Boaty McBoatface—the infamous submarine that the internet voted to give a stupid-ass name—is setting off on its debut Antarctic expedition this week, Gizmodo reports.
Originally, Boaty McBoatface was supposed to be, well, a boat after the UK's Natural Environmental Research Council decided to put the name of a new research ship in the hands of a public vote. When the public opted to go with something brain-bleedingly dumb, the British government decided to change things up.
The boat was subsequently named after Sir David Attenborough—the satin-voiced narrator of Planet Earth, among other things. The name "Boaty McBoatface" was relegated to something less important, in this case, a small submarine, instead. It's that sub that is now making its maiden voyage into the wild beyond.
The autonomous submarine named McBoatface is one of three long-range subs developed by the National Oceanography Center. It will set off on a mission to help map deep sea currents in Antarctica. The information will hopefully give some insight into how climate change is dicking around with the natural flow of the ocean.
Seeing as how a former reality star runs America and the EPA is helmed by a dude who's one bad haircut away from being a Captain Planet villain, it's only appropriate that a stupidly named submarine is going to play a pivotal role in understanding climate change. This is our world now.
When I found out that Toronto police had targeted Cannabis Culture—a dispensary chain run by Canada's most prominent pot activists Marc and Jodie Emery—in a cross-country sting, I waited with anticipation to see what charges would be laid.
In addition to raiding seven Cannabis Culture dispensaries, in Ontario and Vancouver, the cops' operation—Project Gator—resulted in searches of four private residences. I asked Toronto police spokesman Mark Pugash why Cannabis Culture in particular had been targeted, to which he replied, "I think when the case goes to court that'll become clear."
My impression was that the investigation would yield charges that went beyond just selling pot.
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Alas, I was a little disappointed when the cops released that information and it turned out to be more of the same. The Emerys and fellow Cannabis Culture franchise owners Chris and Erin Goodwin and Britney Guerra were charged with multiple offences relating to possessing and trafficking a Schedule II drug (weed).
The question is: why? Why now, with the federal government so close to legalizing and regulating marijuana, and with the public accustomed to and accepting of dispensaries?
Toronto police raid a dispensary during Project Claudia. Canadian Press/Cole Burston
In response to those questions, Pugash told VICE it now looks like legalization may take longer than expected and that "the idea that we ignore the law because it's going to be changed is a curious argument at best." He also said, without presenting any sort of evidence, that he imagines the people living closest to dispensaries would be pleased with this level of enforcement.
But those arguments don't stand up. We know that the groundwork for the legal regime is coming, likely this summer. We also know that police forces have discretion when it comes to how they allocate resources—in Vancouver, for example, cops have explicitly said dispensaries are not a priority for them.
"I'm always going to focus on the things that have to do with violence, before the things that are non-violent. And right now we're not seeing a lot of violence related to marijuana, but we are seeing violence related to harder drugs," Vancouver police chief Adam Palmer told CBC.
Pugash challenged that sentiment, pointing to the spate of violent armed robberies that have taken place in Toronto in recent months. But Vancouver, where dispensaries have actually been licensed by the city, doesn't have the same robbery problem.
Defence lawyer and cannabis advocate Paul Lewin told the Toronto Star dispensary owners here are scared to report robberies to the police, believing it could cause them to be raided or worse, criminally charged.
"It's kind of like we're saying you don't deserve the protection of society because you're involved with a dispensary. That's the effect of it," he said.
In other words, the heavy-handed enforcement is likely contributing to the problem.
As for the public, who largely support both legalization and the sale of cannabis in dispensaries, a cursory glance of reaction to Project Gator shows many people questioning why cops would go after soon-to-be-legal weed dealers when a fentanyl crisis is gripping the country. It's the same reaction we saw after the Project Claudia dispensary raids last spring.
The Emerys claim the crackdown is the government attempting to cut dispensaries out of the picture, securing a monopoly for licensed dispensaries once legalization is in place.
The simpler explanation though, is that they're being made an example of.
As far as pot celebrities go, it doesn't get more a A-list than the Emerys, and they've used their platform to openly sell weed to anyone of legal age. That brazenness made the couple an easy target for a police force that is clearly not ready to let go of a prohibition era. Thing is, the Emerys have already re-opened Cannabis Culture shops, and even if they hadn't, there are hundreds of other dispensaries to take their place.
By the time this case makes its way through the court system, weed will likely be fully legal, so both the laws and public opinion will be onside with the Emerys. Neither will be true for the Toronto police.
When Avery* arrived at the door of a New Westminster, BC recovery home just after Christmas, he was still feeling fucked up from an overdose the night before. The 25-year-old had spent the last five months sober in a treatment centre where "everything was all good." But after relapsing hard, he knew his caretakers wouldn't let him stick around and risk derailing the treatment progress of other patients.
"They had to remove me from the situation," he told VICE.
It was up to Avery to find his own back-up plan, but because the province's recovery industry is so strained by the deadly rise of super-potent synthetic opioids, he had no luck finding a comparable treatment centre bed. "I didn't have a lot of options," he told VICE. "I started phoning around, but nobody would take me."
A friend referred him to a "recovery home" that had a sketchy reputation, but was pretty much guaranteed to take him that day. Recovery home is a broad term that applies to many different kinds of live-in spaces that claim to help clients beat drug addiction—it does not refer to government-run treatment, detox, or community care.
There are about 80 recovery homes that receive funding from BC's assisted living registry in the Lower Mainland, most of them in Surrey. On top of that, there are many more unregistered ones that operate openly without any government oversight or resident protection.
Avery didn't know the name of the place, or whether it was on the assisted living registry. "It was well known as a flophouse-type situation, but it was a last resort for me," he said.
When he arrived, Avery was told to hang out while they figured out where to put him. "From all outward appearances it looked normal," he told VICE, "but it was a really shitty house. There were no carpets, the flooring was all just concrete… there were holes in the walls." He would later learn there were no meetings, no check-ins, no 12 steps. He says they let him walk in with a bag of heroin still in his pocket.
There were two or three beds in each of the house's four bedrooms—all of which, Avery found out, were already taken. The food in the kitchen was all donated, though much of it had expired according to Avery, and not long after arriving he spotted a rat. Avery asked for a place to lie down, and was directed to a ripped couch with the stuffing coming out in a "gross and grimy" basement, where he would spend the next three nights.
"You just don't want to be there," he said. "It wasn't a healthy environment."
Avery was pretty sure others in the house were using, and on a bad day decided to follow that lead. He recalls prepping a hit on that broken-down couch, and then everything went black. "I ended up ODing again," he said. "I didn't know what happened, I just remember waking up in the hospital."
Released from the hospital the next day, Avery spent the next week trying to get his stuff back. When he finally showed up to claim his belongings, his iPod, headphones, and cash were missing. Despite being robbed and overdosing, Avery told VICE his experience wasn't as bad as it could have been—he's just grateful that he's alive.
We have no idea how many people are dying in situations like these. In a year where nearly 1,000 British Columbians died of drug overdoses, BC's coroner was not tracking how many of those deaths were happening in recovery homes, which has one critic calling for urgent action.
VICE first reached out to the BC Coroner about overdoses in recovery homes in June 2016. At the time, a representative of the coroner said information on recovery deaths was not yet readily available due to the broad and contested definition of "recovery home." "Our coroners have called them a variety of titles, often based on what they name themselves," reads a spokesperson email. Some examples: "supportive housing, recovery home, treatment home."
To qualify as a legal recovery home, operators must provide housing, food, emergency response, and at least one prescribed service like counselling. Anyone with an available home can apply online, and after an interview, background check, and fire inspection, operators can start housing drug users. The process can take months or even a year.
Registered operators of the homes can collect $30 per person per day from the government—an incentive to put a roof over the heads of hard-to-house people. Though residents and workers in the industry say there are plenty of organizations doing life-saving work in this field, the industry has not been able to shake the proliferation of "flophouse" operators that take advantage of people trying to go sober.
Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives researcher Andrew Longhurst told VICE even registered spaces are held to few standards compared to treatment facilities. Through his graduate research at Simon Fraser University, Longhurst found operators are not legally required to provide a minimum amount of programming, staff, or supervision, and inspections have historically been few and far between.
***
With little regulation or oversight comes a dangerous dark side. VICE spoke to current and former residents of legal and illegal recovery homes in Vancouver, New West, and Surrey. Even those with positive things to say had first-hand experience with death in recovery.
One current Vancouver resident of a recovery home said his roommate died of overdose earlier this year, and another friend died recently. He described open sex and drug use in the home, with five to six residents relapsing a week.
One former resident of a Surrey recovery home told VICE a methadone clinic referred her to a notorious home when she said she would like to share a room with her girlfriend. Many underground spaces advertise through word-of-mouth as "420 friendly" or allowing couples and co-ed roommates. Another woman who left a recovery home a few weeks ago described dried blood on walls, and ceilings "caving in."
Two former residents described being kicked out a few days in, after their social assistance cheques were signed over to the operator. Welfare scams disguised as recovery homes is not a new phenomenon. Abstinence rules allow these operators to accuse residents of drug use, and kick them out after days-long stays.
"That's not recovery," one community support worker told VICE. "It's a giant scam."
Surrey's municipal government claims it has turned a corner on regulating recovery homes. In the last days of 2016, councillors told media about 20 illegal recovery homes still exist—down from as many as 250 in 2014—and a crackdown is still underway. But workers familiar with the system say as soon as one closes, another pops open across the street.
BC recovery homes were not required to carry naloxone until December 2016. Photo by Jackie Dives
Recovery home residents and support workers told VICE many facilities in Vancouver, New West, and Surrey did not carry the overdose-reversing drug naloxone on premise until December 2016.
"I am writing to you today concerning one aspect of your legal obligation to ensure the health and safety of your residents," reads a letter from the assisted living registry dated December 7, 2016. In the final weeks of a deadly year for overdoses, the province set out new rules: recovery homes must now keep naloxone kits in all buildings, and train their staff in administering it.
Employees at several facilities did not receive training in overdose response until late December and January, according to sources familiar with the training. Both of these efforts came well after overdose deaths surged in November, killing 128 across the province.
Relapse is something all addictions services have to deal with. Advocates say the risk to residents lies in how organizations react. "If we find residents using in the house, we take them down to the sobering centre right away," Steve Ryhorchuk, counsellor for Night and Day recovery homes in Surrey, told VICE. "We don't let people be a trigger for someone else."
Some residents are allowed to return after detox, whereas others are shuffled to another facility. It's often in situations like these, where a more reputable home has to quickly find a new spot for a relapsed resident, that drug users like Avery end up in underground, unregulated homes. Workers and residents familiar with the recovery industry know these places are widespread, and will suggest them to drug users who are prone to relapse or have other barriers to housing. Friends, support workers, methadone clinics, and even jails are all sources that lead people to unregulated and dangerous recovery situations.
Ryhorchuk said their organization saw one overdose death inside a home last year, even with daily check-in meetings, counselling, 24-hour staffing, classes, and recreational outings. Two staff confirmed Night and Day recovery did not have naloxone available at all locations until after the letter from the assisted living registry.
***
When the BC government declared a public health emergency in April 2016, leaders said real-time overdose data was one of the province's top priorities. "We have determined that in order to assist us in providing an enhanced response, a key need is for more information and more detailed information on the who, the where, and the when of these tragic incidents," provincial health officer Dr. Perry Kendall said at the time.
BC is still the only province in Canada releasing standardized reports on fentanyl-detected deaths each month—ahead of many other provinces. In 2016, the province's public data on "where" people are dying is sorted by municipality, and only differentiates between private residence, other residence, other indoor location, and outside.
Longhurst said the province should be looking closer at the places and circumstances in which people are dying of overdose, including recovery homes. "That should be tracked," he said. "That's a public health issue."
Drug users protest in Vancouver. Photo by Jackie Dives
Eight months after VICE first inquired about the number of deaths in recovery homes, an executive assistant to the coroner said this kind of systematic tracking is on the way, but not ready yet. "The BC Coroners Service is currently improving its data collection efforts to be able to report on recovery homes in the near future," Alana McMahen wrote in an email.
Surrey RCMP told VICE they cannot confirm nor deny any investigation into recovery homes or recovery home deaths.
Overdose incidents and deaths are also recorded through the registry. Assisted living registry documents obtained by VICE show few serious complaints make it through official channels. Between January 1, 2013 and April 17, 2016, 13 complaints were substantiated in the entire Fraser region, none of which were "serious incidents."
Advocates say the bottom line is, without alternative harm-reduction based housing, these dangerous spaces can't be shut down without increasing visible, street-level homelessness.
"From my research the ongoing tension in Surrey has been not wanting to shut down recovery houses for fear of seeing more people on the street," Longhurst told VICE. "On the other hand, there hasn't been attention or focus on working with the provincial government to really work towards getting more low barrier harm reduction housing and health services."
Whereas Vancouver's Downtown Eastside has harm-reduction focused assisted living licensed under a health authority, the wider suburbs do not have the same wealth of social non-profit housing. That leaves very few options for people struggling with concurrent mental health, addiction, and poverty issues.
Longhurst told VICE that recovery homes should be regulated through the health authority, to allow for better tracking and accountability. This would require more funding and political will than is currently on offer, but it's not totally out there; a similar system was even in place in BC before 2002.
And there are a few current non-profit models: supportive housing in hotels run by Rain City and Portland Hotel Society in Vancouver are contracted by Vancouver Coastal Health and monitored closely. "There's no reason that they shouldn't be meeting the high standard of licensing and regulation."
After those few days bottoming out on a dingy basement couch, Avery says he was lucky to get back into the treatment centre that was working for him. "They knew the situation that was going on, and they actually saved my life," he said. "They said we can't in good conscience send you back there."
Yet Avery knows others are sticking it out in dangerous recovery conditions. Without coroner tracking, we won't know how many never got a chance to bounce back.
Donald Trump's travel ban in the United States has been making waves north of the border for some time and now it seems that those waves have been powerful enough to spook the Girl Guides of Canada.
The group announced via their website on Monday that they will not be making any further trips to the United States. While not explicitly citing what some are calling Donald Trump's "Muslim ban" as the reason for snubbing the United States, the organization strongly alluded to it the statement, saying that "the safe, inclusive and accepting space" offered by the Girl Guides played strongly into their decision:
"These values are reflected in all we do, including the Girl Guide travel experiences we offer girls and women," reads the statement. "While the United States is a frequent destination for Guiding trips, the ability of all our members to equally enter this country is currently uncertain."
"As such, Girl Guides of Canada will not be approving any new travel to the United States until further notice."
Photo via Girl Guides of Canada Flickr page.
A spokesman for the group further alluded to the ban when speaking to the CBC. "We have lots of girls across the country that travel every year overseas and to the US," Sarah Kiriliuk, national manager of communications for the Girl Guides of Canada, told CBC News Network. "We really wanted to make sure that no girl gets left behind."
This ban will include all trips that involve a connecting flight through the United States—they also canceled a national trip that would have seen troupes from across the country visit California. The group has said that it wasn't a political decision but a preemptive one for the protection of their members.
This isn't the first time that Canadian youth services have avoided the US since President Trump's travel ban came into place. Schools across the country have been cancelling trips to the US because of the fears of one of their students not being allowed into the country.
Chelsea Clinton tweeted that the decision made by the group was "depressing but understandable."
I learned a lot at a swingers' retreat at Niagara Falls over the Valentine's Day weekend, but hanging out with the kinksters there was the most enlightening experience of all.
That was when I first heard about sounding—a form of cock and ball torture that involves inserting metal rods (like the one pictured above left) into the urethra, for pain and pleasure.
Even writing that description makes me clench my thighs together, but my curiosity was piqued, so I reached out to Julie, 37, a woman who has a long history of dominating her male partners. When it comes to cock and ball torture, Julie, who works in social services in Toronto, has pretty much done it all, including sounding, which she does not recommend for beginners. (For the record, women can sound too, but Julie hasn't tried or witnessed that.)
"I think if you want to start with [cock and ball torture], you should read books and talk to others and keep in mind that if you're watching it in porn, which is very fun and entertaining, make sure you don't just copy the person on porn," she said, adding she always makes sure to get consent from partners before trying something new.
These aren't sounds but they still look painful. Photo submitted
With that in mind, we asked Julie about some of the more extreme forms of cock and ball torture she's experimented with, focusing on the art of inserting rods into someone's pee hole.
VICE: How did you get into cock and ball torture? Julie: Over a decade ago, I used to live in the San Francisco Bay Area and it's a really big kink scene there. So I lived there with my partner who was also my submissive 24/7, and I was always sort of into sadism and I started wanting to learn about different techniques and things like that, so I read a couple books—there's a famous book called Family Jewels, which is about cock and ball torture. And I started watching videos on kink.com and there was one model who I really liked. She had a dominant style that I really enjoyed and I learned things from her.
What did you start with? Hitting, like slapping, clothes pins, biting, abrasion play, scratching. Eventually I learned from friends how to safely do ball kicking and sounding and things like that.
Did you have any mishaps I've actually slapped someone really hard on the pubic bone and he lost his breath, I slapped the wind out of him. But I've never had anything serious happen.
What do you do with clothes pins? You put them all along the loose skin of the balls and they grab on and what happens is that part isn't the painful part; if you squeeze them, take them off, and reapply them it hurts more because that's where the blood's gone.
Ball kicking sounds really painful. Like how hard are you kicking these guys? What you do is point your toes so when you kick, you hit him with the flat of your foot. You don't hit them with edges. I wouldn't hit someone with pointy shoes. I don't kick so hard that someone wants to throw up or something. It's always shocking to them even if they like it, it's always a shock to be kicked in the balls. I find a lot of this stuff is really sort of showy so it looks sort of more painful than it is.
Like wrestling... Yeah. Everyone finds cock and ball torture really shocking but it's not, it's just another way to hurt someone and it's fun.
Sounding sounds fucking crazy though. A lot of men are really squeamish about having things put inside their penis so I was like that's a great mind fuck, I gotta learn how to do that. My partner at the time bought me a basic sounding set for Valentine's Day. It's a Hegar sounding set, sort of the most basic common set and it comes with really small dilators to quite large.
So how do you get started? I went to a party with friends and they showed me all the safety things. Make sure you use gloves cause you don't want any kind of bacteria. The first time you use a set, you boil them and you use rubbing alcohol to keep them sterilized. And you need a lot of lube, you can't use spit.
And then what? You just allow it to slide in on its own, you can't push it, if you push it, you can cause problems, you can hurt their urethra, you can hurt their bladder. I let them drop in. It's not painful to just put it in, you're using lube and stuff. You can pull them in and out, you can rotate them, you can manually stimulate them so they have an orgasm with it.
How big are the sounds? They start at a couple millimetres and each end of the sound is bigger, if you flip it over. There are ones that are smooth, there are ones that are bumpy, there are ones that have a thick head but a thin rod, there are ones that scratch a little on the inside. That's a little risky, that's above my level.
What do the guys get out of it? My current partner finds the stimulation really arousing, he likes it. He has a goal, he likes stretching urethra, he sees it as a competition to see if he can stretch it further. Personally I'm not into a big gaping urethra. Other guys see it as a challenge because people are told you're not supposed to put things in your urethra.
What about for you? I like it when men don't like it. They allow me to do it, but it's not their thing. That's what's kind of fun for me. Another thing that I like about it is a few days after it may sting when they pee which is fun to have a little reminder. By the way, because sounds are metal you can electrify them.
What? So your urethra gets shocked? Usually with electrical toys if you put them inside you, they cause you to involuntarily squeeze and release the item.
How many people have you done this to? Somewhere between five and 10. I wouldn't call myself an expert, I would say i'm intermediate. There are people who use sounds, they push past and use it to stimulate their prostate. I don't do that because that's higher risk play and it's better for that person to do it on themselves. I don't want any medical emergencies.
What other extreme stuff have you done to dicks? I like trampling, you can stand on someone's penis and grind your feet on it. I like giving little cuts. For example, we bought brand new toilet brushes and I poured urine on my partner and then I punished him for having urine on him so I put him in an ice bath and scrubbed him with a toilet brush so they caused all these little cuts all over his body. For the next few days every time he sweat it stung a lot. As a punishment once, I put toothpaste in my partner's urethra. I know ppl who use hot sauce. I don't do that, especially with membranes it's kinda risky.
Anything else people should know about cock and ball torture? There's so many things you can do to cocks that aren't damaging, that are painful and fun but it would not hurt them long term.
On Tuesday morning, two runaway ponies scampered out into the streets of Staten Island, ostensibly to do the stuff ponies do best: galloping at a moderately fast (though wholly unimpressive) pace and pooping all over the place.
Local SI resident, Robert Stasio, told Gothamist he saw the ponies dicking around in the middle of an intersection over his morning bagel.
"I followed them and they started running," Stasio said. "As I was doing that I see the cops coming down the block with the lights on. I ran and I grab them by the mane and I was holding them, and [the cops] were trying to get a rope or something."
Metro US reports that another man then managed to capture the rascals using a tow strap, a process that remains to be explained, but hopefully it involved some sort of lasso maneuver and a little bit of pony wrestling.
The NYPD deployed its Special Ops Division to the scene and, with help from local police, returned the ponies to their owners. According to Metro US, the pony pair escaped after a particularly nasty gust of wind blew open the door to their barn. We can only hope that they're back in their warm barn now, continuing to poop and gallop.
Doug Gant was fresh off of work and chilling at a friend's house in Mays Landing, New Jersey, when his pants exploded. It happened in a matter of seconds: He was sitting at a table, he heard a hiss and a pop, and his leg was suddenly on fire. "I immediately got up, started smacking my pocket, and ran outside and disrobed in the front yard. I was like, 'I'm OK, I'm alright.' But then I looked at my leg, and it was just black and charred," he says.
Gant and his friend loaded into a car and took off for the local emergency room. He had suffered third-degree burns all down his leg and onto his foot, and two surgeries and five skin grafts later, he's still not 100 percent, he says.
The likely cause of the explosion: two lithium-ion batteries in the pocket of his Dickies—the same place he kept his lighter when he used to smoke actual cigarettes. But Gant, like 9 million other Americans, vapes. Now he speculates those batteries rubbed up against each other, causing them to ignite.
"After all this happened, I did some research, and apparently it's a huge no-no to keep batteries in your backpack or pocket, which I had no idea about," he says. There were "no warnings of any kind" printed on the batteries, Gant claims.
Still, Gant wasn't planning to sueuntil a lawyer reached out to him directly. "I figured, why not? If nothing else, it'll just raise awareness," he explains.
"What we're seeing a lot of is individuals with spare batteries that get overcharged. They're putting them in their pocket, maybe they have a little bit of change in there, and they explode," says Domenic Sanginiti, an attorney at the New Jersey law firm Stark & Stark. Sanginiti has filed seven e-cigarette cases, including Gant's, and is handling many more. "It's a lot more affordable for manufacturers to utilize cheap batteries," he says. There's A through D quality batteries, D being batteries that would be qualified to be used in the States. We're seeing A- and B-quality batteries that are sent overseas, repackaged by vape manufacturers, and are sold at a cheap price."
"The real problem is with these 'me too' companies—companies that are under-financed, and launch a thing that's not very thought out that maybe has a second-rate battery," says Mike Papantonio, a Florida-based civil trial lawyer, talk-show host, and member of the National Trial Lawyer Hall of Fame. "These companies are gonna wreak havoc in this area, because they're in, and then they're out. It's a methodology of externalizing all the risk, taking all the profits quickly, and moving out of the market quickly."
Sanginiti doesn't believe this will be a problem for long, but while it is, lawyers will lawyer.
"It's not a ten-year issue, it's more of a four- or five-year issue," he says. Eventually he believes federal regulation—which was just implemented last August—will kick in and weed out the bad actors. Until then, he and other lawyers will be there to collect settlements for clients who, like Gant, may not know where to turn.
There's certainly money to be made. In 2015, for instance, a woman named Jennifer Ries in California was awarded nearly $2 million after her vape pen exploded in a car charger.
"When you look at how they're handling the claims, they're using the Big Tobacco mold," Sanginiti says. "They just say, 'We'll just pay it. We'll fight it, and if we lose, we'll pay it.'" And lawyers like Sanginiti are happy to help assist.
Gant, meanwhile, is back at work, not yet fully recovered. He doesn't have any existential hopes riding on a settlement but is glad someone let him know it was a possibility. (Though Sanginiti reached out to Gant, he says most clients contact him, not the other way around.)
"There are still medical bills that need to be paid. I'm still an injured person. My foot took the brunt of it, and I still feel pain there," he says. "It's just like, I had no idea. I had no idea this could happen."
The boy insisted on being called "Buster." It wasn't his real name. That didn't matter. He idolized Buster Crabbe, the dashing, square-jawed actor who portrayed the interplanetary hero Flash Gordon in the Universal Studios serial of the same name. In them, Flash travels to the planet Mongo in a rocketship, where he encounters alien races, rights wrongs, and dazzles the camera with his suave, blond-haired good looks.
The boy named Buster was not blond. He was African-American with a branch of Cherokee in his family tree, possessing of kinky hair, a toothy grin, and wise-beyond-his-years eyes. His poverty-stricken family lived a less-than-dashing existence in Seattle in the 1950s. His mother and father were alcoholics. They fought violently and often. Buster would sometimes hide in the closet during his parents' rows, wishing he could somehow escape to Planet Mongo. There he could battle the villainous Ming the Merciless and rescue the swooning Dale Arden, earning the heroic virtue of his namesake, far from the squalor and broken bottles of home.
One night, Buster and his brother Leon witnessed something that would change their young lives. Outside their bedroom window, a disc-shaped UFO—like something straight out of Flash Gordon—hovered in their backyard. It floated there only a minute, but it was long enough to sear itself into Buster's tender young brain.
A little after 7:30 in the morning on January 28, 2016, 28 automatic-weapon-carrying SWAT team members approached a warehouse in a popular business district in San Diego. They knocked down the doors and pointed guns at two workers inside, commanding that they lie facedown on the ground, before proceeding to turn the place inside out. The police officers, part of the San Diego joint narcotics task force—an amalgamation of local cops from various agencies plus some supporting personnel from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)—found what they were looking for: $324,979 from a safe inside. A helicopter hovered overhead as they made their score.
The business was called Med-West Distribution, a medical marijuana dispensary operating in the open and, according to its owner, paying taxes in compliance with California medical marijuana laws, if not the letter of federal ones. Police, of course, claimed that the company was producing hash oil illegally. But the company maintains cops weren't going after the business for any type of wrongdoing—and that instead they just wanted to seize cash through the labyrinthine and punitive legal process known as "civil forfeiture."
"When they broke open the safe, you could see on the security camera the officers high-fiving each other with glee," James Slatic, the owner of Med-West, told me. In addition to the cash, the officers found Slatic's tax return, which they later used to freeze his bank account and his wife's, as well as that of his two daughters, one of whom was in the middle of a semester at college. Within a few hours, the entire family had effectively been rendered penniless.
Worst of all: No one was even charged with a crime.
Watch our documentary about civil asset forfeiture in America.
The Slatics' story has become all too typical in America, where cops, district attorney's offices, and the feds all use civil forfeiture to transfer massive amounts of cash and property from Americans who are never even charged with a crime to help fund law enforcement. And one of the chief boosters of the practice, Attorney General Jeff Sessions—who has vigorously fought against the bipartisan coalition that wants to finally put an end to civil forfeiture—recently become the top law enforcement officer in the country. President Trump has also signaled his support for the practice, albeit in an off-the-cuff remark where it was not quite clear he understood what he was being asked about. Still, he threatened to "destroy" the career of a Texas state legislator who was proposing statewide civil forfeiture reform.
Even with Trump's apparent support, civil forfeiture has proven odious to prominent members of both major political parties. Particularly upsetting to civil liberties advocates is that those trying to get their money back don't get provided with a lawyer—this being a civil, not a criminal case—and the cost of an attorney usually outweighs the amount of money seized anyway. But we still don't know whether an almost comically pro-cop White House will serve to unleash police and prosecutors when it comes to seizing suspects' belongings. Trump has already signaled that he'll be increasing funding for law enforcement, an infusion of cash that would either discourage police departments from resorting to forfeiture or one that could simply embolden them to pursue even more.
The use of civil forfeiture first exploded beginning in the mid 1980s, when President Reagan's Comprehensive Crime Control Act allowed police departments to "eat what they kill" when it came to seizing cash. In 1986, police departments participating in the Department of Justice's Federal Asset Forfeiture Fund took in just $93.7 million dollars. By 2014, that number had risen to $4.5 billion dollars. Over 88 percent of cases were being closed out administratively, meaning that people hadn't even tried to get their money or property back.
Alarmed by both the civil rights being denied, as well as the property rights being trampled on, lawmakers at every level have increasingly stepped up to take on the problem. Over the past five years, at least ten states have reformed the laws by which police departments seize cash. But most of the laws are so recent, it's unclear whether they've had an impact yet. On the federal side of things, change has been slower—in 2015, then attorney general Eric Holder worked to limit some of the more outlandish uses of the Justice Department's forfeiture program. Still, in many states, civil forfeiture remains a way of life. And in some states like New Mexico, where substantive reforms have already been passed into law, police departments are still seizing cash, leaving citizens stuck in endless legal battles.
Even with the stiff resistance from law enforcement, some advocates like Darpana Sheth, a senior attorney with the Institute for Justice, an organization that has led multiple lawsuits on behalf of victims of civil forfeiture—and is working with the Slatic family—are skeptical reform will be significantly impeded by the new administration.
"We're hopeful that the opposition that would come from the Justice Department would spur on Congress to take legislative action," Sheth told me.
Indeed, House Judiciary Committee chair Bob Goodlatte, a prominent critic of the practice, has said he intends to pursue comprehensive criminal justice reform this session, and Ted Cruz used his appearance at CPAC this year to commit to civil forfeiture reform in particular. And since Trump's election, even conservative states like Arizona have considered major new reforms limiting forfeiture; the State House voted 60–0 to advance a bill setting a higher evidentiary bar for pursuing forfeiture just last month.
"It's the state lawmakers that are really answering that call to protect both property rights and due process rights of our citizenry," Sheth said.
When we spoke, Slatic and his lawyer were set to file another motion in his ongoing case. He has yet to recover any of the money that was taken from his business or any of the money seized or frozen in the accounts of his family. All he can do is hold out hope that even as the broader cause of criminal justice reform runs into something of a wall with President Trump, the principle of innocent until proven guilty is reaffirmed in American life.
"We're just demoralized," Slatic says, sounding exhausted while listing the obstacles still ahead in the fight to get his money back. "This is the dirty little secret of our entire justice system, and people are finally figuring that out."
To help immigrants and refugees integrate themselves into society, Quebec City has put together a guide entitled "Québec, Une ville pour moi"—or in the Queen's English, "Quebec City, A City for Me"—based on "the needs expressed by various organizations, people involved in cultural communities and immigrants themselves during consultations."
But there's a cloud of secrecy hanging over this document. Little information has been circulated in the media about it, and VICE's many requests to city hall for interviews have met with dead-ends, aside for a few emails explaining the guide has not yet been distributed to the 135 organizations it's meant for. "Meetings will take place in a few weeks," they say.
The document was sent to us by an individual who wishes to remain unidentified, however, and the city confirmed the authenticity of the images. Here's look at what you'll find inside:
Questionable advice for living in Quebec City, "A City For Me"
The objective of " Québec, Une ville pour moi" is to serve as a compass for both Quebec morals and the way of life in La Belle Province, particularly in its capital city. So it lays out how to get a driver's license and navigate the health and school systems, while also giving suggestions for eating affordably and highlighting the importance of the French language.
Things get a bit surreal however when it comes to the necessity of wearing reflective tape to walk safely at night or the complete how-to sections on ovens and unclogging toilets, along with some finger-wagging on why it's important to wash your clothes and not beat your kids or piss in the street.
To get an idea of how the guide might be perceived by newcomers, we sent it to Samir Rahmouni, from Tizi Ouzou in Algeria's Kabylie mountain region, who is currently taking the steps to emigrate to Quebec. Rahmouni says he welcomes the passages on integrating into the workforce, housing, language-learning, and entertainment and recreation, which can help immigrants find their way more easily. Other portions he considered useless, like those dealing with "personal hygiene, and how to use the kitchen, electrical outlets, and furnace."
"I think the section on being a good neighbour —'Le bon voisinage'—in which immigrants might be amazed to learn that Quebec City is a city with buildings (no way!) and that these buildings in particular are inhabited by human beings (are you kidding me?) is quite condescending to immigrants. I took this part to mean 'Careful, dude, you're no longer living in your hut. '"
"I don't see what use this kind of information is for newcomers. On the contrary, I think it might have a negative impact, perhaps making them feel judged as uncultured, particularly given this section's language which talks down to immigrants as if they're children," said Rahmouni. "The people who wrote and approved this guide give the impression they're narrow-minded—full of preconceived ideas about immigrants."
Some parts of the guide appear to assume that immigrants have no knowledge of civil society, let alone the Canadian Criminal Code. Check out these six curious lines on incest at the beginning of the guide, which essentially add up to: "Parent + child = illegal."
On the other hand, readers are given a thorough six pages on Quebec weather, explaining that mittens are warmer than gloves and, come spring, "the maple sap flows and allows for the production of maple syrup," not to mention a firm grounding on how to decode a weather report and an entire paragraph dedicated to UV rays.
Precipitation gets explained in precise detail, but as far as incestuous relationships are concerned, best to lay it out as a simple math question. (Yet have they not asked themselves whether immigrants truly understand mathematical equations? Why not use an abacus or cuneiform writing engraved on a clay tablet? Mesopotamian refugees would be delighted!)
For Rahmouni, "[The guide] misses its primary objective, which is to inform immigrants about Quebec City and its way of life. Where it gets completely irrelevant is when it addresses the subjects I mentioned, which in my opinion are not the city's business and have nothing to do with helping people get integrated."
What's going down in Quebec City?
The city's opposition party has a number of questions about the guide. The leader of Démocratie Québec, Anne Guérette, has never held it in her hands. "It's a matter that was decided between four walls, in the mayor's office or by the executive committee. All I know is what I gleaned from the newspaper, like everyone else," she says, referring to an article in the Journal de Québec, which quotes from the guide. At the end of December, she had concluded that certain passages published in it were "insulting."
Guérette explained that she is unaware of what's going on with the file, and she's wondering if perhaps city hall has backed down since the attack in Quebec City. "Have they realized this guide was not a good idea? Are they trying to suppress it, make it disappear? They're not promoting it at least," she said.
The city has assured us, however, that despite this criticism from the leader of the municipal opposition, the guide has not been changed.
"The guide is a collection of removable pages. The appropriate pages will be given out according to the immigrating individual's needs (Children, Recreation, Finding Accommodation, and so on). When the sheets are given out, there will be somebody to ensure that the individual understands them well," said the city by e-mail.
*This article has been updated to add comments from Quebec City officials.
Iceland is a mystical, snow-studded wonderland where cold winds dance with hot springs and the Northern Lights are as awe-inspiring as they are unpredictable. It's not the country's idyllic scenery that first attracted Nick Turner, though. Rather than capturing Iceland's natural beauty in the form of volcanos, geysers, and glaciers, the artist chose to turn his lens on its wildlife, documenting his fascination with Iceland's horse population in a series of salient photographs that have him literally running naked among the beasts.
"I think there's a misunderstanding about the work," Turner tells Creators. "It's not me just running wild with horses naked, or anything like that. Far from it, actually. I'm trying to project this idea of running with them and being in that world because that's the dialogue I am having. I think man has a lot of primal, animal-like instincts."
New Zealand is a picturesque country with roughly 4.8 million people and six times as many sheep. It's also apparently where a flood of Americans are trying to gain citizenship since their own country elected a former reality TV star as president.
In the 12 weeks after Donald Trump's election victory, applications from Americans seeking citizenship in New Zealand jumped 70 percent compared to the same period last year, according to immigration records obtained by the Associated Press. A grant of citizenship, for the record, is a way for those without a parent from New Zealand to obtain legal status in the country. The number of Americans with kiwi heritage vying for citizenship also rose to 203 post-election, up from 183 over the same time period the year before.
Though the 70 percent figure may seem impressive, it's not quite the mass exodus one might imagine. Only 170 people have applied for citizenship since the election, as compared to 100 during the same time period the year before. Still, 170 more citizens means New Zealand will have to add 1,020 more sheep to keep its livestock ratio in check.
Before you hop on a plane, know that most Americans need to live in the country for five years before they can apply to stay there for good. Because of that, Cameron Pritchard, a New Zealand immigration consultant, says he thinks the uptick in applications aren't necessarily from people stateside looking to flee a Trump government, but rather Americans already living in New Zealand who want to cement their legal right to stay.
"It's been more of a flurry of excitement initially than anything that's translated into a huge avalanche of numbers," he told the AP.
Still, interest in the island nation has been keen post-election. In the two days after Trump's win, more than ten times as many people visited the New Zealand website explaining the citizenship process compared to two comparable days that same month. Work visas were up 18 percent in January compared to January 2016, and so was the number of people from the States visiting.
On Wednesday, the Department of Justice indicted four people for crimes related to a massive hack of email giant Yahoo, including two officers of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), one of the country's intelligence and security agencies. The group allegedly used information stolen in the breach to target a myriad of US and Russian government officials, Russian journalists, and private sector employees, according to the indictment.
As well as showing an attack on a US company allegedly carried out to the benefit of the Russian government, the news highlights the already suspected close links between Russian authorities and criminal hackers.
Dmitry Aleksandrovich Dokuchaev, 33 and Igor Anatolyevich Sushchin, 43 are the two FSB officers. Alexsey Alexseyevich Belan, aka "Magg," 29; and Karim Baratov, aka "Kay," 22, are two alleged criminal hackers also included in the indictment. Baratov is a Canadian resident, according to the Department of Justice. The charges include economic espionage and theft of trade secrets.
As a child, I was blessed with what my parents called a "sensitive tummy." I was prone to stomach aches, bloating, and stress-induced diarrhea (when I was nervous, I didn't get "butterflies"; more like a pack of lions pouncing at my gut). But it was after a trip to Florida in my 20s—in which I didn't shit for a whole ten days—that the obsession began.
Anyone who is chronically constipated will tell you that pooping becomes the absolute focus of your life. I became fixated with eating foods that would help my bowels move. I was never into medical laxatives, but super-strong coffee was my friend. I found it hard to poop outside the comfort of my home (hence the ten days of constipation while vacationing in Florida), so I'd obsessively time my coffee-drinking with when I'd be home and relaxed enough to go.
"I'm not trying to make him happy—I am trying to cure his depression!"
As a radio psychiatrist, Frasier Crane may not always have the most therapeutic answers for his callers. But the main character of the sitcom of the same name is one of the most beloved TV psychologists regardless. How do we know? We gathered real mental health professionals and asked them what they thought about their favorite TV doppelgangers.
"[Fraiser is] clever, witty, warm, ... philosophical, and pragmatic," said Cara Itule, a California-based marriage and family therapist. "Although [he does] amazing work, [he is] still simply flawed just like the rest of us. Moreover, [he] juggles ethical conduct while trying to remain personable in [his] practice. A practice that therapists strive to continuously balance."
"He's constantly working on himself and trying to learn to be better," added Nancy Mramor, a Pittsburgh-based psychologist. However, "he oversteps his bounds quite a bit giving advice without knowing what's going on with people."
You can't diagnose a mental health issue in one simple phone call as Crane often does, but that's largely where the show's comedy comes from. And though Crane may be brilliant in his psychiatry career, it's his dysfunctional family relationships that make him relatable. After all, therapists are people too.
"People expect therapists to be above it all. They're not supposed to have feelings, they're not supposed to get upset, they're not supposed to be angry," says Mramor. "People want therapists to be this image of perfection, which they're not. They're very human."
While Frasier is a prime example of a flawed psychiatrist with the best of intentions, he's not the only good model. His dramatic counterpart, Dr. Jennifer Melfi on The Sopranos, provides another humanized portrait of therapy.
"My favorite … is Dr. Melfi," said Dr. Jean Kim, clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at George Washington University in Washington, DC. "I think any sort of media or artistic portrayal matters a lot to a lay audience and sticks in their heads, either on an overt or subconscious level. Dr. Melfi helped humanize the often mysterious role of a psychotherapist/psychoanalyst."
Despite working with a client as extreme as mob boss Tony Soprano, Melfi was able to uphold the basic tenets of what a therapeutic relationship looks like—but Melfi wasn't without flaws. She had to resist the temptation to ask Soprano to kill her rapist, and she also fights off romantic feelings for him that she tries to work through in her own therapy. At the end of the day, however, Melfi's professionalism shines through.
"Dr. Melfi probably squeaked into the hall-of-fame because of many strong sessions," said a clinical psychologist in Chicago. "But she also had inappropriate sessions when she brought in her own problems."
And Melfi isn't the only character on TV that highlights the delicate balance between maintaining a personal life and keeping ethical boundaries with clients. Monk's titular character struggles with severe obsessive compulsive disorder and relies on his therapist, Dr. Charles Kroger, throughout the show. "Dr. Kroger from Monk was my very favorite TV therapist—he was empathic, gentle, and you could feel that he really cared," said Chicago-based psychologist Helen Odessky. "He most resembles what a truly great therapy relationship feels like for both the client and the therapist."
Kroger's struggle with balance came from dealing with his family life while he managed to keep appropriate boundaries with Monk. "[Monk] sent his trash to his therapist, and his therapist said, 'No, you can't do that,' and he sent it back," said Mramor. "[Kroger] can set boundaries with Monk, but not with his own family."
"It is hard to build a relationship with clients that is primarily one-sided, but at the end of the day, we are human and can relate to some of what they are going through," said Esther Ruth Youngman, a licensed clinical social worker in California. "We can't be stoic, but we do have to set limits to create a safe environment for positive change."
Also making the best of list is Dr. Jack Habib on The Newsroom. When lead news anchor Will McAvoy discovers his original therapist has retired, he finds a young Habib in his old therapist's place. While McAvoy is anxious to grab some quick-fix medication for his sleeping problems, Habib pushes McAvoy to spend time on his underlying issues, particularly those stemming from his relationship with his father.
"Dr. Habib offers viewers the experience to witness the positive aspects of being in therapy," said Lisa Brateman, a psychotherapist in New York. "Getting to the source of what is difficult and how it hurts the client is always part of the process of therapy. Viewers begin to understand how their past influences their future and ways to emotionally move past that."
But sometimes what everyone wants, including therapists themselves, is a good laugh. "I believe my very favorite is Fiona Wallice on Web Therapy," said New York-based psychotherapist Janet Zinn. "Laughter is the best medicine and Lisa Kudrow as Fiona Wallice is hysterical."
Wallice invented the modality of three-minute web therapy sessions to cut through the "self-indulgent blather" of regular therapy. During her run, she gives terrible direction to clients, hires a client as her personal assistant, has her sessions hacked, and released by the NSA, realizes her kooky mother isn't her real mother and finally accepts a marriage proposal from another client. Ethical violations and personal dysfunction left and right.
"As a script consultant, I find most representations of mental health professionals on TV lacking in accuracy," said Beverly Hills media psychiatrist Carole Lieberman. "TV shows also often delight in depicting mental health professionals as having more psychological problems than the patients, about which the therapist is oblivious."
This certainly applies to Wallice, who seems blind to her own shortcomings and their impact on the people around her. Which brings up the question about how these over-the-top representations of therapy—whether it's Frasier, Monk, or Wallice for comedy or the ways Melfi and Habib are dramatized—influence clients who may be seeking help.
"I definitely think that all TV representations of therapists impact clients considering mental health treatment," said Maelisa Hall, a California-based psychologist. "There is still a lot of stigma around having a mental health diagnosis, and people are afraid of being labeled 'crazy' if they share about being in therapy."
"I think it's great to have therapists depicted on television and film," added Zinn. "It normalizes going to a therapist and takes the stigma out of getting support."
The police in Monroe, Washington, are currently trying to figure out who anonymously donated a cooler to the local Goodwill—not to give that person a tax receipt for their very heartfelt donation—but to find out why there was $24,000 worth of weed inside of it.
On Tuesday, the Monroe PD posted a photo of said cooler on Twitter, with a very jolly-looking police officer standing above it, revealing almost five bags of pot stashed inside.
Although marijuana sales in Washington State are legal for both medical and recreational use, it's only lawful to have an ounce or less for personal use. Anything more than 40 grams is a felony that can carry a five-year jail sentence and a $10,000 fine.
According to a local FOX affiliate, the police are checking the charity store's security cameras to see if they can identify the very forgetful stoner who left roughly four pounds of weed in an otherwise unassuming cooler. Or perhaps the culprit was actually just Johnny Marijuana Seed making a charitable donation, spreading the word and spreading the seeds.
One of the alleged perpetrators involved in the massive Yahoo hack that compromised as many as 500 million user accounts purported to be a luxury car aficionado and claimed to have made his first million at the tender age of 15.
According to a federal indictment, 22-year-old Karim Baratov—a Canadian citizen born in Kazakhstan — was used by Russian intelligence officers to gain "access to individual user accounts at Google and other providers (but not Yahoo)" and paid a bounty for providing them with the account passwords. The information was then allegedly used to hack into the email accounts of various political and business leaders in Russia and the United States.
Baratov was arrested in Hamilton, Ontario on Tuesday, the same day U.S. officials indicted two Russian spies and Alexsay Belan, a notorious cybercriminal, who has been wanted for more than four years, and has been arrested before.
But Baratov didn't have the same kind of public profile.
According to what appears to be his Facebook page, Baratov lives in Ancaster, Ontario—about a 10-minute drive from Hamilton—and is from Moscow. The photo of him provided in the indictment document appears to match those on his Facebook page. His profile image features him leaning against a black Mercedes and an Aston Martin. "Darth Vader & Storm Trooper combo," he wrote in one caption. Other social media accounts appearing to belong to him show similar images.
For one weekend every year, New Zealand's Hibiscus Coast becomes a stomping ground for diehard female motorheads from all over the country, who show up to show off their wheels—in the least competitive, most joyous way possible. Swerving the stereotype of a typical V8 Supercar driver, the love these women have for their cars is unparalleled. We went along to the festival to ask what drives them.
Last week, poachers reportedly forced open a grate near the rear entrance of a zoo outside Paris, broke through two locked doors, snuck into a rhino enclosure, and shot four-year-old Vince—one of the park's most popular animals—twice in the head. They then used a chainsaw to cut off his horn and crept out undetected before morning came.
Now, officials with the Dvur Kralove Zoo in the Czech Republic plan to remove the horns from all 18 white rhinos before poachers can get to them, the Guardian reports.
"It's for the sake of rhino safety," Andrea Jirousova, a spokeswoman for the Czech zoo, told the Guardian. "The attack put us on alert, the danger is really intense."
Jirousova said those tasked with performing surgery on the zoo's southern white rhinos—a severely threatened species—will put them under anesthesia before using a chainsaw to remove their horns, which will eventually grow back. She said the zoo has done the surgery before for transportation and health concerns but never to ward off the threat of poachers.
Poachers do some pretty messed up things in the wild just to get their hands on lucrative animal parts—even going so far as to poison elephants with cyanide—but the break in at the French zoo was the first attack of its kind in Europe. It shocked conservationists across the continent, prompting not only Dvur Kralove to shave down its rhinos' horns but also the Pairi Daza Zoo in Brussels to do the same.
"To get into these places [poachers] have to climb 3.5-meter [11.5-foot] fences, go through padlocked doors," Paul de La Panouse, an official from the French zoo, told journalists. "It's not easy to kill a rhino weighing several tons just like that. It's a job for professionals."
According to the Guardian, rhino horns are more valuable than gold or coke and can get up to $60,000 per kilo on the black market. Often they're sold to clients in China and Vietnam as traditional medicine or aphrodisiacs. Poachers hunt down more and more rhinoceroses every year, which continues to drive up the price of their horns—and has even prompted park rangers in some parts of the world to start poaching the poachers.
Last week, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Donald Trump remains committed to restoring a wall between investment and commercial banking in the United States. Meanwhile, bankers and their lobbyists probably snickered. Profits are higher than ever. And even though reinstating Glass-Steagall—the New Deal–era bank reform that achieved this very separation and was repealed by Bill Clinton in 1999—was part of the GOP platform last year, most Republicans in Congress haven't shown any interest in that kind of radical overhaul. Trump's Cabinet is also full of veterans from some of the country's biggest financial firms, like Goldman Sachs.
But now one federal official, who happens to be a Republican, has proposed what amounts to a return to Glass-Steagall as an act of deregulation: trading a dense thicket of complex rules for a couple that might be easier to enforce. In so doing, he's poised to change the debate on how Wall Street operates in America.
Thomas Hoenig, the Republican vice chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC)—who has been rumored as a potential Trump nominee to a key spot on the Federal Reserve—released his bank reform proposal in a speech on Monday. Hoenig has long been an anomaly: a conservative who favors aggressively scrutinizing big banks. And he walked that tightrope in this speech, speaking the language of deregulation while promoting a deep intervention into the current system.
"We could pare back the thousands of pages of rules that inhibit bank performance and level the competitive playing field without undermining the stability of our financial system and economy," Hoenig said.
The plan, which you can read here, doesn't exactly split up big banks, Bernie Sanders–style, as much as it segregates their activities. (Sanders also supports restoring Glass-Steagall, which is probably why it ended up in Hillary Clinton's platform, too.) Under Hoenig's proposal, any "non-traditional banking," like securities trading, investment advising, hedge fund or private equity sponsorship, and nearly all derivatives activities—you know, the risky stuff—would be legally separated into an affiliate, with its own management team, its own independent auditor, even its own class of stock. The "traditional bank," which takes deposits and processes payments, would have an affiliate as well, inside the same parent company.
Only traditional banks would enjoy access to what Hoenig calls the "safety net," meaning deposit insurance, access to cheap Federal Reserve loans, and other government assistance. If the non-traditional bank affiliate got into trouble, it would be responsible for covering its own losses. The parent company couldn't even supply the non-traditional bank with more than a small percentage of funding.
In exchange for this, Hoenig proposes eliminating a series of regulatory requirements, including stress tests that measure how banks would fare in a crisis, "living wills" banks must file to explain how to unwind them if they fail, and enhanced supervision of large firms. Hoenig envisions replacing them with one other simple rule: a ratio of liquid assets to overall debt—known as the leverage ratio—of 10 percent, across the parent company and its affiliates.
That 10 percent number is critical, because it's the same as what's in the financial reform bill offered by Jeb Hensarling, the Republican chair of the House Financial Services Committee. Of course, Hensarling's CHOICE Act also rolls back Obama regulations on banks in exchange for a 10 percent leverage ratio—and some are rightly raising the alarm about a potential return to chaos brought to you by shady bankers. But Hoenig reportedly shared his plan with Hensarling's staff before the speech, and he's clearly trying to steer the GOP into accepting a real trade-off: reducing complexity while segregating bank activities.
Watch the VICE News Tonight segment on the murder trial involving a teenage girl that has sparked a movement.
Again, Hoenig doesn't go full Occupy Wall Street here and break up the banks. But by "ring-fencing" risky financial activities, similar to proposals moving forward in the United Kingdom, his plan would achieve something deceptively radical. The goal of ring-fencing is to prevent chaos in the trading markets from seeping into the rest of the financial system—and the economy. Denying government support to non-traditional banking means less funding available for trading activities, and by extension, fewer of them. The proposal creates a smaller set of rules that regulators might be able to monitor. And it may even fix the real problem with mega-banks: that they've become too politically influential. (Bank lobbyists recently launched a "candidate school" encouraging their friends to run for office.) Competing management teams within the same parent company could create internal tensions on what to lobby for, fragmenting their overwhelming power.
The proposal is not without its problems. Having traditional and non-traditional banking affiliates inside the same company creates a jumble of entities that could prove hard to track. And the 10 percent leverage ratio, while higher than the current 6 percent standard, remains too small, according to bank capital expert and Stanford Professor Anat Admati, who has proposed a ratio three times higher.
But Hoenig's trying to start a conversation about the virtues of a smaller but more targeted approach to regulating America's biggest financial institutions. It doesn't assume the free market can solve every problem, but it doesn't micromanage everything a bank does either. It may not stop every risk, but the idea is to make shareholders pay for those risks, instead of taxpayers. Even left-leaning Wall Street reform groups like Better Markets quickly praised the plan as "serious and deeply thoughtful."
Of course, an FDIC chair giving a speech is not likely to spark an immediate legislative overhaul—and that probably wasn't even his intention. Banking reforms in America typically only emerge after a point of crisis. But after 2008, supporters of structural reform didn't have a plan for how to achieve their goals; amid that vacuum we got Dodd-Frank, which made some tweaks to the existing system. Those were important but, in Hoenig's view, inadequate. Now, there's a bipartisan menu full of ideas floating around.
In other words, when the next crisis hits—and it will—reformers will be ready.
