When trans curator and fashion historian E-J Scott went into hospital for surgery, he kept everything from his room: the hospital gown from one of his procedures, the needle used for his morphine prescription, the pillowcase off his bed, and even the cups that nurses gave medicine in. "I'm a collector," he says. "I always have been."
Fifteen years on, his personal collection has grown into the Museum of Transology, the largest collection of trans artefacts and photographic portraiture ever to be displayed in the UK. Over a hundred transgender people have contributed their own deeply personal objects to the crowdsourced exhibition, which opens at the Fashion Space Gallery in London this month.
"It's been the most complex thing I've ever done curatorially in my whole life," Scott says. "There are objects in there that are over 20 years old."
Does It Suck? takes a deeper look at pop cultural artifacts previously adored, unjustly hated, or altogether forgotten, re-opening the book on topics that time left behind.
In the annals of movie history, the 1984 comedy-horror flick Gremlins is widely regarded as a stone classic. Meanwhile, the 1990 sequel, Gremlins 2: The New Batch, is widely regarded as, well, a movie that also exists. It's not that it's bad—it just isn't talked about as frequently or reverentially as the original. To some degree, that's standard operating procedure when it comes to sequels; but there are a few specific reasons why Gremlins 2 doesn't resonate with people the way the original did.
For starters, it's closer to being the dark comedy that the first Gremlins' promotional campaign made it out to be. Gremlins was a straight-up horror film with a few funny moments thrown in, while Gremlins 2 is a lot more cartoonish. One of the scariest moments of the first film was the scene where the Gremlins converge on the local movie theater. Compare that to the big group meeting in the sequel, which involves the monsters gathering in a New York City office building lobby for a group performance of "New York, New York."
This scene marks a clear turning point in the film. It separates the first half—which hews closer to the first film's horror-comedy formula—from the borderline self-parodic second half, in which the Gremlins' antics take on a slapstick quality that was far less present the first time around. In other words the second half of the movie gives the people what they probably wanted from the original, while also making fun of them for wanting it.
Another minor gripe with Gremlins 2 is that changing the setting from the idyllic small town of Kingston Falls to New York City strips the sequel of the timeless quality of the original film. Kingston Falls was so nondescript and everytown that it takes a few minutes of watching before you're even sure what decade the original is set in. You certainly won't have that problem with Gremlins 2, which is very clearly early-90s right out of the gate.
That said, just because it looks dated, it doesn't render the film irrelevant. One lead character, Ronald Clamp, is obviously based on Donald Trump (with a dash of Ted Turner thrown in, shout out to the apocalypse video). Also, weirdly enough, the events of the film somewhat parallel Trump and his followers' stance on immigration.
Before we get into that, let's address the elephant in the room: the Gremlins franchise has always had a cloud of "is this racist?" hanging over its head, so implying that there might be some racial overtones in the sequel isn't that much of a stretch. Hell, the franchise even got its name from town racist Marty Futterman's impassioned speech in the first movie about how the "Japs" are putting little green monsters called Gremlins in all of our electronics. And If anyone from Kingston Falls was going to pop up in the second movie to visit Billy in New York, you'd expect it to be his parents. Instead, the Futtermans pop in for a visit—this time so Marty can deliver a line about how "all kinds of weird foreign bugs are coming into the country."
We can argue all day about whether this franchise is overtly racist or not, but there's no disputing that the filmmakers do their best to get the viewer in a xenophobic kind of mood early on in both movies. Marty Futterman doesn't deliver those lines for nothing.
As for the parallels to immigration in the second movie, they start with Gizmo. After his home (the antique shop run by his owner, Mr. Wing) is destroyed by a corporate interest looking to expand its empire, he's forced to flee to the streets (of America). From there, he's picked up and brought into the Clamp Enterprises building—solely to be exploited for business gains by a science lab on the 51st floor. It's similar to how NAFTA destroyed Mexico's agriculture industry, forcing millions of workers to flock to the United States looking for farm work, only to be exploited as a cheap source of labor. Except that all happened years after this movie came out.
Also, that line of thinking would imply that the movie takes a sympathetic tone in its allusions to foreigners invading our way of life, which it does not. Sure, Gizmo is a "good one," but as soon as he spawns the new batch, it's immediately clear that they're different. In a bad way. They're violently aggressive. They have weird developmental disabilities. The meanest one has black fur. All of this is presumably chalked up to the fact that the water that produced them mixed with the ink from a drawing of a building designed to look like a Chinese temple. Subtle!
The parallels don't end there. When the building is finally overrun with Gremlins, they start taking jobs. Ronald Clamp's secretary is attacked and replaced by a Gremlin in a cardigan; later, Billy is knocked unconscious and wakes up strapped into the chair of a Gremlin dentist.
Even Ronald Clamp's efforts to stop them from integrating into American society involves erecting a barrier between them and the rest of the country. Assimilating and competing for a place in society is precisely what they want to do, by the way. Brain Gremlin says exactly that in a televised interview, not long after giving a team of scientists a brief rundown of the unique traits of his "ethnic group."
Sure, it's possible that none of this is intentional and is just in the active imagination of someone writing a pop culture article on the internet. Either way, the parallels are there, and they help make what could've been an outdated afterthought of a movie into something that's shockingly relevant more than 25 years later.
In March of 1829, Andrew Jackson rode into office as a man of the people—the first American president not born into wealth—and, as a token of his good faith, he opened the doors of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to those people after his inauguration. This was a bad mistake, as anyone who has ever thrown a "bring whoever, it's a rager" party can attest. By the end of the evening, his supporters were said to be so rowdy that they had to literally be lured outside to the White House lawn with bowls of whiskey punch and ice cream. Jackson himself escaped his fans through a window or side entrance, leaving behind—though reports of the extent vary—drunken brawls, muddied furniture, and broken china.
"A monstrous crowd of people is in the city," the senator Daniel Webster wrote of the event. "I never saw anything like it before. Persons have come five hundred miles to see General Jackson; and they really seem to think that the country is rescued from some dreadful danger."
Donald Trump's supporters—who will be coming to Washington, DC in droves for his inauguration on Friday—also feel that sense that the country is being rescued. Luckily, this time around, the White House won't be hosting a bender. But the event is still expected to be one of the most contentious inaugural ceremonies in modern history.
On Twitter, the celebrity-turned-president has promised that his impending inauguration on Friday will be, like everything else in his life, "a GREAT SHOW." But Trump is so unpopular in the entertainment world that the only acts his people could book were 3 Doors Down, Toby Keith, and 16-year-old singer Jackie Evancho. (The inauguration has become so toxic that a Springsteen cover band felt compelled to pull out of a warmup event on Thursday.) Not to mention the congressional Democrats who are boycotting the inauguration, and the poor inaugural staffers who spent time taping over the "Don's Johns" logo on the porta-potties.
So no, hopes are not high for the inauguration of the 45th president of the United States. But Jim Bendat, an inaugural historian, says that it can't compare to some of the clusterfucks and controversies of past presidential transitions.
After losing re-election, John Adams didn't even show up to Thomas Jefferson's inauguration, Bendat told me, because he thought "it would've been similar to King George III attending George Washington's inauguration." His son, John Quincy Adams, skipped on the whiskey punch after losing to Andrew Jackson in the hotly contested election of 1828. "He just couldn't relate to Jackson, and his rowdy bands of followers," Bendat continued. "The Adams were either sore losers, or thought it was wrong."
Flash-forward a hundred years, to FDR's victory over Herbert Hoover in 1932. In the motorcade, Hoover apparently ignored his successor's attempts at conversations, and didn't even look at him the entire time. "If you do a search, you'll find the photos," Bendat pointed out. "Hoover looks straight ahead in every picture."
Then there's the story of outgoing First Lady Rosalynn Carter's treatment of incoming First Lady Nancy Reagan in 1980. According to Bendat, Reagan later wrote that "Rosalynn just looked at the window, and didn't say a word. I didn't know what to say, so I kept quiet, too. Fortunately, it's a short ride." (Michelle Obama seems to have an easier relationship with Melania Trump, even after the whole plagiarized speech thing.)
Now, onto the demonstrations. In terms of sheer numbers, this weekend is on track to attract the largest protest presence that an inauguration has ever seen, which isn't surprising given Trump's historically low approval ratings. But of course, this isn't the first time that an incoming commander-in-chief is divisive and hated by a wide swath of the country.
"There have been a handful of times when the person who didn't get the most votes became president," Bendat explained. "There were plenty of protesters for George W. Bush in 2001, particularly on the parade route. The area called Freedom Plaza, near 14th and Pennsylvania Avenue, was just filled with protesters. As they drove by, in that particular area, there were more protesters than supporters."
Bush's second inauguration, in 2005, was met with resistance as well, with a handful of members from the anti-war group Code Pink trying to interrupt the ceremony. Richard Nixon, too, was opposed by antiwar forces both in 1969 and 1973. But it's the 2001 inauguration that feels most like today.
Bendat read me Bush's own words about that day, from his memoir Decision Points: "They carried big signs with foul language, hurled eggs at the motorcade, and screamed at the top of their lungs. I spent most of the ride in the presidential limo, behind thick glass windows. So their shouting came across in pantomime. While I couldn't make out the words, their middle fingers spoke loudly: The bitterness of the 2000 election was not going away anytime soon."
But a protest that feels even more relevant can be found further back, in 1913—then, as now, a huge number of women marched in a major show of solidarity, though their issues were different. On the eve of Woodrow Wilson's inauguration, 5,000 to 8,000 suffragettes arrived in DC to demand the right to vote. "That is a lot of people, given the year we're talking about and the difficulties in transportation," he added. "That's a large number of women who showed up for women's rights."
It's easy, Bendat continued, to draw the lines between the Suffragist March then, and the Women's March today (the latter event may wind up being the largest protest ever, with hundreds of thousands preparing to demonstrate). "Women were denied a fundamental right back in those days," Bendat explained. "Now women feel like a lot of what Trump represents is a major threat to all of the accomplishments that have taken place since 1913."
When I asked Bendat if there was anything about Trump's inauguration that made it feel different from the rest, he brought up Trump's firing in early January of Charlie Brotman, the 89-year-old announcer who has voiced every inauguration since 1957.
"Every one of them—party hasn't mattered," Bendat said to me. "He's just a really friendly, gregarious person with a bubbling personality, and was just terrific at his job. And he could've been terrific this year. It's really sad, and pathetic, that Trump would fire him." According to news reports, Trump replaced Brotman with an announcer who had volunteered for Trump.
But in most respects, Friday's pomp and circumstance will likely resemble past inaugurations, with more outré ideas like a helicopter ride from New York to DC ultimately being rejected. Though Trump has spent decades puffing himself up into a larger-than-life figure, the office he's entering will prove to be bigger than even Trump's self-image.
"It's not about one individual," Bendat said. "Inauguration Day is about our country, it's about democracy, and it's about those traditions. It's not about one person."
Donald Trump rose to power by defying and defeating the collective Republican establishment, but when it comes to his Supreme Court, Trump has promised to basically be a tool of the conservative movement. At his most recent press conference, Trump reiterated that he was deferring to the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation, two of DC's most prominent right-wing think tanks, a promise Trump has been making since the summer.
Getting a judge to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia, a conservative legal icon, will be one of Trump's top priorities after the inauguration. In many ways, a future Trump administration scares liberals because of its potential unpredictability, but when it comes to the Supreme Court, the fear is different—Trump seems almost certain to pick someone willing to fight against progressive social causes, even though Trump himself hasn't given those issues much airing on the campaign trail.
The Federalist Society, a group founded by law students in 1982, favors judges with conservative legal principles such as an anti-regulatory agenda, a strict interpretation of the Constitution, and a limit on the power of civil rights legislation, explained Amanda Hollis-Brusky, an associate politics professor at Pomona University who wrote Ideas with Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Counter-Revolution.
"They have become the organization monopolizing the credentialing and vetting of judges," Hollis-Brusky said of the Federalist Society, which monitors judges and pressures them to uphold conservative legal interpretations. "Conservatives have said for a long time the reason Republicans have a hard time finding reliable conservatives is because people get on the Supreme Court and kowtow to the liberal-leaning Georgetown set. But the Federalist Society ensures they're going to be faithful to their principles and keeps them accountable."
The Federalist Society, which grew up alongside the Reagan administration and helped nominate Justice Scalia, has grown increasingly powerful in the past few decades. When George W. Bush attempted to appoint his lawyer Harriet Miers, who was not a Federal Society member, she was pressured to turn down the nomination by angry conservative politicians.
"One could imagine Trump appointing a little-known judge he knows… But because of what happened with Harriet Miers, if you're conservative, even if you're as unconventional as Trump, this is such a high-stakes appointment that you have to go with a known entity," said Hollis-Brusky. "Conservatives are not going to roll the dice on someone they don't know."
Trump's 20 potential nominees are all strict constructionist, pro-life judges with views similar to Scalia's, said Richard Hasen, the chancellor's professor of law and political science at UC Irvine's law school.
"In the middle of the campaign there were a number of conservatives skeptical that Trump was actually conservative and that he would appoint conservative justices so on the campaign he took the unprecedented step of naming people… the exclusive list from which he'd pick his nominee," Hasen told me.
"While there have been analyses that argue that some of the potential appointees are more conservative than others," Hasen continued, "they are all seen as conservative on issues that seem to matter to the conservative legal movement."
The Federalist Society's role is to be expected in any Republican administration. The Heritage Foundation's involvement is a little odder, if only because Trump was widely expected not to do much to advance a conservative agenda on social issues. But he may be placating that part of the Republican base by giving them the courts.
"In the campaign you saw Trump come out vociferously against abortion and court evangelicals," said Hollis-Brusky. "The fact that he's allowing [former South Carolina Senator] Jim DeMint and the Heritage Foundation a say is payback for that evangelical support, so I do think you will see a pro-life, anti-choice justice as one of his first picks."
Many members of the Heritage Foundation, which has a long history of advising Republican politicians, are working on the Trump transition team, and the organization gave Trump a "Blueprint for a New Administration" with priorities including the repeal of Obamacare and an increase in the defense budget. Now Heritage is pushing Trump to nominate Justice Bill Pryor of Alabama, John Malcolm, the foundation's legal studies director, told the Hill this week.
"He has a titanium spine," Malcolm told the Hill of Pryor, a staunch conservative who vehemently opposed Roe V. Wade and fought the ACLU in many church-versus-state cases. Malcolm said that conservatives indeed wanted to avoid appointing any Republican justice who might drift leftward—a charge often leveled against Chief Justice John Roberts, who voted not to overturn Obamacare in 2012.
"They want to get a judge who is going to follow the Constitution according to its text, structure, and public meaning," Malcolm continued. "They want somebody who will have the courage of their convictions and not be swayed by the editorial board of the New York Times or what the cocktail circuit in Georgetown has to say."
The people of San Bartolomé de Pinares, a small village in the Spanish province of Ávila, have their own way of warding off evil for 2017, and it's not some vague New Year's resolution to "waste less time on social media and focus on the positive". Instead, they've let a bunch of horses jump through fire for good luck.
Every year on the night of the 16th of January, the people of San Bartolomé de Pinares light up big bonfires in the middle of their small streets, after which a few men from the village get on their horses and jump over the bonfires. The tradition dates back to the 18th century, when an outbreak of the plague hit the area, killing most of the horses around. After that, the villagers started to deworm their horses with the smoke rising from the bonfires. The event is part of the celebrations of the feast-day of St. Anthony, where bonfires are lit up all around the area as a form of purification and good luck for the new year.
Although the custom now mostly serves as a means to attract tourists, it can still be quite chilling to watch. Photographer Adrián Domínguez was there to document the festivities.
"I remember one party where I must have had sex with about 30 people," says Denholm, a beautiful young gay man reminiscing about his chemsex days. "There was this box of toys... I'm not even that into sex toys, but off my face on m-cat I found myself gradually increasing and increasing the size. Then I woke up the next day, took another look and was like, 'How the fuck did I get that in there?' I probably wouldn't have done that without the mephedrone."
Dear old mephedrone. M-cat, drone, bubble, "meow meow" – the formerly-legal high that nobody bar tabloid journalists actually called "meow meow". The white powder that smells faintly of cat piss, defined the UK's party scene from 2008 to 2010 and caused a media hysteria that kickstarted the process of the government banning all psychoactive substances..
In 2010 the drug was the fourth most popular among British clubbers; it's now used almost exclusively on the gay chemsex circuit, thanks to its chemical aphrodisiac qualities and the fact it keeps you awake and alert. So where did it come from and how did it fall so out of favour?
The active agent in mephedrone is a form of cathinone, a substance that occurs naturally in khat, the mildly stimulative root chewed all over the Horn of Africa. The exponentially stronger "substituted cathinone" molecule in mephedrone was re-synthesised in 2003 by the legendary Israeli underground chemist Dr Zee, but the explosion in drone's popularity in the late-2000s was down to a different source altogether: the War on Drugs itself.
In June of 2008 Cambodian authorities seized and destroyed 33 tons of Safrole, a key precursor chemical in MDMA. This quantity was enough to produce around 245 million ecstasy pills, so its seizure had huge reverberations throughout the international drugs market. In 2009 the purity of ecstasy sold in the UK plummeted from roughly 60 percent to 22 percent. In 2010, almost all the ecstasy seized in the UK contained no MDMA at all. At the same time, the quality of cocaine was running at historical lows.
This pretty much set the scene for mephedrone – a drug described by most users as feeling like a mixture of MDMA and coke, and which people could order cheaply and easily off the internet because it was completely legal, sold as "plant food" on sites with names like legalchems.co.uk, or plantfoodbuzz.com. No surprises, then, that people went nuts for it.
"The summer of 2009 was pretty insane," says Andre, a former mephedrone enthusiast. "That stuff was everywhere. It made your body feel crazy and tingly, and gave you these really intense rushes of energy. And obviously made you horny as fuck."
During the period Andre describes it seemed like every club, house party and festival in Britain was awash with the stuff. Maybe because it was legal people were less shy about chopping up lines in public – but throughout that year, where previously one would have seen clubbers shuffling around with great difficulty after taking too much ketamine, you now had super-energised, loved up drone-heads bouncing around in their own personal rush zone.
This presented an opportunity for amateur dealers. I spoke to Josh, who put himself through two years of university by selling m-cat out of his flat in south London. "Me and my mate used to buy it online in bulk from Nanjing, China for £3 a gram, then just go from house party to house party and sell it for £15 a gram after hours, when people had run out and wanted a bit more," he says. "People just loved it. It started out as just other students in London, but soon it was guys coming in from the suburbs or Kent for a night out. It paid my rent for a year, and I went on a bunch of holidays, always paying cash."
The explosion of this new legal high had various knock-on effects, most noticeably the unprecedented drop in deaths from cocaine use. Neil Woods, who worked as an undercover drugs cop for 14 years, tracked the phenomenon closely. "As a police drugs expert I followed the stats and the intel. The only year since the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 that cocaine deaths have actually fallen is the year that mephedrone was at its most popular, 2009," he says. "Cathinone is far less toxic than street cocaine, and mephedrone was generally weighing in at 99.8 percent pure, whereas the average 20 percent pure cocaine had as many as 11 different adulterants."
Mephedrone wasn't just popular in the UK – it took off in various countries around the world – but it was here that the inevitable backlash began. The Sun led with a story about a 19-year-old who had supposedly ripped off his own scrotum while on drone. It turned out this was a joke someone had posted on the message board of a website called mephedrone.com. Then came a huge outcry over the deaths of two teenagers, reportedly from mephedrone – who turned out to have actually been taking the heroin substitute methadone. Mephedrone and methadone are at opposite ends of the chemical spectrum, but what's basic journalistic accuracy when reporting young people's deaths?
Soon, the tabloid press had rechristened the drug "meow meow" and turned a party fad into a manufactured crisis.
(Photo: Flickr user Quinn Anya)
All this isn't to say that mephedrone is harmless; of course it isn't. The drug was banned before proper laboratory experimentation could be done, but there are obvious repercussions to your health – notably how terrible you look and feel after doing it for any period of time. Even Josh the dealer wrestled with how he saw some people reacting to his product. "Most people were OK and could do it in moderation – like anything else," he says. "But there was the occasional case where someone would be coming around every day. They'd lose shitloads of weight – they ended up a mess. Some people had to drop out of uni or repeat a year because of it. That was the dark side."
By April of 2010, looking to appear "tough on drugs" before the general election, the Labour government banned mephedrone. Several members of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs resigned at this obvious knee jerk reaction to tabloid reporting. But, in fairness, the ban sort of worked – people did largely stop snorting m-cat. And then they just started snorting cocaine again instead, so the cocaine deaths that had decreased in 2009 started to climb back up, and have been around the same level ever since.
The ban was also great news for dealers. Josh recalls: "It was only when it became illegal that things got really good. We were reading The Sun and all the chat online. We knew it was going to become illegal, so we stocked up. After that we bumped it to £20 a gram and started cutting it with baking soda. We didn't even have to go around the parties any more, people started coming to us. I guess we made around £30,000."
Josh is clear that he was only ever running a small operation for students. But as Neil Woods notes, the effect on the criminal underworld was serious. "While mephedrone was legal, I recall police intelligence of disgruntled cocaine dealers calling in debts due to a loss of business. With the ban, it was organised crime groups that took the benefit – a huge new market was simply gifted to them on a plate."
The other effect of the mephedrone ban was a massive intensification of the cat-and-mouse game that underground scientists had been playing with the authorities for years, making minute tweaks to chemical compounds before law enforcement had a chance to ban them. This led to the explosion of new research chemicals (or "bath salts", as the American press dubbed them), highly unpredictable chemicals marketed as legal analogues of conventional drugs: "Gocaine", for instance, or "China White".
It was the rise in popularity of these drugs that prompted the introduction of the Psychoactive Substances Act in 2016, a Home Office bill banning any substance which "by stimulating or depressing the person's central nervous system [...] affects the person's mental functioning or emotional state", meaning the list of banned substances is potentially open-ended. The move was described by former Chief Government Drugs Advisor David Nutt as "arguably the worst piece of legislation in living memory".
Once again, control of all these newly banned substances was handed to organised criminals on a platter. Henry Fisher from the drug policy think tank VolteFace is clear: "The demand for legal highs has been displaced to the illegal market… into the hands of street dealers." Neil Woods is even more scathing: "The hunt for new substances only happened because of the mephedrone ban, offering huge incentives to organised crime. The Psychoactive Substances Act was inevitable, but ridiculous – ban imaginary drugs, as if banning tangible ones had ever made a difference."
So where does that leave mephedrone now? Well, it's still about – a study by The Lancet released in April of last year found that use of the drug is rising again in London, among recreational drugs users; intravenous drug users combining it with heroin; and men who have sex with men.
It's that last group in which the drug's use is most visible, in the chemsex scene, where drone and GHB have emerged as the two most favoured types of party fuel. I ask Denholm why mephedrone in particular is so popular for chemsex. "There's a kind of relentlessness to mephedrone – a detached relentlessness," he says. "Where MDMA makes you lovely and friendly, drone makes you excited, but also detached from the world. Maybe it seems like a remedy to what lots of gay men feel – a kind of unlovability, being brought up with constant background homophobia. It's a way of escaping everything and just feeling sexy and elated."
Another chemsex partier, Danny, puts it more bluntly: "Mephedrone? All I know is it just makes you want to fuck everything. Hope that's helpful."
And in that one phrase, maybe he has summed up not only the appeal and history of mephedrone, but also the response of lawmakers to the entire issue of "legal highs" – fucking everything up while trying to be helpful.
Once you get comfortable walking around – usually a few months after your first birthday – you tend to take for granted how easy it is to go through life on two legs. Running to catch a train, swimming, riding a bike and even just standing there is so doable on two legs that you're probably not even aware of needing them for it.
Mickey Delsman is a 23-year-old student from Amsterdam who lost a leg when he was ten. Quickly after the amputation, Mickey learnt to use a prosthetic leg. I recently met with him to talk about exactly how much of a difference having his leg amputated has made to his ability to run to catch a train, swim, ride a bike or just stand there.
VICE: Hey Mickey. How did you lose your leg? Mickey: I was diagnosed with bone cancer in my shin bone when I was ten. I found out more or less by accident – I had strained my leg and couldn't really walk any more. The doctor immediately noticed there was something seriously wrong with my leg and, a year later, I was told they had to remove it as a precaution. I did get a say in how much they would take – I chose to have my kneecap moved up and have everything below that removed.
Do you ever experience phantom limb pain? Yes, I've even been on medication for it, but never finished the treatment. I still feel phantom pain in my missing leg. I don't know if it'll ever go away. For me, it feels like a tingling where my leg would've been. If I try to focus it feels like my foot is still there, but stuck, somehow. I can sometimes feel a shock running through it, or it feels like my foot is still attached, but in a different place.
How are you able to walk? I have a prosthetic leg and I walk pretty well with it. I used to hop everywhere – that's why my remaining leg is very strong. I taught myself how to walk again and never really had physical therapy. I just practiced a lot. I was young and I wanted to play outside, so I did just that.
Not too long ago my prosthetic knee broke – it would just get stuck while I was walking around. The prosthetic leg breaks down quite often because I put too much weight and pressure on it. And then there's oil or some kind of grease in the leg, which can leak. Usually these prosthetics should work for three years or longer, but I wear them out much faster. I just use them constantly – I go out like a normal person and I cycle around the city delivering food. My last prosthetic foot was broken in several places when I was done with it.
All photos by Kas van Vliet
Do people ever joke around with your prosthetic leg? One time I was on holiday with friends in Spain and our toilet seat broke at some point. A few friends asked if they could borrow my leg and take it to reception, to convince the receptionist that my leg had come up from the sewer into our toilet. The poor guy was so confused. That was pretty funny. Another time, at a festival, a friend of mine had built this huge garbage pile and thrown my leg on top of it as a joke. That wasn't fun. You need to ask these things first.
When is it hardest for you to miss a leg? I can do pretty much everything quite well. I might not be able to play football or basketball as well as other people, but I do alright. When it comes to swimming, though, it's difficult. I miss swimming. Going to the beach is hard for me. My artificial leg can't be in the water. Of course I can take it off, but I don't always feel like it. And I'd have to hop to the water on one leg. That's what I used to do, but these days you'd sooner find me just hanging out in the shade.
I've been in some dangerous situations because of my leg. A friend of mine and I were on a ferris wheel once, when halfway through I noticed that my leg had got stuck between the cart and the wheel, which made our cart start hanging more and more askew. I tried to free it but it didn't work, and we really started to panic. When the leg finally came loose our cart dangerously swung back and forth. We almost fell out. That would have been especially unfortunate for my friend, because I might have just dangled there, hanging from my prosthetic leg.
If you'd have had the choice, would you have lost an arm or a leg? When you miss an arm you can still play football and stuff like that, and your balance is much better. But I think I'd pick losing my leg again. It's simply what I'm used to.
Have you ever used your missing leg as an excuse for anything? I used to, sure. I would go to an amusement park, sit down in a wheelchair and go on the rides through the disabled entrance. I already had a prosthetic leg by then, but I just exaggerated a bit how hard it was to walk for me. And at festivals we'd always watch the overcrowded shows from the disability bays.
Have you ever been bullied because of your leg? I might've been teased, but not directly about my leg. People would sometimes laugh at me for not being very fast. They'd say something and run away, and I couldn't keep up with them of course. But I don't recall any specific bullying. I grew up in a relatively small town and everyone knew how I had lost my leg. Everyone was always very careful around me. That annoyed me sometimes – I don't need people's pity.
And now? Do people ever respond weirdly when they notice your prosthetic leg? I used to cover up my leg even during summer, but I'm over that now. People sometimes stare, but they usually respond to it fine. I mostly get questions from young children who don't understand what's going on. They ask me about it and I explain that I have an artificial leg. They usually find that very interesting.
When you have a date do you let them know you have a prosthetic leg beforehand? No. I was on my way to a Tinder date recently when my prosthetic knee got stuck again. That really sucked, but I immediately told her when we met: "We have a problem, because my knee just broke down and I can't walk that well." She had no idea I had a prosthetic leg at the time. But people usually aren't weird about it.
Last weekend, Donald Trump's angry Twitter fingers found yet another person to attack. While we can usually predict his next target, like Meryl Streep after her Golden Globes speech or Alec Baldwin after practically every episode of Saturday Night Live, there are some people you'd think would be off-limits. But this weekend, PEOTUS decided to launch a Twitter tirade against beloved Congressman and civil rights activist John Lewis, just ahead of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
During the special MLK Day episode of VICELAND's Desus & Mero, the hosts talked about Trump's new beef with the renowned activist and how our future president should probably do some fact-checking before trying to put politicians on blast.
You can watch last night's Desus & Merofor free online now, and be sure to catch new episodes weeknights at 11 PM on VICELAND.
It's that time of year again when all of a sudden there's a line for the machines at the gym, your friends constantly bail on you to fulfill their sobriety goals, and you've unfollowed at least three people on Facebook, this week alone, to avoid their constant "new year, new me" updates.
But let's face it, there isn't much of a difference between this year and the last, and if you were an obnoxious drunk last year there's a good chance you're going to be the same obnoxious drunk this year if all you've done is make a tenuous new year's resolution.
Obviously it is possible to achieve a goal for the new year if you put your mind to it, but for the most part, strict year-long deadlines often make goals harder to adhere to. To prove that point, we talked to some millennials who, by mid-January, have already spectacularly failed their new year's resolutions. Good going, guys.
Zach, 23
VICE: What was your new year's resolution? Stop spending so much money on stupid things like Ubers.
So how badly have you failed? Since New Years, I've spent like over $200 I think.
Jesus. What goes through your mind every time you get into an Uber now? Fuck, I gotta wake up earlier.
Do you think this makes you a failure in life? Ouch, that was harsh. I didn't, but now that's kind of on my mind now.
Well, I mean. How have your New Year's resolutions gone in the past? Normally they fail. One year I said I'd eat chicken every Tuesday for a year and I did that. Everyone does a deal on Tuesdays. I like chicken.
VICE: What's your New Year's resolution? My New Year's resolution was to go on more dates and be more out there with my love life. And not just dating, even something just physical or short term.
Why now that it's 2017? I think I kind of forgot how [to date]. I want to meet new people and I have needs that I need to get satisfied. And it's all I talk about.
How's that going? I'm still really shy. If I saw someone cute at the bar, I don't know if I would go up to them. Like, there was a cute guy in my class today, but I just sat near him and didn't say anything because I'm too shy. Maybe I'll try again in my group project.
Would you say you've failed your resolution? Well I haven't done anything to really try to be more open. In a way I haven't set myself up to succeed. But it's still early. Some guys are messaging me on Grindr and stuff, but they're not my type. Or if they are my type, I'll talk to them for a bit and then they'll stop talking to me. So maybe I'm just weird or something.
Vanessa, 22
VICE: What was your New Year's resolution? To quit smoking cigarettes.
How long have you been smoking? Three years.
So why is this the year to quit? I don't like it. It's a bad habit and I know it will kill me. But I caved on Friday. I was drunk and I wanted a cigarette so I had one.
Do you feel like you've failed your resolution? Nope.
Well, I kinda feel like you have. Yeah, but … I mean I guess I technically have, but it doesn't feel like it. If I slip up every now and again when I'm drunk it's not the end of the world. I could be a heroin addict, you know what I mean? It could be worse.
VICE: What was your resolution this year? I wanted to do something called the five dollar challenge because I kept seeing it around on Instagram and Facebook. Basically if you spend your cash and you get a five dollar bill in change, you have to put that away in savings for a year.
Explain your failure. I'd say probably a week within my challenge I racked up so many five dollar bills and I thought, there's no way I can spend on a budget by saving five dollar bills all the time because I can't [control] what kind of change I'm going to get. At the end of it I just ended up using my five dollar bills because I didn't have enough cash.
How does that make you feel about yourself? I'm thinking I'll just use my debit card now. I don't feel bad it just didn't make sense to me.
Do you often make New Year's resolutions? I don't know, this year I'm trying not to make any other New Year's resolutions. I just thought this one was a fun one. So yeah, after that I don't have any other resolutions.
Tagwa, 21
What's your New Year's resolution? It *was* to post a vlog twice a week.
So do you vlog a lot? No, but It's something that I want to start doing this year.
What are you going to vlog? I'm going to be vlogging when I go out and [take photos] and fun stuff during the week.
Hmm, does that make you cool? No, I don't think vlogging makes anyone cool, it's just something I can do to help keep my creative juices pumping.
So how did you fail so far? My goal was to post a vlog twice a week starting two weeks ago and I only posted one vlog. I have yet to film or post a vlog this week.
Do you think it's important to make New Year's resolutions? I don't like calling it a resolution even though it is. But yeah it's good to set goals to do stuff. It's kind of just trendy [to make] new year's resolutions.
Lydia, 29
VICE: Did you make a New Year's resolution this year? I tried to. My resolution was kind of to make resolutions. I tried to say I'd go to the gym, drink more water, change my diet, quit smoking, study more for the LSATs, or at least register for the LSATs.
Why did you think about all of these resolutions but not make them? I guess they're things that I would ideally like to do in my day-to-day life. But I feel like New Year's resolutions are the things that you don't want to do. There's a reason you haven't done those things. Just because January 1st rolls around, it doesn't really change any of the reasons why you're not doing it.
Have you ever succeeded with a resolution? Yeah. One time I was dating somebody and I said I would break up with them by the end of the year. And I did.
So do you think you'll ever start working out or drinking more water or stop smoking? One day. When I'm a grown up.
In the time since 9/11, national security law has become one of the most controversial topics in the public domain. From Wikileaks to Edward Snowden; CSIS to Bill C51—the discussion around national security often pits staunch defenders of civil liberties against entire political establishments, and constituents living in fear of what may happen if the government doesn't take a more aggressive approach to combatting terrorism.
Ultimately, however, after all of the op-eds on massive pieces of legislation and intelligence scandals, the real nitty gritty of national security law happens behind the scenes. Judicial orders, security agency guidelines, ministerial directives. These documents—the ones penned behind closed doors—are rarely ever seen by the public, and when they are, it's usually because of the work of diligent journalists.
University of Ottawa professor Craig Forcese is trying to change that. He is the founder of the Secret Law Gazette—an online repository dedicated to chronicling and annotating the internals of Canada's national security apparatus. We spoke to him Monday to get a better idea of what exactly "secret law" is, and how he hopes his new project will change the tide of information.
VICE: What was your purpose for starting this project? Craig Forcese: Two things: the first is that for any system predicated on the rule of law, the absence of transparency [in understanding how law functions and how it's applied] is enormously concerning. Certainly, since 9/11, more and more of national security is governed and guarded by law, but that law is often opaque and non-transparent. Citizens do not have a real grasp on how national security law works.
The second point is that I have accumulated a wealth of material detailing these laws over the years, some of which I've acquired through my own access requests, and some of which have been acquired through access requests by the media. All of this is quite laborious for me to organize, and also not beneficial for me to keep to myself, so I decided the best way to organize it would be to create a public catalogue.
I should probably ask this before we dive in: What exactly is "secret law"? "Secret law" is not a [singular] term—it's really shorthand for a number of different things. What I mean by secret law is ministerial directives given to CSIS, the RCMP, and other agencies in, well, secret. In other words, these are statutes given by government ministers to agencies dealing with national security on how to conduct themselves.
Can you give me an example? Sure. One such example is the RCMP ministerial directives on national security investigations into sensitive sectors, back in 2003, which included the media. When there was discussion about how the RCMP can interact or investigate the media, there was discussion about the ministerial directives that guided them to do so in the first place.
Another example would be, generally speaking, internal policy that guides the application of statutory authorities, or add some more context to not particularly-detailed [law]. For instance, internal policy at CSIS might add flesh to how persons of interest are targeted, or how one should deal with confidential sources.
Beyond that, there's a whole host of materials I have not got access to because they're so heavily guarded: legal advice given from the department of justice to authorities. A lot of this stuff is not only guarded by national security law, but also solicitor-client privilege. It's almost impossible to get a hold of.
OK, so "secret law" is not really a shady, spooky type of legislation, but more of the inner workings of bureaucratic agencies figuring out how to use these laws to their advantage? Yeah, exactly.
Is it fair to say this law is hidden from the public? No, I wouldn't go that far.
First of all, the law does anticipate that these things will exist. Of course, things such as ministerial directives are excluded from publication, so you have to dig for them. It might seem that they're being purposely hidden—that last example was obtained via an ATIP (Access To Information and Privacy) request, and was posted online—but it's really just a matter of an antiquated system.
Many of these laws do not grapple well with modern transparency concerns or current national security environments, so what you have is older national security law, piled on by ministerial directives and internal policy. It's very hard to see the wording of a law, and extrapolate in what way it will be used by national security agencies, because most people don't have a grasp of where legal wording can stretch it to.
Essentially, interpretation gives these agencies a lot of room to take basic national security law and make some very complex decisions. Exactly! That's the problem with secret law—it is being used to bridge gaps, when the gaps should have been properly bridged by new legislation.
The fact of the matter is that our national security laws have not kept pace, and I don't think we've done a particularly good job in renovating those laws to fall in line with new technology and our security needs.
That's why you see things like that CSIS case last fall, which involved the use of metadata, and whether mass collection of metadata complied with the CSIS Act. It was clear that metadata was not even a conception at the time of the CSIS Act's creation in 1984, which puts not only CSIS but the whole government in an awkward legal position.
As an average citizen, just how hard would it be to figure out what the hell is going on behind the scenes? For legal advice, it's almost impossible. For everything else, you basically need to really understand how to use the ATIP system to your advantage. It requires very specific wording, context, and a lot of attempts before you can make an intelligent request. Even when you've done that, you often get back documents that are so heavily-redacted that it's basically like reading a blank page. There's an argument there to be had about whether those redactions are actually reasonable.
How much of a problem are redactions? Consider this: if you look on at CSIS' 2015 Ministerial Directions on accountability, and actually look at the section that says "Accountability"—most of it is redacted. The fact that it says nothing says a lot.
Everything you need to know about the world this morning, curated by VICE.
US News
MLK's Daughter Says 'God Can Triumph Over Trump' Bernice King, Mather Luther King Jr.'s daughter, told an audience of churchgoers in Atlanta on Monday that "God can triumph over Trump." Celebrating MLK Day at Ebenezer Baptist Church, she said, "Don't be afraid of who sits in the White House." President-elect Donald Trump met King's oldest son, Martin Luther King III, at Trump Tower on Monday. King said he was there to "bridge-build" and explained the pair had discussed ways to improve the voting system.—Reuters
General Motors to Make New $1 Billion Investment General Motors is expected to announce a $1 billion investment in its US plants, a sum that will add or help maintain more some 1,500 American jobs. Although it comes after President-elect Donald Trump criticized GM and other automakers for shipping jobs overseas, the Detroit car giant has reportedly been planning the investment since before the election.—AP
Monica Crowley Will Not Take Key Trump Administration Job Conservative writer Monica Crowley, chosen by President-elect Trump for a role as communications director of the National Security Council, will not be taking the position after all. Crowley said only that she wanted to "pursue other opportunities." The withdrawal follows allegations she plagiarized sections of a recent book and doctoral dissertation.—The New York Times
Eight Shot at MLK Day Festival in Miami Eight people were shot when gunfire broke out at an MLK Day festival in Miami's Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Park on Monday. Two people were held for questioning by Miami-Dade County police. One man, 20, was said to be in critical condition, while five of the other victims—most of whom were teenagers or children—were in stable condition.—NBC News
International News
Search for Missing Flight MH370 Halted The search for the Malaysian airliner that went missing in 2014 has been halted, the three nations involved have announced. A statement from Malaysia, Australia, and China said no new information had been discovered to determine the location of flight MH370, despite multiple searches of swaths of the Indian Ocean. A family support group called the ending of the search "nothing short of irresponsible."—CNN
Russia Wants New US Administration to Join Syria Peace Talks Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov says his country believes officials from Donald Trump's incoming US administration should be invited to join Syrian peace talks in Kazakhstan. Lavrov wants Russian and US officials to "discuss a more efficient fight against terrorism in Syria." Talks are set to begin in the Kazakhstan capital Astana on January 23, a few days after Trump's inauguration.—Al Jazeera
At Least 10,000 Killed in Yemen War, UN Says The nearly two-year war between Houthi rebels and a Saudi-led coalition in Yemen has claimed some 10,000 lives and injured nearly 40,000 more, according to the United Nations. A UN special envoy to Yemen met with President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi in Aden on Monday in the hope of reviving peace talks.—BBC News
Turkish Police Capture Suspected Nightclub Shooter The man suspected of shooting dead 39 people celebrating New Year's Day in an Istanbul nightclub has been captured by Turkish police. Named as Abdulgadir Masharipov, the Uzbekistan citizen was found by police in an apartment in Istanbul's Esenyurt district, and detained along with four other suspects.—Reuters
Everything Else
Last Man to Walk on the Moon Dies at Age 82 Former astronaut Gene Cernan, the last person to walk on the moon as commander of 1972's Apollo 17 mission, has died at the age of 82. NASA said it was "saddened by the loss" of the "last human to leave his footprints on the lunar surface."—The Guardian
Springsteen Cover Band Pulls Out of Inauguration Bruce Springsteen cover group the B-Street Band has withdrawn from playing the Garden State Presidential Inaugural Gala. Leader Will Forte said the band had changed its mind because of "the respect and gratitude we have for the Bruce and the E Street Band." The Boss is not a Trump fan.—Noisey
Lin-Manuel Miranda Performs 'West Wing' Rap Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda has unveiled a new song dedicated to political drama The West Wing. The What's Next? track was heard on The West Wing Weekly podcast and featured "Steadicam" rhymed with beloved (late) character "Mrs. Landingham."—USA Today
Major Poll Shows Majority Believe Their Country in Decline An Ipsos Mori poll of 16,000 people across 22 countries around the world found 57 percent believe their own nation is in decline. Another 63 percent say they want a "strong leader to take their country back."—BuzzFeed News
More than 1 Million Mobile Gamer Details Hacked Accounts of more than 1 million users of a community forum for Supercell, the maker of mobile games such as Clash of Clans, have apparently been hacked and shared online. The company says the breach happened in September 2016 but had since been fixed.—Motherboard
Hundreds of Theater Groups to Protest Trump Inauguration Theater groups across the US will take part in performance-protest the night before Donald Trump's inauguration. The Ghostlight Project will feature free-form events expressing support for vulnerable communities at outdoor theaters.—VICE
Sam Maloney looks like he could be 21. In photos posted to Facebook, he's smiling, and so are the first-year university students surrounding him. His boyish face doesn't seem at all out of place during the 2015 frosh week celebrations captured in these images, and he looks happy and excited. Everyone does.
But Sam Maloney wasn't 21, despite what he reportedly told his fellow students while living in university residence and enrolled in a first-year computer science course at Western University in London, Ontario, a two-hour drive from Toronto.
In reality, Sam Maloney was a 35-year-old freelance developer and an adept self-taught programmer of encrypted and distributed computer systems. Though he maintained a room in residence, Maloney had a common-law wife, Melissa Facciolo, and a son. The family owned a house about a 15-minute drive from the school.
On December 23, 2016, Maloney, no longer enrolled in university, was shot dead by police in his home after he allegedly fired a crossbow bolt at officers during an early morning raid.
According to Facciolo's lawyer, Phil Millar, the police had a warrant to seize Maloney's computer. The police suspected Maloney of hacking a local cinema's website. The person responsible posted a manifesto called "The Declaration of the Independence of Atlantis" that reportedly railed against race mixing. Days before the hack, Maloney posted a rambling screed with a similar title to his Facebook page. According to Millar, the cinema was a client of Maloney's at the time.
Monica Crowley, the conservative author and commentator who Trump tapped for a senior National Security Council communications job, has turned the gig down amid multiple accusations of plagiarism, the New York Timesreports.
Crowley released a statement to the Washington Times Monday, explaining that she's "decided to remain in New York to pursue other opportunities and will not be taking a position in the incoming administration," (one that would not have required Senate approval). She added, "I greatly appreciate being asked to be part of President-elect Trump's team and I will continue to enthusiastically support him and his agenda for American renewal."
The author did not comment on the CNN Money report that found she plagiarized 50 sections of her 2012 book, What the (Bleep) Just Happened? or an additional report from Politico that found she plagiarized at least 12 portions of her PhD dissertation back at Columbia University in 2000. After the reports, publisher HarperCollins announced it would be pulling existing copies of Crowley's book until she could "source and revise the material."
As the senior director of strategic communications at the National Security Council, Crowley would have served under Trump's appointed National Security Advisor, retired Army general Michael T. Flynn. Flynn commented on the move Monday, saying, "The NSC will miss the opportunity to have Monica Crowley as part of our team. We wish her all the best in her future."
As a psychologist, my patients frequently ask me how they they can cure their sadness so that they can feel happier and experience a deeper sense of purpose in their lives. It's a loaded question. I recognize that my answer might not feel like much of a solution, because I often recommend that they reflect upon the things that bring them meaning.
Usually, that's not easy.
They'll suggest solutions like: "Shouldn't I start exercising? Or maybe I should go on a Yoga retreat. Perhaps I should begin eating a clean diet?" Like many of us, they are uncomfortable with the idea that solutions might be discovered through personal reflection.
But, now, there's research to back up the clinical intervention that I've been using for years. A recent study suggests that pondering the meaning of life may also be a panacea for depression, chronic loneliness, and other emotional disorders.
According to this new research, people who ask existential, spiritual questions, such as "What happens after we die?" or "Is there a higher power?" are psychologically healthier than those who avoid them.
The study published by the Journal of Contextual and Behavioral Science collected data from 307 American adults who were experiencing conflicts, questions, and tensions about spirituality and religion. These quandaries included questioning the existence of a higher power, feeling angry with god, and feeling abandoned by god.
Speaking on behalf of Duterte, Philippines Presidential Communications Secretary Martin Andanar told journalists over the weekend that PornHub had contravened the country's strict Anti-Child pornography laws. PornHub, which claims to have never hosted child pornography, has been geo-blocked within the Philippines by all major ISPs since Saturday.
It's unlikely to be a coincidence that PornHub recently released viewing statistics that revealed Filipino porn viewers are spending more time there than anyone else in the world. Filipinos spend an average of 12 minutes and 45 seconds enjoying PornHub content, compared to South Africans in second place who spend an average of 10 minutes and 46 seconds. It's the third year running that Filipino users have watched the most amount of PornHub.
PornHub isn't the only porn site that viewers from the Philippines will no longer have access to. Xvideos, Redtube, and a host of smaller sites have been banned since the weekend.
"We don't want our youth and even the adults to be addicted to lewd videos shown in the internet," Andanar said on behalf of the President. "This website has been ordered blocked under authority of the Philippine government pursuant to Republic Act 9775 or the Anti-Child Pornography Law."
Duterte isn't the first world leader to outlaw online pornography. Citizens of Saudi Arabia, China, Indonesia, Cuba, Iceland, Thailand, Egypt, and Pakistan all face an uphill battle when it comes to accessing online porn.
In response to Duterte's ban, PornHub has expressed its fears that those seeking child pornography in the Philippines will still be able to find it. "Non-consensual and child pornography is strictly prohibited on PornHub. It's disappointing that PornHub was blocked as it will just drive people to use less vetted, riskier, smaller websites. We're open to working with government officials to meet their standards in the Philippines," a spokesperson from the website told The Daily Mail.
The kicker? The age of sexual consent in the Philippines is just 12 years.
Back in March 2014, Australia successfully led a case against Japan's "scientific whaling program" in the International Court of Justice. The court declared whaling within the Australian Antarctic Territory illegal, and the killing of whales for scientific purposes unnecessary. Japanese whalers haven't been spotted within Australian waters since—until Sunday. Patrolling the Southern Ocean, a Sea Shepherd helicopter spotted a group of harpoon ships with what appears to be at least one whale carcass onboard.
The conservation group says it'd been surveying the area for five weeks before it located the factory whaling vessel with a dead minke whale on its deck. There were two harpoon ships on patrol nearby.
The ship, Nisshin Maru, was sighted at a position well within the Australian Whale Sanctuary, which protects whales under both local and international law. Sea Shepherd allege that when their helicopter approached, the Nisshin Maru crew "scrambled to hide the slaughtered whale with a tarp, while the fleet's harpoon ships Yushin Maru and Yushin Maru #2 quickly covered their harpoons."
All images via Sea Shepherd
Japanese authorities haven't commented on the legitimacy of Sea Shepherd's claims. However, the timing is awkward for Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who just met Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe over the weekend. Both leaders committed to strengthening diplomatic ties between the two countries.
The Greens and the Labor Party had urged Turnbull to bring up the elephant (or whale) in the room during the talks. While the Australian Government has taken a firm stance against Japanese whaling in the past, it's unclear whether it was discussed during this trip. In the past, the Australian Government has sent ships to patrol Japanese whaling around Antarctica; however, the Turnbull Government has refused to do so this year.
Sea Shepherd sees Prime Minister Abe's recent visit as a missed opportunity for the Australian Government, which has committed to protecting endangered whale species, to take a strong stance against Japanese whaling.
"The lack of action by the Turnbull Government while whales are being killed in Australian waters just a day after Japan's Prime Minister was on a state visit in Australia shows that the government has no spine when it comes to protecting the wishes of Australians to defend the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary," Jeff Hansen, Managing Director of Sea Shepherd Australia, said.
"The fact that the Japanese crew went to cover up their harpoons and the dead minke whale on deck just shows that they know what they're doing is wrong," Captain Wyanda Lublink of the MY Steve Irwin, added. "They know they are in contempt of the ruling of the International Court of Justice and the Australian Federal Court. How can the Australian Government ignore these actions when the majority of Australians condemn what they are doing?"
In 2015, the Australian Federal Court fined Japanese whalers $1 million for hunting within the Australian Whaling Sanctuary—but this fine has gone unpaid.
"An Economy for the 99 percent" compiled by Oxfam International, ahead of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland concluded that the world's eight richest people have as much wealth as the poorest 50 percent of the world's population. Here at home, Oxfam estimates that the two richest Canadians — specifically billionaire media magnate David Thomson and Galen Weston Sr. of Loblaw fame — have the cumulative wealth of 30 percent of the poorest Canadians.
There's been a bit of controversy about the methodology used in calculating the wealth gap between the super-rich and the very poor (I'll get to that in a minute), but the overarching theme of the report remains valid — that economic inequality is prevalent, and unsustainable. Although the world is less poor that it was 50 years ago and the poverty rate in Canada has certainly declined in the last decade, the benefits of growth have not been evenly distributed — income inequality in OECD countries, for instance, is at its highest level in half a century.
I hate to dry snitch on myself, but just like millions of my fellow Canadians, I frequently and unabashedly watch American versions of digital streaming services through less than legal or ethical means. [Although to be clear, I don't consider it stealing, I'm just correcting a manufacturing error.] I do it, not because I love breaking the law, though I do get a rush everytime I navigate my way past one of those "content not available in your country" messages, but because what's available to us is a laughably shitty version of what's available almost anywhere else in the world.
This discrepancy, while already irksome, becomes particularly galling in light of rumours that the Liberal government is now considering adding a sales tax to foreign digital streaming services. This is different from the "content tax" that was being debated previously, which would charge some of these services a fee that would go towards creating Canadian content. While not a terrible idea, that notion was met with fierce backlash, with even ol'Stevey Harper promising his government would, "never tax Netflix or other online streaming services."
But unlike the 'content tax,' this newly discussed sales tax would not be channeled into creating programming, but funneled to Ottawa to do annoying things like build roads and hospitals. Both of which are great, I guess, but they won't fix the fact that Canadian Netflix has seventeen seasons of Pit Bulls and Parolees and honestly very little else for $7.99 a month.
An argument can, and is being made, however that a sales tax would at least correct a perceived advantage that companies like Amazon and Netflix have against similar homegrown services like say, Bell's Crave TV. A briefing note about the sales tax for Heritage Minister Melanie Joly put it this way, "The lack of sales-tax collection "not only represents a significant loss of potential tax revenue for government, but it can also place domestic digital suppliers at an unfair competitive disadvantage."
Sounds logical on paper, yes, but I have Crave TV. And while it has a large library of content, it's so fucking hard to navigate and actually find anything you'd want to watch under the layers of Letterkenny, that it can in no way blame a tax for better, more user-friendly services like Netflix cutting into their subscriber pickup. A sales tax can't fix poor UX.
And our domestic services DO need fixing. Despite being nearly a third the size of Canada, the Cayman Islands, Curucao, and French Guyana have more videos available to them on their regional Netflix than we do here. And it feels particularly ludicrous for us to get a watered-down version of what's in the US given that the majority of our population lives essentially at the border and our popular cultures have only the slightest variances, most notably exemplified by our lower budget productions and how we pronounce the word 'about.' So why should we pay the exact same amount for a service that, just an hour south has 1,200 more available videos and incrementally more seasons of Law & Order: SVU? It is, as the scholars would say, total fucking bullshit.
In the end a sales tax is unlikely because most OECD countries don't charge a sales tax on digital goods and services, and given that the US doesn't have a federal tax, it would be difficult to force the companies behind the majority of these services to comply to one here.
But I actually think Canadians are willing to pay more for Amazon and Netflix.
Even at an extra $2-3/month, most of us would likely shell out for an equal service to the US to avoid the hassle of now having to find a consistent proxy service that works around Netflix's detectors. In fact, I was previously paying an extra $4 month for an unblocker just to make paying for Netflix up here, "worth it."
What I will never fucking do though, is pay more, whether in the form of a content or sales tax, for an embarrassingly bare offering that in no way matches what I've come to expect from a full-menu subscription service. What I'd really like to see coming out of these Heritage meetings is a better understanding of the modern digital consumer. We aren't content pirates looking to steal everything we can get our hands on. We're just acutely aware of the true market offering and not willing to accept knockoffs at a markup. So, Melanie Joly, I invite you to come hang out with me for a week, catch up on a shitload of whatever's on HBO Go (yeah I liberate that too) and readjust how you treat Canadian consumers.
You can take our lives, but you will never take our hotspot shields!
The hunting was poor in Canada's Belcher Islands in the winter of 1941, and a meteor shower around the same time led some Inuits to suspect the world was coming to an end. It was around this time that a 27-year-old tribal shaman named Charlie Ouyerack proclaimed himself Jesus Christ, and anointed his pal Peter Sala—the tallest man on the Island who also happened to be the best hunter and ice navigator—as God.
The duo's first holy act was to order the killing of sled dogs, complicating escape for the devoted and skeptical alike.
One teenage girl, Sara Apawkok, publicly questioned the new religious order, and was promptly denounced as Satanic. She was killed by the religious leader's zealous converts, who hammered her head in with the barrel of a rifle. More murders soon followed.
The Belcher Islands are remote, but not exactly otherworldly—a collection of 1500 rocks in the turbulent eastern waters of the Hudson Bay. With ferocious winds pounding glacial boulders into a sea of granite pebbles, the frozen sea stabs into North America like an icy dagger on the incoming tide. The New Testament had been introduced to the area fairly recently, but it only took a matter of years for the Good Book to be used to disastrous effect.
In his new book At The End of the World: A True Story of Murder in the Arctic,Lawrence Millman juxtaposes the Belcher Islands murders with our present day screen lives. He sees our ongoing obsession with the digital as a religion unto itself that signals a way of life coming to an end. That might sound like the cranky raving of a Luddite—VICE talked via land-line to Millman, who doesn't text, tweet or have a cell phone—but few Western authors are as experienced as he is in grappling honestly and thoroughly with remote cultures and the Inuit people in particular.
We asked Millman why he thinks this World War II-era story of religiously-inspired murder matters in 2017, why he's alarmed at what he sees as society's transition from the real world to a digital one, and where we can—or should—go from here.
VICE: How did you first find out about the murders on Blecher Islands, and what made you want to pursue it for a book? Lawrence Millman: I've been traveling to and studying the Arctic for 40 years and I've done a lot of ethnographic work—collecting stories, tales, myths, superstitions and taboos from Inuit elders. I always have my antenna out for unusual stories in recent history where people are still alive who remember them. I go with my tape recorder and talk to somebody who's 80 or 90 and say, Do you remember this? I'd read here and there in about these murders and I wanted to find out more.
I was there in 2001 and I happened to be there at the time of 9/11. Most of the elders wouldn't talk to me about the murders. They were embarrassed by them, humiliated. As one man said, "If your daughter was raped, would you go around talking about it?" He thought these murders made them look primitive. At the time, the Inuit in the Belcher Islands weren't primitive, they were traditional. Still, like a lot of native people in the US and Canada, they wanted to erase the past, because they want to be just as up-to-date technology savvy as everyone else in the world. This is part of globalization.
In your research and interviews, did you find out what really happened? How did the introduction of the Bible lead to nine Inuit losing their lives? The one man who could read the Bible talked about its truthfulness, literal truthfulness: There's this guy up in the sky known as God and there's a guy named Jesus who died to save us. And people who hadn't the sense of abstraction or contemporary motives of religion wouldn't have taken all that so literally. One of the women, Mina, thought of Jesus kayaking down from the sky, a literal individual who would come down and save us by kayaking down to earth. The people who were at the fore of this were people who were at the fore in the culture.
[Charlie] Ouyerack was a bit of an Angakok shaman, but was so short that he wanted to make himself seem bigger. And Peter Sala is a key figure—he had contact with the outside world. He was the best hunter, hence he was God. He was the one person on the islands, because of his contact with the outside world, who could have stopped this, but in fact he was swept up in it. And I think the fact that they didn't have food, they were starving, it was cold, there was no contact with the outside world and there was no internet to tell them there was an outside world—their minds went in weird directions. Not the whole population were believers, but they were terrified to say they weren't because of what happened to the first person that was killed. The young teenage girl, Sara, who told Peter Sala and the shaman, "You're not God and you're not Jesus." She was killed because she was Satan.
And it didn't stop there, right? Altogether, nine were killed. A batch of them were killed when Mina, Peter Sala's sister, ushered all the old people and children out onto the ice in minus 20 degree temperatures in February and forced them to take off their clothes. She ran around the village declaring the world was at an end with an Inuit dog whip, which is a scary thing that can whack off your ear or take out your eye. Six people froze to death. All of them were related to Peter Sala. In a way, there was a lesson there, and he took it. After he became aware of that, he realized what a terrible mistake he made, but there was nothing he could do about it. It was too late.
When and how did the murders cease? The murders finally stopped when the people on the mainland found out about them from Peter Sala. He was very divided—he was God on the one hand, but he was also a fairly rational human being. He'd led an expedition of scientists in the 1930s to Belcher. He even knew a little English. He told the Hudson Bay Company's person on the mainland that there'd been three murders—he only knew of three at that time because the six others were occurring when he was absent. Immediately, the Hudson Bay Company telegraphed the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and said you better come, there are murders in these islands. Not only were there no ministers or priests in these islands, there were no police, either.
Ultimately, Peter Sala and one other were sentenced to a couple of years hard labor and imprisonment. "Jesus" and "God" were exiled from the Belchers for the rest of their lives.
Check out our documentary about the ex-cop trying to solve the murders along Canada's "Highway of Tears."
And how do you juxtapose those murders with society's obsession with technology? What is the relationship and what does it mean? People regard iDevices in the same way as they used to regard God. Nothing else matters—they don't see anything else in the world. They walk around playing with them and they don't see a tornado or a tsunami coming. It's a form of idolatry. I talk to people who are more upset when their computers or smartphones malfunction than if they have something seriously medically wrong with them. That, to me, seems more akin to a religion.
I was watching 9/11 in the Belcher Islands. There weren't too many TVs, it was a real old one, and I was curious about why I was far more moved by this old woman's accounting of the 1941 murders than I was about watching 9/11 on a screen. Why was I not moved by these people falling from skyscrapers? This is a crucial event and I'm not moved by it. It was because I wasn't there. It didn't feel alive to me. But the old woman that was telling me of the events of 60 years earlier was right next to me. Very important.
So your book is a warning cry, then, about how culture can be reduced to machinery? I think it's too late to be a warning cry—it's already gone. I have a totally bleak attitude about society's survival, and one of [those attitudes is toward] Donald Trump, but I won't go into that. I see it as a warning cry to select individuals who read the book. It's like, Hey, there's something else around, there's nature and we're losing it. If you are swaggering around with your iDevice and you don't see nature, then why would you want to preserve it? One imagines huge tracts of land of wilderness turned into super malls. That could be considered a warning cry also, because what I do as the book progresses is I sort of start to talk about technology as a religion—a religion that may be more destructive than the one that killed nine Inuit in the Belcher Islands in 1941.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity. Learn more about Lawrence Millman's new book, which dropped Tuesday, here.
Late one February night in 2013, Massachusetts state trooper Eric French pulled over a blue SUV with its rear lights out. When he approached the car, he saw smoke and smelled pot. The driver, Thomas Gerhardt, could count backward from 75 to 62 and recite the alphabet from D to Q. But he couldn't stand on one leg or walk nine steps and turn, standard measures on a field sobriety test. The trooper determined that Gerhardt was impaired, and he was arrested and charged with driving under the influence of marijuana.
Was Gerhardt even high? And if he was, was he too high to drive safely?
This month, his lawyer argued before the state's high court that French proved neither that night.
Massachusetts is one of eight states, plus the District of Columbia, where recreational marijuana use is now legal. Twenty more states have legalized use of medical marijuana. But science and the law have not kept pace with this rapid political change.
We take for granted that not being able to walk a straight line or stand on one leg means that you're drunk, and that being drunk means it's unacceptably dangerous to drive. But there is no clear scientific consensus when it comes to smoking pot and driving. And few of the tools police officers have long relied on to determine whether a driver is too drunk to drive, like a breathalyzer, exist for marijuana.
Cases like Gerhardt's are on the front lines of a new effort in courtrooms, labs, and government agencies around the country to pin down how high is too high to drive—and how to reliably know when someone is as high as that.
Most (but not all) studies find that using pot impairs one's ability to drive. However, overall, the impairment appears to be modest—akin to driving with a blood alcohol level of between .01 and .05, which is legal in all states. (The much greater risk is in combining pot with alcohol.) The increased crash risk with pot alone "is so small you can compare it to driving in darkness compared to driving in daylight," says University of Oslo political scientist Rune Elvik, who conducted several major meta-analysesevaluating the risk of drugged driving. "Nobody would consider banning people from driving in the dark. If you tried to impose some kind of consistency standard, then there is no strong case, really, for banning it."
When it comes to alcohol, science and the courts have long established a direct line between number of drinks, blood-alcohol level, and crash risk. As one goes up, so do the others. Not so for pot. Scientists can't say with confidence how much pot, in what concentration, used in what period of time, will reliably make someone "high." (This is especially difficult to gauge because most of the existing studies used pot provided by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which tends to be a lot less potent than what smokers can buy on the street or in pot shops.)
Blood levels of THC—tetrahydrocannabinol, the chemical component of pot that makes you high—spike quickly after smoking and then decline rapidly in the hours afterward, during the window when a smoker would feel most high. What's more, regular smokers could have THC in their blood for days or weeks after smoking, when they are clearly no longer high.
Still, laws in 18 states tie drugged driving charges to whether drivers have THC (or related compounds) in their blood. Some states prohibit driving with any amount, and some specify a threshold modeled after the .08 limit states use for blood alcohol. But the lag time between being pulled over and being transported to a hospital for a blood draw—on average, more than two hours—can lead to false negatives, while the tolerance developed by regular users (and the tendency for THC to stick around in their bloodstreams) can lead to false positives. This is why, researchers say, blood THC laws make little sense.
"If you're stopping someone who just tried it or uses it occasionally, a little bit of THC goes a long way—they're very impaired," says Washington State University political scientist Nicholas Lovrich. "But people are demonstrably able to drive at high levels of THC if they're a frequent user."
Graphic by Yolanda Martinez for the Marshall Project
The more sensible strategy appears to be prohibiting driving while high, and 31 states take this approach. But proving that a driver is high turns out to be tricky terrain, too.
One of the issues that Thomas Gerhardt raises in his lawsuit is whether police officers with standard training are qualified to make a judgment that a driver is high. Courts in a few states, including New Jersey, Vermont, and Montana, have ruled that they are not. "Unlike alcohol intoxication," the New Jersey high court ruled in 2006, "no… general awareness exists as yet with regard to the signs and symptoms of the condition described as being 'high' on marijuana."
Research shows that failing a standard sobriety test (a series of tasks like walking a straight line) correlates closely with having a blood-alcohol level above the legal limit—plus officers have a breathalyzer to confirm their findings. But "the gap between assessment, cannabis use, and driving is really not completely closed," says Professor Thomas Marcotte of the Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research at the University of California-San Diego. Frequent pot users—even when they're not stoned—may not be able to stand on one leg, for example, whether they're safe to drive or not. Marcotte and his colleagues are working on validating a new field sobriety test calibrated for pot use. Their iPad-based measures test skills like tracking an object on the screen and accurately estimating time.
Some police departments use drug-recognition experts, specially trained officers dispatched to evaluate suspected drugged drivers. Commonly referred to as DREs, these officers use an hour-long 12-step process, including taking the suspect's blood pressure and pulse and conducting several eye exams and balance tests, to generate an opinion about whether the driver is intoxicated, and, if so, by what. Preliminary research seems to indicate their opinions are of mixed quality, and not all judges allow DREs to testify to their findings. "They're not EMTs. They're not medically trained," says Lovrich, the Washington State University professor, who, in a recent study of five years of DRE data in Washington and New Mexico, found a false-positive rate for pot intoxication ranging from 38 percent to 68 percent. "Everyone in the DRE business knows it's really hard to do this."
The gold standard would be a breathalyzer-like device that can objectively measure whether someone has recently smoked and how much. Lovrich is working on developing such a tool, using the same type of technology that security screeners use at airports to check for explosives. He says it will be at least two years before the technology is perfected, miniaturized, and engineered to be durable enough to toss in the back seat of a squad car.
In the meantime, people like Thomas Gerhardt will fight it out in state courts. A ruling on his case is expected this spring.
This article was originally published by the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that covers the US criminal justice system. Sign up for the newsletter, or follow the Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter.
