On Tuesday, VICELAND is airing the season finale of WEEDIQUETTE, sending host Krishna Andavolu to Maine to meet up with a medical marijuana user who got kicked off an organ transplant list. The father of two had been waiting for a new kidney for a decade, only to have the rug pulled out from under him. Left with no other option, he's now fighting for a legislative fix to his problem that is literally a matter of life and death—for him and hundreds of other medical marijuana users.
VICELAND is also airing a new episode of CYBERWAR, where host Ben Makuch investigates how the US intelligence community uses data to identify, track down, and kill suspected terrorists. He heads to Pakistan, where he gets a chance to see firsthand how the CIA puts together its "kill list."
Amid a global conversation about sexual assault, a group of men complaining about their "involuntary celibacy" have lost their central platform.
In the r/incels subreddit, young men wrote about how they couldn’t find women to have sex with. The subreddit, which had 40,000 users a week ago, was a casually misogynist forum that compared women to Nazis and so-called “Incels” to Jews, posited that rape is “just sex” and argued that we need to include “reverse rape”— not having sex with someone—in the #MeToo conversation.
But it wasn’t until last week that the sub was banned for violent content, shortly after a young man turned to the forum to talk about his roommate, who he called “suicide fuel.” The user said it was painful to see his roommate, a “better human being,” have a girlfriend and talk about his close-knit family. Other members jumped in to offer advice to this man about his attractive roommate, a so-called “Chad” in incel speak. They encouraged and instructed the poster to castrate his roommate.
Like other anti-women subreddits, r/incels has been catching heat for a while. It even spawned its own watchdog community r/inceltears, which remains to chronicle incel extremism. Reddit has not said what the exact comment was that led to their banning the subreddit for inciting violence.
"Communities focused on this content and users who post such content will be banned from the site,” their statement said. “As of Nov. 7, r/Incels has been banned for violating this policy.”
Image via r/incels
Reddit recently announced that they plan to re-tool their policy regarding violent content on the heels of an additional $200 million in venture capital funding. It began by cracking down on Nazi and white supremacist subreddits including r/Nazi, r/DylannRoofInnocent and r/farright. However, many misogynist subreddits, like r/MensRights, are still thriving.
This isn’t Reddit’s first attempt to clean house: Its first round started after CEO Yishan Wong’s resignation in 2014 after a flurry caused by a Gawker expose on a Redditor heavily involved in subreddits like r/jailbait and r/creepshots. Interim CEO Ellen Pao, famous for suing Kleiner Perkins for sexism, instigated the first major cleanup, to user revolt: Many Redditors didn’t want to give up any subreddits, including those devoted to hating fat people or leaking celebrity nudes. Pao, squarely vilified during her tenure, did not last the full year as interim, leaving after eight months. (Pao later went on to describe how exclusion is entrenched in tech.)
The glue of communities like r/incels is obvious: Men feel held back by the women who “have it easy.” And as with most online communities open to anyone with Internet connectivity, indoctrination is easy for an outsider to spot. (Though under special circumstances, open subreddits go underground: r/incels went private recently after a member posed as a woman in r/legaladvice for tips on getting away with rape.)
If cults have taught us anything, it’s that the first rule of indoctrination is you (try to) get them while they’re young. Most Redditors are young men, and Reddit offers them unfettered ability to form and engage with “misogyny clusters”—anti-women communities that share DNA, but have distinct personalities and creeds. R/incels is a cousin of many other misogyny clusters on Reddit, including r/MensRights, r/MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way—those who opt out of the “mating dance”), and r/TheRedPill.
Image via r/IncelTears
Ideology functions by creating a monolithic enemy: in the case of misogyny clusters, the enemy is the woman. Women can’t be incels—they are reduced to “femoids,” or “robot-like androids who only crave sex with Chads.” The enemy is often described as feminism itself, which these clusters view as a “doctrine of class hatred and violence”—that is to say, women use feminism to play victim and extort economic gain.
Language is another aspect of indoctrination. To that end, these misogyny clusters have created glossaries of their acronyms, offer cheat sheets, and have their own language patterns. The jargon of misogyny includes “hamster” (a “female” who jumps through mental hoops to avoid cognitive dissonance), AWALT (all women are like that), “roastie” (a repulsive word comparing roast beef to female genitalia), “pussy pass” (women are let off for illegal behavior), alpha/beta distinctions in attractiveness, and so on. The indoctrination is further enforced by the positive reinforcement and punishment of upvotes and downvotes.
Image via r/incels
Obviously, the real issue with ideology is that it’s not all talk, and it doesn’t stay behind a computer screen. The link between violence and misogyny is strong—mass shooters like Elliot Rodger, who killed six and identified as an incel, are usually young white men, and have a track record of sexual violence and entitlement. The Virginia Tech shooter harassed women on campus. Adam Lanza, who wrote about why women were “inherently selfish,” killed his mother before he murdered children in Sandy Hook. The Texas church shooter was dishonorably discharged from the military for severely abusing his wife and son. And in general, 40 percent of women murdered were killed by their partners. When people jump to blame mental illness instead of misogyny for this demonstrable pattern, they underestimate/undercut the violence of misogyny and undermine the safety of women. There is no diagnosis that all mass shooters share. Sexual entitlement is not in the DSM—but it’s chock full in unchecked online communities.
The radicalization of young men online is something that can be reduced: By pushing these clusters deeper into the web, they’re less accessible and harder to stumble upon. Similarly, radicalization can be reversed by breaking those siloes—one Redditor claims that reading different perspectives in the watchdog/parody community r/inceltears made him stop “prescribing [himself] such horseshit.” Reddit, as it implements new content policies, needs to do more than just crack down on objectionable content—it needs to find a way to de-radicalize the young men it’s responsible for.
Debates about whether Star Wars is science fiction or fantasy have been raging on in geek communities since the film’s first screening in 1977. Variations on “It takes place ‘a long time ago’ and sci-fi is supposed to be futuristic” or “the Jedi are basically wizards who just happen to be in space” tend to dominate the fantasy camp.
It’s a pedantic debate that I’ve never felt all that emotionally invested in, until I came across Patrick Johnson’s new book The Physics of Star Wars, in which the physicist breaks down the Star Wars franchise into its constituent parts, and offers scientific explanations, grounded in reality, for just about every detail you might otherwise roll your eyes at. For all its far-fetched goofiness, half-baked mysticism, and overall unbelievability, it’s shocking how easy Johnson makes it look to rationalize and legitimize the force, pod racers, and those weird blue shields the Gungans use in Episode I.
Star Wars, whatever else it may be, is grounded in scientific possibility—if just barely.
Johnson’s explanations range from the humdrum details of what kind of galaxy the films most likely take place in (almost definitely a spiral galaxy like our own Milky Way), to more heady questions like whether the stories actually unfold in a parallel universe, or whether they may have taken place before the Big Bang. He also manages to explain away the seeming foolishness in Han Solo’s boast that he made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs (a unit of measurement, not time).
One example of the lengths Johnson is willing to go involves squaring the circle of Luke and Leia’s age gap. Despite being revealed to be twins in Return of the Jedi, Luke and Leia were described as 20 and 18 years old respectively early on, most notably in the official Star Wars novelization. Rather than chalk this up to error, or suggesting those numbers were rough estimates for the ages of two 19-year-old siblings, Johnson takes the numbers as fact and uses Einstein’s theory of special relativity to explain the gap. If we accept, as physicists do, that time passes differently depending on motion, we can accept that Leia, who has travelled from planet to planet at lightspeed for much of her life, would experience time at a slower rate than Luke, who was roughly stationary for his entire life on Tatooine.
This is the kind of devoted over-analysis that defines any great fandom, and it makes The Physics of Star Wars a compulsive pleasure to read (or a droning bore if you’re not into physics or Star Wars).
VICE reached Johnson on the phone to talk fandom, space wizardry, and picking apart a classic—and the name Jar Jar Binks didn’t come up a single time!
VICE: You give a huge amount of benefit of the doubt to these films. It's almost like anything you could put on the screen will be possible and explainable. Not probable, but possible. Patrick Johnson: One of the main purposes of writing this book is not to say, “this is definitively how the Star Wars universe works,” because the Star Wars universe obviously is fictional. But you can use these things to inspire conversations about real science and real physics that I think can be very interesting. Just because we haven't discovered how to do this or that or whatever, as long as the laws of physics don’t say "this is inherently impossible," why not try to think about the ways that it could become possible? When you talk to scientists at NASA or research facilities that are doing cutting edge research, a lot of them talk about how they got into it because they watched Star Trek as a kid, or Star Wars, or read science fiction novels.
What I try to do in this book is say there is a fundamental speed limit to the universe, as far as we know—the speed of light—and nothing can travel through space faster than that. But, although we've never measured a wormhole or detected a wormhole, it is something that is possible to have in our universe, and if we work on the assumption that this is possible, and all theories indicate that it is possible, then that is a way to travel from one point in our universe to another point in our universe, such that the distance between those two points is significantly huge, and the amount of time it takes is small, comparatively to trying to go there directly. So why not say "maybe a hyperdrive is able to create a wormhole that just connects whatever two points you want to go through"?
Were you ready to write off a lot of this stuff as nonsense, or did you expect that it would all be so explainable? I do feel like I chose things that would inspire what I thought would be interesting conversations. And something like the force being a thing that actually allows telekinesis, and control of thoughts, and being able to jump super high, I will be honest, I don't think that is going to be a thing that is ever possible. But I think it can be an interesting conversation to say, "how would this work in our universe, and what would be the consequences of this?"
I think it's probably fair to say that midi-chlorians (microscopic organisms that channel the force and “speak” its will to Star Wars characters) are an almost universally hated addition to the mythos in the prequels, but they do seem to come in handy for your purposes. How do you feel about them? For the purposes of writing this book very specifically, I think they were able to inspire an interesting conversation, because the idea of parasites able to control what we think and feel, and completely change things that we think we are doing consciously but are actually being controlled by gut bacteria, or a parasite living inside of our body, that I think is a very interesting, very real thing that happens in our universe. Saying that maybe there could be a little bacterium—it's not exactly bacteria in Star Wars—but a small microscopic thing that is able to unlock this ability in people or other alien species, there is real life science that could justify that.
As far as me as a Star Wars fan, I think it's a little bit more exciting when it's just the force and not worrying about why exactly this exists, which I know sounds a bit counterintuitive since I wrote a book saying, "here are ways to explain that."
There are so many Star Wars movies, novels, comics, video games, everything. And Disney has rewritten what counts as canon. How did you decide what you could and couldn't include in the book? I struggled with this, because there's so much out there, and I'll be honest, I have not read every Star Wars book and seen every Star Wars TV show—I have seen all the movies. What I did was I took the movies as definitely canon. And then I said if there's a thing that I need outside of the movies to have the conversation, I will try to go to canon sources when possible, and then if there just isn't a canon source that can get me where I need to go, there's almost certainly a non-canon source that can get me there.
I try not to have what I'm saying hinge on those things. For instance, the radius of Naboo shows up in the section where I'm talking about "can you travel through the planet's core if it's water from surface to surface?" I find that, guess what? Naboo can't be as big as they say it is, because the core would be solid ice, or they have to be using "through the core" colloquially to mean, "you go super deep and then around the core, and then come out on the other side." You're not literally going through the centre of the planet. Or maybe it's not water. Maybe it's some other material that doesn't turn to solid at super high pressures.
Newer cuts of A New Hope have thrown into question whether Han Solo is a cold blooded killer in his first on-screen appearance. As a physicist, who do you think shot first? The physicist in me would say I need to go to the primary source material and would say obviously Han shot first. Obviously Han shot first. If I go to the newer editions, if you go through how fast blasters travel, there's no way he could have dodged that. From a physics standpoint, your reaction time is long enough that that would have just hit him in the face. Unless he's got force powers, which has never been alluded to in the movies, so that is a benefit of the doubt I wouldn't give him.
You fucking did it Australia. More than 12 million eligible voters mailed in their postal ballots, and 61.6 percent of voters supported the legalisation of same-sex marriage. All states and territories recorded a majority Yes response... and we’re proud of you.
Not proud of the terrible politicians who foisted this on us, not proud of the feckless cowardice of Malcolm Turnbull, not proud of the No campaign’s objectively false claims, not proud of anyone who supported this utter mess.
But we can feel good about a country that was saddled with a bad faith game by a scared few, took it on, and conquered it anyway.
So does this mean same-sex marriage is now law?
No. And we’d like to give you a timeline for when it will become law, but the goalposts keep moving.
Turnbull insists there will be a vote before Christmas. But it’s worth remembering that the No campaign is not going stop because they lost the game they themselves made. They’re going to try to muddy the process the way they muddied the debate, including provisions to make discrimination legal. They’ve already signaled their intention to be as graceless in defeat as possible, so the shit fight isn’t over yet.
Even with the yes result, for this to pass Parliament will require a Prime Minister with a degree of power and courage… and oh shit, Malcolm Turnbull is still Prime Minister. Best to keep smashing that F5 button until the new one turns up. There could even be an internal Coalition fight that will see him ousted before the end of the year, based partly but not entirely on today’s result.
But look, one way or another, same-sex marriage is very, very probably about to be legal. It’s the closest it’s ever been.
What happens if they introduce the awful bill that sickly street urchin brought to Parliament House?
First of all, that sickly looking kid was actually James Paterson MP. But I can see how you made that error.
Yes, Paterson tried introducing a bill in anticipation of a Yes win that would allow private businesses to refuse goods and services for gay weddings on the basis of “conscientious objections.” Turnbull has already said that Paterson’s bill has “virtually no prospect of getting through the Parliament, ”which means it’ll probably be law before the end of the day.
But look, even if a watered-down version of marriage equality passes, one with ridiculous allowances for bigotry and so-called religious protections, it’s likely all that extra nonsense will be walked back by Labor when they take power in 2019. Which is cold comfort, I know, but as with all ultra-conservative positions, this one has a short shelf life.
That wasn’t as inspiring as I’d hoped. Are there any other good things?
One of the best parts of all this is that we never have to listen to the Australian Christian Lobby’s Lyle Shelton ever again. We should never have had to listen to him in the first place, but we can consider this his one last hurrah before eternal insignificance. The man who apparently grew up with a Bible that clearly missed the section about not bearing false witness, who claimed this vote was about radicalising children and curbing religious freedoms—that guy can now fuck merrily off forever. No self-respecting news organisation has any excuse to book him or ask for a quote from him ever again.
This also goes for Tony Abbott, whose only useful contribution these past two years has been his rather hilarious undermining campaign against his feckless successor, simultaneously ruining both of their reputations with every inarticulate subtweet. Abbott, who looked at all the problems facing the world and figured the best use of his platform was to prevent his sister from obtaining equal rights, has proven himself even more irrelevant than the time he tried to knight the Queen’s husband.
It’s not admirable to take delight in the failure of one’s opponents. But, conversely, fuck ’em.
So… can I still celebrate?
Oh hell yes. After everything you’ve been through, you more than deserve to take a breather and kick back. Celebrate like crazy, in any way you want, with anyone you want to. This is your day.
Never forget that you did something amazing this year. You took a patently unfair situation, one that was deliberately designed to result in a No vote, and you played by the rules even though the rules kept changing, and you kept smashing that ball even though the posts kept moving, and you fucking won anyway.
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. If that’s not worthy of a drink or 10, I don’t know what is.
On The VICE Guide to Right Now, VICE's new daily podcast, we delve into the biggest news of the day and give you a rundown of the stories we're reading, working on, and fascinated with.
Today, we break down the major headlines before talking about the power of apologies. On this episode, VICE politics writer Eve Peyser explains why it's so important for men to directly say "I'm sorry" in the wake of sexual assault and harassment allegations.
Everything you need to know about the world this morning, curated by VICE.
US News
RNC Ditches Roy Moore The Republican National Committee has scrapped field programs and pulled fundraising resources for the embattled Republican's campaign for Senate in Alabama. The move follows allegations of sexual misconduct and assault five women made against Moore, which he's steadfastly denied. FOX News host Sean Hannity distanced himself from Moore Tuesday night, demanding he explain “inconsistencies” or “get out of this race.”—VICE News/Politico
Cops Praise School for Protecting Kids from Shooter A gunman killed four people in northern California Tuesday, but police said a speedy lockdown at an elementary school almost certainly prevented more deaths. The suspected shooter tried to enter the Rancho Tehama school before firing in the streets outside. Though he did wound two children in the area, he was later fatally shot by police. “The quick action of those school officials… saved countless lives and children,” said assistant sheriff Phil Johnston.—NBC News
Sessions Admits Being Told About Trump Aide's Ties to Moscow Attorney General Jeff Sessions told the House Judiciary Committee he could now recall a meeting he attended with Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos where the latter revealed some connection to Russian actors. Having failed to disclose the sit-down in previous testimony, Sessions nonetheless said he rejected “accusations that I have ever lied under oath.” At the meeting, Papadopoulos reportedly claimed he could set up contact between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.—The Guardian
UCLA Basketball Players Freed After Arrest in China Three US college athletes returned to Los Angeles Tuesday night after being arrested and accused of stealing sunglasses by authorities in Hangzhou. Larry Scott, head of the Pacific-12 conference, said the case had been “resolved to the satisfaction of the Chinese authorities.” President Trump said he had raised the matter with President Xi Jinping.—CNN
International News
Army Seizes Control in Zimbabwe, Denies Coup The Zimbabwean army has taken charge of state broadcaster ZBC, with Major General Sibusiso Moyo appearing on TV to explain that the military was “targeting criminals” surrounding President Robert Mugabe. South African president Jacob Zuma claimed Mugabe told him he had been “confined” to his home. The power shift followed a dispute within Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF party over who should succeed the 93-year-old leader.—VICE News
Australia Votes in Favor of Marriage Equality A clear majority of Australians—61.6 percent—have endorsed the legalization of same-sex marriage. Liberal senator Dean Smith is set to introduce a marriage equality bill Wednesday following the results of the country’s mail-in vote. Senator Eric Abetz, a leading "No" campaigner, said he expected legislation to pass before Christmas.—VICE News
Russia Uses Video Game as Evidence of US-ISIS Collusion The Russian defense ministry claimed photos it posted on social media show US forces protecting an ISIS convoy from Russian air strikes in Syria. But one photo was shown to be a screenshot from the game AC-130 Gunship Simulator: Special Ops Squadron, forcing the ministry to delete it. A spokesman for the US coalition against ISIS said the Russian photo was “about as accurate as their air campaign.”—The Washington Post
Injured North Korean Defector in Stable Condition The solider shot and badly wounded by fellow North Korean troops as he fled over the demilitarized zone into South Korea has stabilized, according to a South Korean doctor. Surgeon Lee Cook-jong said a hip fracture and the potential for infection could still be problematic for the unnamed defector.—Reuters
Everything Else
Taylor Swift Album Becomes 2017’s Biggest Seller Reputation has shifted 1.05 million units in just four days, blowing past the previous best-selling album of the year, Ed Sheeran’s ÷ (Divide). Swift is now the first artist to have four albums sell more than 1 million copies in a week.—Billboard
Actress Sues Weinstein for Sexual Battery, Assault The unnamed woman filed a lawsuit against the disgraced Hollywood producer in Los Angeles Tuesday. She alleged Harvey Weinstein forced her to watch him masturbate in 2015 and sexually assaulted her months later.—AP
Bryan Cranston Says Shamed Stars Could Be Forgiven The actor said some of the Hollywood figures disgraced by sexual assault and misconduct claims could still be given “a second chance." Cranston said: “Maybe down the road there is room for that [a way back]. Maybe it’s possible.”—BBC News
Rose McGowan Arrested on Drugs Charge The actress surrendered to police in Virginia Tuesday in response to a warrant issued over alleged drug possession. She was released by the sheriff’s office in Loudoun County on a $5,000 bond. McGowan said she would “clearly plead not guilty.”—The New Yorker
Congresswoman Alleges Sexual Misconduct by Colleagues Representative Jackie Speier shared allegations that two members of Congress had sexually harassed staffers. Without naming any men, Speier said victims had “their private parts grabbed on the House floor."—Broadly
Forbes Conference Leaves Attendee Data Open, Member Says A website for Forbes’ 30 Under 30 conference was said to expose members’ personal details, including phone numbers, emails, and dates of birth. The bug was discovered by Yan Zhu, a tech engineer included on the Forbes list in 2015.—Motherboard
Make sure to check out the latest episode of VICE's daily podcast. Today we're taking a hard look at the power of apologies.
First celebrity crushes are no joke. It’s such a powerful moment when your pre-teen hormones are kicked into high gear. Whoever it was, and whatever it was about them––Han Solo’s cocksure swagger, Kelly Kapowski’s posi vibes––they take up residence in your mind and never completely move out. We asked friends and co-workers about the first famous person they crushed on. Here’s what they said.
“Kirk Cameron. I know. Shut up.” - Jenn, 39
“Beauty and the Beast’s animated piccolo.” - Allie, 25
“Jake Lloyd as Lil Darth Vader.” - Jaime, 27
"Young Anakin Skywalker because bowl cut." - Katie, 25
“Punk Nick Cage in Valley Girl.” - Tracy, 45
“Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz. Sorry.” - Louise, 23
“Gunnar Nelson. Loved that horse-ish hair.” - Courtney, 39
"Lil Romeo. Always and forever, babe." - Eve, 24
“Donnie Wahlberg. All the right stuff.” - Kate, 33
"Second grade, Antonio Bandares as Zorro." - Lia, 27
“Elijah Wood as Huck Finn. So dreamy.” - Jaime, 32
"Dragon Ball Z's Trunks. Anime #bae." - Janae, 23
"Nick Carter, before I discovered Aaron." - Lauren, 25
“Willie Aames from Charles In Charge.” - Emily, 34
“Loved Christina Ricci as Wednesday Addams.” - Mike, 37
“Marty McFly in purple Calvin Kleins.” - Annie, 39
"Three magic words: Jonathan Taylor Thomas." - Liz, 27
"Jessica Rabbit. Roger didn't deserve her." - Drew, 22
The last message a young British woman sent her mom was simple, “I don’t feel well.”
The next day Natalie Jade Seymour, a 22-year-old woman from London, and her friend Abbey Gail Amisola, 27, of Winnipeg, were found dead in their Cambodian hostel bunks. The woman were allegedly suffering from food poisoning and had bought some pills from a local chemist to deal with their illness.
In online posts paying tribute to Amisola, a family member described her as someone who “filled lights into the room filled with joy, happiness, comfort, and warmth.” Seymour’s mother told the Daily Mail that the two were told by the hostel staff to go get medical help but declined.
“They decided to sleep it off but never woke up again,” she said.
The bunks were Seymour and Amisola were found. Photo via Handout.
According to the Sun, the duo had met while traveling and became quick friends. The two were staying at the Monkey Republic Guest House in Cambodia’s Kampot region. In a statement to the Daily Mail, a spokesman for the Monkey Republic hostel said that the case is “in the hands of the police, but there is nothing suspicious about their deaths.”
In 2015, a British man named Stephen William King, died in his hotel room after complaining of food poisoning. Just last year, award winning New Zealand journalist Christopher Adams ODed in the country. Both deaths were ruled as heart attacks.
In a story published at the time of Adam’s death, Cambodia Expats Online editor Daniel Mackevili told VICE that drugs are available for tourists the minute they touch down and that people die of "heart attacks" in the country weekly.
Mackevili added that, at times, tourists are getting heroin when they think they’re getting cocaine and that rooming houses will allegedly “get rid” of evidence to avoid a fine. A Cambodian local told the Sun that over the counter drug medication in Cambodia can routinely contain opioids.
An official cause of death has yet to be released for Amisola and Seymour but an autopsy has been scheduled.
The gunman who killed at least four people and wounded 14 others in Northern California on Tuesday had a long-running feud with his neighbor, a domestic dispute that may have sparked his rampage, the Associated Press reports.
The suspected gunman, Kevin Janson Neal, 44, was out on bail for stabbing his neighbor in January when he carried out his killing spree. The two had been butting heads for months, and the neighbor had a restraining order against Neal, Tehama County assistant sheriff Phil Johnston told SFGate. She and a second neighbor were among the four people killed when shooting broke out at about 8 AM near Neal's home.
Another neighbor, Brian Flint, told the Redding Record Searchlight living next to Neal was "hell," and that he regularly harassed his neighbors and unloaded firearms on his property. The head of the local homeowners' association, Juan Caravez, told SFGate he had received about two dozen complaints specifically about Neal's gun use.
"The crazy thing is that the neighbor has been shooting a lot of bullets lately, hundreds of rounds, large magazines," Flint told the Searchlight. "We made it aware that this guy is crazy and he's been threatening us."
Neal's sister, Sheridan Orr, told the Los Angeles Times her brother had a history of violent outbursts, and police said he was involved in a "domestic violence" incident on Monday, a day before the shooting. Like Neal, the shooter behind this month's mass shooting in Texas had a history of domestic abuse—a disturbing trend among the perpetrators of America's deadliest mass shootings.
"There are certain people that do not need guns," Orr told the LA Times, "and my brother was clearly one of them."
Neal was fatally shot by police after a 45-minute rampage through Rancho Tehama Reserve, a small community about two hours north of Sacramento. After allegedly killing his two neighbors near his home, Neal stole a pickup truck and drove through town with a semiautomatic rifle and two handguns, indiscriminately shooting at the homes, cars, and people he passed, the AP reports. He ended up at Rancho Tehama Elementary School, where he rammed through the school's gate with his truck and opened fire on the building, according to NBC News.
"This guy was bent on driving by residences and arbitrarily shooting at them,” Johnston told SFGate. “This guy was on a killing rampage."
Although Neal was never able to get into the building, he shot and wounded a woman and two children before leaving the scene.
"The quick action of the school officials saved countless lives and children," Johnston told SFGate. "It was monumental."
Neal shot several more victims, wrecked the truck he'd stolen, and stole another vehicle before police were able to run him off the road. About 45 minutes after his shooting spree began, he was fatally shot in a firefight with the officers.
UPDATE 11/15: According to the Associated Press, the gunman's wife has been found dead in their home, bringing the death toll to at least six.
Around the same time Donald Trump was being inaugurated as America’s 45th president, thousands of protesters surged down the streets of the nation’s capital, some clad in all-black. Chanting slogans like “Whose streets? Our streets!” and brandishing signs with messages like “No Border No Walls” and “Join the Revolution” flags, they were defiant at the prospect of a man who stoked white nationalism time and again on the campaign trail becoming the most powerful person in the world. The DC-based political organization Disrupt J20, an umbrella coalition of activist groups that launched after Trump’s election and had some overlap with the antifa movement, helped lead the march.
As can happen at mostly peaceful protests, vandalism erupted in fits and starts: According to police, protesters—some of whom were armed with hammers and trash cans—smashed Starbucks and Bank of America windows, torched a parked limo, set (purchased) “Make America Great Again” souvenirs aflame, and sprayed “Revolution or Death” on walls of local buildings. Police in riot gear responded by surrounding the march and unleashing rubber bullets, water cannons, flash grenades, and pepper spray.
“Back up! Back the fuck up!” officers yelled, hitting the huddled mass with clubs, as video footage later revealed. “I’m a native veteran. This is my land, this is my country!” one woman yelled as cops circled the group. “You can’t do this to my people!”
Now 194 people arrested at the protests face up to decades in prison in what legal observers have dubbed an unprecedented assault on protest. After all, the US Attorney for the District of Columbia has slapped almost all of the defendants with felony charges of incitement to riot and destruction of property, among other charges. The first trial—of six individuals, including a journalist—was set to begin with jury selection Wednesday in DC Superior Court. It's to be followed by a series of others, since the court could not hear all the cases at once.
With political polarization as high as ever and violent white supremacists clashing with antifa activists an increasingly routine facet of American life, the cases could set the contours of protest in the Trump era. And with such aggressive legal tactics on display, experts and civil liberties advocates feared the saga might dampen activism.
Suggesting that their mere presence at the protest made them responsible for the violence, DC prosecutors alleged in their court filing that defendants used "Black Bloc" tactics to “prevent law enforcement from being able to identify the individual perpetrators of violence or destruction.”
“Individual defendants wore black or dark colored clothing, gloves, scarves, sunglasses, ski masks, gas masks, goggles, helmets, hoodies, and other face-concealing and face-protecting items to conceal their identities,” prosecutors wrote, claiming some individuals were armed with crowbars, bricks, and explosive devices. They went on to argue protesters took part in a “conspiracy” with intent to cause a public disturbance.
Both DC prosecutors and police declined requests for interviews, citing the pending trial, but a spokeswoman for the city’s Metropolitan Police Department claimed in a statement that all 190-plus defendants engaged in an illegal violent protest.
Basically, she insisted, the protesters had it coming.
“During the 58th Presidential Inauguration, there were thousands of individuals who exercised their constitutional right to peacefully assemble and speak out for their cause,” the spokeswoman, Rachel Reid, wrote in an email. “Unfortunately, there was another group of individuals who chose to engage in criminal acts, destroying property and hurling projectiles, injuring at least six officers.”
About 230 people were initially arrested at the inauguration protest march. A handful were not charged because they were under 18 or confirmed to be journalists or legal observers, while others have already taken plea deals for misdemeanor charges, according to Sam Menefee-Libby, a DC activist advocating for those arrested. (At least one protester also pleaded guilty to felony rioting and felony assault on a cop in April.)
But while some may protesters clearly crossed a line, defense attorneys and civil liberties advocates, along with fair number of impartial experts, said the government is clearly overreaching with blanket charges against a diverse array of people exercising First Amendment rights.
Alexei Wood, a journalist who was filming the march when he was cornered by cops and arrested, is among the first group to face trial, and faces up to 61 years in prison. His protest footage “speaks for itself” in revealing his innocence, according to his defense attorney, Brett Cohen.
“In the age of video, there is an overwhelming amount of evidence, and I think a jury will see the evidence for what it is,” he told me. “It’s rare that I have a case where what the government is accusing my client of is all on video. It’s all there.”
Wood’s 42-minute video shows him documenting the march and the police engaging in a common law-enforcement tactic known as “kettling,” where a cordon of officers surround a crowd to physically confine them in a small space in hopes of dispersal or arrest. At the end of the video, officers are seen spraying tear gas at the group, and Wood appears to sink down to the ground, exclaiming, “This is some of the worst pain I’ve ever had in my life.”
Cohen said the other defendants are likely to testify that they, too, not damage any property.
Across-the-board riot charges for so many people, including journalists, are unparalleled in recent US history, according to College of William and Mary law professor Tim Zick. Prosecutors typically target individuals, rather than the whole group, with offenses alleged at mass protest like this one, he said. “The dangers for protesters and free speech and assembly are serious,” Zick, who specializes in First Amendment rights, told me via email.
He added that if the riot theory succeeds in this trial, it could be used to target marches with “far less serious or even minor” damages. “In that event, the threat of felony charges and possible conviction could hang over many large-scale public protests,” he told me. “This could result in a significant chilling of protest activities, as individuals may be reasonably concerned that they could be falsely charged (i.e., through misidentification) or subject to prosecution for merely associating with ‘anarchist’ groups.”
The prosecution follows a larger recent pattern of state legislatures increasing punishments for protest-related activities, according to the professor. “The trend has been to crack down on acts of civil disobedience in ways that make public protest legally—and in some instances even physically—more perilous,” he said.
Jonathan Blanks, a research associate for the Project on Criminal Justice at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, echoed Zick’s concerns that the mass prosecutions raised “serious questions about individual culpability and proximity to crime during mass demonstrations.”
“There is no question some individuals broke the law and should be held accountable for their actions, which included property damage and injuring bystanders and police officers,” he told me. “It is important to hold wrongdoers accountable for their actions, but going too far threatens Americans' First Amendment rights of free speech, free press, and peaceable assembly.”
To Scott Michelman, a senior staff attorney for the DC ACLU, the mass arrests are just one part of the government’s overreach in handling inauguration protesters. The civil liberties group is engaged in an ongoing lawsuit against the District of Colombia and local cops for what they said were unconstitutional arrests carried out with excessive force and invasive searches. They also alleged cops denied protesters access to food and water. That suit, filed on behalf of four people of those, including a journalist and legal observer, is pending in US District Court.
The ACLU in DC has also sought to block the feds from investigating Facebook accounts of activists involved in the protest, after the government filed a subpoena demanding Facebook turn over the accounts of three such individuals. Earlier this week, a DC judge ruled the government could use the accounts, but in a limited way.
As Michelman put it, “We think the government has the responsibility to foster free speech and respect it, not kill it with aggressive search and seizure.”
If you're a left-leaning bro who thinks Cards Against Humanity is a rollicking good time (who doesn’t love making their conservative relatives say, "During sex, I like to think about Dick Cheney?"), you’ll probably get a kick out of the game's latest marketing prank.
The game seems to be stepping up its marketing gimmicks from the time it asked people to vote on whether or not it should slice up a Picasso painting. The game's new promotion, Cards Against Humanity Saves America, promises six "America-saving surprises" for the low, low price of $15. First order of business: fucking up Trump’s border wall.
"Donald Trump is a preposterous golem who is afraid of Mexicans," the website says. "So we’ve purchased a plot of vacant land on the border and retained a law firm specializing in eminent domain to make it as time-consuming and expensive as possible for the wall to get built."
The promotion, which has already sold out all 150,000 slots, will send surprise gifts throughout December to everyone who contributed, starting with "a certificate of our promise to fight the wall." According to the website, customers will also receive new cards, along with some other democracy-saving gifts delivered to their doorstep.
This is really the first time the "party game for horrible people" has made a real effort to weigh in on the political conversation, considering its Cards Against Humanity for Her was exactly the same as the original game, but pink and cost $5 more. Trolling Trump's border wall is a considerable leap from its Cards Against Silicon Valley game, which just added cards like "understated sexism" and "Nintendo-based drinking games."
It's not clear if a card game will actually be able to come between the president and his plans for a "great wall," especially considering Congress has already done a pretty good job of that already. In any case, Cards Against Humanity can still provide plenty of fed-up Americans with some kind of catharsis, allowing them to laugh at phrases like "Donald Trump's latest Twitter war was with Helen Keller in a pussy hat" or whatever.
The fall of 1997 was, simply put, one of the most remarkable moviegoing seasons of our time: Boogie Nights. Jackie Brown. The Sweet Hereafter. Wag the Dog. Eve's Bayou. Good Will Hunting. The Ice Storm. Amistad. As Good as It Gets. Gattaca. And so many more, culminating with what became the highest-grossing movie of all time: the long-delayed, oft-trashed, yet eventually unstoppable Titanic . Each week yielded another remarkable motion picture—sometimes two or more, taking bold risks, telling powerful stories, introducing formidable new talents, and reaffirming the gifts of master filmmakers. This series looks back at those movies, examining not only the particular merits of each, but what they told us about where movies were that fall 20 years ago, and about where movies were going.
“The summer I killed my father, I was ten years old.” Those are the first words spoken in Eve’s Bayou, and as opening lines go, you could do a helluva lot worse. This evocative memory drama was directed by first-time filmmaker Kasi Lemmons, who was best known as an actor, primarily for her supporting role as Clarice Starling’s academy roommate in The Silence Of The Lambs. The movie was selected by Roger Ebert as the single best film of 1997, which is quite a compliment considering the competition.
The ten-year-old of that opening line is Eve (Jurnee Smollett, in a performance of uncommon skill for an actor of any age). She is a quintessential middle child: Her little brother, Poe (Jake Smollett, her real brother), is mommy’s baby, and older sister Cisely (Meagan Good) is daddy’s girl. Said daddy is Louis (Samuel L. Jackson), “the best colored doctor in all Louisiana.” Sometimes Eve goes with him on house calls, and observes lonely young wives purring pleas like, “Could you give me something for the pain?” Early in the film, Eve accidentally spies her father in an intimate moment with a family friend (Lisa Nicole Carson). Eve’s upset by what she sees, but Cisely is particularly livid, for reasons that will become clear.
Eve is especially fond of her Aunt Mozelle (Debi Morgan), a woman who is, as her father delicately puts it, “not unfamiliar with the inside of a mental institution.” Mozelle has visions of future tragedies. Ironically, she can see everyone’s future but her own—the middle-aged woman is a widow three times over. “It’s not your fault they die,” Eve assures her, as her aunt reflects upon her departed husbands—literally, standing together in her bedroom mirror. Later, she tells Eve the story of how she came to lose them, and the scene plays out in the full-length mirror next to her. The glass surface becomes a window into the past.
The whole movie has that feeling. Jackson, still in his white-hot post–Pulp Fiction phase, is credited as one of the film’s producers, and its cast is packed with gifted black character actors who should’ve been stars (Lynn Whitfield, Roger Guenveur Smith, Morgan, Carson, Lemmons’s husband Vondie Curtis-Hall). Frankly, Jackson might have gone the same way, were it not for the right role or two.
Yet Eve’s finest quality is the thrill of a confident filmmaker working with material that risks silliness, and pulling it off. The film’s hinge event plays out a couple of times, from different perspectives, and Lemmons unapologetically sets it during a violent storm. She achieves the delicate balance of laying on that thunder and lightning without diminishing the scene’s power with winking or camp. She’s mixing Southern Gothic and black literary fiction traditions, over the common ground of small-town family folklore. What a rich, powerful film this is.
Mike Figgis’s One Night Stand, released one week later, was met with neither the critical nor commercial success of Eve’s Bayou, or of the writer/director’s previous picture, the 1995 Oscar-winning Leaving Las Vegas. Its title and opening credits make it look and sound like a 90s erotic thriller, which is understandable. The film's original screenplay was the work of Joe Eszterhas, whose scripts for Jagged Edge and Basic Instinct were among the most influential of that subgenre, and New Line reportedly paid $4 million for this one. But in the fall of 1995, at the same time Figgis was triumphing with Las Vegas, the one-two punch of Eszterhas’s Showgirls and Jade made him toxic. (Oddly, Glenn Plummer and Kyle McLachlan, both survivors of Showgirls, show up in One Night Stand.) Figgis ended up doing a top-to-bottom rewrite so thorough, its original writer didn’t even take a story credit. But this isn’t mere trivia. While the erotic thriller was already on the wane, One Night Stand is best seen now as fascinating variation/extension of that movement.
Its central character is Max (Wesley Snipes, very good), a family man and semi-pretentious commercial director whom we first meet in his old stomping grounds of New York City. He’s returned to visit an estranged friend (Robert Downey Jr.) who was recently diagnosed as HIV-positive. This information is all briskly conveyed in a direct-to-camera opening monologue, which Figgis identifies on the audio commentary as a Shakespearean “prologue,” so “we can just get on with the drama.” Said drama is there in the title, an encounter with Karen (Nastassja Kinski, quietly terrific), also a married, visiting-on-business type, whom he meets at his hotel when she notices the fountain pen that’s leaking in his pocket. (I know, I know.)
There’s an undeniable spark between them, and when he misses his flight, they end up going to a concert together. On the way home, they survive a mugging (“Goddamn New York,” Max fumes), and Figgis smoothly captures the vulnerability that can follow a moment of shared trauma and intensify. “Listen, I’d like you to stay,” she tells him, back at her hotel, and in an elegant series of elliptical snapshot scenes, they eventually find themselves in bed together. The sex itself is slathered with 90s clichés, sax and slo-mo and such, but the run up is something else. Figgis uses blackouts between key moments to dramatize the way time becomes elastic over the course of a long, charged, hot night. They hold out all night, but finally give in just as the day breaks.
One Night Stand’s first act is its best, since the narrative that follows relies on a couple of genuinely wild coincidences that don’t quite hold water. The film also closes in on the “friend dying of AIDS” trope, which was very of-that-moment but hasn’t aged well. The film can be accused, not unfairly, of using an ill gay man as a storytelling prop for a straight romance. But that doesn’t negate the power of Downey’s scenes—they don’t soft-soap his pain (this is not some glammed-up, Love Story bullshit)—or his performance, which includes a bedside farewell that’s tender and true, and an eyebrow raise that’s one of the finest wordless reactions I’ve ever seen.
Also worth noting is the dynamism of Downey and Snipes’s reunion conversation, which vibrates with the comfort and rhythm of a real friendship with history (“How’s your beard-wife?” Downey asks his friend, with a gleam in his eye). That’s a great scene. There’s another one much later, when Max and his wife, Mimi (Ming Na-Wen), fight after an awkward dinner party. Figgis and his actors vividly recreate the stickiness of martial argument—how two people who have been together a long while, and presumably love each other, know how to push each other’s buttons, take deliberate offense, and choose to escalate.
But Figgis most adroitly keys in on the delicacy and tentativeness of his main couple’s interactions, most of them non-verbal, and how they accumulate into an attraction that neither can ignore—not that they want to. Contrast Max and Karen’s chemistry with the lead characters in Snipes’s previous interracial romance Jungle Fever, which posits that its characters are primarily tempted by social taboos and stereotypes; One Night Stand assumes they’re hot for each other because their spouses are tiresome, and, well, they look like Wesley Snipes and Nastassja Kinski. (The truth of that matter, most of the time, is probably somewhere in between.) In fact, One Night Stand doesn’t acknowledge its identity politics at all—either with regards to Snipes or his Asian-American wife—in a way that’s either admirably post-racial or willfully ignorant, your call.
Eve’s Bayou doesn’t really mention race either, not because it’s whitewashed in any way, but because it concerns an insular community, and there are frankly no white people around to bring it up. But its themes are beyond the scope of black and white. It is a film whose subject applies to several of the best films of 1997, and many other years. “Memory is the selection of images, some elusive, others printed indelibly on the brain,” go its closing lines. “Each image is like a thread, each thread woven together to make a tapestry of intricate texture. And the tapestry tells a story, and the story is our past.”
Under the waves of the Atlantic Ocean a new front line has emerged as a resurgent Russia tries to exert its influence on the global stage. Russian submarines have been challenging NATO in the biggest increase of underwater military activity since the height of the Cold War.
Submarines from NATO and the Soviet Union vied for control of strategically critical parts of the Atlantic Ocean throughout the course of the Cold War but the collapse of communism left Western navies as the dominant force for the last 25 years as Russia’s navy decayed from lack of investment. Western military attention shifted away from the seas and expensive anti-submarine warfare capabilities took a backseat to a new era of threats. Under Vladimir Putin and a long period of economic growth in the early 2000s, Russia reinvested in the military and the Russian Navy began to extend its reach into the Atlantic Ocean once again
Russian activity in the Atlantic has been on the rise for a number of years and the British First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Philip Jones, acknowledged the threat in a message to the Royal Navy in January 2017: “In northern Europe and the Baltic, we are responding to the highest level of Russian naval activity since the end of the Cold War.” Jones’ comments echoed those of his colleague Vice Admiral Clive Johnstone, the head of NATO’s maritime forces, who stated in 2016 that his NATO forces report “more activity from Russian submarines than we’ve seen since the days of the Cold War.” The head of the US Navy’s Sixth Fleet, Vice Admiral James Foggo III called this the start of “The Fourth Battle of the Atlantic,” referencing past submarine battles from WWI, WWII, and the Cold War.
NATO, therefore, is clearly aware of the growing problem but Western forces are stretched thin with global commitments and years of defence cuts. The UK has lacked a Maritime Patrol Aircraft since the Nimrod MR2 was retired in 2010 and the replacement P-8 Poseidon will not enter service until at least 2019. Sudden submarine activity in waters around the British Isles has prompted the UK to use patrol aircraft from Canada, France and the United States to track the vessels. A Royal Canadian Navy submarine was re-tasked from a NATO exercise to track Russian submarine activity last year in a move that was called “historically significant” by Rear Admiral John Newton, commander of Maritime Forces Atlantic.
The head of the Russian Navy, Viktor Chirkov, has admitted that Russian submarine patrols have grown 50 percent since 2013 and the surge in activity has grown as part of Russia’s latest military adventures. The invasion of Crimea in 2014 and the more recent intervention in Syria has led to a steady stream of Russian ships and submarines transiting through the North Sea en route to the Western Mediterranean to conduct missile strikes.
In October 2017, then UK Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon, cited Russian activity in an address to the House of Commons Defence Committee, and called for spending on capabilities to address the threat. “We have seen an extraordinary increase in Russian submarine activity over the last couple of years in the North Atlantic,” he said. NATO’s acknowledgement of the changing situation prompted it to restore anti-submarine warfare to its list of 16 priority capabilities for the Alliance at the 2014 NATO summit in Wales and the last week’s NATO Defence Minister meeting came with the announcement of plans for a new command structure, set to re-establish an Atlantic Command “to ensure that sea lines of communication between Europe and North America remain free and secure. This is vital for our transatlantic Alliance.”
As increased Russian activity continues to pressure Western militaries, Atlantic countries should pay heed to warnings of dwindling ship numbers and capabilities in their navies. Canada is choosing a Halifax-class frigates replacement next year in the biggest defence procurement project the country has ever undertaken and the UK has started to build eight new ASW Type 26 frigates. Combined with attack submarines and Maritime Patrol Aircrafts, these new frigates will be the backbone of NATO’s anti-submarine warfare capability in the North Atlantic for decades to come.
The Royal Navy’s nuclear powered Astute-class attack submarines are entering service at present and will provide a formidable counterpart to Russian equivalents but the RCN has suffered years of problems with the four conventionally powered (SSK) Victoria-class submarines. A recent report called for a future fleet of 12 new SSKs for Canada, with some estimations putting the price at $50 billion. Canada should take the warnings over the Russian submarine threat seriously as it plans the future of the Royal Canadian Navy.
During a performance at an Australian afterparty, Drake stopped mid song to lose it on a fan.
The interaction, which was caught on video and posted to Instagram, was with a person in the audience who seemingly kept groping girls within the rappers eyeline. “Yo, stop that shit,” Drakes tells someone on stage before pointing out into the crowd.
“If you don’t stop touching girls, I will come out there and fuck you up,” he said before reiterating himself. “I’m not playing, if you don’t stop putting your hands on girls, I’m gonna come out there and fuck your ass up.”
The crowd, understandably, lost all their cool at that moment. The video was taken by a user named @louisesukari at an afterparty following Drake’s show in Sydney on November 15.
“I got this close to Drake threatening to jump into the crowd to start a fight with a guy groping a woman in the audience,” reads the caption.
“Violence against women, 6 God says no.”
This isn’t the first time that Drake has shown signs of being woke. Not all that long ago, in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Drake said that he turned down a starring role in a Harvey Weinstein film called The Heist. Drake’s manager said that they had vetted the man now accused of countless sex crimes and they “got bad feedback about working with him.”
President Trump just got back from a 12-day tour of Asia, stopping off in five different countries to hang out with world leaders from China's president Xi Jinping to Russia's Vladimir Putin. It seemed like he had a blast, getting a chance to do big boy stuff and shake a lot of hands, even if he didn't score too many Ws for the US. If you didn't have a chance to follow the trip, don't worry—the president's crack video team put together a recap, and it's a doozy. Sound on, please:
Then there's the absolute glut of slow-motion shots, mostly applied to things that don't really belong in slow-motion. The president's car, for instance, drives at about five MPH, straight ahead, in slo-mo; a guard turns his head slightly to the left, in slo-mo; Trump walks a whole lot, in slo-mo. Not to mention those bikes at the beginning of the video, which are moving backwards for some reason.
To Trump's credit, this video is objectively better than a lot of his other on-camera appearances. His Halloween video, for example, was actually just a bunch of still photographs spliced together way too quickly, like something you might throw together on iMovie in about two-and-a-half minutes.
It's worth noting that some particularly memorable moments were missing from Trump's Asia recap, too. We didn't get a look at the protesters who greeted him in Hawaii with "Welcome to Kenya" signs. Nor, for that matter, the thousands of anti-Trump demonstrators in Manila who built a massive sculpture of him in the shape of a swastika.
Welcome to Evesplaining, politics writer Eve Peyser's column about why everyone else is wrong and she's right.
On Monday, Joe Biden said he's "not closing the door" on a future presidential run. A new Politico/Morning Consult poll demonstrated why he's considering going for it by showing Biden leading Trump by 11 points in a very hypothetical 2020 matchup.
But don't be fooled by these numbers—the same poll found that a "generic Democrat" would fare even better against Trump. More to the point, to even find himself facing Trump Biden would have to win a likely packed-to-the-brim Democratic primary. And when a Resistance-drunk Democratic base looks at Biden, they're going to see a lot not to like. He'll face the same problems Hillary Clinton did in 2016, but magnified.
Let's begin by noting that Biden has already positioned himself as anti-populist Democrat in ideological opposition to Bernie Sanders, who according to some polls is the most popular politician in the US. In practice, this seems to mean going around saying things like "the wealthy are as patriotic as the poor," which seems slightly tone deaf considering he'd be competing to replace Trump and throw out his cabinet of billionaires and hedge fund titans.
That's just the tip of the iceberg. Young people are probably more familiar with the memefied iteration of Biden, a silly foil to Barack Obama, who was the subject of numerous Onion parodies that portrayed him as a weed-selling, porn-loving "Uncle Joe" who threw parties at the White House when Obama was out of town. But as entertaining as the persona Biden has fostered since serving as vice president is, his past tells another story.
While Hillary was forever tied to the 1994 Violent Crime Control Act that her husband signed into law, Bill actually credited Biden with passing the legislation, which the former president later admitted made America's mass incarceration crisis worse. As recently as 2015, the bill that gave states financial incentivizes to incarcerate more citizens and instituted mandatory minimums for nonviolent crimes was referred to as “1994 Biden Crime Bill."
Biden's role in during Anita Hill's 1991 sexual harassment hearing is also troubling. The then-senator led the proceedings as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and even though he ultimately voted against confirming Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, he was widely criticized by the left for "having mismanaged the allegations of sexual harassment made by Ms. Hill against her former employer, Mr. Thomas," according to a 2008 New York Times story. In a 2014 interview with the Huffington Post, Hill said that Biden did “a disservice to me, a disservice more importantly, to the public.”
On Monday, Biden offered up a half-baked non-apology for his conduct during the trial, saying, "I’m so sorry that she had to go through what she went through... I feel really badly that she didn't feel like the process worked."
Like Clinton, Biden voted for the Iraq War. He later said he regretted that decision—but in a contest with a fresh generation of Democrats who didn't vote for the Iraq War, it's almost certain to be another disadvantage.
He often presents himself as a champion of women's rights, having introduced the Violence Against Women Act in 1990 (it eventually passed as part of the 1994 crime bill), but Biden also voted in favor of banning so-called "partial birth" abortions and said that even though he believes in upholding Roe v. Wade, he thinks life begins at conception. Then there are all the photos of him touching women that look, well, creepy. No one has ever accused him of predatory behavior, but if 2020 is anything like 2017, those photos may skeeve out some Democratic voters.
These low points throughout Biden's long political career make him a less than ideal candidate for 2020, but did you know he's also known for making racist blunders? In 2006, he said, "You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I'm not joking." When he announced his presidential bid in 2007, he called Barack Obama "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy." And even after Obama had chosen him to be his running mate, Biden gave John McCain one of his main talking points when he said:
It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We’re about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember, I said it standing here, if you don’t remember anything else I said. Watch, we’re going to have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.
If the primary gets ugly—and almost all close primaries get really, really ugly—you're also going to see people bringing up the reason Biden's first presidential run failed in 1987, which is that he stole a speech from a British politician.
There are many viable potential 2020 Democratic candidates, from Bernie Sanders to Elizabeth Warren to Kamala Harris. Voters will be spoiled for choice. Why would they pick Biden?
The provincial government in Quebec will officially unveil its plan to regulate weed sales tomorrow.
According to Radio-Canada, the sale of cannabis will be overseen by a branch of the Société des alcools du Québec, the provincial liquor retailer, which plans to open 20 storefronts dedicated to weed sales across Quebec.
Quebecers will also be able to buy their weed online at the as-yet-unnamed subsidiary's site. Delivery will nonetheless be restricted to Canada Post and recipients will be required to show ID before taking delivery. The legal age is expected to be set at 18, or the same as it is for alcohol.
One branch per 300,000 Quebecers
The number of storefronts works out to about one for every 339,000 citizens.
Jean-Sebastien Fallu, a professor at the University of Montreal specializing in drug addiction, says he's reassured by the plan to sell over the web, but suspects the 20 stores won't do much to eradicate the black market.
"It's too little for Quebec, that's clear," he told VICE. "I understand that we want to limit access, but if we limit it too much, it will actually favour the black market and its negative consequences."
Among the consequences he raised: the lack of quality control, ignorance of the THC or CBD content of products, contact with dangerous or otherwise unsavoury people, and exposure to other substances.
He's also worried by the fact Quebec is considering adopting a zero-tolerance policy on driving after smoking weed and the ban on growing it for personal use. "From the beginning, all the specialists have said we need to find a happy medium. But we are not there. What Quebec is proposing is too restrictive. "
Justin Trudeau has often said that legalization would eradicate the black market for cannabis, pointing to the fact there's no black market for alcohol. But as Fallu points out, alcohol is much more complex to produce than weed, and, critically, it's also much more accessible. The SAQ has 400 branches in the province and a total of 840 points of sale. That's not to mention all the grocery stores and convenience stores where you can buy alcohol, the hundreds of bars and restaurants that serve it, and the people who produce it for personal consumption.
One thing is obvious: there will be huge demand for legal weed in Quebec. Cannabis Culture's six illegal dispensaries in Montreal opened to huge lineups last fall before they were promptly shut down.
What we don't know yet
Of course, all of this is speculation at this stage. It's possible the number of branches will grow quickly. Quebec has said it wants to its legislation match that in Ontario, which plans to open 40 stores next summer and 80 more the following year.
In a press conference Wednesday morning, Public Health Minister Lucie Charlebois and Finance Minister Carlos Leitao said the government's measures would evolve over time, while also asking Ottawa to delay legalization by a year to allow for more negotiations on revenue-sharing between the federal government and the provinces.
Jean Sébastien Fallu for one, would rather see legalization go ahead as soon as possible. "I think it's urgent, even if we're not quite ready. We have to stop criminalizing people."
When Pam Grier first started playing a bad-AF heroine in the early 70s, she was fearful of losing her job—because she didn't know how to act. Although she was completely new to the trade, and only took it up to cover her tuition at UCLA, Roger Corman saw something in her, and casted her in his women-behind-bars flick, The Big Doll House. As the story goes, he gave her the book An Actor Prepares, by Constantin Stanislavski. The rest is history.
From classic Blaxploitation films like Coffy and Foxy Brown to an unassailable role in Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, Grier’s worked at just about every level in the business. Her newest role in Bad Grandmas finds her amongst a group of gun-toting, pot-smoking grannies, including a hilarious Florence Henderson in her final role. With the film opening nationwide in theaters this week, VICE caught up with Grier at the film's St. Louis premiere:
VICE: What did you think when you first read the script for Bad Grandmas? Pam Grier: I thought, This is my Arsenic and Old Lace that I always wanted to do, either in films or on Broadway. I couldn’t wait. I love to participate in indie filmmaking, helping small film companies, especially if the script is exciting. You never know how good it’s going to be until you get to the set. I [told them] I wanted to know who was going to play the lead. They said, we’re talking to Florence Henderson, and I said, "You know what? I won’t do it unless she does it." We had worked together before and she was so much fun. When you have the Brady momma and Foxy Brown, come on.
What was it like working with Florence on her final film, and how would you compare your role to others that you’ve played before? In Bad Grandmas, I’m playing older than I am—she’s a grandma. I wanted to show that gray can be lethal as well. I just wanted to play comedy as an older woman, which I will be soon. I had so much fun the first time I worked with her, and [on Bad Grandmas] it just continued. We were separated at birth; she worked on Broadway, she sang musicals, she had a great sense of comedic timing, and she was very generous and sharing. Not all actresses are like that. We were old friends and just had a great time. After work, we’d sit at the bar in the hotel and have dinner and share our past. It was just very comfortable. I wish she could have been around for a few more years.
How was the premiere? It was so much fun. I like to see filmmakers all around the country, because demographically there’s different political, psychological, artistic, and cultural aspects of every area. It’s going to be refreshing to see our history told on film in the form of entertainment. A lot of it is flat when you read it or discover it, or you dust off bones in the dirt, but when you see it on film, and you see it with a narrative of the different shades, textures, music, and the creativity of the filmmakers, whether they’re old school, new school, or after school...
Just the fact that Srikant [Chellappa, the film's writer/director] wrote it in St. Louis, Missouri, which is the heartland, I was really honored to be a part of it. I love being out there, going to the comic cons around the country. You’ve got to salute the indie film community. I’ve got one coming out next year, with Cybill Shepherd and James Brolin, from a small indie company out of Austin, Texas. It’s unique and different.
Courtesy of Parade Deck Films and WowNow Entertainment
When you act, how much of the character is you, and how much is what's written in the script? Well, you’re in a moment, and so if you’re sitting too long, your butt's numb. So we’ll use that. We use numb butts. We use everything. I haven’t cut anyone up, not yet. However, it was fun doing comedy, and it was fun being physical. [Growing up] I watched my grandmother, and I watched my aunts in their 80s, and I said, "I got to use that. I got to use that model. I got to make sure they help me up off the floor." So I would say 50/50.
Who's your favorite character you ever played? They are all unique and all different. There’s no particular one that I love the most, but I can articulate that [the one that] gave me the most variables in a performance was Jackie Brown, with Quentin. I was in a two-hour film with an excellent budget, working with great actors. I had done four years of nothing but theater, from August Wilson to Sam Shepard to Terrence McNally. The Sam Shepard play Fool for Your Love was 90 minutes with no intermission. The August Wilson thing was another type of theater work where I got to play piano and gospel from my own background.
What was it like working with Quentin? To bring all of that to Jackie Brown was a great opportunity to show and flex various colors and textures and beats and articulate exactly what Quentin wanted. And not everyone can do that—a lot of people want to get on the set and improvise, but it doesn’t work that way. If you cant deliver his dialogue, his beats, and you can’t rehearse, he cannot work with you. It's not that he’s selective—he knows who hears his drumbeat. He knows who hears his pulse, and not everyone does. I was surprised that I fit in and wasn’t fired.
Back when you were first doing Coffy and Foxy Brown, did you ever see yourself becoming such an icon? I didn’t at all, and the thing about it is, in real life, being active with cars, animals, tractors, boats, guns, and hunting and my family, I just brought what I do to work. That was normal for me. I was already that before I went to film, and living outside of Los Angeles, living in the heartland, you can really develop your character. You can see the world from other eyes, other lenses when you don’t live in Hollywood or New York. You can see the beats, rebel flags, rednecks, and guns all over the place. See different things or different people. That forms your gift that you have.
You’ve watched the industry evolve since the 70s. Can you compare working in film back then to now? It’s more technologically advanced, but it's also psychological. The more violence you portray, the more people want to see, and it doesn’t frighten them as much or make them shocked. So it's interesting to see the audience participation and development. Also, the marketing areas, where one studio hires an actor and they’ll be featured in two or three other films creating a brand—but that’s what they did [back] then, which is interesting. But also I wanted to do comedy, dark comedies, Afrocentric pieces, foreign films. I was really branching out, and then I wanted to do nothing but theater to see if I’m an actor for the celebrity, or if I really am a craftswoman.
Is this my true craft? My true trade? I figured it out, and I just loved acting. It didn’t matter what you were making, didn’t matter about the stars, didn’t matter about the Oscars. It just mattered about the work, and portraying wonderful and delightful characters that were very complex. That’s all that I’m about. I’m not about all the commercial things. I’ve been able to work with some truly sensational directors and just be funny, zany, or serious, or do small independents. And that was the freedom that I was looking for.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Since the 1970s, Venezuela's wealthiest have piled whiskey and cheap beer inside their boats and faced off in the longest speedboat race on earth: a 900-mile, seven-day trek undertaken at speeds of up to 120 miles per hour. But as the country slides deeper into an economic and political crisis, Venezuela's poor are starting to protest the wealthy and President Nicolás Maduro's government.
That instability made this year's race particularly contentious, with some of the country's downtrodden openly speaking out against the rich teams of sailors passing through their towns. VICE trekked to Venezuela for a firsthand look at the race, hopping on a new boat each day as the teams tore across the Orinoco River. Along the way, host Charlet Duboc drank, danced, and chatted with the race's oldest hands before meeting up with an indigenous community for a look outside Venezuela's upper echelon.
In Britain, a group of men sitting together talking openly about their problems and feelings would be an unusual scene. It would be all the more unusual if those men had spent time in prison and almost impossible to fathom if they were perpetrators of horrific killings.
I am not in the UK, but Rwanda, sitting with a group of softly spoken and smiling men who have all done time in prison for brutal crimes committed during the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. According to government figures, out of a population of 7.3 million, over one million people were killed in the ethnically motivated violence which lasted just 100 days.
“My daughter in law left the grandchildren at my house last week because her and my son are having marital problems. But I am too old to look after them”, says a man in his seventies to the group of 20-odd men, sitting outside in a circle of benches one sunny October afternoon in Juru, a rural area in Rwanda’s Eastern Province.
“My wife was sick this week and I was very worried” pipes up another, wide-eyed. When one person is talking everyone is silent – it feels like even the nearby herd of cows are listening. The group goes on to discuss all their problems, offering sympathies and giving each other advice on what they would do in a similar scenario. The troubled men agree to update each other on their situations the following week.
In Kinyarwanda there is a proverb - “Amarira y’umugabo atemba ajya mu nda” - which literally translates as “men’s tears flow inside the belly” or in other words, men cry on the inside. Illustrations by Charity Atukunda
These men are “graduates” of community based sociotherapy. First implemented in 2005, the programme now operates across eight different districts in Rwanda with the aim of improving “psychosocial well-being and strengthening interpersonal reconciliation and social cohesion”. Though the structured course – led by two local sociotherapists – lasts 15 weeks, according to the organisation over 70 percent of groups continue to meet afterwards of their own volition.
This is the case with the male perpetrator group in Juru. As well as meeting weekly to talk through their personal issues, they have started a money saving group. Joining with a group of genocide survivors, they have managed to save enough to buy a goat for every member.
One of the main aims of the sessions is to rebuild trust within communities coming to terms with the collective trauma of genocide, an event which saw people torture, rape and murder their own neighbours. The scale of the violence means that essentially every Rwandan has been affected, be it directly or indirectly. In this context, conventional psychotherapy undertaken outside a community doesn’t always work: individuals with conditions such as depression and PTSD return home without having addressed ongoing and complex social problems. Research in other countries recovering from genocide has also found local ways of overcoming trauma highly important: in Cambodia, people use elements of Buddhism to achieve mindfulness, particularly through meditation.
Resolving issues as a community is rooted in Rwanda’s history. Gacaca – meaning "a bed of soft green grass" on which a community and leaders gather to discuss and resolve conflicts – is a traditional justice system which was most prevalent during pre-colonial times. After the genocide, Gacaca was adapted to help bring the vast number perpetrators to justice; advocates argue putting 100,000 people through the formal justice system would have been counterproductive. They have a point. Earlier this year, the UN backed Khmer Rouge Tribunal designed to bring to justice perpetrators of the Cambodian Genocide was called into question: it lasted over a decade, spent nearly $300 million, and made just three convictions.
But Gacaca is one-of-a-kind. Unlike the Nuremberg style justice used for other genocide cases, which focuses on persecuting top level instigators only, communities actively participate in the justice and reconciliation process. Criticised by some as violating human rights, and by others as too lenient on those who committed genocidal murders, Gacaca also sought to bring about transitional justice; rebuilding fractured communities by handling crime and punishment on a local level. But however unconventional to the Western eye, Gacaca was first and foremost involved with justice, and to an extent social cohesion – but not mental health directly.
Genocide survivor Sebastien, 43, lost his father, sister and brother in 1994. Sitting inside a church hall in Bugesera, also in Eastern Province, he takes time out from his sociotherapy group to chat to me one-on-one. “I used to think that everyone I met could not understand or hear me. I also felt paranoid, suspicious that everyone was going to do something bad to me” he says. He explains that, like many others, before he started sociotherapy he had gone over 20 years without sharing his grief with anyone. “My sadness did not allow me to cry. My eyes would sometimes contain the tears but they wouldn’t come”. He then references a Kinyarwanda proverb – “Amarira y’umugabo atemba ajya mu nda” – which literally translates as “men’s tears flow inside the belly”. In other words, men cry on the inside.
The saying gives an indication of what is expected of the traditional Rwandan man. Much like stereotypical masculinity in the Western world, in Rwanda men are expected to be strong: the head of the house who protects and provides, never showing signs of weakness. Sebastien describes the man as the “defender” of the family, but also acknowledges the problems that come with this: “During the genocide men wanted to show they were powerful, present in every place. The first to receive information, the first to take action. So the defenders found themselves in situations where they became violent.”
But the number of men involved in the genocide as perpetrators and victims significantly altered the politics of gender in Rwanda. While sexist stereotypes remain, women whose husbands died or were sent to prison in 1994 began to take on traditionally "male" roles. Female empowerment became a landmark policy of President Paul Kagame as part of his government’s strategy to develop the post-genocide nation. Among other things, today women have gender-equal land rights and dominate some of Rwandan society’s most powerful positions: the small East African nation has the highest percentage of female parliamentarians in the world.
Anastase, 73
For many men, this has been a hard pill to swallow. “Some women feel like gender equality is about women being superior and abusing their power… before, you could tell a woman what to do and the family would do it, but now you can’t and that causes conflict” argues Anatase, 73, who is part of the same sociotherapy group as Sebastien. Anatase spent eight years in prison for genocide crimes which he says he was later found not to have committed through the Gacaca system. Like many others returning from prison came back to find his wife had moved on – and in his case, spent money he had left with her. “I was full of anger when I came out, for the person who put me in prison and for my wife. There was a point when I wanted to beat her.”
Survivors and perpetrators alike suffer from mental health problems, yet many remain within the confines of toxic masculinity – unable to express emotion in fear of appearing weak, with some instead resorting to violence against newly empowered women in their lives. The genocide left many men feeling emasculated: from survivors who felt shame for not being able to protect their families from harm, to perpetrators who came home to self-sufficient wives with jobs and often new partners and children.
But while Anatase is part of a generation that is perhaps less likely to understand the benefits of gender equality, he does say that sociotherapy has helped him open up, listen to others and trust people again. “I don’t really have a problem now” he says, talking about the situation with his ex-wife. He was one of several men interviewed who referred to a game played in the early stages of the sociotherapy programme, where one person covers your eyes while another guides you from A to B. “When you open your eyes you see it was someone who you weren’t friendly with, or maybe was even your enemy, but in the end they were the one who helped you”, remembers Anatase. This may not seem particularly revolutionary, but in communities like Anatase’s where trust has been nearly completely eroded, it is a huge step.
In some cases, sociotherapy sessions have brought together perpetrators and the family members of their victims. In the remote, rolling hills of Muhanga, Southern Province, I visit the home of 49-year-old Vincent. His young children potter around outside the house. On the wall inside hangs a picture of Jesus and a crucifix – next to it, a photo montage made up of happy images of Vincent’s wedding and children’s birthdays.
“It was the first time Dative had come to my house. I was scared. Why is she coming here? Are they going to take me back to prison?” remembers Vincent, who spent 11 years inside for his part in the hanging of two people in the genocide. These people were relatives of genocide survivor Dative, 52, who in total lost six family members in 1994 including her father and three siblings.
But Dative had not come to take Vincent back to prison. After going through sociotherapy herself, Dative went on to train as a community sociotherapist – and decided to reach out to Vincent and see if he wanted to join her group. “I had heard he was one of the people who came to hunt me, and though his gang did not find me they did kill two members of my family,” explains Dative, now sitting in Vincent’s living room. When he re-entered their community after prison, she noticed him avoiding her and looking scared every time their paths crossed.
Vincent agreed to join the sessions but remained guarded for the first month of sociotherapy. “I still had thoughts that people were spying on me, trying to collect information, so I decided to stay quiet”, he explains. But he slowly started sharing with the group, and eventually got to a point where he was able to talk to Dative directly. “When Dative was talking about what happened to her I had the feeling inside that I was about to cry, like I was about to burst. I was wondering why I participated in that suffering”, says Vincent, who also describes sharing his own feelings with Dative as a “release”.
The idea of mutual sharing and listening is central to sociotherapy, which is reflected in the phrase Rwandans use for it: mvura nkuvure, meaning "heal me, I heal you". Understandably, Vincent and Dative still don’t seem like the best of friends – but they both say they are able to greet each other without fear, and, incredibly, attend family celebrations at each others homes as they do with others in their village.
Research and understanding of mental health is still in its early stages across the world, and this is particularly so in developing countries. But while stigma remains, the devastation of genocide has forced these Rwandans to confront their mental health – not only for the sake of their personal wellbeing but also as a practical means of bringing about peace and cohesion in their everyday lives.
For some men, the process has resulted in the breaking down of their toxic masculinity, to the benefit of themselves and the women in their lives. Back at the all-male perpetrator group in Juru, one man tells his peers that his wife, having seen such a big change in him since sociotherapy, is asking to attend the group too. Afterwards, Jean, 66, talks to me about the change sociotherapy has made to his marriage: “I used to argue with my wife so much but I have learnt to let things go and manage my anger. Even though I did bad things my wife visited me in prison for five years and welcomed me home afterwards, so how can I get angry with her about little things?”
Yet despite his reconciliation with Dative, Vincent still appears withdrawn. While, on paper, Rwandan women have made strides in the fight for female empowerment, men like Vincent have been left with outdated ideas about what it means "to be a man". When speaking about his mental health, one of the main things Vincent talks about is concerns he had in prison that he would never have a wife and family – and the fact that his children now are still so young, while he is nearly 50. In Rwanda, part of being an ubugabo – stereotypical "big man" – is having a wife and multiple children. The delay in this happening for Vincent, and the fact he has a younger brother with older children than him, seems to be a major internal struggle for him as a man: “It makes me so unhappy. But I cannot cry to the extent of showing my tears. A man must resist showing those tears.”
This story is part of Big Men , a European Journalism Centre project telling journalistic stories about men, masculinity and gender equality in East Africa.
