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Syria's Christian Minority Are Fighting Back

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All photos by: Achilleas Zavallis. A volunteer from one of the Christian militias in the Hasakah Governorate, northeast Syria

The security office is so neatly tucked away into a small side street that it’s a little difficult to take it seriously as a threatening resistance operation. Inside, young guys are sitting around with rifles, some in uniform, others in civilian clothes. It's a typical scene in today’s Syria, a country with more armed groups than is possible to count, except for the fact that the office is so clean you could eat off the floor, and most of the men are strikingly well-groomed. Also, the sign on the office wall is in a language other than Arabic or Kurdish, the two main languages of the region, and there is a cross in its center.

Sutoro, the name the organization goes under, means "police" in Syriac, the language of the Assyrian Christians of the area—the Hasakah Governorate in the northeast of the country. The group has been described as a Christian militia, but it’s really a neighborhood watch, albeit with arrest powers and automatic weapons. Its members patrol the streets of Qahtaniya, Al-Malikiyah and Qamishli, towns and cities where people—mostly Kurds, but also Christians and Sunni Arabs—are locked in a brutal struggle against Islamist militants, some of them with ties to al Qaeda.

Syria’s Christians—many of whom are richer and more comfortable than the country’s mostly poor Sunni majority—have mostly featured in the news as victims of the country's civil war. The fighting between Islamist rebels and government forces in Maaloula, a Christian town north of Damascus where Aramaic, the language of Christ, is still spoken, has been widely reported and seen as another ominous development for a community that was, until a few years ago, thriving not just in Syria but also in Iraq. Since the conflict began, 450,000 Christians are thought to have left the country, more than a quarter of the original total. But some are now resisting.

"We started this group to allow our people to defend themselves, and to assure them that they don’t have to leave their land. The jihadis are targeting us,” said the Sutoro’s commander in Qahtaniya. Like most Syrian Christians—organized or not—he is fearful enough of publicity to ask me not to print his name. The Sutoro doesn’t operate independently, but in cooperation with Kurdish security forces, the northeast’s dominant power. Patrolling and manning checkpoints, they are mostly busy with town security, deterring crime and solving smaller local problems. One group is said to be active on the frontline that divides the region declared an autonomous Kurdish territory at the beginning of this year from the areas controlled by the mainly Arab rebels.

The Kurds have made a point of not tolerating rival armed groups on their territory, a key to the region’s relative calm, but they don’t seem to mind that some of the Christians are forming militias. "All the communities are equal here, so these guys have the right to protect their areas,” said Shahin Yakub, Kurdish police spokesman in Al-Malikiyah. "They coordinate everything with us and there are only about 20 of them in this town.”

The attitude wasn’t always so tolerant; a few months ago, when the Sutoro first tried to set up shop in Al-Malikiyah, the Kurds disarmed them. The intensifying war against the Islamists, and the resulting suicide-bombing campaign that has targeted Kurdish towns, may have helped to change their minds.


An abandoned Syrian Orthodox church in Ras al-Ayn

However, there are some issues with the Sutoro. The groups in Al-Malikiyah and Qahtaniya are under the control of the Syriac Union Party (SUP), which is an anti-government organization. The sympathies of the Qamishli branch are less clear. Many Christians say that the group is riddled with regime loyalists and informants, though that may simply reflect the reality that, in Qamishli, the government is still very much present. This situation also reveals the splits and confusions within the community as a whole and the fact that many Christians want nothing to do with the three-year anti-government uprising, which, as they see it, has brought them only misery.

A good example of these divisions is Father Mallek Mallous, the Chaldean Catholic priest in Al-Malikiyah. Living in something approaching more of a palace than a rectory, and with what appears to be his own church in the courtyard, he openly displays the Syrian government flag on the wall of his home. When I ask how the tricolor can still be there 16 months after government forces gave up these areas, effectively leaving them to become a Kurdish-run mini-state, he said: "This is Syria and no one can cancel this flag without the people’s support."

Father Mallous also has a picture of President Bashar al-Assad in the room where we talked. This makes perfect sense, since he, along with most Christians I interviewed here, genuinely seemed to think that the time before the war was an unadulterated blessing for every Syrian. "After Bashar Assad became leader [in 2000], salaries increased fourfold in Syria. Most people lived comfortable, middle-class lives,” he said. Although it's true that the economy was growing rapidly in the years before the war, his comments did make me wonder whether he has ever left his compound. He also thinks that "Islamism has only increased in Syria because of Saudi sponsorship and propaganda," which is basically the government line on the increase of extremist Muslims in the country.

Many Christians here echoed these views. This is perhaps understandable if you remember that, compared to their Sunni Arab and Kurdish neighbors, the community had a relatively good deal under the Assads. So it's hardly surprising that they view the Islamist-dominated rebellion as the main threat.

"You know what will happen to people like us if the they get here?” Father Mallous asked, shaking his head. "They’ve announced a war against Christians. They are kidnapping and killing us." However, the expectation, heard from many Christian men, that the government will soon return and that "all will be well," solving the conflict and protecting the Christian community, seems highly delusional.


Syrian Christian militia volunteers in Al-Malikiyah

Men like Barsoun Barsoun, who runs the Qamishli office of the opposition Syriac Union Party, an Assyrian-Christian organization, would agree. The main city of the northeast is a fearful, oppressive place, full of government security personnel and informants, regime flags and pictures of the president. Control is uneasily shared between the regime, Kurdish forces and the Sutoro. "We have lots of problems," Barsoun said, casting a nervous glance at the small, silent street from the door of his office. "Kidnappings, arrests... We had two members taken, one in June, still missing, and another who they said had died in custody. But they’ve never shown us the body."

He pulls back into the safe anonymity of the courtyard.

Barsoun—young, softly-spoken, English-speaking—and his guys are trying to distribute aid and organize various community activities to convince the Christians, many of whom are trying to get to places like Sweden, to stay. He articulated an attractive vision, rarely heard in Syria any more. "We want to work with the others—the Kurds, the Arabs—since it’s not our land alone," he said. The SUP took up seats in the new administration of the Kurdish-majority areas, to an extent implementing this vision. "This could be the blueprint for the rest of the country, a solution to the Syrian problem," he insisted.

Perhaps. But amid Syria’s struggle for survival, and among far stronger groups, split among themselves and with so many of them trying to leave, the Christians still have a difficult time ahead of them. 

Follow Balint (@balintszlanko) and Achilleas (@azavallis) on Twitter


Comics: Two and a Half Men

Cyborg Cockroaches Can Now Make Their Own Power

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Cyborg Cockroaches Can Now Make Their Own Power

How to Get Laid at Fashion Week

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Getting laid at fashion week is remarkably easy. Everyone is exhausted, hungover, or still drunk and in the middle of a bender. You can see it in their faces. People are shattered and have lost all forms of inhibition, so consequently no one gives a fuck. It’s an over-sexed industry in general, and a hyper-sexed week in specific. All you have to do is make it happen.

A good first step is picking out your fashion week targets ahead of time. It helps if you find someone who lives out of town so you don’t have to worry about running into them post-fashion week. Right now, fashion week is kicking off in New York. So, if you're a New Yorker trying to get your rocks off, try to undress a funny-talking Brit or a waif-y Parisian. Obviously, you have to be flexible in case your target isn’t down. Having multiple parties to go to and multiple crushes to track down can only help in the long run. The trick is to find balance by being selective and keeping your options open. Remember, make-up artists and security guards need love too—and they are probably the only people at fashion week you'd want to be around after you finishing busting a nut.

Finding the right time and place is important—any spare corner, the back of a cab, stairwell, etc... Just pick a spot that might not be interrupted for a few minutes while you get down to business. Also, wear protection. Getting knocked up at fashion week definitely happens, and cities like New York and London are cesspools of disease. I don’t know what’s worse, a fashion baby or fashion herpes, but try to avoid both if you can.

One thing everyone’s guaranteed to like is a fashion week story, as it gives them something to tell all their friends who weren’t there. It makes them look glamorous. People like looking glamorous. Use that to your advantage. If you do, you might find yourself knocking boots in a stairwell with a much more attractive and vacuous person whose sole mission during fashion week is to "not miss out," even if that means swapping fluids with a pleeb. Glamorous.

Also, bring drugs. There is no greater social lubricant than a little nose candy at fashion week, just don't use it as actual lube. If you do, you could end up with gangrene. It's happened before—probably at a fashion week.  

Being good-looking is also pretty damned important. This shouldn't be a surprise considering most of the people at fashion week are extremely superficial. Remember though, looks can be seriously altered by personality, so if you can figure out a way to become more attractive (whatever the circumstances require), you’ve got a major leg up. If that doesn’t work, offer to get your target another drink or pay their rent.

Unexpectedly, throwing up isn’t necessarily a bad move. It helps you sober up and makes you look pretty badass in the process. I once watched a girl make puking on the street during fashion week look so sexy that I had no choice but to start playing tongue-hockey with her as soon as she finished spitting up some bile. You see, for every sexy girl at fashion week, there’s a corresponding scumbag. It's something about all the posturing of fashion week that has a way of bringing us out like worms during a rainstorm.

Now, there are two distinctly different types of scumbags you should be aware of: the Han Solo, who is rough around the edges with a heart-of-gold, and the kind of person who lies about their positions of power in order to get laid. Don’t sleep with the latter. I’ve watched more than one guy tell a young model that he could make her famous, make her a somebody, and then use that notion to take full advantage of her. It’s almost an industry standard at this point. Be careful. Sharks are in the water.

Having a good name and doing something “important” will always help. The same goes with being sly, having a great personality or accent, and being loaded. Some girl told me that if you have access to a show or party and can get them in, it’s automatically a turn-on. I can’t confirm that. I’ve hustled a number of girls into events and have not had sex with any of them. It’s probably true for some people though, so access is a good thing. At the same time, you don’t want to flaunt it, as bragging can be a major turn-off for a lot of people—which brings us to the crux of the matter.

The thing is, no single approach is guaranteed to be successful. The people you’re dealing with are just as different as yourself, so what might work on one person isn’t necessarily going to work on another. Assuming everyone’s receptive to the same game is naive. Getting laid at fashion week is like getting laid anywhere else, and that means you have to use your own method according to the person and the circumstances. Don’t be afraid to not get laid either, because let’s face it, sometimes things don’t work out. You need to recognize that it’s all about who you are, not what you are, and in a world of superficiality, authenticity stands out. So my only honest piece of advice for getting laid during fashion week is quite simple (for those who have the guts to pull it off): be yourself.

VICE News: Warlords of Tripoli - Part 2

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The war in Syria is dragging neighbouring Lebanon to the edge of the abyss, and nowhere is the growing chaos more stark than in the second city of Tripoli. Sunni militants aligned with the Syrian rebels frequently clash with fighters from the city's encircled Alawite minority, who support the Assad regime, in bitter street fighting that the country's weak government seems powerless to stop.

With the rule of law no longer in effect in Tripoli, warlords like Sunni commander Ziad Allouki are now the city's real rulers. VICE News hung out with him and his fighters for a week to discover why they're fighting, and whether the country really is on the brink of civil war.

This Guy Wants to Help You Download Your Brain

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Image via

Ever wanted to download a copy of your own brain? Say you went through a serious car crash, for example—wouldn't it be nice to take out your damaged brain and replace it with a replica you'd downloaded and stashed away prior to the accident? Or perhaps over time you could even build a collection of brains, each storing different memories, thoughts, and dreams that would equate, in a sense, to different versions of you? Something like that might come in handy when you're trying to throw off various neuroses, like a fear of asking out hot people or an anxiety about bungee ropes, or a reluctance to believe that scientists could one day pull something like this off.

There are people trying to make this a reality. Last month, a Japanese supercomputer managed to simulate one second of human brain activity; last summer, some German scientists unveiled a remarkably high-res 3D digital model of the human brain; and last April, the Obama administration announced the BRAIN Initiative, a research endeavour projected to cost hundreds of millions of dollars and take over a decade to complete. Its humble goal? To map every single one of the tens of billions of neurons in the human brain, creating a "connectome"—a comprehensive diagram of the brain's neural connections.

Theoretically, a complete connectome of an individual's brain would constitute a copy of the pathways between every memory, thought, and experience that person had ever had. The implications of this kind of precise knowledge of a brain are far-reaching, but at this point still largely speculative.

Current procedures for brain imaging on a micro level tend to be incredibly time-consuming, costly, and require the destruction (via slicing and/or dyeing) of the brain being studied. But with the freakish, robotic march of progress, the technology required is being built and improved upon, and some futurists suggest that humans will be able to download and store copies of their brains within the next two decades. Naturally, labs the world over want to get there first, but I couldn't find many that are already trying to sell the tech to you.

One I did find is Brain Backups. Headed up by 32-year-old Russell Hanson, the neuroinformatics startup based out of Cambridge, Massachusetts, aims to map human brains without destroying them. While other research groups are being formed and funded through government grants, Brain Backups hopes to crowdsource a great deal of its research costs by offering the future storage of all your neurons and synapses. I gave Russell a call to find out his thoughts on the matter.

Russell Hanson.

VICE: Can you explain—in the simplest possible terms—what your company does or proposes to do?
Russell Hanson: Our team is developing the tools to image the brain non-destructively and non-invasively. The earlier methods in this field required slicing the brain very thin and imaging it on an electron microscope, which is both extremely slow and extremely expensive. We wanted to do this faster so researchers can learn how the brain changes over time, without destroying the brain every time they wanted to make a measurement.

OK, and how are you going to research this?
Obviously we’re talking about animal experiments here. We're a small company with a big goal. We have some very talented engineers, scientists, and designers from MIT, Harvard, the Danish Technical University, UCLA, biotech, and pharma, and also the synthetic biology community in Boston. Our goal is to do this cheaply and non-destructively, so that anyone can image their brain, like they can map their genome affordably using a [personal genomics testing] service like 23andMe. I got into this a number of years ago when I asked how much space is needed to store the contents of the human brain in a class at MIT. It’s only become more interesting since then.

How much space is needed?
It depends a lot on how detailed the information you want to store is. The range is somewhere between 1,000 terabytes to 10,000 terabytes. With compression, this can be much smaller—this is an estimate of the uncompressed size.

Does the technology you want to use even exist yet?
The actual technology does exist, but it is cumbersomely slow and prohibitively expensive. Our equipment is quite real—we're not working with hypothetical equipment. It's incremental; we can do a certain set of things now, and we want to do a certain set of additional things tomorrow. And it's just getting easier, just like building anything. Ford didn't start out with their 2013 model, they started out with the 1908 Model T—the first car affordable to the middle class. And before that there were prototypes—19 of them, in fact, before they got to the Model T. The whole goal when I started this at MIT was to make the personal brain map affordable on a middle-class income.

A PET scan of a normal brain. Image via

At the moment, how much would it cost to back up your brain, and what exactly would that get a prospective buyer?
Please understand this is the current “research and development” price, not the price of the product, which will be much lower. The current estimate is in the range of $1.5 million to $3 million for a destructive, knife-edge scanning, optical microscope imaging of a human brain. It would give, essentially, a complete brain map, but of course would destroy the brain in the process. This would provide the set of images that can be used to do a whole brain circuit reconstruction.

There are other methods that use nanoparticles, synthetic biology, X-rays, or MRI that can reduce this cost significantly, and that do not require destroying the brain during imaging. The price for high-throughput genome sequencing has come down to $3,000 to $4,000 recently, and there are methods that are in development to use this inexpensive method to get high resolution brain connectivity information. Getting this cost down significantly, making the data more useful and easily understood, and building the interface and platform are the foci of our work.

Currently, you have to have a non-living brain for imaging, right? How far are you from being able to map a brain without destroying it?
It’s all about the resolution. Currently we can map the brain’s activity using fMRI non-destructively. Newer special purpose MRI machines with higher power and animal MRI machines have greater resolution than older medical MRI machines. Determining exactly what is needed for different types of brain maps apart from “everything” is an open research topic. What is the minimal amount of information needed to accurately characterize or model a brain, and in what way? Adapting these methods from animal experiments to safe methods that can be used with human subjects is where much of the new Obama BRAIN initiative and many research labs are heading.

So once a brain has been imaged, can you effectively play back that information, like a tape?
A single snapshot is a static image, so you can’t play something back that doesn’t have a time series associated with it. Conceivably, you could "rewind" just as you can peer back in time into your memories. The way different people access different pieces of their memories is hierarchical and everything is built upon prior experience, so you would have to build a special kind of "relative knowledge engine" that needs to construct the mechanism of accessing the memories for each person individually. Research has shown that the brain is very poor at telling wall-clock time, and is affected by all sorts of things, like whether we caused an event or not. So no—you can’t really "play back" the information in the kind of frame-by-frame or second-by-second manner we’re used to with audio or visual recordings.

The connectome, from my understanding, is simply the documentation of connections, but provides no information about what is being passed between neurons at these points. If you can't play back or otherwise access the information in your brain, what's the use to the average person of having a map of their brain's pathways?
The goal of the work is to build the infrastructure to make this data usable and interesting. It is pretty clear that having the brain map is a necessary first component to "playing back" or "running" a meaningful dynamical simulation of a brain, whether it's a mouse, fly, or human. We decided to tackle this engineering challenge first before the other one—that's being worked on by other very capable groups. In its simplest form, this research will surely inform treatments for devastating diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, autism, depression, and others—research that the governmental funding agencies have a long history of supporting.

A 16th century diagram of how to prepare the skull for brain surgery. This is the kind of thing Brain Backups would like to avoid. Image via.

Who do you think might be interested in "backing up" their brain, and what might be the benefits of having a copy?
"Backing up" the brain is really just a short way of saying "getting the relevant information on cellular structure, neuronal connectivity, etc, at a very high resolution and recording all that information to a computer or hard drive." There are lots of compelling reasons why getting this brain backup is useful. I think one of the most compelling ones is that it’s like an insurance policy, a backup of something you value. You could get in a car accident tomorrow morning and really wish you could just rewind. The medical benefits of having this detailed personal information are also huge: a doctor could know exactly which treatment you should receive for depression or Alzheimer’s or epilepsy without having to guess or rely on crude measurements.

What do you make of the suggestion that the brain can't possibly be uploaded or stored in its entirety because its important features are the result of unpredictable, nonlinear interactions among billions of cells? Are the brain and the human experience it processes too random to be computerized?
This is essentially a computability problem. All of the information in the brain is a finite set of finite-precision numbers. It is well known that any finite set of finite-precision numbers is computable. From a chemical or biochemical perspective, having enough data about the biochemical interactions—i.e. that these proteins, genes, RNA, etc, are used in this neuron and in this way—is all the data that is needed to determine the neuron’s function. Gathering the appropriate dynamical and time series data with the appropriate metadata and also gathering the chemical and biochemical data without destroying what is being imaged is a technology problem, not an intrinsically intractable system. There are already many neuron modeling computer programs that can model experimental neuronal firing data very accurately.

What are the implications of having someone's brain content downloaded somewhere, in terms of identity theft or large-scale life tampering?
I think it is very unlikely. For example, anyone can steal your DNA by just getting a sample of your saliva. I can’t think of anyone who thinks twice about spitting because they fear someone is going to come along and harvest their DNA, which is all the information needed to make them. These days, people are uploading all kinds of information about themselves, including their genome, because they realize this data is important and can benefit society. Some people are uploading their genomic information in the hopes that, because it is available, someone will use it to fix the ailments that affect them personally, or that affect their families. This is happening at hospitals in controlled environments, but also on the open internet. Right now it is a purely hypothetical problem of online genomic identity theft. It is too expensive, and the skills required are very specialized.

Regarding protecting the data, encryption is the industry standard. If you steal someone’s data, decrypt it and that data is used to impersonate someone—and that data you are using to impersonate them is everything they know—the problem becomes a little bit more tricky.

Yeah, I can see that you might run into a few problems there. Finally, can you map the brain successfully without mapping the consciousness? A lot of the criticisms of brain backup research seem to rest on the idea that machines can’t possibly process phenomenal human experience.
Most of the work on this tends to be philosophical. It is a classic philosophy vs. science debate. I am not much of a philosopher. In my view, and in the view of many others, consciousness arises from biological, chemical, and physical interactions. This isn’t to say that there aren’t many interesting philosophical issues of mapping the consciousness; there are. Deciphering the neural codes that are used to communicate with the nervous system has shown that they are indeed very much like machine codes.

Follow Monica on Twitter: @monicaheisey

Goodbye Great Barrier Reef, Hello Dredge Dumping

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Imagine you work for the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority. Your job, as quoted from the website, is “to ensure all human uses of the Park are ecologically sustainable and that the ecosystem's natural functions, especially resilience, are maintained.” Then in 2012 an Indian resources conglomerate comes along and wants to dredge out the world’s largest coal port at Abbot Point, right on the reef. Strangely, you say OK, with the simple request that something responsible be done with the dredge spoil. But the resources conglomerate, Adani, comes back and says “Actually we were hoping to just dump it in the reef.” So you and your colleagues mull this over for a while before finally saying, “Well all right, but please be careful.”

That's basically what happened on Friday, when the GBRMPA decided to gamble the “resilience” of the world’s largest reef so Adani can cut dredging costs and chase historically low coal prices that’ll mostly benefit India.

Could Australia look more environmentally irresponsible? The World Heritage Committee is doubtful. As far back as January 2012, when the dredging at Abbot Point was first discussed, UNESCO announced that they were considered placing the reef on their “in danger” list. The federal government baulked and promised they’d provide evidence of a healthy reef by decision time in June this year. Obviously, that got swept aside Friday so the UN received a government report on Saturday, detailing Australia’s efforts to save the reef. Aside from the awkward hypocrisy of the whole thing, the real shame is that the reef is genuinely struggling and if we won’t stop neglecting it, perhaps we could at least acknowledge there’s a problem?

As we detailed last week, the most condemning report on reef health appeared in 2012. The Australian Institute of Marine Science concluded that 50 percent of coral cover had disappeared since 1988, all of which was due to human influence. For 190 years of European settlement, Queensland has been washing fertilizers, pesticides, mining run-off, and a whole bunch of erosion sediment onto the reef, which, combined with Crown of Thorns starfish outbreaks (encouraged by nitrogen-rich fertilizers) and global warming, is slowly killing it. The report to the UN acknowledges that some inshore areas are declining, but claims that the rest remains in passable condition. This is not untrue, but then quantifying something like reef health is somewhat subjective, especially as the process is so slow. Long-time Airlie Beach resident and diving operator, Tony Fontes, describes that process as “moving the goal posts.”  He explains that “the people with long-term memories of the reef, they die off or move away, and the new people see the reef and they think it’s great, but they don’t know what it used to be like. And then that becomes the norm. One day the goal posts will move so that we’ll think one-fish coral will be amazing.”

And therein lies the whole problem—the value of the reef is in wow factor only. It has reached its apex by simply being, and to access that commodity we have to build less and not more, which is a weird concept to someone who doesn’t easily understand wilderness. Indeed, the decision to allow dredge dumping coincided with a federal government request to the World Heritage Committee to delist about 74,000 hectares of Tasmania's world heritage forest. This was met with more economic reasoning from the same government that pretends to take climate change seriously, all the while making decisions that undermine their claims and exacerbate problems.

Maybe the upshot to all this is that the issue has finally become so ridiculous that people can't pretend not to notice. As Tony puts it, “dredging has happened here before. I’ve seen it happening under the radar, but not this time. This time the world has taken interest and Australia looks really foolish. So I think the next time this comes up, hopefully it’ll be harder to get it through. Hopefully next time they’ll say guys, sorry, but we don’t do this anymore.”


Follow Julian on Twitter: @MorgansJulian

Canadian Cops Launched a Sting Operation Against Sex Workers Last Month

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Police target. Photo via.

January was global Human Trafficking Awareness Month. In the wake of the Bedford Supreme Court decision decriminalizing sex work, police across Canada coordinated and carried out a massive, sting-style operation targeting and potentially entrapping as many as 330 women sex workers in an anti-trafficking initiative aimed at multiple cities, including Toronto, Kingston, London, Ottawa, and Waterloo in Ontario. Details of the operation, which took place on January 22nd and 23rd, first surfaced on social media when workers across the GTA began to warn each otherabout the raids, posting known numbers that police posing as clients called from.

Police used the pseudonym “John” according to workers who were targeted. They found the women—and the police only targeted sex working women—largely through the website Backpage.com. Once the initial online interaction had been made, numbers were exchanged and details confirmed. Workers were met by one plainclothes officer who did not identify themselves as police until in the elevator or the hallway near their door, which is significant given most independent workers targeted operated out of their homes.

At that point, badges came out and workers were informed that three other officers were already on the way and that they were there to “help” them. Faced with the option of having a loud conversation about sex work in the hallway or elevator of their building of residence, many workers chose to invite police in. One woman, Quinn, recounted her experience to Ottawa based sex worker advocacy group POWER:

“My options at that point were either to continue to have a conversation with OPS in my hallway, where my neighbours could overhear, or to invite them in and have a conversation behind closed doors. So, obviously I chose to invite them in. I didn't really feel like I had an option, given that three of the officers were already on my floor and a fourth was on his way,” she said.

Once she let them in, they demanded to see her identification (with her real name on it) and conducted a search of her apartment without her consent. The justification behind the illegal search?

“Ottawa Police have said that because I invited the officers into my location, that they then did not need a warrant to go through my location to ensure their safety,” according to Quinn.

Because Quinn invited the police in—seemingly under duress—they were performing the search for their own safety. The obvious question is: what sort of threat does a single female sex worker present to four male police officers?

“All four officers were white men, mid-30s, wearing street clothing. They ignored me when I said that they did not have permission to search through my apartment. They said they did not need a warrant because I had invited them in, and they were just making sure that they were safe. When I went to block an officer from opening a closet, he told me not to touch him as that would be assault of an officer,” Quinn said. 

Interestingly, it seems police used different tactics when they contacted workers at established spas and massage parlours, in Ontario at least. They had a female officer present and were respectful when workers declined to speak with them or give identification. They did not book sessions under false pretenses as they did with independent workers.

“At a spa or parlour, there is often more than one provider present, which may also include management or a receptionist. I was alone with four male officers, which is incredibly intimidating in terms of the power dynamics, especially given that I was a lone female who was expecting one client to arrive, and also as a female who has experienced sexual assault (in my personal past, not as a worker). To say that I felt intimidated and harassed is really putting it lightly,” Quinn explained.

A coalition of sex workers and advocates across Canada, comprised of the Sex Professionals of Canada, Sex Workers Action Group Kingston, Stop The Arrests!, and Maggie’s: the Toronto Sex Workers Action Group amongst others released a statement on Facebook last week condemning the operation as intimidation and an invasion of privacy in lieu of prostitution arrests being suspended post-Bedford. 

"These sorts of deceitful and menacing approaches further degrade trust between sex workers and the police, and stop people in exploitative situations from seeking and accepting police assistance. This policing strategy seems to contradict the recent Supreme Court decision that insisted that the law cannot be used to further endanger the security and safety of sex workers. Sex workers express feeling intimidated by the current police tactic and coerced into allowing police into their homes and worksites. Privacy and dignity are compromised," the statement read in part.

Ottawa Police released a statement themselves last week explaining that the project—known as Operation Northern Spotlight—was launched to rescue victims of human trafficking and those forced into the sex trade. Police have identified a fifteen year old girl as a victim of trafficking in Burlington, who they say was being controlled by a twenty-two year old woman, and as many as twelve girls and women were “believed to be under some degree of control” in the Durham and Peel regions.

The methods used in Operation Northern Spotlight (not to mention the name itself) however, clearly act to stigmatize, intimidate, and surveil sex working women. Not only is it hard to believe police believe they will be able to help victims come forward by carrying out what are essentially four man raids, it also flies directly in the face of the Bedford decision handed down by the highest authority on the law, the Supreme Court of Canada.

The Bedford decision states quite clearly that the law, in both its prescription and application, must prioiritize harm reduction for sex workers: “...the harms identified by the courts below are grossly disproportionate to the deterrence of community disruption that is the object of the law. Parliament has the power to regulate against nuisances, but not at the cost of the health, safety, and lives of prostitutes.”

I was able to sit down with Chanelle Gallant, spokesperson for Maggie's Toronto to talk more about the complicated intersection of sex work, policing, and human trafficking. Gallant is deeply concerned with the plight of abused and trafficked women yet remains critical of what some have termed the “saviour industrial complex” around human trafficking.

“There's a common misbelief that these tactics are necessary to help people that are being hurt but in fact they do the opposite. They entrap hundreds of people who are choosing sex work and scare off the people who may really need help. We [at Maggie's] are concerned about coercion and exploitation and this isn't an effective method. It creates a lot of fear and mistrust and sets back any attempts that are being made to help sex workers that need help,” Gallant said.

The myths that surround sex trafficking often feed narratives that may disempower or harm the women the police seek to help in the first place. In anticipation of Super Bowl weekend for example, which is often touted as causing a surge in sex trafficking, there is an uptick in policing initiatives to prevent sex trafficking. The only problem is, it appears there is no empirical data to back that claim up. An online hashtag started recently, #notyourrescueproject aims to ask critical questions around these myths and narratives while centring the voices of sex working individuals. 

These conversations are coming at a critical moment. Part of the Bedford desicion suspended the ruling for one year to give Parliament time to respond and ostensibly draft new legislation. In an article for the Globe and Mail, Alan Young, lawyer for the sex workers that brought the Bedford suit, explained that the recent decision creates a seemingly paradoxical situation where the law remains in place but cannot be enforced. Policing initiatives conducted around trafficking which primarily impact sex working as opposed to trafficked women, then, seem to occupy a legal grey area particularly when it comes to intent versus effect.

“Harassing over 300 sex workers in this manner is a misuse of police resources, oversteps acceptable police conduct and undermines everyone’s right to fair application of the law. It's a terrible method for trying to address violence and coercion in the industry," said Gallant. "People don't want to come forward who may need help. We have questions about if this was part of a backlash against the recent Supreme Court win."

@muna_mire


A Few Impressions: Philip Seymour Hoffman's Light Touch

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Philip Seymour Hoffman in The Master.

I didn’t know Philip Seymour Hoffman personally. I only met him a few times over the years. The first was in the early 2000s in a bathroom at the MCC Theater, during the intermission of The Glory of Living, a play he directed starring Anna Paquin. We bumped into each other, but said nothing. At the time, I was too in awe of him to initiate small talk. I remember him laughing the loudest in the theater and I was moved by the support he gave his actors on stage. The second time we met was in 2006 at Jeffrey Katzenberg’s annual Oscar party at the Beverly Hills Hotel. That was the year he was up for an Oscar for Capote. You know how that turned out: He won an Academy Award for Best Actor and gave a powerful tribute to his mother during his acceptance speech that still echoes in my head.

What a year for actors that was. The late and great Heath Ledger was up for Brokeback Mountain and Joaquin Phoenix (pre-mocumentary) had blown us away with his performance in Walk the Line. But it was Philip who reminded us of the power of the light touch. Yesterday morning, someone, shocked by how an actor who seemed to have the world as his oyster could seemingly throw it all away, compared Philip to Marlon Brando. I certainly don't think Hoffman threw it away, but I agree with the second part. Philip, like Brando, had innate power. He was a force. His face had the weight of an emotional sledgehammer. I think Philip knew that and he used it the same way Marlon Brando did—by covering it with the light touch. Look at On the Waterfront, The Wild One, The Godfather, or Last Tango in Paris, and you’ll see a hurricane contained by the silk-like veil of an elegant man speaking in the high pitch of a poet. Watch Philip in Happiness, Magnolia, Capote, Mission Impossible III, Charlie Wilson’s War, and Doubt, and you’ll see the strength of an American actor playing seemingly soft-spoken characters, while delivering gut punch after gut punch with his deeply grounded understanding of humanity. Like Marlon Brando, Philip delivered the poetry of true emotion.  

Philip hit us, year after year, with constant magic, changing himself with each performance. What put him on the level of chameleons like Daniel Day Lewis and Meryl Streep and Benicio Del Toro was his sculptural way of acting. By sculptural, I mean his characters seemed to be intricately carved. From The Master to Along Came Polly, all of his characters have this indelible quality. As Michelangelo said of his own work: “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” This is how Philip’s characters feel—like they were real people living their deep and odd lives and were pulled onto the screen to deliver the most intense aspects of themselves. But Philip didn’t just deliver realism, he also tinged each one with the patina of greatness, which goes back to the sculpture idea—his performances had a lapidary quality. They were harder than human, but simultaneously blessed with the inner spark of humanity. They were more human than human. 

His characters also always served the film they’re in. He was never a show-boater, but inevitably his acting shined through its context, so that the main thing we usually remembered about a movie with a Philip performance was Philip Seymour Hoffman’s performance.


Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote.

I first became aware of Philip in Scent of a Woman. But it was his touched devotee of Dirk Diggler in Boogie Nights that knocked me out. Watch him castigate himself after making a pass at Mark Wahlberg’s Dirk and you’ll see some of the most moving material in that film. But all of his work is great. Just look at that nasty “fuck-off, cunt” face Philip gave Matt Damon in The Talented Mr. Ripley as Matt and Jude Law swerved to jazz music in the record shop. It was so nasty and so good. Watch how he fucked with his change in the cafeteria in Charlie Wilson’s War to give a sense of reality, or look at the the ruddy-faced glee he exhibited as a priest drinking wine in Doubt. He conveyed so much life in slight behavior. My favorite performance by Philip, however, was him as Lancaster Dodd in The Master. It’s my favorite because it’s his best work with his best collaborator, Paul Thomas Anderson. The performance has an ethereal power, somehow greater than it's parts. As Lancaster Dodd, he was both a genius and a madman—which was one half of the real Philip Seymour Hoffman equation: Genius? Yes. Madman? No. From what I’ve been told, he was one of the sweetest guys around.

The last time I ran into Philip was at Bar Centrale, a theater restaurant, when he came in with a group that included Chris Rock, Zach Braff, and a bunch of great stage actors. At the time, I had read that Philip had gone to rehab for heroin. I was shocked, because you don’t think that a person who absolutely everyone acknowledges as great, would have such problems. But that was foolish, because addiction cares nothing for personality. It is an illness, not a matter of will, class, intelligence, or lifestyle. I have no idea what happened to Phil before he was found dead, but a friend of mine told me they saw him the day before he passed and he looked happy. This says to me that Philip was not someone who had given up. He didn't throw it all away. He was just someone—a very special someone—who was sick. His death is shocking to us because his greatness made him seem invincible. At the very least, all the incredible art he gave us should warrant him another chance. 

Rest in peace Phil, you will live on forever in the fire of your work that burned its way into our hearts.

What I Learned About Style from Shakira's "Can't Remember to Forget You"

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What I Learned About Style from Shakira's "Can't Remember to Forget You"

My Brooklyn Neighbors Hate Me

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Crown Heights via.

Last week, I wrote about my painful transition to living in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. 

I admit it: I overreacted. Crown Heights is not that bad a place. Now that the entire neighborhood has united against me, I realize, too late, the tightness of its makeshift society, and am sad to have forfeited it forever. But what can I do? If Brooklyn means anything, it means keeping it real. Was I supposed to just roll over and reverse myself, just because I moved here? That doesn't seem right either. Anyway, I began this essay in a feeble attempt to conciliate my new neighbors and reverse my Brooklyn fatwa. 

But I can't do it. Not because I am insufficiently craven; it's just that it won't help anyway. Every hand is against me. I am despised, and not without cause. Still, the torrent of loathing that has come my way has left me shaken. The rancor, obloquy, and invective that has come my way on this site alone (634 comments and counting, all wrathful) would make any man want to take back the words that gave so much offense. But I can't do it. I'm sorry. There is no milquetoast at this address. Crown Heights is not an awesome neighborhood. It's just not. But then neither is Park Slope, or Williamsburg, or Tribeca, or Chelsea. It's the East Village that I longed for, the East Village that cast me out, and the East Village that, for all its trustafarian decadence, high rents, and vanished hardcore cred, is still the most desirable of all neighborhoods. At least to me. 

That should have made that clearer in my Crown Heights essay, but I thought its over-the-top irony would have alerted readers to take what I was saying less than seriously. I am not actually "an old bum with matted hair and dead, sad eyes." You can tell that from the picture. Brooklynites love to close ranks, though, and it suited many to pretend that I was the personification of Manhattan condescension. Get this! Some sneering snob says Brooklyn isn't good enough for him! He thinks we owe him more fancy restaurants! That greasy queen has got to go! He's just asking for a beat-down! And so on. I suspect that the voice they hear belittling Brooklyn is in fact coming from inside, and is all the more powerful for that. Whatever! I just want everyone to like me. The other day some brutal-looking fellow confronted me on Franklin Avenue. Taking a cue from the movie mobsters of the 1940s, he let pregnant phrases linger menacingly in the air. "That didn't read like it was a joke," he said. "This is a close-knit community...you ought to watch what you write." When I failed to register the vaguely veiled threat, he really let me have it. "You know what? I don't want to sit next to you," he said, getting up. 

I didn't understand. Was I meant to think he would beat me up? What was I supposed to say? One of my heroes is Bob, the cowardly dockworker who Rocky menaces while still employed as muscle for a loan shark. "Not the face!" is Bob's first reaction; his second, even more abjectly, is "Take my jacket! It's worth 60, 70 dollars!" I would have said that but, as with the piece, the irony would have been lost in the translation.

He was right, though; Crown Heights is a close-knit community, one that I have now forever exiled myself from. I am afraid to go buy a bagel or some fried clams. I am a sensitive man. The sense that even a single person despises me is enough to put me off my feed. I put my foot in it this time, I can see that, but I wish my neighbors would at least give me credit for continuing to hate Brooklyn even after I was forced to move back here. Wouldn't it be even worse to hector them from Avenue C and then change my tune once I was here among them? I think so, but at the same time, I don't blame them for hating me. If I didn't know me, I'd hate me too. The idea of me is deeply repulsive. But less so is the reality.

So I will say this to my neighbors. Give me a chance. I see now how you have coalesced against my fatuous essay. I wish I had someone like me to hate, and friends to jeer with. Sadly, I have forfeited them. Ironically, it just may be that I don't deserve to live in Crown Heights. No doubt I will be shipped out for Canarsie next. 

Previously: The Painful Exile to Brooklyn

The Harper Government Insists it’s Legal to Collect Metadata

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John Forster, head of CSEC, testifying yesterday. Via the Senate/CBC.

Last Friday, Canada got its first major taste of Snowden’s trove of surveillance files when it was revealed through the CBC that CSEC—Canada’s NSA—ran a metadata collection program at a major Canadian airport in 2012. The program was designed to capture the unique MAC addresses of the iPhones and laptops of travellers using free WiFi before their flights. Ronald Deibert, the author of Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace, called this type of data-collection outright illegal in a column he wrote for the Globe and Mail. Meanwhile Stephen Rigby, Canada’s National Security Advisor, claims metadata: “does not represent a compromise of private communications by Canadians. It’s data about data and so it is well within the parameters of CSEC’s operations.” 

For anyone who has been following the political drama in the United States surrounding the NSA fallout, a defense like Stephen Rigby’s is a broken record of spy agency doublespeak. The idea that metadata is somehow innocuous because it is “about data” is a frustrating, semantically overwrought, and illogical defense that avoids the real issue of government culpability when it comes to the invasion of its citizens’ privacy.

As Glenn Greenwald told VICE while discussing the NSA’s collection of metadata from Verizon customers: “In many instances, metadata is actually more invasive than listening to the content of your calls or reading your email.” In that interview, he provides the example of a woman calling an abortion clinic. If you’re simply listening to the content of that call, you may only hear that woman making an appointment to see a doctor—but if you know the number she’s calling, you can identify it as an abortion clinic, and get a much more detailed picture of what’s going on in her private life.

In the case of CSEC, there is no evidence of a similar cell phone data sweep program operating out of Ottawa. The airport WiFi program, however, apparently allows CSEC to create a metadata trail of a person’s travels throughout the globe, using their unique MAC address built into their phone or laptop as the tracking key as they sweep and collect information—which must mean they are collecting information from other public WiFi hubs to develop these trails as well.

John Forster, the head of CSEC, described the WiFi program in his own words at a Senate hearing yesterday: “This exercise involved a snapshot of historic metadata collected from the global internet. There was no data collected through any monitoring of the operations of any airport. Just a part of our normal global collection.” Forster’s apparent inability to equivocate metadata and data is troubling, and his appraisal of CSEC’s day-to-day duties as “normal global collection” may be ordinary to the agency, but it certainly requires further questioning. Forster has also admitted the metadata of Canadians gets collected by CSEC because “there are foreign and Canadian information mixed together in the internet,” a statement that is also rooted in confusing semantics—does foreign mean terrorist? Or is Canada okay with gathering information on pesky foreigners, like their friends in the NSA, who only need to be 51 percent sure that their target lives outside of America?

CSEC's gathering of the "haystack" by sucking up as much information as they can in order to find the "needle" (the terrorists are needles in this hokey analogy that permeates the intelligence community's defense) is a problematic strategy that sounds more like mass surveillance than a useful terrorist-catching system.

In the Dark Knight, when Bruce Wayne is staring at a mass surveillance apparatus that uses every Gotham City resident’s cell phone to sniff out the Joker, he faces more of a moral quandary than CSEC or the NSA has ever demonstrated in public; and he destroys the machine after finding the bad guy! Who is the Joker, exactly, that the Canadian government is so afraid of? In a hearing yesterday, Michel Coulombe, the head of CSIS, pointed to Syria, al-Qaeda, and the Iranian nuclear program as bad guys that ostensibly threaten Canada—while also indicating CSIS is concerned about “over 130 Canadians” operating as extremists abroad; noting that these 130 lapsed Canadians are CSIS’s primary concern.

In a section of the Canadian government’s “2013 Public Report on the Terrorist Threat to Canada,” in a section entitled “No Country is immune from terrorism,” Canada’s ready-for-whatever approach to supervillainy is summarized as such:

“A terrorist attack could still occur within Canada. The April 2013 arrests of individuals in Quebec and Ontario who were allegedly conspiring to carry out a terrorist attack and the tragic events in Boston remind us of this possibility. Terrorists may also attempt to recruit supporters, raise funds or acquire other forms of support in Canada. The terrorist threat impacts how we conduct diplomacy, business, travel, security and development assistance, both at home and abroad. It can threaten Canadian charities, foreign investments and international development projects. It can threaten Canadian goals, prosperity and quality of life. Terrorism poses a risk to Canadians travelling abroad - tourists, soldiers, diplomats, aid workers and business people. Terrorists may target an individual, a community or Canadian society as a whole. A threat to any Canadian is a threat to us all.“

The problem with “terrorism” is that it can be used as a way to frame every facet of our society as being endangered (charities, goals, prosperity, quality of life, business, travel) by such a nebulous and all-encompassing threat. With precisely zero terrorist attacks—and yes, there have been close calls—on Canadian soil to date, and the odds of an American being killed in a terrorist attack ranking lower than drowning or being in a car accident, it’s hard to understand why we should be signing off on massive surveillance systems in the name of foreign boogeymen. Especially when it’s already been disproven that the NSA’s mass surveillance systems could have stopped 9/11.

Unfortunately the Canadian government has decided to offer insultingly insufficient answers to the public instead of discussing these issues in any meaningful way. For example, according to Paul Calandra, Stephen Harper’s Parliamentary Secretary, Glenn Greenwald is a “porn spy” who sold “stolen documents” to the CBC, while quoting CSEC’s technically true (but essentially false) statement that “no Canadians’ communications were collected.” While Paul hasn’t got back to me about what it means to be a porn spy, his ranting and raving is disappointingly juvenile and completely avoids the content of Snowden’s leaks.

In an article titled “Canada's WiFi Surveillance and CSEC's Non-Denial Denials” written by Ryan Gallagher, who helped break the latest CSEC story with the CBC and Glenn Greenwald, he analyzes the frustrating responses from Harper’s government:

“CSEC's denial that it 'tracked' Canadians or foreign travellers, I think, hinges upon a narrowly defined interpretation of the word. The US Department of Defence, for instance, uses 'tracking' as a specific technical term meaning the "precise and continuous position-finding of targets by radar, optical, or other means." CSEC's IP profiling definitely fits the dictionary definition of "tracking" as it is understood by most people—but does it fit the narrower military definition? Perhaps CSEC believes that IP profiling [CSEC’s term for its tracking method] does not constitute ‘precise and continuous’ tracking. But if so, it should be explaining this—as otherwise its denial is highly misleading.”

Clearly the government is playing a game of semantics to avoid the issues detailed in Snowden’s leaks. With more documents presumably on the way from the “porn spy” and co., it will be harder and harder for the government to hide behind ambiguous definitions of proprietary terminology. Meanwhile, legal action from groups like the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, who launched a lawsuit against CSEC in October for “collecting Canadians’ private communications and metadata information in a manner that violates the Charter of Rights and Freedoms” will hopefully push forward a review process that can dismantle the super-surveillance systems which appear to be operating silently in Canada.
 

@patrickmcguire

Arguing About Nothing

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A few months ago, I flew to Nashville, Tennessee, to watch the founders of the Sunday Assembly establish one of their “atheist churches” there. While on the trip I was reading about congregational humanism, which is what you call it when a bunch of people get together to talk about philosophy, hear secular sermons, and/or celebrate life through rituals—church without a god or gods, basically. So on the plane I was reading a book by Greg Epstein, the Humanist Chaplain at Harvard, who is a major figure in the congregational humanist movement, and it turned out the guy next to me, a middle-aged man in a baseball cap, was reading a book about a science-based case for belief in a creator. He noticed that we were coincidentally reading books that were respectively about godlessness and God, and we struck up a conversation.

He told me he taught at a Bible college in Tennessee, and that he enjoyed watching debates between theologians and scientists about the existence of God. I was a little nervous as we chatted about this—I didn’t want to get into a situation where he’d try to convert me, and I also didn’t want to have a shouting match about Jesus and creation with a guy who clearly thought a lot about his faith. He talked about the book he was reading and how much science supposedly supported some form of creationism: If there was a Big Bang to begin everything, well, something or someone would have had to start that process, right? I said that that sort of thing was over my head and that the book I was reading was more concerned with morality; it wasn’t an argument against Christianity or any other religion. I mentioned that there was a section where it discussed the Ten Commandments and that it concluded that most of them were pretty good rules to live by. It was a pretty interesting conversation of a kind I wasn’t used to, since I live in New York and most of my friends are godless people who take godlessness as a given.

I imagine that most people, like me, live in bubbles where their beliefs are more or less reinforced. It’s nice on occasion to get out of those bubbles and talk with people who think crazy things—both because you can gain something from trying to explain your ideas to someone who doesn’t share them, and because it’s good to remind yourself that people who are on the other side of whichever debate aren’t unreasoning giant mouths screaming gibberish, but flesh-and-blood people who aren’t any scarier or more insane than anyone else.

There are conversations, though, and then there are debates. Tonight, Bill Nye the Science Guy is going onstage at the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, to argue about evolution with the museum’s founder Ken Ham, who is a young-earth creationist, meaning he thinks the world is only a few thousand years old. Nye is going to “win” the debate in the eyes of anyone who thinks that science is right about anything; Ham’s going to be similarly celebrated by a lot of hardcore Biblical literalists. The debate is the WWE for pseudointellectuals who spend too much time on Reddit, a made-for-YouTube event that will serve as a soapbox for Nye and Ham to stand on and shout.

It should be noted that lots of people think this is a shitty idea. Many scientists have criticized Nye for agreeing to the debate, as young-earth creationism is such a discredited, ludicrous notion that arguing with its proponents just makes them look good. You wouldn’t argue with a crazy person about whether a giant pigeon is trying to eat his head from the inside—and giving him a serious response in public would make him look more logical than he is. In other words, don’t feed the trolls. Even Richard Dawkins, who has debated the existence of God in public countless times, has famously refused to debate creationists on the grounds that it would lend them credibility.

The don’t-debate-the-wackos-cause-it-just-makes-them-look-good strategy makes sense, but it obscures the larger question: Why do atheists want to debate believers at all?

Christians at least can say that arguing about God in public gives them a chance to preach the gospel to the unsaved—if they can convince someone that God is real and Jesus Christ died for our sins, that’s one more soul rescued from the fires of hell, which is no small achievement. If, however, an atheist convinces a Christian that the Bible is nothing more than a weird story written a couple thousand years ago, well, one more person is aware that death is just a cold void of absolute nonbeing and that our lives are not watched over by a compassionate god. Good job, I guess.

The act of standing up in front of a bunch of people and going, “No, no, your beliefs are wrong, let me lay a little bit of logic and science onto your ignorant heads” smacks of ego—at the Creation Museum tonight, Bill Nye won’t be talking about the wonders of science and the scientific method as much as will be telling Ken Ham that he’s wrong and everyone who agrees with him is dumb. The rightness of Nye’s cause aside, that just seems jerky.

Which isn't to say Nye doesn't have right on his side. Debating young-earth creationism is different than debating the existence of a deity—the latter becomes a fairly esoteric question when you start talking about existence and consciousness and so on, but the former is a more down-to-earth discussion. If you embrace Ham’s beliefs you have to deny a great deal of science, and children who are taught that the planet is only a few thousand years old and that evolution is a lie (this happens even in some schools that receive public money) are being misled and confused by adults. As Nye said in a viral YouTube video from 2012, “If you want to deny evolution and live in your world that’s completely inconsistent with everything we’ve observed in the universe, that’s fine. But don’t make your kids do it, because we need them. We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers for the future.”

In shot: boo creationism, yay science. But matching creationism up against atheism is a “false dichotomy,” as an article in Catholic Online about the debate puts it. Plenty of Christians believe in both God and evolution, but the Nye-versus-Ham debate seemingly pits the Bible against Darwin as mutually exclusive systems of thought. “Viewers are being asked to either favor a Protestant fundamentalist young-earth creation story, or a scientific, atheistic view of the universe,” writes Catholic Online. What about a third option? What about the Christians who think Ham is a nut and carbon dating is not a bizarre conspiracy, but also don’t enjoy the tone atheists take when they dismiss the Bible out of hand? What about people who think natural selection explains a lot but that God could have set the process in motion? Why leave those voices out of a debate over creationism?

It’d be great if we could get Christians and atheists talking together in more public forums—by which I mean actually talking, not putting up billboards that mock sincerely held beliefs. It would give both sides a chance to discuss differences—like do people need God to be good, and is it offensive to say that only believers can be moral?—but also commonalities, like how great a guy Jesus was, or how mysterious the origins of existence and life and conscious are. At this debate, I imagine the only thing Nye and Ham will agree on is their shared unspoken desire for publicity. No one’s mind will be changed, no one will “win,” and the YouTube comments under the livestream of the debate will fill up with various versions of “I’M RIGHT YOU’RE WRONG HAHA.” Which, actually, would be a pretty good tagline for this whole mess.

@HCheadle

Third-Hand Smoke Could Kill You

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Image via the Flickr account of DCist

UC Riverside published the results of an experiment last week, concluding that "third-hand smoke," i.e. that rich, burnt oatmeal smell emanating from grandpa's sweater, is a credible health threat. The takeaway: Don't smoke. Don't hang around smokers. And don't hang around people who hang around smokers, which, outside of Utah, pretty much eliminates everyone.

The experiment itself was conducted by Manuela Martins-Green, Professor of Cell Biology at UCR. She exposed lab mice to a simulation of the conditions under which humans take in third-hand smoke. Burnt tobacco residue was added to surfaces and dust within the mouse enclosures, but the mice weren't added until later, meaning they were exposed to no actual smoke. In the end, Martins-Green said in a UCR news release, “We found significant damage occurs in the liver and lung. Wounds in these mice took longer to heal. Further, these mice displayed hyperactivity.” The details of the experiment are all online. The damning conclusions written up in UCR's release are as follows:

  • There was an increase in non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
  • The lungs became inflamed, and showed risks for fibrosis (a kind of abnormal cell growth).
  • Risk for obstructive pulmonary disease increased.
  • Slower wound healing, comparable to that of smokers after surgery, was observed.
  • The mice became hyperactive, because they had cute little nicotine buzzes.

They hasten to conclude that babies are at the highest risk, because like mice, they crawl along the ground, mingling with the cigarette schmutz. Obviously, these results in mice merit some kind of longitudinal study in humans if such a thing is possible.

For a while now, even the most ardent smokers have been able to pay lip service to the safety of others by just going outside to do their filthy business. This new study is a nod to the early days of secondhand smoke publicity in the early 1990s, when smoking was suddenly a crime against humanity, and lighting up at a concert meant a posse of Minor Threat fans might come and slap the cigarette from your mouth

The term "third-hand smoke" sounds preposterous. I can already hear the Fox News pundits going, "What's next? Fourth-hand smoke? Fifth? Sixth?" Anti-smoking crusaders should do themselves a huge PR favor and switch to what Wikipedia calls it: "passive smoking." If the residue left behind by tobacco smoke contains particles like polonium-210, and it apparently does, then there's a cancer risk, no matter how many times the effects of the smoke symbolically change "hands."

At any rate, the study could be good news for sanity. Smokers in the US and many other wealthy countries feel pushed to the margins by regulations, but as VICE readers are no doubt aware, poorer countries still don't have their shit together when it comes to  preventing kids from smoking. More information like this could stem the tide of passive smoking deaths worldwide, which, counterintuitive as this may seem, are still on the rise, at 600,000 per year and climbing.

And anyway, anti-smoking advocates need something to do with their time other than try and ban e-cigarettes, which would be a fucking stupid thing to do.

@MikeLeePearl

The Internet Black Market That Brings Online Browsing to Life

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“I do not know what I am saying!” Internet Dude screamed out tweets as he walked through the rows of market sellers, from the URL Lottery to Firefox tattoos.

This past weekend was the biggest net-nerd fest yet. You could find and browse all the internet kitsch your heart desires “offline” at the Yami–ichi Internet Black Market in Berlin. Market-goers could experience what a "tweet" felt like in real life or they could buy a small bottle of MacBook-Air air. The strangest of the internet goods came to life at what felt like a small mall in Tokyo: laptops were scattered everywhere; CDRs covered all the tables; and three different languages were within earshot at any given time.

“Once upon a time, the internet was supposed to be a place for liberty, now it’s so uptight,” said Sembo Kensuke and Yae Akaiwa, the Japanese net artists who co-organize the event. “We explore what offline is and isn’t.”

Since its launch in late 2012 in Tokyo, the Yami-ichi Internet Black Market has made a big bang with international buzz. This weekend in Berlin was one of the biggest with 50 exhibitors in total—20 who flew from Japan and 30 “local” vendors from from America, Australia, Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands. Even though I spotted a few “sold out” signs at the end of the day, profit isn’t the focus: some sellers crowdsource their flights to be a part of the spirited event. They view it as a digital vacation.

In case you didn’t make it to Berlin—or even if you did—here are the biggest analogue hits at event, which was presented with the Transmediale festival for art and digital culture. “Once you do it, everyone connects with the idea,” said Kensuke. “It’s like everyone has been waiting for it.”

Internet Dude will scream Tweets for you for 50 cents, or if you want him to “follow you” he will follow you around the market for a period of time.

"Edward Snowden Globes" by Jens U. Jorgensen. This snowglobe features "NSA data" that, erm, leaked from the floating USB drive. 

"Love Letters by Russian Spam Bots" by Carl Emil Carlsen.

Dorita Takido designed web browser tableware.

Glitch Embroidery sweaters by Nukeme. You can only buy these at the black market due to copyright, er, complications.

Photo Shop by Dutch artist Lukas Julius Keijser: “Your 1.5 MB of fame.”

MacBook-Air Air by Shunya Hagiwara, which offered offered bottled air from Japan.

Katsuki Nogami, who was wearing an Internet Explorer tattoo by Dorita Takido, was selling digital travel portraits.

Solo black market jacket dude by DIY Church, which sells random objects that have been put through a plastic chute and their sound recorded into a .wav file.

Filmmaker and comic artist Hoji Tsuchiya was crowdfunding for an animated film production.

Buddha statues and a Pray and Fortune Telling Game by writer and editor, Fukuda Kenichi.

The NMN cat by Christian Graupner. The Japanese Maneki Neko lucky cat holds a "no more nuke" sign, signifying "bye-bye" instead of "welcome."

@nadjasayej


The Environmental Martyr of the Sochi Olympics

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Photo via

In 2012, Russian environmental activists Evgeny Vitishko and Suren Gazaryan removed a section of fence near Sochi in order to gain entry to a public forest. The fence had been erected as part of the massive construction efforts taking place in preparation for the Olympics, and activists claimed 5,000 acres of trees had been illegally destroyed in the process. Before they left, Vitishko and Gazaryan also painted slogans on the fence. One of them: “This is our forest.”

The men, who are both members of the group Environmental Watch on North Caucasus (EWNC), were subsequently convicted and given three-year conditional sentences. They had to follow a strict nighttime curfew and report any changes to their place of residence, which made it extremely difficult to do their jobs—both men are scientists—or continue their environmental activism.

This past December, Vitishko was charged with violating the terms of his sentence, and was told he had to serve three years in a labor camp. (Gazaryan had already fled Russia to avoid potential imprisonment.) Vitishko is now awaiting a hearing to appeal the sentence, scheduled for February 22. “Right now we are trying to help Evgeny with the appeal, as well as publicize his case as much as possible and draw the attention of human rights organizations,” an EWNC spokesman told VICE News.

We got in touch with Vitishko, who said he has been under constant surveillance by the Russian government for the past year and a half, while being followed by police and often harassed for dubious reasons.

“If they condemn me to imprisonment and the district court upholds the conviction, it would mean that for the government and entire system created in Russia today, there is no chance of turning back to a dialogue with society and civilian activists,” Vitishko told us. He believes that his case is only one of many to come, since the Russian government won’t stop persecuting environmental activists. “They will continue with criminal proceedings against the defenders of the Khopyer River, of the forest around Moscow, and in general all ecological activists who call the attention of the global community to the destruction of the environment.”

Vitishko said that in order to prepare for the Sochi Olympics, changes were made to Russian laws in 2006, 2011, and 2013 that had protected nature conservation areas. The changes made it possible to build sports facilities, social infrastructure, and just about anything else in national parks. Though most of the construction was done in the name of the Olympics, Vitishko said much of it was actually beneficial only to tourism businesses that wanted to build on previously protected parks land.

The Olympics are projected to cost $51 billion, or more than every other Winter Olympics combined. The high price tag is being blamed on Sochi being extremely ill-suited to host an Olympics and rampant corruption.

Vitishko said the preparations for the Olympics have also had adverse effects on the UNESCO World Heritage site in the Western Caucasus and on some nearby rivers. For instance, while several companies engaged in construction signed off on the "Restoration of the Mzymta River Ecosystem" plan to return it to its original state, the many roads built around the river for construction projects won't be removed. And that is to say nothing of contaminants that have been dumped in the water.

“Despite official claims of adhering to a principle of zero waste, vast amounts of untreated waste are being exported from Sochi to the TBO landfill in Belorechensk, as well as the officially closed Loo landfill,” Vitishko said. “Millions of tons of construction waste is disposed of in dumps lacking any protective engineering, and so it then contaminates the territory of the Sochi National Park, as well as populated areas.”

Despite demonstrations held in his honor and help with his legal defense, it's quite likely that Vitishko will be sent to a penal colony following an unsuccessful appeal. That said, he didn't express concern with his potential imprisonment. Vitishko, who originally offered to pay for the fence he vandalized back in 2012, simply wants justice.

“The government is still not prepared to live according to the laws of the Russian Federation," he said. "No one has the right to violate the law—not the governor, not the president, not Vitishko."

Phillip Seymour Hoffman Should Wake Us Up to the Reality of Addiction

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No matter how many years of sobriety you have, the battle of addiction lasts your lifetime. Photo via.

When I found out Philip Seymour Hoffman died, I was on the phone with my mom. She was telling me about a dress she bought me for my sober anniversary next week. “I saw it and thought of you and how you should have something pretty to celebrate in,” she said excitedly. “I’m just so proud of you—two years!”

It’s a miracle to my mom that I’m even alive today. The idea of me having two years of straight sobriety under my belt didn’t even seem like a remote possibility a few years ago when I was in and out of hospitals for everything from a withdrawal-induced seizure to an overdose. It was hard at the time for my parents to understand what was going on, since I didn’t seem like an addict to them. Even I didn’t think I was a true addict, despite cracking open two cans of mixed vodka drinks in a bathroom stall before work every morning just to get my day started. I still had a Master’s degree to prove I was type-A, a decent online editing job that I had yet to be fired from despite drinking vodka from Gatorade bottles at my desk, and a fairly active social life. I had bills to pay, and I paid them. And I had pain to kill to get through the monotony of a career that had turned out less artistic than I had envisioned it. I killed the disappointment with booze and prescription sedatives.

I was in the middle of thanking my mom for the dress she was mailing so it would make it on time for my second sober birthday when an article popped up in my Facebook newsfeed. “Oh Mom, Philip Seymour Hoffman is dead!” I gasped reading the headline. My Mom asked how. “An overdose, it seems,” I answered and couldn’t say anything more because I felt my eyes well up. I heard my Mom take a breath on the other end. When you have experienced an overdose either as an addict or as someone who loves an addict, hearing about anyone succumbing to addiction brings back memories of the most painful kind.

 “Where would I know him from?” my Mom asked and I could tell she was suddenly crying. My Mom doesn’t know famous people. She wasn’t crying because Philip Seymour Hoffman, the great actor, died; she was crying because another addict lost his life to the disease. She’s been to support groups with me in all kinds of neighbourhoods and even in different cities. She has met friends of mine in recovery from former homeless people to reformed drug dealers, but she knows that the majority of addicts out there have things like modest mortgages and student loans. They’re you, and they’re me, except you probably wouldn’t guess our backstory if you passed us on the street. We’re not the reckless celebrities, tortured artists and amoral criminals most people imagine when the word “addict” gets tossed around.

“He’s an Oscar winner,” I said, still referring to him in the present tense. “He won for Capote, but we saw him on 60 Minutes once talking about his struggles with addiction—how he went to rehab after university. I remember reading that he relapsed last year after something like 23 years of sobriety.” I said. “That means he overdosed on a Saturday night. So did Cory Monteith in the summer, remember? And I overdosed on a Saturday night too.”

“I know,” said my Mom, now sobbing. “I still have flashbacks to finding you. And I feel sick when it happens. I relive the feeling that I’m losing you.”

I remember feeling devastated last spring when I read that Philip Seymour Hoffman had relapsed after 23 years of sobriety. I had been so thrilled to make it to my one-year sober anniversary just a few months earlier, something I never thought I would be able to do. It made me feel sick that another addict could give into temptation after so long. I used to think about booze almost every minute of the day in the beginning of living sober, but it eventually faded—like eventually, mostly, moving on from someone who broke your heart.

It’s been two years since my last drink on February 9, 2012. I remember what it felt like going down. It didn’t taste good. Relapsing only makes you hate yourself more no matter how hard you try to drink your way back to the numbness you used to know. You can’t have back what it was you that you used to love so much, and there’s pain in that realization. Relapsing is like being pity-fucked by an old flame and knowing the magic that was once there is never coming back. It feels like a secret, shameful stab at trying to feel a sliver of something that’s really just a memory of complete detachment.

Like Philip Seymour Hoffman, I relapsed in my bathroom that time, alone in my apartment. It was before noon. It was just beer—which was less revolting than the first relapse where I drank mouthwash. Relapsing makes you raise the stakes because you go into it failing, knowing you’re a loser. I had started a six-pack around 8am that morning and I was down to the last one. I’d been drinking every waking hour for days, but even now I can’t remember how many days went by. They all just blur into one blob of a fuzzy memory peppered with random fears about getting to the store for more booze without being too wasted to walk. I didn’t go to my bathroom to die, like so many addicts seem to do. I went to my bathroom to look in the mirror while I drank the last beer. It wasn’t my last beer; it was just the last beer because it wasn’t mine anymore. I wanted to look in the mirror for some sign of who I was, who I lost, who I might be because I needed to find some part of me who wasn’t a raging addict. I had already called 911 and the ambulance was on its way.

I spent the night in the hospital because I knew I wasn’t safe at home. Doctors put me on suicide watch. For everything the Hemingways and Fitzgeralds had made me once believe about addiction being tragically beautiful, when the sweat is pouring out of your pores from the latest comedown, when you’re peeing in front of a suicide watch guard into a wheelchair with a built in toilet, you are just a suffering addict living in a body that hates you for what you do to it. I sweat toxins out of my pores all night while the guard continued to watch me. It was ugly, shameful and I promised myself that was the end. Rehab may not have sunk in right away the year before, but I couldn’t do it anymore. And now, two years later, that day is the last day I ever drank.

Whenever I even slightly think I miss drinking, I make myself remember how awful I used feel when I woke up somewhere unfamiliar beside someone I didn’t know, with a shame I couldn’t even account for, and a need to make the pain and disappointment stop before it ever started again. There’s nothing tortured or artistic about addiction when it’s real—it’s just an obsessive compulsion to feel nothing, a cycle of numb-chasing that’s just a giant hamster wheel going nowhere.

Support groups keep me sober now. I need to know other people like me to normalize the disease for myself, to feel less like an alien for being wired the way I am. I need to believe I am an addict with a disease and not just a sensitive artistic type with a temperament too precious for reality. I’d like to celebrate my two years of straight sobriety next week knowing I am in the clear forever, but Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death is proof that relapses are possible at any time in recovery for anyone, especially when addiction remains something society still romanticizes instead of treating like a deadly illness.

As it stands, there are long wait lists for government rehabs for those addicts who don’t have the financial freedom of celebrities and the 1% to go to private treatment facilities. Even in Canada, a country that allegedly has one of the best socialized healthcare systems in the world, we have a plethora of rehabs run like money-making businesses that start at $15,000 up front—while government-run rehabs for addicts without money generally have wait lists that are months long. We don’t discriminate between the wealthy and the poor when it comes to treating diseases like cancer though, because we believe cancer is real.

It’s easy to call Philip Seymour Hoffman a tortured artist—a picture that’s been painted in recent posthumous tributes by Vogue, The New Yorker and Esquire—to feed the myth that addiction belongs to creative geniuses and the derelict and no one in between. He has a great body of work—an Oscar, even. But calling him a tortured artist also makes it sound like he was a man so purposely obsessed with his art that he willing sacrificed his well-being for it instead of what he really was: an addict who sometimes let his disease get the better of him, both the man and the artist. Hoffman was open about his struggles with addiction and didn't paint it as torture. That's the weird part. It's like society still insists on seeing it that way. I am sure Mr. Hoffman, the addict and not the artist, would not want his own painful battle to feed the misconceptions surrounding addiction. Mr. Hoffman, the great actor, is gone, but so is Mr. Hoffman the father of three, the beloved son, the cherished friend and the addict. He was larger than life to most people, but to those close to him, he was human—a human with a disease. 


@vicki_hogarth

A Love Letter to Cam'ron on His Birthday

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A Love Letter to Cam'ron on His Birthday

Sherborne, Dorset Is a Paradise

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According to brochures, Sherborne the market town in northwest Dorset, England is "a small, historic market town boasting a vibrant culture and prestigious schools." To the over-60s and commuting city workers who dump their kids in its private schools, this may well be the case.

For everyone else here, it's a swept-under-the-rug existence. The buses shuttle in the grey tourism to see the historic Abbey, or to eat sticky toffee pudding. You get the feeling that those who run the town aren't too excited about the idea of the oldies seeing us and spoiling the scenic views.

The wealth divide here is pretty stark. A street of houses worth just short of a million each, with lavish furnishings and high-end cars in the driveways, have their huge gardens backing onto rows of terraced council housing.

There are two or three months of summer every year, though, when everyone can enjoy the beautiful countryside, get mashed in it, and fuck and fight each other in it. But then it's back to being wet and feeling miserable.

See more of Bill's work here

Does your town or city qualify for paradise status? Feel free to send your pitches to ukphotoblog@vice.com. Don't be shy.

Learning to See the Future at Psychic School

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An artist's impression of the author flirting with a psychic hippie girl. Illustrations by Will Laren

"Whenever I do psychic readings for someone, it's always bad news," says Bill with a heavy sigh. Bill is a 60-something electrician and, like me and nine others, a student for the day at the College of Psychic Studies in Kensington, London. "But then I think, 'Well, they've gotta hear it, ain't they?'" he continues. "They're meant to."

Without warning, our teacher, Avril Price sweeps into the scented basement studio. After this class, presumably, we'll know when people are about to enter rooms. We will begin this Sacred Arts of Divination workshop with a group meditation session, she tells the group. We all close our eyes.

The College of Psychic Studies was founded in 1884 by a group of academics and scientists—scholarly individuals who wanted to formally investigate the psychic phenomena that had taken Victorian-era London by storm. Now, 130 years later, the school still works toward furthering the understanding of psychic abilities, using new scientific techniques to work out whether stuff like astral projection and dowsing have any kind of rational explanation, are truly supernatural, or are just persistent examples of New Age bullshit. It also hosts classes for anyone who wants to enhance their psychic abilities, employing healers, "sensitivesm," and counselors to prise open that third eye—people like Avril.

"Cords of light pour forth from your lungs with every breath," she assures her class of other meditators. "A lotus flower slowly blossoms from the top of your head—your crown chakra."

This sort of thing goes on for a fair bit, so it's a relief when Avril deposits us in a field: "It’s nighttime; the stars fill the sky. In the distance you see a stone circle. You approach it, and, from the shadows, a figure emerges—your spirit guide. They lead you to a stone table in the midst of the stone circle. You look down into the palm of your hand, your palm chakra, and see an object there—a gift from your spirit guide. What is it?"

I look down and see a stone. I then immediately chastise my stunted imagination, which has clearly just copy-and-pasted from the surrounding stone circle/table setup. Eventually, after some bargaining with my spirit guide, the stone turns into a flecked gray, brown, and white feather. Avril asks us to open our eyes and share our "gift" with the group.

A tiny blond cancer surgeon named Agnes gets a little blue ball. A nervy-looking Essex housewife gets a "white golden pyramid." A stunning hippie girl named Aïsha gets exactly the same thing as me: a flecked grey, brown and white feather. (We exchange smiles; the first bit of astral flirting I've ever taken part in.)

Bill the electrician gets a dagger.

This imaginary weapon sends a nervous ripple of unease through the group, but Avril expertly smoothes it away by explaining that the blade represents Bill's "previous life as a Celt," as opposed to, say, his passion for shanking people he meets in amateur psychic workshops. 

Armed with the gifts from our spirit guides, the group is now ready to tackle aura reading. It's an interesting proposition: How can you teach someone to see auras? Isn't that a gift you're born with, like a nice smile or two penises?

I would learn during my day at psychic school that some people are terrified of second-hand clothes.

Avril begins by dashing through the aural equivalent of the periodic table, a bewildering array of corresponding chakras, colors, and abstract nouns that have been compiled into an Excel handout. We're then partnered off and told to get on with it. Which leaves me wondering if I might have missed something this spreadsheet is trying to teach me—after all, it's not like I've gone through life seeing everyone I meet bathed in tinted hues of radiant light and just chosen to ignore it.

Anyway, here I am sitting opposite Agnes, who is patiently waiting for me to tell her something profound. Feeling strangely guilty about my substandard aura-reading game, I choose to go with the first color that pops into my head: orange.

We consult the Excel handout, which says "creativity" or "health" or something. Avril approaches, making her workshop rounds.

"I guessed orange," I tell her, sheepishly.

"We don’t use that word here, Thomas!" Avril booms.

"Orange?"

“No: guess.”

We switch partners and keep on at it until lunch, but auras remains stubbornly imperceptible, at least to me.

After some sandwiches, Avril tells us we’re going to be hitting the pendulum—a crystal on the end of a chain. Following the disappointing aura stuff, my expectations are pretty low. Avril drapes a pendulum over her forefinger and asks it to give her a "yes," then a "no." As it spins one way and then the other, I try to stop myself from laughing—there's nothing particularly miraculous about subtly swinging a crystal around without anyone noticing that you're moving your wrist.

It's time for me to have a go. My neighbor lends me her, and I ask aloud for a "yes." To my surprise, the pendulum obediently twirls off in a big clockwise swoop. I ask it to stop. It does so. Dead. I request a "no," and the pendulum shoots off counterclockwise, without any kind of conscious motor control on my part.

Avril interjects to tell us that, despite this tantalizing decision-making function, you should never consult your pendulum concerning matters of the future. Instead, she says, these bizarre para-psychological devices should apparently be used for slightly more practical purposes.

"My friend uses hers to pick out the freshest fruit and veg," offers the white golden pyramid lady.

Avril nods sagely, before telling us that we’re going to be using our newfound pendulum powers to give one another’s chakras a check-up. I then experience a moment of lucid clairvoyance, certain I'm about to be partnered, for this intimate procedure, with Aïsha. And I am. The course is working.  

Aïsha approaches, her pendulum ready. We're told good, healthy chakras should set a pendulum (held sort of near you by someone else) twirling in alternate directions as it's lowered from the crown of your head downwards. Aïsha raises her pendulum and everything, initially, goes smoothly enough, the pendulum going one way then the other—although one or two of my chakras are apparently a bit weak (embarrassing!)—then we get to the last, lowest chakra, which makes the pendulum swing the same way it did the last time. I'm not really certain what a chakra is, exactly, but it's still pretty worrying to learn that one of mine is out of whack.

Avril appears and invites Aïsha, who is peering at me with concern, to apply some ad hoc treatment with her third eye. So she holds her pendulum near my waist and really scrutinizes the problem area: my crotch. It comes as no surprise when the pendulum promptly shifts direction and starts spinning like a greyhound chasing its own tail. It's then my turn to do Aïsha; her chakras are in almost obnoxiously perfect working order.

The pendulum stuff is fun, but it's soon time to move onto psychometry. This is where a psychic holds on to an object and deduces its history through touch alone. Psychometry makes aura reading look like an exact science. There isn't even a handout.

Turns out my shitty old phone is a good vibes kinda guy.

Avril pairs us off again and I get white golden pyramid lady. We sit rubbing our palms together for a while ("chakra stimulation") before exchanging possessions. As I have nothing more suitable, I hand over my Nokia, a century-old piece of shit with Snake, squishy buttons, and an ink-stained ear piece.

White golden pyramid lady meditatively fondles my crappy phone—searching for its meaning with her eyes shut. It's one of the dumbest things I've ever seen. It also distracts me somewhat from the silver snake ring she's handed me, which is predictably proving to be one of those very strong, silent types of inanimate object.

Yet again, I feel strangely guilty about not being Rasputin and am obliged to bullshit.

"Does this ring," I ask, raising it between my thumb and forefinger, "have some kind of story behind it?"

"Sort of," says white Golden pyramid lady, encouragingly. "I bought it in a Native American shop in Brighton. Everything they sell there is actually made by Native Americans."

"OK—so it’s well-travelled, then."

We turn our attention to my Nokia.

"Now, I dunno if this is exactly a psychic thing," she ventures, "but I just felt that this was, like, a really happy little phone."

I am pleased to hear this, and concur that, yes, "he" has had a pretty good time of it—after all, he's still out and about while most of his kin have gone on to the phone equivalent of the afterlife.

Finally it's time for Avril's concluding question and answer session, which opens a floodgate of severe neuroses from some of the students, who by the sounds of it live in perpetual terror of the bad vibes potentially infecting second-hand stuff.

"What about second-hand clothes?" stammers one, as if that Oxfam cardigan could prove to be a ticking Indian burial ground of hand-me-down disaster.

"I usually wash them," says Avril, doing her best to chill everyone the fuck out.

"Is washing enough?"

"Yep. Washing’ll do it."

"What about second-hand jewellery?" worries another student.

"Well, you can use bells, tuning forks, or smudge sticks," sighs Avril. "You can also, with second-hand jewellery, use your third eye and imagine yourself washing it."

Follow Thomas on Twitter: @ThomasHeadpress

Illustrations by Will Laren

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