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BC Will Fight Fentanyl Overdoses with ATV and Bike-Riding First Responders

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Not a first responder, but you get the idea. Photo via Flickr user Arctic Warrior

After a record number of overdose calls to 911 dispatchers last week, British Columbia has unveiled its latest weapon in the fight against the deadly drug fentanyl: ATVs.

As part of a new $5-million plan to slow the ever-rising death toll caused by opioid overdoses, paramedics on bikes and quads will patrol back alleys and parks in Vancouver and other inner cities.

Health Minister Terry Lake made the announcement yesterday in Kamloops. "I know our paramedics are feeling tremendous pressure as they respond to this public health emergency on the front lines," he told media Friday afternoon. "Last week we had the highest number of overdose-related 911 calls ever recorded."

This amounted to nearly 500 suspected overdose calls over a few days, he said, many of them concentrated in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside and Surrey. In response, Lake said the province would put more resources into street-level supports and dispatch centres, including more "nimble" modes of transport.

The strategy mirrors some of the grassroots projects started by local drug users and volunteer first-responders. The government plan includes stationary "medical support units" in hard-hit areas, similar to the unsanctioned harm reduction tent that popped up in a Downtown Eastside alley in September. After months of providing overdose relief without permission from authorities, that group has opened a second tent near Main and Hastings Streets.

Read More: This Back Alley 'Harm Reduction' Tent Isn't Asking Permission to Operate

The Vancouver Area network of Drug Users also launched its own "Spikes on Bikes" patrols, bringing naloxone kits and other harm reduction supplies to the hidden corners and homeless encampments where people are overdosing.

Workers in the Downtown Eastside say they've already spotted first responders taking their sweet new wheels for a spin. Pop-up injection tent operator Sarah Blyth told VICE it was a welcome sight.

"It's a really good thing to see the ambulance folks in the alleys," she said, adding the unsanctioned tents would stay open. "We can't imagine taking that away and just having people back in the alley."

BC is the only province to declare a public health emergency over the fentanyl crisis. So far 622 people have died from illicit drug overdose in the province, with fentanyl detected in roughly 60 percent of cases. With hundreds more killed in Alberta and Ontario, observers like Blyth say it's about time the federal government followed suit.

"Even though the federal government doesn't think it's an emergency, the people here do," she said.

Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson chimed in yesterday, after a ride-along with the downtown fire hall that serves the Downtown Eastside. He "strongly" urged the feds to help open two new sanctioned safe injection sites in the area.

Lake also called on Trudeau's government to repeal Bill C-2, which limits safe consumption sites, and to ban pill presses across Canada.

"We are working with many others including harm reduction and addictions experts, police, the coroner and the federal government to find solutions, but in the meantime, we must make sure patients get the care they need," he said.

Follow Sarah on Twitter.


What Would Deradicalization Programs for the Far-Right Actually Look Like?

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A photo shared on Instagram by Donald Trump Jr during the US presidential election campaign (Photo via)

You might have noticed the term "alt-right" debated a bit more since the US voted a reality TV star as their president-elect. Although the 'alt' preface might suggest something young, trendy and counter-cultural, it's pretty much just a mishmash of variations of conservatism. It encompasses everything from white nationalism, anti-feminism and pro-segregationism to classic online trolls, looking to get a rise out of people. And, from the outside, a lot of its members look like they're coming together online, Pepe the Frog memes and all.

It may sound distinctly familiar to anyone who's been following the way we discuss online extremism. "When we talk about online radicalization we always talk about Muslims," Motswana writer Siyanda Mohutsiwa recently tweeted, after years following alt-right groups online. "But the radicalization of white men online is at astronomical levels. Young men came to these groups for tips on picking up girls and came out believing it was up to them to save Western civilization... found young white men at their most vulnerable and convinced them liberals were colluding to destroy white Western manhood."

Deradicalization programs, mostly targeting young Muslims, have been running in the UK for around ten years now, but we're seeing more referrals related to the far-right—in some parts of the country, these may make up the majority. We spoke to Rashad Ali, a counter-terrorism practitioner at the Institute of Strategic Dialogue, about what deradicalization could look like when applied to a different, relatively amorphous, group.

Hi Rashad, what's your background with radicalization, first of all?
Rashad Ali: I became involved with radical Islamist groups as a teenager in Yorkshire. After a while, I began to realize it was wrong—I saw it had no real moral framework, that it was devoid of any political substance, and that it was problematic. I've been working in counter-terrorism for over eight years now, and have worked on over 100 cases. The far-right and radical Islam are actually very similar, because they create this narrative of a civilizational conflict between the "Muslim world" and "the West." That's the problem with Trump and Steve Bannon—they essentially push the same message as radical Islamists.

What kind of person tends to be susceptible to radicalization?
I don't think there's a specific type of person. Human beings, on a base level, share the same vulnerabilities and trigger spots. Grievances, personal experiences and existential identity crises are what extremist narratives manipulate. They present themselves as anti-establishment, authentic, and the voice of the people.

For example, radical Islamism is really quite superficial and reactionary, but the narrative resonates with people who are having existential identity crises and who have religious views that can be manipulated. Far-left politics, such as Corbyn's rhetoric, exploit genuine grievances people have with the government, but there's no real substance there in terms of actual policies.

So why do you think we're seeing a rise in extremism right now?
There are several reasons. When people feel a disconnect between government and society, it creates space for an extremist narrative to step in. It isn't as simple as saying that neoliberal economics has failed people; it's because the narrative is there to manipulate them.

Secondly, you have to look at what's going on globally—the rhetoric of both the far-right and left in Europe and the US are in line with Kremlin propaganda, and we know that the Kremlin funds certain far right groups. Then lastly, you have the online dimension. Social media polarizes views and creates an echo chamber. Any interaction between different groups ends up being combative. If you want to engage with these people, then you have to engage them within that space.

How do deradicalization programs work?
There are two main types: online and offline. Online work is done on a mass scale, reaching large numbers of people, and offline programmes work with individuals.

In the online space, we craft counter-narratives to reach out to people. We'll use targeted advertising on social media to identify people who like certain groups or are engaging very heavily with extremist content, then impact that echo chamber and present them with an alternative. You have to make sure your counter-narrative is interesting from the get-go—it needs to grab them in the first ten seconds—it needs to be engaging, so they keep coming back to you, and they need to have a way of contacting you afterwards.

Can you give an example of a counter-narrative?
We've found former group members can be really effective—it's a credible voice to engage people with. Survivors of attacks—such as the Anders Breivik massacre in Norway—can also be very powerful.

And what about the offline?
It happens through leakage—family or colleagues will pick up on radicalization and report it. There will then be a channel referral, and mentoring may happen. Instead of criminalizing these people, we see them as vulnerable individuals who are in need of support. Depending on the individual case, this can last for up to a year.

How do you identify people?
It isn't that difficult to identify them, the harder part is measuring what's happening. We work with a tech company that analyses data, such as whether people are sharing and commenting, if it's positive or negative, and if they're coming back for more. We then use the same tools to analyze how well our own counter-narratives are performing.

How would the programs work?
There are already projects doing targeting far-right extremism—from South Wales and Yorkshire to the East Midlands—and doing it well.

What constitutes a success?
You can see success in attitudinal changes. Do they still demonize the Other? Do they see groups of people as subhuman? They might still have grievances, but they may be channeling them in a different way.

Also, If you get the senior people, it creates a ripple effect because those below them will start questioning things. For example, look at Tommy Robinson. If you look at his Twitter feed he's still a bit of a twat, but removing him from the EDL means it isn't really functioning as an organization any more.

Do you think we're currently doing enough to combat the far-right?
We're doing a good job, but we could definitely be doing more. Deradicalization costs time and money, and it needs continued government support.

@jessicabateman

More on VICE:

Is the Government's Anti-Terror Strategy Damaging British School Kids?

David Cameron Should Be Ashamed of His Speech on 'Extremism'

What Do Prisoners Think of Anjem Choudary Going to Jail?

How Would the UK Actually Scrap the Monarchy, and What Would Happen Next?

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The Royal Family (Photo: Lefteris Pitarakis AP/Press Association Images)

Once again, some people are unhappy with the Royal Family. First it was the announcement last week that the Treasury intends to spend £369 million on doing up Buckingham Palace in the middle of a housing crisis, and then – bizarrely, given the outrage over the refurbishment handout – the Palace put out a job advert for a new gardener, offering a salary that works out at less than the London Living Wage.

Both of these things have provoked "action", with former journalist Mark Johnson starting a popular online petition demanding that the royals pay for repairs themselves. Bloggers on Royal Central – which, in fairness, is essentially a royals fan site – and The Spectator have pointed out that it is actually money generated through an additional tax on the Crown Estate that will fund the work, not money from the British taxpayer, but for many that still doesn't justify the huge amount of cash being spent on the Palace as the rest of the country falls apart.

Either way, none of this is particularly new; anti-monarchy petitions have always had a presence online. Yet polls consistently show that people prefer Jubilee bunting and ritualised deference to democratic accountability. In fact, about 70 percent of the UK's population continually say they would rather keep the royals than chuck them.

But imagine a world in which that statistic leant the other way. Theoretically, what would it take to actually remove the royals from the throne, and what would happen once they were gone? I'm glad you asked.

FIRST, A LOT OF GROUNDWORK WOULD HAVE TO BE LAID

Republic is an organisation campaigning for a "democratic alternative to the monarchy". Pia de Keyser, the group's campaigns officer, says their vision of change involves years of healthy public discourse, gradually pushing the issue onto the political agenda, before provoking a national referendum.

"Since Brexit, we do definitely feel that we wouldn't want any referendum to do with this to be as divisive," she says over the phone. "There would need to be a sizeable majority before the referendum would be held – it wouldn't be a case of '51 percent would do it'. Public education should be far more balanced and accurate, unlike Brexit, where so many people were googling 'What is the EU?' right before it."

CHARLES WOULD HAVE TO BE TRULY AWFUL

Historian Phillip Murphy tells me the warm fuzzy feelings people have towards the monarchy are mostly for Elizabeth herself, rather than the institution as a concept. "I think as long as she's there, there will be pretty strong support," he says over the phone. "But once she's gone, there may be a change of mood."

Relative to the Queen, Charles isn't exactly popular. He's been criticised in the past for sticking his oar into political matters, and if he kept at that it would highlight the problematic royal prerogative powers monarchs still technically have. Pure speculation here, but I can't imagine that would do much for his ratings.

WE'D HAVE TO ENDURE THE UNKNOWN, MESSY POLITICAL FALLOUT OF ANOTHER REFERENDUM

A referendum in favour of a republic would only be the start. De Keyser says Republicans don't have a concrete vision of what post-monarchy Britain would look like – and that they wouldn't yet want to. "Like Brexit, we would be facing a situation that we haven't had to take through Parliament before. It could be quick, but like with Brexit, my instinct would be not to rush it," she explains. "The ideal would be that we would slowly, pragmatically walk through it."

Beyond the whole "what, so we're getting a president now?" chat, this process would also involve lots of complicated legal disentanglements, like working out who would occupy the position of head of the Commonwealth and the Church of England.

Also, as Murphy says, you've got to be careful that a restructuring of political power doesn't just leave a new demagogic-shaped hole to be filled. "In a world in which Donald Trump has just been elected, and in which Marine Le Pen seems to be within fighting distance of the French presidency, even people on the left now might be thinking, 'Do we really want Nigel Farage as our president?'" he points out. "Which might be the likely result of a national election for a president."

READ: A Big Day Out at... The Queen's Diamond Jubilee Party!

CAMPAIGNERS WOULD WANT THE ROYALS TO HAND OVER THEIR RICHES

Anti-monarchy campaigns tend to revolve around the injustice of the massive amounts of wealth and privilege commanded by a select few people lucky enough to be born into the right family. So, the thinking goes, in a post-monarchy UK, while the royals would still have a private wealth in the multi-millions – thanks in part to their extensive property portfolio – all profits generated by the Crown Estate would be handed over to the people.

Currently, the Queen pays an 85 percent tax on earnings generated through the Crown Estate – a huge property and land portfolio, including Regent Street and Buckingham Palace, worth about £12 billion – with the remaining 15 percent going to her to pay for stuff like royal travel and Palace garden parties. According to Murphy, this 15 percent going to the people instead wouldn't do much to correct social and economic imbalances.

"You might hope that it would change British society," he says, "but some of those divisions – the aristocracy, the power of public schools, the power of Oxbridge – unless you really radically changed the way society is governed, they would still be there in the social character of Great Britain."

This year that 15 percent worked out at nearly £43 million, which is admittedly just a fraction of the £1 billion the NHS spends every three days, but, you know, every little helps. And what of Buckingham Palace, which – as part of the Crown Estate – would also theoretically be handed over?

"The 750 barely used rooms in the Palace would hopefully become a huge central community hub, or a museum, or a centre for education, or a hub for democracy," says de Keyser.

THE ROYALS WOULD BECOME MERE COVER STARS OF 'HELLO' MAGAZINE, SLOWLY AND INEVITABLY DECLINING IN STATURE

"There's the sense that themselves are sort of trapped in many ways," says de Keyser. "In terms of the human rights that the rest of us have, like freedom of expression and movement and choice of marriage partner, they are massively curtailed from enjoying."

So in a republic, the Royal Family would be free to be whatever they wanted to be. EDM DJs! Chartered surveyors! Openly xenophobic! But in all likelihood, as Murphy says, "They would certainly still be on the guest list of any trendy party in London, New York or Paris."

So we wouldn't have to worry too much about them.

More on VICE:

Royalists Celebrating the Queen Told Us What She Means to Them

Why Do Young Australians Love the Monarchy So Much?

What I Learned Working a Summer Job at Buckingham Palace

Comics: 'Human Egg,' Today's Comic by Marian Bodenstein

'Mars Attacks!' Was the Disaster Movie That Ravaged Disaster Movies

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No genre is as renowned for strewing the debris of trash culture across the cinematic landscape as the disaster movie. Virtually bereft of critically-acclaimed masterpieces and instead characterized by visceral (albeit empty) spectacles of annihilation, the genre provides audiences with an embarrassment of riches in the "So bad, it's good" department.

Though often associated with the 1970s, the disaster movie reached unprecedented popularity 20 years later during a fertile cycle of big-budget releases. 1996 inaugurated a disaster movie renaissance with such genre defining blockbusters as Twister and Independence Day (the two highest grossing films that year), and many less-well-remembered films with apocalyptic scenarios followed, culminating with the epoch-making Titanic—one of few to receive critical acclaim.

Amidst this revitalization, Tim Burton released one of his most polarizing works: the knowing parody Mars Attacks!, which is about to celebrate its 20th anniversary in early December. Released six months after Independence Day, Burton's film saw comparatively limited success, grossing just over $100 million; it was roundly savaged by critics, and compared unfavorably to its more successful rival.

The film's vilification obscured how effectively its over-the-top satire ridicules the seriousness of the disaster movie's artistic pretensions, trafficking in the genre's clichés while it bludgeons their self-seriousness and hollows out their meanings. Few movies nail the pleasures and perils of their own genre as deftly as Mars Attacks!, roasting fans, critics, and artists alike while also marshaling trash culture in service of a critique of apocalypticism, American exceptionalism, and high-concept filmmaking. In other words, it revels in the victory of trash over taste.

The plots of Independence Day and Mars Attacks! are strikingly similar: Malevolent aliens invade our planet, destroy landmarks, level cities, and slaughter citizens only to succumb—at the very last minute and against all odds—to our ingenuity, can-do spirit, and basic human decency. Featuring impressive CGI space creatures and overflowing with an eclectic all-star cast, Mars Attacks! draws upon the same cultural repository of sci-fi as Independence Day. Both films are entirely constituted by intertextuality, references to 1950s B-movie science fiction, and 1970s disaster films, overtly name-checking such genre classics as The War of the Worlds, Earth v. the Flying Saucers, Plan 9 From Outer Space, and, tellingly, Dr. Strangelove.

But where Independence Day draws from its pop culture sources in a manner that commemorates movies as escapist, uplifting utopian visions, Mars Attacks! celebrates its references for their inherent trashiness, their outsider status and ephemeral nature, and as an alternative to the somber high-art pretensions of the big-budget blockbuster. While the embrace of trash culture might have accounted for the film's inability to garner a mass audience—its satire too knowing to appeal to all but the genre's most devoted fans—what most accounts for the film's reputation as a failure is its gleeful, blithe violations of the disaster film genre's social contract.

By being 'too much'—a hallmark of trash culture—the excess of sadism and brutality in Mars Attacks! reveals to us our own hypocrisy.

Movies described as "apocalyptic," a term so overused that it has seemingly lost its relevance and importance, typically provide a vision of societal rebirth. Part edifying discourse and part revenge fantasy, an apocalyptic story passes judgment upon civilization as irredeemably corrupt and unable to be reformed. An apocalyptic narrative yearns for total destruction so that a new world may be born, built upon the smoldering ruins of its predecessor.

As cataclysm purges society of any undesirable elements, it reveals inviolable truth, affirming society's deeply held values. Bad people perish in an over-determined, moralistic manner—a poetic death appropriate to how they sinned—while good people survive to establish a better, more perfect, divinely sanctioned society. That's the vision offered by Independence Day: the peoples of the world come together, buffeted by the essential inherent goodness of America's defining institutions of state, military, faith, and scientific know-how, to defeat the extraterrestrial hordes and usher in a new era of peace overseen by benign patriarchal, egalitarian leadership.

Mars Attacks! refuses to deliver on the grand promise of the apocalyptic narrative. It doesn't give us absolute truth or allow us to feel pride and satisfaction in American Exceptionalism. Instead, as the martians blithely lay waste to our planet, it reveals that at the heart of the apocalyptic story is inherent sadism—reveling in vindictive destruction for its own sake. What Mars Attacks! shows is that apocalypticism is a narrative device that movies have employed to great effect and thrills, but nothing more. The trope's oversaturation has reduced its value as an exploration of American morality, ideals, and faith to the point where it withholds catharsis and fails to signify anything at all. Rather, Burton calls our attention to how much we enjoy these mean-spirited spectacles of apparently bloodless mass murder.

For more on movies, watch our episode of VICE Talks Film with director Mike Leigh:

Burton delineates the pleasures of the genre and then overstates them to reveal their inner workings. Almost every role in the film is inhabited by a filmmaker, character actor, or recognizable celebrity—after all, a feature of the genre's 1970s iteration was the star-studded spectacle, offering audiences the rare thrill of watching famous actors "get it."

Mars Attacks! takes this convention and grossly overstates it: a bevy of stars are obliterated by martians in excessively cruel ways, calling our attention to the notion of poetic death itself. Glenn Close's shallow First Lady is crushed by the "Nancy Reagan chandelier"; Martin Short's Press Secretary lothario is dismembered by Lisa Marie's martian seductress; Danny DeVito's cringe-inducing lawyer is annihilated as he tries to cut a deal with an alien; Michael J. Fox's glad-handing reporter is vaporized except for, well, his hand. Most disturbingly, Jack Nicholson's President Dale, an empty suit concerned only with photo ops and polling, is eviscerated by a martian handshake just as he delivers a stirring plea for understanding and peace.

Burton and Gems liberally ladle on the poetic death and sadism, to the point where we become painfully aware of the genre's reliance on vicious displays and lack of empathy. By being 'too much'—a hallmark of trash culture—the excess of sadism and brutality in Mars Attacks! reveals to us our own hypocrisy: We want destruction and mass death—we just don't want to be held to account for it or be reminded of how unseemly it is to revel in the murders of millions razed by a natural disaster or extraterrestrial life.

Mars Attacks! is pop culture's marginalia exacting revenge upon American civilization and the pretensions of the disaster movie. The martians represent the campiness and superficiality that is always present underneath the solemnity of movies like Independence Day and The Towering Inferno, revealing what's underneath isn't truth and revelation but trash and crap. In Burton's doom narrative, society isn't saved by heroic figures like brave Captain Hiller or geniuses like David Levinson, but by society's rejects—familial outcasts, forgetful grandmothers, B-movie actors, Vegas lounge acts like Tom Jones, and teenage video game virtuosos. The final victory, the triumph of trash, is that the martians are finally defeated by pop culture detritus—a unique Bad Object in the form of an earworm novelty song by Slim Whitman, whose upper octave yodeling in "Indian Love Call" proves deadly to the martians' hearing. In the end, it is our refuse that refuses to let us die.

Dr. Julian Cornell is a professor whose research and teaching interests involve the politics of taste in American pop culture, with a focus on Hollywood genre movies. For 15 years, he has taught at NYU and Queens College. Prior to teaching, he was a programming executive at HBO from 1993 until 2001.

I'm Depressed, But Is That Actually a Problem?

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This article originally appeared on VICE Australia/New Zealand

It's 8:30 AM, my alarm has gone off for the fifth time and I can't get out of bed. It's 11:30 AM and I get an email saying I've been offered a dream gig and I can barely muster a smile. It's not until 4:30 PM, after sobbing in bed alone, that I realize I'm depressed. Again.

I was always an anxious kid. I'm the oldest, which meant looking after my brother and sister when mum and dad were at work. It meant calling the police when my uncles got drunk and fought out the front of the house. In year nine, I got so anxious I couldn't go to school for about a month. The same thing happened again at the end of year 10. Anxiety and depression caused me to defer two different degrees, and quit at least three jobs. I've cancelled more Tinder dates than I can remember.

I think now being the oldest and the responsibility that has sometimes come with it means my fight or flight mode is almost always on. My anxiety comes in peaks and troughs, but it's there in most social situations: Why did I say that? No one got that joke. Why do you talk so much? You are such a fucking idiot.

Sometimes I look around at all these carefree and smiling people and wonder how the fuck they do it. They can't all be that happy. And statistics tell me they aren't. On average one-in-four Australians will experience anxiety at some point in their lives. One-in-five will experience depression at some point in their lifetimes.

But for Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander people, the rate who'll experience psychological distress it's nearly 31 percent. It's no surprise then that most blackfullas I know are facing some sort of mental health issue. Research shows us that mental health is greatly affected by your environment. But genetic factors also play a part, and there's no doubt that colonization has fucked us up.

I wonder what trauma did my great great great grandfather pass down, as a young boy who survived a massacre? What trauma did my great grandmother pass down being stolen from her country and family? What trauma did my mother pass down?

Sometimes I worry about what trauma I am going to pass on, if I decide to have children. What happens when those genes, and all that trauma, is coupled with experiencing family violence, white supremacy, misogyny, and queerphobia? It's no wonder we're all a bit fucked up.

Like many other communities, Aboriginal people don't really talk about mental health. It feels like we are too busy trying to survive. Too busy putting food on the table, too busy looking after the kids, too busy working, mourning, just trying to keep our heads above water to consider our own well being. We are all too busy trying to maintain, when what we really need is healing.

We're told success looks like going to school and uni, getting a good job and a mortgage. We aren't warned that we will mourn our mother tongue, that many of us will perpetually feel uncomfortable being the only black person in white spaces. No one tells you how exhausted you will feel all the time.

Getting help can feel like a luxury. I'm privileged enough to have an income, food on the table, a roof over my head, and no dependents. I have the time and support to go get help. Not everyone has this. It's a cruel irony that sometimes you to have to be well enough to get help.

Living in a settler colonial society and getting therapy from the settler is a strange experience too. In therapy as a black woman, I'm relying on my white therapist not being fragile when I rage about colonization, racism, and microaggressions.

Then there's the fact that white Australian culture values individualism. It often feels like the western therapy focuses on you—the individual. In my culture, we centre the collective. This can make therapy challenging. It's rare to just happen on a therapist who understands these race and power dynamics.

Usually, they just try to help you. They try to fix you. Your depression is a problem that must be solved.

So, I'm depressed, but is that actually a problem? Is my depression a problem to fix? I'm not saying it doesn't suck. I'm not saying it's a fun time. But it's not a surprise that a group of people who weren't meant to survive genocide occasionally struggle to navigate their black bodies and minds on stolen land.

The moments I feel most happy and well are when I am surrounded by black people and feel self-determined. Even if, structurally, that isn't really the case. The older I get the more I think that maybe my depression is a totally normal response to being a blackfulla in this country.

Maybe my depression isn't the problem. Maybe it's a collective symptom, one that should be expected with this country's history. Maybe it's the price we pay for colonization and assimilation.

Follow Nayuka on Twitter.

You can call Samaritans on 116-123 any day, at any time, if you're feeling distressed or down. If you or someone you know might be thinking about suicide or self-harm, you can also call Papyrus on 0800 068 4141. Lines are open from 10AM to 10PM on weekdays and from 2PM to 10PM on weekends.

How Fidel Castro Dominated Miami's Politics for Decades

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Miguel Saavedra, a longtime anti-Castro activist (in the orange polo shirt), leads a rally on Saturday after Castro's death. Photo by the author.

On Saturday afternoon, about 12 hours after the world learned longtime revolutionary leader and communist strongman Fidel Castro had died, hundreds of Cubans, along with a few dozen Nicaraguans, Colombians, and Venezuelans, gathered in front of Versailles Restaurant, a Cuban joint in Miami's Little Havana neighborhood that has long served as the de facto center of anti-Castro fervor. Among a group of 16 demonstrators holding up a large Cuban flag was Miguel Saavedra, a 58-year-old handyman with sandy blonde hair and a neatly trimmed beard, who started a chant: "Cuba si! Castro no! Cuba si! Castro no!"

As the founder of the anti-communist organization Vigilia Mambisa, Saavedra has dedicated the past 37 years of his life to mounting protests against Castro, the Cuban government, and anyone who dares stand against the hardline Cold War approach toward the communist nation. "I come from a very patriotic family," Saavedra told me between shouts. "It's our duty to fight for a free Cuba. Now that the assassin Fidel is dead, we must not stop until it happens."

Saavedra personifies how Castro, who is universally reviled in Miami, reshaped the city just as he influenced socialist revolutions across the Western Hemisphere. Before Castro conquered Cuba in 1959, Miami served as the playground for rich Americans. Since the revolution, Miami has become an international metropolis filled with immigrants hailing from Cuba and other countries in Latin America upended by communist revolutions. Because of Castro, Miami became the front line of defense against the red threat, where even decisions about whether to allow Cuban bands to perform at local venues caused widespread community discord.

"Fidel Castro not only shaped events in Miami and around the world where communist revolutions took place, he shaped how we reacted to those events," said Roberto Rodriguez Tejera, a local commentator for Miami AM station Actualidad Radio. "If Fidel didn't exist, Miami is not the city it has become today."

Anti-Castro political stances have become a requirement for candidates running for local, state, and federal office in Miami, Rodriguez Tejera noted. "As a candidate, you identified yourself through your anti-Castroism," he said. "Issues impacting the community like transportation were not as important."

Consider the 1993 Miami mayor's race that pitted Stephen P. Clark, a white man, against Miriam Alonso, a Cuban-American woman. During the campaign, Clark touted his credentials assisting Cuban immigrants since the early days of Castro's revolution. Alonso, at the time a city commissioner, argued that only a Cuban could properly serve as the city's leader. According to a New York Times article from the time, Alonso argued on Spanish language radio stations that only a Cuban-American mayor was equipped to handle the aftermath should Castro die or lose power. Ultimately, however, Clark won by a 3-2 margin, helped by a photo that Alonso's detractors claimed showed her standing next to Castro.

Francis Suarez is a Miami commissioner whose father, Xavier Suarez, was the city's first Cuban-born mayor. He told me that Castro was part of the fabric in the lives of many Miamians. "There is a connection between my generation and the people of Cuba even though many of us have never been there," Suarez said. "In my case, my grandfather and his two brothers were political prisoners. We have lived firsthand the stories even though we weren't there."

The commissioner pointed out that Spanish language AM radio stations often structured local programming around what Castro was up to. "The informational system was predicated on everything that was happening in Cuba," Suarez said. "Certainly the news and politics were very closely tied to Cuba and the constant manifestations to protest significant events were part of daily life in the city."

But as Castro's power waned in Cuba after he relinquished the presidency to his brother Raul in 2008, el comandante's influence on Miami's civic affairs has also lessened. A September Florida International University poll found that 56 percent of local Cuban Americans "strongly" or "mostly" favor reestablishing US relations with Cuba and 63 percent don't believe the US embargo against Cuba should continue.

Raul Martinez, a former mayor of Hialeah, a city neighboring Miami that has the highest percentage of Cubans in the US said Castro's role as bogeyman in local politics and civic affairs has been on the downswing in the last decade. "We are closing one chapter in Cuban history," Martinez said. "He's gone and now it's, 'What's next?'"

Follow Francisco Alvarado on Twitter.

News Spin Is Fucking Out of Control and This Headline Probably Isn’t Helping

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2016, man. Still via 'An American Dream: The Education of William Bowman'

It's weird to imagine that Ken Finkleman's latest film was written before Donald Trump announced his run for president.

2016 wasn't even a twinkle in the eye of a news cycle dominated by llamas and dress colours, and Finkleman was thinking about mass shootings and conspiracy theories. Maybe you were thinking about conspiracies too—that Sandy Hook was an inside job was a popular one at the time—but you probably weren't guessing that nearly two years later, noted Sandy Hook truther Alex Jones would supposedly be taking thank-you calls from the President of the United States.

Finkleman wasn't guessing that would happen either, he was just seeking out logical extremes in the CNN coverage he watched every night. He's made a career out of skewering news media with shows like Good Dog and CBC's The Newsroom, and Wolf Blitzer's latest hysterics just seemed like an easy next target. In his latest feature, An American Dream: The Education of William Bowman, Finkleman has sketched out a new post-truth media dystopia, but what we've actually ended up with in recent weeks is arguably worse.

In this barely-distant alternate reality, recent grad William Bowman goes wide-eyed into a soulless Wall Street job incapable of reading between lines. Soon fired and left wandering across the United States, he takes everything he encounters at face value, including a suggestion that disasters are mass produced so that governments can build a narrative around them.

It's worth noting the film's description says it's "aimed at the post-Donald Trump era of American politics." When I ask Finkleman if he honestly expected that particular era to be over by now, he only notes the US election result is "very strange."

"These themes, really American themes, I had in my head," he said. "I don't think I'm unusually prescient, the ducks just happened to line up." This week real-life Nazi salutes were spun as "exuberance," which does seem to exceed the limits of any Canadian parody.

Our protagonist lives in a TV-saturated news and information environment, in which state executions are televised and news anchors are pretty much nine years old. Explosions stand in for human interactions, and he stumbles onto reality show in which a host finds homeless people to fuck on live television.

Though still somewhat dazzled by cable news reporters in action, Finkleman says he started to see reflections of his own Hollywood "hackery" in the trade. It turns out a CBS segment comes together a lot like Grease 2. "They talked about stories like this: who is the good guy? Who is the bad guy? Where's act two, where do we nail act three?" he said. "They were writing scripts using real footage instead of inventing it like we were. They used what was already available, structured it, and matched it exactly to the same dramatic arc that stories that you write in fiction."

"You don't get an understanding of any truth, you get a picture they paint. They've decided to paint what the reality is," he added. "They just have an instinct for the drama, and not a fucking care about the truth."

Finkleman has since seen that play out virtually every day of Trump's campaign, in alarming post-satire excess. At a rally with evangelicals, he remembers Trump literally thumping a bible. "He held up the bible and he said 'This is a terrific book. This is terrific, terrific. I love this book...' He didn't read the fucking bible, ever. And it was so obvious, and he was talking to these people who, this is the most sacred thing in their lives, and they couldn't see through that snake oil pitch that he gave about loving the bible."

It's enough to make you feel like over-the-top movie drama is more honest by comparison—at the very least up front about its Los Angeles-based worldview. But even that doesn't begin to comment on the proliferation of full-on news fakery we're only starting to learn about. Finkleman says he was amazed to see the twenty-somethings trading in caps-locked rumour and conspiracy here in Canada, too. "You start to understand, and see the model, and then you see also, how the model then can change."

All of this shows the difficulty of satire in 2016, and the way art changes meaning in the wake of world events. Up against four years in a Trump era, An American Dream doesn't quite go as far as the real thing, but it's pretty damn close.

Follow Sarah on Twitter.


Westworld: How the Creators of 'Westworld' Built a Violent World of Robot Cowboys

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Over the last two decades, HBO's original programming has become synonymous with ambition—but Westworld might be one of the channel's most expansive and audacious projects to date. Drawing from the 1973 Michael Crichton film of the same name and premiering this Sunday at 9 PM, the show chronicles a gigantic Western-themed amusement park that's less Six Flags and more Red Dead Redemption: Androids dressed up in dusty garb are the main attraction, and you can do anything you want with them—befriend them, drink with them, fuck them, even kill them. The robots—or, as the show calls them, "hosts"—are unable to inflict injury on the park's guests; without giving too much away, there's plenty of foreboding occurrences in the episodes sent out to press to suggest that the host-guest relationship won't remain neutral for long.

Explicitly tackling Big Themes—religion, technology, morality, and the nature of human (and inhuman) violence among them—while casting a captivating aura, Westworld impressively balances its weighty philosophical bearings with a heady and entertaining swirl of romance, murder, and mystery. If that description reminds you of ABC's mid-2000s sci-fi-tinged sensation Lost, you're not too off the mark; that show's creator and executive producer, J. J. Abrams, also carries an executive producing credit on Westworld with creators and showrunners Jonathan Nolan (The Dark Knight, Interstellar, Person of Interest) and Lisa Joy (Pushing Daisies, Burn Notice).

One of the many issues Lost faced was a lack of planning when it came to fleshing out and making sense of the show's mythology. Clearly, Joy and Nolan are taking pains to avoid similar pitfalls: In recent weeks, there have been reports that they and HBO have planned for a whopping five seasons of Westworld thus far. When I brought up that figure to Joy and Nolan in conversation earlier this week, they laughed before clarifying that their vision is not that specific just yet. "The fastest way to guarantee you don't get the number you want is to settle on a number," Nolan explained. "I've done this long enough to know that it's foolish to assume you can plan things out with that much precision—but when you embark on a series like this, you really need to have a sense of where it's going."

Creating a TV show with its own distinct world separate from its source material was important to Joy and Nolan, too. "The original movie provided a springboard for the world we wanted to create," Joy said. "When we initially embarked on this, we spent a lot of time committing to what we wanted to do in the pilot—where we wanted to go and how we wanted to build the mythology. In the end, we looked like maniacs, because we pasted all of these ideas on the wall of the room in which we were working. By the time we were done, there wasn't a window to be seen. That's when we thought, 'OK, it's probably time to start writing so we can take this stuff down off the wall.'"

VICE: The show reminds me a lot of playing open-world RPG video games. Were video games something that you guys were thinking about while creating the show?
Jonathan Nolan:
Yeah, very much—I used to play video games, before we had a three-year-old.
Lisa Joy: And a TV show.
Nolan: A lot of interesting storytelling that's happening right now is in video games—which literally didn't exist when Michael Crichton was writing the original film. Now, video games are a bigger industry than film or TV. I've never worked in that industry, but we have friends who have, and I was fascinated by the concept of writing a story in which the protagonists' actions aren't part of the story. In games like The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, Red Dead Redemption, or the sandbox games that Bioware make, morality is a variable. How do you write a story in which the hero's moral component exists on a spectrum? That's a fascinating challenge.

I'm also fascinated by how non-player-characters in video games have their own lives. In Skyrim, when you walk into a village, you aren't necessarily the most important person there. The NPCs have lives that happen whether you're there or not. I was listening to directors' commentary from Ken Levine about building Bioshock Infinite and the affection that game developers and designers develop for their characters. It's a qualitatively different relationship than the one screenwriters have with their characters, because video game characters don't just recite dialogue—they do shit, and the players interact with them. It's a relationship that I think Crichton anticipated to some degree, but it's become much more complicated than even he could imagine.

"The honeymoon is probably going to last for about 18 months before one of them becomes sentient and wants out. I definitely think this is the story of our age." —Jonathan Nolan

Some of the elements of artificial intelligence that Westworld explores seem closer to real life than we might like to admit. Are the growing capabilities of AI good or bad for society?
Joy:
For me, it's about whether we're bad or good. AI is, in some way, a reflection of its creators. How it behaves is patterned on what drive we program it with, and how we behave with it is up to us—what our values are, as well as our levels of empathy and humanization with it. Historically, I've been less than impressed with how well humans empathize with groups that they think of as "other." I think it's a glitch in humanity, this inability to empathize. But I'm also optimistic—there's a lot of good that can be done in AI, and I hope that side of it prevails.

Nolan: We're just about at that uncomfortable moment in which we'll be able to create universes fully inhabited by nearly-AI creatures who will do our bidding and satisfy our every appetite. The honeymoon is probably going to last for about 18 months before one of them becomes sentient and wants out. I definitely think this is the story of our age.

Photo by John P. Johnson/courtesy of HBO

Both of your previous experiences in television have been quite different from what Westworld is.
Nolan:
When they say, "It's not TV, its HBO," they're not kidding. In terms of the scope and the production values, it's somewhere in between a television series and a series of films. A lot of the things we've learned over the years were helpful, but a lot were not, too. , I got very accustomed to being able to write and produce and shoot and cut simultaneously, but with this show that was impossible.

Joy: For me, being able to tell a completely serialized ensemble story was completely new. Everything else I'd done before had a certain level of procedural quality to it. This was a wonderful opportunity to dive deep into character and long-form mythology storytelling. On Pushing Daisies, always emphasized the visuals on the page, and that's a habit that stuck with me. It's not just about the words you're writing down—it's a visual spectacle, too, and Westworld is a very visual show.

Even considering HBO's reputation, Westworld is pretty violent and sexually explicit.
Nolan:
This might be somewhat hypocritical, but Lisa and I aren't terribly interested in portrayals of sexual violence onscreen. Obviously, part of what the show is about is that, but it wasn't something we were interested in fetishizing. It is a show about violence, though, and we're asking the question, "Why is it that we like violence in almost all of our entertainment?" Violence is in most of the stories we like to watch, but it isn't part of what we like to do—so why are paying money to exercise that appetite?

Joy: We have a toddler at home, and I try to curate her movies and entertainment so that its not that violent—but it's incredibly difficult, because even most of the classic children's tales feature violence and loss. Why are we so drawn to loss and violence? I think it's a kind of medicine—we explore in fiction what we desperately fear and abhor in reality, and chronicling it in fiction is our way of avoiding it or learning from it. Maybe that's also why people go into the park in Westworld. It's not necessarily a question we have the answer to, but it's something that we've talked about.

Follow Larry Fitzmaurice on Twitter.

Westworld premiered on Sky Atlantic at 9PM on the 4th of October.

Why Instagram Became the Perfect Breeding Ground for Conspiracy Theories

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When my girlfriend caught me looking at a picture of a naked woman covered with only a skateboard and the words "TAXATION IS THEFT," I had a good excuse: I was just scrolling through my Instagram's Explore tab. There's a perfectly reasonable explanation for why Instagram (correctly) thought I might be interested in such a photo: I can't stop clicking on the glut of conspiracy theory-related images that permeate a dark corner of the app.

Chances are, you clicked on this article from one of your social media feeds. The practice of typing a homepage address into the URL bar is dying, and 60 percent of Americans now get their news from social media sites. Facebook is the juggernaut here, far and away the biggest source of traffic. The quintessential Facebook news post is something designed to be shared, whether a positive, Upworthy-type story, or an outrage-baiting partisan blog post on a fly-by-night political site. On Twitter, where all 300 million active users seem to at least moonlight as media critics, insider accounts of the day's top news thrive. Snapchat, meanwhile, has partnered with publications, allowing them to share millennial-centric stories in its Discover section. Of the major social networks, only Instagram lacks a real value proposition for news organizations (though that may be changing soon).

A big reason Instagram stands out is the insular nature of the app. Whereas one can easily click from Twitter to an article on a news site, head back to Twitter, and share that article, Instagram doesn't allow for hyperlinking, except in your bio and to other Instagram accounts and hashtags. This means the social network can't really drive any meaningful traffic, outside of paid ads. (Instagram is currently testing out a function that lets users post links in the new Stories feature, but this is currently limited to verified users, and hasn't yet affected the way ordinary people use the app.) You can't even copy text in the app. Without being able to link to outside sources, citing information on Instagram is a difficult task that no one really bothers with.

This lack of accountability and context has been the status quo for the app for a while, as evidenced in everything from the image macro in which Hillary Clinton promised she would "Create 10.4 million jobs" and Donald Trump will "Lose almost 3.5 million jobs," to this truther account posting a meme about "that moment when you find out it's legal to use aborted fetal cells for flavoring." Instagram is built for easily digestible information, not fact-checking. It even lacks a top comment feature, so one user's informative reply is quickly covered up by another user's comment that, "." Disinformation that would quickly be debunked on other networks thrives on Instagram, especially since it hasn't been worth mainstream media organizations' effort to devote significant time or money to the platform until recently. (Remember, Instagram has traditionally sent very few people to websites, compared to Facebook or Twitter, and minimal traffic means minimal ad revenue). Consequently, many passionate people fill this news void by posting pictures that don't necessarily adhere to conventional definitions of truth. In short: conspiracy theory memes, like the aforementioned naked skateboarder with the anti-tax screed.

I first discovered conspiracy Instagram through the "Explore" feature, where users can find photos and videos that are similar to those posted by the people they already follow, often from friends of friends. Explore is designed to make spending hours researching the lives of acquaintances' acquaintances seem like a totally normal thing to do. Thanks to the election, my tab had become increasingly political, and once Bernie Sanders's campaign was over (and friends stopped the once-omnipresent Bernie memes), the political posts in my feed took a turn toward the fringe.

Over time, Explore learns what you click on, and uses this to decide what to show you in the future. It's also endless (limited only by the number of photos posted to Instagram by all users), and consequently resembles the world of conspiracy theories: an inexhaustible source of new-but-related information that builds upon what you've previously been shown. I quickly found myself down the rabbit hole: Fringe-left politics led me toward political conspiracy memes, which were in turn only a quick jump away from "skeptical third world child" image macros about Zika being a conspiracy and "inside job" starter packs (note the "demolition squids" and "termite cut beams"). If there are two things I can't not click on, it's conspiracy theories and niche memes; consequently, my Instagram was soon dominated by grainy images of Rothschild bankers and the World Trade Center.

In general, images shared by any one truther wouldn't be out of place on any other truther account (and if you follow multiple accounts, you'll notice that they often share the same memes.) Spend enough time browsing, though, and a few distinct varieties emerge. To name a few, there are people concerned with GMOs and chemtrails, who believe environmental changes are intentionally created by big business, for profits, and by the government, which uses global warming as an excuse to pass new regulations. There are anti-Semitic conspiracists who slap the Star of David on images of politicians and post gross caricatures like "The Simpsteins" ("Dohy Vey!!!!"). There's also all the people with Anonymous mask avatars who post lots of screenshots from RT, Russia's English-language propaganda site. Sometimes I wonder if these accounts are being run by a Russian troll farm, but then I worry that maybe I've spent a bit too long on conspiracy theory Instagram.

What all these accounts seem to have in common is a belief that we're being lied to. In many cases they're right, or at least not completely wrong. Sometimes their posts address very real problems—environmental degradation, unfair drug laws, economic inequality—that mainstream politicians too often ignore. Other times—like when they suggest deserts were actually caused by ancient mining—their posts are baffling, offensive, or just obviously false.

Sometimes I wonder if these accounts are being run by a Russian troll farm, but then I worry that maybe I've spent a bit too long on conspiracy theory Instagram.


Curious about their motivation, I sent direct messages to several accounts. Most ignored my request for an interview, but one, @connecting_consciousness, was willing to talk. The account, which boasts nearly 50,000 followers, is run by Shayne, a 21-year-old Canadian who says his goal is simply "raising awareness about the problems and solutions we all face."

The account is an environmentally-focused one, but ultimately he describes all of the things he posts about—chemtrails, GMOs, the global banking system, vaccines—as part of one interconnected conspiracy. It's slightly complicated to explain, as these things tend to be, but essentially @connecting_consciousness believes the "Rothschilds and Rockefellers own every central bank in every NATO country," and they have done so since 1913, when the US government signed over all power to the Federal Reserve (which is neither federal nor has any reserves and is actually a private incorporated business owned by the 13 families who own the media that you'll be potentially posting this on)." How chemtrails play into this is that, "weather has an impact on every single global financial market, so there's a lot of money you can make by having an edge on the weather," according to him.

Consequently, Shayne doesn't place himself on the left-right political spectrum. "Since 1913 every election has been a complete and utter fraud," he says. "Rothschild and Rockefeller are president and vice president every single year." This echoed what I'd noticed on other conspiracy accounts, a tendency to reject the political system and see voting as part of the grand scam.

Might this online rejection of the political system have a real-world outcome? I asked Kevin Munger, an NYU politics Ph.D. candidate who researches how social media interactions affect behavior, for his thoughts. He told me that while studies relating social media exposure to political participation have had mixed results, "I do think that memes were genuinely politically important among young people this election cycle." Of course, these conspiracy theory memes are only a small part of the larger political meme phenomenon, but that doesn't mean they should be ignored. With millions of followers combined, these accounts could feasibly influence huge numbers of young people to believe in falsehoods and lies, and to stay disengaged from the real politics that affect their lives.

In recent months, much has been made about the power that dubious right-wing Facebook pages have over the American electorate. Many critics have even argued that Donald Trump owes his victory to the power of fake news on Facebook. If Facebook played a role in convincing older Americans to vote Trump, Instagram—which Facebook owns—may very well have convinced some people not to vote at all. After all, Instagram is especially popular amongst young people, the demographic that's hardest to get to the polls. Following an election in which roughly 40 percent of adults didn't vote, and in which crucial swing states were won by only tens of thousands of votes, I can't help but wonder if these accounts played a role, however minor.

What's clear is that social media has allowed the angry and disaffected—whether legitimate political activists, conspiracy theorists, or ethno-nationalists—to find each other, spread their message, and bypass the gatekeepers of mainstream media in a way that was previously unimaginable outside of Reddit and 4Chan. While guessing how the app and its uses will evolve in the future is a fool's errand, the current protocols and functionality of Instagram have turned the platform into the perfect breeding ground for these types of internet users.

Consider, for example, that these Instagram accounts and Donald Trump both frequently warn of "globalism," a term that the Anti-Defamation League describes as a "dog-whistle" for attracting anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists. As Ian Bremmer, president of global risk assessment firm the Eurasia Group told the New York Times, "Through this new technology, people are now empowered to express their grievances and to follow people they see as echoing their grievances. If it wasn't for social media, I don't see Trump winning."

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Please Kill Me: What It Was Like to Party with Weirdos and Misfits in the 1970s

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Bruce Weber and Philippe Marcade on the beach, Truro, MA, 1975. Courtesy of Nan Goldin and Matthew Marks Gallery

This article originally appeared on VICE US

America used to have sanctuaries across the country where fuck-ups, weirdos and other "marginalized" people could hide out and live without much contact with "straight" America. Places like downtown New York City in the East and West Village, Haight Ashbury in San Francisco, and, of course, Provincetown, that great artistic outpost at the very tip of Cape Cod. All these locations provided affordable living, while tolerating bizarre lifestyles. Hallelujah!

Now most of these sanctuaries have been wiped out by yuppies and gentrification, or in downtown NYC's case, fucking idiot students who've made the East Village their own private frat party. Gone are these special places to live out your life exactly as you wanted to, so we thought we'd provide a reminder to all those kids who have told us they were born too late and look fondly to the past—Quaaludes, 45 records, black beauties, 16 millimeter movies, and when "making art" was not just a hobby. You lived it.

Philippe Marcade is an old friend who lived a wild life as the lead singer of the Senders, and hung out with Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan, as well as Richard Hell, Dee Dee Ramone, Debbie Harry, and Chris Stein. Philippe was also a featured voice in our book, Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, which we recently celebrated with a 20th anniversary edition. Get it, it's good.

But he was more than just a French punk rocker who hung out a CBGB and Max's Kansas City. He was "in" with a bunch of malcontents who celebrated the idea of "inspired amateurism" from the lonely outpost of Provincetown, Massachusetts before commercialism ruined that town. The crew included Channing Wilroy, an actor who appeared in several of John Water's movies, the film critic Dennis Dermody, the late photographer David Armstrong, and other experimental artists.

Philippe was also good friends with both photographer Nan Goldin and writer/actress Cookie Mueller, two woman whose lives were the blueprints for today's punk girls. They were independent, intelligent, rebellious, bi-sexual, and hysterically funny. And they did it before there was this thing called punk. This is the story of the 1970s summer they spent partying in the Cape.

Philippe Marcade: I met Nan Goldin in Boston—both her and David Armstrong. Do you know who he is? He's a photographer who got pretty famous, and he was also from Boston. Nan and David were good friends, and they were my friend Bruce's best friends. Nan was really funny at the time, she used to crack me up a lot, but she would take pictures discreetly of people, you know, to catch intimate things.

Nan was like someone taking pictures while they were on vacation, you know? Like summer snap shots.

Nan Goldin: When I was 15, I went to a school at a place that was based on Summer Hill in England, which was a free school where there were no classes. Most of the students were thrown out of normal schools, so we ran around naked and we had sex, and I immediately became obsessed with taking pictures, so I became pretty much the school photographer.

Philippe Marcade: Man, we had no idea Nan's photos were going to be so famous! I mean, she basically just shot regular pictures, always in color, and she got them printed at the photo print shop. But it was not like she was just snapping pictures for fun, and thinking nothing of it. She was totally into it; she was hoping to make it, and she always had her camera with her. I guess that was her passion.

Nan Goldin: David Armstrong was the first person I photographed and that continued till his death. David looked like a woman and started to dress in semi-drag. Through him I met a whole community of drag queens. So about a year out of "hippie free school", I started living with these drag queens on Beacon Hill, and I thought they were the most beautiful people I'd ever met in my life.

This was the early 1970s in Boston, and at this time the queens couldn't work, they couldn't go out during the daytime, so we lived a nocturnal existence, and we went to the same bar every single night except Thursday when they had their bologna buffet.

I became the bar photographer, even though the bar was run by the mafia, but they liked me, so they let me photograph all the time. And I took the pictures to the drugstore—I didn't have a darkroom—so they came back as little snapshots, and then the queens would make piles, to see who had the most pictures, and they ripped up the ones they didn't like which I completely accepted.

Philippe Marcade: We also met Cookie Mueller and her friends in Boston, too. She told us about Provincetown, and said she had a house there. Cookie invited us to come see her there; she invited us for a weekend, and that's the first time we went to Provincetown.

Channing Wilroy: The crazy people came to Provincetown, the people who didn't fit in Cleveland, or wherever else they were from. This was like a dumping ground for the ne'er-do-wells. And we all got along quite well there.

Philippe Marcade: Everybody was drunk all the time, so I think everyone got along real good.

Channing Wilroy: The town was very forgiving that way. Everybody's welcome here; you can be anything you want.

Cookie and John gossiping on the opening night of 'Pink Flamingos,' Provincetown, MA, 1976. Photo courtesy of Nan Goldin and Matthew Marks Gallery.

Nan Goldin: Cookie was one of my best friends, we were family, and there was no distinction between gay and straight. Cookie and myself were both bisexual, and really lived that. I mean not just in theory, but in actuality.

Philippe Marcade: Cookie had a son, Max, by then. He was already born.

Dennis Dermody: Cookie had just had Max, and I went over her house one day, and she was peeling potatoes, and Max was screaming, crying.

So I said, "What's going on?"

Cookie said, "Well, potatoes are his friends...."

And I thought, "Oh my god!"

Mink Stole: Cookie wanted to name Max, "Noodles," but the hospital refused to put it on the birth certificate. So she had to name him Max. And he actually is the "Baby Noodles" in Pink Flamingos.

Dennis Dermody: I'm glad Max was not named Noodles. Noodles Mueller?

Philippe Marcade: Cookie gave us the address, and we drove to P-Town, but we got there very late at night because we got kind of lost. We couldn't find her house at first, but when we did all the lights were off. It was maybe three or four in the morning, and the door was unlocked, so we just walked in.

We didn't want to wake Cookie up, so we didn't turn the light on. We just found a sofa that opened up, like a bed, and we went to sleep.

And I woke up the next morning expecting to see Cookie, but it wasn't Cookie—it was a rifle, two inches from my nose!

And this little guy holding it, who says to me, "Who the heck are you, and what the fuck are you doing here?"

The guy was in his pajamas, with the rifle pointed at me, and his son was there too, with a rifle pointed at Bruce.

So we had our arms up in the air, still in the bed, and we explained out mistake and that we were looking for Cookie Mueller's house. He knew her, and said she lived just down the road. So he understood the situation, and he calmed down.

He was in his pajamas first, then came back in the kitchen putting on his uniform, and that's when I realized, "Oh man, he's a cop!" It turned out we stumbled into the house of the Sheriff of Provincetown! We were in the house of a cop! But he was really nice, you know? So he made us breakfast, and he was just laughing his ass off, and he asked how I would like my eggs, and I said, "Sunny side up," ha, ha, ha!

Susan Lowe: Cookie and I were like bad girls together, you know, kinda like Eddie Haskell and Eddie Haskell. We wanted to see how rebellious we could be, and get away with it in whatever way was rebellious at that time. We were on black beauties and Old Crow, or something—I don't know. We're hitchhiking in tiny miniskirts, and wearing black fingernail polish. We were a mess. It was great.

Cookie Mueller and Sharon Niesp dancing in the Back Room, Provincetown, MA, 1976. Photo courtesy of Nan Goldin and Matthew Marks Gallery

Philippe Marcade: We ended up staying at Cookie's house for a bit, and we loved P-Town so much, that we decided to rent a house for the summer, and we did. We rented a house on Commercial Street, with me, Bruce, Nan Goldin, and David Armstrong. It was a really fun summer. It was so great.

Nan Goldin: Cookie was the diva, the superstar around whom our whole family rotated, and it was at her house that we had Thanksgiving, where she would serve opium and turkey.

Susan Lowe: Once Cookie, Mink Stole, and I got kidnapped by these hillbillies in P-Town. We got in the car because they had booze.

Then we realized they were trying to get us lost, and that this was not the way we wanted to go. So we started writing notes to hand to the tollbooth attendants, "Help, please help us!"

We were trying to sneak them, but the hillbillies would catch us and rip the notes up. Also, we were coming down off of speed, right, and you know how that is. Maybe you don't, but it's horrible.

So Mink Stole and I jumped out of the car, and these guys took off with Cookie, and we were left at this other hillbillies' house. I mean real Appalachia, so we called the police. And Mink and I stayed at the police station. They were giving us a hard time because I had a sketch book. I was an artist, and I had a sketchbook with nude sketches in it, and they were going to confiscate it. I thought, "What are you going to do with that?" Probably jerk off in the back room with it.

Cookie got away from somehow and hid in the woods, underneath her bag. But I don't know how she got her bag out of the car.

You could feel that something new was coming up. Like, enough of the fucking hippies, give us something else! So I guess that's the influence of John Waters, and his films, of course. — Philippe Marcade

Philippe Marcade: We had a lot of fun with Cookie in Provincetown that summer. There were a lot of parties, and my favorite memory from there, that completely changed my life, was that my friend Bruce brought an old suitcase full of 45 records that had belonged to his older brother. We had a little record player, and I would put it on the porch at night in front of the house, and play all these records. It was like all these rare rock and roll records, a lot of rhythm and blues, rock-a-billy, surf, and all the late 50s and early 60s stuff. That became my passion during that summer.

I was listening to those records and discovering all that old stuff for the first time. Stuff like, "Woman Love" by Gene Vincent, "The Swag" by Link Wray, and "I Put a Spell on You," by Screaming Jay Hawkins, and then classics like "Louie Louie" and "Wooly Bully," all that rhythm and blues, rock-a-billy, surf, as well as Dick Dale, the Ventures, the Trashmen—all that kind of stuff. At the time, I didn't know all these songs; it was a revelation!

It was so perfect in Provincetown, being outside in front of the house with the old car parked in front, and the little lights hanging from the porch. It was just perfect.

When I discovered those records, I couldn't stop listening to them. I spent all summer doing that—well, during the night when there wasn't some wild party going on, ha, ha, ha!

So that really got me into old rock and roll.

John Waters: Divine and I used to listen to Ike and Tina Turner when we were shoplifting, and we'd go see the Ike and Tina Turner Review in high school. I don't care what anyone says, Tina was better when she was with Ike. I mean, I don't blame her for leaving, but...

Philippe Marcade: The first time I saw a guy with blue hair was in Provincetown.

Earl Devreis: They were just an odd, odd bunch of people there with dyed hair, and their dress, and body makeup, and facial makeup were way ahead of their time.

Philippe Marcade: You could feel that something new was coming up. Like, enough of the fucking hippies, give us something else!

So I guess that's the influence of John Waters, and his films, of course. And John Waters still had really long hair then, but with a kind of punk attitude.

And anyone who got kind of serious, or snobbish, would be told to fuck off immediately. And I dug that.

Dennis Dermody: Cookie was a great character, and anytime she walked out the door, her life was a story. I mean, she would say, "I'm going to get the milk," and something lunatic would happen to her. Her life was like that all the time!

Sharon Niesp, Cookie's girlfriend, had some money she had to bring to the bank, and they dropped it in a puddle, and they brought it home, baked it in the oven to dry it off, and set it on fire! I mean, that kind of stuff that happened all the time. She would tell us what would happen in the course of her day, and I'd just think, "God, this is too good!"

Philippe Marcade: The entire group of people that we hung out with in P-Town was no more than 25, maybe 30 people, and every night we went to the same club called the A-House.

Mary Vivian Pearce: The A-House was the bar that we liked to hang out in the most.

Dennis Dermody: I met Cookie in Provincetown. I moved in the early 70s, and it was great then. There was a girl named Black Beverly who had taken too much acid and walked backwards for a whole year because she had headaches, and walking backwards alleviated it. And, typical of Provincetown, nobody thought that was an odd thing, you just saw her walking backwards. Cookie and I crept up and looked in her window, and she really walked backwards around the house, so it wasn't a gag. But that was the typical of the kind of people who lived there.

So I met Cookie, and we started becoming friends, started hanging out, and we went to movies together.

Philippe Marcade: There was a little movie theater that John Waters kind of took over, and he did a screening of Pink Flamingos, and it was wild because I was watching the movie with every actor in it! Everybody screamed their head off when the dancing assholes appeared on the screen!

John Waters: Originally, the P-Town premieres were at the art cinema, but I rented the movie theater, and I would have to pay the percentage that I owed for each seat . We would go out on the street and hand out fliers. They weren't big events, they were local premieres, but they sold out.

Philippe Marcade: It was great watching Pink Flamingos in a cloud of marijuana smoke in that little theater, ha, ha, ha! The crowd was funnier than the movie; they were screaming and shit. And I remember also coming out of the movie theater and everybody in the movie was right there. It was kinda cool.

I had lived 15 years in utter darkness. I had never gone out during the day, so all of a sudden I was living in this light. — Nan Goldin

Dennis Dermody: Cookie would say, "I'm going to dress down and go to Hyannis to pick up my welfare checks..."

And I would see her hitchhiking on the highway in a monkey fur coat, looking like "Cookie Mueller!" I mean she looked amazing, and I thought, "She thinks that's normal? She has no clue what normal is!"

She was really pretty unique. She was great.

Nan Goldin: I really admire people who recreate themselves, and who manifest their fantasies publicly. I think it's really brave.

Philippe Marcade: You know, it's funny because Nan never shot while looking through the viewfinder of the camera. That's why she got those great shots with some kind of strange framing. People were not aware of the camera; they're not posing, because you didn't know she was taking the picture. The camera would be hanging around her neck, and then suddenly you hear "click, click," but she wasn't looking through it. So Nan took pictures of me naked when I didn't know. Nan just took pictures of people when they didn't know it—that's all she did.

Nan Goldin: I knew from a very early age that what I saw in popular culture had nothing to do with real life, so I wanted to make a record of real life. That psychological need included having my camera with me at all times and recording every aspect of my life and the lives of my friends, so the camera functioned partially as my memory. And when I started to drink and do drugs I wanted to remember everything from the night before. My camera allowed me to be out of control and in control at the same time.

Philippe Marcade: Our last summer in Provincetown was crazy because the little room we rented was above the A-House was dirt cheap, since the music was incredibly loud until four in the morning. Every night!

And we were right above , and there was no way to stay in that room till four in the morning, so we were forced to go out! But by 1976, the P-Town scene was starting to get more and more gay, and although I'm completely fine with that, it was getting a bit boring for me.

So I kind of lost interest—too gay, too expensive—and for me, too much junkie business. And when I moved to New York, I started to see Nan less and less, because I was totally in the punk scene, and she was not. She started to be more into the art scene, so I kind of lost touch with her during that time. I would see her occasionally, but not that much.

Nan Goldin: When Cookie started sleeping with men, her girlfriend, Sharon, went through a crisis, and I was the confidant of both of them. But, by the mid 1980s, many of us became addicted to drugs, mostly to heroin and cocaine, and so the line between use and abuse was crossed. I got to the point in my addiction where I didn't go out of the house for six months or so. I was doing an enormous amount of cocaine and about five to ten bags of dope a day.

Philippe Marcade: I was a junkie for about a year, but I flirted with heroin for years before that. First, it was maybe once a month, then for a year it was once a week, and then for the last year it was every fucking day, ha, ha, ha!

For a long time, I was saying to myself, "Me, I'm smarter than the others, I can enjoy myself, I can do it once in a while. I won't get hooked. Never!"

Yeah, right! Ha, ha, ha!

So finally I went cold turkey, and I called a friend to chaperone me, to be with me, to stop me if I tried to get past the door. I knew that's what I needed, somebody to keep an eye on me, cause I couldn't trust myself anymore, you know?

What got me to do that is I OD'ed alone at home and I woke up with a needle in my arm 12 hours later. It scared the shit out of me, so I thought I better stop because something's wrong here.

So, I did that. But two months after I stopped, I fucked up, I went to cop some dope, and I got mugged at gunpoint. The guy who mugged me saved my life because he not only mugged me, but when he took the dope, he looked at me and said, "Faggot!"

Not only did he mug me, he was insulting me too, ha, ha, ha!

I was so disgusted with myself, I went back home and fucking threw a fit. I smashed up everything in my apartment, I was so mad at myself!

And that was the very last time I tried to get dope. I think if I had copped that day, I would have went back to it. But that mugging finally did it for me, cause a thousand people called me faggot before that, and I couldn't care less, but that guy, that day, it really did something. I was like, "I'm sick of this." And I never went back to it.

Nan Goldin: I was in a drug rehab clinic for two months in 1988, and then for three months I was in a halfway house. And I stated to photograph myself and my own face, in order to find out what I looked like without drugs, and to fit back into my own skin. It was a period of a lot of fear, and sort of crisis of identity.

Nothing was familiar; I had lived 15 years in utter darkness. I had never gone out during the day, so all of a sudden I was living in this light.

And, a year and a half later, I was strong enough to move back to New York.

I used to think I couldn't lose anyone if I photographed them enough. With the death of Cookie I realized it didn't work. — Nan Goldin

Philippe Marcade: I only stayed with Cookie once in New York, when I broke up with my wife. She put me up because I didn't know where to stay, and, as a matter of fact, it was a time when I was very sad, and Cookie was essential to put me back on the right track.

You know, of all the girls I met in New York, I would say Cookie was the most fantastic one by far. I never went out with her or anything, but I thought she was such a cool girl. I really dug her. And she was a great writer, too.

Nan Goldin: Cookie went to Italy and met an Italian artist, Vittorio Scarpati. A few years later he came to New York, and they got married, and they were both HIV positive. When Vittorio died in September of 1989, Cookie had lost her voice and could no longer speak, and she couldn't walk without a cane... she kind of gave up.

Philippe Marcade: You know what really shocked me? I don't want to put down Nan Goldin, but I went to see her show at the Guggenheim because there was a picture of me, and I wanted to see it. But there was a huge blow-up photo of Cookie dead in her coffin, and that shook me so bad. I could not hold my tears. I couldn't, it just shocked me. So I left the museum, and I was a bit mad at Nan for showing a picture like that. I thought, "Well, if I was dead, I wouldn't want people to see me like that!"

Nan Goldin: I used to think I couldn't lose anyone if I photographed them enough. With the death of Cookie I realized it didn't work.

Philippe Marcade: It's so sad, all these people who died of AIDS, her husband had it, and they died one after the other, Cookie and him, you know?

Cookie Mueller: Fortunately, I am not the first person to tell you that you will never die. You simply lose your body. You will be the same, except you won't have to worry about rent or mortgages or fashionable clothes. You will be released from sexual obsessions. You will not have drug addictions. You will not need alcohol. You will not have to worry about cellulite or cigarettes or cancer or AIDS or venereal disease.

For more on culture, watch our doc 'Was Punk Rock Born in Peru?':

Philippe Marcade has a book coming out in April from Three Rooms Press called 'Punk Avenue.'Get it! It's great! (I even did the introduction!) And if you haven't read Cookie Mueller's 'Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black,' from Semiotext(e), stop what you're doing and order it right now. I promise you, you won't be sorry!

And, of course, if you don't own 'The Ballad of Sexual Dependency' by Nan Goldin, you're an asshole. But also check out Nan's current exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York, open through December 23.

For more reading about Cookie Mueller, there's a great new oral history of her life, "Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller," by Chloe Griffin, published in 2014 by Bbooks Verlag. A few of the quotes we used in "Bourbon & Black Beauties" are from "Edgewise," so if you liked this, you'll love the book!

And for more stories about the glorious days of punk, check out the 20th Anniversary Edition of 'Please Kill Me' by Legs McNeil & Gillian McCain.

What to Do if You're Busted With Drugs Overseas

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This article originally appeared on VICE Australia/New Zealand

On Wednesday morning, news broke that 18-year-old Perth teenager Jamie Murphy had been arrested in Bali for allegedly possessing a suspicious white powder. The recent high school graduate, who was celebrating Leavers (that's West Australian for "schoolies"), is currently being held in custody in Kuta. And thanks to Indonesia's harsh drug penalties, he may be facing 12 years in a local prison.

It's a narrative we're familiar with. Young Aussie tourists are caught with drugs throughout Asia on a semi-regular basis, and their lives change forever. For this reason we got in touch with a legal expert to find out what to do if you get busted overseas.

Donald R. Rothwell is Professor of International Law at the Australian National University College of Law in Canberra. Here's what he said:

VICE: Hi Donald, what's the first thing you should do if you're busted with drugs overseas?
Donald Rothwell: The first thing is to request a phone call to the nearest Australian embassy, or the nearest Australian consulate. You should insist on that. It's your entitlement as a foreign national in the legal system of a foreign country. Once the embassy or the consulate has been alerted, they can send a representative to be there during initial questioning with police. They can make recommendations concerning the availability of a local lawyer. So it would be critical for any young adult caught up in this situation to do this—it makes it clear straight away that the Australian citizen will be supported by their government during that crucial first phase of the investigation.

How should you act around police overseas, should you deny everything?
Well obviously if you consider yourself innocent, it's probably in your best interests to answer questions and assist the police. On the other hand if you're under suspicion, as in this case, where he was found in possession of a substance—and especially given his age, age is an important factor here—under those circumstances, you need a lawyer and a consular official to be there by your side, to assist in answering questions.

What obligations does the Australian government have here? Do they have to try their best to protect nationals when they're overseas?
It's a really good question. The Australian Government publishes what's called a Consular Services Charter which is available on the DFAT website. Under that charter, it outlines the extent of the assistance that they can provide citizens. It makes very clear that they do not give legal advice, nor do they provide legal assistance. But they will provide an Australian with details of local lawyers who can assist. They're really there as a resource, but they make it very clear they won't provide legal assistance.

So what can the Australian consulate really do, given they can't help legally?
What they can do is be relatively interventionist in terms of ensuring basic human rights are observed while citizens are held in detention.

Would the government ever make some kind of political deal to get someone released?
That's not the practice of the Australian Government. Certainly the nearest to a deal that's been made was in the case of David Hicks, and his repatriation from Guantanamo Bay. The Howard Government was very keen in 2006 to ensure the issue surrounding David Hicks was resolved, but in more regular criminal matters such as Schapelle Corby or this one, the Australian government won't engage in a deal.

Support for Australian Schapelle Corby, who was jailed in Indonesia's Kerobokan Prison for nine years. Image via Wikimedia Commons

What if you're convicted and jailed? what kind of ongoing support might you get?
You are very much on your own. The Australian Government will still ensure that consular representatives will visit the Australian in jail, and once again that goes to ensuring that their welfare and the conditions in which they're being held meet the minimum standards. But, you know, it's difficult for the Australian Government to press countries on some of these matters. Sometimes in Southeast Asia the standards of jails are considerably different to what we're used to in Australia.

Any chance of being deported and serving time back home?
We don't have what's called a "prisoner transfer agreement" with Indonesia. So that's another possible situation where a prisoner could serve out their sentence in Australia—but such an agreement has not yet been negotiated with a country like Indonesia.

Are there any other countries with strict drug laws where we have such an agreement?
Yes, we have one with Thailand, and we also have one with China. The one with China has recently come to prominence because of the situation with Matthew Ng, who was an Australian-Chinese businessman convicted of certain crimes in China who was returned and repatriated under the Australia-China prison transfer agreement.

What role does the media play in this situation? Would Australian media coverage of your family pleading for your release persuade the Indonesian government to show some mercy?
Look, I think the Indonesian Government isn't very responsive to media attention over these matters. Certainly in higher profile death penalty cases, there may well have been some merits to media attention, because it then focuses attention on Australian politicians on the significance of those issues in Australia. It often moves Australian politicians. But in these more standard cases, media attention in Australia I think has no impact on the Indonesian criminal justice process. Indeed I would suggest to you, if you think back to the media circus around Schapelle Corby, it just adds to the trauma of the accused person if they end up going to trial.

Ok, let's say you've just received a decade-long jail sentence. At that point could you take any action to get your sentence reduced?
Yes you can. As we saw with Schapelle Corby it is possible to seek parole. So there are mechanisms in the Indonesian court system for good behaviour.

Follow Kat on Twitter

What Happens if Young People Never Buy Homes?

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Paying rent is hard enough. Photo via Flickr user Sascha Pohflepp

If you're collecting clues that civilization as we know it is about to collapse (be honest, we all are), the fact that millennials aren't buying homes maybe isn't at the top of your list right now. Yet modern economies generally depend on young people making this step—which to many of us feels about as likely as a Donald J. Trump presidency bankrolling free tuition for everyone. Home ownership is an economic driver, a retirement savings plan, and a cornerstone of community building. What happens if we all decide we can't afford this shit?

VICE asked two experts—Paul Kershaw, a policy professor in the UBC School of Population and Moshe Milevsky, a professor of finance in the Schulich School of Business at York University—to weigh in on what would happen in the aftermath if millennials simply stopped buying houses. While it may not turn out to be the final straw that collapses the world economy, they told us it certainly won't make life any easier for our generation.

VICE: If a generation doesn't buy in, what happens to the generation trying to collect on their investment?
Paul Kershaw: There is a domino relationship between people making initial acquisitions and then people making sales more generally. If people stop making initial acquisitions there is a possibility that further sales and other parts of the retail sector will slow down and then that will have an impact on the price people can sell their homes.

Moshe Milevsky:I don't think we're going to see the collapse that worries people. We have a valuable natural resource in housing and so many groups of people around the world who would love to have that and are gaining access to the money to do that—they're always going to want to take this off our hands. I don't think they're going to give up on it.

We have to start thinking about housing as a natural resource and develop a framework around who has access to that. Who does it belong to? The highest bidder or the people who live here who have made it valuable?

Read More: The Harsh Reality of Being Broke

People often choose buying over renting because there is stability and community for family life. What changes when we stop buying houses?
Milevsky: We suddenly lose the stickiness of our labour force. It's very important for Canada to have more than just high wages keeping us here. The last thing we want is to be a commodity labour market. What's stopped us from doing that is the connections we've had to our community. If the younger generation sees housing as unaffordable and uninteresting they're more likely to move internationally.

People may lose their anchor to a particular geographic location. I want my neighbourhood park to be clean and green and well maintained. If I just live their temporarily, do we lose our interest in the environment beyond our immediate needs? There's also the transient nature of politicking. Who are your constituents if communities change?

Kershaw: If you opt out of home ownership, you opt out of the most secure opportunity for starting families and to have your kids in the same school, childcare, and community. Home ownership has also been a route to get access to the ground and playing outside. Renting in bigger cities is not having the kind of stock suitable for families. Big cities aren't losing 20 somethings, it's when the biological clock starts ticking you see a bit more of an exodus.

If renting is going to become a common practise for adults, systems such as childcare need to be improved. I'd like my child to be in the same childcare space for a few years. I don't want to move around from neighbourhood to neighbourhood because I'm being evicted because my landlord can make more on other renters. We need to think about how renting can create that kind of security.

Read More: How Scared Should I Be of Never Retiring?

Homes have slowly become not just a place to live, but the primary retirement investment an entire generation has made. What happens to retirement in a world where people do not invest in homes?
Kershaw: Right now people have been relying on home ownership as a valuable contribution to retirement. And Canada has a long vision of subsidizing housing through home ownership that we don't talk about it that benefits that retirement planning. If you sell a home and it's been your primary residence you don't pay any tax on the increases you gained. You can save money in your RRSPs that don't get taxed and you can put that in your down payment. It adds up to billions. Renters don't benefit from that. You're not getting any of those equity increases when you move from your rental. You're not getting a tax break. We're going to have to fundamentally think through how we're supporting a young group of renters and how they're accumulating wealth for their own retirements.

Milevsky: There's a parallel to how investing has evolved in general. People used to think I buy one good stock in my retirement portfolio, but over time people realize that's a dangerous way to invest. You should have a diversified portfolio. Apply that thinking to housing: 20 years ago people thought investing in one house was enough, but that's one house, in one city, in one country. Even if real estate is a good investment I'd rather buy it as a fund. Or we'd make an agreement, we'd split 50/50 the gains of a house in Edmonton and a house in Toronto.

Follow Sam Power on Twitter.

London Rental Opportunity of the Week: London Rental Opportunity of the Week: A Fucking Shed in Cheam! CHEAM!

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(All photos via Spareroom)

Last week the Autumn Statement happened, and with it came news that there would imminently be a ban on tenants being charged letting fees. This news itself does not exactly fill me with a warm feeling of glee: you feel that the obvious move from landlords suddenly being hit with costs is to absorb these costs into rent instead, meaning rents will rise and we will all save even less money each month, and the lofty idea of owning property one day will be edged even further away from our grubby little hands, like a casserole dish poked along a table.

No: what filled me with joy was imagining people who drive new Minis and take £80-a-gram gak in the toilets of Be At One – I am of course talking about estate agents – having The Worst Possible Day of Their Professional Lives as they tried desperately to deal with this news.

Have you had The Worst Possible Day of Your Professional Lives yet? I have. I confused the name of newly formed X Factor boyband member "George Shelley" with short story writer and essayist "George Saunders" in a massive online gallery of the previous, and all the fans of George #1 called our brand account "wrong" and "stupid", and I went very red and started sweating out of my face and had to go and have a big hyperventilate in the toilets. A bad feeling at the time, sure, and the cause of one of my more glowering and terrible memories, but at least I am allayed a little by knowing that every single estate agent in the country felt like that for an entire day last Thursday. At least I have that.

Oh yeah, we've got to do this bit:

What is it? It's a log cabin, it says here, but let's be honest, lads: it's a shed;
Where is it? Cheam, which I learned today is not the name of a small, ugly, unpalatable fish, and is instead a place, somewhere near Sutton;
What is there to do locally? There is a place nearby called "Nonsuch Park", apparently, although honestly that sounds like a joke. An online guide to Cheam also says there is a place called "The Feedwell Café". Some very literal place-names in Cheam, aren't there. What a place. What an odd, odd place. I bet there are some real unexplained deaths around there.
Alright, how much are they asking? £650! Six hundred! And fifty! Pounds!

"Why are estate agents bad, Joel?" people ask me. "Why are the lizard people you spit when you speak of so awful, so void of soul?" And I lean down close and hiss to them: because those pig-scum think it is acceptable to rent a shed – in fucking Cheam, by the way – for six-hundred-and-fifty bastard pounds a month; they think that is acceptable, somehow, the scum-humans; they think that price is OK.

And so to Cheam, where someone who was distracted by an especially interesting cloud during every single reading or writing lesson they ever had in their life is tasked with selling you this shed:

Rare opportunity to rent this log cabin , lovely size on TVs radio and fridge ,also microwave beautiful part of leafy south cream , free parking in side road , 2 min walk to bust stop 470 to cheam Sutton , or epson , would suit someone private , shared kitchen and toilet , must fit in with other housemates

Some notes: there is a reason this opportunity is "rare", and that is: not many people have the temerity to rent a shed in their garden. Yes, you would have to get on with the housemates, seeing as you have to trudge inside of their house to piss, shit and make sandwiches. "Would suit someone private" is, I assume, because if someone's friend comes over and goes, "Mate, you're living in a shed," realisation might hit and the person living in a shed might suddenly discover they are living in a shed, and move out.

It's not a log cabin, is it? Is it now? No. It is a shed. A log cabin suggests a crackling fire, a groaning AGA, a bear outside that you can shoot, cosy nights in deep leather armchairs reading large hardback books by the heat of the hearth. A shed, meanwhile, is made of planks, has a microwave inside it and is in fucking Cheam. That's the key difference here, between a log cabin and a shed. Cheam. Cheam is the fucking difference.

As the fun series "London Rental Opportunity of the Week" wears ever on and chips away ever more at the remaining dregs of my soul, we must always consider the context of the opportunity: how absurd it is compared to the rest of the city, the country, the market as a snapshot today. I have to report that £650 for a shed in Cheam is fucking batty whatever way you look at it. Cheam is a tiny dead village on the very, very outskirts of London – half an hour from Victoria Station, the nearest available outpost of civilisation. It is not central London, and it is not even good.

I don't care how much you want to be alone: £650 for a shed in Cheam with no toilet in it isn't going to help you find euphoria. If you have to pay £650 to live in London – which I think most people do, by now; some are maybe faltering a hundred quid or so below that waterline, but most are there or thereabouts – then just get a room in a house-share that isn't in Cheam, where you don't have to tiptoe outside and then in again to do pisses. I don't often dish out straight advice – because who am I, really? I am just a boy, standing in front of the world, asking if it knows the difference between George Shelley and George Saunders – but I am breaking form to tell you this: do not rent this shed. Do not rent this shed out, in Cheam.

(h/t @AlfieWaldron)

@joelgolby

More from this "Christmas book deal waiting to happen" of a series!

A £7.5 Million Birmingham Mega-Brothel!

What Happened in the Dread House?

A Bed in a Kitchen in Euston!

The VICE Guide to Right Now: Proof, If You Actually Still Need It, That the Gender Pay Gap Is a Very Real Thing

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Former chief cashier of the Bank of England, Graham Kentfield, holding the then-new £50 note in 1994. (Photo: John Giles PA Archive / PA Images)

Businesses would like to think they're making decent efforts to close the old gender pay gap. Yet, every time a study is commissioned, it shows women are still miles behind in their earnings. Recent estimates were that the gap will close – but not until 2069. So if you're a woman of reading age currently reading this, chances you'll either be retired or dead by then. Better luck next time!

A massive new study released today has shown similarly bleak results. After looking at the earnings of 500,000 UK workers, it was found that men are still paid vastly more than women across many jobs and regions. If you're lucky enough to be a woman in the east Midlands, you'd be earning 34 percent less than a man. The regions with the next largest gaps were the south-east, at 30 percent; the north-east, at 28 percent; and the West Midlands, at 26 percent.

What does this actually mean? Well, where men and women are doing the same job, men still have a slight advantage over women to start with – earning an average of 1.6 percent more. This isn't hugely significant, but it shows there's still discrimination happening in workplaces. The real gap, however, is caused by the scarcity of women at the highest and best-paid levels of industries.

On Friday, London mayor Sadiq Khan challenged all Greater London Authority bodies to publish action plans to tackle the gender pay gap. He released figures showing a gender pay gap of 11.6 percent in the Metropolitan police, 19.2 percent in Transport for London and 35 percent in the post-Olympics London Legacy Development Corporation. Khan made closing the pay gap in London one of his main campaign pledges, so we'll wait to see what happens there.

Of course, none of this is particularly new news: after all, thanks to the pay gap and compared to men, the average UK woman has been working for free since the 10th of November, and won't start earning again until January. If this pisses you off, pressure your employer to publish an equal pay audit and make them respond to the inequality they'll no doubt find.

More on equal pay:

When Will We Get Equal Pay?

Calling Bullshit On the Men Who Think That the Pay Gap Is a Myth

Should Women Be Paid the Same as Men In Tennis?


Why Do So Few Young People Talk to Their MPs in Person?

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MPs Nick Clegg, Naz Shah and Jacob Rees-Mogg (Photo courtesy of Channel 5)

It's fair to say that, over the past year or so, British politicians have seemed anything but local. Whether they've been laying waste to decades of European legislation or wading in on presidential shit shows overseas, they've seemed more like pieces on a very big and battered chessboard, rather than playing a day-to-day role in the lives of ordinary people.

Yet so much of that is perception. It's easy to forget that most MPs are mostly doing their regular jobs: running their constituencies, chiefly through holding "surgeries" once a week, opening their doors to the British public and dealing with their concerns face-to-face. In some ways it comes across as a sort of quaint facet of our political system; a practice that makes running the country seem a little bit more like running a neighbourhood watch committee. In reality, it's a vital leveller, reinforcing the idea that even the highest appointed member of cabinet still has to spend a few hours every week sat in a damp church hall listening to pensioners complain about the light pollution coming off the big yellow Morrison's logo three streets away.

Tonight, Channel 5 is airing MPs: Behind Closed Doors, a documentary following a trio of relatively high-profile MPs as they open their doors to their constituents. Labour MP for Bradford West, Naz Shah; MP for Sheffield Hallam, one-time deputy Prime Minister (and full-time Nick Clegg apologist) Nick Clegg; and Conservative MP for North East Somerset, Jacob Rees-Mogg all feature, offering an insight into their weekly consultations.

In many respects it's a pretty heartening piece of television. Far from the "politicians as universe-wrecking lizards" impression we've all adopted of late, this is a chance to see them interacting with real people who have (mostly) real problems – and they come off pretty well. Shah seems fiercely proactive in how keen she is to support a local man's battle against a disruptive neighbour; Clegg appears so comforting and supportive you'd probably visit his surgery after a breakup; and even Rees-Mogg – a man so Tory he probably combs his hair with truffle oil – is compassionate and constructive in assisting a family whose disability support has been suddenly, and wrongly, cut off.

The programme depicts a part of our political machine that isn't failing; an opportunity to consult or interrogate our elected officials and get real answers in return. So why do none of us use it?

Judging by the snapshot offered in the show, there are basically two types of people who visit their local member of Parliament each week. Firstly, people who have nowhere else to turn. Across the episode there are a few genuinely heartbreaking stories, from a mother desperately seeking recognition for her son's severe mental health problems to a migrant who has been living in the UK for over a decade, suddenly threatened with deportation.

What's striking about all of these stories is that it has taken those involved so long to speak to their MP. In each case, constituents waited until their situation had become completely unbearable before reaching out, as if not wishing to waste the time of their elected official until that point. That's not to say that a visit to an MP will instantly solve all these problems – in fact, Jacob Rees-Mogg makes a point of telling his constituents the "extent of his powers" – but it's certainly true that in each case the MP's surgery could have been a first point of contact, rather than the last resort.

The second type of regular falls into a category probably best described as "bored old person". There's a traumatised Bremainer popping in to tell Jacob Rees-Mogg he done fucked up with the vote to leave the EU; a mother incensed that teachers are picking on her son because he's tall; and – in possibly the most yer da scenes since The Grand Tour premiered last week – a bloke complaining that the staff working for HMRC are probably spending all their time on Facebook and Twitter, sending text messages, booking holidays and "surfing insurance comparison websites". Bloody bastards! Browsing GoCompare when they should be reviewing self-assessment returns! And it's all coming out of taxpayers' money! Disgusting!

This is all funny enough, right? But then, it's sort of not when you consider the domineering role that over-65s play in British politics. We normally understand this in terms of voting turnout stats, but Behind Closed Doors shows us the IRL version. How the most direct point of communication with the government has become a sounding board for confused retirees who've seen one too many memes about cyber-warfare.

It's striking that barely anyone featured in the programme is under 30, and when they are it's only because they've completely run out of options. Why is this? Why are so many people in Britain completely absent from this easily-accessible part of the political conversation until they hit 60, experience some problems with the new double-yellow parking near the leisure centre and suddenly become the dominant voting bloc in the country? That's not to devalue the real concerns of the over-65s, but when political dialogue is dominated by hedge-trimming and church halls, something's got to be missing.

There's a practical reason, of course. MPs run surgeries during weekdays, meaning the elderly are the main group with the time to make an appointment and pay them a visit. But the real answer feels like something more fundamental: people just don't know it exists. Having spent my entire life in Britain, MPs' surgeries were only something I became aware of in more recent years. They were certainly never covered in school, and even then I still don't know when or where my local MP meets, let alone the types of issues I'm supposed to take to them. Sadly, surgeries are a part of political and social life that are seemingly invisible to most people – except those with enough spare time, or those experiencing abject desperation, to warrant seeking them out.

It seems that so much distance yawns between MPs and their constituents – both the fault of the culture of Westminster, but also the effect of demonising the "political class" at every opportunity – that we've all forgotten we can actually talk to government every week if we want. Hopefully tonight's documentary will build some awareness of surgeries, because until that happens our Members of Parliament will continue to be little more than therapists for confused OAPs – and paid for with taxpayers' money! Disgusting!

MPs: Behind Closed Doors airs on Channel 5 on Monday the 28th of November at 9PM.

@a_n_g_u_s

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What Oil Pipelines Can Do to Native American Land and Life

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Black, ant-like figures crown a russet hill ringed by the Cannonball River at the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota. Soon they come into focus: dozens of policemen in full riot gear, stationed on high ground so as to better surveil the handful of people lingering in the aftermath of what Native Americans protesting a new oil pipeline and their allies call a "direct action," or a confrontation with the law.

On closer inspection of the hilltop from the ground across the river, at least two officers are peering through rifle scopes. Others seem jovial, laughing as they wave contemptuously to the few demonstrators lingering on the far side of the river. Most glare back, stone-faced. One girl in a flowing purple skirt raises two fingers, flashing a peace sign. A black-clad young man with a long, glossy braid and a bandanna draped over the lower half of his face gives the cops the finger.

"There were people from that shoreline to that shoreline," an activist named Marcus says when asked about the confrontation, one of several here in recent weeks. "People were walking on the boats to get across to the other side and advancing up the hill. The cops shot two guys were playing drums. Everyone was just standing their ground."

Asked how the cops behaved toward the demonstrators, Marcus turns his head and spits before responding. "I mean, you could hear them laughing up there, you could hear them just cracking jokes," he says, with a bitter smile. "Apparently that's the word from other people who have been here for a while... They're just having a good time."

Back at their camp, wounded demonstrators receive medical care: Bandages are applied to injuries left by rubber bullets, though some of the demonstrators seem to be suffering from the effects of tear gas. Down by the water, the standoff between police and the stragglers continues.

Often calling themselves "water protectors," hundreds of people from all over America have joined many members of the Standing Rock Sioux as they demonstrate against a massive oil transportation project known as the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). The oil company Energy Transfer Partners and its subsidiary, Sunoco Logistics Partners, won approval to begin construction from the US Army Corps of Engineers in July. The Standing Rock Sioux promptly sued to block it, but a federal court denied the tribe's appeal in October. Meanwhile, the DAPL was opposed by a wave of social-media-powered activism starring prominent allies like actors Mark Ruffalo and Shailene Woodley, backed by advocacy groups like the ACLU.

In the weeks leading up to Election Day, dozens were arrested as cops and private security forces tried to extinguish the protests. But what many protesters and observers have described as a pattern of swift and brutal law enforcement response may have injected new life into their cause. On November 20, police hit activists with water cannons in freezing temperatures, sparking a fresh wave of condemnation and outrage. Prior to that incident, protesters were reportedly kept in confined spaces that resembled dog kennels after arrest, and injuries have been reported on both sides following clashes between cops and demonstrators.

Those at the encampment have refused to back down, insisting that the pipeline will desecrate burial grounds sacred to the Sioux, and that it poses a serious risk to the environment, threatening to contaminate the local water supply in the event of a leak. A few days after Trump won the White House, the Army Corps of Engineers announced another delay in construction, citing the need for additional study of the project. But on Friday, the Engineers sent a letter to Dave Archambault II the Standing Rock Sioux chairman, ordering protesters to disperse by December 5. A "free speech" zone is apparently to be established south of the Cannonball River, but activists have vowed to stay put in defiance of the order.

Meanwhile, protests over Trump's win were followed by demonstrations against the pipeline by Standing Rock allies across the country. Given the current president-elect's throwback views on fossil fuel and the increasing urgency of climate change, it's clear that many of the people camped out at Standing Rock aren't just protesting the construction of one pipeline—they're making a statement about the way the United States has treated Native Americans, and their lands, for centuries. And you can find evidence of that treatment—and its consequences—just a few hours down the road, in Fort Berthold, another North Dakota reservation.

Police surveil demonstrators near the Standing Rock Native American reservation in North Dakota. All photos by the author

Pipelines are built to move crude oil from production sites to its intended destination, which can be hundreds or even thousands of miles away. This can be a messy process. As American oil production has soared in recent recent years, pipelines have leaked at sites around the continent. Since 1995, there have been 2,000 significant accidents involving pipelines carrying crude oil and refined petroleum products in the US, causing about $3 billion in property damage.

The Dakota Access Pipeline would snake across the northeastern tip of the state, where it meets Canada, down to Illinois. Its oil would come from the Bakken formation, which includes land belonging to another Native American community that has a very different relationship to the oil industry. The Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara tribes, otherwise known as MHA Nation or the Three Affiliated Tribes, live on Fort Berthold, a few hours away from Standing Rock.

The Berthold reservation lands are starkly gorgeous, even in their drab winter colors. Red cliffs rear up against the sky, split by canyons and creeks that spill into the wide blue expanse of the lake. But every few miles or so, oil rigs and hydraulic fracturing sites dot the landscape. Fiery flares shimmer into the air, and pools of wastewater produced by the fracking process collect in large bins.

Fracking is the process of injecting liquid into subterranean rocks to widen fissures, granting access to previously impossible-to-reach reserves. These liquids often contain toxic, hazardous chemicals that can gravely impact the health of local populations if they leak into the air or water. This year, Environment America, a national federation of environmental advocacy organizations, released a report detailing the adverse health and safety effects of fracking. Though data on the impact of fracking upon local populations remains scarce, a 2014 study in Colorado linked prenatal exposure to fracking chemicals in the air to higher rates of birth defects. "People who live close to fracking sites are exposed to a variety of air pollutants including volatile organic compounds (VOCs) such as benzene, xylene and toluene," the Environment America report reads. "These chemicals can cause a wide range of health problems— from eye irritation and headaches to asthma and cancer."

While the DAPL is meant to carry oil underneath land that borders Standing Rock, the reservation itself doesn't sit atop valuable oil, so there was little financial incentive for oil companies to ingratiate themselves with the community. But Fort Berthold is at the very heart of North Dakota oil country. It also includes Lake Sakakawea, a primary water source for MHA Nation.

The reservation is on prime fracking land. Until the technology advanced in the early 2000s, it was known that large oil and gas reserves existed in the Bakken shale formation, but there was no way to obtain it. Once fracking became available as a method of extraction, oil companies were able to gain access to the massive reserves that exist under layers of stone. The development greatly enriched the state economy for a time, but plummeting oil prices have recently burst that bubble, leaving many North Dakotans without a primary source of income.

Still, Fort Berthold is pumping out massive amounts of oil—nearly one-fifth of North Dakota's daily production. And even as it enriches parts of the local economy, the deluge has had serious consequences for the reservation's environment. In 2014, a massive pipeline spill caused more than 1 million gallons of saltwater used in the fracking process to leak onto reservation land, raising concerns that Lake Sakakawea had been compromised. Several other spills have been documented in the years since.

In June 2015, the Three Affiliated Tribes made a move to increase tribal involvement in oil production, which had traditionally been dominated by outside companies that lease land from the tribes. Prior to that decision, the tribal council, MHA Nation's governing body, had a troubling history of oil-related corruption. The former tribal council chairman, Tex Hall, lost his bid for a fourth term after being accused of mismanagement and misappropriation of oil funds. Though the council receives a significant amount in oil royalties, as well as hundreds of millions in oil tax revenue, some Fort Berthold residents say that money still isn't making its way to the community that so desperately needs it.

"Right now, we have a lot of social issues," explains Lisa Deville, a local environmental activist, as she drives through the oil-rich cliffs of Fort Berthold. "These guys are so excited to fund powwows... and aren't helping those tepee families that live right along the power grids without water and sewer... Some of looks like a third-world country."

Deville is outspoken about the need to regulate oil development in Fort Berthold—and her distaste for the oil companies. "They think they have answers for everything, these white people ," she says. "They think everything they do is right and they have all the solutions. They think these pipelines are good. It's like, What don't you understand? You guys just contaminated us. We have proof, and you guys are sitting there and saying, 'How much?' You don't live here. You don't have to drink this water. You can go home whenever you choose."

She also thinks that getting in bed with the oil industry is a betrayal of the tribe's ideals. "I don't know where we've gone wrong, where we've lost our identity as Native Americans," Deville says with a sigh. "We would rather have these nice things, these material things that we never relied on. We were raised to protect the earth. Every time we put a hole in her, we are killing her."

Deville is deeply disliked by some MHA Nation leadership, even as she has won support from other activists. At a large powwow, or gathering of Native American tribes, held at the Four Bears Casino in nearby New Town, a man affiliated with the tribal council who prefers to remain anonymous makes a face when her name is mentioned.

"That bitch is always spreading lies about our leaders," he sneers. "She's a real pain in the ass."

The powwow is a lavish gathering, and it's no secret that the oil industry has enriched segments of the reservation economy. In 2014, MHA Nation reported $184 million in oil tax revenue accrued in less than one year, much of it officially designated for reservation infrastructure and activities. At the casino, dancers and singers in traditionally elaborate dress perform their ancient rituals in an event hall. It's a light-hearted, festive affair, with hundreds of attendees celebrating until well into the early morning. Stands sell intricate pieces of silver jewelry and T-shirts with defiant slogans like "Proud Indian Warrior," while children with jangling bells sewn to their tribal costumes scamper through the building's hallways.

In an empty ballroom on the second floor of the sprawling casino, two teenage girls who prefer to remain anonymous discuss how they've seen oil impact their reservation during the course of their short lives. Asked if they've noticed any positive impacts of the industry, one of the girls nods.

"We have a lot more buildings and more activities," she says. "But I don't know where half of our money goes."

Asked why no one in Fort Berthold is resisting oil development on tribal lands like the Standing Rock Sioux, the other girl giggles nervously. "Our tribe just signs deals," she responds. "They don't really look through it at all. That's what we think, anyways, because of how much are taking over our tribe. It's mostly like we're run by oil companies here. People from surrounding tribes say that."

"Besides, , they used to come over and steal our horses all the time."

Lisa Deville, a local environmental activist, stands between warning signs that water, gas, and petroleum pipelines exist underground in this area of Fort Berthold Native American reservation in North Dakota.

The oil industry may fund extravagant powwows, but researchers and advocates say it is severely impacting Fort Berthold's environment. Nicole Donaghy, an oil and gas organizer at Dakota Resource Council, the same group dedicated to monitoring environmental damage in the region to which DeWitt belongs, collaborated on a study with Duke University earlier this year. It produced alarming findings about fracking's impact on Fort Berthold.

"We took six samples from oil and gas–impacted landowners, as well as from saltwater spill on Fort Berthold reservation," Donaghy says. "What Duke University found was that even though there was reclamation done on most of these sites, there is still a high level of radioactive material that has been left behind.... Radium causes many types of cancer, mostly bone cancer. In terms of agriculture, nothing will grow where there has been a saltwater spill and it's not properly reclaimed, and in my experience, it's not possible to completely reclaim the affected lands."

Marcia Mikulak, professor of anthropology at the University of North Dakota, notes that MHA Nation has historically resisted efforts to investigate and amend the harmful effects of fracking and drilling on reservation land because the oil industry has permeated the tribal economy.

"People are living with it every day," Mikulak says. "But all that data, those numbers, are not put in our daily newspapers. They are not talked about in terms of everyday people's lives. People who earn their living from oil—and this goes back to the Three Affiliated Tribes—corruption also is there, and people who live in poverty, when you take their jobs away, when technologies change, they freak out. There's always a pushback."

Mikulak says that in order to understand why these tribes would allow their lands to be damaged by the industry without resistance, one has to examine the historical treatment of Native Americans by the United States government.

"These people were forced to assimilate, or actually be eradicated," she explains. "People learned, through this constant enforced rhetoric of identity, that they were different, worth less than others—and were even constructed constitutionally—as dependent that the state had to take responsibility for, and create laws to control, indigenous ways of life. These are deeply embedded in our legal systems, in our cultural systems, our narratives of education... It's a nightmare scenario."

"We're not against all pipelines. We just want responsible development."
—Mark Fox, MHA Nation Tribal Chairman

For his part, Mark Fox, the current chairman of the MHA Nation tribal council who campaigned under a platform of transparency and fighting corruption in the wake of the scandal surrounding former tribal leader Tex Hall, says the oil boom has had mixed effects on the reservation.

"I can honestly say that since 2008 to the present, the negativity has outweighed the positivity, as far as what we have to contend with and what opportunities we get," he says. "That's Tribes to protect its land, its reservation, and its people.

"Now, on the positive side of things, has it brought in more revenue toward tribes to do programming to build facilities and things of that nature? Absolutely, it has," he adds.

Asked about his feelings toward the protesters at Standing Rock, Fox says that MHA Nation supports the Sioux tribe's desire to block risky oil development.

"We're not against all oil and gas development," he explains. "We're not against all pipelines. We just want responsible development... That being said, if our fellow tribal nation says, 'We don't want that,' that is their right. We stand firmly behind them."

But perhaps because of complicated tribal ties to the oil industry, not everyone at the casino powwow is eager to join the protests. A man belonging to a Native American tribe from Washington State who says he's close to members of the MHA Nation tribal council remains unconvinced.

"The reason why I'm not actively taking part in this protest is because the issues that are being protested were already addressed in court," he explains as the casino empties on the day after the powwow. Families trudge to their cars carrying their jangling costumes, readying themselves for the drive back to whichever part of the Americas they came from. Some say they are headed down to Standing Rock, but the Washington man won't be joining them.

"They have already ruled against the tribe's point of view in protecting the land because of the pipeline and the investment that's already been made," he says. "The money that already has been put down is sealed and dealed. Bagged and tagged. We can't beat a dead horse. The horse is lying there, but it's still dead because the ruling wasn't favorable."

He pauses for a moment, taking in the bright lights and cheerful dings of the casino playing floor. "But there's a part of me, in my heart, that wants to be there at Standing Rock," he says longingly. "I should be with my people."

Follow Sulome Anderson on Twitter.

How It Feels to Fall off a Balcony

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Schoolies hopping between high-rise balconies. Image via

This article originally appeared on VICE Australia.

If there's one danger persistently causing death and injury on schoolies, it's balconies. Every year the balconies of the Gold Coast feature in a range of headlines, in spite of mounting measures to prevent people from messing around on them.

Tragically, most young people who fall from a high-rise building don't live to tell the story. But we figured that hearing how intensely painful it is would be more persuasive than simply saying, "don't do it." So we reached out to a guy who's fallen three stories, landed on his head, and survived.

James* is an Australian Navy marine technician who fell off a Sydney balcony one night when he was 21. James wasn't on schoolies, but the essentials were the same: he was wasted, he underestimated the consequences, and he was horribly injured. Here's what he said.

James on left, before the fall. Note: we've blurred all faces so James doesn't get fired. All photos supplied

VICE: Hi James, so this went down nearly five years ago. Can you take us through what happened?
James: So it was a Friday night towards the end of the year and I was out on the town with a friend. When I got back to my apartment, I realised I'd forgotten the keys but figured I could climb up three sets of balconies to get inside. I remember climbing up the first balcony, then the second, then pulling myself up on the third and holding on to the rail. But I was so drunk that I lost my grip.

Do you remember what went through your head when you slipped?
I will always remember the moment before the fall, when I was sort of holding on but slipping, so I decided to let go. It might sound crazy, but I was so drunk I thought if I fell, I'd be okay. In that moment there were no serious consequences.

I started to fall and my leg hit the second floor balcony, which sort of spun me over. Because of this, I was falling headfirst and landed on my head. My head practically folded up so that my legs came all the way around—I pretty much reverse scorpioned myself. My back curled up and compressed, crushing my vertebrae. Luckily, all the force didn't compress my skull, just my back. So in the end I only had a fractured skull, jaw, and hyperextended knee from hitting the second floor, and of course, a really broken back. I had crushed my T6 vertebrae.

Later, in hospital

Did you black out?
Yep, and the guy I was with started freaking out. I stood up, apparently—I don't remember this at all—and he thought I was fine, but told me to stay at his house where I slept on the couch. Because I was both concussed and drunk, I was vomiting nonstop all night.

I woke up the next morning and remember saying, "guys, I'm in excruciating, unbearable pain and I can't really move properly. I don't know what's wrong." But they all thought I was being a soft cock. One of them even suggested they should crack my back. I ended up going back to my apartment and I immediately passed out and slept until Monday.

You slept for two whole days?
Yeah, pretty much. The pain was so bad that I couldn't move from bed. Luckily, I didn't need to go the toilet or anything, but I also couldn't drink or eat. What actually woke me up on Monday was my alarm, letting me know I had work. I remember texting my friend and asking him to take me. He said yes and I was soon hopping into his car, but it's all a blur now. He told me he knew something was wrong because I kept moaning and groaning. As soon as I got to work, I went to go see the medics on board the ship but they told me I was fine.

Wait, they said you were fine? Did you tell them what happened?
Yeah they thought I was lying to get out of work. But in their defence, I didn't tell them I got drunk and fell off a balcony. If I'd told them that I would have been in severe trouble. I was also staying at a Navy complex at the time and didn't want to risk my place. Instead, I told them I'd just fallen down some stairs.

James' back-brace, a month after his fall

When did you realise how seriously you were injured?
Eventually, they told me to go to the on-base doctors. They looked into my ear, saw I had internal bleeding, and rushed me into intensive care. I was soon getting all these CAT and MRI scans, getting braces, the whole works. It went from 0 to 100 real quick. They essentially told me my back was broken and it made so much more sense, considering the pain I was in.

What was the recovery process?
I was in intensive care for about six days before being moved to a standard hospital room. I had to lie down on my back for practically everything—I couldn't stand up to go the toilet, I couldn't stand for the shower—I was literally on my back, even when eating food. It went on for roughly a month, where I had every kind of specialist looking at me. Because I was so young, fit, and healthy at the time with a positive attitude, my recovery was really quick. They initially wanted to operate, but I healed so quickly I didn't need it. This was good because if I'd had the operation, they said I'd have had ongoing health problems all my life.

What did you learn from all this?
I think it's stupid that this was all because of drinking. It was literally just a night out and a combination of pre-drinks at a friends', making the drinks too strong, and partying with the right people. It got too loose too quickly. Also I can't believe this actually happened. You always hear about people falling off balconies on the news, but then it happens to you. Don't think it won't happen to you.

*Name has been changed to keep James out of trouble with the Navy.

Follow Monique on Twitter

The Standing Rock 'Water Protectors' Vow to Stay No Matter What the Government Does

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A protester near Standing Rock on November 25, 2016. (Photo by Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

Despite a government order to vacate, tribal leaders as well as demonstrators camped out in Standing Rock, North Dakota, say they are staying put.

In a letter sent Friday to Dave Archambault II, Chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, the Army Corps of Engineers said they will be closing a portion of the land north of the Cannonball River on December 5, and that anyone on that land will be "considered trespassing and may be subject to prosecution under federal, state and local laws."

It's unclear if the Corps will take steps to arrest or remove people who stay. The Army Corps of Engineers did not respond to my request for comment. One thing's for sure: It would take a major effort to remove the estimated 5,000 encamped to stop the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. (Update: The Corps released astatement late Sundayclarifying that they have "no plans for forcible removal." Instead, they say, they are "seeking a peaceful and orderly transition to a safer location." How exactly that would happen is unclear.)

"Our Tribe is deeply disappointed in this decision by the United States, but our resolve to protect our water is stronger than ever," said Archambault in a statement. "We ask that all everyone who can appeal to President Obama and the Army Corps of Engineers to consider the future of our people and rescind all permits and deny the easement to cross the Missouri River just north of our Reservation and straight through our treaty lands."

In the letter, the Corps included a map, specifying what they call a "free speech zone" on the land south of the Cannonball River, where anyone peacefully protesting is permitted to stay. Citing safety concerns, the Corps says the decision to close the lands north of the river is "necessary to protect the general public from the violent confrontations between protestors and law enforcement officials that have occurred in this area." The letter also mentions liability, saying that anyone who stays on those lands "does so at their own risk."

"It is both unfortunate and ironic that this announcement comes the day after this country celebrates Thanksgiving—a historic exchange of goodwill between Native Americans and the first immigrants from Europe," Archambault said. "Although the news is saddening, it is not at all surprising given the last 500 years of the treatment of our people."

"The letter was kind of devastating for a lot of people," a man named Graywolf who is director of the Southern California chapter of the American Indian Movement, told me. He's been living at the Oceti Sakowin camp. "I don't expect anything positive from the government. What treaty have they honored? Why should we believe anything they say today?"

Reports from activists at Standing Rock as well as amateur video on social media has shown police violence against the demonstrators, who refer to themselves as "water protectors," intensifying.

In the early hours of the morning last Monday, a 21-year old woman named Sophia Wilansky was severely injured during a demonstration.

Wayne Wilansky, the victim's father, told reporters outside a Minneapolis hospital that the injury was a result of police throwing a concussion grenade into a group of demonstrators. "Even she's lying there with her arm pretty much blown off, she's focused on the fact that it's not about her, it's about what we're doing to the country, what we're doing to native peoples," Wilansky said.

The Morton County Sheriff's Department did not return multiple requests for comment, but in a statement to the Los Angeles Times denied using concussion grenades.

Activists are still calling on federal officials to step in on their behalf. In a press conference at the Oceti Sakowin Camp Saturday in response to the Army Corps' letter, Archambault told a crowd of activists and reporters, "If they want public safety the best thing for the federal government to do is to deny the easement."

Eryn Wise, with the International Indigenous Youth Council, said that President Barack Obama himself should get involved. "Right now our land is to be left unprotected if we are to leave this space," Wise said. "The Indigenous youth are calling upon the United States government for protection. They're begging for people to start caring for them."

No matter what the government does or doesn't do, there seem to be at least hundreds, if not thousands, of people willing to risk arrest.

"Most people are staying," said Victory Lonnquist, an EMT from Washington who arrived at the camp in September and has no plans to leave. Her Facebook live video went viral last week after she was tear-gassed by police. She was treating other protesters who had been injured from police firing water cannons, rubber bullets, and tear gas into a crowd.

"I will stay as long as it takes," Lonnquist, who left her job in the fall to be here, told me. "These people are my family now. As medical, I'm concerned. I have no doubt after what I've seen the police would and might kill people. When I worry, I go back to what is true: This movement was created by the children, in prayer. In the end, love always wins."

"As long as we continue to stay in prayer and in peace we can accomplish a lot of things in life," Archambault told a crowd gathered at Oceti Sakowin Camp Saturday afternoon. "It's important that we continue to stand together."

"The federal court has never been good to Indian Communities," Archambault said. "We never have a successful record. If we continue to wait for the federal court to rule in our favor it probably won't happen."

The VICE Guide to Right Now: Charleston Shooter Dylann Roof Will Defend Himself in Court

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Dylan Roof appears in court accompanied by assistant defensive attorney William Maguire in July. Photo by Grace Beahm-Pool/Getty Images

A federal judge has granted Dylann Roof's request to defend himself against hate crime charges in court after finding that he's mentally competent to stand trial, the Charleston Post and Courier reports.

Roof, the 22-year-old who faces state murder charges and federal hate crime charges for gunning down nine black parishioners in June 2015, won the petition to be his own lawyer on Monday morning.

"I do find defendant has the personal capacity to self-representation," Judge Richard Gergel said. "I continue to believe it is strategically unwise, but it is a decision you have the right to make."

The self-described white supremacist is accused of targeting African Americans at a prayer group at the Emanuel AME Church. He faces 33 federal charges, including hate crime violations, in addition to separate capital murder charges in state court. His offer to plead guilty and serve life in prison was rejected last week, as the feds appear determined to give him the death penalty.

By representing himself in court, Roof will be able to question prospective jurors and may even interact with survivors of the shooting or victims' family members.

Watch: Obama's Responses to 16 Mass Shootings in Eight Years


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