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People Keep Trying to Make Movies About Elisa Lam’s Mysterious Death

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Other filmmakers and studios have abandoned the idea, but Friday the 13th producer Sean Cunningham is moving forward with a plan to shoot a horror film loosely based on the mysterious death of Elisa Lam, called The Elevator Game.

The 21-year-old University of British Columbia student was found dead in a water tank on the roof of a Los Angeles hotel in 2013. The coroner ruled her death was an accidental drowning, but a surveillance video of her acting strange in an elevator just before she died has spawned a truly impressive amount of theories about how the hell she got there. Her story added to a long history of spooky shit going on in the Cecil Hotel, once home to serial killer and rapist Richard Ramirez, and where many guests have committed suicide.

Read More:  Elisa Lam Drowned in a Water Tank Three Years Ago, but the Obsession with Her Death Lives On

The grainy video of her hopping in and out of the elevator and making erratic hand movements has been viewed millions of times, stoking the curiosity of amateur true crime investigators and paranormal activity enthusiasts. In deep corners of Reddit people continue to debate whether this was a demonic ritual gone wrong or a secret agent conspiracy involving the Clintons.

The Elevator Game appears to trade in the paranormal elements of the internet's Elisa Lam obsession. According to Bloody Disgusting, the horror flick is about a young woman whose sister disappears after participating in a "mysterious internet ritual" that involves pushing buttons of an elevator in a specific sequence.

It comes long after Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn abandoned his version of the story, tentatively titled The Bringing in 2014. Sony initially replaced the Drive director, but spiked the idea completely in 2016.

Though Cunningham's project will be the first Hollywood adaptation of the story, TV's American Horror Story has already devoted a whole season to the Cecil's freaky reputation. The hotel was named a historical landmark earlier this month.

Earlier this month, Elisa Lam truthers started a Kickstarter campaign to make a documentary that also visits paranormal themes. The film aims to trace three working theories: one from police, that Lam's death was an accident prompted by mental illness; the online truthers who believe it was murder; and the ghost hunters that see her death as some otherworldly shit.

Whatever your own theory, it seems big players think there's enough appetite for Elisa's story to sustain more than one release.

Follow Sarah Berman on Twitter.


Inside the Sex Museum Using Erotica to Push Activism

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A few blocks off Vegas Strip, in the shadow of the giant gold phallus that is the Trump Hotel, sits the Erotic Heritage Museum. Once a simple tourist trap for visitors looking to be titillated with a Puppetry of the Penis performance and some risqué exhibits, the museum is trying out a new, more activism-heavy approach as the country enters the Trump age.

Opened in 2008 and primarily bankrolled by Harry Mohney, the founder of the Déjà Vu chain of strip clubs, the Erotic Heritage Museum was already a more progressive sex museum than some of its contemporaries due to its treatment of pornography as a legitimate art. While other institutions shy away from all but the artsiest of adult films, the EHM was setting up to host the unabashedly porny Adult Film Festival of Las Vegas when I arrived to tour the collection.

I met with Dr. Victoria Hartmann, the museum's director and a sex scholar, for a tour of the property. Drawing from her own 20 years of experience producing in the adult-film industry, Hartman has played an active role in the museum taking on an increasingly accepting and progressive stance over the years.

We began in a mockup of a red-light district, meant to convey the museum's staunch support of legal sex work. Elsewhere in the museum is a lineup-room tableau, also meant to help normalize the scenario of working girls meeting prospective clients for non-Nevadans passing through.

"If someone's going to choose to do sex work, whatever the reasons are, we believe they should be as safe as possible," said Hartmann.

Inside the main entrance of the museum's exhibits, guests are greeted by a talking Trump statue. This spotlighting of Trump, Hartmann said, plays into the museum's dedication to calling out the sexual hypocrisy of political leaders who would seek to legislatively restrict women's reproductive rights while simultaneously philandering or engaging in deviant acts. A wall of political sex scandals and cardboard cutouts of Monica Lewinski and be-dildoed Bill Clinton have long been popular attractions.

But with the current administration so hell-bent on silencing journalists and obfuscating truth, the museum has doubled down on championing of freedom of speech and political parody as a cornerstone of it.

"We even plastered the First Amendment right up on the roof, facing Trump Tower, on Martin Luther King Day," said Hartmann. "Just as a permanent reminder that the First Amendment, not him, rules here."

She pointed across the room to a wall full of posters from the January 21st Women's March that the museum was in the process of turning into a permanent exhibit.

"Vegas is a playground," said Hartmann. "We don't worry too much about protesting. But this march drew about 15,000 people, which is unheard of for us."

Next, the tour took us to displays on sex research done by the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, a sexology research center operating from 1919–1933 in the Weimar Republic before the Nazis burned its books and documents. Hartmann made it clear that this section being in such close proximity to the Trump content was no accident, noting that "something like this can happen anywhere."

As Hartmann whisked me from one display to the next, the latent themes of progressivism further crystalized. Despite its owner being a man who made his fortune trading in seductive women, this museum was hardly a man's lurid collection of ancient erotica à la The Handmaiden that one might expect.

Tracy Sydor's 100 Women and the Survivors' Wall

More than a repository of artifacts, the EHM is positioning itself as a space primarily seeking to empower women, LGBTQ people, and other traditionally marginalized segments of the sexual spectrum. As part of this empowerment push, the museum has recently opened a Survivors' Wall plastered with blank notebook pages as a cathartic way for victims of sexual violence to share their stories.

"The fun stuff is great," said Hartmann, "but we also need to look at the more challenging things, so we're aware of all aspects of sexuality."

When asked about what initially attracted her to the position, Hartmann told me that "sexuality doesn't have outliers, and this museum is meant to be all inclusive. We want to celebrate everyone's erotic history in a non-judgmental space of acceptance. There's no real way to box anybody in. Sex and gender are so diverse. And as long as there's consent and people are enjoying themselves, I personally have a hard time understanding why anyone would be judged."

This inclusion extends beyond the exhibits. Hartmann told me there are three gender diverse and a few openly non-monogamous people on staff. She also said that, as the facility has slowly emerged as a beacon of resistance in the desert landscape, the museum has been getting a surge of requests from people seeking to work or volunteer there, some simply wishing to "exist within the activist space" the place has created.

"We want to be the antithesis to the pointlessly malicious and cruel movement we see popping up," said Hartmann. "Las Vegas took us pretty casually all these years, but after the election, people started seeing us as activists. But I think we're just doing what we've always been doing, and everyone else is finally starting to catch up."

Follow Justin Caffier on Twitter.

Turns Out Eric Trump Plans to Update His Dad on the Family Business

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Back in January, President Trump announced he'd be handing off his business operations to his two sons, ignoring calls from a number of government ethics groups to divest from the Trump Organization outright. To ease the nerves of watchdogs worried about potential conflicts of interest, his lawyer said Trump would be prevented from knowing or discussing the operations of the company with his sons, thanks to limited "information rights." But now it looks like that's not the case.

In an article published Friday in Forbes, Eric Trump claimed he and his dad never talk about the family business—a "steadfast pact" struck between the pair. Then, later in the same interview, he admitted he plans to keep the president updated on the Trump Organization "probably quarterly" during his four-year term.

"Yeah, on the bottom line, profitability reports, and stuff like that, but you know, that's about it," Eric Trump told Forbes. "My father and I are very close. I talk to him a lot. We're pretty inseparable."

If that happens, it'll be just one more headache for all the good-government watchdogs already worried that the most powerful politician in the world may be making decisions for the country based on how they might benefit his business.

"He is breaking down one of the few barriers he claimed to be establishing between him and his businesses, and those barriers themselves were weak to begin with," Larry Noble, former chief ethics officer at the Federal Election Commission, told Forbes. "But if he is now going to get reports from his son about the businesses, then he really isn't separate in any real way."

The Pirate Women Who Made Blackbeard Look Like a Joke

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If you're into pirates, you've probably heard of Mary Read and Anne Bonny. The two ruthless corsairs were part of Calico Jack Rackam's crew during the Golden Age of Piracy, a roughly 80-year span from 1650 to 1730, when an excess of skilled sailors, combined with a rise of colonial cargo and general lawlessness, led to privateers seeking loot on the seas until the navies of Western Europe and the North American colonies finally cracked down on the practice. But other female pirates and the mythology surrounding them have become footnotes in pop-culture history—buried, obscured, or otherwise forgotten.

While names like Blackbeard, Captain Hook, Henry Morgan, and even the fictional Captain Jack Sparrow have lived on in infamy, notorious buccaneers and marauders like Cheng I Sao, who commanded more than 400 ships and 50,000 men off China in the early 19th century; Grace O'Malley, the Irish pirate who terrorized the British Isles in Elizabethan times; and Sayyida al-Hurra, pirate queen of the notorious Barbary Corsairs, have been largely ignored.

A new book, Pirate Women: The Princesses, Prostitutes, and Privateers Who Ruled the Seven Seas by Laura Sook Duncombe, seeks to change that. In 14 chapters with titles like "Medieval Maiden Warriors" and "A Cinderella Story Among the Corsairs," Duncombe details the lives of some of these pirates, from Queen Teuta, a Illyrian blue blood who marauded the Roman Empire, to Sadie the Goat, a scrappy, one-eared pickpocket turned river captain straight out of Gangs of New York. Duncombe, a lawyer, writer, and Jezebel contributor, goes into particular detail on Sao, whom she describes as "the most successful pirate of all time" and who was notable for explicitly banning the rape of female captives, a crime that was punishable by death.

I recently spoke with Duncombe about the universal appeal of piracy, why pirate women have been considered unworthy of historical documentation, and why the Cheng I Saos of the world deserve to have their own Pirates of the Caribbean.

VICE: What did the women whose stories you've told get out of living a pirate's life on the high seas?
Laura Sook Duncombe: Piracy really exemplifies freedom because it's an escape from the ordinary and what's expected of you. They're outlaws operating outside of the law and outside convention. These women particularly benefitted from that escape from convention because many of these women went from being the property of their fathers to the property of their spouses. The women of the past were not allowed to do the sort of things that women now take for granted, like work outside the home, own property, get a divorce. These women were able to literally cast off these constrictive garments—the petticoats, the corsets, the things that made it hard to move and hard to breathe—and donned trousers and shirts and sailed the seas. They didn't belong to anyone but themselves, and that's alluring to modern women. So I can only imagine how alluring it would have been for women living in more restrictive eras.

Pirate life was known to be challenging in so many ways—being on the sea for months on end, strenuous work keeping the boats sailing, terrible nutrition and hygiene—how did the women adapt?
Life was pretty rough and violent for many of these women anyway on land. We don't have many pirates who came from happy homes and storybook childhoods. Many of them were exposed to this kind of behavior early on. I don't think anybody exactly knows how these women were able to conceal their femininity for so long. I think a lot of times people see what they want to see, and as long as the women were pulling their weight and doing the job, they were good. Clearly they're not as delicate and unsuited for these positions as some people might think.

"I think women in general are frequently considered unworthy subjects of documentation because most historians are male. There's an erasure of people of color. There's an erasure of LGBT people and other minorities."

Why do you think women pirates have been considered unworthy subjects of historical documentation?
Well, I think women in general are frequently considered unworthy subjects of documentation because most historians are male. There's an erasure of people of color. There's an erasure of LGBT people and other minorities. Whoever is telling the story controls what happens. Look at the way America talks about the Vietnam War compared to the way the Vietnamese talk about the Vietnam War. It's a very different story. There's such a sacred relationship between man and the sea, and the men conquer the sea, which is considered female. For a woman to be involved in that upsets the mystical relationship between man and the ocean. I think it was just easy to leave women out and keep the fantasy. There were possibly many women who lived and died as men, and we don't even know about them. In the ranks of women pirates, we have this small number, but there were undoubtedly countless more that just never got caught.

Why was Cheng I Sao the most successful pirate of all time?
It is thought that she had a pretty rough childhood and adolescence and may have even been a prostitute. I think that a hard existence tends to make one pretty tough, and I think that she was just determined to avoid going back to where she came from. She was already part of a pretty successful pirate empire with her husband, but she absolutely went above and beyond that once he died. Her fleet was larger than many of the legitimate navies at the time. She had to be smart and able to have her crews be fiercely loyal to her. She was ferocious, and when she saw what she wanted, she just took it. People were so unused to that type of behavior coming from a woman that they were sort of hanging there with their mouths gaping open while she plundered their treasure.

How does the legend of Princess Alfhild reinforce how Viking society felt about women going to sea?
The story is told as sort of a love story, like this woman goes on this zany exploit, but then her boyfriend brings her back in line, and they sail off happily ever after into the sunset. I think that it's tragic that this woman makes this desperate gamble for freedom to avoid marrying this man that she says she has no interest in, and then he captures her and drags her back home. For this woman, who had no nautical training that we're aware of, to head off to sea just to get away, and then to be captured and brought back, it's very sad for me that her bid for freedom was not enough to get her away from this prince. When a prince wants a princess, the princess marries the prince. She doesn't get to say no, and I think that's very sad.

The Barbary Corsairs were well known as brutal pirates, but were led Sayyida al-Hurra, their pirate queen. What eventually happened to her?
There's so much misinformation that has not been particularly corrected by scholars about the barbaric nature of these Barbary Corsairs. It's hard to know what's true about them and what's not. But Sayyida al-Hurra, regardless, was an incredibly shrewd businesswoman. She'd sort of come into this governmental position, this ruling position with her husband, and then she took off running. She decided that she needed a naval operation to hit the Spanish where it hurt, because they'd driven her and her family from their home. We wouldn't know that much about her at all if not for all of the people with whom she did business, because she's written about in these Spanish and Portuguese sources as the pirate queen of the Mediterranean. Her own people did not discuss her in the same way. She eventually disappears. She was married to the king of Morocco, and we have no idea what happened to her.

In your book, you recount how the Irish pirate Grace O'Malley met with Queen Elizabeth, who'd captured her son. What was the outcome of that meeting, and did Grace keep pirating with the Queen's consent?
Grace O'Malley was incredibly smart, driven, and calculating. Toward the end of her life, she switched over to the English cause, and her son fought in the end for the English. She was always looking out for her family, and she was willing to do whatever it took to take care of her family. She wrote these letters to the Queen, and she sort of paints herself like, "I ended up as a pirate, but really it was just because I had to, but if you give me my son, I'll be loyal to you." The Queen sent her home with her son and gave her a license to pirate. Elizabeth was very fond of privateers, and she used privateers to get the money to build the British Empire that Parliament wouldn't give her. I think Elizabeth saw this incredible pirate who eluded capture for so long and has this crew that is loyal to her and decided it would be stupid to pass up that opportunity. It worked out well for everybody.

How did you determine if the legends were real or not in your research? Can you give some examples?
With Mary Read and Anne Bonny, we have transcripts from their trial. We have many sources of eyewitness testimonies that corroborate these stories. Finding documents from the time period is really a clue to me that I hit on someone who is most likely real. On the other hand, there's Haitian buccaneer Jacquotte Delahaye, who is in many stories and legends. She's very popular, but there are no primary sources about her. I found a Spanish language book that said she did not exist, and putting that together with the lack of primary sources led me to believe she most likely did not exist. It's a treasure hunt. But there are some pretty strong indications when you find a primary source document, when you find a trial, when you find stories written up in the papers at the time, when you find things that came from that era that talk about these women—that is an indication that they're real.

In your opinion, which female pirate story would translate best to the big screen?
I think for every famous movie male pirate we should have female ones! I love Sayyida, though. I think it is just so triumphant to have this powerful, brilliant Muslim woman as the heroine of this story. I would love to see her be more known. And of course Cheng I Sao. Cheng I Sao was much more successful than Blackbeard. She pirated longer. Her ships were bigger, and she made more money. She kind of makes Blackbeard look like a joke. I would love to see Cheng I Sao depicted. She kind of is actually in Pirates of the Caribbean. In the third one, there's a character Mistress Cheng, but she has very little to say and do. She's on the pirate council, which is modeled on a real thing, the Brethren of the Coast. I think she should have her own movie.

Follow Seth Ferranti on Twitter.

Pirate Women: The Princesses, Prostitutes, and Privateers Who Ruled the Seven Seas by Laura Sook Duncombe will be published by Chicago Review Press on April 1.

Jesus This Healthcare Bill Is a Mess, Huh?

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As I write this on Friday afternoon, no one knows what the fuck is happening with the Republican healthcare plan. Top GOP leaders, including House Speaker Paul Ryan and President Donald Trump, have been trying to rush through a bill called the American Health Care Act (AHCA), a diluted version of Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act (ACA). But since the AHCA is opposed by all Democrats and a fairly large number of Republicans (especially conservatives), the vote on the bill in the House has been scheduled, rescheduled, and rescheduled again. The bill has also been revised multiple times in order to appease conservatives. Thursday night, just after the latest vote delay, Trump issued an ultimatum: The vote should happen Friday (on a bill that was just finalized this morning). If the AHCA failed to pass, Trump would supposedly leave the ACA in place. Right now, it's unclear if Ryan has enough votes to get it through the House, but White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said a vote would be scheduled for 3:30 PM EST anyway—though who knows if it will be rescheduled again.

If it does pass the House, the AHCA almost certainly won't be able to pass the Senate. If it doesn't, it will be a striking failure on the part of Trump, who's sold himself as a master dealmaker, and Ryan, who like most Republicans has wanted to repeal the ACA for years.

So, how did we get here?

The nation is ultimately in this mess because the AHCA is a supremely shitty bill. While it seemingly sought to strike a conciliatory middle path between competing interests within the GOP, almost every possible faction has panned the AHCA, with some Republicans going so far as to say it could be worse than the hate ACA. The more people learn about it, the more they seem to hate it; it had just 17 percent of the country's support in a recent poll.

"The only thing one can conclude is that Trump trusted Ryan to deliver the goods and Trump has no understanding of what is in the bill," said University of California–Berkeley healthcare expert Helen Halpin. "It is actually really difficult to write a bill that is this universally hated by everyone—liberals, conservatives, and independents."

Any effort to repeal the ACA was going to face stiff opposition from Democrats. But the AHCA is actually doomed because of congressmen to Ryan's right. The Freedom Caucus, a group of three dozen hardline conservative House Republicans who have a history of opposing not just Democrats at every turn but also GOP leadership when they see that leadership as weak, made it painfully clear they would oppose the bill—and had the votes to kill it. (The AHCA can't lose more than 21 votes in the House.)

Trump personally took point on negotiations with the Freedom Caucus. On Monday, the bill's crafters added amendments speeding the repeal of ACA-related taxes, opening up the possibility of work requirements on Medicaid, and rejiggering funding for older Americans, mostly changes demanded by conservative interests. (The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reviewed these tweaks on Thursday, and found they would not result in more people having insurance, but would save the government less money than the original.)

These initial concessions failed to appease conservatives, who pushed first to see the AHCA axe the ACA's ten essential healthcare benefits (medical services every plan on the market must cover) in the name of creating a deregulated market. When Trump expressed his willingness to consider such an amendment, conservatives made it clear that would not guarantee their full support either. They pushed further to eliminate all the ACA's insurer regulations, including popular provisions banning companies from discriminating against people with pre-existing medical conditions and allowing children to stay on their parents' plans until age 26.

Each of these concessions to conservatives alienated moderate Republicans, even some typically firm allies of the leadership, who were not calmed by Trump or his proxies. Many were reportedly scandalized by how much had been ceded without securing definite support from the Freedom Caucus. Others grumbled about the opacity of the revisions being made to the bill, or worried that it would result in insurance becoming too expensive for their constituents. It seemed like Ryan might pursue an open-ended delay of the vote and possibly start a longer negotiation process.

Instead, Trump made his ultimatum, indicating that he didn't want to wait. He started Friday by calling out the Freedom Caucus on Twitter, and was demanding a vote Friday, even as Ryan headed to the White House to tell the president the support wasn't there.

Critics see the ultimatum as an act of rage from a notoriously impetuous politician who reportedly has little interest in the details of and is increasingly frustrated by health care policy. As Halpin sees things, Trump is "ready to move to another policy arena—tax reform—where he has a better chance of a win. He wants to drop this like a hot potato… 'Failing' is his best option, because the impacts of this bill on the lives and wellbeing of millions of Americans would be devastating. The fact that he isn't even staying in Washington for the vote suggests he has concluded it is a loser. He will blame Ryan and the Republicans and take no responsibility for the disaster."

Watch Motherboard's documentary on smart guns:

By Friday morning, leadership has caved to Freedom Caucus demands on dismantling the ACA's essential health benefits—making this a harder vote for any Republican who worries about being called heartless by a Democratic opponent in 2018. As a sign of this bill's unpopularity, a late-night vote allowing the bill to be heard right out of committee saw four Republicans saying "no"—a rare note of dissent in what's usually a perfunctory process.

Mike Cannon of the libertarian Cato Institute, who has harshly criticized the ACA, says many conservatives in Congress truly believe voting for this bill is worse than voting for nothing at all. These individuals are willing, he told me, to push ahead on a full repeal bill with or without Trump's support, and may actually see the collapse of the AHCA as a benefit, giving them time to carefully build their case with moderates .

"I don't think that [Trump's] bad-cop routine is going to have the effect of making them all think this is their only opportunity," said Cannon, who also doesn't buy the idea the president will walk away from healthcare. Trump , Cannon said, likely realizes he can't do so because he needs the AHCA's cost savings to justify other initiatives like tax cuts.

Few people think the bill will pass on Friday—but not many are willing to make predictions, especially since the president is involved. (Remember November?) Trump has characteristically flipped the political script by charging headlong into a vote whose outcome is uncertain. That might be a calculated move to keep his opposition off-balance and force House Republicans to take a tough vote. Or it might just be a mistake.

That uncertainty created a fracas of rage and recrimination among the GOP that is one part House of Cards and ten parts VEEP. But this isn't TV; things tend to happen slowly in Congress. Even if the House passes the AHCA, it's only the start of a long slog that will probably be even more brutal and tense in the Senate, where there'll be parliamentary procedure subplots as well as substantive negotiations, likely more focused on moderate Republican dissent and constrained by a smaller margin of Republican control in that chamber. If the bill is altered, it would swing back around to the House for yet another round of deliberations. This level of uncertainty is draining at the very least, and could be damaging to Republican Party unity—not to mention the stability of the American healthcare market.

"No one has ever seen anything like this," concluded Halpin. "It is chaos. It is frightening."

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

We Need to Stop Treating Mental Health Like a Selling Point

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Awareness: this is the term most often used in reference to the UK's snowballing mental health crisis. Often it's used positively, through campaigns like Time To Change that aim to tackle the discrimination—particularly among men—that can prevent people seeking treatment. Sometimes it's used like a band aid for a severed limb, such as when Theresa May claimed the problem was "more about the stigma" than funding, even though budget cuts are leading to a rise in unexpected deaths, and lack of emergency beds mean the NHS often has to pay private hospitals to take their patients or send them hundreds of miles away. Then there is the music industry, which, despite so many artists and organizations being vocal on the issue over the last few years in particular, has routinely failed to provide enough tangible support. What it has done, however, is spin it into something marketable.

In a similar way to how "feminism"—in its vaguest terms—has been hijacked as a way of selling anything from period pants to singer-songwriters, mental health is rapidly becoming a commodified issue. Most recently, NME put Stormzy on the cover of an issue titled "Depression: it's time to talk" without his permission. The cover features Stormzy holding his fist in his other hand like an Eastenders character about to avenge a family crisis—as if to say "yes, it is time to talk"—and it's designed to give the impression that he gave NME an exclusive interview in which he spoke about his mental health, when in fact he turned their request down. They quoted things he'd said elsewhere and ran the cover anyway. Just weeks earlier, Stormzy spoke about his misconceptions about depression, his own experience and what convinced him to talk about it on his debut album, Gang Signs & Prayer, in an interview with Channel 4 News. Being the first time Stormzy had spoken so openly about depression, the video ended up going viral. NME then basically printed the transcript of that interview, with an intro tacked on.

Continue reading on Noisey

ICE Is Raiding Sanctuary Cities as Revenge, Reports Say

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Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents conducted raids in retaliation against at least one sanctuary city that declined to cooperate with federal immigration laws, a federal judge determined. New reports indicate it might be more widespread than just his city.

US Magistrate Judge Andrew Austin said in an immigration hearing Monday that the ICE carried out city-wide raids in Austin, TX that netted more than 50 people at the end of January to retaliate against the local sheriff's department, which instituted a policy to limit cooperation with federal immigration law.

CNN, citing a senior US immigration official, reports Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were also instructed to focus their efforts on sanctuary cities in general.

ICE did not respond to VICE News' request for comment.

Continue reading on VICE News

A Bunch of People Got Naked and Slaughtered a Sheep at Auschwitz

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A group of people in their 20s managed to find something even more offensive to do at Auschwitz-Birkenau than take selfies or play Pokemón Go.

The AFP reports that a group of men and women were arrested at the former Nazi concentration camp in Poland on Friday after they slaughtered a sheep, stripped off all of their clothes, and then chained themselves to the camp's famous Arbeit macht frei (or "work makes you free") gate. According to the BBC, they also lit a firework in the parking lot.

"This is the first time something like this has happened at Auschwitz," museum director Piotr Cywinski told the AFP. "I have no idea what their motives were."

Local police apprehended the men and women on Friday and swiftly took them to a local station for questioning, according to authorities. Police haven't yet determined what inspired their weird, nude sacrifice, but they reportedly filmed the whole thing with a drone so that footage could later offer some clues.

"Any use of Auschwitz for political statements, even using Auschwitz for moral statements, is not how Auschwitz should be remembered," Poland's chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, told the AFP. "The Germans used Auschwitz to try to eliminate the Jewish people. Any happenings are a desecration of the memory of all those killed at Auschwitz, Jews, Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, Roma, and others."

Malgorzata Jurecka, a spokeswoman for the local Oswiecim police, told the AFP the trespassers "will likely be charged with desecrating a monument or other historical site" and could face fines.

About 1 million people were killed at the camp between 1940 and 1945 and it's since become a harrowing symbol—and tangible remnant—of the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis during World War II, which killed an estimated 6 million Jews. The museum has been open on the site since 1947 and receives more than a million visitors every year. It's a haunting, difficult place to visit, where people laugh, text, and talk just like they do everywhere else.


Inside the Manchester Restaurant That Serves Drake’s Favourite Butter Chicken

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Drake and Zouk go way back. The Canadian rapper first ate at the Manchester restaurant in 2012 as a guest of troublesome Manchester City footballer Mario Balotelli. Balotelli himself was already a fan. A few months earlier, he broke his club's curfew by staying out at Zouk til 1 AM, receiving an estimated fine of £150,000.

During his 2014 UK tour, Drake came back for more, this time bringing then-girlfriend Rihanna for a romantic meal. Then after his gig in Leeds earlier this year, Drake and his entourage snubbed the Yorkshire city's local restaurants, choosing to travel across the Pennines en masse for yet another meal at Manchester's Zouk.

So, why does Drizzy keep coming back? Zouk isn't one of Manchester's typical celebrity haunts. It sits on a quiet street off Oxford Road, far from the flashy VIP venues in Deansgate favoured by reality TV stars and minor celebrities. But as Manchester locals know, Zouk is the place to go for unforgettable Indian food.

In the kitchen at Zouk, Manchester. All photos by the author.

Brothers Tayub and Mudassar Amjad opened the restaurant in 2009. It's a bright, roomy place with an outside shisha section and a large open kitchen that spans the length of the venue. The vast menu goes a step further than standard Indian cuisine.

Read more on MUNCHIES.

The Rise of RuPaul's Drag Industrial Complex

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In the introduction to Magnus Hastings' photo book Why Drag?, Boy George unequivocally asserts that "few have taken drag to the heights that RuPaul has. Ru has literally dragged drag into every living room in America."

That's nowhere clearer than in his long-running stint as host and producer of RuPaul's Drag Race. Since 2009, the reality TV show competition has played a major part in elevating drag's cachet from a countercultural artifact, tucked away in gay bars and drag balls, to highly celebrated entertainment. If drag is not yet mainstream—and Drag Race guest stars, from Lady Gaga to Chloë Sevigny to Aubrey Plaza, would indicate that it is—it is certainly no longer underground. That's thanks in no small part to Ru himself, whose show has helped introduce the world to over 100 queens. (More are on their way tonight, as Drag Race premieres its ninth season on VH1.)

While the show has championed queens of all stripes throughout its run—with queens specializing in comedy, pageantry, fashion and more—what's become apparent is that above all else, Ru and his judges groom and uplift what we could call the "Branded Queen". Queens who excel on Drag Race, by and large, are entrepreneurs who exhibit a willingness to hustle above all else. The rise of the entrepreneurial queen, in turn, has helped bring drag out of the gay bars and into the streets, changing the art form in strange (and often exciting) ways.

Where decades ago many drag queens could barely scrape by, with scant gigs available in select urban centers (as chronicled in Esther Newton's Mother Camp), making a living in drag today is all but the norm in some circles. Through live shows and appearances, pageants, merchandise, albums, and a near-limitless array of other ventures, many queens today are one-woman powerhouses.

Drag's transformation from an eccentric slice of queer entertainment into a veritable global industry is exactly what Ru would have wanted—after all, his career has been nothing if not an impressive hustle. With his incredibly successful show, a podcast, a string of albums ("available on iTunes," as he's wont to remind us), a lengthy list of film and television credits, two books, a drag conference, and a hand in nationwide Drag Race tours, not to mention a line of chocolates, it makes sense that he'd be drawn to similarly driven queens. He's said as much himself: to win Drag Race, queens "need to be a fashion designer, an American Idol, and a Top Model all rolled into one," he told Perez Hilton in 2008. "What we're looking for is someone who can really follow in my footsteps," he told Vulture a few seasons later. "Someone who can be hired by a company to represent their product."

It's those capitalist terms—those of a business-savvy queen who can parlay her own image and skills into a career through constant self-promotion—which, above all, describe Ru to a tee. No queen in the history of drag has so skillfully turned the art form into an industrious and lucrative endeavor, a testament to his ambition as much as it is to his talent.

Drag Race challenges often stress entrepreneurship, from the third season's "RuVC" segment, where queens created and pitched marketable products, to the following season, where they made infomercials for Ru's albums. In season five, queens were tasked with creating, marketing, and filming a commercial for a signature fragrance. In Drag Race: All Stars, the brief was simpler: they had to create a product "worthy of your unique 'All Star' brand." It was the most explicit acknowledgment of the show's mandate: to be a successful drag queen, you must embody and sell your brand.

New York City-based queen Miz Cracker (who has written for VICE) noted that Drag Race's success has created a nearly unsustainable glut of queens. "And now the business side of it"—attempts to create and sell merch, for example—"has become part of the excessive competition out there," she said. Former contestants, almost without exception, sell slews of products; sites like DragQueen Merch and Huntees pawn merchandise for hundreds of queens. For performers who once relied on pageant prizes, meager bar tips and side gigs to eek by, the drag economy has ballooned into its very own cottage industry.

Seaon six contestant BenDeLaCreme noted that that emphasis on brand above all has drawn focus away from what was once a queen's bread and butter: booking live shows. For certain queens, "the real focus now becomes the web content, the social media, and the rest of it—which is what gets you the booking—and then the booking itself is not the focus of the industry," she explained.

All that capitalist pressure inevitably produces real innovation. Miz points to a queen like BibleGirl666, with her sizable Instagram following and the recent release of her own drag mobile game, as an example of a queen who's successfully internalized Drag Race's model of success. As BibleGirl told the New York Post following the game's launch, "my boyfriend and I saw how drag was starting to evolve as an industry. It was becoming a real market to tap into. Drag Race found a way to do that through TV, and I wanted to see if I could do that through another medium, like video games."

Drag, which might still in certain corners be understood as an art form, a cultural fuck-you, or a means of self-expression (and more likely a combination of all of the above), is now also a potentially lucrative business. If nothing else, RuPaul's Drag Race, as both a platform and a pulpit, has made it easier to envision being a drag queen as a full-time paying job. And to many on the show who talk about the constant hustle and the economic hardships they face on a daily basis as drag performers, that fantasy is now more than ever a plausible reality. Good wigs ain't cheap, didn't you know?

Follow Manuel Betancourt on Twitter.

Trump's Attempt to Repeal Obamacare Just Crashed and Burned

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After weeks of drafting, hiding, debating, and tweaking a bill that would repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, House Republicans scrapped it just minutes before a scheduled vote on Tuesday. ACA repeal, which the Republican Party has been promising voters since the bill was signed into law by Barack Obama seven years ago, is suddenly in doubt.

The Republican-backed American Health Care Act (dubbed "Trumpcare" by some) faced resistance from legislators on both sides of the aisle—Democrats objected to a bill that would cause millions of people to lose health insurance, and some conservative Republicans were upset it didn't strip enough provisions of the ACA. Despite President Donald Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan's best efforts to ram the AHCA through Congress, it was clear by Friday afternoon that they couldn't get enough Republicans onboard. Ryan reportedly went to the White House to tell Trump the votes weren't there, and hours later the speaker officially announced the bill would be pulled.

The loss is a big-league embarrassment for Trump, who threw his full support and a handful of tweets behind his first major legislative effort. He told Republicans that he wanted to move on from healthcare if they couldn't manage to pass the AHCA today. Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, were willing to admit that this was a failure.

"You can't pretend and say this is a win for us," Republican representative Mark Walker said, according to the New York Times.

"Moving from an opposition party to a governing party comes with growing pains. We're feeling those growing pains today," added Ryan. "This is a disappointing day for us. Doing big things is hard," he added. "All of us, all of us—myself included—will need to time to reflect on how we got to this moment."

Follow Drew Schwartz on Twitter.

What's Happening Inside Your Body During a Soul-Crushing Hangover

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The medical term for a hangover is veisalgia, and it's absolutely perfect—so on the nose it's hard to believe it's real. The word's roots are Norwegian and Greek; "uneasiness following debauchery" (kveis) and "pain" (algia). I mean…

We've certainly all been there, buried in a debt of pain when the bill from the previous night's partying comes due—the joy and fun and bliss of the night disappearing with the morning sun, replaced with a brain-splitting, body-flattened regret that leaves you bargaining with God. Just one symptom of the common hangover—headache, sensitivity to light and sound, fatigue, nausea—could ruin your day. Combine them, and you want to die. Fortunately, (unfortunately?) you won't.

There is no cure (save for time, which we'll get to later). Once you're in the throes of a hangover, you can only seek to understand why your body is making you pay such a brutal price. To do just that, we talked to Jerrold B. Leikin M.D., Director of Medical Toxicology at NorthShore University HealthSystem. He explained the physiology of a soul-crushing hangover to us in painstaking detail. Here's what's going on inside that temple of yours.

The Basics

Hangovers are basically mini alcohol withdrawals. As you drink, alcohol affects the neurotransmitters for chemicals in your brain, says Leikin. Initially, drinking makes you feel euphoric because the disruption of these neurotransmitters results in large amounts of reward chemicals, like dopamine, being released all at once. Your brain adapts to these changes, and when the alcohol is removed, the opposite reaction occurs. In essence, you go from feeling like The Shit, to just plain feeling like shit. Why?

"As it's being metabolized, alcohol is oxidized into a substance called acetaldehyde, which makes you feel awful," says Leikin. "Acetaldehyde is a really toxic metabolite. It's more toxic than alcohol itself in a lot of ways. If you get too much of it, you'll feel dysphoric, you'll start to feel nauseous, your head will start to hurt, and it can exacerbate depression."

If you'd kept the drinking to a minimum, your liver would have been able to get rid of the acetaldehyde before it had time to do much damage. But you didn't, so your liver's store of glutathione–a chemical that would normally attack acetaldehyde and break it down into a less harmful substance–has been severely depleted by the amount of alcohol you sucked into your poor, broken body. Hence, everything hurts.

Headache, Fatigue, and Sensitivity

The reason even small movements send throbs of agony rocketing through your temples? According to Leikin, it's because "alcohol intoxication causes what's known as vasodilatation, or expansion of the blood vessels." Vasodilation has been touted as a cause of migraines, so from the get-go, it's not good. As the effects of alcohol start to wear off, the blood vessels in your head begin to retract in a process called vasoconstriction, which further causes headaches. "Any time blood vessels expand or contract, there is going to be pain," said Leikin. "It can be expected that alcohol hangovers can exacerbate migraines for this reason."

What's more, says Leikin, the disruption of those neurotransmitters we talked about earlier are why you have an extreme sensitivity to light and sound when hungover. Excess alcohol disrupts your body's biological rhythms, which messes with your sleep cycle, the reason you feel so tired.

Dehydration Station: Population, You

Alcohol...makes you pee. Have you heard this? Experienced it, even? Well, all that tinkling takes a toll on your body. Alcohol ("technically it's a diuretic, says Leikin) essentially tricks your kidneys into peeing out significantly more liquid than you put in by blocking a hormone called antidiuretic hormone (which Leikin refers to as ADH), that usually aids the process of water absorption.

"Drinking just 50 grams of alcohol can cause the elimination of, eventually, up to a quart of water over several hours," says Leikin. This is what causes your many drunken trips to the bathroom while out on the town. But pissing the night away isn't the only reason you feel like a dried-out sponge. "Don't forget, sweating is a common hangover symptom," says Leikin.

Your Stomach and Asshole

"The nausea you feel during a hangover is due to the fact that alcohol is an irritant to the stomach," says Leikin. "It causes gastritis, or inflammation of the stomach lining."

According to Leikin, alcohol causes a buildup of lactic acid in the body, as well as increased pancreas and intestinal secretion. "Alcohol stimulates the pancreatic enzymes, which makes the pancreas secrete more than usual," he says. "Any one of these things can cause nausea, vomiting and diarrhea." All together, they conspire to keep you within arm's reach of a toilet for a good portion of your day.

A Thick Fog Blankets Your Brain

There are many reasons why you just can't concentrate while hungover, says Leikin, and if you've read this far you can probably figure it out on your own. "You're dehydrated and your electrolytes are likely at abnormally low levels." You have a lot of acetaldehyde building up in your system, and you're also dealing with all the intestinal disturbances we just talked about. In addition to that, your blood sugar may be low or wacky overall." Also, remember, you likely didn't sleep very well. Any one of these things on their own would cause concentration problems, he says. "Combined, it's going to be difficult for you to get anything done."

Off to the Races: Your Heart

"Alcohol has a direct effect on the heart," says Leikin. "There's actually a condition we call Holiday Heart, which is arrhythmia [irregular heartbeats] that is caused by alcohol abuse."

Holiday Heart, or atrial fibrillation, happens for a variety of reasons: alcohol can weaken the heart muscle, which can lead to irregular beats. It also messes with the way your heart responds to adrenaline, and depletes your store of electrolytes like magnesium, sodium, and potassium, which can in turn affect the heart's electrical currents.

You're All Up in Your Feelings

If you're feeling extra weepy during a hangover, you're not alone. An endorphin crash is to blame, which leaves you emotionally vulnerable and a bit down in the dumps. It's the reason, say, you started crying hysterically when your favorite contestant on The Great British Bake Off pulled a soggy bottom and got sent home. "This is what we call emotional lability, which is characterized by overreactions to small triggers," says Leikin. "Think about it: the dehydration alone makes you dizzy and lightheaded, and that contributes to your emotional state."

Nothing You Can Do About It

There are countless hangover cures on the market, and a (no pun intended) thirsty public hoping like hell they work. Surely, something exists that makes the pain go away, right? Right? "There is no cure for a hangover," says Leikin. "It's pretty much down to symptomatic treatment and time. Basically it takes time for your electrolytes to become normalized and recover. Drinking something like Pedialyte might make sense as a symptomatic cure, but I can't endorse any of that. Only time cures hangovers."

Follow Caroline Thompson on Twitter.

Ottawa Drafted Plans to Allow Warrantless Access of Your Data While Still ‘Consulting’ the Public

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The federal government began moving forward on new legislation that would allow police to obtain Canadians' data without a warrant — even as they ran a national consultation that feigned indecision on the issue.

The warrantless access program had been previously declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of Canada.

New documents, obtained by VICE News under access to information laws, relate to meetings of a federal-provincial working group on cybercrime that had recommended proceeding with new legislation to restart that program. The details of what, exactly, that legislation would look like are contained in a report that Ottawa has refused to make public, against the advice of its own civil service.

The documents add to a wealth of information obtained by VICE News that show the Trudeau government has been working to build support for broad new investigative powers, all while keeping information about RCMP and CSIS surveillance tactics out of the public domain.

The program that Ottawa is looking to reboot allowed police, spy agencies, and possibly others to obtain Canadians' data and personal information without a warrant from telecommunications companies and others. While the government argued in court that this practise, which often came with no paper trail at all, was simply a way through which police could obtain "basic subscriber information" which linked a phone number or IP address to a name and address.

But media reports, including from VICE, and evidence entered into the Supreme Court case showed that the program was consistently used to obtain personal information that should require a warrant. The court found that the program, by design, was an attempt to "link a specific person … to specific online activities." It concluded it was an infringement on Canadians' privacy and ordered it to end, except in emergency situations.

Read the rest at VICE News.

The Power Rangers Are Back, and They're Trying Really Hard to Be Woke

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At the coffee shop Joan's on Third in Studio City, California, the Mexican-American actress and singer Becky G sits behind a marble table. She wears a yellow jumper, yellow shoes, and yellow necklace—a tribute to Becky's role as Trini the Yellow Ranger in the new reboot Saban's Power Rangers. "I always wanted to be the yellow Power Ranger growing up," Becky says. But journalists have ignored her character's uniform color, instead focusing on her character's sexuality and dubbing her "the gay Power Ranger." The Power Rangers have gone to space and traveled through time. Now they're getting woke.

"It's establishing a new foundation for Power Rangers," Becky explains. "It's very now."

Her pivotal scene occurs midway through the movie, when the five Rangers gather around a campfire. One remarks that Trini's moody because she's experiencing "boyfriend problems." Trini then admits she's dealing with "girlfriend problems."

"It was a really honest and genuine moment," Becky says of the scene. "Zordon says in the movie, 'You must shed your mask to wear this armor.'" Becky, though, holds mixed feelings about her character's already infamous moment. "Diversity, unity, equality, are things I support as a human being," she says. "Another part of me is, like, what's the big deal? It's 2017."

Photo by Kimberly French. All photos courtesy of Lionsgate

Power Rangers does make a big deal out of addressing trendy political issues. At times the film feels like the action movie equivalent of Matt McGorry, hitting every base to score points with young audiences: Kimberly the Pink Ranger's subplot revolves around cyberbullying, and Billy the Blue Ranger has been rebooted as a black teen with autism. Unlike most of Hollywood, the film has aimed to cast a diverse group of actors—important progress—but the reboot falls in line with Riverdale and the "explicitly gay" scene in Beauty and the Beast remake, embracing young audiences' liberalism to sell a pop culture brand from the 1990s and/or 2000s. It's marketing masked as bravery.

Power Rangers's new consciousness juxtaposes the controversies that riddled the original series, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, when young millennials watched it in the early- and mid-1990s. Haim Saban, owner and founder of Saban Entertainment, produced the show on the cheap. He casted young unknowns, including a black actor as the Black Ranger and an Asian actress as the Yellow one. After the first season, three actors quit over contract disputes.

Read the rest at Broadly.

Cheap Pints and Sanctuary in the UK's 'Most Remote' Gay Bar

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It's just past 11PM on a dreary Saturday when I arrive at the Central Bar in Strabane. It's not the only place to get pissed in this small Northern Irish town; the pubs and bars that line the high street are a clear signal that people here like a drink. But unlike the other watering holes, this bar is out, proud and gay.

Sitting right on the border of Northern Ireland and the Republic, Strabane isn't a place you'd expect to have a thriving queer scene. Back in 2005, professional stud-wall finders Kirstie Allsopp and Phil Spencer named it the eighth worst place to live in the UK, and this traditionally conservative corner of the British Isles is a far cry from the bustling streets of Soho, or Manchester's Canal Street. Northern Ireland is yet to legalise same sex marriage, so in a town of just 17,000 an LGBT venue is quite unexpected.

But since its opening in 2008, the Central Bar has become a favourite among Strabane's younger locals, opening its doors Monday to Sunday for queers and straights alike.

"I always thought there was a market for a gay bar in the area," owner James Mccarran explains over the phone. He's 46, heterosexual and unashamedly proud to be the landlord of the UK's most remote gay bar. James has been in the bar business since the age of 13, and time and time again would ask his bosses to put on a gay night. "They'd always refuse to," he says, "so I knew I wanted to open my own – it's a market that needed to be tapped into."

I'm somewhat hesitant as I step inside; middle-aged straight blokes don't often run gay bars in small towns, and a part of me thinks this all might be some sort of god-awful trap. But the place feels reassuringly familiar: rainbow flags on the walls; a DJ in a polo shirt pumping out trashy pop songs; a sign advertising "BIG GAY WEDNESDAYS" hanging proudly above the bar.

Shauna

"I've been working here for nine months now, see," 21-year-old Shauna tells me, "but I definitely drank here before then." Passing me a pint – it's two beers for a fiver tonight – she shows me around the busy bar. There are two main rooms, but just one is currently open, plus there's a slightly dingy smoking area outside.

"Generally it's a gay bar," Shauna continues, "but it's a mixed crowd of everybody, as everyone here is welcomed equal. There aren't really gay bars in small Northern Irish towns like this – the nearest to here is Belfast [an hour and 45 minutes' drive away]."

Shauna tells me that they never have any trouble, besides the occasional drunken spat, and that it's rammed almost every night of the week. "It's such a small town, but we sometimes even need to get extra staff in," she adds proudly.


WATCH: 'Living Through Gay Conversion Therapy'


With Shauna off to serve another punter, I take a seat at an empty table, turning to talk to a group of guys. "No, I'm definitely not gay," one of them assures me when I ask if any identify as LGBT, "but there's nothing wrong with being gay either, mind." Nobody else in the group is forthcoming, with one guy looking at me slightly awkwardly before also turning around.

In gay bars in larger towns and cities, straight invasions are often bemoaned by the queer clientele. But if Stonewall's estimate that 6 percent of Brits are gay is correct, it stands to reason that, here, straight people are a necessary demographic to keep business ticking over.

Steven

Outside in the courtyard 18-year-old Steven Patton is drinking, and welcomes me over when I ask for a chat. "I'm here because I'm gay," he tells me matter-of-factly, "and to be honest it's the only bar I feel comfortable in in the town." Born and bred in this small community, the bar has been a godsend for Steven. "This place normalised being gay in the town," he continues, "so when I came out it wasn't such a shock. Knowing there's a gay bar in the town has helped people understand, to see. I already know so many trans people coming out here – I never thought that would happen in this town."

We talk about coming to terms with our sexuality; how as a young queer person it's an indescribably lonely task. LGBT isn't a heredity condition, so finding guidance among your immediate support network can be a tricky prospect. Pop culture references and googling "what does gay mean" in an incognito Chrome window only takes you so far; human contact and an understanding ear are vital.

The gay bar, therefore, becomes nothing short of a sanctuary; a pilgrimage to be made when it's time to explore and to escape. They're spaces for contact, for community; places to embrace your desires in ways straight kids had for so long taken for granted. Small town teens usually have to travel for hours to find one, but not in Strabane.

"If this place wasn't here, I don't know what would have happened," Steven smiles.

Kelly

As I head back inside someone shoves a shot in my direction. "Drink it!" they yell, and I happily oblige. Perched on the stool opposite is Kelly Devlin, another regular who lives just down the road. Born in London, the 34-year-old has been in Northern Ireland for nearly a decade, moving to Belfast before ending up here in Strabane.

"When I lived in Belfast for a wee while I met a guy and had a child," she explains. "Then I came to Strabane and figured out that actually I like women. I got with a girl and, well, me and her split up, but since then I've been rolling with it! When I was younger you'd go to a certain bar and act a certain way around here; you'd have to talk a certain way, be a certain person. Now you can just come here and be yourself. It's changed the community – it's changed Strabane, for sure."

Whitney (centre)

With the place getting busier, an off-duty barmaid called Whitney grabs me to have a chat upstairs. "There are a lot of younger fellas who do come into the bar, but who've not come out to their family," she says. "They feel it's alright to talk to us about it; they feel comfortable here."

A few drinks in and it's normal for a guy to ask to pop outside with one of the team for a fag, for him to say that he's gay and not sure how to handle it, looking desperately for a helping hand. "It feels great, like you're helping people, as if you're their mammy," Whitney grins. "Sometimes they'll come back during the week, when they're not drinking, and have another chat. It's such a small town, and I think people still find it hard to speak about being gay. It's nice to be here to help them."

The next few hours are pretty blurry, but there's enough music, booze and unwanted groping to match any other big gay night out. As I stumble towards the exit, and beeline for the local chippy, it dawns on me just how much of an impact this place has already had. A home for local queers, and a place of advice and refuge, the Central Bar clearly serves its customers well. But more than anything it's quite literally put "gay" on the map in this small town, starting conversations that force people to open up and chat.

Gay shame and stigma still run deep in our culture, and the earlier we confront what it means to be queer the easier the coming out process – and what follows – will become. And when there's a gay bar at the heart of a small town community, you know that, at the least, it'll be getting people to talk, especially when vodkas are a quid.

@MikeSegalov


Alex Jones Is Very, Very Sorry for That Pizzagate Stuff

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Alex Jones—the barrel-chested don of the modern day conspiracy theory movement—did something completely out of the ordinary this week.

Jones didn't take his shirt off and scream that Hillary Clinton worships the devil and smells like sulpher (that was so 2016), no, in something far more out of character, Jones got serious and apologized for his role in pizzagate.

Weird, right?

This is a man who has backed down from almost nothing in his time as the fearless leader of Infowars—from inspiring hate mail sent to Sandy Hook parents to calling the Quebec mosque massacre a false flag, Jones typically stands his ground—not this time, though. This time, in a pre-recorded video package aired on Friday, Jones went full out in saying he was wrong.

While the Joneses of the conspiracy world have backed off, the diehards are still going full bore. The day after Jones issued his apology, a contingent (read: dozens) of the true believers made their way to Washington to try and prompt President Trump to look into it.

"The elite have failed to cover up their sad world," wrote the new pizzagate king David Seaman in a tweet Saturday. "Today we make our voices heard. Pedogate [the new rebranded term for pizzagate] is real and we demand answers."

For those of you people who live full, rich lives and don't yet know what pizzagate is (you lucky, lucky folks) here's a quick catch up. The term came to light after Democratic party emails were leaked and some fun folks online started noticing what they thought to be pizza-based "code words" in the emails. This of course convinced these sleuths that there was a pizza-based pedophilia ring in DC that involved all sorts of government power brokers.

The pizzagaters started focusing on a man named James Alefantis and his pizza shop, Comet Ping Pong, because of several mentions in the emails. Jones and his theorist flunkies, alongside many, many YouTubers, fanned the flames of this theory and, at times, suggested people they should investigate it themselves—some people, as they always do, took this too far.

A man named Edgar Welch was one of the people who let pizzagate rot his brain. The 28-year-old travelled to Washington DC from North Carolina. With a rifle in hand he stormed Comet Ping Pong in an attempt to investigate it and fired three shots into the air. This, thankfully, was the final straw for many people and, other than the die hards, theorists started slowly backing away from the notion.

In the apology, Jones says that the lawyers of James Alefantis, the man behind Comet Ping Pong, sent him a letter asking him to apologize for his comments. Jones does just that and outright says the narrative around pizzagate was "incorrect" and that apologizing was "the right thing to do."

"To my knowledge today, neither Mr. Alefantis, nor his restaurant Comet Ping Pong, were involved in any human trafficking as was part of the theories about Pizzagate that were being written about in the media outlets and which we commented upon," Jones says.

"I want our viewers and listeners to know that we regret any negative impact our commentaries may have had on Mr. Alefantis, Comet Ping Pong, or its employees."

Repeatedly in his apology Jones distances himself from the theory and throws shade to other news outlets who were the real bad guys—but still, the man apologized. The Chicago Tribune talked to Alefantis who said he was pleased with the apology but that it does nothing to mitigate the harm done to him, his family, or his business and that he "continue[s] to evaluate our legal claims."

This, being Infowars and Alex Jones, has of course became meta with media folks and conspiracy theorist both taking the time to come up with theories on why the surprise apology came about—many believe it was prodded by a threatened lawsuit hanging over his head. The pizzagaters meanwhile believe Jones is being forced to do this. Seaman, made a response video which he posted to YouTube in which he says "Alex Jones did what he had to do."

"It's a disgrace and it's unfortunate that Alex Jones has chosen to back away from this story," says Seaman. "What do they have on him, that the day before the national protest against pizzagate and pedogate, he has to issue a public apology?"

The stage set up at the pizzagate demonstration in front of Washington on Saturday, March 25. Photo via YouTube screenshot.

Oddly enough, the potatoman's reckoning with a false narrative wasn't the only reason that pizzagate was in the news this week. For starters, Welch pleaded guilty on Friday to two charges for when he fired in Comet Ping Pong. The charges in question are a federal charge of transporting firearms and ammunition across state lines and a local charge of assault with a dangerous weapon—both carry maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.

Furthermore, the day after Jones' apology a national pizzagate demonstration will be taking place on Lafayette Square in front of the White House. The demonstration calls upon pizzagaters to show up and demand the government investigate their claims. A few dozen people showed up with signs and set up a stage for speeches.

"Protect god's children. Investigate pizzagate," chanted one rhyme-challenged woman with a tambourine.

David Seaman, one of the organizers, gave a speech where he said he still believes in the theory and wants accountability and justice for pizzagaters. At the end of his talk, Seaman led the group in prayer.

"God, please grant our country the strength to deal with this crisis," he said to the crowd while kneeling on the stage. "Please bring swift justice to those who are involved and please allow our societies to heal."

Just because Alex Jones has bowed out, for these folks pizzagate is not yet over—not even close. The paranoid genie is out of the bottle, and no single apology is putting it back in.

Follow Mack Lamoureux on Twitter.

We Interviewed Macka B, That Guy Who Went Viral Rapping About Cucumbers

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Think of all the songs you listened to this week; on the bus, in the club, in your bedroom, out someone's car window. Now think about what those songs were about. Chances are—and this is based on absolutely no factual data—they centered on one of the following: sex, love, money, or getting trashed.

There's a reason most songs are about those subjects: they are our driving forces, the reason we unglue our eyes in the morning, take a breath of new-day air and plough onwards with our lives. They are the reason we speak to each other, the reason our thoughts continue to flow and pretty much the only reason for continued existence.

But maybe we've been restricting ourselves to those four depressing themes this whole time. Maybe life isn't just about fucking and getting fucked, in all senses of the word. Maybe there are other subjects that can get our juices flowing, get us pumped about being alive and inspire musicians to create with enough passion that will have us ugly crying on the sticky club floor at closing time because we relate so hard.

Continue reading on Noisey.

Trolling Scholars Debunk the Idea That the Alt-Right’s Shitposters Have Magic Powers

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Since Donald Trump won the election, journalists, academics, and various online commentators have speculated wildly about the role that trolling, 4chan, and the alt-right's "meme magic" played in Trump's rise. Across countless news articles, hot takes, and Twitter debates, several recurring assumptions have emerged. First, that members of the alt-right (and even members of the Trump administration) are trolls, and more broadly, that the word "trolling" is the best descriptor for the current political climate. Second (and these are points that tend to be baked into broader stand-alone articles), that this "trolling" is interchangeable with 4chan, with the further assumption that 4chan is interchangeable with Anonymous, itself framed to be the Ur alt-right. Third, that 4chan itself, as a website, radicalized users towards white nationalism. And finally, the coup de grâce: that 4chan—and its alt-right trolls—were a deciding factor in Trump's election.

This all makes for a compelling narrative. But what actually happened—what has been happening for the last several years—isn't so straightforward. Pro-Trump antagonism during the election may have been omnipresent, and may have helped amplify Trump's message. But it cannot and should not be tethered to online communities of the past. It was, instead, symptomatic of much deeper, much more immediate cultural malaise.

We can makes this claim, because we've been studying online communities and subcultures for years; the three of us, Jessica Beyer, Gabriella Coleman, and Whitney Phillips, have each published books on hacking and/or trolling cultures, with a particular focus on 4chan and Anonymous between 2008-2014. We're not alone; ours joins the work of other researchers and journalists also writing about trolling and Anonymous at the time, including David Auerbach, Burcu Bakioğlu, Michael Bernstein et.al., Julian Dibbell, Lee Knuttila, Ryan Milner, Quinn Norton, Parmy Olson, Molly Sauter, Luke Simcoe, and others.

Continue reading on Motherboard

This Beekeeper Wants You to Stop Eating Counterfeit Honey

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Ryan LeBrun's love of honey bees is emphatic, a necessary vice for his post at Bee Local, where LeBrun harvests Oregon's only single-origin honey, a career he began nearly six years ago before the honey outfit joined Portland-based Jacobsen Salt Co. Bee Local began as most small-batch businesses do, out of the owner's kitchen. Now hitting its stride, Bee Local taps into the micro-worlds the flying insects create, sustainably raising them and harvesting their honey with fellow beekeepers and researchers, some of which come from Oregon State University's honey program. With hives scattered throughout Portland, Bee Local utilizes urban beekeeping practices, allowing the brand to build relationships with chefs, bartenders, brewers, and others interested in the magical world of bees. As far as LeBrun is concerned, he's living his dream, as his post allows him to interact with fellow honey lovers, representing his furry friends and the liquid gold they produce.

I spoke to LeBrun about bees, honey laundering, and the future of ethical honey harvesting in America.

Some of Bee Local's honey offerings. Photos courtesy of Jacobsen Salt Co.

MUNCHIES: How is Bee Local's honey sourcing and producing process different from other companies? Ryan LeBrun: We love single-origin honey, and more importantly, single-origin hives. Meaning, all of our hives have a home where they stay, which is a rooftop. We have hives at Hotel Lucia, Hotel deLuxe and Sentinel in Portland, and we also have hives at farms, wineries, and backyards close by. We like to present our honey as a location, as opposed to what giant mono-crop it pollinated.

What is honey laundering? Honey laundering is what you get when Winnie the Pooh binge-watches Narcos. Seriously, though, most governments do not have a strict standard for what honey actually is. If you're buying honey at a grocery store, chances are you're purchasing a product that is laundered, or honey that is diluted with fillers like high-fructose corn syrup, yet labeled and sold as pure honey. It's very misleading to the consumer!

Large quantities of Chinese-produced honey are being dumped illegally on the US market. To curb the importation of chemical-ridden honey, the US established high tariffs on honey imported from China. Taxes drive up prices, so big companies are essentially sneaking this honey in to keep their costs at a low price point. Honey from China is being rerouted through other countries, and it's getting mislabeled throughout the process to hide its origin. Many of these Chinese producers are using non-FDA-approved chemicals on their bees, and like the drug trade, the producers cut their honey with additives like high-fructose corn syrup, making it less pure and less expensive, since it contains a filler. At the end of the day, when laundered honey arrives in the US, it's no longer pure honey.

Read the rest of the interview at Munchies.

Cadbury Accused of Anti-Christian Conspiracy Over Rumours of 'Halal' Creme Eggs

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The latest in internet lunacy is taking the joy out of the seasonal release of Cadbury's Creme Eggs, and all we can ask is how can people criticise those delightful chocolate bombs filled with all that creamy who-knows-what-the-hell-that-stuff-inside-them-really-is?

Well, internet trolls have found a way—two ways, in fact—to claim that Cadbury is engaged in a pro-Muslim and anti-Christian conspiracy, which they allege centres on its famed chocolate eggs.

First, an image from 2014 has been circulating among nationalist and Christian rights groups on Facebook; it shows a man holding several Cadbury bars in one hand and two Halal certification statements in another. Online provocateurs are suggesting that the public should boycott Cadbury because the photo, by their argument, shows that the company supports Muslim values. Twitter user @heatmeterman's reaction is typical; he commented, "so gone from a product with a christian Quaker background to a muslim appeasement society.I rufuse [sic] to buy cadbury chocolate."

Read more on MUNCHIES.

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