It's a seemingly straightforward premise, an up and coming band wants to play one of their city's hottest live music venues and will do anything it takes to get their big break. Only this band has no actual music, the venue's heyday for live music has long since passed, and their plans to get noticed include 10-foot-tall dick pics and arson. VICELAND's first foray into scripted series, Nirvanna the Band the Show is unlike any traditional sitcom you've ever seen. It blends co-creator Matt Johnson's gonzo shooting style with a Nathan For You-esque discomfort that involves real people and surreal scenarios. And it's absolutely one of the funniest things on television right now (I promise George Soros isn't even paying me to say that.) I sat down with Johnson and co-creator Jay McCarrol at Toronto's Canoe restaurant, on the 54th floor of a bank building downtown, to talk about the ethics of filming strangers on the street and why this city is so deserving of its starring cameo.

VICE: It's nice to see this view because you never see Toronto this way.  
Jay McCarrol: This is like Springfield.

Matt Johnson: Yeah, exactly. Jay and I talk often about going up the CN tower or showing what Toronto looks like from up above because in movies, I think the reason why we all know what New York and Los Angeles and Chicago look like is because of aerial shots and establishing shots in movies. But because no big movies are set in Toronto, people outside of the city never see this. They don't know what it looks like. I imagine when they do aerial shots of the Skydome, you get a piece of it. But everyone in the world has a rough idea of what New York looks like. So we talked about, you know, "Maybe in one episode we should go up the CN tower." We had a terrorism episode where Matt and Jay were going to fake a terrorist attack on top of the CN tower and try to make headlines. They were both going to try to make it and stop it themselves so they'd be these heroes and they'd get all this credit and it would be like we're famous. And we thought one of the great side effects of that shoot would be to show Toronto from the perspective of the CN tower, which many people even in Toronto don't care about looking at. I mean, you talk with people who are students here and a lot of them haven't even gone up the CN tower.

Have you done the walk?
Johnson: I would do it! The edgewalk!

McCarrol: I don't want to do it.

Johnson: You know what, it's not hardcore enough.

So how much of Matt and Jay's characters are Matt and Jay the friends?
Johnson: Like how much of it do we fake?

How much of your characters are just you being you? Obviously the dynamic is pretty natural.
Johnson: I would say everything except for the racism and homophobia is the real us.

I see in your eyes that you love going there.
McCarrol: Well, of course. What else is there? There's nothing funnier.

Johnson: Yeah it's very funny to think that these guys are innocent and charming and that they could do no wrong but then they have very 90s opinions about absolutely everything that has to do with minorities.

McCarrol: Any sort of hot-button topic.

Johnson: But yeah, we're good friends. All the stuff that you see us do is—we don't script anything. It's always the hardest when we have something we need to do for the plot of an episode that takes us outside of what our natural dynamic is. It's like, "Oh no, Jay, you need to be very much against this idea here." And then all of the sudden you go, now you have to act. All the back and forth is just stuff that we do. We shoot so much and we just kind of roll. It's just us joking around. Camera guys are kind of involved too, it's a group dynamic really. It's a good model for young people specifically, not to make this like a Film School education argument, but when you don't need to write your dialogue and you're just doing something with your friends, you can skip a whole lot of steps that hold people back. When you're young and try to make movies, often time writing a script and writing a perfect narrative and then pitching that narrative to somebody to make is a really big impediment to actually going out and doing it.

Still from Nirvanna the Band the Show episode, "The Blind Side"

I know that if we were to write outlines and scripts of everything and every episode that we did and tried to get those approved by VICE or Rogers or basically any network executives, there'd probably be a lot of back and forth over what exactly we were going to do. I mean an example is some of those really tasteless jokes that we do. They would get flagged early on and whether you agree with us being able to do those types of jokes or not, it would mean that we just wouldn't have the opportunity to. The conversation would happen before the footage was shot. Whereas, this way, any debate we're having about story or censorship, jokes, anything, we're having it about something concrete.

I think that production model is the most revolutionary thing about making movies in television now. Young people have access to that and because of that access, they can make their own meal without needing the permission of other people to go out a do things. But it's hard because if you don't feel comfortable doing that or if you are anxious or you don't have that dynamic, you don't want to do it. You want something or somebody to give you permission to go out and say that the script is great and that you'll do fine.

And what about people who just happen to be on the street and get caught up in what you are doing? Do you ever think about the -
Johnson: The ethics of using them, you mean? That's something we talk about a lot. Our show, since it's come out, is very often compared to a mix between Flight of the Conchords and Da Ali G Show, which is a great show. It really is a mix between those two things. And I think one of the things that Jay and I really pride ourselves on is showing the real world for the way that it actually is. And not the real world as ugly, in the way that a movie like Borat would do or in a show like Trailer Park Boys would fake it to look like. We want to show the way Toronto actually is and that means showing people the way they actually are. And an unfortunate side effect of filming anything is that if I tell somebody, "Ok, you better play yourself and we're going to come up and say this or that," then they can never be themselves. It's like trying to measure the speed and location of a particle with any kind of precision. You can't because as soon as you look at it, it moves. It's the same with telling somebody, "Ok, you're going to be on camera. You're going to play yourself. Don't worry, you won't look bad.." They can't be themselves. What we want is to show people really looking their best. We're never trying to make fun of people.

McCarrol: People end up looking the way they look and it's just a very real, unfiltered version of reality. The difference is, we're never going out of our way to make anyone or manipulate the footage so much. We want this as sincere—as a sort of...

Johnson: Yeah, the joke is never on the people we shoot with. The joke is on us. And we're quite conscious of that because we need things to anchor our characters, unlike most hidden camera shows where they're trying to manipulate reality so that the person walking into it is really the victim of certain circumstances beyond their control. Here, Matt and Jay always have something wrong and that confrontation between them and reality is what makes the show interesting.

McCarrol: We also separate ourselves from the way Nathan Fielder, as much as we love that show, Nathan Fielder will have on people and he doesn't necessarily manipulate the footage so much but he does put them in such awkward situations and you can tell that these people are going through a hard time.

Johnson: Well, they find people who are eccentric. People who have ideas that are very against the norm, normally. It's like exposing the underbelly of American culture where everyone wants to be famous. That's what Nathan For You is really about. People doing whatever in order to have some type of fame. Whereas, with us, Matt and Jay really want to be famous. And they don't even think about the people they're interacting with.

McCarrol: And nobody sees the cameras hopefully.

Johnson: Or, if they do that's a part of it. Jay and I never break character, we always act like we're these stupid guys but for somebody to be like, "Wait a minute, are you guys really this stupid?" The political risk of actually saying that to somebody is really high. Like is she going to say to us, "Are you guys messing around?" because there's an inherent insult in that. So most Canadians are just unwilling to say that.

McCarrol: We also ride the line too. When we're with Bebe in SEARS, we're dipping in and out of how stupid our characters are getting. And then doing other things, and conversing with her where it's like, "No, we're really excited about our band and we can get caught up with each other."

Johnson: We seem normal. All of this brings up a much bigger question ethically, which I'm faced with all of the time and we've been talking about it for a while. Even if our show is making people look like kings and queens, even if they look better than they've ever looked in their lives, even then we are still crossing a major ethical boundary. We are filming people without them knowing and putting them on television. We're doing that without asking their permission, without consulting with them, without giving them any say at all as to what they're going to say, how they're going to look, what they'll be involved with. Maybe people just have a problem with being on TV? Maybe people have a problem being associated with VICE?

They could be in the Witness Protection Program!
Johnson: Right! And all of the sudden, we're showing them on the streets in Toronto. A lot of ethical things are brought up. I'm not sure how you feel about it Jay but I have such a strong—I wanna see people do new things with media really badly and especially young people. I am maybe on the far end of the spectrum in terms of what ethically I am willing to do in order to try new things. I don't mind doing things which can be considered unethical to tell new types of stories and that certainly is problematic but this is opening up a new world of storytelling for generations. People just haven't been doing this before. I don't mind that we're stepping out into this space and being criticized for it.

McCarrol: It's not like we don't have any rules at all. We will see certain things when we're reviewing the film and we try to make jokes with people but if we get that sense, that kind of ugly feeling...

Johnson: Like we're doing something at someone's expense...

McCarrol: We get a bad feeling. Our barometer goes off on that. We're aware of what we're doing, we have some parameters.

Johnson: Yeah, it's funny because what we are using to do this kinds of stuff is very new interpretations of law that have just come around in the last ten years. That's why we're allowed to make the show the way we do. I wonder if other people, maybe without the same sense of taste, could use these things.

You could see it going very badly.
Johnson: Yeah, I think Borat, even though I think the movie is incredible, is an example of that. I mean, the people who are in that even signed releases and most of them sued. You had many people whose reputations were destroyed, like so foolish and racist.

It's easier to do it when it's a web series and no one really knows who you guys are but now that you guys are on VICELAND, your faces are plastered all over the city, on Now magazine, is it harder? Are you nervous about losing the freedom to play these characters?
McCarrol: No, we're talking about a small niche of people. Take a show like It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, they're on their 15th season and they could conceivably walk down the street and run into a 50-year-old person on their way to work and they'll have no idea who they are.

Johnson: Plus, it's very rare for the characters of Matt and Jay to be interacting with people in their own demographic. Often times, we're in Toronto, talking to people in the library, with adults. Not young hipsters. The plan of the show is to involve people with power, people that can do things they can't. We're always interacting with people who wouldn't be friends with Matt and Jay. I think that helps a lot. It would be great if the show was so well-known that we couldn't walk down Queen Street and shoot but Toronto's a big city so I don't see that being an impediment. Plus, we've shot so far ahead. We're halfway through season two being done already. We'll be all done before anybody knows about the show.

'Nirvanna the Band the Show' airs Thursdays at 10 PM on VICELAND in Canada, midnight in the US.

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Like many molecular biologists—and, for that matter, plenty of condensed matter physicists and materials engineers—Dr. Maryam Zaringhalam is not one for crowds.

"Shout-out to all the introverts that are here screaming their lungs out!" the petite 28-year-old Ph.D shouted into a microphone, straining to be heard over the hundreds of researchers, academics, tech workers and rationalist allies in Boston's Copley Square on Sunday, during the brief and deeply nerdy Rally to Stand Up for Science.

For most of the researchers who flanked Zaringhalam on stage, the rally was a brief but urgent diversion from the American Association for the Advancement of Science's (AAAS) annual meeting just down the block, where the country's scientific establishment converged for the weekend. But underneath their white coats, these once reserved investigators shared something far more striking in common: Though men still dominate science in America, the new scientific resistance to President Trump is being led by women, many of whom insist there's no such thing as science without politics.

"We didn't start it with the goal of leading a resistance or building a movement, but that's kind of what happened," explained Dr. Jane Zelikova, a AAAS fellow with the Department of Energy and one of the co-founders of 500 Women Scientists, a neophyte scientific-political network formed in the wake of the election. When the administration began its assault on agencies from the National Parks Service to NASA, erasing peer-reviewed science from government sites and silencing dissent, "women sort of got it right away," the climate scientist told me. "I think on our male colleagues' side, there was more hesitation."

In fact, when a trio of researchers first floated the idea of a March for Science—now scheduled for April—the response from many in the scientific establishment was swift and damning. "A march by scientists, while well intentioned, will serve only to trivialize and politicize the science we care so much about," geologist Robert S. Young wrote in a widely-circulated op-ed in the New York Times.

Others, like Dr. Mike Brown—the Caltech astronomer who famously killed Pluto—wonder about the effectiveness of public demonstrations.

"Everyone's concerned and wants to do something: the questions are how best to do things, not whether to do things," he told me of the March for Science and its allied actions. "I am not convinced it's going to do much, but maybe I'm wrong—and that would be great."

So far, the debate has been a contentious one.

"There is a huge battle right now in the scientific community to figure out what is the politics of science," said Dr. Lucky Tran, a science communicator at Columbia University who sits on the steering committee of the March for Science and counts himself as a male ally of 500 Women. "Most scientists are resistant to collective action, and they're resistant to getting involved in politics."

Environmental Scientists Jessica Leonard and Lana Bluege hold up signs made by the Natural History Museum for the Rally to Stand Up for Science in Boston's Copley Square on Sunday, Feb. 19, 2017

That seems to be changing. Many prominent scientific organizations have since come out in support of the March, which now has Earth Day actions planned in 150 cities. (The letter that launched 500 Women Scientists has garnered more than 16,000 signatures.) The AAAS itself condemned Trump's since-blocked travel ban, with President (and former Congressman) Rush Holt calling fellow researchers reluctance to do the same "excuses for inaction." Still, the Association has so far declined to officially support either the march or the broader anti-Trump resistance.

"If you look at who are arguing on the side that, 'Of course science is political, you fools,' they're largely women, people of color, immigrants who have known forever that science is political and has always been political because our access has been restricted," explained Zaringhalam, the molecular biologist, who has since become a New York City organizer for the group. "You see that and you see that this is exactly a microcosm of America. It feels pretty political when you see on one side mostly white people and on the other side mostly marginalized people."

Unlike Zelikova, a protest-averse Soviet-Jewish emigre, Zaringhalam has more practice with politics. Her Instagram is scattered with DC grip-and-grins and BLM marches. As a dual citizen of the United States and Iran, she's even applied for an AAAS fellowship to work in scientific diplomacy—but she said the current administration's hostility to Tehran makes her chances remote at best.

"When you're engaging in scientific collaboration with another country and you come up with something like a cure or a new technology, it goes a long way to creating diplomatic capital," she said. "It's hard to think now about what could have been."

With her dream deferred, she now spends her time away from the lab organizing other scientists, debating policy platforms and posting protest outfits to Instagram. Unlike most other groups that have formed since the election, the coalition of female researchers is working both to defend science from outside attack and to reform it from within.

"They really want to focus on science in policy. We really want to work on addressing these entrenched biases against women and minorities," Zelikova, the climate scientist, explained "We're not reinventing the wheel, but we're giving a different voice and a more activist one to the issues."

STEM fields are notoriously male, and while women now outnumber men in some disciplines, few have traditionally reached the top of their department or laboratory. It's a phenomenon known as the "leaky pipeline": while more women than ever are studying science, relatively few end up with advanced degrees and scientific careers, and only a fraction of those who do endure claw their way to leadership roles. While one study last year suggested the leak has largely been plugged since the 1970s, for minority scientists, it still feels like a gush.

"In science, it's not just a gender imbalance, but that the gender imbalance comes with a power differential," said astrophysicist Dr. Rukmani Vijayaraghavan, an organizer for 500 Women. "When people try to say we must have more women in science, what ends up happening if we have more white women in science, and they consider the problem solved."

This is particularly true of climate science, which holds the odd dual distinction of being both the most embattled scientific discipline in America and one of the whitest fields in STEM. "If you go to the annual meeting, it's overwhelmingly white," Zelikova said of her own field.

Inside the Dark Matter Lab Buried Over a Mile Underground

In an echo of the intersectional debates that raged around the Women's March in January, some science-activists say they hesitate to stand up for the institutions of science while those same institutions still oppress them.

"I can't go out and rally for climate change and still have all of this" — racism, gender discrimination, sexual harassment and assault — "to deal with," Vijayaraghavan said. "I can't separate the two. It's not different aspects of my life."

Brown, the Caltech astronomer, frets that mixing the scientific community's internal politics with polarizing external debates may be counterproductive. But he's cautiously optimistic.

"I'm an old white dude, so it's not surprising that I don't see it the same way, but I'm not sure I see how those two relate to each other well," he said. "At the same time, the Women's March was God knows how many issues, and it was effective. Maybe this is the same."

For her part, Zaringhalam remained hopeful the grassroots networks that have sprung up to defend vaccines, climate science and the EPA can be leveraged to reform the discipline she loves.

"A very vocal minority of us are starting to yell and we're forcing the community to make noise and stand up for us," she said. "On the one hand it's super scary. On the other it's very empowering time to be disempowered."

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More than three months after Election Day, lots of Americans are still trying to grapple with the odd result that our vaunted democratic system spat out: The guy running the country is disliked by most of the people in it.

The most recent marker of America's unhappiness with Donald Trump is a Quinnipiac poll released Wednesday showing that just 38 percent of voters approve of the job he's doing. A majority of respondents thought Trump was dishonest, not level-headed, and a bad leader who doesn't care about average Americans or share their values. Though more people approve than disapprove of his handling of the economy, most voters in the poll were opposed to his high-profile executive action suspending refugee admissions to the US. (Though most respondents also thought of Trump as being "strong" and "intelligent," so life's a rich tapestry I guess.)

That poll follows a trend (stretching back to before the inauguration) of Americans not liking Trump. He was the least popular incoming president since people started caring about polls, and his following through on his anti-immigrant, anti-regulation rhetoric hasn't made him any more beloved. Combine that with the mass protests springing up in American cities, and you're left with an impression that opposition to Trump is both deep and wide.

Trump is understandably cheesed at all this. He's called these polls "rigged," insisted that "any negative polls are fake news," and also highlighted one poll that found a majority of Americans approved his controversial travel ban. But though low approval ratings annoy the president and warm the cockles of left-leaning Americans, they don't mean much at this point. Why is that true? Let us count the ways:

A Lot of Polls Say Different Things

King poll nerd Nate Silver wrote a whole thing this week about the varying approval numbers polls came up with depending on whether they surveyed all adults or registered voters or likely voters, and whether the polls were conducted online or through automated scripts or by live interviews. Basically, there are a lot of numbers floating around out there—some often right-leaning pollsters put Trump's approval rating at 55 percent, while Pew and Gallup have him hovering around 40 percent. If the truth is somewhere in the middle, that's a pretty big middle.

The Partisan Divide Is Enormous

If these numbers indicated that Trump voters were changing their minds about him, that would be major news—but that's not happening. Only 10 percent of Republican voters surveyed by Quinnipiac disapproved of Trump, while 83 percent approved of him. This is backed up by other data showing how polarized America is right now, which goes beyond people's opinion of Trump. After Trump's victory, the number of Republicans who viewed the economy as being excellent or good suddenly jumped, according to Pew. The perception of the media also breaks on partisan lines, with Democrats trusting the press more than Trump and Republicans trusting the president more. It's possible to explain Trump's unpopularity as a byproduct of few Democrats being willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Presidents Are Sometimes Very Unpopular

It's true that Trump hasn't enjoyed the positive approval numbers that most newly minted presidents enjoy. But he lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million ballots, a record negative margin for an election winner—he could hardly have expected a honeymoon period. And presidents throughout the 20th and 21st centuries have often had sub-40 approval ratings, including Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama in their first terms. Historically, those low numbers have come at times when the overall US economy is doing much worse than it is now, but presumably there are things Trump could do that would push his approval rating up between now and any election. Which brings us to:

No One Is Voting for a While

This is obvious, but: Trump isn't up for reelection until 2020, and even the 2018 midterms are a long way off. Harry Enten at FiveThirtyEight took a very early look at the relationship between presidential approval ratings and midterm results. Dive in if you want—but the overall takeaway is that local conditions (like what sort of candidates the opposition party fields and how aggressively gerrymandered House districts are) will matter a lot. So will voter turnout and which demographics of voters turn out. It's complicated! Let's move on.

It's Not Clear if Democrats Can Take Advantage of Trump's Weaknesses

Here's the big one: It's not like millions of people woke up in January and just realized that, actually, they didn't really care for Trump's personal brand of laziness, bluster, cable news ethno-nationalism, and authoritarianism. Though many pre-election polls were wrong, the RealClearPolitics poll tracker showed Trump's approval rating had been underwater throughout the campaign, a result that's consistent with everything we've seen since Election Day. Trump won anyway, at least partly because Hillary Clinton's numbers were even worse. Both candidates were intensely disliked, and it's possible that Clinton would have a low approval rating were she in office—Republicans likely wouldn't take to her more than Democrats have taken to Trump.

For Democrats to actually unseat Trump, or flip enough seats in Congress to take control of it, they'll need to do more than demonstrate Trump is bad, they'll need to convince voters that they can do better. Trump's unpopularity in that Quinnipiac poll was part of a broad dissatisfaction voters had with their elected officials—Republicans in Congress had a 31 percent approval ratings, and Democrats were at 32 percent.

Trump didn't win the White House because people liked him. He won because a lot of Americans hated what their government had come to represent, and trusted Trump to at least disrupt things. Trump's opposition will have no problem in 2018 and beyond demonstrating that things are broken. The trick will be selling the fix.

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(Top photo: People protesting health care reform in the US hold a photo of Andrew Breitbart, who had a few things to say about cultural Marxism. Photo: Charles Dharapak AP/Press Association Images)

On the 22nd of July, 2011 in downtown Oslo, the right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik – who once gifted his mother a vibrator – detonated a bomb outside the prime minister's office, killing eight. He then drove 25 miles to Utøya island, where the ruling Labour Party's Youth Rally was being held, and began an hour-long shooting spree that ended with 69 more dead, most of them teenagers. That morning he had electronically distributed a 1,520-page tract, 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, decrying the "rise of cultural Marxism/multiculturalism in the West". Later, he said the massacre had been a way of publicising his manifesto.

The trope of "cultural Marxism" has been steadily gaining traction among the broad and diverse entity that is the radical right (although, hating diversity, they would baulk at you saying so), where it serves as an umbrella term variously responsible for such un-American and anti-Western ills as atheism, secularism, political correctness, gay rights, sexual liberation, feminism, affirmative action, liberalism, socialism, anarchism and, above all, multiculturalism. The ultimate goal of cultural Marxism, we're led to believe, is to slowly and stealthily dilute and subvert white, Christian Western culture, thereby opening sovereign nations to rule by a one-world corporate government. Whether that's by Jews, lizards or communists isn't always clear.

So the theory goes, "cultural Marxism" was the master plan of a group of émigré Jewish-German academics – widely known today as the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory – who fled Nazi Germany in 1936, decamping to New York. What's certainly true is that, in an attempt to understand why the objective conditions of the European proletariat had failed to trigger widespread revolt, they concluded that religion – that great "opium of the people" – and mass culture served to dampen revolutionary fervour and spread "false consciousness". So, adding a splash of Freud to their Marxism, the likes of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse and Walter Benjamin trained their eyes on the subtle intertwining of social and psychic/sexual repression, believing that a revolutionary consciousness could be engendered through psychic liberation and more enlightened cultural forms and attitudes.

While these were the staunch views of a handful of left-wing thinkers writing in the middle of the 20th century, it does not follow that they have been the ideological architects of a wholesale takeover of Western culture. Yet those who believe it has already happened end up having to explain how George W Bush and the neocon hawks somehow served a leftist agenda.

The "cultural Marxist" conspiracy has a slippery genealogy through the American Right, beginning with its coinage by Lyndon Larouche in the early 1990s (although Hitler had warned of "cultural Bolshevism" during the 1920s). It passed through various esoteric journals and hard-right think tanks, and was picked up by paleoconservatives such as Pat Buchanan (author of The Death of the West), William S Lind and Paul Weyrich, and over the last decade has spread feverishly through the murkier, more hyper-masculinist and libidinally challenged corners of the web. It has been rolled out everywhere from the Daily Mail (whose editor accuses the BBC of cultural Marxism) to the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer, from Milo fans to meninists, becoming a staple of permanently livid YouTube ranters. Ubiquitous and almost infinitely flexible, it's the perfect scapegoat, yet betrays not only a mind-numbingly ill-informed reading of the Frankfurt School's output, but also a staggeringly stupid grasp of the historical process (spoiler: it's the requirements of international capital, not the string-pulling of a few sociologists, that has provided history's chief motor these last few decades).

"For Breivik, Breitbart and others, multiculturalism is a strategic goal en route to a globalist superstate"

Arguably the biggest boost for the conspiracy came from its liberal use at Tea Party rallies, where it was fastened on to by Andrew Breitbart, soon to be making cultural waves with his eponymous news aggregation website, focused initially on the ills of Big Government, Big Hollywood and Big Journalism: the dark troika of American society's takeover by cultural Marxism.

In his autobiography Righteous Indignation, Breitbart describes the discovery of cultural Marxism as his "awakening" – redolent of the "red pill" that all conspiracy cranks feel when the vast, anxiety-inducing complexity of the universe becomes pacified in the paranoiac, pattern-seeking mind, reduced to the imaginary order of some joined-up plot (the irony of "red pill", of course, being that it's taken from The Matrix, whose makers, the Wachowski Brothers, are now the Wachowski sisters – trans politics being another plank of cultural Marxism). Grasping its effects, he said shortly before his death in 2012, was like "putting the medicine in the sherbet […] My one great epiphany, my one a-ha moment where I said, 'I got it – I see what exactly happened in this country.'"

The self-righteous zeal animating Breitbart's subsequent kulturkampf drips through almost every interview, illustrating the propensity for the internet to enable a single person's prejudices, ignorance and resentments to seize the cultural narrative – to resonate in echo chambers, free of intellectual checks and balances.

For Breivik, Breitbart and others, multiculturalism is a strategic goal en route to the aforementioned globalist superstate: erode the foundations of the nation and the culture of its people, and hocus pocus, you have monolithic, monocultural (yet somehow also still multicultural) corporate rule. Apparently it hasn't occurred to them that the system of nation-states, with their tax havens and labour cost differentials, is intrinsic to the technocratic global order.

One of the principal delivery systems of cultural Marxism and the subversion of these wholesome Western norms – such that women can be more than housewives and non-whites are allowed to vote – is popular culture. Here's "editor-at-large" of conspiracy website InfoWars, Paul Joseph Watson – after Milo the most eloquently ignorant of the right-wing provocateur webslebs – helpfully explaining this mass indoctrination and degeneracy: "Why is popular culture so contrived, plastic, empty, meaningless, grotesque and incredibly retarded? Because from the 20th century onwards, post-modernist, moral relativist, critical theory-espousing cultural Marxist nihilists began to seize control of society … The goal? To completely undermine the foundation of Western civilisation and leave us open to subversion and capitulation."

And yet, in another of Watson's blustering sermons, we hear, over a montage of mainstream media logos, the following endorsement of capitalism: "A competitive market creates quality, because businesses fail if they don't please the consumer." Among the many ironies that Watson fails to grasp – aside from being a ceaselessly haranguing critic of mainstream media bias making his pro-capitalist point over a montage of MSM logos – is that the culture industry is precisely the result of … [extreme Paul Joseph Watson voice] … CAPITALISM. This point was perhaps most forcefully made by … [extreme Paul Joseph Watson voice] … THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL.

And what about the sexuality of Miley Cyrus that so terrifies him? Is that also some scheme of those notorious Marxists, Disney and Sony? No, that's market forces – capitalism grinding its crotch in your face. (Mind you, it's not clear how, exactly, bemoaning the "hypersexualisation" of pop culture, which forces men-victims to re-trench into "neomasculinity", squares with interviewing porn stars roped in to repudiate rape culture, whose online omnipresence presumably has very little to do with the "hypersexualisation" he laments.) People want it, however dreadful it might be. And that's exactly the point about capitalism: it has precisely zero intrinsic beliefs. None. It doesn't operate by meanings. It's mathematical. Make bank! And it can monetise anything, from the faithful's desire to access the Kingdom of Heaven through to alt-right YouTube cranks. If ultra-conservatives can make profit off Miley's crotch, they will.

If universities are churning out so many Marxists, why no collective ownership of the means of production?

Despite Breitbart's assertion that "we experience [cultural Marxism] on a day-to-day basis, and by that I mean minute by minute, second by second: it's political correctness and it's multiculturalism", the ultimate failure of this long Marxist insurgency can surely be gauged by, y'know, the total absence of any Marxist government in the West since Adorno and crew tipped up in the USA, or the fact that the world's 67 richest individuals have the same wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion, something that Lenin would most likely have frowned upon. Or to look at it still another way: if universities are churning out so many Marxists (excluding the now defunct Trump University, of course), why no collective ownership of the means of production?

It's all nonsense, of course, the overheated product of the free-floating pathologies informing each new lunatic claim that shapes the alt-right's toxic ideologies.

The idiocy of the cultural Marxism conspiracy is demonstrated by the way the neo-nationalist anti-globalist New Right ascribes the dynamics of the idea to the left, identifying and conflating cultural Marxism with late-capitalist globalisation. This is a fairly major misunderstanding of the Marxist worldview. Likewise, positing as the principal organ through which cultural Marxism propagates itself the pop culture that the Frankfurt School so explicitly denounced would strike them as the saltiest of ironies. And colossally stupid.

But then, as Frankfurt School expert Martin Jay notes, "We have clearly broken through the looking glass and entered a parallel universe in which normal rules of evidence and plausibility have been suspended." And that's the perverse beauty of a conspiracy theory: the more that people denounce it as crazy, the more it stiffens the conviction of its adherents that they're correct ("We must be, because no one else believes it, and you sheeple are all brainwashed, ergo…") to the point where they end up pitying you: "If only you could see the signs: they're everywhere!"

And so cultural Marxism – this protean right-wing bogeyman responsible for Queer Studies, globalisation, bad modern art, women wanting a life on top of babymaking, African-American Studies, the 1960s, post-structuralism: essentially, everything that isn't nationalist, "white" and Christian – ends up becoming akin to a cheap condom: stretched to the point of uselessness.

@reverse_sweeper

More on VICE:

The Sad Truth About Milo Yiannopoulos

Ex-Neo Nazis Explain What's Driving the Alt-Right

What Happened When I Trolled an Alt Right Hero

A large, rugged boulder sits in the middle of the gallery on a sheet of grey metal. From a distance, it could be a piece of minimalist art, a hunk of rock torn off the land. That is, until you realize there's a human inside.

Abraham Poincheval's work Pierre (French for 'stone') is a performance work that began on February 22, 2017 at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and is running through the week. Part-sculpture, part-endurance test, the boulder contains a cut-out section to accommodate the shape of Poincheval's seated body, arms outstretched.

By choosing the 13-ton limestone rock as the material for this work, the artist questions the different timeframes that humans work within. "I will achieve a mineral journey," Poincheval told Creators before he entered his new rock entombment. "For this work, I wanted to experiment [with] another time than ours, to melt in a geological time, much longer than ours and which seems slower. You should see it as a trip at the geological speed."

Read more on Creators

Just over a month after a VICE investigation showed how a $100 annual medical co-pay for Texas inmates is emptying commissary accounts and creating hardship for families without raising serious cash for America's largest prison system, lawmakers are considering doubling that co-pay to $200.

Desperate to cut hundreds of millions of dollars from the budget during their upcoming biennial legislative session, officials are zeroing in on the rising healthcare costs of an aging prison population, as the Houston Chronicle reported. The problem is that only 15,000 people paid the co-pay in 2014, out of a prison system that averages more than 150,000 prisoners every year. As the VICE investigation showed, many prisoners either empty their "trust funds" (a.k.a. commissary accounts) to qualify as indigent—which entitles them for free care—or else avoid seeing a doctor altogether so they don't have to pass the burden of scraping together money for the co-pay onto their families.

Which is to say the co-pay only hits a chunk of the inmate population, but when it does, it hits hard.

In an email, the director of public information for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ), Jason Clark, suggested officials were not even considering raising the co-pay. "Any change to co-pay amount would require legislative approval and there are no bills currently before the Legislature regarding offender medical co-pays," Clark wrote.

Testimony delivered to state lawmakers earlier this week and a conversation with at least one of them suggest otherwise. Jennifer Erschabek, executive director of the Texas Inmate Families Association, which advocates on behalf of the families of the incarcerated, went so far as to say state prison officials are running a "shell game" where the fee increase is decided on during ongoing budget negotiations without sufficient public debate.

"The spokesman is saying there's no bill out there, because of course there's no bill out there," Erschabek told me. "They're negotiating it right now." (Follow-up requests for comment to TDCJ went unanswered.)

Kelsey Vela, a fiscal coordinator for the Legislative Budget Board, testified Monday to state lawmakers on the Corrections Committee that "funding alternatives" for the prison healthcare system "include raising the offender healthcare fee from $100 to $200." Vela then submitted a report to the committee that included details of the fee increase, by "amending Government Code 501.063 to increase the offender healthcare fee from $100 to $200 per year."

The report goes on to say that while 50 percent of offenders are deemed indigent, and therefore don't pay for their healthcare at the moment, "funding for an increased health care fee would be drawn from future trust fund deposits." For advocates like Erschabek, this revelation is "shocking," as the plan means placing even more of a burden on Texas families by increasing the amount that will be docked from deposits to commissary accounts.

But James White, a state representative and chairman of the Corrections Committee, is seriously considering the co-pay increase proposal.

"In lean times, we take a particularly close look at recommendations, and we will weigh this proposal relative to all of the other cost-saving measures," White, who voted in favor of installing the original co-pay in 2011, told me. "In times where in the free world families are suffering through escalating healthcare costs, they're paying co-pays, they're paying deductibles—there's no reason why we can't ask prisoners to do the same."

Pressed on whether the co-pay has been placing an additional and undue hardship on the families of the incarcerated, White recoiled.

"Let's get a grip. We're not requiring this of the families," he said. "The inmate receives healthcare whether they have money or not. The money is sent to the offender. It's under the control of the offender." White then compared the commissary account to a checking account used by college students, where their parents fill the account with money, but the students choose how to spend it.

Watch the Daily VICE segment on the app that promises to test what's in your weed.

Texas's state government only meets once every two years for a marathon series of legislation and budget negotiations. This time around, Texas governor Greg Abbott has proposed a scorched-earth budget that started with a hiring freeze on all state employees. He's also looking to cut funds across the board, seeking an almost 3 percent reduction in discretionary spending.

Healthcare for Texas's sprawling criminal justice system cost the state roughly a billion dollars last year, while the state collected just $2.5 million from the co-pay.

"This co-pay is totally indifferent to the burden that it puts on the families," Erschabek, the inmate family advocate, said. "It's just crazy the band-aids they're trying to use to cover a system they can no longer afford."

Follow Max Rivlin-Nadler on Twitter.

If you couldn't imagine anything worse than a schoolbus of full of screaming children, I present to you: a schoolbus full of screaming school children ON SPEED.

This nightmarescape is an actual thing that happened on Monday morning, disrupting the calm in the normally quaint town of Saint Paul, Quebec.

According to a report by TVA, a bus driver trying to calm down a squabble discovered the children were arguing over a jar of something they all believed to be candy. But according to a couple of the kids' parents, the goods quite a few of the children are believed to have ingested was apparently a bunch of speed.

Reporters were told that a six-year-old boy had found the tablets in his snow pants pocket, where his stepfather had allegedly opted to hide his stash.

Though there are no reports of serious illness or injury, one parent did bring her daughter to hospital after she complained of stomach pains.

The Sûreté du Québec (the provincial police force) is currently investigating, but a spokesperson says it's too early to confirm that the children were in fact cranked up on amphetamines. "We're currently investigating to determine the type and origins of these pills," Sergeant Ronald McInnis told VICE

While McInnis couldn't confirm whether this could lead to arrests, he said the school board, the school, and the child protection agency were also involved in the investigation.

Follow Brigitte on Twitter.

If drones ever reached the singularity and attempted to wipe out the human race, we can rest assured that the rest of the animal kingdom wouldn't go down quietly. The future drone wars will apparently not only be fought from the sky by selfish eagles—tigers will also wreck the flying robots if they fly too low to the ground.

Some Siberian tigers in China demonstrated that when they were caught on camera in their enclosure chasing down a drone and then leaping into the air, bringing it down for a feast. Unlike the French birds of prey being trained by the military to take down unmanned aircrafts, tigers seem naturally inclined to take down flying drones like they would a bird. The China Central Television footage even caught the large cats chewing on the robot's frame, probably puzzled at the lack of meat.

The drone—which Gizmodo points out was likely a DJI Inspire—was reportedly flying above the enclosure to grab some aerial footage of the hungry beasts. Whoever was flying it just happened to move it a too low, solidifying its inevitable fate.

If you found yourself in Saint Paul de Vence, a charming French village just a short drive from Nice, you might walk by James Baldwin's former house without even knowing it. It isn't much to look at now, and there is certainly nothing there to tell you what it once was. The house is bare—dilapidated even—the windows blocked by bricks and slabs of wood, shattered rock and snaking wires sticking out of its once vibrant structure. But it's still standing, something that means a lot to some people in the village.

While the house is just a shell of its past life, you can bet that Hélène Roux sees something completely different when she looks upon it.

When Baldwin first moved to her village in the early 70s, he was a far cry from that kid from Harlem, who fled the segregated United States for Paris with only $40 in his pocket. At that point, he'd already published multiple novels, and the successful essay collection The Fire Next Time, which established him as an important voice of the civil rights movement, and got him on the cover of Time magazine in 1963. Despite such intimidating achievements, he was an approachable guy. Roux just called him "Jimmy."

Roux and her mother Yvonne would often visit his house, which was just down the street from the Colombe d'or, the Roux family's hotel and one of Baldwin's favorite haunts. His gate, never locked, was draped with bougainvillea and ivy. Roux remembers a grove filled with citrus trees and lots of roses, plenty of places for a young girl to get lost in. Baldwin would bring her mint syrup and grenadine while she played, and unlike the formal suit and tie he wore when debating at Cambridge or on the Dick Caveat show, he'd be wearing espadrilles—the local shoes of Provençal—and underneath his straw hat he often wore a big, white smile.

James Baldwin's house in Saint Paul de Vence. Photo by Shannon Cain

That cottage in Saint Paul de Vence now has two possible fates: It could be remodeled and turned into a residence for writers of color by activist Shannon Cain, who, last year, spent ten days squatting in the house to raise awareness about the property's history. This is what the author had always wanted, according to Roux, but the Baldwin family lost ownership of the house after he died of stomach cancer in 1987. If they can't buy it back, the house could end very differently.

The property is owned by a French real estate company called Socri, which is planning to build 18 luxury apartments on the ten-acre plot, according to Cain. It would erase the last physical trace of the author's time in Saint Paul de Vence, a place that he not only loved dearly, but took refuge in, according to Baldwin expert Magdalena Zaborowska, who has written numerous books on the author.

"Baldwin, who grew up in segregated New York city, who was targeted by the police, and who was victimized because of his sexuality as a queer person and because of his race, obviously had a really tough time finding places that were safe, that were nurturing," said Zaborowska, an Afroamerican and African studies professor at the University of Michigan. "And lo and behold, even though he associated himself with big cities, until 1971, when he went to the south of France, he found himself and really loved his home in that tiny village."

Despite the house's poor condition, it has become a pilgrimage destination for Baldwin fans, longing to connect with the place he lived and wrote. Roux said that lost travelers often ring the bell of her home in Saint Paul de Vence, wondering where the Baldwin house is. And while it's one thing to read a writer's work, "It's something to see where the writer actually lived, where he made sense of the world from," said Thomas Chatterton Williams, an American writer living in Paris, who chronicled his journey to the Baldwin home for The New Yorker.

"I was moved," Williams told me of his trip to see the house last year. "What's somewhat sad is, you know, often times black people don't have the ability to pass on wealth. Here was a guy who achieved so much, who truly excelled. But he died a kind of a really common kind of death, which was, without a piece of land, he said" "Something about that was sadly very African American."

Losing this house would be a loss, to the history of literature and to Saint Paul de Vence. And while Charles H.F. Davis, who is on the board of advisors at His Place in Provence, a group trying to raise money to save the house, hopes to see the house saved, "the legacy of Baldwin isn't determined by this thing being there or not being there." And that's true. Whatever happens to the house, whether it gets surrounded by wealthy condominiums or turned into a writers colony, Baldwin's work is having a resurgence that is bigger than any bulldozer. Raoul Peck's new film about Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro, has been nominated for an Oscar, and writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates are introducing the author to a new generation of Americans, hungry for advice on how to deal with America's race issues.

"Some of the things that make him so ill fit for the kind of black power era came back to make him kind of perfectly tailored to our own," said Williams. "The fact that he was gay, the fact that he was comfortable in a variety of cultures, that kind of made him intersectional before that was a thing."

That's the good news, that Baldwin's legacy is bigger than the loss of any one building.

But there's bad news too. Whether the house is saved or not, it wouldn't revive what has already been lost. The fact that Americans have to go all the way to France and break into an abandoned house just to experience such closeness with a black author is a sad footnote to this story either way. Because while you can visit the houses of William Faulkner and Herman Melville, according to Zaborowska, it's almost impossible to do the same with black authors. The real bad news is, out of over 70 homes of American authors open to the public, Zaborowska and I could find only four of African Americans: the homes of Frederick Douglass, Alex Haley, Martin Luther King Jr., and Langston Hughes (which was also recently slated for destruction).

"Baldwin's legacy in terms of a material setting, in terms of material culture attached to his life, has not been preserved," said Zaborowska. "And this has been true for many other black writers. So I think we have a huge task in front of us to really think through what the matter of black lives is and how to preserve it."

Follow Matt St. John on Twitter.

Hi Manitoba friends, mind if you answer a question for me?

Is your province, like, a bad sci-fi novel? A dystopian film with some serious budget issues? Something that briefly passes through the mind of Ridley Scott while he's on the pooper?

Because, if not, did you see the Manitoba RCMP's newest play toys?

Alright, if I'm being honest, maybe that's going too far, but, still, look at those things. These little beauties are the Off Road Vehicle Transport Pods just introduced by The Pas RCMP and will be used to service that, and the surrounding, communities.

While they may look like something thrown together by a prop director with only 125 bucks and a wagon to his name, they serve a pretty important purpose for the people in remote locations who oftentimes are an afterthought for emergency services. They're not all that far off a snowbulance (another kick-ass invention.)

Here is how the RCMP describe them:

"The "Off Road Vehicle Transport Pods" are multi-faceted and can be used year round with a "wheel to ski" change out. These pods are heated, lighted and are equipped with a prisoner securement seat which can be removed allowing the pod to be used for patient transportation."

Before the transport pods the RCMP had to use a sleigh for the more remote areas in the central Manitoba community, now they got these guys.

Just imagine those bastards on skis. Picture, if you will, an angry RCMP officer ripping a '79 Yamaha Enticer across the Tundra, in tow this black egg with the most wanted criminal in Manitoba strapped in tightly (may I suggest The Smalls as background music for this day dream) and tell me that's not both badass and yet the goofiest thing you'll ever see.

Apart from transporting baddies, RCMP believe the pod can help with "ATV/snowmobile collision investigations, missing or lost hunters, remote crime scene investigations, transportation needs during or after major snow storms and a variety of other uses."

So, in the end, if they're useful and will help people, who gives a flying fuck if they look goofy as hell—honestly, it just makes them a little better.

Lead image: The Pas RCMP towing the "Off Road Vehicle Transport Pods" in a parade. Photo via Facebook

Follow Mack Lamoureux on Twitter

After two months of hazing—contour and makeup tests, socials and shows—the Rice Rockettes' Holiday Drag showcase this past December was the performance that would determine whether I'd be inducted into the historic all Asian American San Francisco drag house. The group challenged me to perform a pop number that incorporates political commentary.

I decided to sport a black leather harness and a sexy Santa velveteen one-piece; the number is "Into You" by Ariana Grande. And despite my traction-less stilettos and severely rushed tuck, I'm thrust on the stage, under hot, throbbing lights, about to lap dance a man with a sign taped to his chest that reads "Obamacare."

After mime-fisting Mr. Obamacare, a Trump impersonator forcibly removes him from the platform. "Into You" transitions into Anne Hathaway's rendition of "I Dreamed a Dream" from Les Misérables. I remove my wig and proceed to ugly cry and chop off all of my real hair with safety scissors. The Rockettes gasp, the audience cheers, and the bartenders groan as chunks of sweaty black hair flutter unceremoniously to the bar floor.

Within 24 hours, Rice Rockettes' drag mother and founder, Estée Longah, tells me that I've officially been voted in as their newest member. "May the gods have mercy on your soul," she says.

But don't let the frivolity give you the wrong idea—the Rockettes are a drag family with serious roots in radical, race-conscious HIV/AIDS advocacy.

The Rice Rockettes and friends, gathered on the stage at a show last year. Photos courtesy the author

The group's origins lie in an Asian American HIV/AIDS outreach project called the Rice Girls, a punny homage to the Spice Girls. In the mid 90s, as HIV rates began to rise among Asian and Pacific Islander men, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) saw a need for culturally competent methods to engage the community. They turned to trans Filipina activist Tita Aida ("Auntie AIDS" in Tagalog), who they hired to serve as a San Francisco health ambassador for the Asian and Pacific Islander community. Her outreach efforts often seemed more like stand-up comedy, and they routinely packed hundreds into 150-person-capacity bars.

In 1998, to kick it up a notch, she recruited five Asian American drag queens and health educators to accompany her in her outreach, a group she named the Rice Girls. They performed at the now-shuttered San Francisco gay bar N'Touch (short for "Asian Touch") with shows that acted out campy safe-sex scenarios on the stage before lip sync performances of Spice Girls singles. The CDC supported them through grants until 2005, when funding parameters shifted, and they were forced to disband.

After the Rice Girls disbanded, Tita took to grooming another drag queen—Alex Baty, another N'Touch performer—into the drag queen and community organizer she is today: Estée Longah. Alex soon teamed up with a cadre of drag collaborators to put on a performance fundraiser in 2008, and after rave reviews, she rebranded the group the Rice Rockettes, which today carry on the Rice Girls' activist-performance mission.

The Rockettes have since performed at pride festivals far and wide: the Gay Asian Pacific Alliance's Special Evening with George Takei, theme parks, special events, and, notably, before a seemingly confused panel of judges on America's Got Talent. They're now in their third generation of girls; in addition to founding members Estée Longah, Doncha Vishyuwuzme, and Chi-Chi Kago, members include Brenda Dong, Emma Hooker, Kristi Yummykochi, Imelda Glucose, LuLu M. Pia—plus myself, Panda Dulce.

But the road to becoming a member was not easy.

Imelda Glucose (left) and Kristy Yummykochi (right), performing

I've been doing drag for a while, but to join the Rockettes, I was subject to lengthy tests of my willpower, drag prowess, and loyalty. The first was a makeup tutorial, where Estée asked if I was right-handed (I am) and proceeded to paint the right side of my face—the easier side—before instructing me to perfectly recreate the look on my left. She and a Rockettes alumni closely examined my work, and after some deliberation, I passed. When I said, "Well, that was terrifying," she said, without a hint of humor, "We're Asian. Our hazing is subversive and psychological."

Over the weeks to come, I was pushed to my drag limits. I was asked to perform a conceptual routine that blended old-line, traditional drag with contemporary pop; I went with "Bitch I'm Madonna," dressed in the same Soviet-inspired S&M leatherwear as her music video's Asian backup dancers. I brought a walking cane and played "old," clutching my back during a shaky, belabored Charleston.

Then I was nearly eliminated by a lackluster Halloween performance. My fellow Rockettes pulled out all the stops—Kristy dressed up as a juggalette, brandishing a butcher knife and laughing maniacally during her set; Estée performed "Hello" by Adele as Samara from The Ring, whispering "hello" from the other side of a television—but my goth-skewed Azealia Banks performance was knocked for lacking surprises to keep the audience on their toes.

So surprises I brought. Fisting Mr. Obamacare with pudding-covered latex gloves and giving myself an Anne Hathaway haircut were my aces in the hole at my audition. According to the girls, that was the show that cemented me as a member. I was immediately asked to learn choreography for a performance at the Imperial Court, one of the world's longest-running and largestLGBTQ organizations.

Chi Chi Kago serves it.

"For me, the Rice Rockettes is all about inclusivity," said Imelda Glucose. "We're celebrating a community that are often othered in the gay world." And since the group's formation, it's moved on from solely focusing on AIDS/HIV to a larger mission: celebrating and empowering the LGBTQ Asian American community in all respects.

For Tita Aida, the Rice Girls and Rockettes promote more than just LGBTQ Asian American visibility. "Six of the Rice Girls have since transitioned to identify as trans women," said Tita. "This family can, and has, opened the door for young Asian American trans women to seek their authentic selves. It's modeling empowerment. There isn't a whole lot of that for Asians in the LGBTQ community."

In an age where Asian drag queens like Kimora Blac, Phi Phi O'hara, and Kim Chi have opened unprecedented doors for their community, breaking down barriers for Asian and Pacific Islander Americans in drag, their mission—to increase Asian American visibility in both drag and the larger LGBTQ community—has been made more attainable than ever. The Rockettes' monthly show remains one of the only regular events in San Francisco featuring solely Asian American drag queens, and through ongoing performances and outreach efforts, they're not quitting anytime soon.

Follow Kyle Casey Chu on Twitter.

When the British Ministry of Defense built a nuclear bunker in the English town of Chilmark in 1985, it was supposed to act as a government safe house in the event of a nuclear attack. But when the Cold War ended, it no longer had an official purpose—that is until a couple of men snuck in and allegedly transformed it into a giant marijuana grow house.

British police had suspicions about the fortress, which cops described as "almost completely impenetrable," and staked it out before raiding it on Wednesday. Once the officers got past the nuclear blast doors to the underground lair, they uncovered 20 rooms—each 200 by 70 feet—brimming with thousands of weed plants.

Wiltshire police detective inspector Paul Franklin told BBC News that it was one of the largest crops the force had ever seen, with a street value of about $1.25 million. Shortly after the discovery, cops arrested six men between the ages of 15 and 45 and charged them on suspicion of cannabis production and human-trafficking offenses.

The decommissioned fortified establishment is far from the strangest grow factory British police have stumbled on this month. Earlier in February, they uncovered a bunch of weed in an abandoned building at the Legoland theme park in Windsor—which was reportedly only accessible through land that's owned by the Queen of England.

Almost since the moment they backed in to being good thanks to the cold feet of James Dolan during the 2012-13 season, the Toronto Raptors have been faced with a difficult question: Is their core good enough to warrant mortgaging the future to push their near-term window open further?

Kyle Lowry, DeMar DeRozan, and company make for a very solid starting point, and a mix of depth, development, youth, and chemistry has helped the Raptors climb into the league's second tier. Even as the team rose to a franchise-best 56 wins and their first trip to the Eastern Conference final, the question of how to close the gap with the Cleveland Cavaliers during LeBron James' prime—if a solution to "how" even existed—continued. As this year's trade season approached, the Raptors complicated things further by playing poorly, ratcheting up the "is this team even good enough with an extra piece" side of the equation.

And so again 10 days ago, president Masai Ujiri and GM Jeff Weltman found themselves facing a tough conundrum: You have to maximize the Lowry-DeRozan window, but in the event that window still isn't good enough when maximized, there's an argument for maintaining long-term flexibility. What do you do, then? Add pieces now in hopes of taking a more aggressive shot at Cleveland, or hang on to assets to ensure the window, however small, is open longer?

Thursday's deadline—and the week-and-change that preceded it—answered those questions with a wink and a sarcastic question of their own: Why not do both?

Read More at VICE Sports

At his daily White House press conference, Sean Spicer painted a clearer picture of how the Trump administration views recreational marijuana by likening it to the opioid crisis, Politico reports.

After explaining that the president "understands the pain and suffering" that medical marijuana eases in some people with terminal illnesses, the White House press secretary went on to say, "Recreational marijuana, that's a very, very different subject."

"When you see something like the opioid-addiction crisis blossoming in so many states around this country, the last thing we should be doing is encouraging people," Spicer said. He added, "I do believe that you'll see greater enforcement of it."

Spicer was right in some regard, as the opioid crisis is "blossoming." Roughly 30,000 Americans died of an opioid overdose in 2014, but prescription-painkiller abuse is rarely associated with recreational weed use. In some cases, weed has even been used to help opioid addicts get clean.

Back when Obama was in office, the government generally didn't step in to discourage states from legalizing recreational marijuana, which has already passed in Alaska, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington. Spicer's statement seems to suggest that Trump's new attorney general, Jeff Sessions, might try to make it difficult for more states to try to legalize recreational use in the future. Sessions, who has been notably against expanding recreational marijuana laws, was vague about the issue during his Senate confirmation hearings.

Marijuana advocates, like Tom Angell of Marijuana Majority, find the move hypocritical.

"If the administration is looking for ways to become less popular, cracking down on voter-approved marijuana laws would be a great way to do it," Angell told VICE. "On the campaign trail, President Trump clearly and repeatedly pledged that he would leave decisions on cannabis policy to the states. With a clear and growing majority of the country now supporting legalization, reneging on his promises would be a political disaster and huge distraction from the rest of the president's agenda."

In 1987, Algerian-born Frenchman Didier Lestrade witnessed the early days of ACT UP while visiting New York. Two years later, he founded a Parisian counterpart of the AIDS advocacy and protest movement. Over the years to come, he and ACT UP became a pivotal force in improving medical care and reducing infection rates for HIV/AIDS in France.

The following essay—a reflection on 30 years spent living with the virus—was published last year on his blog. With the 30th anniversary of ACT UP's American birth next month, it's a moving consideration of the HIV crisis in a personal light that's too often unseen.

A friend recently told me he had become disillusioned and no longer had the righteous indignation with the world that I did, and I thought to myself, secretly, that it had to be because I'm HIV-positive. Last April marked 30 years since the test that thrust me from one reality to another. I was 28, it was at the Centre Fournier, and I'm not going to hash it out again. It was a nonevent. I didn't walk back home crying. I told my first real boyfriend, who went and got tested and learned he was positive as well, I told my brothers quickly enough, and then I became a militant, pure and simple.

I discovered ACT UP in New York on my first trip to America in 1987. My lover at the time took me to my first meeting, and what I saw was such a revelation that I co-founded the Paris group in June 1989 and stayed involved for the next 15 years.

I wrote about my seropositivity at my tenth anniversary, and my 20th, but my 30th has me torn between disaffection and the astonishing realization that 30 years is an entire life. I became positive before some of my friends were even born. I keep reminding myself that I never thought I'd live for so long. My survival has been uncertain enough that I've never decided whether I should do anything serious with my life. I've had to steel myself against survivor's guilt as everyone else got sick and died while I didn't. Little by little, I stopped caring that everyone else was passing away. I've become the armor I built for myself.

I've seen enough gay guys hit their 30th anniversary that it's not so surprising anymore. A decent number have even been positive for 35 years. We all have the same face. We all know that this epidemiological crisis is the most extraordinary one in modern times; we've seen its effects on science and sexuality. It's not over; those awaiting treatment still outnumber those who have their disease under control. But the victory is still real. We've done something with our lives. Ours and everyone else's.

Now the nurses who drew our blood from the very first day are retiring. We'll follow suit in a few years. We'll get older; we'll keep apace with all those who haven't been positive. We'll hold back from dwelling on what we've lived through. Maybe we won't have completely bored you talking about our condition. We'll have spared you. We won't have told you about the worst of it; most of us will have resorted to adages that are now truisms. The worst of AIDS hasn't been told. The books and films have been too afraid of scaring off our hard-won allies. And there's always that fear something worse will come along, a far more serious illness with less prospect of treatment. Car accidents are far more fatal. Victims of warfare and terrorist attacks and famine make us look fortunate. So we've tried not to annoy you too much, even if some of us cashed in on our masochism.

What gets my blood boiling these days is that I have to take a dozen pills every night. Every single night, every single night, every single night. This repetition since 1991 has driven me crazy on the inside. Over those 25 years, that fury has forced me into every single contortion I could devise. I'm worn out by this compliance, even though I know anger and fatigue are pointless—it's my own prison, one that nobody can ever see or understand. I know it's nothing compared to what diabetics endure, but I could have become an insomniac conniving to take those pills as late as I possibly could each night. I've come so far in my hatred that I take these tablets by myself, as if I were hiding them from my guests, even though they don't care, even though I used to intentionally swallow them in front of everyone, to inure and educate them. But these days, it's as if I want to shield them from this truism I've become.

Being HIV-positive changes you irrevocably, and these pills are the miracle workers that you have to show anybody who might claim it's not that serious to seroconvert in 2016. Three hundred sixty-five days multiplied by 25 years makes 9,125, but that doesn't convey just how exhausting this repetition has become. The worst part is that I'm actually grateful. These pills, even the most toxic ones, have allowed me to live. My faith in medicine has only increased. Those dealing with my health, skin, teeth, sight, heart, bones, guts—I owe them my soundness of mind. But 30 years, I'd never have imagined it. I didn't want to die, but I didn't mean to live so long.

Over these 30 years, we've managed to overpower this illness. But other conflicts have intensified in this time. A virulent virus turns out to have been easier to eradicate than colonialism or imperialism. The environment is going to hell. Wars and attacks flare up everywhere. Famine is now compounded by drought. And all the rich just get greedier. A friend stopped by two days ago and said what I've been thinking recently, that gay people ought to be happy. But we're still a reminder of what has happened, of what we've endured. People abandon us one day or another, with just a text message and no explanation of why they don't want to see us ever again. And we have to keep quiet, we have to not get angry, we have to accept that we scare them since we're positive and, often, they're not.

Younger generations don't want to know anything, and the older ones are ashamed of their past. And the rest of us are dying off, all of us wellsprings of knowledge with thousands of stories to tell but nobody listening. All that's left are these pills that we hide and don't talk about.

And Sidaction, that annual AIDS awareness event, has created an advertising campaign that reduces what we in France call SIDA and you call AIDS to its simplest form: "It's complicated."

Well, yes, we know.

Translated from the original french by Jeffrey Zuckerman

The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday voted to eliminate open internet transparency protections for millions of consumers, in the Trump administration's most overt salvo yet in its nascent campaign to dismantle net neutrality protections.

As a result of Thursday's action, "thousands" of small and medium-sized internet service providers (ISPs) around the country are no longer required to give their customers detailed information about broadband prices, speeds and fees, according to the FCC.

The newly-rolled-back disclosure requirements, which were designed to help consumers make informed decisions when selecting an ISP, were a key part of the FCC's 2015 policy safeguarding net neutrality, the principle that all internet content should be equally accessible.

Republican FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, a former Verizon lawyer who was installed by the Trump administration to lead the agency last month, framed Thursday's action as a move to "relieve thousands of smaller broadband providers from onerous reporting obligations."

Pai, who has claimed to be a champion of "transparency," asserted that removing the disclosure requirements would allow ISPs to save money that can then be used for broadband deployment.

Read more on Motherboard

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