Welcome back to Can't Handle the Truth, our Saturday column looking at the past seven days of fake news and hoaxes that have spread thanks to the internet.
Let's start off this week in fake news with a bit of real news: On Thursday the New York Times ran one of its notorious anonymously-sourced stories about the White House. This one reported that President Donald Trump ordered the firing of Special Counsel Bob Mueller, but backed down when White House Counsel Don McGahn threatened to quit—a somewhat troubling near-miss for the integrity of American institutions. Whoever gave this information to the Times reportedly "spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be identified discussing a continuing investigation."
As I've noted in the past, this kind of reporting is common. It has a lot of downsides, but at the moment it's really the only way for the public to get information about what is happening inside a chaotic White House. All papers, including the Times, have gotten things wrong on occassion, so while you can generally trust what the Times prints, it's usually a smart idea to read other outlets as well and generally be aware if someone is credibly disputing the accounts of its sources.
With all that in mind, on Thursday night Fox News host and Trump fanboy Sean Hannity relayed the report of the Mueller attempted firing to his viewers as if it had been whispered by a middle schooler under the bleachers and could easily be dismissed. Just minutes later, after someone at Fox News checked with a source, Hannity updated his report, saying, OK, yes, Trump had attempted to fire Mueller, but who cares? Then he starts talking about a high-speed chase.
Watching this is enormously gratifying, particularly since Hannity is absolutely terrible at reporting himself. I'd like to say he learned his own mini-lesson here about making a claim before you fact-check it, but then again, I've never seen any evidence that Hannity learns lessons.
Predictably, the president has now called the Times story "fake news." So we're all forced to decide who we trust more: Fox News and the New York Times (and the Washington Post) or the current United States president. While you mull that one over, here's some definite fake news.
R.I.P. Tide Pods
Did you see this tweet going around? I sure did.
The Tide Twitter account never posted anything like this, which shouldn't be hard to figure out since it's not a tweet per se but an image of a tweet without a date stamp or a display of the number of likes, retweets, and comments. Also worth noting: If I were a corporate lawyer, I would never let my PR department acknowledge that the company "can't risk lives over having clean clothes." That seems dangerously close to an acknowledgment of liability.
Anyway, it's fake. Tide Pods, the futuristic snack that's as gross as it is toxic, will never die. Pods are still selling like hotcakes, and teens are still eating them like hotcakes. America has voted with its dollars and once again we've said yes to over-packaged, overpriced versions of products that we were already perfectly happy using. That's probably because we're dumb, as evidenced by the fact that we eat detergent.
You have to fill out a consent form to have sex in Sweden
Remember that joke from Chapelle's Showabout sex consent forms? And the same joke from South Park? Haha, everyone does! But remembering is fun. Anyway, no, sex consent forms still aren't real anywhere.
This dumb and extremely fake Facebook post is from last week, but it kept floating around this week, possibly because there's a kernel of truth in it. Swedish lawmakers really are pushing for a law that could go into effect in July requiring one person to go "want to have sex?" and the other person to go "OK" before they have sex. This has prompted derisive stories from right-wing outlets like the Russian-propaganda-and-LOLs repository Sputnik News, along with a crop of other dumb blog posts about sex consent forms, or in the case of the photo in the Facebook post, consent cards.
Apparently, this story was so viral in Germany that the Swedish government had to explicitly state on its German website that no one has to get written consent to have sex in Sweden.
A photo depicts children in Afrin, Syria, injured by a Turkish attack
This week, the Turkish state media outlet Daily Sabah is making hay out of the fact that Salih Muslim Muhammad, a Kurdish political leader, retweeted a photo claiming to show four Kurdish children injured by a Turkish attack on the northwest Syrian region of Afrin. The photo was real, but was actually taken "after an air attack by [Syrian] regime forces in Douma district of Eastern Ghouta," according to the Turkish government. My own sleuthing confirms that the photo was online all the way back in 2014; it seems to be a sort of all-purpose device for soliciting pity about attacks in places as far from Syria as India, and I wasn't able to independently confirm that it's from Syria at all.
If you feel like you lack the proper context to understand what's going on in this particular fake news dispute, here's what you need to know: Starting last week, Afrin was being shelled by Turkish forces. Afrin is controlled by the US-backed YPG, a Kurdish group whose armed units were recently part of the ground invasion that all but finished off ISIS in its stronghold of Raqqa. The YPG's group's famous all-female affiliate celebrated that victory by emphasizing its links to the PKK, or Kurdistan Workers Party, which the US has officially branded a terror group. Turkey has been at war with the PKK for about 30 years. Salih Muslim Muhammad, who retweeted the photo, has denied any connection to the PKK, but Turkey called him "a senior leader of PKK terror group's Syrian affiliate" in its report on his retweet.
Regardless of how much of that you parsed, just know that Turkey is generating a huge volume of propaganda in English via the Daily Sabah and the Anadolu Agency English News. At the same time, Turkey is carrying out a massive military campaign with the aim of creating a "safe zone" in the Afrin region of Syria, where a bunch of people associated with the US anti-ISIS campaign currently live. The US, for it's part, is "concerned" about all this new violence, according to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Mind you, this is happening at a time when no one from Syria is allowed to enter the US, and in fact, the US is probably about to kick a bunch of Syrians out when their special immigration status expires on March 31.
Oh, but that photo of the kids wasn't real.
Note: This will be the last "Can't Handle the Truth" column for a while. It will return in mid-April.
According to the Dallas Morning News, the inmate, Joshua Hansen, successfully broke out of a Beaumont, Texas, penitentiary on Wednesday—only to get busted trying to sneak back into his cell with a bunch of snacks in tow.
Hansen reportedly staged his great food escape Wednesday evening, slipping out the back of the prison and into nearby farmland. But Hansen apparently wasn't interested in taking his newfound freedom. He just wanted a home-cooked meal.
Authorities busted Hansen as he attempted to sneak back into his cell unnoticed with a duffle bag. When they searched it, they found candy, chips, tobacco, bottles of whiskey and brandy, and "a large amount of home-cooked food," according to the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office.
According to the Beaumont Enterprise, sheriff's deputies had previously been tipped off that inmates on work release often sneak out to snag snacks and other contraband. The sheriff's department and a team of US Marshals set up surveillance Wednesday evening, which first spotted a vehicle drop the duffle bag full of goodies on private property nearby—and then caught Hansen as he zipped out to retrieve it.
It's unclear who dropped off the duffle bag or cooked up the fried chicken and green beans good enough to break out of jail for, but an investigation is currently underway, the sheriff's department says.
In the meantime, Hansen is back in custody and charged with escape and possession of marijuana, likely wishing he had chowed down on that bag of Fritos while he had the chance.
Part of the modern human condition is to be on the internet all day and get physically uncomfortable and stressed out about everything you see and read. However, there's a significant group of people whose stress levels go into overdrive before they've even read a word online – people who claim that the fact the internet simply exists has a negative impact on their health. These people are dealing with a condition called electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS), meaning, they say, that they suffer from a range of physical symptoms when exposed to electromagnetic fields from things like wifi routers, mobile phones and TV sets.
Not everyone in the medical community is convinced that EHS is an actual medical condition. A 2007 study by the University of Essex found that participants claiming to have EHS only experienced symptoms when they were told that a phone mast nearby was "switched on". When participants didn't know whether the mast was on or not, the signals had seemingly no effect on their health.
Still, that doesn't take away from the fact that around 5 percent of the UK population think they're affected by EHS. If the condition sounds familiar, that's probably because it's prominently featured in the Breaking Bad spinoff Better Call Saul, in which Saul's brother Chuck hides away in his own home to protect himself from all the electromagnetic signals the world sends his way.
Since I cannot imagine living in a civilised world without internet, I'm interested to find out what it's like when you believe it actually makes you feel physically ill. To find out, I contacted two women dealing with EHS – Nanny and Martine – who invited me to spend the day with them in their wifi-free bunkers.
WATCH:
Martine picks me up at the train station in Steensel, a small town in the south of the Netherlands. As soon as I get in her car, she politely asks me to turn off my phone – or, at the very least, put it on flight mode. Since I don't want to make her feel sick and I'm here for the full experience, I do what she asks.
Martine, who's in her forties, used to work in the legal department of a high-profile refugee support organisation in Amsterdam. That was until she started feeling the need to get away from what she considered an overdose of wifi and radiation, and flee the city.
"I was completely burned out," Martine tells me. "You sort of force yourself to just keep going until something breaks inside you."
Nanny's kitchen is covered in tin foil to protect her home from the neighbours' wifi. Both Nanny and Martine asked not to be photographed for this feature.
Martine says she is one of the few people in the Netherlands who have been granted unemployment benefits based on her symptoms – though the authorities which granted it haven't officially declared electromagnetic radiation to be the cause of her symptoms. Today, she provides legal aid to others with EHS. It hasn’t been easy – many researchers in the field believe EHS to be a psychological issue, with some specialists believing it's the fear of radiation itself that could be unhealthy. Martine pushes back at this notion, pointing me to other studies she says prove the harmfulness of radiation.
We arrive at Martine’s home – a wooden house built right next to her parent’s place. Her dad, a scientist, also claims to have EHS, and considers himself an expert on blocking out radiation. Martine’s friend, Nanny, who's in her fifties, has been staying with her the last few days to get a break from the electromagnetic fields in her own home. She runs the website EHS Zichtbaar, which she hopes will raise awareness of what she thinks are the unhealthy effects of the ever-present wifi in our daily lives. Her husband helps run the website, though his love for gadgets often gets the better of him. "John loves his smartwatch," Nanny says. "but it makes me so ill it has to live in a drawer for now." Nanny doesn’t hate technology – but she wants to see wifi replaced with something healthier.
Nanny never goes outside without wearing her protective headgear, which looks like a beekeeper's hat made out of silver wiring. Just ordering the outfit alone was a huge ordeal – Nanny can’t use a computer or talk on the phone without falling sick for the rest of the day.
Nanny takes me for a walk around the woods behind Martine's home, and explains why she thinks radiation might be the new asbestos. "A lot of people just assume it’s safe and tested, or don’t even want to think about it at all," she says. "There are so many terrible things happening in the world, I can understand why people just want to get on with their lives without having to worry about radiation pollution. Being afraid all the time isn’t healthy either."
Nanny lives in a small caravan in her garden to get away from her fuse box.
Back at the house, the three of us enjoy a light lunch and an intense discussion about the negative impact of society’s obsession with social media. Halfway through, Nanny starts to get very nervous and takes out a small device to check the room’s radiation level.
In turn, I get uncomfortable as the equipment’s long antennae lingers over my laptop. "Just taking a quick look to be certain," Nanny says, in an attempt to reassure me. Luckily, it’s a false alarm. I ask if I can test the device to see if it really works. Martine gives me the go-ahead to switch my phone on for a few seconds.
When I turn off flight mode, messages from the outside world start flooding my phone. Soon after, the radiation meter starts squeaking hysterically, with alarm lights flashing bright red. Embarrassed, I turn off my 4G and the detector falls silent. A few seconds later, I secretly turn my phone back on to be sure the meter isn't being manually operated by Nanny or Martine. But just as before, it screams and flickers, detecting my phone’s electromagnetic field.
Nanny normally lives with her family in Geldrop, a town about half an hour's drive away. But every so often, when she finds the electromagnetic radiation around her overwhelming, Nanny visits Martine and her dad for a few days to recover. She is returning home today after five days with her friend, and has invited me to come along. As Martine drives us both out, I’m struck by how uncomfortable Nanny must be, leaving the relative safety of the woods to return to an environment she's convinced is making her sick. We mainly stick to country roads to stay as far clear of transmission towers as we can. "At a certain point, you start seeing them everywhere," Martine says.
WATCH: 10 Questions You Always Wanted to Ask a Flat Earther
Nanny's husband John, her two teenage daughters, her visiting mother-in-law and the family dog are all there to welcome her back. "Nanny, don’t sit there," her mother-in-law warns her soon after she walks in. "John and I measured earlier and that’s the worst spot in the entire house."
On my tour of their home, Nanny tells me the walls are plastered with special anti-radiation paint and that the kitchen is covered in tin foil to keep out the neighbours' wifi. Nanny says that's still not enough to rid the house of radiation completely, because "there is an electromagnetic field in the fuse box". So Nanny lives in a caravan in the garden, but comes inside for dinner.
"It was fun in the beginning," she explains. "It felt like being on holiday. But now I’d love to be able to permanently move back inside the house."
Nanny's anti-radiation garms.
As fascinating as I’ve found Nanny and Martine's wifi-less worlds, I achingly miss my own normal existence, however much radiation might be swirling around it. Just as I'm about to leave, Nanny brings out her line of novelty T-shirts, which she created with her husband and sells on their website. The shirts have anti-radiation slogans printed on them, like "Want kids? Don’t fuck with your phone", and "Feeling Blue-tooth?".
After I say my goodbyes, Nanny asks her daughters to escort me to the nearest bus stop. I ask them how they feel about their mum being away so often. "It was nice to have wifi for a few days," they tell me, "but in the end, it’s better to have your mum around."
Welcome back to House Party, our column looking at the 2018 House of Representative races as midterms approach.
As is the case with most leftist movements, the Bernie Sanders 2016 campaign has split into a variety of People’s Front of Judea–Judean People’s Front infighting. Which is too bad, because properly harnessed, the leftist energy on display all over the country could create some primaries in safe Democratic seats.
Why safe seats in particular? While it’s important to show Democrats they can’t abandon progressive ideals to win competitive races, you get the most bang for your buck, the highest ROI, on competitive House primaries for safe seats. That’s because you usually won’t have to face national money pouring into the contest—instead you’re just tilting against local powers. And in open seat contests you can have a candidate win with as little as 20 percent of the vote to win a primary (outside of a few Southern states that have primary runoffs). Open seats are also a great place for Democrats to increase the diversity of their caucus—it’s feasible that none of the districts we profile here send a straight white man to Congress in 2019. So progressives would be wise to focus their energy on a few of the following:
Illinois’s Third Congressional District (Southern Cook County)
Past presidential results: 2016: Clinton 55–Trump 40s 2012: Obama 56–Romney 43 2008: Obama 58–McCain 40
The fact that Dan Lipinski is in Congress is an embarrassment to democracy, not to mention the Democrats. His father, Representative Bill Lipinski, was an old-style Daley machine Democrat—socially conservative but willing to bring home the bacon for his constituents in a safely Democratic seat. In 2004 he decided to retire. But he waited until after the Democratic primary to do so. That means instead of the voters choosing the replacement nominee the local Chicago ward bosses did. And you know who ran the powerful 23rd Ward? Why, none other than Representative Bill Lipinski.
Bill wanted his son Dan, then a conservative political science professor in Tennessee, to get into the family business. So he put him on the ballot, not letting the messy business of democracy get in the way of the Lipinski aristocratic ideal. Bill, by the way, spent his post-congressional career as a lobbyist for transportation interests while his son sat on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.
Dan has also repeatedly voted against the Democratic Party’s interests. He’s pro-life, one of only three Democratic congressmen to vote for the 20-week abortion ban. He’s anti-gay, both opposing same sex marriage and supporting FADA. In spite of being a diabetic whose government-provided healthcare shields him from medical bankruptcy, he voted against the Affordable Care Act. In 2011, a group of political scientists found that 12 House Democrats lost their seats (the study said 13 but one race was later called for the Democrat) due to their ACA votes; if Lipinski had been willing to swap votes with one of them, he might have been able to save a his party a seat.
Remarkably, until now Lipinski hasn’t faced an organized primary challenge. But Marie Newman, a local small business owner and activist, has decided to finally take him to task and give the Third the type of representation it deserves. Lipinski has swamped her in terms of fundraising and can still count on labor support, but a bevy of progressive and pro-choice groups have endorsed Newman. Other congressmen have turned on Lipinski too, even one representing a neighboring district. It’ll be interesting to see whether the newly angry masses will be able to knock off Lipinski the Second and last.
If school board president Dori Fenenbock wins this primary, liberals should be embarrassed. She’s running as a centrist in a district that Hillary Clinton won by nearly 40 points. She’s also raking in Republican donations because they see her as their best-case scenario for such a liberal seat. To top it off, Fenenbock criticized outgoing Representative Beto O’Rourke for being insufficiently pro-Israel even though he’s running against Republican Senator Ted Cruz right now. Way to be a team player, Dori.
Thankfully she has a credible opponent in El Paso County Judge Veronica Escobar, who’s running as a reliable Democratic vote. She should be able to beat Fenenbock, but primary turnout in this district can be low. In 2012, only 46,000 people voted in the Democratic primary where O”Rourke beat incumbent Representative Silvestre Reyes. And while Fenenbock and Escobar have both raised credible amounts of money, Fenenbock has raised more. So Escobar will need to make sure she turns out her supporters in numbers or this district will be stuck with one of progressive Democrats’ top primary targets in 2020.
Incumbent Colleen Hanabusa could drive to work instead of flying 14 hours there if she wins her race for governor. So who can blame her for leaving the House? The field to replace her has four prominent Democrats running but voters should be wary of two of them. Former State Senator Donna Mercado Kim has consistently opposed gay marriage, putting her far to the right of the district, and while Attorney General Doug Chin is an anti-travel ban hero he’s also got some gross ties to private prisons. So State Representative Kaniela Ing is Democrats’ best bet here, especially because unlike so many Democrats, he talks like a normal person. He’s great at making left-wing issues salient to disaffected and cynical people and on issues like legalizing marijuana and unfucking the internet. I’ve come across a lot of Democratic candidates when writing House Party and Ing is the one that I’m most excited about. We need more congressmen like him.
Massachusetts’s Third Congressional District (Metro West)
Representative Niki Tsongas decided to call it a career next year, and the race to replace her has attracted a ton of political talent. The candidates jockeying to win the primary here all seem ideologically similar, so ultimately there’s little risk the seat will be represented by a secret Republican.
But the candidate that most intrigues me most is State Representative Juana Matias. Only 29, she’s the first Dominican woman to serve in the Massachusetts State House and she won her seat by doing something Democrats are normally terrible at: organizing young Latino voters. Big names like Daniel Koh, Barbara L’Italien, and Rufus Gifford will no doubt outraise her, but in a multi-candidate primary she may be able to sneak through with only 25 percent or so if she gets enough left-wing support. In all likelihood whoever represents this district will be a reliable Democratic vote, but a Matias win would be a boon for those who believe the party should build itself by turning out young voters and people of color more reliably.
New Mexico’s First Congressional District (Albuquerque)
One embarrassing fact about America is that we have never elected a Native American woman to Congress. Tribal administrator Deb Haaland could change that, and she’s been endorsed by the Congressional Black Caucus and much of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, among others. There are a slew of Democratic candidates for this seat but Haaland and activist Antoinette Sedillo Lopez seem to be the most viable left-wing ones.
Pennsylvania’s First Congressional District (South and West Philadelphia)
Representative Bob Brady is a reliable liberal vote in the House. It’s what he does when he’s not in the House that’s a problem. Brady is the longtime chair of the Philadelphia Democratic Party, and delivered votes for Democratic presidential candidates to carry Pennsylvania in every election from 1992 to 2012. So Democrats were willing to overlook stuff like him agreeing to the Pennsylvania Republicans’ gerrymander because it protected him at the expense of suburban Democrats. Or the fact that 32 elected Philadelphia Democrats have been investigated by law enforcement since 2000. But 2016 showed that his Philadelphia machine may be going the way of the ENIAC, so now there’s blood in the water.
And the blood has only flowed heavier in recent months as two of Brady’s top lieutenants have been charged with bribing a political rival to drop a primary challenge against the congressman. Brady still controls the Philadelphia Democratic machine, but that machine is starting to look more and more like GM in the 70s. Former Deputy Mayor Nina Ahmad seems like an excellent progressive alternative. And with a remap of the state looming, Brady could be put in even weaker position as his new seat will include a lot of people who’ve never been represented by him.
Maryland’s Sixth Congressional District (Western Maryland)
If you don’t live near Washington, DC you’ve probably never heard of David Trone. If you do, then his nonstop commercials drove you insane when he was running for the neighboring Eighth District in 2016. The booze magnate will presumably adopt a similar advertising strategy leading up to the 2018 primary for the Sixth, which is being vacated by Representative John Delaney so he can run for president in 2020 as a moderate (don’t ask).
Trone is running as a traditional liberal but he has a history of donating to Republicans to support laxer regulations on his business. So State Delegate Aruna Miller is the better choice for voters looking for a reliable progressive.
However, Maryland has the only effective Democratic gerrymander in the country (the ones in Illinois, Massachusetts, and Arkansas have a minimal net impact on the partisan composition of their delegations) and a suit to redraw the lines is pending before the Supreme Court. If the Court rules against partisan gerrymandering, the map could be redrawn so that the Sixth returns to its pre-2012 state of being solidly rural and Republican. In that case, Democrats should beg Trone to run for that seat. If he spends $13 million tying down Republican resources, that’s a net win even if he loses.
After John Conyers resigned in disgrace, a generation of ambitious Detroit politicians who’ve waited decades for him to step aside floated potential congressional bids. Of the announced candidates, two—Ian Conyers and John Conyers III—will likely split the Conyers relative vote. Considering the circumstances of Conyers’s departure it would be nice if Democrats nominated a woman to replace him. Detroit City Council members Brenda Jones and Mary Sheffield and former state representatives Rashida Tlaib and Shanelle Jackson could represent the district instead. (Also a plus: None of them are part of Conyers’s family.) The primary field has been a bit slow to develop, so it’s hard to discern who would be the most reliable progressive vote among that cohort.
Michigan’s Ninth Congressional District (Detroit Suburbs)
Man, what is it about Michigan Democrats treating congressional seats like peerages? Debbie Dingell, Duchess of Dearborn, is the wife of her predecessor (who was the son of his predecessor); Dan Kildee, Earl of Genesee, is the nephew of the guy he replaced; Lord Conyers of Highland Park has two relatives trying to replace him; and retiring Representative Sander Levin (brother of former Senator Carl Levin and resident of perfectly named Royal Oak) is trying to get his son Andy to win the nomination for his old seat.
If Michiganders feel like breaking this aristocratic fever, State Senator Steve Bieda and former State Representative Ellen Lipton are both viable alternatives who have non-hereditary claims to elected office.
Nevada’s Fourth Congressional District (Las Vegas Suburbs)
This district may appear to be tough win for Republicans, but in 2014 Nevada Democrats put a disaster of a candidate atop their statewide ticket and turnout collapsed across the board. This led to incumbent Steve Horsford losing a shocker to Cresent Hardy. Hardy then lost in 2016 to Democrat Ruben Kihuen, but with Kihuen’s career in shambles after a sexual harassment scandal both Hardy and Horsford are attempting comebacks.
But Horsford won’t have the Democratic primary to himself. State Senator Pat Spearman is running to his left and as a lesbian, African American, veteran former preacher she’s got about as singular a demographic profile as you can find (Horsford is also African American). Horsford has spent the last four years living in Washington instead of Nevada, so Spearman may be a better general election candidate as well. Hopefully they don’t split the primary’s left-wing vote with a pair of other challengers allowing the relatively conservative North Las Vegas Mayor John Lee to sneak through to the general election.
Colorado’s Second Congressional District (Boulder)
I’m lumping these three districts together because, while they are safely Democratic open seats, each primary has a heavy favorite with most institutional backing locked up. In Colorado, Colorado University Board of Regents member Joe Neguse has edged most of the other prominent Democrats out of the primary, as has State Senator Sylvia Garcia in Texas and Cook County Commissioner Chuy Garcia in Illinois. All are reliable progressives and would ensure Democrats continue to have a diverse caucus.
And that’s it for Democratic open seats/primary challenges. Next week we’ll turn back to Republican seats that Democrats are trying to take, specifically open seats (including special elections) and freshman Republicans in seats that neither Obama or Clinton ever won.
Robert Wheel (a pseudonym) is an attorney who lives in New York. He tweets here, and his DMs are open.
#1. Obviously I am imagining my own entrance were I to ever be on Take Me Out. (This is what you do when you watch extended amounts of Take Me Out over a short period: you imagine yourself in there and wonder if you would flail or thrive). The entrance, for men, is key. The song choice has to say: hey, I’m fun. It has to say: this is what I’m about. It has to reflect you, as a person, as well as your musical tastes. In many ways, picking your entrance music for Take Me Out is a lot like picking your funeral music ahead of your death. In both cases you are descended, through a tightly confined space, into something that’s either heaven or hell. (In both cases mine is the entire nine-minute mix of Fuck Buttons' " Flight of the Feathered Serpent".) Then there is the dancing, which you must consider also: pointing, hip thrusting, eye contact with 30 women at once, all clapping on their own frequencies, all clapping out of time. You have been thrown to the lions and you must jig for their amusement in the hope that one of them pities and has sex with you. Alright ladies, you say, then: you’re all looking lovely this evening. My name’s Joel – and then I inhale, like I am announcing the arrival of a king, like I am telling the peasants salvation has come – and I’m from, CHESTERFIELD!
You know the noise. It goes like: byew. Again: byew. A little ripple: byew, byew, byew, byew, byew. You know the noise. Like a space laser, but not. Byew. The noise you hear is this: the noise you hear is 30 lights extinguishing at once.
#2. Take Me Out is a light entertainment TV show that very crucially pivots on the idea that, if horny enough, people will behave like absolute fucking cretins, on camera, for no pay. This is a premise Take Me Out repeatedly proves to be true. So you have lads with shaved chests doing back flips out of a lift. You have every single Missguided dress currently on sale in the UK being worn at once by a gamut of HD-eye-browed women. The light is pink, and purple, and red then white. Bring on the girls. There’s a new lad in the lift. Sometimes, Take Me Out zigs from "wholesome if horny Saturday night-lite" into something darker, with more of a hard-edged vibe: the horniness bleeds from the screen, there’s something in the air here, people pull animal faces like you think they’re about to fuck. Sometimes the Take Me Out mood is light and airy, and sometimes it’s a bit 3AM-in-the-basement-of-Berghain. Take Me Out is, deeply, not respectable. Many of these people are just seconds away from tearing their underwear off and splashing bodily juices onto the set floor. Sometimes it feels like a rugby game where everyone is naked and hungry for flesh. Like an orgy in a straight-to-video vampire film. Paddy McGuinness officiates, and I have to say: he does it well.
#3. One of the girls is doing kick-ups. This happens, sometimes, because Take Me Out presents you with so many female contestants in such a concentrated period of time that it’s hard to pull them out as distinct and individual personalities, so props and activities are sometimes necessary. So Paddy will crook one arm on their plinth and say: "So, Joanne," or whatever. He has heard she hula hoops, or something. Heard she likes to sing. What is your party trick, Joanne? Come out here at the front and do it in heels. Joanne can do kick-ups, and so is doing kick-ups. Later, a boy will come out saying he likes football. He used to play semi-professionally, he says. He goes every weekend to the game or watches it with the boys at the pub. He lives and breathes it, he says. Joanne's eyes light up. She keeps her light on throughout. This, Joanne thinks, is fate. He turns her light off first chance he gets and she looks really, really sad when he picks the towering blonde next to her.
#4. I am not an anthropologist, and in my day-to-day I am "this medical professional would like to study you for their PhD" levels of bad at interpreting people’s body language signals, but I think one cue the girls on Take Me Out give away is: when a boy comes down the lift who they like, their brains short-circuit and they can just no longer dance in time to a beat. Michael from Bath is coming down to Return of the Mac and Rebecca from Swansea is jigging from side-to-side like a windscreen wiper. Or: Katie from Dumfries is clapping three-four when the beat is four-four. Sometimes the girls just look at a man and their eyes widen and they scream. And like yes: you assume they are getting them quite pissed behind the scenes, unlimited Prosecco and vodka-crans sort of deal. But also: who screams? Who just screams?
#5. Types of girl, a list: fun one in hat; grumpy one in hat; fun one in glasses; Very Northern; ten years older than she looks; mad; Has Seen Some Shit And Is Harder Than You, Has A Hand Tattoo To Prove It; Dyed Her Hair Red Once And Now That Is Her Main Personality Thing; blonde, smiling, anonymous, thousands of teeth, hundreds of thousands of teeth. These are the only girls that exist.
#6. Types of boy, a list: professional rugby player; former professional rugby player; gymnast; Loves 2 Keep Fit; amateur magician; mad; Sells Things For A Living But Looks Fucking Awful In A Three-Piece Suit; boy w/ groomed beard who has tattoos; wide-shouldered lad who is convinced he can sing. These are the only boys that exist.
#7. My suggested Take Me Out retool is this: 30 blokes stand behind the plinths. (All of these blokes are what you’d call "quite hard"). Coming down the love lift? Another bloke. (This man, too, is q.h.) And then, for a while, the format stays more or less the same: the man at the centre reels off a list of his traits, his strengths, his desires, and the men behind plinths choose whether they want to match up with him. And then, at the end, finally, two men pair off: but instead of going to Tenerife and fingering each other, they strip to the waist and, in the centre of the studio, have a fight. I mean, they fucking deck each other. I call this format refresh, "Bloodbath".
#8. Here is one of Paddy’s jokes: a girl will say something slightly bizarre – "I just love hair, Paddy, I always have. I’ve kept all my hair from every haircut I’ve ever had," or something – and he will lean on her podium and look disappointedly to the floor and shake his head. And that is his joke. He does this, I would say, two times per episode.
#9. I am obviously thinking about whether I could replace Paddy McGuinness. (This is what you do when you watch extended amounts of Take Me Out over a short period: you imagine yourself in there and wonder if you would flail or thrive). I have decided that I could. I have decided that the perfect Take Me Out host – should Paddy McGuinness succumb to a fatal accident at a Take Me Out afterparty, slipping on a mess of Ann Summers own-brand lube and clonking his head on an ornate chocolate fountain that three Grimsby natives are all fucking in, somehow – I have decided the perfect replacement host is me. Think about it: McGuinness manages to effortlessly straddle this weird nether-zone of banter-matey with the lads, and sort of cheeky-older-sibling with the girls (a strange grey area: the deferent way some of the Flirty Thirty say "Paddy" falls somewhere uncomfortable between affection for a father or a lover), plus his physical dimensions are what tailors would describe as "monstrous". A lot of this is me. McGuinness is a curiously sexless presence in the Take Me Out fuckdome: he’s there to officiate, a sort of love referee, full of point-at-the-camera puns and knackered jokes about Fernando’s. He is northern and his eyes are, as best I can tell it, black like the devil’s are. When he dies I want first dibs on replacing him.
#10. I honestly don’t want to see the dates. I don’t care if any of them find love, is the thing. There have been seven weddings and three babies as a result of this show, and statistically I find that to be too low. We are ten seasons in. Per episode it is 30 women, minimum, matched per season w/ approximately 50 men. The success rate of this show – a show designed solely to help single people find love – is ridiculously low. You’d be better off putting them all in an office for a year, working mildly close to each other. More fucking would get done. It is arguable at this point that Take Me Out is anti-chemistry. I do not want to see two people in off-season holiday wardrobes be whipped by the wind in Tenerife before having some sort of grey picnic together where they silently clink plastic champagne flutes, sigh at the sun and say it’s been the best date of their life. Do they bang? "He lives in Scotland, I live in Essex." They do not bang. Do not show me this miserable sausage. I only want to watch the monster being made.
#11. How many times do you think one person can hear the sentence, "Good evening, ladies, you’re all looking lovely tonight" and still believe it? I think: two, absolute maximum. But they still say it, the boys. Every single boy. They still say it and pretend like it means anything.
#12. THE LOVE AT FIRST LIGHT TWIST INTRODUCED IN THE FOURTH SERIES RUINED THE FORMAT OF THE SHOW AND SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN MAINTAINED, I HATE IT WITH MY LIFE, THEY WILL NOT LEAVE THE COLD-LIGHT-OF-DAY SPLIT-SECOND PEN-AND-PAPER HORNINESS JUDGMENT ALONE
#13. Best bit of Take Me Out is watching the faces drop. A single-round of Take Me Out is like a tiny three-act play about the underlying disappointment of romantic love, told through 30 well-contoured faces. First, the boy comes down the lift, silent and perfect, dancing, hi-energy, slick, doing handstands, and the girls are rapt – gazing lovingly, or laughing alone, or staring like a lion might at a pile of steak. And then he says his name and reveals the exact size and shape of his provincial accent and they are immediately turned off.
Then the first round happens, which is the sizzle reel of the boy’s likes, dislikes, quirks and hobbies. Piece-by-piece the man reveals his true self to the women in front of him, tearing himself open in the most intimate way, and they respond by turning their lights off to him. "I love to keep fit." Byew. "I’ve got a weird phobia: I’m scared of cheese." Byew, byew. "I’ve got a twin brother – and he’s my best mate!" Byew, byew byew byew byew byew. Watch the faces: watch them sink from horny to deathly cold, as some skinny jeans lad from Inverness tells us that he likes a beer with the lads. A microcosm of what romantic love is: hot jets of intense attraction cooled like a sparkler plunged into sand when you learn literally anything about their personality at all. Take Me Out takes love and accelerates it at light speed. I suppose that’s why the attraction so often burns out before the couple has even got on the plane.
#14. Here’s a move you can do, when you’re on Take Me Out. I just thought of it. At the end, when the guy has to pick between two girls., and they're both screaming, like, "Pick me! Pick me!" and everyone in the audience is just losing their minds, here is the thing you do, which I just thought of, which has never been done before: run to the girl you’re going to pick. She’s going start thinking you’re running over to turn her light off, and she’s going to panic. "No," she’s saying. "No, no, please, no!" All her mates huddled around her podium, trying to stop you. And then: right at the last moment: zig instead of zag. Awkward cheek-kiss over a podium. Hurriedly whisper, "You’re going to Fernando’s." Run back the other way and turn the other girl’s light off while they both go mental. This is classic. I am the first person alive to think of it.
#15. Every single girl on Take Me Out has at least one "Live Laugh Love" trinket in their home and a 400-item deep ASOS wish list they never, ever look at. Every girl on Take Me Out is drawn like a magnet to department store MAC counters and has those wine glasses at home – you know the ones: opaque, plastic, white. Every single one of them has tried to raise money for charity by "doing a run". They all have cracked phone screens. Not one of them has an un-cracked phone screen.
#16. Every single lad on Take Me Out has at least one discreet banter tattoo on a non-visible flesh surface that means it won’t show up in his gym selfies. Every lad on Take Me Out supports Manchester United and thinks Conor McGregor is "god". Every lad on Take Me Out takes a quiet minute to himself on the anniversary of Paul Walker’s death. His favourite meal is "my mum’s roast". His second favourite meal is "my mum’s sausage and mash". Every lad on Take Me Out really, really – too much, if I’m honest – really, really loves his mother. He cannot cook a single meal for himself and will say as such during the "quite misogynist, actually" rant footage they will inevitably have to cut out of the resulting first date. "If we're going to happen, you're doing the cooking," says James from Leeds. "[30 minute redacted monologue about 'being alpha' that ends with the words "...and that's why I want to get cracking on with having babies"]"
#17. Would a gender-swapped Take Me Out work? What if they did it just once, as sort of a joke? I’m here to tell you that it would not work. Alright, so here’s Lindsay, 24, from Brighton, and she’s coming down the lift to Love Machine. "Hi boys," she says. "You’re all looking fit this evening!" Thirty lights still on. VT round where she explains she likes tall men, she loves a dance, she loves a night in with her girls, she loves her mum. Thirty lights still on. Stitch up round where her mate carefully explains that Lindsay regularly shits herself and rubs it down her legs. "Lindsay’s a great girl," her mate is saying. "But for this one thing: she regularly shits herself and rubs the shit down her legs like a dog might." Zooms in. "And I’m talking wet shit, boys." Thirty lights still on. "She does this, like, once every two days." Thirty lights are still on. The final round where Lindsay gets to choose a boy turns into some sort of animalistic horny set-to. Loads of hench blokes from Newquay rutting together like stags. Fights breaking out. Two bouncers per lad to keep things in check. Paddy, in the centre, grey-faced and beyond banter. Finally she picks some bloke with waxed eyebrows who lifts her entire body and carries her up the stairs, where she shits herself. They wave to the crowd. Next round a girl comes out with an ankle tag and starts telling them all about her GHB charges. Thirty lights still on. This repeats and repeats itself until the universe extinguishes beneath them. And never a single light goes red.
#18. What I don’t understand is how more of the Flirty Thirty don’t die on their way into the arena. Watch them clatter down the stairs like animals stampeding down a hill. Watch them march and lurch down the white, white stairs in towering heels. I do not understand how more of them don’t fall over. I don’t understand how more ankles don’t snap like Pocky. I don’t understand how the last girl hasn’t – at least once – tripped on the top step and barrelled down, through the other girls, scattering them like bowling pins. Instead, they pull the same six motions to the camera as they walk by it – air kiss, peace sign, tit shimmy, tilt down glasses and wink (they have to be wearing glasses for this one to work), salute and/or wave, pirouette – before the last two, the Anchor Girls, take an arm each of Paddy McGuinness and walk him down towards the Love Lift. It’s a very tightly choreographed ballet, studded throughout with the looming feeling of dread. It’s a very high stress intro to watch, for me. All I can think, whenever I see it, is: someone could die at any second now. Someone could snap their legs like two twigs.
#19. I suppose if we were to identify the "vibe" of Take Me Out, it would be "the nicest nightclub in a TMO what it is: the music, the bandage dresses, the shaved chests, Paddy McGuinness staging a heart attack whenever someone does flanter, the audience-wide chant of "Oooh!" The entire atmosphere is very "£8 entry after 10PM".
This all sets the tone for the kind of """"love"""" people are on the show for, which is club love: not capital-L forever love, but a cheeky shag possibly standing up, possibly in a toilet cubicle but maybe not, and honestly what is wrong with that? It’s sort of funny that the show is dripped so heavily in the idea of romantic love – "Who’s gonna find love tonight?"; "Get together on the Isle of Fernando’s"; "Is this the start of a wonderful journey together?" – when it’s essentially just three-dimensional Tinder. But I suppose it’s a veneer beneath a veneer: the tasteful face of love, ITV primetime love, let’s not admit we’re going to do some hand stuff about this. I bet the end-of-season afterparties are absolutely fucking appalling.
#20. Why do we enjoy watching people – and I don’t want to say "fall in love", because nobody ever does on this show, and I don’t want to say "enjoy a first date", because that rarely happens either – but why do we like to watch people being horny at each other, on TV? I think maybe it’s a similar reason we like to watch people buy houses on Grand Designs: we get to live vicariously through people living a life that is beyond us. Think about when you’re in a relationship, when you get all settled and cosy on the sofa: you don’t miss it, do you, the spending 90 minutes to four hours getting ready to go out to somewhere called "Rascals" where you have to shout "SO WHERE ARE YOU FROM?" at someone mildly sexually viable to you who really would rather just talk to their friends. It’s sort of fun at the time, isn’t it, but also very fundamentally dreadful, and bad for your soul, and you forget that, in a relationship: you spend four consecutive holidays at "her parents' house in France" and get matching jumpers at Christmas and pose with your dog on Instagram, and think: wouldn’t it be good, again, the old thrill, to go and try and shag someone from a nightclub but actually strike out and go home, realising you’ve somehow spent £80 and you’re not really pissed, walking back instead of taking a taxi, slumping on the sofa to send out ‘u up?’ texts to literally everyone you’ve ever matched with on Tinder. Take Me Out synthesises the feeling of chirpsing someone who’s never truly going to shag you and makes it primetime Saturday night viewing. That’s what makes it watchable. It gives coupled-up normies a fleeting taste of the life they leave behind. Bite the old feeling like the sour taste of blood.
#21. Obviously I am imagining my talent section would be were I to ever be on Take Me Out. (This is what you do when you watch extended amounts of Take Me Out over a short period: you imagine yourself in there and wonder if you would flail or thrive). I have no viable talents that I could show off in a half-minute segment in front of 30 women who hate me. What can I do? I can write a sentence. What am I supposed to do, write a big sentence? On a whiteboard? While Paddy McGuinness gurns behind me with a pen? "Look how many comma stops he’s ignoring, girls!" Paddy’s saying. "Have you ever seen a sentence this needlessly long! He’s gonna do an en-dash in a minute!" Byew, byew byew, byew. Byew byew byew. Byew.
I think about what Paddy McGuinness will smell like when he hugs me (Paddy McGuinness offers conciliatory hugs to men deemed unworthy of love on national TV, and I would be one of them). I feel like he would smell like expensive aftershave and warm not-quite sweat and, faintly, crisps. Smoky Bacon crisps. He smells good, and familiar. He smells like a fine leather sofa someone left for a minute in a clean kitchen. I sob in his arms, in this fantasy, and he shushes me like I am his gigantic baby. The floor manager has asked the girls to file out for a minute while I process my emotions. "He’s not taking it well, ladies," the floor manager says. "Take 15 so you can all extricate yourself from your Spanx long enough to have a piss. We've got 12 more lads coming."
Take Me Out is the perfect pre-night out show and the perfect hangover show, too. It’s weirdly wholesome, because nobody really gets hurt. It’s sort of cheeky and bawdy and horny and wink-wink nudge-nudge, and Paddy McGuinness keeps doing the same joke over it, the same girls season after season with slightly different faces, more or less the same boys, but it’s very safe. The Isle of Fernando’s is there, unchanging. The set is there, deeply unchanging. Whatever happens to you, you know there is one constant in this unyielding life. That – somewhere, in a TV studio in north-west England – Paddy McGuinness and a Travelodge full of women are having a right old laugh. Byew, byew byew byew. They are laughing at you, you fucking loser. They are having way more fun than you will ever have in your life.
Piers Morgan and Donald Trump are going to be in the same room tonight, talking, for an interview on ITV, and you know how it’s going to go: Piers Morgan is going to do "hearty talk-over-you banter voice", then "earnest well actually voice", then sign off laughing to the camera at a joke nobody actually made, and then they are both going to go on Twitter and say how good an interview it was.
By that I mean Piers Morgan is going to bodily insert himself – nose then face then skull then neck – into the anal passage of Donald President Trump, then just start making kissing noises and licking around a bit. If you want to make a fun game of that, drink whenever any of the following things happen and see how hammered you get by the end. Clue: yr gonna get very hammered.
TRUMP LAUGHS LIKE A LION GROWLING AT A CAT
I don’t personally recall ever seeing Donald Trump laugh, but I feel like, seeing as this is some ornate press stunt to make him look appealable and human to the UK audience, he might at least attempt some chummy banter with Piers Morgan, which will involve something like PM saying: "I’m joined by President Donald Trump… and you look so healthy and tan!" and Donald Trump will expose all his fake white teeth and instead of laughing just make this long sort of guttural near-zombie noise, like this: hurrrrrr!(DRINK)
HAND STUFF
I’m afraid if, mid-interview, Piers Morgan takes off his blazer and rolls up his shirt sleeve and starts to masturbate the President, deliberately and with great care, if Piers Morgan starts literally wanking Donald Trump off, you have to (SINK YOUR DRINK)
PIERS MORGAN DOES A NERVOUS LAUGH LIKE A BOARDING SCHOOL BOY WHO HAS JUST NOW EARNED THE CALM RESPECT OF THE BOYS IN THE YEAR ABOVE THEM – MAINLY BY GIVING THEM ALL CRISP FIVE POUND NOTES NOT TO PUNCH HIM, AND INVITES TO HIS 13TH BIRTHDAY PARTY – BUT IS STILL VERY AFRAID THEY MIGHT SUDDENLY LUNGE AND PUMMEL HIM AND STEAL HIS MEGADRIVE CARTRIDGE OF 'MORTAL KOMBAT II'
(DRINK)
PIERS MORGAN SAYS "I UNDERSTAND WHERE YOU’RE COMING FROM, BUT A LOT OF PEOPLE WILL BE WONDERING…" AND THEN SOFTBALLS ANOTHER FUCKING QUESTION TRUMP CAN DEFLECT
I’m afraid when Piers Morgan makes it easy for the President to talk for two straight minutes without really saying anything, you need to (DRINK)
DONALD J TRUMP MAKES IT EXCEPTIONALLY CLEAR THAT HE DOES NOT REALLY KNOW WHO THE PRIME MINISTER OF THE UK IS AND DOES A LOOK TO CAMERA TO SUGGEST HE COULD NOT RELIABLY FIND OUR ISLAND ON A MAP
"You know, your leaders – your, you know, your main guy – they’re saying to me: Donald. Build a wall." (DRINK)
PIERS MORGAN BRINGS UP THE CELEBRITY SEASON OF THE AMERICAN APPRENTICE APROPOS OF NOTHING AND DONALD TRUMP NODS AS IF HE REMEMBERS IT AT ALL
"The Apprentice, of course – which I won, remember," says Piers. Mate, you beat someone called "Trace Adkins" in the final; don’t try to tell me that person is real and exists jfc (DRINK)
DONALD J TRUMP PRONOUNCES THE WORD 'SCOTLAND' EITHER RELUCTANTLY OR PLAIN WRONG
Does DJT even follow one Scottish Twitter banter account? I dinnae think sae! Have a lovely (DRINK)
PIERS MORGAN PRETENDS HE IS SPEAKING FOR BRITAIN BY SAYING THE WORDS 'SPEAKING FOR BRITAIN' THEN ASKING A QUESTION WHICH WAS NOT PRE-APPROVED BY, FOR EXAMPLE, BRITAIN
And then you (DRINK)
PIERS MORGAN WILL REFER TO 'ELECTION NIGHT' THREE SEPARATE TIMES WITHIN THE FIRST TEN MINUTES OF THE INTERVIEW BECAUSE THAT WAS PROBABLY REALISTICALLY THE LAST TIME DJT FELT ANY REAL HAPPINESS – BEFORE THE ENORMOUS DREAD CREPT IN – AND REMAINS HIS BIGGEST VICTORY TO DATE SO HE KNOWS JUST MENTIONING THAT A LOT WILL GET HIM ON-SIDE
(DRINK) once for every mention and (GLUG) if my three in ten prediction turns out to be right
PIERS MORGAN SUPERFICIALLY CHALLENGES TRUMP ON SOME EXTREMELY MINOR AND PRE-ARRANGED POINT OF FACT, WHICH TO AN OUTSIDE OBSERVER MIGHT SORT OF SEEM LIKE IT’S GOING AFTER HIM FOR LIKE THE BRITAIN FIRST FUCK UP OR THE IMMIGRATION FUCK UP OR THE ALMOST STARTING A NUCLEAR WAR FUCK UP, BUT ACTUALLY IS FOCUSING ON A VERY MINOR PART OF THE WIDER WHOLE OF TRUMP AND BASICALLY MORGAN IS GONNA CROW ABOUT IT LIKE IT'S A WIN, ISN’T HE, BUT ALL THAT’S REALLY GOING TO HAPPEN IS TRUMP’S GONNA GO 'IF THAT’S THE WAY YOU SEE IT, I’LL APOLOGISE', AND AGAIN NOTHING REALLY CHANGES OR HAPPENS AS A RESULT
"The most hard-hitting interview he’s ever had!" – Piers Morgan, seconds after broadcast, a lie, 6,000 RTs but 150,000 @replies, the most cursed ratio in Twitter history (DRINK)
BOTH OF THEM DO THAT THING THEY DO WHERE THEY SIT THEIR LEGS WIDE APART, THE MOST MASCULINE OF ALL THE PASSIVE SITTING POSITIONS, HANDS CLASPED TIGHTLY TOGETHER IN BETWEEN, UNTIL THEY JUST GRADUALLY – IMPERCEPTIBLY AT FIRST, BUT GRADUALLY GATHERING SPEED – UNTIL THEY JUST SPREAD, WIDER AND WIDER AND WIDER, UNTIL THEY ARE BOTH JUST SQUATTING ON THE FLOOR
Sorry, but there’s absolutely no way these two lads don’t end up in a ball-off. And when they do, you (SINK YOUR DRINK)
PIERS MORGAN PUTS HIS NOSE INTO THE ANUS OF DONALD TRUMP
Just starting off slow, here. Every time Piers Morgan puts his nose into the anal passage of the President – just the nose – you have to take a (DRINK)
PIERS MORGAN MANAGES TO GET HIS NOSE AND PART OF HIS JAW INSIDE THE PRESIDENT’S THICC MAGNIFICENT ASS
Oh, now we’re hotting up: whenever Piers Morgan really warms up that thing, and manages to stretch it out to encompass his large flat lower head and neck, you also have to (DRINK)
PIERS MORGAN HAS GOT HIS HEAD INSIDE THE PRESIDENT LIKE AN ANACONDA THAT DIED CHOKING ON A GOAT
Okay, here we go: whenever Piers Morgan manages to stretch like a balloon the anal entry of the President of the United States and yam his entire head up there, his softball questions fully muffled now, I’m afraid you have to have a big swill of your (DRINK)
PIERS MORGAN GETS HIS SHOULDERS AND PART OF AN ARM UP THE PRESSIE
By about minute 45, i.e. three ad breaks in, we really should be seeing some progress between the supposed immovable forces of Piers Morgan’s head and torso and Donald Trump’s now voluminous ass. At the point there is more Piers Morgan in the President than out of him you have to (SINK YOUR DRINK)
NOTHING REALLY HAPPENS AND NOTHING REALLY IS SAID AND BY THE END OF IT YOU REALISE YOU HAVE WATCHED TWO MEN TALK CONSTANTLY FOR 45 MINUTES AND SAY ABSOLUTELY NOTHING OF NOTE BECAUSE THE WHOLE EXERCISE WAS A SORT OF SELF-FELLATING OUROBOROS DESIGNED TO PROMOTE THE BRANDS OF BOTH MEN AT THE EXPENSE OF OUR TIME AND ATTENTION
(SINK YOUR DRINK), then pour another drink, then (SINK YOUR DRINK, AGAIN)!
Piers Morgan's interview with Donald Trump airs tonight on ITV at 10PM.
In 2016, researchers from New York University blindfolded a handful of terminally ill cancer patients and gave them a potent dose of psilocybin—the psychoactive ingredient in magic mushrooms. Each of the 29 patients had volunteered to take part in the medical experiment for somewhat comprehensible reasons: they were unable to handle the certainty of their own deaths.
Around the same time, Johns Hopkins University was conducting a similar experiment. Volunteers would be narcotised with psilocybin, isolated in a room with a purpose-built playlist, and carefully monitored by a pair of psychotherapists. The idea of both studies was that maybe a hallucinogenic could play a positive role in the context of palliative treatment. By giving a terminally ill person just one intense, psychedelic trip, could we maybe alleviate some of that crushing end-of-life anxiety? Anyone who has achieved a sense of clarity and inner peace with recreational drugs will get the idea.
“This is a completely different way of working with people,” clinical psychologist Dr Stephen Bright tells VICE. “What we try to do in palliative care at the moment is to relieve the pain and suffering as much as possible by giving people pain medication. But morphine’s not going to take away their anxiety or their depression.”
As vice president of Australia’s Psychedelic Research In Science and Medicine association, Dr Bright has been keeping a well-trained eye on the progress of these studies overseas. And much to his delight, the results have so far been decisive.
Subjects showed a significant and enduring reduction in anxiety, depression, and existential distress. In a follow-up assessment some six months after the treatment, 70 percent of the patients from the NYU trial later reflected on the psilocybin experience as one of the top five most spiritually significant experiences of their entire lives, while 87 percent reported increased life satisfaction overall.
A research paper published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology attributes a large part of these therapeutic outcomes to the so-called “mystical experience” of psilocybin, which it defines as “encountering a profound sense of unity, transcendence of time and space, [and a] deeply felt positive mood… infused with a renewed sense of purpose and meaning.” That’s one way to put it. But the potential palliative benefits of the drug become slightly less abstract when we consider the effect psilocybin has on the way we see the world.
The “mystical experiences” associated with drugs like psilocybin and LSD most likely stem from their influence on the ‘default mode network’ of the brain—that is, the neural network that allows certain parts of our brain to communicate while simultaneously cancelling out “cross talk” from other parts. The default mode network is important to our everyday functioning, insofar as it keeps us focussed on the things that are immediately relevant—like, say, this article you’re reading—and sidelines those things that aren’t—the overwhelming nausea that comes with impending death, for example.
Dr Bright explains that psilocybin disables the default mode network, thus opening the lines of communication between different parts of the brain that would “never normally cross talk.” Hence the mystical experience, which he says may provide people with “a completely different perspective on their situation” and bring in to focus those things that humans typically tend to repress or pass over. And counted among those, of course, is the biggest downer of all: our own inescapable demise.
Westerners have a timid relationship with death. We don’t quite look it in the eye. We pussyfoot around it, bury it in our subconscious and dig for wellsprings of eternal life instead. Which is awkward, really, considering eternal life isn’t an option.
“It’s almost taboo in Western culture to talk about death,” says Dr Bright. “And I think part of the problem that people in these studies are having is coming to grips with the idea of death because of the way it’s treated in society.
“[These patients’] significant others may not want to talk about it, and they may not want to bring it up. But after the psilocybin experience I guess they feel a sense that there’s something else out there, and they’re more likely then to talk heart-to-heart and have that meaningful conversation.”
A not insignificant aspect of psilocybin’s palliative benefits, then, might be the way in which it allows us to reach an understanding of death by facing it head on: to look it in the eye for the very first time and accept it for what it is. As far as psychiatrist Nigel Strauss is concerned, that makes this kind of research invaluable. After all, if we can truly help people come to terms with their own death, then we might just be able to dissuade them from wanting to take their own life.
“One of the things that makes a life good is the acceptance of death,” says Dr Strauss. “In fact we as a society should be thinking about death a hell of a lot more, because it’s an inevitable part of our existence.”
Strauss is well-versed in the subjects of psychedelic research and death. Just last year he had a paper published in the Australian Medical Journal which looked at the relationship between psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy and euthanasia.
“Euthanasia’s such a topical thing in Australia at the moment, there’s been a lot of conversation… and I think it misses the point,” he says bluntly. “For many of these people pain is not the big factor… What the majority of these people are requesting is early death or instant death because they’re not coping with the thought of having to die in the next several months. They just can’t accept that they’re going to die.”
Strauss cites studies conducted in parts of Europe, where assisted dying is legal, which indicate that more people request euthanasia on psychological grounds than physical ones. The way he sees it, palliative psilocybin could assuage the psychological weight that comes with a terminal diagnosis, and give a small flicker of hope to those who might otherwise want to “short-circuit” the process of dying.
“Hopefully a number of people who would have that treatment would then say ‘No, I can see what’s happening. I feel a lot better and more positive about it, and even though I am dying I don’t want to use euthanasia: I want to use the next couple of months to come to terms with everything and everybody.’
“By having the psilocybin experience they can see death in a whole different way and they’re much more comfortable with it.”
Our attitude towards death could probably use a reality check. For centuries we’ve been telling ourselves to “rage, rage against the dying of the light.” But dying doesn’t have to be so dark. If the research so far is anything to go by, there is a more optimistic way to think about the ends of our lives—and psychedelics may well be the key to unlocking it.
Good afternoon. I hope you are enjoying another windless day of emptiness here in the United Kingdom, or as we're now calling it: The Atos United Kingdom Public-Private Initiative (AUKPPI), currently in liquidation by PwC.
Last night was Sunday evening, typically a time for residents of the AUKPPI to relax and watch TV ahead of the 60-hour working week. Before we became a miserable vassal state for global finance and private contractors, this period used to involve high-budget drama and nature documentaries. Now we get this: a disgraced newspaper editor who was fired for publishing fake photographs interviewing a fascistic American leader who has called all Mexicans rapists, all Muslims dangerous and half of the world a shithole. 10PM, ITV – now that's entertainment.
Some commentators – themselves dreaming of such powers of self-promotion – applauded Piers Morgan for securing the first international interview with President Trump.
If Morgan had used his decade of servile Trump rimming to land an exclusive interview, only to take the President to task with a tough, forensic line of questioning learned over decades in the tabloid media, it's true that this would have been a coup. But that's not what happened. Instead, we got exactly what we all expected: two men, legs spread wide so you know they are men, in what looks like a dimly-lit Holiday Inn foyer, gently caressing each other's egos with an almost tantric rhythm.
The President would say something and Piers would fawn after him. The President would give economic figures, about the stock market doing well, and unemployment being low, including for women and "blacks", and Piers would go gooey-eyed. "A lot of people don’t want to give you any credit – but a lot of that is indisputable. The economy is in good shape," he cooed at Trump, who returned the favour by giving him a nanosecond of eye contact.
It is indisputable, I suppose, except for the fact that, under Obama, the African-American unemployment rate fell by 8.6 percent, and under Trump it has fallen by 1 percent; or that most poor white Americans who helped get Trump elected are still getting poorer; or that, even by Trump’s favoured measure of stock indices, the US has lagged behind France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Spain, Japan, China, India, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Argentina and Chile during his first year in office. But yes, it's indisputable. And why should we dispute it when you’re being this fantastic, Mr President?
Like an underling with a gun to his head, Piers went on to tell the President how brilliant he's been on trade and managing social media, and then how fantastic he would be as Arsenal manager – that the club would surely win all their games with him in Arsene Wenger's place. Trump seemed entirely unimpressed by both this strange compliment and a personalised Arsenal shirt brought along as a gift, but Piers grovelled on regardless.
Perhaps most shocking was when our host turned to the subject of women. The President has been accused by scores of women of sexual harassment and assault; was accused this month of sleeping with a porn star just after his wife had given birth, and then paying for her silence; and was caught on tape bragging about how easy it was for him to assault women and get away with it. So how did Morgan summarise this history? By blaming women for blaming the President, offering not so much softball questions as massage-chair questions:
"The #MeToo and the Time’s Up campaigns have really resonated with millions of women. And they partly hold you to blame for a lot of attitude towards women. Do you have a message for them? What message could you give these women who are marching that you’re for them and not the problem?"
Yes, what message, Mr President, will make these women understand how fantastic you are?
If that wasn't enough, Piers continued:
"A lot of the women I spoke to about this, they said it would be great to hear the President – given some of the more disrespectful things that have been out there, and the way you’ve spoken about women... would you acknowledge that you had said things that perhaps you wouldn’t say now?"
Crucially, Piers ignored all the things the President is accused of doing to women, and instead focused on his comments – the old locker-room banter excuse, except this time being pitched by the journalist rather than Trump himself.
Finally, he reminded the President that he has "a lot of strong women around you... Melania, and your team here, the press team". Never mind that less than 27 percent of the Trump administration are women – at least your wife is a woman!
In keeping with the bizarre fake news, as the president avoided the questions, repeated campaign lines and told blatant lies, Piers would then, in a disembodied voiceover, say the exact opposite had happened. "What a revealing response," he'd claim as they threw to an advertising break, "the President is really opening up to me," when he had said nothing of note whatsoever. It was a glimpse into living under an authoritarian regime with a state media, the sort of thing you'd expect in Saudi Arabia or North Korea.
The saddest moments came when Morgan was defending topics we know he felt passionate about, like gun crime, global warming and the retweeting of British hate groups. Through mealy-mouthed "the people just want to get to know you better" buttering up, he managed to bring these topics up with the President, and then just let him off the hook.
It’s so sad because we know Piers can be a tough interviewer. Whenever someone goes on Good Morning Britain – Morgan's usual gig – to defend trans rights, discuss structural racism or debate whether the national anthem should be sung in schools, he shouts them down, taunts them, challenges their slightest utterance before they’ve finished speaking. Yet, somehow, when the most powerful man in the world said, "There is warming and there is cooling... they used to call it global warming but that doesn’t work any more" in response to a question about whether he believes in climate change, Piers was left speechless, no facts at his disposal.
Of course, we should not still be surprised by Trump, and we are not. But perhaps we should be surprised by ITV. Despite the fact it is cheaper, less adventurous and skewed-older than Netflix and HBO, one of the saving graces of British television is a sense that stuff like this can’t happen. No matter how famous the guest, no matter how big the interview, there are rules against just letting a racist authoritarian foreign leader speak unchallenged for 45 minutes on primetime TV.
But that was before and this is now, post-Brexit, post-Piers, in our stagnant leech nation floating away into melted ice caps, doing anything for someone to listen to us. Anything. Even this.
On a recent visit to Stockholm, I met Miranda—an LGBT-activist and mother of a two-and-a-half-year-old child. I use the word "child" deliberately here, because Miranda chose to raise her baby gender neutral, which means she is trying to bring her child up in an environment free of gender stereotypes.
It seems like a very Swedish thing to do—what with the Swedish government handing out Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's We Should All Be Feminists to every 16-year-old in the land, and encouraging Swedish dads to take 90 days of paid leave off work for every baby they make. With that in mind, it's no surprise that the first gender neutral pre-school, Egalia, opened in Stockholm in 2010, funded with money from the municipality.
But raising your children gender neutral is not an exclusively Swedish thing: Beck Laxton and Keiran Cooper are Britain's most famous gender neutral raising parents, having appeared in the media about the subject and maintaining a blog about it for a while. A very short phone call I had with the couple made it pretty clear that they didn't want any media attention. On her blog, Beck Laxton writes that the couple got "accidentally splashed all over the media after innocently giving an interview to a friend of a friend who was working for Cambridge News" in January 2012.
But there are quite a few Facebook groups for parents who want to raise their children gender neutral, and that's where I found Dani, who was willing to talk to me. Dani, from Dartford, Kent, is the stay-at-home parent of a five-year-old who identifies as agender. I talked to Dani and Miranda, as well as Lotta Rajalin – the founder of Swedish gender neutral pre-school Egalia – about what it means to raise a child gender neutral.
Miranda and her baby. Photo courtesy of Miranda
For both Miranda and Dani, their parenting philosophy doesn't feel like a radical change: "My ideas on gender were already part of my life before I gave birth, so that was just an extension of what I believed and practiced," Dani explains. Miranda tells me she sees it as a basic feminist notion to believe we're all limited by gender roles and the expectations that go along with these roles.
According to Dani, gender neutrality is not about finding a gender neutral middle but about offering a child the option to be whoever they want to be—without feeling obliged to choose blue over pink. "We love all colors—we love the rainbow," Dani says. "The world is colorful." For their children, they try to mix toys and clothes meant for both sexes. "Whether my child wants to wear something pink or a shirt with Superman on it, it's all fine," Miranda explains. Which doesn't sound very radical, but Dani says people do take Mathilda for a boy every now and then, when she's wearing a blue shirt. Which doesn't bother Dani nor Mathilda.
Miranda and Dani both say the way they were raised influenced them in their own parenting. Miranda's mother was, as they say, a bit of a tomboy. "My mother was worried she wouldn't naturally do girly stuff with me, so she actively took me to ballet and horse riding. But I hated it." Dani's mother was different: "My mother loved red so that's what she dressed me in. She didn't like the fact that I cut my hair short, but I grew up in East Germany in the 1980s, so it wasn't as big of a problem as it might have been here in the UK these days."
When they found out they were pregnant, they both decided they did not want to know the sex of their baby before birth. Miranda says: "I noticed that when people hear you're pregnant, the first question they ask is whether it's a boy or a girl. I really didn't care myself—why were other people so eager to figure out my child's genitals?"
Miranda doesn't call her child a he [han] or she [hon], but she uses the gender neutral pronominal hen, that officially exists in Swedish since last year. She also doesn't use the traditional pronouns when she reads to her baby. "Stories in children's books contain a lot of gendered clichés, and I'd like my child to remember the characters and actions without connecting them to a sex." She gave her child a unisex name, so the name won't influence the child's sense of gender either. "I'm just being honest about what I know and what I don't know. My baby is just two and a half, how much can we know about its gender?" she exclaims.
Critics say the effort that goes into gender neutral parenting is a form of unnatural indoctrination—that there's simply a biological difference between men and women, and that that difference starts even before birth. But Miranda feels she's actually liberating her child from the gendered indoctrination society pushes on people. "It's ridiculous to say that gendered behavior is purely natural—it's cultural. Representations of men and women throughout history have been so different, and I'm just trying to liberate my child from that mold. People say I indoctrinate my child, but I'm really not the one doing the indoctrinating."
Lotta Rajalin, the director and founder of Egalia, tells me she received a lot of hate and threats when the pre-school opened. Apparently, the hate is gone: "There is actually a long waiting list now," she says.
I ask her if she thinks that Egalia is preparing kids for the real world or not, and she says she thinks it does. "The world is changing so fast: There are a lot of non-traditional families—a lot of children are raised in a family with two fathers or mothers, and within traditional families, gender roles are changing. We're preparing them for that." She adds that a lot of people think that there are no toy cars in the pre-school. "But why shouldn't we have toy cars? We don't limit anyone. We find a way to play with cars that can interest everybody."
Despite living in Stockholm, Miranda's child isn't going to Egalia. "I think people who send their kids to Egalia need help in raising their kids gender neutral. I don't. My child and I are surrounded by people who already identify as queer. Besides, that pre-school is in Södermalm—an upper-class, white neighborhood. I don't want my child to grow up in an environment dominated by white people." She also did not ask the pre-school she did choose to treat het child gender neutral: "I'm not a utopist, but I just want to offer one environment where my child can feel free from gender roles."
Reactions on their parenting philosophy are mixed—split 50-50, according to Dani: "Some people agree with me, but some people around me ignore it and keep buying Mathilda girly stuff."
Miranda, on the other hand, feels she has inspired some other parents: "They start to wonder why they wanted to know the sex of their baby." According to her, it's mostly the older generation that has difficulties accepting her lifestyle. "When older people want to give a compliment to a child, it's often expressed within a gender stereotype. They say stuff like, 'You're my big strong boy,' or 'Aren't you a cute little princess?'" Her family, however, respects her decisions and tries to avoid addressing her child that way. "The world is changing and adapting to new gender concepts, she says. "It just needs time."
In a last-minute attempt to win 2018's Best Spoken Word Album that doubled as a weird audition for the upcoming Fire and Fury TV show, James Cordon rounded up a bunch of celebs to read passages from Michael Wolff's explosive book for the Grammys on Sunday night.
The pre-taped segment featured everyone from John Legend, DJ Khaled, Snoop Dogg, Cher, and Cardi B reading about the dysfunctional mess that is the Trump White House. But last in the lineup was a surprise appearance from Hillary Clinton, who apparently took a break from walking her dog in the woods or whatever to read about the president's "longtime fear of being poisoned" and his weird obsession with McDonald's.
"That's it, we've got it, that's the one," Corden said.
"You think so?" Clinton asked. "The Grammy's in the bag?"
Clinton seemed to be hoping to follow in Obama and Jimmy Carter's footsteps, both of whom have taken home Grammys for the Best Spoken Word Album. In the end, though, it was Carrie Fisher who ended up winning the award posthumously for her memoir The Princess Diarist.
For what it's worth, Corden might have done better by just having Cardi B read the whole thing.
"If Trump was not having his 6:30 dinner with Steve Bannon, then more to his liking he was in bed by that time with a cheeseburger," the singer read. "Why am I even reading this shit? I can't believe this. I can't believe that he really... this how he lives his life?"
Dark net marketplaces are essentially Amazon.com of the underworld. Think of items you're not supposed to have, and chances are you can buy them there: assault rifles, credit card details, every breed of drug under the sun, whether they're conventional, experimental or one-off powders synthesised in a bedroom lab and named after a Stargate character.
It's that final category, drugs, that the marketplaces have become most infamous for. Countless outlets – including VICE – have written extensively on the dark net's dealers, power struggles and quirks, like the fact you can leave online ratings for, say, your last order of Blue Skypes, a luxury not afforded to people still buying their pills from the passenger window of a Golf GTI. Consumers, understandably, are just as interested as journalists. In 2017, the Global Drugs Survey found that over a quarter of British drug users bought their supplies on the dark net – more than in any other country except Finland and Norway, and up 200 percent from 2014.
Silk Road was the first prominent dark net market, before the FBI shut it down in 2013. This was replaced by Silk Road 2.0, which in turn was replaced by AlphaBay, Hansa and Dream. Though Dream and a few smaller markets still exist, AlphaBay and Hansa were shut down in July and, since then, buying drugs online has gone through a massive change, especially in the UK.
But is it the change law enforcement predicted? Not exactly. Instead of stopping the trade, these closures have forced many dark net dealers into selling on a different digital platform: the secure messaging app Wickr. On the DNMUK subreddit – a busy forum where British users and dealers discuss the drugs being sold on the dark net – out of the last 100 "Vendor Reviews", where customers rate the substances they receive in the post, 60 reveal their drugs had been bought using Wickr, while only four months ago there were almost zero mentions of the app.
Johnnie*, a customer who has used Wickr "a few times", tells me how he got started: "Like everyone, I just saw it all over the sub [subreddit]. Then I waited to see if it was safe and packs [of drugs] were landing, and they obviously were."
WATCH:
So, what is Wickr? The context I've just given you might suggest it's an app created by university kids with dreams of taking over the online drug game – but it's nothing of the sort.
Founded in San Francisco in 2012, Wickr is – first and foremost – a messaging app that allows for highly secure communication between "teams and enterprises". A business dedicated to the privacy of other businesses. In an age in which hacking has become commonplace, protecting companies from prying eyes has obvious appeal. As a result, Wickr hasn’t lacked funding; as of September, 2017, £51.8 million had so far been injected into the company, with its investor list making for fascinating reading.
Jim Breyer, Facebook’s first big backer, led a £21.3 million investment in 2014. Other financiers have included Gilman Louie, founder of In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA; Thor Halvorssen, CEO of the Human Rights Foundation; Richard Clarke, a former US counterterrorism official; and Erik Prince, founder of the controversial private security firm Blackwater USA (now called Academi). There is no suggestion that any of these backers are aware that the app is being used to arrange drug deals that would have previously taken place on dark net marketplaces.
Wickr is available to download for free on the App Store and Google Play – though there’s also a desktop version – and is essentially a very secure WhatsApp. Unlike WhatsApp, however, Wickr lets you set how long messages can be seen before they disappear, and protects each one with military-grade encryption. Furthermore, Wickr hides identifiable information by adding random digits to everything in the air, before mixing it all up in a mathematical algorithm several times over, a process called "salting and hashing". This means nothing is ever truly stored, making it useless for police to seize a phone. Wickr is completely legal, and the company doesn't endorse or promote drug dealing via the app, but you can see why dealers and buyers are attracted to the security it provides.
While writing this story I contacted Wickr for comment multiple times, but they are yet to reply.
A block of cocaine stamped with "TOP PRODUCTO COLOMBIANO". This picture was in an Imgur folder linked to in a dealer's Wickr auto-reply.
Nathan*, who has bought drugs via Wickr over ten times, tells me it seems "relatively safe".
"This is a feeling, more than anything based on fact," he says, "but as it's a chat app and not something designed for, or highly associated with, illicit activities, I feel it’s less watched and monitored. If a seller is compromised, I’m buying amounts which I think would of be of no interest to law enforcement, so it’d likely be disregarded as there are bigger fish to fry. Overconfidence, maybe?"
The increased usage of Wickr by dark net drug sellers and buyers is new, but look around drug forums and you'll find references to the app dating back to 2015, while on the DNMUK subreddit there are a few mentions prior to the current explosion.
Last spring, for example, Xanax vendor HulkedBenzoBoss began offering direct deals ("DDs", in dark net parlance), as well as customer support, over the app. This may explain why adoption of Wickr was so widespread among UK dealers following the AlphaBay and Hansa closures. Until his disappearance last summer – later revealed to be an arrest – HulkedBenzoBoss (HBB) was considered the gold standard of British dark net dealers. With cheap prices, perfect product and on-time shipments, he and a few partners built a multi-million pound drug empire out of essentially nothing, fostering a demand for the highly-addictive Xanax among thousands of British users. Dealers and customers alike may well have seen HBB was using the app and decided to follow suit.
Bob*, a dealer I messaged on Wickr, said, "It's just about what punters want. The risk we take is huge, so there doesn’t feel like much difference, though I’d probably prefer [to use] Tor [the browser used to access the dark net]. Wickr is a bit unknown."
The mechanics of a direct deal are as follows:
1. Message a dealer on their Wickr name, asking for a price list. 2. Agree a price and send the fee to their Bitcoin (or other cryptocurrency) address. 3. Give your postal address and wait a couple of days for the drugs.
That's it. A few messages in a few minutes.
"It saves time," says Johnnie. "Sometimes when you send Bitcoin to [your wallet on the marketplace] Dream it takes a while to come up, sometimes days, and that’s really frustrating. But with the app you can just go straight to the vendor and then there's no waiting."
"It’s much, much more convenient," says Nathan. "Dark net markets are sometimes difficult to navigate, slow and full of phishing links. Here, you just get a username, send a few messages and you're sorted. My current laptop also doesn’t support Tor, so using my phone is my only option, and dark net markets aren’t well optimised for mobile."
When more dealers began offering this service in September of 2017, demand was high. It’s fair to say those who’d been scared off by the markets' technical jargon were suddenly more interested in this more user-friendly experience. However, the majority were experienced dark net users who’d grown tired of its unpredictability – some had lost money in the AlphaBay and Hansa closures, and Dream didn’t seem much steadier.
The DNMUK subreddit proved a coalface for these deals. Dozens of threads popped up with users wanting to know dealers' Wickr names and how it all worked. Soon, threads became so overwhelming that a moderator pinned one to the top of the page – "Anyone who wants to post their wickr contact details can do so [here]," she wrote.
Bob says dealing on Wickr is "a lot more work. People want to chat shit about stuff that isn’t even drugs. Orders pile up. Some vendors have puts limits on it, like you can only order over a certain amount."
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With investors like Jim Breyer and Erik Prince, it's no wonder big business is flocking to Wickr. Recently, Uber made the news when executives revealed during a lawsuit that Wickr was widely used there, and that in October of 2016 it had started paying for a business version, which allows users to set message visibility for up to a year rather than the free version's six days. Though use of disappearing messaging apps is technically legal, Uber came under fire because companies also have an obligation to preserve records that may be seen as relevant to any future litigation.
Wickr has found its way into politics, too. Following the hacking scandal of the US presidential election – where WikiLeaks released thousands of Democratic Party emails and documents – swathes of Democrat politicians began using it in 2017. In 2015, it was revealed that the Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, also uses the app.
Now, reading the hundreds of Vendor Reviews posted on the DNMUK Reddit over the past four months and seeing the word Wickr regularly appear alongside "ketamine", "cocaine" and "heroin", it does feel like the tool that allows much of the world's elite to communicate has been slightly coopted by the online drug community.
Obviously, there are downsides to buying on Wickr – especially in relation to drug safety. Though the DNMUK subreddit does a decent job sounding the alarm over dodgy substances in Britain, the dark net’s inbuilt ratings system definitely feels like a first line of defence users can’t afford to lose, especially when drug deaths are at an all-time high in the UK because of dodgy or super strength substances. Scams are also rife on the app. Occasionally dealers disappear from the dark net markets with customers' money ("exit scamming"), but, on Wickr, cons are a daily fact of life – impersonators contact people all the time claiming to be known dealers, looking for Bitcoin for nonexistent drugs.
Today, though, Wickr represents a growing number of people being able to buy strong and plentiful drugs online. Though the percentage of dark net users migrating over is already significant, wait until dealers invade "clear net" – i.e. normal internet – spaces and make known how easy it is to use Wickr. To see the beginnings of this, just search #wickr on Instagram.
"This will be the new way of online dealing," says Nathan, "the ease being the main factor and, coupled with Reddit, you can trust that opinions on vendors and products are for the most part truthful. It also feels like you can get to know the people you’re talking to – it feels like you’re messaging an acquaintance to sort you out for the weekend, not doing something highly illegal on the internet."
Bob calls the evolution of dealing "endless. If people want drugs, they’re going to get them, and this is just the next step."
So, what can Wickr do about all this? If there is a plan, they don't seem keen to share it with me, having not replied to my requests for comment. But considering their entire existence depends on the security these dealers are exploiting, they seem a little hamstrung.
Everything you need to know about the world this morning, curated by VICE.
US News
Legislation to Protect Robert Mueller Again Broached on Capitol Hill Senator Lindsey Graham said he would be “glad” to support legislation preventing or complicating any attempt by the president to fire the special counsel, but also suggested the measure may not be necessary. Graham’s Republican colleague, Senator Susan Collins, said congressional action to secure Mueller’s position “probably wouldn’t hurt.” House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, however, disagreed. "I don't think there’s a need for legislation right now to protect Mueller," he said.—The New York Times
Hillary Clinton Criticized for Reading ‘Fire and Fury’ at the Grammys Nikki Haley, US ambassador to the UN, complained that a Grammy awards sketch in which Clinton read from Michael Wolff’s book about the Trump White House “killed” the ceremony. “Don’t ruin great music with trash,” Haley tweeted. Trump tweeted: “Getting to read a #fakenews book excerpt at the Grammys seems like a great consolation prize for losing the presidency.”—CNN
Fitness App Heat Maps Said to Reveal Soldiers’ Locations The US military was scrutinizing the online publication of heat maps apparently showing the jogging routes of US personnel overseas. Compiled by GPS firm Strava, the Global Heat Map is based on data from fitness apps like Fitbit, and may have inadvertently pointed to US bases—some of them classified—in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere.—The Washington Post
Majority of Millennials Say US on ‘Wrong Track’ The latest NBC News / GenForward poll found 63 percent of young people aged 18 to 34 thought the country was not going in the right direction. The same proportion disapproved of Trump’s job performance. Only 50 percent of millennials said they were planning on voting for a Democrat at this year’s midterms, with another 25 percent expressing uncertainty about which party they would vote for, or whether they would vote at all.—NBC News
International News
Attack at Afghan Military Base Leaves at Least 11 Dead The deaths were the product of a suicide bombing and shootout at an army facility in Kabul Monday, an early-morning raid for which ISIS claimed responsibility. The Afghan defense ministry said 16 more soldiers were wounded, and four militants killed. The assault came after Saturday’s suicide bombing in Kabul that left at least 100 people dead.—BBC News
Russian Opposition Leader (Again) Arrested at Rally Alexei Navalny was taken into into custody at anti-government rally in Moscow’s Pushkinskaya Square on Sunday. Police also picked up eight of his staffers after raiding the opposition leader's offices, with 185 people reportedly arrested at protests held across the country. Navalny was released, but will soon have to appear in court to face charges.—CNN
Australia Wants to Be ‘Top Ten’ Arms Exporter The Australian government has announced a plan to become one of the world’s leading exporters of weapons. “The goal is to get into the top ten,” said Prime Minister Malcom Turnbull. The government was to set up a $3.1 billion loan program for manufacturers struggling to get funding from the country’s banks.—AP
At Least a Dozen Killed in Yemeni Gun Battle Some 130 others were reportedly wounded as government soldiers fought separatist militants in the southern city of Aden. Gunfire erupted Sunday after separatists with the Southern Transitional Council (STC) took control of the city's main government building.—Al Jazeera
Everything Else
Bruno Mars Wins Big The pop star took home six awards at the Grammys, including album of the year and song of the year. Kendrick Lamar earned four awards including best rap album for DAMN. and best music video for “Humble.”—Rolling Stone
Weirdly Bad Night for Female Representation at the Grammys Only one female solo star won a major award at Sunday night’s ceremony: Alessia Cara for best new artist. While Kesha’s performance paid tribute to #MeToo, Lorde, the only female nominee for album of the year, was reportedly denied the chance to perform on her own.—Noisey
Alec Baldwin Bizarrely Suggests Dylan Farrow Made Up Sexual Abuse The actor compared Woody Allen’s adopted daughter to Mayella Ewell, the To Kill a Mockingbird character who falsely accuses a man of rape but was also raped by her father. “Her tears/exhortations r meant 2 shame u in2 belief in her story,” Baldwin tweeted.—Vulture
Omarosa Signs Up for ‘Celebrity Big Brother’ The former assistant to the president and star of The Apprentice Omarosa Manigault joined the cast for the upcoming CBS show. American Pie actress Shannon Elizabeth and Sugar Ray singer Mark McGrath, among others, were also slated to take part.—Variety
Trump Says He Gets British Fan Mail In a British TV interview with Piers Morgan, the president claimed to be “very popular” in the UK, despite a petition signed by more than one million Brits demanding his invitation for an official visit be withdrawn. “I get so much fan mail from people in your country,” Trump said.—VICE News
JAY-Z Attacks Trump’s ‘Hurtful’ Remarks In an interview for The Van Jones Show, the rapper described Trump’s reference to “shithole countries” as “disappointing and hurtful.” Trump responded by tweeting “Somebody please inform Jay-Z… Black Unemployment has just been reported to be at the LOWEST RATE EVER RECORDED!”—Noisey / CNN
Make sure to check out the latest episode of VICE's daily podcast. Today we’re looking at Philadelphia's plan to be the first US city with a set of supervised drug injection sites.
A group of ten foreign nationals—including two Canadians—have been charged in Cambodia for creating pornographic images. The charges follow a police raid at a party on Thursday in a rented villa nearby Angkor Wat temple complex in the resort town of Siem Reap. The party was reportedly a bar crawl of sorts that foreigners were discovered “dancing pornographically” at, CityNews reports. Partiers had reportedly shared the images in question on social media.
The photos Cambodian National Police released in relation to the charges show what looks like a bunch of clothed tourists (save for a shirtless dude) mounting each other on a dancefloor.
If convicted on charges, the foreigners could face up to a year in prison, according to an Associated Press interview with Samrith Sokhon, the prosecutor of the Siem Reap provincial court in Cambodia.
“Any people producing pornography is contrary to Cambodia’s traditions,” he said.
Though about 90 foreign nationals were reportedly detained in the raid, most were released. Out of the ten who were arrested—who may have been organizers—five were British, one was Norwegian, one was from New Zealand, and another from the Netherlands.
Global Affairs Canada told CityNews that it’s providing consular services to the Canadians who’ve been arrested in Cambodia.
“Consular officials are in contact with local authorities to gather additional information,” a Global Affairs Canada spokesperson said.
The perpetually pissed off Doug Ford—brother of former Toronto mayor, the late Rob Ford—has announced he is running for leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party. (And considering how disliked the ruling Ontario Liberals are right now, let’s make no bones about it, the winner of the PC leadership race stands an excellent chance of being the next premier of the province.)
During a press conference held in his mother's basement on Monday, Ford announced his plans to run to a group of journalists thirsty for the hot mess of clicks that a Ford being in the political game brings. Ford’s announcement comes at a time of upheaval for the party after former leader Patrick Brown resigned over sexual harassment allegations, and party president Rick Dykstra resigned over sexual assault allegations.
This isn’t Ford’s first time entering into the political fray, he served as a city councillor from 2010 to 2014 (in the ward where his brother had been councillor for a decade) and, in 2014, ran for mayor of Toronto (after his brother dropped out of the race during his battle with a rare form of cancer). The elder Ford lost the mayoral race to John Tory, a former PC leader.
Since Brown stepped down, the party has announced Vic Fedeli as the interim party leader and that they will be holding a leadership election in March prior to the province’s general election in June. It is safe to say that the party is in immense turmoil right now and it is also safe to say that the de facto leader of “Ford Nation” will only add to the insanity.
The millionaire son of a businessman told journalists that “this is truly a critical moment for our party, for our people, and for the future of our province," and railed against the nefarious “elites.”
Now, in service to any readers outside of Toronto who aren’t totally familiar with the extended Ford family, here is an incomplete list of things working against Doug Ford, Ontario Premier:
- He was an alleged hash dealer - Not the greatest brother - He refused to go in the dunk tank during VICE Canada’s 2015 Election Special - He lost to John Tory, known loser of elections - He somehow made Rob the likeable Ford - Doug once called Rob Ford, the “White Obama” - He once got in a fight with Margaret Atwood, then said he didn’t know who she was - He once flipped off a plane that he thought was following him (actually, this kinda rules) - He said a shower station for bikers would result in “hanky-panky” - He gave out $20 bills to constituents for Christmas - He tried to get the city to build a ferris wheel on Toronto’s waterfront - Said the following sentence: 'You can be racist against people that eat little red apples' - Tried to downplay his brother using an anti-Semitic slur by talking about his Jewish doctor, dentist, lawyer and accountants.
This is by no means the complete list. I’m sure this list will grow as the campaign goes on.
This story was published in partnership with the Marshall Project.
When Perry Fisher was sentenced to a California prison for second-degree murder in 1991, he knew he was going away for a very long time. Not surprisingly, keeping an eye on his finances wasn’t the first thing on his mind.
But at the time, Fisher believed he had nearly $43,000 to his name, money from an award he won in an earlier workers’ compensation lawsuit. Worried he would squander the cash on a drug habit, he says he entrusted most of the settlement to his attorney in the case. Once he was incarcerated, Fisher says, he would occasionally ask the lawyer, Burt Channing, to put some of the money into his commissary account. But Channing stopped responding.
When Fisher was released from prison at age 60 in 2016, he went looking for Channing—and the cash. The lawyer’s Los Angeles office had closed.
That’s where the story might have ended, but Fisher met Peter Borenstein, a young LA attorney who has carved out a niche helping ex-prisoners who believe they have been victims themselves. “People are gonna say I don’t deserve [the money] because of my crime,” Fisher said. “But I earned it before I got in trouble. And Mr. Channing and I, we had a contract.”
Borenstein took on Fisher’s case, eventually locating Channing in South Carolina, where he had retired. A lawyer for Channing says he wrote Fisher a check for the full amount a year or two after the 1984 settlement, and that the statute of limitations for filing a civil lawsuit has long since passed. “This was the first my client ever heard about it—when he was sued some 31 years later,” said Richard Klein, a lawyer for Channing. The case is ongoing.
Long-term inmates are especially vulnerable to being defrauded by family members, business associates, or others who believe that no one will care about the property and assets of convicted felons who might die in prison anyway, Borenstein said.
“Thirty years is a long time to hold onto someone else’s stuff,” he said. “People think, if the guy is in there forever, what’s the value in making sure that he’s not stolen from with impunity?”
But, he said, “You still have property rights in prison. You’re paying your debt to society with your liberty.”
Borenstein grew up in Santa Monica, California, learning about white-collar crime and finances from his father, a longtime corporate attorney who is now a civil judge in LA Superior Court. But he didn’t necessarily plan the same career path. Corresponding with one of his father’s former clients, a federal prisoner, for more than 20 years, made Borenstein deeply idealistic about reforming the criminal justice system, he said.
After graduating from law school in 2014, Borenstein reached out to a friend who managed the Francisco Homes, a transitional housing facility for ex-prisoners. He started volunteering there once a month, helping the residents with their post-incarceration legal issues: getting their criminal records expunged, their public-assistance benefits restored, or their housing and employment sorted out.
Soon, he realized that some of the men shared a problem: while they were behind bars, someone they had trusted had disappeared with something that belonged to them.
Before long, Borenstein was distributing one-pagers in prison libraries, placing ads in publications for inmates, and giving his business card to every formerly incarcerated person he met, telling them: If this happened to you, then you may have a claim. He also partnered with a prisoner hotline service, asking that any calls about theft be forwarded to him.
“It’s just my speed,” he said. “I get the deep client interaction of a public defender with the legal nerdiness and strategy of a corporate civil litigator.”
His first success came in 2016. Rodney Ficklin was released from prison in California in 2013 after serving 23 years for second-degree murder. He had hoped to live in his family’s home in South LA, which he believed his mother—who had died of cancer while he was incarcerated—had left to him and his four brothers.
But he soon saw a “for sale” sign in the yard. Ficklin discovered that his brother Eddie, who had been taking care of their mother, had acquired power of attorney over her estate just days before her death. Eddie transferred the property to himself and collected rent from tenants, then later tried to sell the house, according to a lawsuit that Rodney later filed.
“When my brother says, ‘Well, look, man, I’ll take care of [the house] for you,’ I didn’t think nothing of it,” said Rodney. “I mean, he was the one taking care of me in there. I would’ve never thought he would do this.”
With Borenstein’s help, Rodney Ficklin sued his brother. In a settlement agreement, a judge ordered that the other brothers be made co-owners of the property once again. But like many family disputes, it is emotionally tangled. The boys’ mother wanted Eddie to have the home after he cared for her for years and added another floor, his lawyer says. Rodney still has not moved in, and the brothers cannot agree on how to pay for much-needed repairs.
“The only son who helped the mother was Eddie… Rodney had no expectation of any real property,” Eddie Ficklin’s lawyer said in a statement.
Most prisoners don’t know if they have been fleeced in the first place, Borenstein said. Many of their cases involve complicated legal concepts such as “bad faith” and “breach of fiduciary duty.” If a family member dies during their incarceration, they might not be aware they are owed an inheritance at all. By its nature, prison makes it difficult to locate and collect debts from people on the outside.
That’s why Borenstein plans to expand his work by educating new inmates on setting up bank accounts and trusts and managing assets from inside. He points out that while some incarcerated people already make investments from prison—and that many “jailhouse lawyers” have been practicing for longer than he’s been alive—they are not the majority.
Perry Fisher, who lives at a home for ex-prisoners in Los Angeles, is trying to reclaim money he says his former attorney stole from him while he was incarcerated. Photo by Brinson+Banks for the Marshall Project
Perry Fisher’s pursuit of his worker’s comp money is still in court. An aging ex-prisoner with no credit, he is now working odd jobs through an employment agency, including as a plumber. He still has not made enough to move out of the Francisco Homes, especially since the rents in Los Angeles, where his parole requires him to live, skyrocketed while he was away.
“I always thought, ‘Hey, at least I’ll have this [money] when I get out,’” Fisher said. “So I’d be lying to you if I said I wasn’t pissed off.”
But “one thing I do have after being behind the wall for such a long time,” he said, “is patience.”
A version of this article was originally published by the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that covers the US criminal justice system. Sign up for the newsletter, or follow the Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter.
A 20-year-old charged with murdering a gay, Jewish teen this month belonged to an extremist neo-Nazi group that trained him in firearms and hand-to-hand combat, sources close to the suspect told ProPublica.
Samuel Woodward was arrested earlier this month after police found the body of 19-year-old Blaze Bernstein, who had been stabbed 20 times, buried in a Southern California park, the Washington Post reports. Police arrested Woodward, a former high school classmate of Bernstein's, after discovering that the two had been chatting on Snapchat the night of the murder. Orange County police later said that DNA evidence connected Woodward to the crime.
Now three people close to Woodward have come forward to shed more light on the suspect's history, as prosecutors try to figure out whether or not to charge him with a hate crime. According to ProPublica, Woodward is a member of the Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi, white supremacist hate group that targets Jewish people, minorities, and the LGTBQ community. Two of Woodward's friends and a former Atomwaffen member said he joined the group in 2016 and spent three days at one of its "hate camps," learning hand-to-hand combat and firearms training. The former member said Woodward—who was photographed making a Nazi salute at the summit—went on to organize for Atomwaffen in California.
The hate group reportedly idolizes Hitler and Charles Manson, and has roughly 80 members nationwide. According to the Anti-Defamation League, the group channels its rhetoric into extremist propaganda online, promoting a "race war," anti-semitism, and anti-LGBTQ ideology. The group's "hate camps," like the one Woodward allegedly attended, apparently provide training for the "ultimate aim of overthrowing the US government through the use of terrorism and guerrilla warfare." Individuals connected to the group have been tied to at least five killings since it was founded in 2016, the Post reports.
Police are still investigating whether Bernstein's death could be considered a hate crime, and so far Woodward is only facing a single felony count of murder, according to the Los Angeles Times. The suspected killer still hasn't entered a plea ahead of his arraignment on February 2.
Since my formative years, I’ve been romantically and tragically entangled with—and nearly completely consumed by—the all-encompassing idea of the end of the world.
It probably began at whatever young, wide-eyed and terrified age I was when my older brother told me the universe had no end. It was that same age I would look up at the dark sky, which, in eastern Canada in 1998, was crystal clear and teeming with aliens (er, lights), when I became both fascinated and scared with the world at large. A few months later, Armageddon came out. I avoided watching it for as long as I could. My dad was reading The Bible Code at the time, and over dinner I would intake bits of casual commentary about humanity’s impending doom which he would divulge to my mom between spoonfuls of scalloped potatoes.
Fast forward twenty years and a couple dozen world-ending prophecies later, and here we are in 2018: teetering on what seems like the edge of million different ways our demise could manifest itself. From the threat of nuclear war to increasingly frequent and fierce natural disasters, to the seemingly less likely alien invasion or zombie apocalypse—now, more than ever, the current climate of the world (and our two-minutes to midnight Doomsday Clock status) seems to have validated my childhood paranoia.
So, this story is about the end of the world—the apocalypse, doomsday, Armageddon, the rapture, etc. etc. etc. It’s bleak and weird, and according to the experts—ranging from climate change pros to military professors—this generational melancholy we all seem to feel is somewhat legit.
WHO: Richard Zurawski WHAT: Meteorologist, professor, former host of CTV’s Wonder Why? , Halifax city councillor WHERE: Halifax, N.S.
VICE: From a climate change perspective—or maybe otherwise—do you think we’re living in end times? Richard Zurawski: It’s an ecocide. We have two huge issues that we have to contend with: the first is our population—it’s unsustainable. Most of the population increase is in the non-Western world.
“The consumption that we have in the west is the noose that is tightening most quickly around our necks.”
Population increases are not an issue for the western world—and that makes up probably the wealthiest 10 percent of the world. The second part of this, is while the population is not increasing in the Western capitalist part of the world, what is increasing is consumption—and the consumption more than makes up for the population not going up in the west—the west, including Europe and parts of Japan and industrialized countries. The consumption that we have in the West is the noose that is tightening most quickly around our necks. And this is being offloaded by the really hyper-capitalism that is being proffered on us by neoliberal policies, and the great disparity in wealth between the rich and the poor.
Capitalism and hyper-capitalism and consumption are an absolute necessity in order for us to maintain economic health. So we don't examine what is happening to the rest of the world. We continue to buy SUVs, live in giant homes, talk about very minuscule changes in our attitude as though they will help us survive the next 50 years, when in fact, they won’t.
We see the effects [of our consumption] everywhere. From plastics in the oceans to increased amounts of carbon dioxide that we’re just not coming to terms with, [to the] the melting of the glaciers all around the world, and now the rapid disintegration of the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps. The truth is that civilization as we know it will end in the next 50 years, if not before then, and in fact, we may be pushing ourselves into extinction, which is a terrifying aspect. So, me sitting here talking to you on a phone, this type of world is going to end in the next two decades, and then we’re going to move into subsistence. In the next two decades, if we don't stop this ecocide, it doesn't matter what we do in the year 2040.
When you say over the next couple decades civilization as we know it will not be the same, and then we’re going to push ourselves into extinction, what do you mean? What will happen before we wipe ourselves out? The first thing that will happen is the wealthy will create enclaves to keep to the rest of us out. So, the hyper-gated community attitude saying, “I'm OK. I'm going to build a wall and keep you people out and I'm going to continue to live my lifestyle with my mansion and jet planes and communication systems and billions of dollars and infrastructure.” Well, what’s going to happen is the infrastructure will begin to fall apart rapidly. Power grids will be the first thing [to go]. Think about going without power for a week. When they start to disintegrate, when power stops, everything stops. We will then look at a fracturing of our society. We will begin to quarrel over natural resources. There will be military excursions to distract ourselves from the problems that we have—we will polarize things even more than they are now. If power stops and you have to forage, we do not have the ability to live off the land. The wild animals are pretty much gone. The hunter-gatherer stuff will not sustain eight billion people, and we’re past seven-and-a-half billion now. The ravages of our ecocide will come home to visit us. We will not have city councils or provincial or federal governments that are effective. Things will fracture. So, we will not see the type of life that we’re used to—roads are looked after, power systems and communication systems and sanitization systems—all of that will begin to degrade very rapidly.
So, rather than a cataclysmic natural disaster wiping us out—a super-volcano erupting or something like that—it’s going to be a really slow crawl to the death; a fight for resources, and maybe we’ll start eating each other and resort to cannibalism? Well, I don't know about cannibalism, but certainly the resources won’t be there. Think about going to the hospital if you get a cut. It becomes infected and you go to the clinic and you get a shot of antibiotics. Antibiotics won’t exist. Hospitals won’t exist.
There have been [only a few dozen] major empires in the Earth’s history since we've moved out of hunter-gatherer [times]. And each one of these empires have ended, and when the end has come, it has not been pretty. Probably the most famous one was the fall of the Roman Empire. Empires end poorly. They lose power, there is nothing but waste and war that happen afterwards, and it’s not a pretty sight. If you take a look at the United States, it is our empire. And this empire is creating wars all over the place. It seems like every time we turn around, we have yet another conflict to distract us from these things.
So you think we’re sort of coming to the end of the Western, and then shortly thereafter coming to the end of humanity as we know it? Yes.
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WHO: Dr. Chris Madsen WHAT: Professor, Department of Defence Studies WHERE: Canadian Forces College and Royal Military College of Canada
VICE: Given your military perspective, with the current state of the world and threat of nuclear war globally, are we approaching a catastrophic time, or putting humanity at risk? Chris Madsen [via email]: The world is at a comparatively peaceful stage at the moment, so the threat of major war or nuclear annihilation is remote. In fact, most militaries are worried about justifying expenditures for resources and personnel, which are under pressure. Conflict today is very regionalized and most commonly undertaken by non-state actors. We are spectators to the low-level conflict in the Middle East and elsewhere. China is a major trading partner, and Russia prefers espionage and auxiliaries to attain its goals, instead of open conflict. The use of nuclear weapons would only be very localized, and immediately invite condemnation from most of the world. These conditions suggest that the relatively peaceful state will continue for the foreseeable future. Militaries generally do not like this message, and try to latch onto any crisis. Canada should engage in more peace support operations under the auspices of the United Nations, to support a stable and peaceful global order, to control and end local conflicts.
The major threats, in my opinion, to the world today are environment degradation and global pandemic. These are both related to increased population and consumption of resources. We are slowly, more quickly according to some, poisoning and destroying the ecosystem on which humankind depends for habitation. Nature has a nasty habit of correcting the balance. The Earth does not really care if people are around or not. We are making our own planet unlivable. Our one saving grace might be waking up to become more environmentally conscious or stepping up migration outward into space across our solar system and beyond.
[But] 20,000 years without people would return the Earth to its natural state. The only end of times is for humankind—the Earth and nature continues on. [We’re] just like the dinosaurs.
WHO: J. D. Harrington WHAT: Public affairs officer WHERE: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Washington, D.C.
VICE: Given your knowledge, with potential contamination or pending invasion from extraterrestrial lifeforms—are we approaching a catastrophic time in humanity? J.D. Harrington [via email]: Unfortunately, we’re unable to support your interview request on this topic. Our Planetary Protection Officer is responsible for protecting solar system bodies (i.e., planets, moons, comets, and asteroids) from contamination by Earth life, and protecting Earth from possible life forms that may be returned from other solar system bodies. NASA and the other space-faring agencies around the world are diligently working to protect us from unintended contamination during future sample return mission.
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WHO: Dr. Eric Ouellet WHAT: Professor, Department of Defence Studies WHERE: Canadian Forces College and Royal Military College of Canada
VICE: Given your knowledge of military and current rising tensions—threat of nuclear war, WMDs—are we approaching a time that we are threatening humanity more than we ever have before? Eric Ouellet: The short answer is, I don't think we are closer to the end of the world now than we were 50 year ago or 100 years ago. There is still a significant balance of power among the great powers in the world. And because of that—because of those great powers that have nuclear weapons—that prevents them from attacking each other directly. From that point of view, I don't think things have changed much.
Since we've seen since the end of World War II, the balance has changed a bit, but in the end, there is a still balance of power. Some people might think about maverick states like North Korea—they’re actually much more disciplined than most people think. So I don't think there’s a big risk there. There’s a little bit more risk now than, say, five years ago, but we’re certainly not contemplating the abyss just yet.
[In terms of] WMDs, a lot of people are afraid of them, but there are all kinds of technological issues that make them very difficult to use—otherwise, they would probably be used much more. I don't think we should be very worried [though]—[if we’re] talking about mass casualties in terms of millions of people, these weapons are too complicated for many people to use.
So for all those reasons, I would say, no, we are not close to the end of the world from a military standpoint.
Where do you see the state of the world in 100 or 150 years? There’s been a slow decline of the West in terms of its strength overall. In my opinion, the decline started in the First World War. It’s hard to say what technology will be in 100 or 150 years from now, but I would say there will probably be more conflict in the Western world because we won’t be as strong as we are now. Our strength is what protects us in many ways from major catastrophe—that's the sad reality of the world. So, yes, I expect in 150 years there'll be more conflict, and the west will be more involved in the conflict.
So, for now we’re OK though? Yes, for now, I'm not too worried. Of course, there’s maybe less than one percent chance [that something catastrophic could happen], but if we are realistic, it’s unlikely.
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WHO: James Thompson WHAT: Author, Rise of the Mudmen , has cat named Zombie WHERE: Sydney, N.S.
VICE: From a zombie apocalypse standpoint, are we living in the end times? James Thompson: Probably, though we would never know it, and it’s probably been that way for a very, very long time. We understand very little about nature, let alone how we affect nature when we mess around with it. Things like germ/chemical warfare are going to have unexpected side-effects. When you get into genetic manipulation, and the development of super-viruses, something like a zombie becomes a very real possibility. Not the “dead rising from the grave” thing, nor the ones that feed primarily on the brains of the living, but it’s not all that hard to imagine a kind of rabies that affects humans turning their brains and bodies over to baser, more violent instincts. The flip of that is, if people are aware of things like this, it can be easily remedied (vaccine, quarantine, or just killing the damn thing). It’s when some other mistake gets made—that’s when the zombie outbreak begins, and as we’ve seen with pretty much every major epidemic from the past 200 years, it takes one very simple mistake to wipe out a whole lot of people.
Interviews have been edited for length and clarity.
Hillary Windsor is a writer living in Halifax. You can follow her on Twitter.
Lorimer Shenher knows the grave consequences of underestimating the seriousness of a missing persons’ case.
Shenher, formerly the lead investigator of Vancouver police’s investigation into missing women from the Downtown Eastside, was given a tip about serial killer Robert Pickton in July 1998, after he’d stabbed and nearly killed a sex worker. The attempted murder charge against him was stayed. But Pickton wasn’t arrested until February 2002, when cops first obtained a warrant to search his pig farm for illegal guns. There, they found personal items belonging to some of the missing women. Between the stayed charge and the time of his arrest, police believe Pickton killed an additional 21 women, many of them sex workers.
“If they had been white UBC students, you would’ve seen the National Guard being called out,” Shenher told VICE.
Eventually, Pickton was convicted of the murders of six women, though he was charged with an additional 20 murders—those charges were stayed in 2010. Pickton confessed to an undercover cop that he had killed 49 women his farm, disposing of their bodies with a meat grinder and feeding them to his pigs. Suffice to say, he is one of Canada’s most notorious serial killers.
On Monday, Toronto police announced that Bruce McArthur, 66, a landscaper they arrested for two murders earlier in the month is now officially an alleged serial killer. The news comes just over a month after cops said there was no evidence to indicate any of the missing persons’ cases in the city’s gay village were connected. McArthur has now been charged with the murders of five men—Selim Esen, Andrew Kinsman, Majeed Kayhan, Soroush Mahmudi, and Dean Lisowick, dating back as far as 2012. The “dismembered remains” of three men were discovered in large planters at sites where McArthur worked on landscaping jobs and police have searched 30 properties so far.
Within the LGBT community, there is anger over whether or not police investigated the missing persons’ cases seriously enough.
“It took someone who was white to be the catalyst for them to actually get up and go do their jobs,” Alphonso King, a friend of Kinsman, told the media after McArthur’s arrest. Though it’s early days, the case is drawing parallels to Pickton. In both scenarios, the victims were missing persons from marginalized communities.
Shenher, who is trans, told VICE one of the big issues in missing persons cases involving marginalized people is cops question whether or not they really went missing or simply ran away.
“I don’t know if it comes from a bad place other than a systemic bias,” he said. In Shenher’s experience, it’s very rare for someone to disappear without a trace, especially in the electronic age. So he said cops should be able to quickly determine whether or not someone deliberately took off. He admitted that it can be trickier to obtain things like bank and cellphone records for missing people (who are still presumed to be alive and therefore have privacy rights), but that there are ways to get around that. The default, he added, shouldn’t be to assume a person voluntarily went missing.
Shenher said he’s troubled by some of the coverage he’s read about the McArthur case, specifically references cops have made to dating apps.
“There are judgments that get made and presumptions that get made,” he said. “You say to yourself ‘this is a 40- 50-year-old detective… who doesn’t realize that a really large percentage of people in the world use dating apps.’” It was a similar situation in Vancouver, with Pickton’s victims who were sex workers or used drugs.
“What follows again is that judgement or stereotype that you don’t really want to be found, or your high-risk behaviour somehow translates into a less robust investigation,” he added.
What happened with Pickton deeply traumatized Shenher, who has been on medical leave with PTSD since 2013 and will retire next year. He said if he were to go back in time and investigate the missing women cases again, he would air on the side of assuming there was foul play involved.
“The worst thing you can be is wrong,” he said.
Another similarity between the Pickton and McArthur cases was the police’s reluctance to warn the public about a possible serial killer.
“I sat in a meeting where some of my superiors said, ‘We don’t want to make a statement to the community that there’s a possibility of a serial killer because we don’t want to create a panic,’” Shenher said. “The more I unpacked that, I thought what would a panic look in the Downtown Eastside?... Is there going to be some stampede down the street or is it just going to look like people who are already being as careful as they can within the high risk lives that they lead. They’re just going to try to watch out for themselves.”
Shenher suggests the wiser thing for cops to do is say they can’t rule out the possibility of a serial killer and that people should be careful.
Most of the men missing from the village are Middle Eastern, which, according to reports, was McArthur’s sexual preference. Shenher said racial biases are another reason why some investigations are taken less seriously than others. He pointed out that with the Highway of Tears, a stretch of highway in BC where Indigenous women went missing and were murdered over a 40-year period, it took the disappearance of Nicole Hoar, a white woman, in 2002 to truly kickstart investigative efforts.
“The majority of the police force is predominantly white, male, straight and cis. I think for some police officers, it’s hard to put themselves in the shoes of someone who is other and relate to the lives of others.”
The best thing cops can do is admit their biases and try actively to address them, according to Shenher.
The Cleveland Indians' signature logo is finally on its way out of American baseball.
On Monday, the MLB confirmed that the racist icon—a Native American caricature nicknamed Chief Wahoo—is "no longer appropriate for on-field use" and will be removed from the team's uniforms by the start of the 2019 season, the New York Timesreported. MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred has apparently been pressing the team to retire the cartoonish rendition for the past year, and team owner Paul Dolan is now, at long last, at least rhetorically on board.
"We have consistently maintained that we are cognizant and sensitive to both sides of the discussion," Dolan said in a statement issued by the League. "While we recognize many of our fans have a long-standing attachment to Chief Wahoo, I'm ultimately in agreement with Commissioner Manfred's desire to remove the logo from our uniforms in 2019."
Wahoo has been the Indians' logo for the past 70 years, after the original version was first designed by a 17-year-old artist back in 1947. And while the image will no longer be included on the uniforms the Indians wear on the field—after one more season, anyway—fans who still feel a deep-seated and not at all problematic desire to rep racist stereotypes will be able to buy merchandise featuring the logo at Progressive Stadium and in select stores. The official MLB website, however, will not be selling them.
Meanwhile, longtime advocates of the change were left wondering why the new uniforms couldn't be arranged between now and opening day of the 2018 season in April.
“Why wait?” Phillip Yenyo, executive director of the American Indian Movement of Ohio, asked the Times. “If you are going to go this far and get rid of it, why not do it now? All they are doing is testing it out, because the name has to go, too. The nickname absolutely has to go. It’s not just the logo." Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.
