Everything you need to know about the world this morning, curated by VICE.

President Obama speaks at an event for the Ohio Democratic Party in Columbus, Ohio. Photo via JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images

US News

Obama Blames GOP for 'Swamp of Crazy'
President Obama is directly blaming the Republican Party for the rise of Donald Trump. "They've been feeding their base all kinds of crazy for years," he said at a fundraiser for the Ohio Democratic Party. Trump's candidacy "is in the swamp of crazy that has been fed over and over and over and over again." Obama will campaign for Hillary Clinton at a Cleveland rally later today.—ABC News

Justice Department to Track Police Violence
The Department of Justice is planning to track police shootings and the use of force by cops. The feds hope to have a pilot program in place by early next year. The database will be run by the FBI, but will involve all major law enforcement agencies.—The New York Times

Verizon Signals $4.8 Billion Yahoo Deal Is in Doubt
The huge data breach Yahoo acknowledged a few weeks ago could jeopardize the $4.8 billion purchase of the firm's core business by telecom mammoth Verizon. "I think we have a reasonable basis to believe right now that the impact is material," Verizon general counsel Craig Silliman said, referring to Yahoo's potential value.—The Washington Post

Ken Bone's Uber Tweet May Have Broken FTC Rules
Presidential debate star (if that's what we're calling him now) Ken Bone may have violated Federal Trade Commission (FTC) guidelines for advertising Uber's black car UberSELECT service on Twitter by failing to mark his tweet as an ad or mentioning that Uber paid him for it. "He and Uber are in violation of FTC guidelines," lawyer Rick Kurnit said.—VICE News

International News

Thais Line the Streets to Mourn Revered King
Thailand has entered a one-year period of mourning following the death of King Bhumibol Adulyadej at age 88. Thousands of people dressed in black lined the streets of Bangkok ahead of the funeral procession. Crown Prince Maha Vajiralongkorn is expected to become the new monarch, but he has called for a delay in succession.—BBC News

Boko Haram Releases 21 Schoolgirls
Boko Haram has released 21 of the 276 Chibok schoolgirls kidnapped in the northern Nigerian town in 2014. The president's office said the release was "the outcome of negotiations between the administration and Boko Haram, brokered by the International Red Cross and the Swiss government."—VICE News

Twenty Killed in Car Bomb Attack in Northern Syria
At least 20 people perished in a car bomb attack targeting an opposition checkpoint in northern Syria. The blast struck a Free Syrian Army affiliate near the city of Azaz, close to the border with Turkey. ISIS has routinely targeted rebel factions at the border.—Al Jazeera

Colombian President Extends Ceasefire with FARC
Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos is prolonging a ceasefire with FARC rebels until the end of the year in hopes of breathing new life into the peace process, one voters recently rejected at the polls. Santos's team is trying to bridge the gap with the opposition that lobbied against the deal before taking new proposals to FARC leadership.—Reuters

Everything Else

Dylan Stays Silent on the Nobel Prize
Bob Dylan made no mention of winning the Nobel Prize for Literature when he performed at the Chelsea theater in Las Vegas Thursday night. He was given the prize for creating "new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition."—The Guardian

J.K. Rowling Promises Five Fantastic Beasts Movies
Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling says she's planning scripts for a total of five Fantastic Beasts films. A sequel to the first movie in the new series, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, has already been confirmed by Warner Bros.—TIME

Samsung to Lose $3.1 Billion More on Galaxy Note 7
Samsung expects to lose an additional $3.1 billion by taking Galaxy Note 7 smartphones off the market after already taking major losses on the device. The Note 7 was recalled last month after battery fires, then scrapped altogether when replacement phones experienced the same problem.—The Wall Street Journal

Trudeau Pledges $4 Million to End Unsafe Water on First Nation Preserves
The Canadian government has announced $4 million in new funds to expand a program aimed at purging unsafe drinking water to 14 additional First Nation reserves. The scheme trains young indigenous people to operate water-treatment plants in their communities.—VICE

Universe May Contain Ten Times More Galaxies Than We Thought
The observable universe boasts at least ten times as many galaxies as previously estimated, according to new research in the Astrophysical Journal. This suggests there may be a whopping 2 trillion galactic systems.—Motherboard

Domestic Violence Victims Allegedly Charged Up to $200
The city of Columbus, Georgia, is punishing victims of domestic violence with charges of up to $200 if they decide they don't want to testify against their attackers in court, according to a lawsuit filed by the Southern Center for Human Rights.—Broadly

Last Friday, Wikileaks began rolling out what the infamous pro-transparency group has been calling the "Podesta Emails," a batch of communications stolen (very possibly by the Russians) from the email account of Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta. During the 2016 campaign, Julian Assange's organization has been a clearinghouse for anti-Clinton document dumps, and Assange has trafficked in a few Clinton conspiracy theories. But the emails, whatever their source, seem to be genuine and have provided, if not an election-deciding "October surprise," a window into how political-operative types talk behind closed doors—and have given critics of Clinton more than a few "I told you so" moments.

Wikileaks, as is its style, seems not to have done much in the way of curation, simply dumping the emails out in a searchable database that journalists have been combing through in search of stories. It also occasionally tweets out highlights from the emails, though sometimes there really isn't much there. "HRC vs Clinton Cash: Communications Director tells HRC 'we got a few stories placed... we are also leaking... to the press,'" Wikileaks tweeted breathlessly last weekend, describing a routine PR response to a negative book.

Here are some of the notable things and strangest tidbits that have been found in the emails so far:

"You Need Both a Public and a Private Position"

One of the earliest emails to be highlighted was what appears to be a list of damaging statements made by Clinton during paid speeches she made to banks like Goldman Sachs, as well as a variety of other private organizations—the same speeches that Bernie Sanders called on Clinton to release the transcripts of throughout the Democratic primary. One of the statements flagged by Wikileaks itself (though the group mangled the exact quote in its tweet) was Clinton's remark that, "If everybody's watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position."

This should not be a particularly controversial line. Delicate negotiations sometimes involve saying one thing in a room and another when speaking to the public, either because public opinion can be a source of leverage in that room, or just because some discussions have to remain secret for a period of time. Wikileaks has both an institutional bias against this view—it seems to regard any hidden information as a threat to democracy—and a grudge against Clinton, so it's not surprising to see it underscore the idea that Clinton is dishonest. But rather than dishonesty, what the Podesta Emails show is the messiness of that public/private distinction.

"Open Trade and Open Borders"

And here is a prime example of a private position Clinton presumably didn't want to go public. In a speech to a Brazilian bank—this is from the same email as above—she said, "My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere."

Some neoliberal think tankers and even some libertarians wouldn't take issue with this dream. What's wrong with shared prosperity? The problem is, Clinton has never said she's pro–open borders in public, and that sort of opinion is anathema to mainstream American politics. If the campaign wasn't distracted with the accusations of sexual assault against Trump, Republicans would be able to turn this into a pretty damaging narrative: Clinton in her heart of hearts wants to erase national borders and even, who knows, create an Pan-American Union that will be run by internationalists and globalists.

To toss the conspiracies aside for a second, at several other points in the speech transcripts Clinton is (unsurprisingly) pro–free trade, and other Wikileaks emails show her supporting the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership, which she now opposes—at least in public. On this issue, it's fair to ask Clinton exactly why her public and private positions differ so drastically.

Sympathy for the Banks

One of the reasons Sanders was able to challenge Clinton in the primary was that on many issues she's a centrist who can't muster the fiery left-wing populism that Sanders, Barack Obama, and Senator Elizabeth Warren (all of whom back her) are fluent in. In those private speeches, she was obviously friendly to the banks—"It's important to recognize the vital role that the financial markets play in our economy and that so many of you are contributing to," she told an audience at Deutsche Bank.

"Clinton, when speaking to the financial industry, adopted their mindset and privileged their arguments," wrote the Intercept. "The question that arises is whether members of a possible Clinton administration will reflect this worldview."

Elsewhere in the speeches, Clinton throws out a variety of other opinions: Walmart stores serve "a real purpose" in low-income communities, for instance, and "affordable universal healthcare coverage like you have here in Canada" is a goal to strive toward. Whether any of these statements represent her true, deeply-held beliefs, or if she'd act on them in office, though, is far from clear—and there's no way a likely Republican-dominated Congress is going to let her open borders or dramatically expand healthcare coverage even if she wants to.

The DNC's Pro-Clinton Bias

One of the more inside-baseball mini-scandals to emerge from the Podesta Emails came about via an email from Democratic National committee chair Donna Brazile where she appeared to share a question from a CNN primary town hall event with the Clinton campaign. It might seem like a small thing, but it confirmed the narrative among Sanders supporters that the DNC, and its former head, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, were pro-Clinton partisans. Some of the wilder theories about Clinton "stealing" the primary from Sanders remain ridiculous, but there was clearly a institutional bias for frontrunner Clinton from the start.

Clinton Wanted Trump to Be Her Opponent

This is hardly surprising, but way back on April 23, an agenda for a strategy call included a memo outlining what the Democrats' strategy should be when it came to the Republican primary. The goal was to get one of the "Pied Piper candidates" to win—this meant Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, or Donald Trump, all of whom had pretty extreme views and would be weak opponents. That memo went on to highlight ways the Clinton campaign and the DNC could weaken the other, more moderate candidates, who were obviously more feared.

This worked out pretty well for Clinton.

"Needy Latinos," the "Red Army," and a "Catholic Spring"

Many of the Podesta Emails aren't really about Clinton, and beyond the transcripts of her private speeches don't necessarily reveal anything about her. What they shed light on is the way people in political campaigns talk about different strategies, sometimes making rather impolitic remarks. In one email chain, Podesta and another staffer chat about a "Catholic Spring" modeled on the Arab Spring, basically a way for Catholics to break away from their conservative leaders and embrace conservatism. But it's hardly an insidious plot, with Podesta writing, "Like most Spring movements, I think this one will have to be bottom up."

In another email, Podesta included the phrase "needy Latinos" in the subject line, which sounds offensive—but what he was talking about was making some calls to Latino leaders for endorsements. (I'm not linking to that email because Wikileaks, in its infinite wisdom, didn't redact the phone numbers.)

Anyone who emails the same people regularly knows that after a while you slip into jokes and references that might not sound great out of context, like a Clinton staffer joking that "John Podesta (and the Red Army) want to support $15!" in a discussion about whether to support a $15 minimum wage.

In fact, most of the emails that have been flagged by Wikileaks and the press are just regular conversations of exactly the sort you'd expect. Campaign aides debated about whether to let Clinton take questions from the press. A progressive emailed Podesta to say that Clinton "says things that are untrue" about Sanders and would like her to stop attacking him. Univision chairman Haim Saban wanted Clinton to highlight immigration in the wake of Trump's campaign—maybe that last one reveals some anti-Trump bias on Univision's part, but what, if anything, does it say about Clinton? Wikileaks says it has a lot more emails from the Podesta hack, but it remains to be seen if any are the sort that could really make heads roll.

Oh, and also Podesta got emails from former Blink-182 frontman Tom DeLonge about aliens.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

A good bar is easy to find. Just do a quick Google search or pick up whatever free weekly paper is distributed where you live, and you'll find a bunch of options. Swanky, aggressively twee "speakeasies" staffed with bow-tied mixologists, sports bars with way too many taps, faux dives where you pay for the atmosphere, nondescript been-there-forever joints that are just places to sit and drink. Whatever your sensibilities, you can find the stool to fit them.

That is, except, if your definition of good is "objectively bad." For people like me, the ultimate test for any drinking establishment is that it induces discomfort in all who enter it. The bars I like are the ones that make me afraid. The best bar I've probably ever been to was in New Orleans, in a neighborhood that our taxi driver did not want to take us to. It was inside a trailer, you had to light a match to see two feet from your face, and it was inhabited by cockroaches large enough they could solve algebra equations.

You can't find that sort of bar in New York, at least not the sanitized, gentrified New York I live in today. But maybe I was missing out on some great—that is, terrible—bars because I didn't know about them. So I set out to find the worst bar in New York.

Here's my methodology: I'd go to a bar (with my photographer Julian in tow), ask the people there where the worst bar in New York was, then head off to that bar. I'd repeat this until I found objectively the worst bar or until I could no longer stand, whichever came first. So I began with:

The Continental

All photos by Julian Master

The Continental sits at the end of a strip of dollar-pizza joints, tattoo parlors, and vaguely shady dudes selling rings from stalls. Right next door, crust punks loiter outside of the McDonald's. Because its most notable feature is a banner outside that says, "5 shots of anything $10 all day/all night (yes we're serious)," I always referred to it in my head as "Shots Bar." Meanwhile, its website vigorously defends this special's authenticity and also has a 1,200-word explanation of how its proprietor, Trigger, is decidedly not racist despite the fact that the NYC Commission on Human Rights has investigated him three times over his policy against baggy pants. It's cash-only, but the ATMs outside are both broken. The decor is straight out of Spencer's Gifts––basically black-light posters of Jimi Hendrix and tigers.

In other words, it was as good a place as any for me to start.

After downing a beer and a shot, I sidled up to two dudes at the bar who were wearing baseball caps. Nick and Jonathan, who were both ordered by the doorman to turn their hats from backward to forward before entering, agreed that the Continental is very, very bad. It was quiet as we spoke—it was 4 PM and the bar had only been open a few minutes—but it apparently gets extremely rowdy at night.

It didn't take me long to start guessing what that might look like. Over the bar was a sign giving a long explanation about how bars aren't legally required to serve tap water, though restaurants are. "SO STOP BREAKING MY BARTENDERS BALLS!!!" it demanded.

As young men wearing University of Central Florida football shirts gathered in a pack behind me and started gesticulating wildly at a small TV, I started to envision what they'd be like after taking ten shots apiece without drinking any water.

"This is the only place I've ever been to where someone can throw up on the bar and just get a warning," Jonathan told me.

Like me, these friendly bros loved bars that sucked. But one place they never went was Wicked Willy's, a nearby "pirate-themed" bar where Nick's ex-girlfriend once worked. It was frequented by college kids, and it just so happened to be International Talk Like a Pirate Day. That sounded hellish. So off I went to:

Wicked Willy's

Half of the people at Wicked Willy's were New York University kids who looked like children, and the other half were people who probably took Pirates of the Caribbean fan quizzes online. As I sipped my allegedly alcoholic frozen peach "Bellini," I struck up a conversation with a middle-aged couple from Long Island named Joan and Terry who said this was their favorite spot—the drinks were relatively cheap for the neighborhood, and it was "wild."

By "wild," they either meant that there were a bunch of 22-year-old guys who thought they were Johnny Depp, or that Wicked Willy's is the kind of place with a stripper pole and a water-pong table. Bars like this are beloved by 20-somethings who have just moved to New York. But 20-somethings who have lived here longer than a year loathe them with a passion that is actually kind of weird.

To Joan and Terry, the definition of a "bad bar" was a place that didn't really exist when they were my age. Although they didn't have the vocabulary to describe it, they basically were referring to so-called speakeasies, or places meant to mimic secret bars in the Prohibition era. Drinking at one of these places in 2016 involves waiting in a long line to enter through a phone booth inside a hot dog joint then paying $16 for a cocktail that has muddled peanut butter in it.

As much as we differed in our assessment of Wicked Willy's, I thought the two did have a point. The bar is supposed to be a democratic institution, and any place where drinks cost more than a meal is anathema to that concept.

After a lot of bickering, the pair told me that if I wanted a bad bar, I should go to Jake's Dilemma on the Upper West Side. According to them, it was "bland." That didn't sound so terrible to me, but anyway:

Jake's Dilemma

Given Joan and Terry's screed against cocktail bars, I expect to end up at one. Turns out their suggestion was sort of a non sequitur, because they sent us to a bro bar that I do not have words to describe. Two tequila sodas later, I was no closer to being able to tell you about Jake's Dilemma. Jake's Dilemma is fine. Jake's Dilemma is OK. The seeing-eye dog outside was awesome.

For the next stop on my increasingly buzzed tour, I turned to a gay couple, two guys named Diego and Saulo, who wasted no time coming up with Toolbox, a gay bar that they described in no uncertain terms as being full of predators. Knowing I would at least be immune to that and not really displaying any sort of concern or empathy for Julian, my boy wonder photographer, we immediately got into a cab, and sailed off to:

Toolbox

Fuck them; Toolbox ruled. It was the kind New York place that Sex and the City's early seasons took place in—frozen in the 90s except it was playing lots of Beyoncé. (At this point I had fully switched to liquor and was starting to feel really good, so my narration from this point on may be a bit unreliable.)

When Kill Bill came on the TV, I got excited because it's one of my favorite movies, so much so that I had the action figures in high school and even made my own T-shirt when the first part came out. After I got super fucking into the movie and started taking shots, I vaguely remember Julian saying something to me about how every time this couple walked by us at the bar, they would use it as an excuse to caress his entire body with their hands. "Shut up, that's a woman's world every day," I replied, allegedly, according to what he told me later.

Eventually we moved after Julian wouldn't stop pestering me about being overtly molested. We talked to a couple of older guys who were happy to point out where people used to go get fucked back in simpler times. "That hallway was considered the place to go," some dude in a hat told me wistfully.

Feeling pleased with myself for stumbling into an actual den of iniquity, I walked outside to smoke a celebratory cigarette. That's where I met Billy, a former Marine, who didn't seem to understand the clientele Toolbox caters to. "I'm supposed to meet a date in here, I think she wants to have sex with me," he slurred. "But I think she's 50, and I just saw her, and she's with her gay friend."

I didn't have the heart to break it to Billy that he and the woman he met on the street moments before were not on a date, but I did get the chance to ask the very drunk soldier what he thought was the worst bar in New York.

"It's Applebee's," he said as part of a really long rant. "It's for people who are afraid to explore outside of their fucking shit."

In my memory, what happened next is that he told me about how he and a buddy used to go to Applebee's and play pranks on tourists, then I moved on. The recording I made of our conversation, however, revealed that we spent a solid 30 seconds just yelling "Applebee's, baby!" at each other, and then I started talking in a Deep South accent for three or four minutes. Then it was time for Times Square, it was time for eatin' good in the neighborhood, it was time for:

APPLEBEE'S

Applebee's, I'm sure, is a fine place to go sometimes, for some people, in some states that are probably square-shaped. But when you are me, ten or so drinks in, right after a Tarantino flick in a gay bar inspired an uncharacteristic feminist rage in you, it is extremely disorienting.

Here's what happened to me in no particular order, because there is no such thing as time in Applebee's: I headed up an enormous escalator to the bar, I ordered a margarita that ended up being a scorpion bowl of raspberry-flavored sugar water, I ate some sweet-potato fries that came in a sauce that tasted like it belonged on the top of a Cinnabon, my waitress thought I was famous because Julian was taking my photo, I could not operate the iPad-like thing you have to use to pay your bill, the bill turned out to be $100, the margarita turned out to be $17, I (apparently, according to the receipt) ordered two things called "Whiskey 2.0" and "Long Pour."

I do not know if Applebee's is the worst bar in New York. I do know that mixing a giant vat of alcoholic sugar and then eating food that is probably entirely made of sugar and then dipped in sauce that is also made of sugar does not mix well with a day's worth of beers, pickle backs, shots, tequila sodas, and something called "Long Pour."

I went to another bar after Applebee's because I do not make good decisions. It was called Happyfun Hideaway, it's in Bushwick, and it's actually a very good bar. I met my friend there who said something completely benign to me about how he wanted to get the bartender's number. I'm not sure if it had more to do with the Kill Bill swimming in my brain or the equivalent of three caffeinated Four Lokos swimming in my stomach, but I have a flip-book-like memory of me accusing him of unspecified "microaggressions" (I have never used this word before), me running across the street, me being approximately halfway to my house in a cab, and then me waking up halfway through the night to find a Kill Bill Vol. 2 DVD that I didn't even know I owned stuck in my PlayStation at a 45-degree angle and upside down.

So that's how you find the worst bar in New York.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Randen Pederson

Up until now, the Creepy Clown Craze of 2016 has drawn the line at just being creepy. The clowns may lurk in the woods, menacing children with knives and chains, but menacing was all they did. That's all changed.

Police in Sweden say that a man in a clown mask has officially drawn first blood by stabbing a teen in the shoulder and fleeing on foot, the Guardian reports. The Swedish clown stabbing comes in the wake of some other evil clown sightings in the area. A woman told Swedish police that two clowns threatened to kill her earlier this week.

"She was extremely frightened," a spokesperson for the cops told a local newspaper.

The evil clown hysteria started simply enough, with a few kids in South Carolina reporting creepy Pennywise-types lurking in the woods near their apartment complex. When that news report went viral, the inarguably stupid idea to dress up like a scary clown and spook kids went viral, too. Now evil clown sightings are a global phenomenon.

Scaring people while wearing red noses and flowers that squirt water is one thing, but actually stabbing a teenage boy in the shoulder is a step too far, clowns. This is a plea for common decency. Please let this joke die.

Read: Ronald McDonald Is Going Away Until People Like Clowns Again

All art by Zoë Ligon

Creampie is an adult industry term for when a male pornstar jizzes inside the orifice(s) of another performer, then allows the camera to linger on his cum seeping out. Interestingly, it has become a powerful porn sub-genre that's oozed it's way into America's sexual vocabulary. Although not as common in your average film as the cumshot or even its popular subset, the facial, it picks up substantially more search traffic on Google, was one of Pornhub's top overall searches in 2011 and 2012, and continues to be a top regional search term in parts of America. According to the industry's paper of record, one of this summer's top porn rentals was a creampie title. The all-but-mainstreamed fetish has even been referenced in Hollywood features like Michael Fassbender's Shame and the TV show It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Creampie scenes have become so pervasive in porn and beloved by consumers you'd assume it was a long-established trope.

However, according to Jeff Vanzetti, a porn archivist and founder of IAFD.com, porn's IMDB, the distinct genre of creampies didn't acquire its name, visual vocabulary, or norms until the 1990s. And it wasn't until the early 2000s that it became one of the more popular genres in porn, launching countless series like Creampie Cuties, Creampie Surprise, and Internal Combustion.

The spread of the creampie in porn was not some organic process. It was the result of sustained activism of a group of fans-turned-producers-and-lobbyists. These fans, who operated the still-extant site creampie.com, at first to aggregate and review scenes they liked and later to host original content, coined (and trademarked) the term "creampie," drew up rules for how these scenes ought to be shot, and sold some of the most mainstream, profitable studios of the era on their fixation.

VICE recently caught up with one of the main voices behind creampie.org and its creampie advocacy, a man who goes by the pseudonym "Sir Ron." Once just a fan and a self-described successful "tech guy," Sir Ron's work with creampies became so all-consuming that he eventually quit his job, moved to California, and dug himself deep into the adult industry, where he still works today. We talked about why he and his compatriots were so eager to see creampies in film, the tactics they used to popularize the act, and what he thinks of modern creampies.

Art by Zoë Ligon.

Our project started back in 1994 in response to the adult industry only doing facials—scene where a guy jizzes on another pornstar's face. Instead, we wanted creampies to become a variation of a popshot. You have five scenes in a movie. You don't want to see cumshots in all of them. We were over it.

In the magazine days, what did people jerk off to? The pussy shots. Having a close-up shot of a pussy is a turn-on. Having a close-up shot of a pussy with cum coming out puts it over the top because men are visual. Now you're seeing the pussy shots—an extra stimulus—combined with the aftermath and the excitement of the aftermath.

The amateur market was doing creampies all along—e.g. Jan B, Amy French, Lynn Carroll. We originally started as a list and review site to find and present videos that contained creampies or internal cum shots. Adult video fans contributed to the list and we maintained it.

We started to do advocacy for creampies in the adult industry in 1996 by attending trade shows and asking video manufacturers for creampie videos. As you can guess, they didn't have any.

We started producing our own content around 1998. We had to recruit girls, and the only places you could really do that, outside of the one big gatekeeper talent agency, were the swinger's magazines like Oddity and Continental Contacts. You might see a girl in them and write to her. We had interviews beforehand, and in the beginning some new, amateur girls would say, Isn't that how you're supposed to do sex? It's what everybody does in real life. We just show it.

We had instructions on the site for making a good creampie video: You can fake a creampie, so one of the rules was you couldn't cut the footage. In the 1990s, if you cut, it's implied that you put something fake inside the girl. Now it's a little looser, a little easier. Still, you don't pan away on the popshot. You stick with it for up to two minutes. You've got to watch it come out. That's what made it successful, what makes it a creampie.

Our first attempt at marketing our content and spreading the term was to contact AVN and say, Did you know that creampie is the industry term for an internal cumshot? Of course they'd write us back and say, No, we didn't know that. So we started getting the word out like that.

"Creampie" is actually our registered trademark. It was 1999. Mainstream companies were going after adult companies that owned domain names like WhiteHouse.com, which was a porn site. Nina Footwear tried to sue Nina Hartley for her website—she was at nina.com. She fought it. But we didn't want Entenmann's or Pillsbury or whoever to go, Hey, creampie, that's us! So we trademarked it to protect ourselves and keep using the name. We almost never enforce it, though.

Towards the turn of the millennium, we also saw creampie series from big producers like 4-Play Video, Anabolic Video, Bangbros, Devil's Film, Elegant Angel, Kickass Video, Lethal Hardcore, and Randy West. This industry is sort of trend driven. If somebody's doing anal then everybody has to do anal. So if somebody's doing creampie, then everybody's coming out with creampies one after the other.

Starting in 2001, Red Light District, which may have then been the largest adult studio around the millennium, put the genre over the top with a slew of creampies. . Basically we achieved so much success eventually our product wasn't unique anymore.

"This industry is sort of trend driven... So if somebody's doing creampie then everybody's coming out with creampies one after the other." — Sir Ron

Creampie has now become a niche. There are super specific series like Creampie Thais. And Pulse has Anal Consumption, a creampie genre where the guy cums in a girl's butt and it comes out in a glass and she drinks it. So the genre has even micro-niched. People are trying to break it up more. It's about two factors: You need to find new stimuli. And, to survive in this market today, it's about people coming out and saying, I have a micro-niche and I'm gonna exploit that.

We never meant for creampie to become a fetish, with an entire series devoted to creampie-only scenes. All we wanted was for one scene to be a creampie, vaginal or anal, and mix it up a little.

But the nice thing is that the fans are loyal, and we attracted a lot of fans early on without doing much advertising. One of the first guys who joined our site, his membership ended last year because he passed away. His name was Jerry. He stuck with it. He'd always write. This is Jerry from 1996, he would say.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

This article was published in collaboration with the Marshall Project.

On my birth certificate, my father's occupation is listed as "policeman." Dad was a cop as far back as I can remember, though he later worked in corrections as a medical supervisor for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

Being raised in a law enforcement family—and in a military town where minimum-wage jobs in fast-food restaurants are plentiful, but jobs paying a living wage are scarce—it never occurred to me to be afraid of working in a prison.

Then I worked at a GEO Group private prison in Lawton, Oklahoma.

GEO operated a medium-security correctional facility southeast of town, and I knew—from a billboard ad—that they were hiring. They paid a better wage than any other job I'd found, so I applied.

The hiring process took a couple of days. There was an online questionnaire that had a lot of questions about temperament, like, "Should you force an inmate to obey your order, or should you speak to him with a respectful tone?" I had to pass a physical, which consisted of little besides a brief conversation with their contracted doctor.*

My first three weeks at Lawton were spent learning use-of-force submission techniques and becoming chemical-weapons certified. During the training, I remember one of the instructors telling us that what we were learning was not designed to force an inmate to do something against his will, but rather to help him decide for himself that he wanted to drop to the ground, face down.

I came into the process with preconceived notions about prisoners I'd inherited from my own world. I once heard my dad say, "A bullet costs 75 cents—they ought to line them all up, and shoot them in the head."

I don't think Dad was being literal, but I know he doesn't think much of people behind bars. Either way, I certainly thought prisoners were different from normal people. They didn't feel pain like I did; being abused wasn't as bad for them as it would be for someone like me, I figured.

But a few weeks into the job, I noticed a good-looking young inmate serving lunch in the staff dining area. He couldn't have been older than 20, and something about him reminded me of my son, Michael, who died when he was 20.

This boy seemed to be enjoying his job, as though he belonged at a high school dance or a football game. I was happy he could to find some joy in such a dreary place.

But then I saw him the next day.

His face was bruised and beaten, his hands swollen like someone twisted them with a corkscrew. I wanted to know what happened, to know who did this to him. But I couldn't ask—that would have been frowned upon—and never found out.

The next day, someone else was working in staff dining. I never saw the young man again.

Everyone who decides to work in prison has to figure out exactly how to interact with the inmates. No one wants to be accused of being "inmate-friendly." At first, I was awkward around the prisoners: I didn't want to be hateful, but I didn't want to be a pushover.

Once I saw a piece of pencil art drawn by an inmate. I wanted to tell him how much I admired his piece, but I didn't. Prisoners were often keen observers of human behavior, opportunists who wouldn't hesitate to use me for their own ends. So I said, "Don't get the idea you can take advantage of me, but I want you to know you're an extraordinary artist."

He was grateful and said he understood that the compliment didn't mean I was going to start slipping him cigarettes.

Another time, a sick inmate was taken to a hospital for a couple of weeks. When he returned, he was post-op with a colostomy bag. I didn't know what this man had done to be in prison, but the only thing worse than being in prison was being there in his condition. These cells were tiny steel walk-in closets with two bunks, a sink/toilet, and a small desk. This was where he'd have to adjust to the traumatic changes in his body.

The waste from the colostomy sometimes leaked onto his body and in the cell. I remember the stench being so strong that it drifted into the pod, making me gag when I was nearby.

An inmate locked in a cell with human waste oozing out of his body—that is prison.

After a couple of years, I took another job helping inmates prepare for reentry into their communities. Those men each had their own backstories about how they became prisoners. But almost all of them grew up believing prison was inevitable.

I felt that, like my father, I had been viewing the world through the wrong lens. And the prisoners I met who were locked away, as well as the ones trying to reemerge on the outside—they were the ones helping me see things as they truly are.

M. LeAnn Skeen is a substitute teacher in Lawton, Oklahoma. She graduated from Cameron University in 2016 with a BA in English Literature, and is in the process of obtaining her certification to be an English teacher and reading specialist.

*In statement, Pablo Paez, vice president of corporate relations at GEO Group, Inc., said, "We train our officers to treat our inmates humanely and with the utmost respect for their rights, we supervise and review our officers to ensure they follow this policy, and we enforce it strongly, including terminating officers who violate our policies. At our Lawton, Okla. facility, our officers must complete training consistent with nationally recognized standards set by the American Correctional Association. This training includes 120 hours of pre-service training, including 16 hours of training on the use of force, chemical agents, and related matters. Our officers then receive 40 hours of additional in-service training each year. Our trainers receive 40 hours of certified training courses developed by the National Institute of Corrections. Our Lawton facility received an accreditation score in excess of 99.7 percent during a recent independent review by the American Correctional Association."

Illustration by Matt Rota

Photo via Jake Kivanç.

When I step into a bar as a black woman I'm faced with a weird dilemma: I don't want to be ignored by men, but I'm also wary of being noticed.

It is exhausting, disappointing, and triggering, to date while being a black woman. Being black welcomes its own struggles—as racism does—but being a black woman I feel constantly dehumanized by the partners that pursue me. As black women we're understood as a group rather than as individuals, leading us to be defined through mainstream stereotypes that are then imposed on us in relationships. Society shows black women being catty and fighting on reality television shows like Bad Girls Club, or they portray the message that the same black features we have from birth are better appreciated on women of lighter skin tones. Magazines are guilty of this when they praise Lady Gaga for her dreadlocks but Giuliana Rancic thinks Zendaya's dreadlocks "smell like patchouli oil. Or weed." Let's not forget when Charlie Sheen called Rihanna the "village idiot." These comments and images put black women on the lower end on the scale of respect and humanity, sending a loud message to us and to our potential partners.

Read More: Canada's Tinder Men Are Annoying Black Women With Their Racist and Sexist Bullshit

I began using Tinder about three years ago, and OkCupid and then Bumble starting this year. I was hopeful for love but soon found my hope replaced with sheer disgust towards my matches. The issue was not one rotten apple but a rotten barrel. One message I received from a white male had him talking at length about his barely suppressed desire to touch and tear at my body, telling me he "was craving some fine chocolate." Chocolate being a treat and a commodity, waiting to be unwrapped. To be compared to an item, especially to be exoticized based on my skin tone, had me feeling disillusioned and ashamed. Another message came from a male non-black person of colour. He was so happy that we matched because he "had never been with a black woman before." As if being with a black woman was a checklist or some game to be won. I matched with a black male and hoped to God that things would be different. Surely this black man must understand being black and how the world sees us. Of course, I was again disappointed. "I'm surprised at how you carry yourself. The other black chicks I've been with are loud and catty haha. Always looking for someone to fight." This experience reminded me that stereotypes about black women come from all colours and nationalities.

Read More: Women of Color Get No Love on Tinder

I now find myself jumping at the mere vibration of my phone, letting me know I have a new match. I'm disappointed by my matches before introductions are even made. As a black woman my pre-screening of my potential partners must be spearheaded by questions involving race. A topic so close and dear to me as it determines the outcome of my life, and those around me. I have been denied the fun and charm of asking questions about occupation and desires, devaluing those answers over whether or not my match believes, understands, and supports the movement and cause of Black Lives Matter. Do you care about it? Will you understand my pain and can I count on you not to add to it? I wonder if my partner will understand how neglected my wants and needs are by society. Will you understand why I feel devalued when a white woman is praised for having (often purchasing) predominant black features? Will you understand if I do not feel my prettiest in my natural hair? Will you speak for me and my sisters when we are slain in the streets? Will you remind me that black really is beautiful when I am made to forget? By the time I've hit the second question I am already disappointed and I logout and cry. I did not even get to ask him if he likes dogs or cats.

Dating while being a black woman is a constant realization and fear that you will be analyzed when an analysis doesn't need to be made. You'll be compared to women you've never met. But even after countless awful experiences I log in again in the hope that they are not all the same.

Follow Annette on Twitter

It's a visual metaphor. Photo via Twitter.

Have you ever nursed delusions of grandeur? Is your imagination fired by visions of making Canada great again? Would you like to live forever with your hero Robert Stanfield in Conservative Valhalla? And do you have a hundred grand to blow on a personal vanity project?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then do I have a deal for you: one federal party, freshly out of government, with an all-access pass to the belt-busting Alberta barbecue circuit. There are approximately 80 people running to become leader of the Conservative Party of Canada and the leading favourite right now is "someone else." That someone else could be you!

Somebody please do this. Otherwise the race is shaping up to be as much of a slog as trying to sit through an entire episode of The Littlest Hobo.

Case in point: before his abrupt exit from the race earlier this week, the top contender for Stephen Harper's old job was Tony Clement, who is best known to most Canadians for building a $50-million gazebo. Next is "Mad Max" Bernier, who seems to genuinely buy into the myth that a libertarian dream world is one where ragged men roam around a broken world lobbing small explosives at each other out of armored jeeps. Brad Trost is on a crusade to put buggery back in the Criminal Code and Kellie Leitch went on the cover of Maclean's to warn us about brown-skinned stranger danger. Chris Alexander is on a personal redemption tour and nobody has ever heard of anyone else in the running. Welcome to the jungle; it gets worse here every day.

Read More: Ranking Canada's Prime Ministers by How Boring They Are

The race is still young, of course: the deadline for declaring candidacy is February 2017 and the convention is next May. But barring something truly incredible happening—like Kevin O'Leary emerging monstrously out of a toilet in a perfect visual metaphor for what he'd bring to the national conversation—it's pretty easy to chart out where this thing is going to go.

It's a tale as old as time—or at least 1980, when political scientist George Perlin first wrote the book on "Tory Syndrome." Like clockwork, after a bad election showing the Conservative party eats its failed leader and then attempts to eat itself. Conflicting personalities take up the cause of one or more of the party's internal factions: the social conservatives or the laissez-fairies or the East Coast aristocrats, with a sprinkling of Western populism to accelerate the ferment. Too many people compete for too few donors, resentful rivals linger on the sidelines, the party machinery stalls out and another bad election jumpstarts the death spiral all over again. Meanwhile, some Liberal bastard laughs all the way to the next spending scandal. Lather, rinse, and repeat.

Not that there aren't some mitigating circumstances to this classic formula. Unlike Tory losers past, Harper wasn't utterly crucified by the electorate or his caucus the way John Diefenbaker, Joe Clark, or Brian Mulroney were. The Conservatives still hold most of Western Canada and few of the candidates are keen to totally disown Harper or his legacy. This also isn't the 1990s: there are no obvious signs of an impending Reform/PC divorce on the horizon.

Canadian social conservatives have long been more bark than bite, and despite Brad Trost's homophobic fever dreams it seems unlikely they're enough of a political force to get him past the first ballot at convention, let alone overturn the national consensus on abortion or same-sex marriage. Kellie Leitch's doubling-down on the "barbaric cultural practices" schtick might generate lots of coverage in the left-nationalist outrage economy, but it hasn't seemed to give her much traction with internal supporters. Odds are, the 68% of Canadians sketched out by obvious signs of foreignness will prefer a more subtle form of anti-immigrant hand wringing more in line with their mushy progressive self-image.

All this raises the question of who the CPC base actually is, and what they actually want. Realistically, other than the basically irrational brand loyalty at the heart of all partisanship, what do the Conservatives offer that the Liberals don't? So far, on the major policy fronts, the functional differences have been negligible—both parties love running deficits and sticking to the same emissions targets. The biggest differences hinge on personality and branding—and here Justin Trudeau is a master of the dark arts.

It's possible the Tory leadership race will give us a thoughtful exploration of principles and policies. Maybe it will culminate in a grand, detailed vision of a properly conservative Canada to challenge Trudeau's Sunny Ways in 2019.

More likely, it's going to come down to a basic conflict of personalities. The stakes are low, so you have a bunch of obscure also-rans competing in a popularity contest for a job nobody really wants. These are the classic symptoms of Tory Syndrome. Remission is always possible, of course. But without some compelling personality stepping up to the mic in the next four months, the prognosis is likely terminal.

It's a gruesome death: anemia for the party, and boredom for everyone else.

Follow Drew Brown on Twitter.

Donald Trump waving a Pittsburgh Steelers Terrible Towel at an October rally in Pennsylvania. Photo by Jeff Swensen/Getty Images

Since Donald Trump said during Sunday's debate that he had never groped a woman without her consent, multiple women came forward to accuse him of making unwanted advances that sometimes edged into actual sexual assault. In the past few days, the country has heard allegations about the Republican presidential candidate barging into a beauty pageant dressing room, lunging at a People writer and forcing his tongue down her throat, and grabbing a stranger's breasts on an airplane. These accusations, all of which Trump and his campaign deny strenuously, are being made by women knowing full well that this powerful man (and his rabid social media followers) will do everything he can in his power to humiliate them.

First Lady Michelle Obama spoke for many women on Thursday when she said, of Trump's 2005 remarks about grabbing women's pussies, "I can't stop thinking about this. It has shaken me to my core in a way that I couldn't have predicted... It would be dishonest and disingenuous to me to just move on to the next thing like this was all just a bad dream."

The silver lining to this national nightmare is that it seems that assault survivors, maybe inspired by the increasing attention paid to the bad behavior of famous and powerful men, are more often breaking the silence that so often follows sexual violation. I know something about that silence, because I experienced an incident of sexual abuse when I was a child. I didn't tell a soul until I was 18.

Earlier this week I wrote a calm, clinical essay about Trump's consistent alleged abuse of women. When I showed it to a friend, she said, "Where's the emotion?" I wanted to stay factual because I was afraid of being called an "angry woman." This is what happens to survivors of sexual abuse: We suppress anger. We blame ourselves for what happened. It feels like having an invisible gag around your neck, something that is constricting your throat and telling you that it's better to just move on, forget about it, pretend it didn't happen.

If you're asking yourself why these women waited—as many Trump supporters have been—think about it: Would you enjoy telling the world about the time a powerful man groped you, in the process perhaps inviting him to come after you? Even if your abuser is not rich and famous, it can be a terrifying experience to tell anyone about your violation. Speaking out takes huge courage, and that courage needs to be recognized.

I've been researching the links between sexual violation and emotional and physical health because I'm writing a memoir about my own journey to heal the after effects of sexual abuse. Men and women who experience sexual violation often face years of feeling damaged, alone, and unlovable. Survivors struggle to enjoy sex and to form trusting bonds in intimacy. One in three women who are raped contemplate suicide, and about one in ten rape victims actually attempt suicide. There's a growing body of evidence that rape and sexual abuse negatively impact physical health, too. Recovery from sexual assault and abuse is possible, and it takes effort, courage, money, and often years.

Obviously, sexual harassment and sexual assault are serious subjects, but whether or not Trump is guilty of everything he's been accused of, he has a well-established pattern of joking about these acts. He didn't just boast about being able to assault women (when he was 59!), he went on to dismiss those boasts as "locker room talk" and the controversy over the tape as a "distraction," a word that angered me as a survivor—sexual abuse or assault is not a "distraction" if you are on the receiving end of it. He's also bragged about being able to walk in on women at beauty pageants, allegedly made demeaning comments to women on The Apprentice, jokingly told 14-year-old girls he'd be dating them in a couple of years, and laughed about being called a sexual predator on The Howard Stern Show. He sees nothing wrong with this sort of talk.

What I've realized from my own healing from sexual abuse is that anger has its place. Let's not be afraid to be angry. Anger is a chance to draw a boundary, to say no more, to say back off. So it is with righteous anger that I say it's inconceivable that we have even gotten to this point. A vote for Trump tells other people this behavior is OK. We look to a president for inspiration; from Trump, we get "grab them by the pussy." Billy Bush, who egged Trump on during that now famous 2005 conversation, has been suspended by the Today Show. We shouldn't hold talk-show hosts to a higher standard than we do presidential nominees. People left supporting Trump should be taking a long look at not just their candidate, but themselves.

Sasha Cagen is the author of Quirkyalone: A Manifesto for Uncompromising Romantics and she's at work on a memoir called Wet. She also teaches transformative tango in Buenos Aires to help women reconnect with lost parts of themselves. Check out her work at sashacagen.com.

Even with today's increased diversity in film and television, many people still have a monolithic view of black life. Issa Rae, an actress, writer, and director, is aiming to correct this with her new HBO series Insecure, which premiered earlier this week and shows what black people do in our day-to-day: Living, loving, messing up, making up, and just generally trying "hard as fuck," as the show's tagline says.

Insecure follows 29-year-old Issa (Issa Rae) as she tries to do good in the hood by offering enrichment opportunities to inner-city children as part of her job with We Got Y'all, an LA nonprofit that doesn't actually employ people from the neighborhoods it serves. From "secret white people meetings" at Rae's work to being trolled by school children who ask her "Why you talk like a white girl?" Insecure gets points for verisimilitude. Rae brings the experience of being a young, college-educated black woman to center stage as Rae and her best friend Molly, an attorney, tackle life's big and small questions, such as what makes a good friend, broken pussies (yep!), and all the general drama that goes along with relationships. Throughout the first season, Insecure offers a comedic antidote to the perception of a singular black experience, telling both specific and universal stories to put blackness at the center.

Showrunner Issa Rae met up with VICE at the Chicago Cultural Center to talk about making Insecure, her favorite creators, and the black stories that still need to get on television.

VICE: You've clearly worked very hard, jumpstarting your career while still attending Stanford University and launching the successful YouTube series Awkward Black Girl, among other accomplishments. With so many opportunities coming your way, what do you have to feel insecure about now? Issa Rae: I talk a lot about my blackness and not feeling black enough and feeling like, What am I then? And what does that mean? Then getting over that and realizing how stupid that is. Current insecurities are still like: I have social anxiety, I'm very much an introvert, and still feel like I'm just a boring regular person. People are always like, "I want to be your best friend." And I'm like, "No, you don't. You really don't because it would be sitting on the couch watching stuff constantly."

Since college, you've been a self-starter, production-wise. Now that you've scaled up, what's your routine like?
Going to college you feel like you have to work through everything. You feel like you have to take on so many things at once. You don't really get breaks because you also have the social element where I'm partying but I have homework and I have extracurricular activities and when can I stop even? I think that carried over to me in my professional career, too. But I've had to learn how to be like, "Girl, calm down."

Do you ever call off black, you know, just take a break from the racialized bullshit of the moment?
Thank goodness I work for myself. It's devastating what's happening, but conversely, I feel like, well, I'm taking the day off because I'm like, "Fuck this," ya know? All of the shootings that have been happening... this Trump shit is crazy. The other night, just for the debate, I went out with a friend, and we drank while watching it. I take breaks when I need to because you feel overwhelmed. It's so tiring, and you just think about what can I do? Nobody understands. It enrages me.

From Atlanta and Luke Cage to Queen Sugar and even Empire, it seems like there's more room for varying depictions of black life right now. Black nerds, for example, can finally let their freak flag fly.
For sure. It's just the age of black people being just what they want to be. And that's what's really exciting: having different stories, having various storytellers as opposed to it falling on, like, one person. That to me is the most exciting: You get to see so many types of black people on television right now, in film.

Who are your favorite storytellers of the moment?
Donald Glover, Ava DuVernay, Gina Prince-Bythewood, Cheo went to Stanford, too, so a shout-out, Chocolate Cardinal! There are so many people telling great stories right now that I'm just excited as a fan of television. I have to be—I wanted to get into this for film, but I haven't seen a film in a very long time. I've seen about all of Ava's movies, but I don't actively go to the movies right now because television is just so good and it's accessible and it's there.

Insecure is really the story of two women—your character Issa and her best friend Molly (Yvonne Orji)—and their dating foibles, workplace tokenism, living a double consciousness, projecting different versions of their black female selves in any given moment. What are other stories from a black perspective that still need to be told?
More LGBT stories. And I think we need more international stories, too, 'cause blackness isn't just in America. There's stuff I won't think of, like the pockets of blackness that we don't know that I'm most excited about. I saw an Afro Caribbean series the other day, and I feel like that's a unique experience all on its own.

In other news of blackness, I'm sure you've heard about that recent court case where dreadlocks at work were basically outlawed, right? An Alabama employer was allowed to require a worker to cut hers off or be fired.
That's another Call Off Black Day. That's like blatant racism. It's prejudice in the worst way. It's just a huge insult because it implies that there is just one standard of professional look and that look is the European standard, which we've been fighting against this entire time. And watch when some white woman comes in with locs, then it's gonna be OK. That's what's crazy. And then the perception is just wrong, too, because there is still a perception that locs aren't clean and they're unkempt. Once that changes then things will change. It's ignorance.

Do you ever feel the pressure to explain blackness to people, such as the scene where a white co-worker asks Issa what "on fleek" means?
I get it. At the end of the day, you have questions, you're curious. But like, google it. Use the information that's at your fingertips, and find out about it yourself. Engage in the conversation in a different way... like, it's the way we're treated like pets. Or like it's our job to inform you. We've just had to get used to stuff and learn it by ourselves, and other people should do the same thing.

Follow Deborah Douglas on Twitter.

Toronto Maple Leafs center Auston Matthews celebrates a first period goal with teammate William Nylander. Photo by CP/Sean Kilpatrick

Toronto, it has to stop. You have no idea what powers you are meddling with here. The Canadian space time continuum hangs in the balance. The unseen gods who control the perilous peace that somehow reigns across our vast country are in peril of being swept aside. I'm talking about your happiness, your uncontrollable glee and self-satisfaction at having a functional hockey team with a bona fide superstar. For those sports fans who don't live in Canada's Sports Media Epicentre, the Maple Leafs sucking is as important to us as having that one person at the office who is worse at their job than we are. This is an intrinsic part of human nature; I believe it was Descartes who said, "Let the world be cruel and unjust, yet let there be one guy who can't figure out the photocopy machine, and I will endure."

Jim Prentice. Photo via Flickr user Connect 2 Canada

Editor's note: This article has been updated to reflect the most recent developments.

Sad sad new for all who knew him. Source confirms to the Star former Alta Premier, fed cab min Jim Prentice killed in B.C. plane crash.
— Tonda MacCharles (@TondaMacC)

Thinking of and praying for the many, many friends and family who loved Jim Prentice dearly. Those who knew him the best loved him the most.
— Mark Strahl, MP (@markstrahl)

I served in Parliament w/ Jim Prentice. He was a respected & honourable parliamentarian. Our thoughts & prayers are w/ the Prentice family.
— Bonnie Crombie (@BonnieCrombie)

The flight path of Prentice's Cessna Citation and the location where the plane disappeared from radar. Image via Flightradar24.com

Corporal Dan Moskaluk, a spokesperson for the RCMP in British Columbia, said officers and a police dog arrived at the scene of the crash shortly after midnight, but couldn't find any survivors.

"There was catastrophic damage at the crash site," he said.

In a press release on Friday, The Transportation Safety Board of Canada said a team of investigators is being deployed to the scene of the accident, and that they're gathering information.

"All of us in the Conservative family are ‎devastated today," Rona Ambrose, interim leader of the Conservative Party, said in a statement. "It is a huge loss to the country. He was a well-respected political leader and a business leader ‎but we know he was most proud to be a father and grandfather."

"Jim was a leader in our movement," she added, "a valued colleague in Cabinet, and a close and cherished friend of so many, not just in our party, but right across the political spectrum."

Follow Tamara on Twitter

All photos via 'Z'Isle'

The Walking Dead has taken audiences from the woods of Georgia to the suburbs of D.C. Shawn of the Dead and 28 Days Later imagined an overrun London. Even Norway got the spotlight with its Nazi-zombie horror-comedy classic Dead Snow.

But Canada has been left out of a global phenomenon spanning movies, TV shows, comic books, novels, and video games. (Arguably I could make this point about everything, but let's stick to zombies for this article, eh.)

Perhaps the winters make our flesh into an unpleasant popsicle-like texture that zombies don't care for or they just hate hockey or something. Whatever the reason, we have been largely ignored in the oeuvre (although, there was a brief mention in the seminal zombie novel World War Z of American refugees attempting to find refuge in Canada, a bad idea that ultimately led to Franklin Expedition levels of cannibalism.)

But an independent comic book series and video game is trying to change that.

Z'Isle, which is both made and set in Montreal, takes a less well-travelled route to telling a post-apocalyptic tale. In the five issues published thus far, there has been no exposition-heavy origin story: it begins years after humanity was decimated in a war with the dead (another four issues are planned for the first volume, with two other volumes to follow over the next few years). Now, it's time for various factions to rebuild Canada's second largest city while fighting what's left of the zombie hordes and each other. (I didn't say it was an entirely original plot.)

Montreal native Lateef Martin is a bit of a nerd renaissance man. A zombie fanatic, cosplayer, voice actor and now, video game and comic book writer, illustrator and art director, he is the founder of Miscellaneum Studios, the company behind Z'Isle. He said the decision to make Montreal the setting for a zombie comic was just a matter of thinking analytically.

"What's the safest you can possibly be at during a zombie apocalypse?" he told VICE. "We figured a deserted island."

It's a tough time to get started in zombie lore since the gold standard has already been set. World War Z, which Martin admits was a key inspiration, was so thoroughly researched that author Max Brooks has become a non-resident fellow at the Modern War Institute, lecturing on how thinking through seemingly insanely problems can be a useful mental exercise. Any attempt at building a fictional universe around zombies now must compete with that depth of thought. The Z'Isle comic reaches for that level of consistency, building an internal logic based on the city's unique geography, architecture and demographics. Montreal's signature stylistic flourishes, like spiral staircases, abound and landmarks appear in both the foreground and background: a soldier training camp built out of the remains of La Ronde, the rusted-out wreck of the Jacques Cartier Bridge, the toppled over remnants of the Mount Royal cross.

More importantly, the book's survivors are based around Montreal's multicultural ethnic makeup—there are ample characters of colour present, although race has yet to be overtly discussed in the series. (Many of the city's fictional inhabitants are actually real people—donors to a 2013 crowdsourcing effort were able to get themselves incorporated into the series. A wall of Martin's home studio is lined with dozens of profiles of individuals who will be incorporated, an area that Martin cheerily refers to as "The Wall of Death").

While the racial politics of horror could be analyzed for hours, the sad truth is, it can be summed up in one trope: The black guy dies first. Z'Isle is a conscious repudiation of that stereotype. Though racial politics have yet to play into any of the first five issues, it's an issue that lingers at the margins.

"I was tired of the black guy getting killed," said Martin, launching into a list of underdeveloped black characters who have been eaten or beaten to death on the television version of The Walking Dead.

"Our company is about representing people of colour, women, the LGBTQ community and other marginalized communities," he added. "Let's face it, there's a lot of stereotypes in media, it's ridiculous. We want to make sure we can counter that to the best of our ability without beating people over the head."

The fact that just having numerous characters who are black or gay is somewhat revolutionary is a depressing indictment of where TWD has taken the zombie genre. While there are ample zombie flicks that are cheesy fun, zombies have their roots in social commentary: many have read George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, the granddaddy of zombie films, as a critique of American racism. His follow-ups Dawn of the Dead and Land of the Dead took on commercialism and capitalism, respectively, while Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later tackled everything from environmentalists' arrogance to unbridled militarism.

While TWD the show has devolved into main character death fakeouts and CORAL! memes, Z'Isle is returning zombies to their origins as flexible symbols.

"Feeders represent bias in our story," said Martin. "Originally, zombies represented the threat of other. People of colour, black people, that was the origin. These things are coming after you... It's not something that's so much in the story, it's just what is, in the sense that we all grow up with bias. As a result, unless we engage in critical thought, we think about certain people in a certain way... We're all infected with it and if you don't change the way you think, you're stuck with this one way of thinking and that's what zombies are."

Intellectual themes aside, nobody would read zombie comics if there wasn't an ample amount of blood and guts. Here is where Z'Isle does falter a bit—the first five issues contain a kill here or there but much of the running time is spent setting up a gigantic cast of characters and factions doing mundane things like giving dental checkups, growing broccoli and building water purifiers.

Martin said there is another four issues planned for the first volume with another two shorter volumes to follow over the next few years.

Over those first five issues, that methodical pacing does have advantages. Examining the art work, little details emerge that show how well thought out this world is.

Take guns, for example: it's almost taken for granted that any zombie-slayer worth his salt will end up armed to the teeth eventually. But with Quebec's low rate of gun ownership (at least compared to the United States—there are just under 500,000 gun licenses issued in the province as of Dec. 2014), it would make little sense to have a bunch of French-Canadian Rambos running around.

Instead, Martin and company looked for the things that there are ample of on the island: hence, weapons scavenged from the corpses of thousands of bicycles.

"After seven years, the bullets run out but you've got a lot of bikes. So, bikes became the most readily resource to make weapons," said Martin. "No one's done cycle-punk before."

A video game, which is planned for a release on Steam followed by PS4 and XBox One in 2018, is a chance to expand that universe—other than a flashback showing the collapse of one of Montreal's most iconic landmarks, little is shown of the apocalypse's onset in the comic. The game will take place during those initial days in the form of a turn-based RPG. Players will complete missions while building their communities, all while fighting off the hordes and a recent ex with whom you have survived.

Miscellaneum has launched a Kickstarter to help with development which will run until October 15.

Like the comic book, there are big themes at play—what it means to form communities and why that so often goes awry. You don't need zombies to set people at each other's throats—just look at Ferguson or Syria or any of a billion other conflicts through human history. Tear your eyes away from the throat ripping in a zombie movie or show or game or comic book and you might realize David Bowie and John McCrae got it right: We are the dead.

"It's about the human experience," said Martin. "At the end of the day, you look at a zombie story going what is it about? It's not about the zombies, because that's white noise, it's a threat, it could be anything. It could be a pancake with wings. It's about reconnecting and trying to trust each other again."

Photo via Wikimedia

Some investors who found themselves in financial ruin after buying units in Toronto's Trump Tower can sue the US Republican presidential candidate, an Ontario court ruled on Thursday, overturning a previous decision that he and two of his associates couldn't be held responsible.

Actor Charlton Heston starring as Moses in the movie 'The Ten Commandments.' Perhaps you've heard of it? Image via Paramount Pictures

The Ten Commandments are God's most essential laws. They are perfect and immutable. They are also a complete goddamned mess and can and should be changed. The original ten are a self-serving jumble of the Almighty's insecurities ("Thou shall have no other gods before me") and oddly specific rules about who you can and can't bear false witness against. (Your neighbor? Thou shall NOT lie about him. But a stranger? DRAG HIM.)

In the essential doc, God doesn't even get around to "Thou shall not kill," a pretty key rule in any list of rules, until commandment number six! In today's climate of moral uncertainty, we need a Ten Commandments we can actually use. Here, on the stone tablets of today—the internet—are the New Ten Commandments. (Plus a bonus, all-in-one commandment, for those with bad memories!)

I. THOU SHALL NOT KILL

There's a reason it's number one: As a foundational law of ethical conduct, not killing people is as basic as you can get. It's like how baseball has a lot of rules, but the first rule is, "Don't kill the baseball players."

II. THOU SHALL BE SO WOKE THAT YOU DON'T NEED TO CONSTANTLY SHOW OFF HOW WOKE THOU ART

• Being woke = good.

• Posting a shirtless Instagram of you reading the New Jim Crow with the caption, "Had to get a second copy because I ruined the first one by crying on it" = bad.

Being a visible ally is awesome. Just don't do it for the likes.

Even to this guy. Photo of Office Space via 20th Century Fox

III. BE NICE TO RETAIL EMPLOYEES AND WAITSTAFF

God could never have imagined this one, because in his day any job that wasn't building pyramids while being whipped by shirtless Egyptians was a dream job. Today, anyone who raises his or her voice at a Gap employee making minimum wage because they can't find the perfect cable-knit notch-collar cardigan in oatmeal heather should be tortured for all eternity by demons wearing casual, American-style denim. Same goes for anyone who is a dick to a server. Your water won't be refilled in Hell.

IV. THOU SHALL NOT SAY THINGS ONLINE YOU WOULDN'T SAY IN REAL LIFE

In a single hour playing Xbox Live, you will be called the N-word more times than Martin Luther King Jr. was in his whole life. If you tweet about Hillary Clinton, your mentions will be filled with death threats from "Heil Hitler"–ing frog cartoons. And if you're a lady on Tinder, you will be called a "bitch" just for existing. If you're the type of maniac who would walk up to a stranger on the street and scream, "I will burn your house down and then rape the house's ashes," then, by all means, interact with people online the same way. But if you're a normal, courteous, non-rapey person in real life, act the same way on the internet.

V. ONCE EVERY 100 YEARS, GOD GETS TO DESTROY A SINFUL COUNTRY

In the Old Testament, God is furiously smiting nations left and right and even drowned everyone on the planet once. What changed? God's moral standards are absolute, and all the sins Sodom and Gomorrah were committing, like blowjobs and mixing fabrics, are still going down all the time! So this commandment is really about giving a God a chance to flex his muscles every once in awhile. His gleaming, heavenly muscles.

VI. FREE WIFI

Whatever, it would be nice.

VII. AS SOON AS ELLEN DOES A SEGMENT ABOUT WHY SOMETHING IS BAD, THOU SHALL NOT DO THAT THING ANYMORE

There's a lot of evil shit in the world—sexual assault, bullying, police officers who refuse to dance while directing traffic—so Commandment Number VII is sort of a catchall.

Infamous cheater Tiger Woods. Photo via Wiki Commons

VIII. THOU SHALL NOT COMMIT ADULTERY

God's original list of ten had two separate commandments about not cheating on your wife. (Don't commit adultery and don't covet your neighbor's wife.) Was God going through a breakup when he was writing these? And who was he married to? A mountain? The Big Dipper? (The North Star is its clitoris.) Remember, "don't murder people" only got one commandment, so if cheating on your spouse makes God twice as sad as homicide, we should probably still avoid it.

IX. BE HONEST OCCASIONALLY

Honesty is extremely important... sometimes. Other times, honesty is as useful as a 70-inch plasma TV that only gets CMT and the Dog Diarrhea Channel. If your significant other asks, "Do you love me?" you should be honest. But if the 250-pound psychopath who lives above you knocks on your door and says, "Hey, is it cool if I lift weights and scream while blasting Doobie Brothers B-sides all morning?" you can say, "Not only is it cool, that's exactly what I was about to do down here!"

X. THOU SHALL NOT GO INTO FINANCE

At this point, people who become bankers kinda enjoy making money but really love destroying society. Don't do it.

BONUS ONE-SIZE-FITS-ALL COMMANDMENT: BEFORE YOU DO SOMETHING, ASK YOURSELF, "IS THIS GOING TO FUCK SOMEBODY OVER?" IF SO, DON'T DO IT

As far as absolute moral laws, that's really all you need. Just be a decent person.

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A performance by Hystée Lauder. Still from a video by Cameron Cole, courtesy of Chris Bogia

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Are drag performers fine artists?

A case could certainly be made. The elaborate, handmade dresses of Bob the Drag Queen could give couture designers a run for their money. The intricate makeup of a queen like Kim Chi verges into high art.

The distinction between the two worlds is blurry. And as drag's popularity increases, spurred on by the success ofRuPaul's Drag Race and pop-culture crossovers, a pair of gallery openings are exploring the ways in which it's only becoming blurrier.

Tomorrow, drag legend Tabboo!—otherwise known as Stephen Tashjian—opens a new exhibition of his tender paintings of friends and contemporaries at New York's Howl! Happening Gallery. At first glance, his portraits of avant-garde stalwarts appear to have little in common with his outrageous and outspoken drag persona, which has graced the stage of both the renowned Pyramid Club and notorious drag festival Wigstock. But Tabboo! renders portraits of several figures who have performed drag, such as Flloyd and Agosto Machado. You'll even find a restrained portrait of himself without makeup on display, a bold move for any queen.

The opening is preceded by a group show, which opened October 1 at New York's Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, a queer bookstore located in the city's LGBT Community Center. The show examines the wide range of art, fashion, and performance emerging from Brooklyn, a hotbed of American drag today. Curated by Chris Bogia, director of the Fire Island Artist's Residency program, and visual artist and drag performer Montgomery Perry Smith, Coney Island Babies: Visual Artists from the Brooklyn Drag Scene introduces a new generation of queens with artistic practices to a wider audience. In many ways, they're Tabboo!'s drag children.

These aren't the only recent shows that brought drag into an art setting. From Howl! Happening's May exhibition When Jackie Met Ethyl, which looked at the theatrical careers and artistic influence of queens Jackie Curtis and Ethyl Eichelberger, to Jürgen Klauke's drag-influenced photography from the 1970s in his show Transformer at New York's Koenig & Clinton, which opened in January, it seems like the intersection of drag and fine art is a clear one.

And considering the artistic prowess needed in drag, maybe this isn't such a surprise. "Drag is such a visual art form that it's natural. It would be against expectations if a person with that talent wouldn't also go in another direction," says theater historian, drag expert, and Drag Show Video Verite director Joe E. Jeffreys.

"If a drag performer is a person with too much fashion sense for one gender," continues Jeffreys, building on an oft-repeated quote from the 1995 drag classic To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, "then these people have too much talent for one medium. They need to express it in painting, drawing, graphic design, fashion, and music."

If the staggering number of artistic disciplines on display at Coney Island Babies is any indication, he's right. From a giant structural lobster claw used in performances by queen Hystee Lauder to Fred Attenborough's Polaroids of Brooklyn's drag scene to intricate drawings by Matthew de Leon, the creative prowess of drag performers is wide and varied.

A polaroid portrait of Colin Self by Fred Attenborough. Photo courtesy of Chris Bogia

It should be said that, for some of the artists, the line between their studio practice and drag career is more defined. One of the show's co-curators is Montgomery Perry Smith, who is both an artist and participant in Brooklyn's drag scene as Patti Spliff (yes, she performs drag send-ups of Patti Smith songs). Smith started his drag career while attending art school in Chicago and continued doing drag after moving to New York to pursue his art career. While Smith talks about his art and drag as two separate endeavors ("I focused on drag more for a while but still had my art"), his fellow co-curator Chris Bogia sees aesthetic similarities between Patti Spliff onstage and his opulent sculptures. "I feel like half the time you're channeling Patti," says Bogia. "There are formal comparisons that can be drawn."

'Room,' a work by Sasha Velour. Photo courtesy Chris Bogia

The variety of practices seen today is a near-direct descendant of the much-romanticized East Village art and performance scene in the 1980s and 90s, during which art and drag seemed to fit together seamlessly. It was a period that saw drag queen Linda Simpson capture her experiences in the Downtown nightlife scene through photography, artist Hunter Reynolds perform in both galleries and nightclubs as queen Patina Du Prey, and Chris Tanner maintain a drag career alongside his bright, glitter-filled paintings.

And, of course, there's Tabboo!, who got their start in 1982, producing the swirling graphic design that became both their trademark and defined the era's aesthetic through their iconic Pyramid Club flyers, backdrop design for Wigstock, and the typeface for album covers such as Deee-Lite's World Clique.

Of course, the lines between drag queen and fine artist had been tested well before the East Village scene. All the way back in the 1920s, Dada master Marcel Duchamp put aside the urinal for false eyelashes when he created his female alter ego Rrose Sélavy. While most recognized in a series of Man Ray photographs as Sélavy, Duchamp also attributed several of his artworks to the alter ego, signing the pieces in her name.

"Everyone can make art, but not everyone is an artist," said Bogia. "I think in the drag world, it's probably pretty similar."

While drag queens have always refused to be boxed in by any one definition of their work, what's clear is a strong tradition of crossover exists between the two seemingly distinct worlds.

Jeffreys said he understands drag as art without question, calling it "body art." "That's what they're doing," he asserted. "They're taking their bodies and transforming them—much in the way other body artists would with piercings, suspensions, tattooing, or corseting. They're using their bodies as a medium."

He emphasizes that even the terminology of drag borrows from artistic methods. "The word 'painting' is very prevalent today" within the drag community, he said. "'Oh, I'm going to go paint my face,' or 'Oh, you should see how she was painted.'"

"And really, the style of drag today is all about contouring," he concluded. "To me, it's very much like Old Master renaissance paintings."

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Supporters of Rentboy.com show out at World Pride London. Photo via Flickr user Jason Rogers

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Last Friday, Jeffrey Hurant plead guilty to promoting prostitution. He was the final defendant on a lawsuit against his website, Rentboy.com—the largest website on the internet for gay male escorts, according to the US Justice Department—after six employees under him at Easy Rent Systems, Inc. had been removed from the suit this February.

Some say the lawsuit is an attack on a marginalized group, and for those escorts who used Rentboy to vet and communicate with clients, the effect of last August's raid was felt long before Hurant entered his plea: One year on, the absence of the popular listings website has made their profession riskier, done nothing to tackle larger issues within the sex work profession, and has forced a lot of queer businessmen to think on their feet. Luckily, you'd be hard pressed to find more industrious folk.

Hurant founded Rentboy in 1997 as a site where men could pay to spend time with other men. (According to Lawrence v Texas, it is legal to pay for a person's time; what happens in that time is their business. The site carried disclaimers making clear that those escorts who advertised there were offering companionship, not sex, though the Justice Department says that was mainly what was on offer.) But it expanded into much more than that: partnering to sponsor the Hustla Ball, a "gay porn and clubbing event"; hosting the International Escort Awards (or "Hookies"); throwing dances, socials, and pool parties. "If there was something big and gay in New York, Rentboy was on top of it," said escort Ares Apollo. Through their nonprofit Hook, the company also offered 'harm-reduction classes' called "Rent University" on sexual health, financial advice, and business acumen.

The website was shut down following a raid carried out by Department of Homeland Security and NYPD agents on August 25, 2016. The office's papers and computers were confiscated, and Hurant was handcuffed and arrested while his house was searched.

Ares Apollo said he first saw news of the raid on escort reviews website Daddy's Reviews. He said that, that day, escorts were either trying to deny the news or claim this was "their Stonewall." But it was one of his own clients Apollo remembers clearest: a married man who had become a friend. "He had posted every day for a long time and he totally vanished purposefully," he said. "They had the credit card information of hundreds of thousands of escorts and clients."

Although the raid triggered protests and a rallying cry for sex worker's rights among the LGBTQ community, Apollo said that once charges were dropped against the employees of the site named in the lawsuit, "it was hard to keep up that kind of momentum and it fizzled out."

Bryan Knight, another escort, attended protests at the first indictment of Hurant. Knight has always been entrepreneurial—a venture into carpentry led to massage, which led to escorting—but the changes to the industry in Rentboy's absence were challenging. Costs for listing on the remaining websites (e.g. Rentmen.com or Men4RentNow.com) "skyrocketed," he said, and efforts among those sites to mitigate chances of being involved in future lawsuits increased. " made it harder for customers to call us directly; some sites even removed their options for listing our prices at all," explained Knight. According to Knight and other escorts, hourly rates were driven down across the industry as Rentboy's diaspora migrated to those sites that remained.

Like Knight, escort Abel Rey has relied on personal branding to ensure clients can find him online without Rentboy. He's hosted a YouTube series called "Ask An Escort" since March 2015 and kept active on social media, allowing past clients to find him via Google searches. But while Rey thinks business will always keep going regardless of which websites prevail, he says Rentboy represented a sad loss. " to meet up and network, like Rent University, The Hookies and other mixers."

Kate D'Adamo, National Policy Advocate at the Sex Workers Project, a New York–based legal aid foundation for sex workers, said that it may have been Rentboy's work in the wider community that made them liable for prosecution. Others have argued it may have been down to an H1B visa application for an employee made in 2013. But if outreach and visibility is what exposes sites like Rentboy to legal action, D'Adamo said, that's a much bigger problem. "If safety information is silenced because, it's criminalized, that puts people at risk," she said. "There's a fear that's created isolation with serious ramifications."

D'Adamo mentioned RedBook, a popular website for sex workers to find and vet clients based in the Bay Area, which was shut down by the Department of Justice, FBI, and IRS in 2015 for "money laundering derived from racketeering based on prostitution." These are websites where information can be shared, reviews left and blacklists of untoward clients posted—all important measures that ensure escorts don't end up alone in dangerous situations—that today increasingly exist only in private Facebook groups.

Knight said that "there is no sense of community" in his industry now that Rentboy is no more. He misses the ease of promotion Rentboy brought to his work. "And they provided a sense of legitimacy and respect," he said. "We are what we are and we deserve respect for what we do. And sometimes, we individually have to fight for basic day-to-day dignity."

Knight, like Rey, said he's also made a larger push into social media, and is making forays into other interests—animation, graphic novels and music—to bolster his online presence. He said that despite the increasingly fragmented nature of his industry online and a depression in hourly wages, the turn away from central websites has helped him. "I don't have abs, I don't have a ten inch dick," Knight said. "Even those with abs and a ten inch dick? The clients get bored, they want to see something new after a while. So if an escort pretends they're a celebrity, that's probably the best way to handle the business."

Apollo said that not everything that came out of the Rentboy raid was bad. The sheer amount of press that followed demonstrated to him a larger public pushback against the idea that "rentboys are somehow not human, and therefore what happens to them is of no consequence to society," he said. "And there was an awareness that although our personal circumstances were going through changes, the world was talking about us. Perhaps for the first time."

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Image via EF's Twitter

It can be painful observing white people attempt to recognize or work against their privilege—especially if they're confronted with the topic. In fact, recent surveys have suggested that the majority of white Americans believe they face as much discrimination as people of color, while others subscribe to the misguided concept of reverse racism.

But how can white people fight against systemic racism in a way that exorcises, rather than exacerbates, their inherent privilege? Sandra Kim, founder and executive director of the online magazine and educational platform Everyday Feminism, has one solution, and it's called Healing from Toxic Whiteness.

This month, Kim and her team launched the 10-week online education series built on the premise that "white people need to restore themselves to emotional wholeness in order to truly free themselves from racism and move into action to end white supremacy." The $297 program (scholarships, group discounts, and early bird specials are available) promises to decondition white people from the toxic burdens of white privilege and unconscious racism so they can effectively fight for racial justice.

Healing from Toxic Whiteness is just the latest step in Kim's global movement to break down everyday systemic and racial oppression. She founded the activist website Everyday Feminism in 2012, and it now receives two million unique visitors from 150 countries monthly. A staff of six full-time paid staff (four who are people of color,all identify as queer, four as trans or gender non-conforming) plus 40 contributors aim to advance the site's mission of social liberation. With articles like 10 Ways White Liberals Perpetuate Racism and 3 Ways Our Middle Class 'Good Intentions' Do More Harm Than Good, the site can sometimes feel like a parody of PC culture (detractors sometimes send hate mail with accusations of male or white genocide)—but it's become a haven and healing tool for anyone who's ever felt emotionally abused, victimized by the many kinds of white, Western, straight, or thin privilege that abound today, or wondered how to make a terrible world feel a little more welcoming.

VICE spoke to Sandra Kim over the phone to learn more about Toxic Whiteness and its goals. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

VICE: Is Everyday Feminism a political movement?
Sandra Kim: Yeah. It's always about power—the redistribution of power and resources so that self-determination is a viable option. We don't live in a society of self-determination, interdependence, and invitation. We live in a society of domination, extraction, and coercion. So, it's really about, how do we shift that? How do we be the change we wish to see in the world? We do that by noticing how we aren't doing those things—how we've all been bombarded by the lies of systemic oppression, patriarchy, white supremacy, classism. focus so much on everyday stuff that people gloss their eyes over.

Can you give me some examples?
For instance, colorblindness. We were taught in this country that colorblindness is proactively anti-racist. But you can't go on from a deeply racist society—I think most people agree that, historically, this country was founded on racism, between colonization of native people's lands as well as enslavement of African folk—when we're in the legacy of that cultural history. We may not have the same intention to exploit and colonize, but that legacy shapes the current context we live in. You can't just skip over the fact that we were raised and bombarded with messages of racism simply because we want to be. It's actually racist to ignore how these racist messages impact people of color because it erases our lived experiences, as if our pain isn't real.

What is the workshop Healing from Toxic Whiteness about?
The implicit biases that everybody holds. Until you become conscious of it, you can't choose to do it or not do it. It's a really scary thing for folks to realize that they've been harming people unintentionally. We are oriented toward taking care of each other, toward compassion; what systemic oppression has done is disconnect us from each other so that now we think of some people as superior and inferior, some people worthy and deserving of protection, and other people as not.

This is why we can have police officers kill children and have white folks bending over backwards to say, Well, probably it was justified, there was probably something we don't know. But there's a historical context for this kind of depiction of black folks which we, as a country, intentionally don't get taught. For example, I remembering seeing this old ad , then none of this makes sense.

For a complicated look into gender movements, revisit our doc 'The Women of the Men's Rights Movement':

How do you respond to the site and workshop's detractors?
People are misconstruing the message that it is inappropriate for white people to process their feelings and make their feelings primary in cross-racial spaces with people of color. Because, if I have set you on fire, that's not the time for me to be like, Oh, I didn't realize I set you on fire, I don't know why I did that. At that moment, I should be focused on helping put the fire out on you so that you're not burning alive. That's the appropriate response.

So what people are misconstruing is that white people should not have feelings, white people should just shut down and do the work. I'm a firm believer that feelings are valid and important; it's what we do with them that makes the difference. So that's why we're creating a separate space for white folks where they learn the tools to process their feelings so they're no longer stopped by it. They're building a new community of anti-racist white folks to be in relation with. That's why I created this program. Because it's a terrible burden to put on marginalized folks to educate people of privilege when they are still trying to put out their own fire. I'm doing this work so that individual people of color don't have to.

Who signs up for your workshops?
Primarily individuals, some sets of folks who are parts of organizations, and some organizations who are doing it as a group.

Do you sometimes feel that you guys are the cognitive therapists of the web?
I come from a healing background. In self-help, we talk about how we can heal ourselves but there's not so much questioning of why we're so universally wounded that we need this. Then, in social justice, where I've worked my entire adult life, there's a focus on changing external circumstances but not talking about how that's impacting us emotionally, and how it impedes our ability to come together to do something about the structural forces at play. I see ourselves as a bridge between those two worlds. We are self-help meets intersectional feminism.

Are people more emotionally oppressed or wounded today than in the past?
Systemic oppression has existed for as long as humans have been organizing ourselves as a group, which is probably always. What is different is the means through which we can feel not alone. The civil rights generation had the TV. We have the internet.

Do people who attend your courses cry a lot?
It's kind of a running joke. I'm known as "the cry-maker." When most people access their pain, it's from a place of resistance, blame, and shame. If you access it from that place, it's going to blow up in your face. But if you access it from a place of acknowledgement and gentle attention, you'll open up.

What are some goals you have for the future of these offerings?
I want to train others so that I'm not the only one giving these trainings, and that requires some resourcing. So the way we try to make ourselves financially sustainable while also being financially accessible is this method of charging a set fee and also offering scholarships.

So you're reinventing the activist business model?
Correct. We're not a non-profit for various reasons; there are some issues inherent in that model. I wanted my financial bottom line to be aligned with my mission bottom line, though mission will ultimately trump the financial. And, if I'm delivering something that doesn't get interest, that tells us something. We're not trying to just preach to the choir. If we're going to be part of a wave of different organizations and individuals speaking on this to create a cultural tipping point, we want to be reaching folks who generally believe in the same values but don't realize how that's not aligned with their thinking and behavior.

Are there other organizations doing this work?
Oh yeah! The Body Is Not an Apology is really great. Black Girl Dangerous is really great.

What makes "everyday feminism" different that other ideas of feminism?
It's a deepening and expanding of what was already built by those before us. I stand in a strong lineage that we acknowledge and honor for their contributions. But they were human, not perfect. Our job is to build upon that. Everyday Feminism is a new way of being in the world where our intentions are aligned with our impact.

programs are for folks who are getting conscious enough and are finding it difficult to know what to do. Systemic oppression gives us a shared narrative with shared values, understanding, and language. It's something we can ground ourselves in. That's often a big reason why some people really struggle to give up believing and acting on the lies of systemic oppression. So we need something else to ground ourselves in—something that's based on our values of compassion and shared humanity. At Everyday Feminism, we strive to provide different affirming alternatives to systemic oppression's lies and do so in an affirming, supportive online community.

(Screenshot from 'Living in an Unreal World: A Film By Adam Curtis For Readers of VICE')

Adam Curtis is one of the best filmmakers on planet earth. Every time a new film of his comes out we write about it because they're always important. Now he actually made a short one for us to help promote his new BBC project. You can read more about Adam and his work here, here and here.

No one talks about power these days. We are encouraged to see ourselves as free, independent individuals not controlled by anybody, and we despise politicians as corrupt and empty of all ideas.

But power is all around us. It's just that it has shifted and mutated into a massive system of management and control, whose tentacles reach into all parts of our lives. But we can't see it because we still think of power in the old terms – of politicians telling us what to do.

The aim of the film I have made—HyperNormalisation—is to bring that new power into focus, and show its true dimensions. It ranges from a giant computer high up in the mountains of northeast America that manages and controls over 7 percent of the worlds total wealth, to the complex algorithms that constantly monitor every move and choice you make online, to modern scientific ideas about what the normal human being should be—in the their weight and in their feelings and moods.

What links all these systems is an overriding aim is to keep the world stable. To avoid all change. The giant computer constantly compares events happening around the world to events in the past. If it sees a dangerous pattern, it immediately adjusts its trillions of dollars to keep things stable. That is real power. The algorithms on social media constantly look at the patterns of what you like and then feed you more of that—so you enter into an echo chamber that constantly feeds you back to you. So again nothing changes—and you learn nothing new that would contradict how you feel. That too is real power.

What results is a system which cocoons us and makes us feel safe. And that means we have become terrified of all change. But that fear of change is in the interest of a system that wants to hold everything stable. And stops us from ever challenging it.

But it is impossible to keep things frozen forever. The world is dynamic. Things happen that you can never predict just by reading the past. This is why more and more we are being hit by events—the horror in Syria, Brexit, Trump, the waves of refugees—that neither we nor our leaders have the mental map to understand let alone deal with. Because we have bought into the dream that the world can be held stable and safe.

The short film I have made for VICE is about how, if you pull back and look at the everyday life all around you, you can see the cracks appearing through the shiny surface of the cocoon we are living in. So much of the modern world is beginning to feel odd, unreal and sometimes fake. I think these are the dynamic forces outside beginning to pierce through as the system begins to fail.

'HyperNormalisation' is available on BBC iPlayer from the 16th of October, at 9PM.

More documentary stuff on VICE:

A Q&A with Adam Curtis on How the News Affects Our Generation

Watch an Exclusive Clip from Curtis' Forthcoming Film, 'HyperNormalisation'

What Do People from Perugia Think of the New Amanda Knox Documentary?