair was waiting for somebody. Then this woman walked in and she’s late. It’s raining a little bit outside. She’s British. She’s looking around, sees him, and her face is like Holy shit. And she sits down and immediately apologises for being late, but she also says she can’t be there for very long. And he’s like, “Oh, OK.” And she’s like, “I have to make a call.” So she gets up and leaves. I went outside to have a cigarette and overheard her conversation on the phone, which was that she had been set up on a blind date with him but hadn’t been told that he was in a wheelchair. She was really pissed off about that.

How’d that make you feel? There’s a level of honesty there – and this is mirrored in the film – that you can’t really deny. People want to be nonjudgmental and whatever, but you witnessed an undoubtedly honest moment outside that restaurant and incorporated it into the film.
Janicza: I mean, I think that, to me, that guy is disabled or handicapped. And obviously I am physically very able. But, then again, I have my own handicaps. We all do. And so it made me feel really bad. Because I think I have my own broken things like that, you know? Being of colour, being a woman. I experience my own things as a result. But I also think that, if I had been set up with somebody that was in a wheelchair, I would just want to know that beforehand. Anyway, she comes back inside, and he’s ordered two glasses of prosecco.

And she’s like I’m definitely going to leave soon. She drank it really fast. And they continued to drink and have a really great time.

She didn’t walk out on him?
Janicza: No, she stayed.

So this short takes place in the Salton Sea, which to me is a great setting to heighten certain uncomfortable realities.
Janicza: I’d become really infatuated with the Salton Sea, and I thought it’d be great to set this kind of story in that place. And to kind of write in my language but in that environment. So it’s a little bit heightened, but it still feels like it makes sense. It’s not like anywhere I’ve been.

Have you visited there before you shot it?
Janicza: Yeah I had.
Brett: Twice before we shot it, right?
Janicza: Yeah. I visited once because I was interested, and then I just kept thinking about it. Then I wanted to spend more intimate time there, and it just seemed like a good place for the film to take place it. I mean, when you read the script, it wouldn’t work in LA, where we live. It needed to feel like it was somewhere special – like an island, you know? Somewhere where there weren’t that many people.

Well, it’s like, what’s Michael Cera’s character’s – uh, oh shit never mind…
Janicza: Gregory.

Obviously. Duh. Oh fuck, I’m dumb.
Janicza: Gregory. The film...
Brett: It’s just in the title!

We’ll leave all that in the interview, don’t worry. I really enjoy self-deprecation. More people should be OK with it. It should happen more often.
Janicza: Please, you’d better leave that in.

Oh, I promise you.
Brett: If I speak at all in this interview, I will trump your embarrassment. I will say something way worse.

That’s going in, too. And Brett, you play the creepiest character in the film, which makes perfect sense. You really came off as someone who lived near the Salton Sea. Mad serial killer vibes.
Brett: Oh I did? Thank you.

It’s the same in real life.
Brett: Oh, I know.
Janicza: In your personal life, that’s what you definitely seem.

It seemed like some of the people in the movie were natives of the region – well, maybe exaggerated versions. What were the locals like?
Janicza: I mean there’s definitely a town of people who are born and raised and have history and roots there. But then there’s also a feeling of, like, rapists, tax-evasion, criminals, people with guns. It just seems like maybe a lot of the people there ran away from something. I wouldn’t say in Bombay Beach, where we shot the film, it feels like that. But in Slab City, where Salvation Mountain is, Slab City – “the last free city in America” – there are definitely, like, murder vibes.

How did you instruct Michael Cera to prepare for the role?
Janicza: As I said, I’d been to the Salton Sea few times, so I’d taken a lot of photographs. I sent him a bunch of the pictures, we hung out, we talked about it. But I really entrusted him with the role because we were both on the same page about it.

But had he been there before you started shooting?
Janicza: No he’d never been there, but seeing my photos gave him a sense of the world. And we had talked about a few real-life people that inspired his character. We talked a little bit about Daniel Johnston – people who just seem like the summation a lot of really bad things, or unfortunate things.

How did you link up with him? Did you have him in mind?
Janicza: Yeah, I mean, we linked up because we’re working on a full-length together – Lemon, which Brett and I wrote together.
Brett: Can we say that?
Janicza: We can say that, that’s how we know Michael.

If you want to, it doesn’t have to go in...
Brett: Don’t put that in.
Janicza: Yeah, go ahead and put it in.
Brett: Yeah, make me seem like a little coward – a total asshole. Oh, this... this is mine? [looks at the table] Is this my phone?

No, that’s mine, I just took the case off.
Brett: Oh, OK.

Yeah, I’m recording you. I’m not a pickpocket.
Brett: Have we had that many margaritas?
Janicza: You have, apparently.

You’re drugged actually. I already touched your privates a few times when you were passed out.
Brett: I remember one of those.

Yeah, OK.
Brett: It was great.

I know.
Brett: It was great.

You’ve still got some… stuff in your beard.
Brett: I thought you were her, but...

Hey, what can I say, I have small hands.
Janicza: Your hands are tiny, aren’t they? A little bit bigger than mine.

A little bit bigger, but you wouldn’t know.
Janicza: Once it’s on a dick, you never know the difference. Uh... what?

We’re leaving that in, too.

@rocco_castoro

More from Janicza and Brett:

Hippo Mary’s Vendetta

The British tabloid media has a love-hate relationship with legal highs. At the same rate that the drugs are being invented by the Chinese party chemists eager to make anxiety-inducing powders available over the internet (which is stupidly quickly), the media churns out a barrage of scare stories about overdoses and hospitalised students. But while their sensationalism generates plenty of page impressions and probably helps sell the odd paper or two, the flaw is that they're providing the legal high industry with complimentary advertising space that reaches millions of potential customers every single day.

Last weekend, the Daily Mail reported that the hallucinogenic drug salvia was available on Amazon. (Don’t go looking for it now, because a) it's been removed, and b) it's a perpetual waste of time, unless you want to part with £15 you could otherwise spend on something that doesn't just hurt your lungs and make your eyes go a bit weird.) 

Luckily, everything worked out fine for the Mail editors and their outraged cloud of commenters: Amazon were exposed for who they really are – irresponsible drug pushers who care more about hospitalising teenagers than selling Kindles and other knickknacks for a profit – and forced to apologise. The Mail had performed its civic duty, Amazon had been publicly shamed, everyone had been saved. But, weirdly, interest in the legal high boomed:

As soon as the article was published (in May 2013), Google searches for "salvia amazon" shot up astronomically. Whether any of those searches led to sales of salvia is impossible to tell, but the Mail’s piece generated a significant amount of publicity for the drug. And if you're into drugs – and the Mail attracts somewhere around 100 million unique visitors a month, so I'm assuming a couple of them will be – the website's description of salvia as "more powerful than LSD", although very wrong, just may have got a few potential buyers interested.

All of which isn't particularly mind-blowing, it's kind of obvious that interest in a drug would increase after media exposure. But the graph below highlights something that is a little more surprising:

Remember the case of the supposedly drug-crazed Miami man-eater back in May 2012? The guy who was believed to have ingested the legal high mephedrone – known in America as "bath salts" – before viciously attacking a stranger, eviscerating his face and torso with his teeth and being shot dead by police? After news spread that the high (or at least the batch of it the Miami man-eater reportedly had access to) could turn you into a nasty, cannibalistic dickhead, you'd have thought that the drug's popularity might suffer. But directly after the incident on the 26th of May, and all the subsequent media hysteria, the number of people frantically hammering in the search term "bath salts buy" rose exponentially.

Once again, it's important to note that there's no way to verify that any of these searches actually led to purchases. But you'd imagine a few of the people searching out ways to buy bath salts probably ended up buying them.

A baggy of mephedrone.

The same thing happened during the initial UK mephedrone wave of 2010, bar the whole zombie thing (that seems to be exclusive to Florida). Take one Mail headline: "Mother's Warning As Yet ANOTHER Teenage Girl Dies of Suspected Meow Meow Overdose". In spite of the fact that the article described an overdose and, worse yet, called the legal high "meow meow", interest in buying the drug yet again rose thanks to the coverage.   

The final irony to emerge from the situation was that, besides calling attention to legal highs through their articles, media outlets sometimes end up hosting actual ads for the legal highs they're so vehemently against. Below is a (very small) screenshot taken on the 7th of June, 2012, after a search for "ivory wave" (another legal high) on the Mail website:

If you can't read it properly because you don't tend to carry a magnifying glass around with you at all times, the advert below the article reads, “Ivory Wave wholesale – best of bath salts, don’t miss special offers, discounts and amazing prices! Secure online shopping!” Of course, these adverts aren't controlled by the Daily Mail directly – and they seem to have since been removed from the site – but it's still a bizarre sight.

So, is all this media coverage and Google Trends data just a strange coincidence? I spoke to Stephen Rolles from Transform, one of the UK's leading drug policy think-tanks, to get some further insight into what it all means:

VICE: Hi Stephen. Tell me all about the relationship between tabloid outrage and the popularity of legal highs.
Stephen Rolles: Through publishing articles like the ones mentioned, the tabloid press is inadvertently giving free ad space to legal high companies. The articles often state the name of the drug, its effects, that it’s cheap and that it’s freely available on the internet – everything a potential consumer would need to hear to arouse their interest.

So would it be fair to say that media hysteria in fact causes an increased interest in legal highs?
I would say that's fair, yeah; it's clearly what's happened in many cases. The surge in interest immediately follows the publication of the articles. It even echoes the coverage given to ecstasy in the late 80s: as more panicked media surrounded the rave subculture, more people were introduced to it.

Is shutting down the websites an effective way of preventing the potential harm?
No. If anything, knee-jerk enforcement responses often exacerbate the problems. Once you shut down a website, consumers will simply go to one of the other myriad sites offering the product. And once a drug gets enough tabloid attention for people to demand that it be made illegal, a ban simply moves the marketplace underground, making the products even more risky as the contents, strength and purity become less reliable.

And people just come up with new stuff anyway, right?
Yeah, a new product with unknown risks will emerge to fill the vacuum created by the ban, as has happened repeatedly over the past few years. It's important to note that the media can also sometimes usefully warn about the harms of certain drugs, legal or illegal. When there are fair reports about high risk products or rogue batches, interest seems to decrease or stabilise, like in the case of the legal high "Annihilation".

Yeah, I mean maybe its name alone had something to do with that. What do you think the future of legal highs depends on?
Well, policy makers only have a couple of options: they can leave these products in the hands of unregulated websites and head shops, or they can try to ban them, which tends to make the problem worse. What's needed is a third option that allows for risky products to be evaluated and have production and sales properly regulated, which is exactly the model being developed in New Zealand. We need pragmatic market regulation rather than endless futile and counterproductive bans.

-

So there you have it: it looks like tabloid campaigns to turn people off legal highs are doing the exact opposite, instead broadcasting their strength, low prices and easy accessibility, and popularising the drugs even further.  

Follow Joseph on Twitter: @josephfcox

More stuff about drugs:

An Interview with a Mexican Coke Dealer 

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Watch - Sisa: Cocaine of the Poor