An RCMP officer who claims to police a First Nations community allegedly wrote that Colten Boushie “got what he deserved” when he was shot and killed by Gerald Stanley, according to APTN News.
APTN obtained comments from a private Facebook group made up of Canadian police officers, some of whom were discussing Stanley’s murder acquittal in the death of Boushie. One of the comments reportedly came from an RCMP officer from the Prairies who believes Stanley, a white farmer, was justified in killing Boushie, a 22-year-old Cree man.
Stanley was acquitted on Feb. 9 of both second-degree murder and manslaughter by an all-white jury.
“This should never have been allowed to be about race…crimes were committed and a jury found the man not guilty in protecting his home and family. It should be sending a message to the criminal element that this crap is not going to be tolerated and if you value your life then stay away from what isn’t yours,” the Facebook post says.
“Too bad the kid died but he got what he deserved. How many of us work on or near reserves and are getting fed up with the race card being used every time someone gets caught breaking the law?”
The comments suggests the officer is the ignorant of the facts of the case, if not the law itself. Stanley did not use self-defence as a justification for shooting Boushie in August 2016. He testified that the bullet that killed Boushie, hitting him in the back of the head, was the result of a hang fire—a delay between the time the trigger is pulled and the time the round goes off. In Canada, it is not legal to use lethal force to protect your property.
According to APTN, the discussion came from a group called News Stories that Matter to or May Impact RCMP, which has more than 1,000 members.
In a statement to VICE, the RCMP said it is investigating the post and that on- and off-duty officers are bound to the force's code of conduct. It said the group is not monitored by the RCMP.
"The Facebook post reproduced is antithetical to the standards of the RCMP and the manner in which its employees are bound to conduct themselves," the statement says.
"When using social networking, RCMP members must avoid compromising the integrity of the RCMP or portraying themselves or the organization in a disgraceful or discreditable manner."
The statement also said the RCMP is "committed to the reconciliation process with Indigenous peoples."
Stanley's acquittal has been a flashpoint across the country, with many, including Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould calling for a change in how the criminal justice system treats Indigenous Canadians.
Saskatchewan-based lawyer Rob Feist told VICE the Facebook comments are troubling, especially given that the RCMP's treatment of Boushie's family after his death is currently under heavy scrutiny.
"Regardless of whether the comments were made by active members, they will do nothing to inspire public confidence in the RCMP's relationship with Indigenous communities," he said, adding no Canadian should support vigilante justice.
When the doctors delivered what appeared to be a white baby and put me in the arms of my black mother, she wasn't surprised. A year earlier she'd given birth to my sister Cynthia, who also had albinism, a congenital disorder. Because my parents had the matching recessive gene, out of three children, two of us were albino. When Mom looked down at me for the first time, I imagined her happiness mixed with concern over raising an African American child with light skin, blonde hair, sensitivity to bright light, and lousy vision.
In the sixth grade, kids began to notice the differences between one another and how to use that information to tease. I lived in Huntsville, Alabama, where black and white children mostly stayed with their own. But once I was introduced, all the races came together to make fun of me. I didn’t look like any of them, which united them all.
The Caucasians treated me like a pariah, and the black kids could be just as unaccepting. One terrible afternoon I walked outside of my immediate neighbourhood, and a boy who couldn't have been more than eight ran up to me screaming, "Get out of here, white boy!" Do you know how hard it is to convince an eight-year-old you're black when you have pale skin, light hair, and hazel eyes? It was impossible. I was 12, and the confrontation made me question my ethnicity.
The first time I remember my lack of pigment being positive was when a few of my 12-year-old friends and I turned to shoplifting. Nothing crazy. We were young, we didn’t have a lot of money, and we all wanted candy. I was terrible at it. I paced around the store for ten minutes before I crouched down in front of the chocolate bars and carefully looked both ways multiple times. I clumsily slipped the Snickers into my pocket. The clerk never noticed me because he was too busy being suspicious of my darker skinned accomplices.
While wrestling with disconnected feelings about my racial makeup and looks, I struggled with visual impairment. My mother sought the help of state-paid disability counselors to evaluate my potential ability to live on my own with my “crippling limitations.” One counselor told me that the best life I could hope for would be within a community of other blind adults. “You might even find someone you like to settle down with," she encouraged in a backhanded fashion. In America, about one-third of the blind live in poverty, as do a little more than one-fifth of African American families. So I was the poster boy for eventual unemployment.
My Family took the state's dismal portrait of my life to heart. I was outfitted with thick glasses, plenty of sunscreen and large print books to remind other kids in school I was different, to be avoided half of the time and pitied the rest. On the first day of my high school History class, my teacher stopped everything to ask me aloud if I would feel more comfortable sitting in the front of the room. Without waiting for my answer, he had another kid move a few rows back so that I could silently walk to the front with an armful of visual acuity aids. The other kids looked at me with concern, a smirk or stared at the floor until my shuffling was over.
I could see the limited trajectory of my future as a partially blind black man who looked white; I wanted to abandon it.
Gym class was a constant reminder of my disability. When an activity required hand-eye coordination, the instructor came prepared with a “simpler” activity for me to perform in the corner. Literally watching from the sidelines in Phys-ed echoed the exclusion I felt in every other area in my life. The reasons I chose that day to “rebel” are a twisted amalgam—born in part always noticing strangers checking me out from of the corner of their eye, part new friends not knowing what to do or how to act when they discovered I was visually impaired. Mostly, thought, it was fear of who I might be if I didn't “do something now.”
It was time for dodgeball. When the gym teacher suggested that I draw in the corner, I asked to play instead. To his credit, he only paused for a few seconds before cautiously gesturing for me to join the other kids. The team captains took turns picking from the crowd gathered in the center of the room. I’m sure the more frail kids were happy to have someone else get picked last for a change.
The giant red rubber ball was placed in the middle of the court. When a whistle blew, each team rushed to be the first one to grab it. I arrived at the dividing line after Pedro, the most athletic kid in class, had already grabbed a ball. I stood six feet away from him as a lone target. He hurled the ball at me. I wasn’t great at judging the depth of flying objects, but was quite excellent at stopping the rough red ball with my face. The pinging sound it made as it bounced off my skull and toward the ceiling was joined by rolling laughter from the rest of the class.
The next round I did a little better. By the end of the period I had a few noticeable welts. But most importantly, I had actually caught the ball and sent more abled kids to the sidelines. Even though I was terrible, I was hooked. Not on the game, but on pushing myself to enjoy the world the way I wanted to.
I continued to ignore the advice of protective authoritarians and bought a skateboard. My ribs broke when I missed a jump on stone steps. My wrist fractured when I hit the wood the wrong way in Taekwondo class.
I became obsessed with living a life more significant than my perceived limitations. My inspiration was trite and straightforward, but it did the trick. My love of comic books and my weird childhood obsession with Greek mythology depicted heroes who performed terrific feats, and I yearned to do something incredible, too. I haven’t accomplished all the things I feared I couldn’t (or wouldn’t be allowed to) so far, but I have surprised myself along the way with some once in a lifetime achievements and a few fulfillments of boyhood dreams [COULD WE GIVE A COUPLE EXAMPLES].
By the time I moved to Los Angeles at 32, I skipped the free public transportation most states offer disabled individuals and headed to the California DMV to get a driver's license. With a visual impairment, you can still be approved if a doctor signs a form affirming that your corrected vision is within certain limits. I went to an optometrist and passed the exam.
The answer to what might be your first question is “Yes.” I have been in an automobile accident. I totaled my Toyota Corolla. When I collided with the other vehicle during my one and only crash, every doubt I had about my ability to function in the world came flooding back. Why did I think I could get behind the wheel? Did I not see the other car pull forward? I believed I'd conquered my fears, but they were just waiting to reignite. That was what I was taught: assume everything was my fault because I was born wrong.
When we pulled over to inspect the damage, the other drivers turned out to be three teenagers who'd spent the night drinking with no insurance. A third car pulled over, and a gentleman in a tracksuit said he saw the whole thing: The kids were at fault for not yielding. They agreed. With the overwhelming evidence, I let myself off the hook.
Moving to New York a few years ago, I allowed my license to expire. Instead of dwelling on the disadvantages of albinism, I continue to focuse on the positive. For instance, most people have never met a black person with albinism before, so there are zero expectations about how one should act. I can’t be entirely sure if it’s my albinism or my personality, but people seem to put up with a large amount of nonsense from me. I pre-board every time I fly because flight attendants never question if I qualify to embark early. Second, I have never been called the “n-word.” It’s strange. People seem to forget that word even when they are racist and mad at me. I have indeed had people say it to my face, but only when they thought that I was their white, bigoted buddy. They were wrong. And unlike most black men in Manhattan, I have no problem hailing a cab. I’ve had to play point man for years when hanging out with my non-albinistic black friends while we tried to grab a taxi back to Brooklyn at the end of the night.
Although I was born to black parents, while growing up I didn't consider myself black or white. I felt I occupied an unnamed category of race that I had to discover along the way. Ultimately it was my family and the experiences that we share that solidified my personal identity. Even if the world sometimes fails to recognize it.
My bucking against the rules society has strongly suggested for people with disabilities hasn't ended. It took me most of my life to realize the truth; I’m vain. I can’t bear the thought that anyone would pity me. I don't want to do things that are great for a person with disabilities; I want to be undeniable.
When I come across a situation where most people would counsel me to be cautious or to perhaps even abandon the thought of, say, biking through the city at night, I just say to myself, “What’s the worst that could happen?” I then ignore the answer, and do it anyway.
The Incredibles, Brad Bird's Oscar-winning animated movie about a superpowered family, was a breath of fresh air for the superhero genre in 2004. Sure, X2 was fine and the Raimi Spider-Man movies were alright, but whatever good superhero fare we got in the early 2000s was quickly drowned out in a sea of films like Daredevil, that brain-bleedingly bad Catwoman, and, good god, the version of The Punisherstarring John Travolta. The Incredibles was fun, it had heart, and there wasn't even one action sequence scored by a nu metal song.
Now, 14 years later, things are different. Superhero movies are actually good now, and Marvel has turned the entire genre into an all-encompassing, Galactus-style Hollywood juggernaut. But on Wednesday, Pixar debuted an exclusive new trailer for the long-awaited sequel to The Incredibles, and the thing proves there's still room for a family-friendly superhero flick in 2018.
Incredibles mastermind Bird has previously said that the new movie will center on Incredibles matriarch Elastigirl, but the new 90-second clip focuses mostly on Bob Parr, a.k.a. Mr. Incredible, and the unique hell that is raising a toddler with superpowers. Avengers: Infinity War may be full of a lot of things—oh lord, so many things—but the domestic trials and tribulations of parenting isn't one of them.
When a tycoon named Winston Deavor (Bob Odenkirk) recruits Elastigirl to "help [him] bring supers back into the sunlight," Bob has to Mr. Mom it back at home and raise the family, which means helping Dash with his math homework and trying to keep track of baby Jack-Jack, who seems to have developed the ability to teleport, shoot lasers out of his eyes, sneeze lightning, and morph into a little Hulk when he doesn't get a cookie. As good as Black Panther may turn out to be, it probably won't include a scene about the frustrations of Common Core. For that, we have Incredibles 2.
"Done properly, parenting is a heroic act," she says, eyeing a very haggard Bob. "Done properly."
The sequel was again written and directed by Bird, who also voices Edna. And the new cast list is even more stacked than the original, with Odenkirk, Catherine Keener, Jonathan Banks, and even Isabella Rossellini lending their voices this time around. Incredibles 2 is slated to hit theaters June 15.
Most people tend not to think of criminal organizations outside of watching Netflix.
Up here in Canada we have the Hells Angels, the Montreal Mafia, and simple smalltime petty crooks, but, in the end, they are all connected tightly to their international couterparts. To put it simply, the criminal market has, like every other market, adapted to globalization. At first it can be hard to wrap your head around but that is where Misha Glenny comes in.
Ten years ago Glenny, a British investigative journalist, published McMafia, a book that mapped the globalized criminal market and attempted to show how we got to here. The book was published in over 30 languages and was a hit. Now, a decade later, the BBC has turned the book into a mini-series. The show just had it's season finale in the United Kingdom and will be airing across the pond on AMC starting on February 26.
The show, starring James Norton (Black Mirror, Happy Valley), is a globe-spanning gangster drama that has been compared to another BBC production, The Night Manager. Glenny, who serves as an executive producer on the show, was in the writer's room to assure the mini-series has the authenticity of the book, as some of the show's plotlines are based on real-life cases Glenny reported on.
VICE Canada sat down with Glenny in a Toronto coffee shop to talk about where Canada fits into the global criminal market, adapting a non-fiction book into a fictionalized TV show, the opioid crisis, and using toilets to smuggle books across the Iron Curtain.
VICE: So, to start, can you explain the globalized criminal market and how we got here? Misha Glenny: It can kinda be traced back to two major events. The first was in 1986 with Thatcher and Reagan introducing financial measures that would facilitate globalization—so all of a sudden multinationals could move huge sums of money at speed across the world and incentivize countries in emerging markets that previously had been resistant to outside investment to build up their domestic capacity.
Misha Glenny. Photo supplied.
That was important, but the importance of it doesn't come clear until the implications of the second event, which was the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union. The key thing about that is that capitalism emerged from the planned economies in a very haphazard way because there were no state structures that could regulate capitalism. So without state regulators or commercial justice systems that would arbitrate business disputes and things like that, the new entrepreneurs taking the opportunities had to create their own support mechanism with what sociologists refer to as privatized law enforcement agencies, but we know more colloquially as the mafia. This is exactly what happened in southern Italy in the mid-19th century. Suddenly in this huge swath of territory, this capitalistic organized crime emerged in eastern Europe.
So what they're doing is they're protecting markets, and they're protecting entrepreneurs active in those markets. What happens with most mafias is they look at the markets themselves and say 'why don't we get involved in this because we can make money out of buying and selling stuff.' They became involved with licit and illicit markets.
They were looking for market opportunities everywhere. Conveniently for them, they had on their doorstep the European Union, the largest consumer market in history. One that through the late 90s, in particular, was increasingly wealthy and the population liked to spend some of their spare cash sleeping with prostitutes and sticking 50€ notes up their nose and smoking untaxed cigarettes. During the Yugoslav war, the criminal syndicates, under the fog of war, used it to channelling all this stuff—whether it was heroin from Afghanistan, women from Ukraine, blood diamonds coming from Africa, coke from South America—into the European Union.
A screenshot from McMafia. Photo via AMC.
It was that experience that saw Russian criminals, Eastern European criminals, Balkan criminals, Turkish criminals link up with people from elsewhere in the world to satisfy demand and create new markets and all sorts of things. There was a similar process going on in Asia at the same time as partially a consequence of China and India opening up which itself goes back to that 1986 business. So all these things were coming together at the same time, Afghanistan was rocking and producing huge amounts of heroin, the entire state of Columbia was subverted by the cartels, and all this came together in the 1990s.
Organized crime was the industry that best appreciated the methods of globalization, how you could launder money through all of these new financial pathways that were opening up around the world. If you're in places like the former Soviet Union, parts of Africa or South America, then you have got to have some state officials in your pocket. Because the profits you make in this industry is so vast, you can basically by off prime ministers and presidents if you want to.
Where does Canada fit into the global crime market? For a time and, of course, that's changing now because of the legalization of recreational marijuana, Canada was an incredibly important hub and will remain so still for the production and export of marijuana into the United States. It got going in BC, but it went country wide. Vancouver is important because it's a port and people found that moving stuff across the border from Canada to the US was easier than just trying to get it into US ports. It wasn't just marijuana that was being shifted but cocaine as well which was coming up to Canada and then going south, partly with the Hells Angels.
What you're beginning to see is a slow and steady shift from the production of narcotics from the organic narcotics from the traditional areas like Afghanistan and moving into zones of consumption. So Amsterdam, the Balkans, Israel, to an extent the United Kingdom, but also Canada and Japan, are becoming zones of production for methamphetamines for MDMA and for a whole range of other synthetic drugs. Not fentanyl though, which, as far as we know is exclusively produced and developed in China.
You also have in Canada a fairly lively market in money laundering and currency exchange for money laundering purposes. Interestingly, Vancouver is starting to become a real centre of this now because you can create companies in Canada or outside of Canada whose beneficial owners remain unknown to the state. So, I think the top 100 properties in Vancouver in terms of market value, [nearly half of them,] are owned by anonymous companies. This is something that plagues London hugely and why London has become a centre in the money laundering trade is the fact that you can buy property without revealing who you are.
Essentially, you have three areas in Canada that are important. First of all, you have the consumption zone—Canada is a target for good and services of transnational crime. Then you have the production zone that is increasingly creating synthetic narcotics and is using the discrepancy in prices between the US and Canada on the whole range of goods. Then you have the facilitation industry, the money laundering, the lawyers, people facilitating major operations, so on and so forth. It, like all western countries, is a fairly lively place in organized crime but it does have that unique aspect of being seen by criminals as an easier entry point into the United States.
That 49th parallel, that border with the States, it's just very easy to penetrate. It's a big country and, you know, big countries provide opportunities. It's sparsely populated and that's difficult to police.
How has the war on drugs affected this industry? The overwhelming problem, both from an economic and moral point of view on the war on drugs is it leads to undeclared civil wars in countries of production and distribution—Brazil, Mexico, Afghanistan. If you take Brazil for example 62,000 people were killed at the hands of human beings and over 50 percent of those deaths are directly attributable to the consequences of the war on drugs.
Hundreds of thousands of deaths every year in South and Central America because of demand by countries like the United States, Canada, and Western Europe for decades because of the war on drugs. You’re starting to see death in the West with the opioid crisis but that is very small compared to the overarching numbers. When you work down there and you see the consequences and you know that a great majority of those killed are desperate, unemployed, black males between 16 and 30 you begin to see this is just an outrageous strategy and policy that needs to change and which is slowly changing.
If you're an ordinary voter in the United States, you cannot see this unless you live in Miami or somewhere like that. I think the war on drugs has been a demonstrable failure since the 1920s and I'm glad we're finally starting to see the beginning of revisions of this although there is still a long way to go.
You mentioned the opioid crisis. Portugal has decriminalized drugs and some in Canada have been discussing that as a way to tackle the opioid crisis. How would a policy change like this impact the globalized criminal market? Within [Portugal] what you have seen is a reduction in crime because people have easy and cheaper access to recreational narcotics and because market prices have come down it's become more affordable for people so they don't have to break into stores in order to get that money for their dope. You've seen, fascinatingly in Portugal across the board, is a reduction in consumption.
The problem with decriminalization is the wholesale market remains a criminalized market, so how can you allow people to have access to a market which is at a wholesale level criminal? It's a very difficult circle to square and one that the Dutch have been puzzling over for decades and never quite succeeded. That's why everyone is looking at the US and Canada with intense scrutiny right now. We have seen it in Portugal, in Holland, we have seen it in the Czech Republic—where marijuana is de facto decriminalized—and in Switzerland on the whole pretty positive results.
On the whole, that seems to be working but there are very significant changes afoot in terms of narcotic distribution—the dark web. In the UK it's huge, the dark web is absolutely huge, especially in towns and cities with a big student population there is a huge turnover on these sites. The quality of narcotics is increasing because of the peer review system and habits are changing. It's through these websites that you see these habits changing away from organic narcotics to synthetic narcotics. The thing about that it's an unregulated market like everything else and you can infiltrate material like fentanyl in it.
This is now, partially due to the shift in distribution over the dark web, a full-blown social crisis the like of which we haven't seen in terms of drugs anywhere, ever in the western world because the number of deaths is so high.
McMafia first came out ten years ago. How much has changed in this world since the book was initially published? You had up until quite recently two parallel tracks of criminality, you had the traditional organized crime dealing with services, product, and protection—things like that—and you had cybercrime and there was a gap between them. That gap existed because in traditional organized crime in order to be in the game you had to have a convincing capacity for violence or the threat of violence and in cybercrime, you don't need that—you can be at home attacking someone 5,000 miles away.
vaWhat we've seen over the last five years is we've seen the emergence of younger people in traditionally organized crime syndicates who are digital natives. So they're much more amenable to using and exploiting cyber in a way of making their business more efficient and engaging in strictly cybercriminal activities and so that's happening on the traditional crime syndicate and on the cybercrime syndicate a lot of the script kitties and opportunistic operations are being shed and you get a lot more organized cell-like structure. Where you have somebody coordinating the whole thing, you have a malware writer, you have someone responsible for malware deployment, you need a good social engineer for the phishing operation, then you need mules, money launders, that sort of thing and it's become a much more structured, institutionalized operation. As a consequence of this, that gap between the two types of crime has been narrower.
The fact that you ended up doing so much reporting on smuggling is kinda poetic…
Oh really? (laughs)
Yeah, well correct me if I’m wrong, but back in the day you used to smuggle books across the Iron Curtain, didn’t you? I did do this myself!
I was a part of democratic opposition groups of Eastern Europe. We were actually a part of a leftist network who were engaged in this activity. So, for example, going from Vienna to Budapest you would have a whole variety of carriages, some from the Austrian railways some from Romanian railways and we would scope it out beforehand. And I discovered that in the Romanian carriages you could unscrew a panel on the toilets in the back of the base. I would unscrew it, put all the documents in there and then screw it back up so no one would know. Once I was over the border I
A screenshot from McMafia. Photo via AMC.
would go back to the loo and put it back in my luggage and that was done. Mainly I took stuff through in a car into Czechoslovakia, into Prague. I would take stuff back across with me as well.
I was just out of my teens and it was a very sort of idealistic thing and I learned a lot. The documents were sort of political debates, magazines, and so on and so forth because of the state control of the media was very, very extensive but into Hungry I would also take in Xerox machines so they could copy material and distribute it in Budapest.
While I have you here I would be remiss not ask you about the TV show... You sure would! (laughs)
How has the process been? The book, as we discussed was written many years ago, and it did have a real impact amongst law enforcement, amongst people engaged in organized crime, amongst policy makers, people doing long-term security planning but it was limited. It did well as far as books go, it was sold into 30 languages but you're always restricted to a few hundred thousand copies at best. The impact that we've had with the show has been quite astonishing.
It is in the newspapers, it is on the television all the time. We have something now that's being referred to as the “McMafia law” which is unexplained wealth orders where the government has said people with assets of more than £50,000 have to explain where it comes from if they're foreigners living in London. We've had real estate pages explaining McMafia houses. Articles about the beneficial owners of anonymous companies. It's been massive, I mean in the UK and it feels like there hasn't been a show that has had this political impact in years. I am particularly pleased that these issues about organized crime and money laundering have you know moved over to the mainstream and you can only really do that through television.
Why that name, why McMafia? So I called it McMafia first of all because of the association with McDonald's and their strength globally. When I was interviewing Mark Galeotti, who is a Russia specialist, early on in the research, he said to me that the Chechen mafia in Moscow had franchised out there name to groups elsewhere in Russia so they could call themselves the Chechen mafia whether there were Chechens in them or not. They had to pay a tribute A and B they had to maintain the ruthlessness that the Chechens were famous for in Moscow. He said it's a McMafia if you like so there two things came together, my idea of the globalization and his idea of the franchising came together and I thought this was the right title.
Although a lot of people in Scotland were disappointed because they thought it was about the Scottish mafia.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I'm working from home while a man wearing a motorcycle helmet and an iPad strapped to his face goes into the office as my surrogate. Through FaceTime, my head is displayed on the screen, allowing me to see and interact with my coworkers all while commanding a body that does not belong to me.
This sneak peek of the future was inspired by a product unveiled at MIT Tech Review’s EmTech Asia conference, held a couple of weeks ago in Singapore. It was there that the ChameleonMask, described by its website simply as a “telepresence system that shows a remote user’s face on the other user’s face,” had its debut. Shortly after, tweets containing photos of people wearing the device’s prototype began to hit social media, where it was dubbed “Human Uber."
The iPad over the face of the Human Uber that I've sent into work today as my surrogate is our broke-ass DIY attempt at ChameleonMask, and visually speaking, it’s pretty spot on. ChameleonMask, after all, is basically just an iPad over a face, by any means necessary. The only flaw in our version's design is that it is nearly impossible for the surrogate to see, what with his face stuffed behind a computer and all.
The first task I give my Human Uber is to simply open a Google Doc on my computer. Eager to please, he dutifully follows my direction, but I'm having trouble seeing the screen. I ask him to get closer to the computer, and he zeroes in on a stack of books on my desk instead. I give instructions to him loudly through the iPad speakers. His hearing muffled by the helmet, he replies louder still.
“No, no. A bit more to the right!” I command.
“Here?” he shouts back.
“A litttttle more,” I answer.
“HOW ABOUT NOW!?”
After the first hour, all I’ve done is walk him through turning on my computer and logging into all the accounts I need to do my job (email, Slack, Chartbeat, VICE’s CMS, Twitter), a process that usually takes a few short minutes. Just finding this doc today took nearly half an hour.
Through the iPad and a slight turn of my surrogate’s head I see that nearly everyone within earshot has decamped to another part of the office, unwilling or unable to sit through what amounts to the world’s oddest conference call. The few who remain have their phones drawn and are taking my photo. Or, rather, my surrogate’s photo. I am just a face on an iPad strapped to a helmet, alone at home, talking loudly and annoyingly at the blind man I’ve sent to do my bidding.
This is the future, and it is a giant pain in the ass.
The idea behind a Human Uber isn’t a bad one. Send someone as your proxy to do things you don’t want to or simply don’t have time for? Sure! But the execution?
ChameleonMask was brought into this world by Jun Rekimoto, a professor of Information Studies at the University of Tokyo, and Deputy Director of Sony Computer Science Laboratories. His research includes “human-computer interaction, computer augmented environments, and computer augmented human (human-computer integration),” according to his EmTech bio.
This is what it looks like when the theory of "human-computer integration" becomes reality:
Reached over email, Rekimoto tells me about some of the things his invention can be used for, and why it’s worthwhile: “remote presentation / giving a lecture at a classroom, remote participation at a conference (especially for asking questions for presenters), remote doctor's hospital rounds, training,” he lists coldly.
Of course, all of these can be done with tele- or video- conference systems that have been around for some time—FaceTime, Skype, Bluejeans. None require a physical human stand-in for the remote user, much less a helmet or the use of electrical tape like our creation. The Human Uber, it seems, is just a new twist on old tech, and not especially practical, as I come to learn almost instantly during my work day. It occupies some weird middle ground, a step above FaceTime or telepresence robots on their own, but far below what you might envision a digital proxy might look like in the not-too-distant future—stuck between a new dawn just over the horizon and the present, not quite an HD hologram realistic enough to fool someone after a couple of drinks, but arguably better than one of these dumb things. Still, the fact remains this stuff already exists in different forms. Why add the human?
“A typical telepresence robot available today uses wheels for walking around, but it's function is still limited,” Rekimoto writes via email when I ask this very question. “It can't manipulate a doorknob to open the door. It can't climb the stairs. More sophisticated humanoid-robots might be able to deal with such situations, but [are] much more expensive. So we came up with the idea of human-surrogate.”
Robots also can’t make lunch. And after having done my best to edit a story and some other workday morning routines through my Human Uber, it is time to do just that. My surrogate has packed his, and uses the Munchies test kitchen to prepare it.
He makes a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich on bread he’s toasted in a high-powered salamander oven. But considering he can’t really see, this is all very dangerous. Everyone in his orbit gets sucked into the process. Our photographer hands him a spatula. A kitchen manager makes sure the gas is turned on medium. Through FaceTime I count at least three people nervously hovering around my Human Uber to make sure he doesn't injure himself. This high tech human surrogate thing takes a village.
Having survived the flames and sharp edges of a professional kitchen, my Human Uber eats. After a few bites, convinced no one needs me, I allow him to take off his iPad helmet to enjoy his food in relative peace. A benevolent God, am I.
After lunch I meet with VICE Junior Staff Writer Drew Schwartz about a story he’s working on for me. We take a couple seats in the lobby and begin chatting about where he’s at in his reporting, the shape he thinks it will take, some new details learned, and a couple deadline concerns. It’s the first time of the day I feel I’m using my Human Uber for a task it is actually equipped for.
Drew sits next to me at work, and so he sat next to my Human Uber too, and was forced to help him out throughout the day. When my blind surrogate bumped into things, he frequently stepped in to be his seeing eye human. He guided him down stairs and around plants and poles. He opened drawers for him. He pressed "power" on my computer for him. My Human Uber couldn’t have gotten through the day without his gracious guidance.
After our talk, Drew leads my Human Uber down to a supply closet in shipping and receiving so he can grab some pens and a notepad I've asked him to get. Along the way coworkers stop and take photos, sometimes crowding my path like paparazzi. I’ve walked to the mail room/ supply closet dozens of times, but this is a first.
ChameleonMask suggests, for realism's sake, that the person you choose to be your Human Uber have a similar body type as you, and mine definitely does. We are similar in many ways, actually. Because my Human Uber is my twin brother Sean, and after his rigorous morning blindly fumbling through basic tasks and having his picture taken countless times by people he doesn't know and will never meet I begin to worry he’ll be angry with me for convincing him to do this once it's all over. After getting my supplies we break for a while and I call to check in with him, ask how things are going on his end—something I hope I'd consider even if my Human Uber and I hadn't once shared a womb. He tells me it’s a weird mix of humiliating and exhilarating, that throughout the day he’s felt both “small” but also constantly “under the spotlight”—helpless in the face of basic tasks, the incompetence born of his being suddenly without sight is on full display. "It's kind of a 'Dance, monkey!' feeling," he says.
As a result, I start to wonder about the ethics of the whole Human Uber endeavor. Say this ChameleonMask thing catches on and we’re sending people out into the world to handle our tasks while we beam ourselves to a tablet on their face. It creates an instant divide, the surrogates and those using them. Additionally, my brother tells me that being cloaked in the semi-dark behind a tablet and in a helmet that, he confides, is a size too small for hours on end is, surprisingly, very trying. At points during the day, when I'm not bossing him around, he says he is moved to close his eyes and meditate “to power through it." Is that not wrong? Human Ubers are humans, after all. Then again, everyone's job is a test in endurance sometimes.
James McGrath teaches philosophy and ethics as a professor at Butler University, and is currently researching AI and ethics. He sees no ethical dilemma when it comes to the use of a Human Uber, provided you pay fairly for their time. In fact, he thinks the itch scratched by ChameleonMask is a pretty common one, and understands why a human-surrogate may be preferred over a simple videoconferencing robot. “The truth is that we hire people to represent us very often—lawyers advocate for us, movers lift boxes and transport cargo for us,” he says in an email.
"If I cannot travel to Britain to guest teach a class, I can Skype," he continues. "If I cannot attend a conference, I can ask someone else who will be there to read the paper on my behalf. Why not merge the two, so that someone could be hired to mediate and supplement my videoconferenced guest appearance by also writing on the board and looking around at the audience?"
“At this moment, it is still a research prototype and we just tested it for experiments,” Rekimoto tells me in regards to the ethics of the product. He concedes that it would be an issue if the ChameleonMask grew in popularity to such a degree that people were forced into becoming surrogates.
“On the other hand,” Rekimoto writes in an email, “the feeling of being a surrogate is actually very interesting. You will become free from your free will (= no responsibility), and you can constantly feel you are helping other persons.”
This, my twin assures me, doesn’t gel with his experience. Because he couldn’t see and required so much help, the opposite turned out to be true—an office full of people helped him on a near constant basis. I also happen to believe he was able to maintain free will, and wouldn't have acted on anything out of the bounds of decency or the law simply because I, his boss for the day, suggested it.
Regarding vision—I ask Rekimoto to describe how it is a surrogate sees out of ChameleonMask. He sends a photo diagram.
“Shown in the picture, we put the smartphone behind the iPad tablet," he writes. "Image from the camera mounted on the smartphone provides a view of the real world to the surrogate user. This image is also transmitted and displayed on a screen in front of the remote user.” This is done, a short, not-at-all-conclusive video on the ChameleonMask site explains, through something called "Hacosco." But neither it or Rekimoto's answer can convince me it isn't as disorienting as barely being able to see. Essentially, you watch live video of your surroundings on a phone a few inches in front of your eyes while a "director" (user) offers navigation help through a separate audio channel. Sounds easy!
I can’t help thinking the whole sight hurdle could be easily cleared if the iPad were someplace else. Hang it from a necklace or something, ya know? It turns out, that’s actually not too far off from the original concept of ChameleonMask. Rekimoto tells me that initially they’d been developing a shoulder-mounted telepresence module. “I think the shoulder-mounted approach is more practical,” he says. But over the face "is more thought-provoking.”
“Even when I know another person is behind the mask, I tend to regard and directly speak to a person on a mask screen,” he says. “I realized that with this simple configuration, it is able to create human-presence.”
My Human Uber/ twin brother comes back from a coffee break just in time to “create human-presence” at our editorial meeting.
The meeting lasts about an hour, as it typically does. In addition to general housekeeping and updates, staffers around the table are asked to pitch Olympic-themed stories.
I strain to listen to the ideas of my colleagues, but only manage to catch mention of the word "curling" a couple times and the phrase "that weird sport where you ski and shoot a gun." I pitch a couple of my own ideas, after asking for forgiveness in the possible event any of them are repeats. No one looks at me while I speak.
Photo via the author
The meeting wraps up and I hear maybe 15 percent of it. To catch up some coworkers suggest we head to a nearby bar to recap the day.
At the bar there are more stares and pictures. Among the many things I've learned over the course of this long day, chief among them is this: if you don't like being paid a ton of attention to, the Human Uber experience likely isn't for you. That is true of users on both sides of the equation.
Or maybe give it a few years. Human Uber is a combination of two things that we already consider normal, even mundane, says McGrath—hiring people to do physical activities for us, and communicating with others despite the fact that we are not physically present. Human Uber, then, is just a natural extension of this. “There is nothing ridiculous about combining the two,” McGrath says. "It is the sort of thing which might one day seem ordinary rather than odd.”
A major Canadian health insurance company will soon cover medical cannabis. Sun Life Assurance Co. is set to add medical cannabis to its group benefits plan on March 1. It will be the first major Canadian insurance company to take this step.
“Sun Life’s approach reflects current evidence-based clinical knowledge regarding the medical use of cannabis,” Sun Life said in a release on Thursday.
"As this has become something our clients—being the individual companies known as plan sponsors—have been asking us about more and more, we have moved from the stage of evaluate and review, to now offering it as a benefit for medicinal purposes,” Dave Jones, senior vice-president of group benefits at Sun Life, told the Globe and Mail.
The yearly maximums for those who will be covered through Sun Life for medical cannabis range from $1,500 to $6,000 per person per year. Medical cannabis will be an optional coverage through Sun Life, which insures more than 22,000 companies in Canada. Sun Life currently lists the following conditions and symptoms as being eligible for coverage: cancer, multiple sclerosis (MS), rheumatoid arthritis, HIV/AIDS, and for patients in palliative care. There will be a prior approval process for those seeking coverage.
Justin Loizos, owner-operator of the compassion club Just Compassion in Toronto, has officially been a medical cannabis patient since 2012. Loizos uses cannabis as a medicine because he has MS and post-traumatic stress disorder. He estimates he would spend about $80,000 per year for his medical cannabis if he didn’t have access to wholesale pricing through the compassion club he owns.
“I own and operate a dispensary—the only reason I can afford my medicine is because of this,” Loizos said.
Loizos said going through the current legal system rather than the grey area his dispensary operates in isn’t an option to for him right now because what’s offered would fall short of his needs and wouldn’t keep him out of the hospital.
Loizos said the average grams used for medical cannabis patients would be significantly lower than his needs, however, as he describes himself as an “oddity.” He estimated it would be three to five grams per day for an average medical cannabis patient, whereas he uses around 40 grams per day (though it can vary depending on his medical needs).
Loizos said Sun Life’s coverage would likely cover only about a gram per day.
However, Craig Jones, the executive director of NORML Canada, said that he’s hopeful the cost of cannabis will go down after Canada’s cannabis legalization and regulation are put into action this year. NORML Canada is a non-profit that “aims to eliminate all civil and criminal penalties” for private cannabis use.
“It’s likely that the cost of cannabis will decline and—once people figure out which strains work best for which conditions—they’ll have no problem accessing through government vendors or from friends,” Jones told VICE via email.
Jones said it’s essential that more good-quality research is conducted on cannabis. He said that doctors are slow to pick up on new therapies such as cannabis—in part due to its stigmatization, but also because there needs to be more quality research and the results of such in the public domain.
“NORML Canada has long held that the full potential of cannabis is yet to be discovered—and with legalization and the end of bureaucratic obstacles, we may be on the verge of a whole new research era,” Jones said.
“I expect that insurers will expand availability as we learn more about what cannabis therapies work for which groups and conditions,” Jones told VICE. “We are at early days. Expect the unexpected.”
Sun Life’s coverage will categorize medical cannabis under “medical services and equipment” rather than under a drug benefit since it does not have a drug identification number (DIN). Medical cannabis does not have a DIN since it has yet to be approved by Health Canada under the Food and Drugs Act.
For Loizos, medical cannabis has greatly improved his life. Proper dosage level has meant that he has greatly reduced his number of hospital visits for MS-related issues, including being able to avoid potentially dangerous therapies such as those including large amounts of IV steroids.
A next step forward, Loizos said, is for provinces’ disability support programs (such as Ontario’s ODSP) to cover costs—not just a gram per day, but whatever amount a doctor prescribes—of medicinal cannabis.
“Sun Life taking this first step is gigantic,” Loizos said. “Even if it’s a gram a day or whatever, it’s not a joke, it’s showing that a major staple in our medical community has accepted cannabis as medicine and is allowing coverage. That’s very positive."
Planning a destination wedding is a stressful thing to do with your time (I assume; never tried) but it gets even more complicated when you add criminal record checks, prison security, a room full of 100 strangers, and a vending-machine-catered reception.
This is precisely what’s been on Kanahus Manuel’s to-do list for the last several months. On Saturday she married her incarcerated partner Orlando Watley surrounded by family at a maximum-security prison in California.
“There were 11 of us, plus Orlando’s mother,” she told me by phone on her way back to her home on Secwepemc territory in central British Columbia. “The prison policy is you can only have 10 in—nobody had told us 10 was the limit.”
That wasn’t the only surprise prison rule Kanahus learned on her wedding day. “You also have to have two-inch straps,” she said of the prison’s dress code. “I had this see-through lace thing across my shoulders, so they denied me access because of my wedding dress.”
Not one to let men in uniforms ruin a good party, Kanahus and her sisters ripped strips off the garment bag that came with her dress and pinned the makeshift “straps” on in the parking lot. After some negotiation with security, their wedding party of 12 was allowed to finally meet the groom.
On any given weekend, a prison visiting room is full of inmates visiting with their parents, partners and kids under the watchful eye of guards. Kanahus recalls there were about 45 tables, with as many as five people sitting around each. The space is filled with the sounds of visitors and prisoners mingling. And because you’re not allowed to turn your back to the front of the room, those 100 or so strangers became a de facto audience to their vows.
Kanahus’s family formed a semi-circle around the couple, to give a sense of intimacy and privacy. They chose an officiant who had done time on the same yard, who was celebrating 20 years of freedom this February. “He said, ‘I married my wife five years before I got out, so I know this can work—she stayed by me those last five years.’”
(You might be wondering a lot of things, among them why someone would choose a prison wedding, and not wait until said prisoner is outside to hitched. It’s probably worth noting married couples are eligible for family visits, which means staying in a bungalow on the yard together for up to two days.)
After the officiant said a few words, he asked for the rings. “We said no, we don’t have a ring, but this is the real ring—our family that’s here supporting us always.” Orlando and Kanahus each said their own vows to each other. There’s no photography allowed on the inside, except for the “click clicks” taken by prison staff.
“My mom said a toast, and my sister said a speech—it was so, so emotional for all of my family. They’ve known Orlando all this time but this was the first time they could see him,” Kanahus told VICE. “Everybody was tearing up.”
Prison rules only allow each person to bring in a maximum of $50 cash, and if prison television dramas have taught us anything, it’s that you’re obviously not allowed to bring in food, lest a nail file or wire cutters be hidden in the cake. Instead, they toasted with Gatorade and ate coconut-flaked cakes purchased from the prison vending machines. “We joked it was just like every other native wedding—we just improvised.”
The guards let five people stay beyond the first hour and a half, says Kanahus. Her sister and the best man stayed with their kids. By this time love was in the air, and the other inmates—”all the killers and bank robbers”—began congratulating the happy couple.
Kanahus says her wedding fits into her own life mission to fight injustice—in this case the disproportionate incarceration of people of colour. “We’re in there and it’s all native and black people—everyone is brown and black, maybe one family of white people,” she said. “Those families could really relate to our family. They were crying too—seeing us month after month visiting each other.”
“We’re defying their prison law, defying their system, doing a ceremony, showing our love, and we’ll never stop that.”
"Oh FFS" is a new column picking out all the stuff you love most in life and looking at how it's destroying the planet. Enjoy!
What is it? Vinyl. What's that? Big black discs containing music, used by your dad, DJs who only play disco and people who are obsessed with letting everyone know they own loads of vinyl because "it just sounds better than anything else!" Is it biodegradable? No.
How bad is the problem?
The term "vinyl" is short for polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, a common plastic polymer used in everything from credit cards to window frames. The vast majority of new plastics are made from crude oil, although a small but growing proportion are now being made by recycling old plastic. So what’s wrong with it?
"When it comes to vinyl, there are environmental impacts related to anywhere energy is used," explains Andie Stephens, associate director of corporate carbon footprint measuring company Carbon Trust. "This includes the extraction of crude oil from the ground, refining it, the subsequent processing of [turning] that refined oil into PVC, then using PVC to manufacture a vinyl. The black colour comes from the addition of carbon black, which is also made from fossil fuels."
Not only is vinyl made using dead pterodactyls, its production and use also creates further problems for Mother Earth. "There are also impacts from packaging, which includes chopping down trees, processing them into pulp, turning that pulp into cardboard sleeves, alongside the production of inks and printing," adds Andie. "And then there's transport and logistics between all these separate stages, plus the carbon emissions from energy use every time the record is played. Plus a comparatively tiny amount from all the studio equipment used for the recording in the first place."
Okay! So vinyl and your general enjoyment of music is bad!
WATCH:
What's the solution?
Even though PVC is technically recyclable, you shouldn't recycle it on a consumer level – i.e. in your recycling bin – because it'll likely end up at a landfill site, where it'll sit for decades. You can, however, recycle the cardboard sleeves your vinyl came in, or – if you're getting rid of a big load – send the records off to specialist vinyl recyclers, like these guys. If that's not an option, don't be disheartened: you can re-use unwanted vinyl in other ways.
"Vinyl records are in high demand, so you can definitely try selling them to collectors online or at a car boot sale, or just give them away to charity shops, or for free on local networks like Freecycle," suggest Andie, adding: "There are also a lot of people who have found ways to up-cycle old vinyl records into new products, from wall clocks to decorative bowls."
But if you don't like clocks made from old Peter Frampton vinyl – which, yes, is perfectly understandable – and can bear to live without that little crackle you hear when you put the needle to record, here's another idea: just listen to music digitally. It sounds literally just as good as vinyl, takes up a fraction of the space and, according to Andie, the switch could be your good deed of the day.
"Studies have been done comparing CDs with MP3 downloads, which conclude that MP3s have a much lower carbon footprint than a physical CD," he explains. "This is because the emissions associated with the physical CD are greater than the emissions from the energy in the data centres and networks to store and download the MP3 files."
Consider the fact a vinyl record's carbon footprint is much higher than that of a CD, and it's clear that your crate-digging obsession makes you a monster who doesn't care one bit about the future of this planet. But what if you can't let go? What if you need to keep buying vinyl because it's "tangible" and "real", unlike MP3s, which are "also absolutely real"? Well, you can still do your part.
"A DJ that wants to be more environmentally conscious should try to make sure that sound systems and lighting rigs are as energy efficient as possible and travel in an efficient vehicle," says Andie. "Also, the traditional record pressing process requires making an aluminium platter and heating the PVC in a press to form the vinyl disc, but there's an injection moulding process which uses 65 percent less energy than in the conventional record pressing process."
So there you have it: if you press vinyl professionally, think about switching to that process. If you're a touring DJ, get a Prius. If you buy vinyl to play at home, stop it.
Within a few hours’ span today, the following stories came out about former (we think) Ontario Progressive Conservative Party leader Patrick Brown: He is suing CTV for the reporting that lead to his resignation; sources say he didn’t actually resign and he’s still PC leader; and finally, Brown didn’t know about the preceding story and he’s not focused on “technicalities,” whatever that means.
Brown resigned last month after CTV News reported two young women accused him of sexual misconduct. At the time, he issued a blanket denial about the alleged incidents, but quickly stepped down amid pressure from his party.
“After consulting with caucus, friends and family I have decided to step down as leader of the Ontario PC Party. I will remain on as a MPP while I definitively clear my name from these false allegations,” he said.
But after one of the key allegations in the CTV story turned out to be inaccurate—one of the accusers said she was not underage and in high school at the time of the incident as was first reported—Brown went on the offensive in an interview with Global, aired Wednesday.
"I am suing CTV," Brown wrote in a Facebook post. "My lawyers are talking to CTV. Early this week, CTV lawyers agreed to ensure that all emails, texts and other correspondence related to this travesty are held independently for safe keeping."
If there is one glimmer of light in a Canadian February, it is the sweet excitement in the air just before a new federal budget. What magical presents await us this year? Who will get the lump of coal? Imaginations are fired with fervour. It is an exciting time to be alive.
But Coyne is correct to observe that the newspaper chains are largely the authors of their own disaster. It’s a faux pas to take a politician at their word these days, but let’s give Joly the benefit of the doubt when she declares that “non-viable business models” will not see a dime. Let’s also assume that the federal government is able/willing to make a meaningful distinction between “public service providers caught in the throes of market failure” and “more money for us, fuck you”—type money sinks. Consider it a thought experiment.
Imagine Society is an ecosystem, Journalism is a fruiting tree, not unlike the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Local reporting and writing is the root system. It is an invaluable public service presently caught in the throes of market failure, because it happens on a scale that is too small to generate self-sustaining profits through a transitory period of technological shock. The roots are currently parched and the canopy is so top-heavy that it’s blotting out the rain. There are weeds cropping up everywhere and someone is dumping poison in ground.
What is key is for the government to water and fertilize the roots, not spray the foliage. Only then will the proper photosynthesis of Good Content take place. The tree will be vigorous enough to purify the fake news poison. Hard facts and empiricism and the equitable inclusion of community voices will slowly seep up the trunk until the bare branches burst forth with Good Takes. But if the feds only do a half-assed job of gardening, the tree will die. The bear named Democracy will have no Fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil to eat, and it will become a hangry, raging beast. It will then do something stupid and harmful, like fail to prevent forest fires, because it won’t know any better.
Also, parasitical columnists like me at the ass-end of the media food chain would be out of work, and that is the real tragedy.
This metaphor needs work but just roll with it. Let’s say the government successfully overhauls the Canada Periodical Fund. More money is funneled to local journalism, which is great. But many of the already-existing community papers are run by large corporations that seem less interested in building a sustainable future for Canadian journalism than in having more money for their shareholders’ furnaces. (They will also somehow have to square this circle with the CBC, which is a publicly-funded competitor to newspaper and digital startups).
The emphasis of any subsidy has to empower journalists directly to produce good work—it can’t just boil down to a bailout for the stooges who employ them. If the government gets in the business of subsidizing newspaper owners instead of journalism—or if it fails to make a distinction between them—then this whole racket is probably toast.
On Wednesday, America was reminded that it's easy for a disturbed person to acquire guns and walk into almost any school, office, or store in the country and start killing. This time, the site was Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where a former student killed at least 17 people and wounded more than a dozen others. It was the second-deadliest public school shooting in American history. The country has suffered through so many similar incidents—at schools and concerts and nightclubs—in recent years that the response is almost ritualized: Photos are distributed of victims' families huddling in grief, biographies are assembled of the suddenly famous murderer, thoughts and prayers are offered in person and online, and many, many Americans call desperately for gun control.
The question hanging over everything is always the same, too: How do we prevent this from happening again? But Donald Trump and other Republicans remain unwilling or unable to take that question seriously.
On Thursday morning, the president noted on Twitter that there were signs the shooter was "mentally disturbed" and chided, "Neighbours and classmates knew he was a big problem. Must always report such instances to authorities, again and again!" But what the authorities could have done about the shooter's problems isn't clear. He reportedly passed a background check when he bought the AR-15 he used in the spree; Florida has fairly lax gun laws, and the shooter didn't fit into any of the narrow categories of people who can't buy or own firearms under state or federal law. (Many mentally ill people can legally own guns.) Last year, the shooter made a YouTube comment that said, “I’m gonna be a professional school shooter.” That comment was reported to the FBI, but little or nothing was done—in America, being obviously unbalanced and obsessed with guns is not a reason under the law to inhibit someone's Second Amendment rights.
Later Thursday, Trump gave a more substantial response in a six-minute address to the country in which he declared, "It is not enough to simply take actions that make us feel like we are making a difference, we must actually make that difference." The only action the president promised to take was pretty vague, though. "We are committed to working with state and local leaders to help secure our schools and tackle the difficult issue of mental health," he said. "Later this month, I will be meeting with the nation’s governors and attorney generals where making our schools and our children safer will be our top priority."
"Mental health" is of course the Republican go-to phrase after a mass shooting. Attorney Jeff Sessions alluded to it on Thursday as well. But people who actually study mass shootings often say that their perpetrators are hardly ever mentally ill. And though Republicans have talked for years about "mental health" as a counter to calls for gun control, they've also supported cuts to mental health services. The American Health Care Act, a.k.a. "Obamacare repeal," would have made it harder for many suffering from mental illness to get treatment by slashing Medicaid and eliminating requirements that private insurers provide mental health coverage. If Trump was talking about placing restrictions on the mentally ill owning guns, that's a different debate—but Trump has already signed a bill striking down those very restrictions.
As for "school safety," that could mean a few things. Trump has previously endorsed the NRA-sanctioned plan of arming teachers as a defense against school shootings, and his administration is apparently open to allowing more guns in schools period. But arming teachers (or placing armed guards in schools) would create other problems—would you prepare every teacher to engage in a firefight? If you did, would you have to (or be pressured to) pay them better? Would you have to be more careful to screen teachers given the expectation that they would be armed? Would cash-strapped towns and cities be expected to provide the weapons to their schools? What if an armed teacher or school resource officer killed a student by mistake? And of course armed guards can't stop all school shootings—they didn't stop Columbine, after all.
Trump doesn't seem prepared to even begin to grapple with what it would mean to put more guns in schools. Republican legislators, for all their concerns about mental health, have never moved to do anything about it. And though Trump promised to support the Florida survivors and families affected by the shooting, he'll likely ignore them if, like other relatives of mass shooting victims, they call for gun control (some already have).
The cynical response to Trump's words is that they are just an excuse to avoid the problem of Americans being gunned down for no reason week after week, and that the Republican Party as a whole simply doesn't care much or at all about gun violence. And it's very difficult not to be cynical after watching so many mass shootings in such a short time: By one count, there have been more than 1,600 since the shooting at Sandy Hook in December 2012, and according to the New York Times, three of the ten deadliest shootings in modern American history took place in the last five months.
As Trump left the podium, a reporter could be heard shouting the obvious questions: "Why does this keep happening in America? Will you do something about guns?"
On Monday, President Donald Trump finally released his infrastructure plan, something he’s been promising to deliver almost since he took office. And it was a total letdown.
Sure, it’s ostensibly bigger than Trump originally promised; he goosed it from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion during his state of the union address. But the 53-page plan mostly codifies ideas the White House has been floating for months. “None of this was a huge surprise,” said Jacob Leibenluft of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “We just got confirmation that this was their approach.”
More importantly, while Trump and company have signaled this plan will be a legislative priority for 2018 and are preparing to sell it to lawmakers in the coming weeks, it’s pretty much doomed already. In the emphatic words of infrastructure investor and academic Joel Moser, “it’s never going to happen. It’s DOA. It’s a joke.”
Despite its big topline number, Trump’s plan actually calls for just $200 billion in direct federal funding, which would theoretically be leveraged into $1.3 trillion more in state, local, and private spending. Of this limited pot of cash, $100 billion is slated for matching grants for state and local spending, $50 billion for block grants for rural projects that might not be able to raise local or private funds, $20 billion for “projects of national significance,” and $10 billion for capital financing to fund the acquisition of federal governmental facilities. The plan also calls for the federal government to drastically reduce how much it will contribute to infrastructure projects as a ratio of overall spending, shifting fundraising responsibilities onto states and cities. Additionally, it advocates loosening restrictions on localities creating of new or increased tolls and fees for public usage of any infrastructure, save for “essential services” like water and public restrooms.
On top of that, the plan calls for streamlining the federal permitting process, making it easier to lease or sell federal assets to localities and private corporations, allowing the Department of the Interior to authorize pipeline construction inside national parks, and tweaking Pell grants and apprenticeship program requirements so that they can support more training for engineers and construction workers, among other comparatively minor provisions.
This is an ambitious proposal that would drastically reorganize how American approaches infrastructure. Yet it still falls short of addressing America’s baseline infrastructure needs, which the American Society of Civil Engineers estimates to cost between $4 and $5 trillion. The plan also does little to address how projects that cannot generate revenue would be funded.
Democrats have already come out strongly against this small-government plan and are mostly advocating for a more traditional direct spending approach instead. As any infrastructure bill would require 60 votes in the Senate, noted Brookings Institute infrastructure wonk Adie Tomer, “the Democrats hold almost all the cards here. If they don’t want to negotiate something in the Senate, there’s no bill.”
Although some Republicans have come out in favour of Trump’s plan, there’s also resistance to it among fiscal conservatives. Especially in the wake of a costly tax bill and spending deal within the past few months, deficit hawks have no patience for even $200 billion in spending without clear offsets. And the White House proposals offers no specific ideas on how to pay for this modest investment, making only vague suggestions that Congress ought to consider hacking an equal amount out of existing infrastructure programs it believes are not well managed. “Cutting from current transportation programs, many of which have very deep support,” said Tomer, “is really hard to see going through.”
It also reads as a cynical shell game. Paying for $200 billion in infrastructure by cutting $200 billion in infrastructure spending, fumed Moser, is “a bolder lie, a bolder sleight of hand, and a bolder bunch of BS than I would have ever imagined even from” Trump.
(Trump also reportedly brought up the idea of raising the gas tax to pay for infrastructure in a recent meeting. But, well, Trump says a lot of stuff in meetings.)
Team Trump could have sidestepped this complication if it had allocated the proceeds slated from the reparation of American cash stowed overseas to the US, part of the tax bill, to infrastructure, an idea that had broad support. But instead they used that projected cash to offset the costs of more tax cuts. “The president and other people are serious about doing something on” infrastructure, said Marcia Hale of the infrastructure booster group Building America’s Future. “They were just more serious about doing tax cuts.”
The plan will also face likely opposition from bipartisan city and state officials who will not relish the idea of being forced to levy new taxes and tolls, especially just after the Trump tax bill killed their constituents’ abilities to write off some of those expenses on their federal taxes.
All of this may be exacerbated by the fact that no one’s sure Trump is fully behind his plan. He’s voiced his concern with its central fund-leveraging mechanisms in recent months; reportedly this was a large part of the reason it took so long to roll out the plan, which was last promised to drop before the state of the union. Yet at the same time it appears House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell are waiting for the White House to take the lead on pushing this proposal through Congress.
According to all of the experts I’ve consulted, there’s still broad support on Capitol Hill for some kind of infrastructure bill. So there’s a good chance an infrastructure bill will make it to the floor of Congress at some point this year. It may even include elements of Trump’s proposal—most experts I spoke to agree streamlining permitting, so long as there are guarantees for environmental and worker protection retentions, could make the cut. But this bill would not include the major funding reform and spending elements of Trump’s proposal. Instead, it would likely work within existing infrastructure programs, and be modest in scale.
It’s also unclear how any kind of infrastructure bill would pass this year. Fiscal hawks won’t like any bill with a notable price tag. Democrats will not be eager to deal with the GOP in an election year. And there’s just not much trust between the parties on which to build.
Congress also has a host of other issues to address in the coming months, notes Hale, including the 2018 budget and an immigration deal pegged to the expiration of protections for Dreamers. Those fights will eat up Congress’s bandwidth until at least late March. Past that point, primaries and imminent Congressional races will increasingly suck the air out of the Capitol. “It’s a clock that’s ticking down and it gains speed as it gets closer to zero,” said Tomer.
“People are already saying, ‘Well, we may not have enough time to do an infrastructure package,’” said Cato Institute analyst Chris Edwards. “Which is kind of stunning. The year has just begun and people are already talking about a limited number of days for legislation… We’re up against Washington dysfunction. So even stuff where there would be a lot of bipartisan support, if the leadership doesn’t make it a priority, it just won’t happen.”
For two and a half weeks, Guido Grolle's phone has been ringing off the hook with calls from pizza shops, letting him know he's got a big order on the way. His inbox fills up with emails telling him what time his pies are coming through. But every time a delivery guy pops by his office to drop off the za, Grolle tells them, for the millionth goddamn time, that he never ordered a thing.
According to Nuhr Rachrichten, the lawyer in Germany has been getting pie after pie, dropped off at various times of the day, without having ordered them himself. More than 100 pizzas from multiple different shops around Hamburg have made their way to Grolle's office, and he still can't figure out why.
It may be a dream for most people—getting pizza delivered daily to your desk for free, without having to pick up the phone. But for Grolle, the whole thing has made his life a living hell.
"It's infuriating," Grolle told Nuhr Rachrichten. "You can barely manage to work."
It's not clear if the incessant flood of gooey cheese and dough is the work of some pizza-obsessed stalker, a disgruntled client, or the result of some kind of Black Mirror–style Seamless glitch. Grolle's reportedly scanned his PC for bugs and slapped a filter on his email, but the pizzas keep coming. He's even started to receive unsolicited sushi and Greek food, Nuhr Rachrichten reports, changing up the monotony of endless slices.
Thankfully, the local restaurants and delivery guys started to catch on after seeing 15 orders pop up in Grolle's name in the span of a half hour week after week, and have started to check with him before stopping by his office. Without any answers, Grolle's called in the local police to investigate what has become yet another case of weird, unrequested deliveries.
Still, Grolle might be the only person on Earth annoyed at the prospect of receiving a free deep dish–style lunch every day. After all, there are worse things that could show up on your doorstep uninvited.
In a bizarre, mysterious turn of events, a Canadian firefighter who went missing during a New York ski trip last week was found wandering Sacramento, California, on Tuesday with no clear memory of how he got there, the Mercury Newsreports. He was even wearing the same ski gear he had disappeared in, with no idea what day it was.
Danny Filippidis was last seen February 7 at Whiteface Mountain in upstate New York, after leaving a group of work friends to go on one more ski run at the end of the day. When he never returned, his colleagues reported him missing, and law enforcement kicked off a massive manhunt in the Adirondacks. But the nearly 200-person search was unsuccessful, and no one found any trace of the man until nearly a week later when a disoriented Filippidis called his wife from Northern California—almost 3,000 miles from where he originally disappeared.
Recognizing his voice, Filippidis's wife told him to call 911. Authorities reportedly found him standing in a car rental lot near the Sacramento airport, "confused" and "unable to give direct answers," the Toronto Professional Firefighters' Association president, Frank Ramagnano, said during a press conference. In addition to sporting the same ski jacket and pants he wore on the slopes in New York, the Sacramento Beereports, Filippidis also had a new phone, $1,000 cash, no ID, and a fresh haircut.
Filippidis said he couldn't remember the details of how he got across the country in six days, but told police he remembers riding in a "big rig–style truck" where he slept a lot, a spokesman for the Sacramento PD told the Post-Standard, though Filippidis was unable to recall specifics about the vehicle or its driver. He said he also may also have suffered a brain injury, and cops don't believe he was drugged or taken against his will.
"He was very nonchalant, and kind of out of it," Sergeant Shaun Hampton of the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department said after the discovery.
According to Filippidis, the truck dropped him in downtown Sacramento, where he bought a phone to call his wife and stopped somewhere for a haircut, for some reason. But he said he couldn't remember how he made it out to the airport, where local police eventually found him. Filippidis was then hospitalized in Sacramento before being sent back to New York, where state law enforcement are hoping to try to help him piece together the story of his journey.
New York police are currently searching for anyone who may have picked up a confused hitchhiker wearing full ski gear and drove him across the country, or anyone else who may have information regarding his disappearance—like, you know, someone who recently spotted mysterious glowing orbs beaming a human down onto the Sacramento streets or whatever.
"At this point, we want to assist Danny in getting back the last six days of his life," New York State Police major John Tibbitts told a press conference.
Transparent has officially cut ties with its lead actor, Jefferey Tambor, after two women accused him of sexual harassment, Deadline reports. The official decision from Amazon comes months after Tambor, who starred as trans woman Maura Pfefferman, said he'd exit the show.
Amazon launched an investigation into the actor's behavior after Tambor's former assistant Van Barnes claimed he repeatedly groped her, propositioned her, and played pornography while she was in earshot, Vanity Fair reported. About a week later, Tambor's co-star Trace Lysette accused him of dry-humping her on set without her consent and making inappropriate comments about her body, allegedly saying he wanted to "attack [her] sexually."
The network reportedly concluded its investigation into the Emmy-award winning actor, and while the results have not been made public, a source told Deadline Tambor's behavior "could not be justified or excused under scrutiny."
In a statement, Transparent showrunner Jill Soloway praised Barnes and Lysette for coming forward with their allegations, calling them "an example of the leadership this moment in our culture requires."
"We are grateful to the many trans people who have supported our vision for Transparent since its inception and remain heartbroken about the pain and mistrust their experience has generated in our community," Soloway said. "We are taking definitive action to ensure our workplace respects the safety and dignity of every individual, and are taking steps to heal as a family."
This article was published in collaboration with the Marshall Project.
My son is big for his age. At only 16, he’s already 6’4” and 225 pounds. As he grew, I began to have a lot of anxiety because I knew he could get mistaken as an adult. And being an adult black male in St. Louis—like anywhere in America—can be uniquely dangerous, especially when the police are involved.
So recently my son and I began having The Conversation: What to do if he gets stopped by a police officer.
No matter what’s going on, I tell him, stay quiet. Keep your eyes down. Lower your shoulders. Let the air out of your chest. Get the bass out of your voice. Sound as much like a child as possible. And above all, do not make any sudden moves.
Whatever they ask you to do, I tell him, you do.
They are going to jiggle your balls searching for drugs. Your face is going to get dirty, and so are your new clothes, because they’re going to have you on your stomach. Be ready for these things.
At first, my son didn’t quite get it. One day, as we role-played an encounter with the police, he asked, “Mom, well what if it’s cold, don’t I have a right to just reach back and grab my jacket? What if I drop my phone, can I just pick it back up? What if my nose is running, am I supposed to stand there with snot running down my chin?”
“Let it run down to your ankles if you have to,” I told him.
He thought he had the right to voice an opinion, to tell an officer he was wrong. The only right you have, I corrected him, is to make it home alive. Me explaining in court that my son was right in his actions, but dead as a doorknob, is not going to help me.
I know all too well the importance of being subservient to law enforcement. Over the years, I’ve been pulled over by the police for lots of stupid things. Once the officer said it was because my license plate was dirty. My son, who was in the car with me at the time, was so confused. “It’s not dirty,” he told me. “You should say something.” And I kept shaking my head no. I had to teach him it didn’t matter who was right or wrong, only that we made it out of that situation alive.
Still, traffic stops have resulted in me getting jailed many times in St. Louis County, Missouri, often over unpaid fines for minor driving-related infractions. It’s a common problem for folks in my area who are financially strapped, especially people of colour. Public transportation is very limited, so you need a car. When you’re making nine dollars an hour, and the rent is due at the same time as the car insurance, the car insurance waits for the next check. Not because you’re trying to cheat the system, but because you’re trying to provide for your family. But before you get that next check, you get pulled over for no reason and caught. What happens then? You go on the run. Or you just don’t drive in certain areas. Or you accumulate the warrants and you wait.
When my son was small, having him in the car didn’t keep me from getting pulled over, but it did keep me from going to jail; officers would let me go rather than take me in along with a young child. But he wasn’t always there. I remember the first time I had to call to tell my son I wasn’t coming home because I was in jail over traffic tickets. He was about ten years old, and he just cried and cried.
As my son got bigger, I would sometimes either have him slouch down in the back seat or else we just wouldn’t go through certain municipalities because it looked like two black adults in the car, rather than a mother and her young son.
I know that my son has been affected by my experiences with police. But it was when Michael Brown was shot by an officer in nearby Ferguson, when my son was 12 years old, that he lost some of his innocence. At his school, it was all about the Pledge of Allegiance, that we’re all American citizens, and kumbaya with the world. But he saw that the reality of living in St. Louis as a black man didn’t match those ideals. One time he said, “I don’t think the US Constitution applies in Missouri.” He thought that because of what he was witnessing in his own community.
My son turned 16 in August, and I still have not let him drive. I’m too worried he’ll get pulled over by police. At first, I told him, “Wait until next summer.” Or, “I’ll teach you when you make all As.” But right now he has a 3.7 GPA. Sometimes when he'd ask me to teach him, I'd reply, “So I can get you out of jail?”
I think he’s starting to get it. If my mom can get locked up for traffic stuff, I don’t stand a chance. He hasn’t said a word about getting his license or driving a car in awhile now.
My challenge is: How do I give my son the hope that he can be a productive member of society, but at the same time, let him see society in its ugly, bare-naked truth? My choice has been, I’d prefer to let him know how to really navigate life as it is rather than say: You can be president! You can be anything you want to be when you grow up! Except, that is, for being black while driving through certain parts of St. Louis.
Meredith Walker, 47, is a plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit filed by ArchCity Defenders in 2016 that alleges residents of the city of Florissant, particularly African-Americans, have been jailed improperly and unconstitutionally solely because they could not afford court fines and fees arising from tickets and other minor offenses.
Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man how to use a fridge and he'll leave a fish in it for weeks and weeks until it congeals and smells so bad he'll briefly consider burning down his entire flat.
Not wanting to waste is a virtue – British households senselessly chuck out about 4.4 million tons of food every year. But there's "not being wasteful", and then there's just being too lazy to rid yourself of the mound of vegetables left from last week's brief health kick, the dried-out limes bought for gin and tonics that never happened, and the overpriced takeaway you justified by telling yourself you'd have the leftovers for lunch at work.
To find out just how filthy humans can be, I spoke to five people about maggot-infested chicken, four-year-old tomatoes, foot cream and all the other shit they had nestled in their fridges.
Lidia, 28, A Slice of Cheese
This slice of cheese has been stuck to the side of Lidia's fridge for just over a year.
VICE: So, Lidia, how long has this piece of cheese been in your fridge? Lidia: I think we bought it sometime in February of 2017. I have no idea whether it’s still edible, and, unsurprisingly, neither me nor my boyfriend is willing to take the hit and taste it.
Why don't you just throw it away? To be honest, we should have just eaten the cheese when we first bought it, but the slice sort of slipped out of its packaging really early on and then stuck to the side of the fridge. We’re both too lazy to get rid of it.
How much longer do you think it will be stuck there? Well, I’m a bit embarrassed now that everyone knows what slobs my boyfriend and I are, so I’m going to throw it away now.
Lara, 30, A Jar of Sun-Dried Tomatoes
A jar of four-year-old sun-dried tomatoes.
VICE: How long have these sun-dried tomatoes been rotting in your fridge? Lara: I bought the jar four years ago, and I don't think I ever ate more than three of them.
Why did you initially buy them? At the time, I had planned on hosting this big dinner party for loads of my friends, and I thought sun-dried tomatoes were exactly the sort of nice thing you’re meant to have for big dinner parties. But it never happened, and so I just left them there. Do you think they’re still edible? I don’t know, and I really don’t think trying them would be a very good idea. The oil congealed years ago and now a bunch of weird balls have started forming all over the jar. But seeing as it’s technically a preserve, it might be alright. Right?
When will you finally throw the jar away? Maybe now is the time. But the thing is, it really doesn't bother me. I don’t need the space it takes up for anything else, and I’ve actually gotten used to having it there.
Nora, 23, Chorizo
This piece of chorizo used to be bright red.
VICE: How long has this blackened piece of chorizo been in your fridge? Nora: The chorizo turned up about five months ago, when my best friend and flatmate, Celia, brought it back after visiting her mum in Valencia. Celia easily gets attached to things, and this slab of chorizo is just another item on a very long list of stuff she can't bring herself to throw away.
Has it always been this dry and this black? I swear it used to be bright red. It was really fresh chorizo when it first arrived – almost raw – so it needed to be left to dry age for a few months. But five months later, I still remind her almost daily to eat it, but she thinks the longer it hangs, the better it will eventually taste.
Have you ever tried it? No, and I've only ever seen Celia eat it once, when she packed it in some Tupperware with rice and took it to work. When she got back home, she said it was really good – the rice, that is. The chorizo was apparently "a little too strong".
Do you think she will ever throw it away? No, probably not. The worst thing is that after all this time, Celia is still adamant that she's going to use it to spice up bland meals in the future.
Jacobo, 41, Tube of Foot Cream
The foot cream is approaching its 10th anniversary in Jacobo's fridge.
VICE: Hi Jacobo. Why do you have foot cream in your fridge? Jacobo: My then-girlfriend – now wife – bought the cream in 2009, I think. She decided to put it in there to keep it "fresh", which is where it has stayed ever since.
Has it expired or can you still use it? It looks pretty fresh from the outside, but if you pop open the lid you'll see that these solid brown globules have formed inside the tube. And the smell, which was always pretty intense, will instantly make your eyes water.
Have either of you ever tried throwing it away? There have been a few perfect opportunities to get rid of it, but we just haven't ripped off the band-aid yet. Every time we try, we realise we've grown somewhat attached to it – and who knows, it might be bad luck to throw it out.
Antonio, 27, A Job Application
A job application in a fridge.
VICE: What is a job application doing in a fridge? Antonio: The application was already in there when we borrowed the fridge from someone. We only really use it to keep beers cold in our rehearsal studio.
But why is it still there? To be honest, none of the six people who use the fridge can be bothered to take it out. So there it will stay, until its owner comes to re-claim it.
Do you see any symbolism in the image of a job application left in a fridge? I guess it represents putting off the moment you're meant to conform to an existence rife with responsibility and the basic routines of adult life.
Christmas was a sober one for me. Thanks to a course of antibiotics you genuinely can't drink on, I was teetotal for five whole weeks. That meant a lot of lime and sodas, a healthier bank balance than ever before and – to my surprise – absolutely no change to my social life.
Despite the lack of liquid incentive, I went out, socialised and even stayed in clubs until they turned the lights on. By the way, when you do that without getting on it, you learn a few things: i) there are actually a lot of drugs on the floor if you just look down; ii) it's much harder, as a journalist, to walk around a techno night at 7AM, asking people for quotes for a music magazine, without at least a moderate amount of MDMA coursing through your veins; and iii) all your favourite clubs have takeaways next door, which, astonishingly, you’ve never noticed before.
Anyway, that five-week break got me thinking about the way we consume alcohol in the UK, and the reasons why. Current drinking stats paint an ambiguous picture. On one hand, we have a study published last month, commissioned by charity Drinkaware, which looked at the drinking habits of 6,000 Brits. Worryingly, they reported that 60 percent of the participants "are drinking alcohol in order to cope with the stresses of everyday life". It's unclear if those findings can be generalised across society, but according to the NHS, more than 10 million people in England regularly drink "above low risk levels" (classed as consuming more than 14 units a week).
On the other hand, we recently had Dry January. According to research commissioned by the charity Alcohol Concern, 3.1 million people in the UK pledged to take part this year. Sales of low-alcohol beer and cider (less than 1.2 percent) soared by 30 percent last year when compared to 2015 – which should come as no huge surprise; you might have noticed both the mammoth marketing campaign from Heineken for its zero alcohol beer, as well as the vast array of non-alcoholic options available in every bar these days.
Then we've got Gen-Z, i.e anyone under the age of 21. They’re supposedly not really that bothered about getting pissed – figures published by the Office of National Statistics last year concluded that while 7.8 million people in the UK as a whole "binged" on alcohol regularly, for various reasons more than a quarter of 16 to 24-year-olds do not drink at all.
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It seems that, although we are very much still largely a nation of folk who revel in getting apocalyptically hammered most weekends, more and more people are opting to cut it out. Which does make sense in some ways: booze is, let’s face it, a pretty shitty drug. The high isn't all that, and it's the biggest risk factor for death among people aged 15 to 49 in the UK. Plus, it comes with a load of terrible side effects, like memory loss or, conversely, that mortifying moment you remember what you said to your colleague the previous night.
Still, many of us plough on, even after telling ourselves we should cut it out, or at least cut right down. Why? Because, admittedly, having a drink can be a great way to decompress after a long week. But also because of the social aspect: the drug is as ingrained in British culture as Sunday roasts and only ever reluctantly making a doctor's appointment. We're a society that, at times, seems to be built around boozy lunches, nightcaps and phrases ("cheeky pint", "hair of the dog") that seem to serve no purpose other than to justify drinking at all hours of the day.
Think – how many people have you heard say they would give up drinking tomorrow if only for the fact their social life revolves around it?
I have no idea what it would be like to stop drinking altogether, so I spoke to some people who have done just that, to see how it impacted their social lives. Jean Pierre Szajniuk works for Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and has acted as a sponsor for various people over the years. At 54, he’s been sober for 13 years after quitting because he was struggling with addiction. "People who stop drinking and start working with the AA programme can live a normal social life," he told me. "Personally, I go to Glastonbury; I go to loads of concerts; I go fishing; I go to the theatre."
After also quitting drinking 13 years ago, because it gave her migraines, Kate, a 54-year-old journalist, told me she agrees with Szajniuk. "I still have an active social life," she insists. "But there are downsides to it: when you go to the pub it’s fine for a while, but if people start getting hammered you’re left behind. That’s a bit dull after a while."
A man gesturing towards a puddle of sick for the camera – something you can avoid doing yourself if you quit drinking. Photo: Jake Lewis
Valerie, a 27-year-old who works in media, went sober three years ago because she found it gave her more energy and better skin. "If I go out on a night I tend to go home a bit earlier," she says. "Just because it gets to that point when everyone around you is plastered. It’s quite a strange experience when you’re not."
Szajniuk explained that if someone is going to go sober, it's advisable that they initially choose their environment very carefully. "If you go to a barber, you will get a haircut," he says. "If you stay around people using, the temptation – with the smell of it and things like that – could easily arise."
"Yeah, it was just ruining my life," says Tom, a 27-year-old supermarket employee. He knocked it on the head a year ago. There are some bars and old friends he "avoids" now, but he still goes out clubbing regularly. It’s a big temptation, though: "It's hard going out, because sometimes I’ll think, 'Fuck it, I’m going to have a beer,'" he says. "But, at the same time, I think, 'Nah,' because it just doesn’t agree with me and I realise that it is a really shit drug now."
So there you have it: putting down this particular state-sponsored narcotic will not kill off your social life; you can absolutely still see your friends while they drink and you don't. For some, of course, it might mean a slight shift in how you socialise – at least for the first couple of months. You can meet your friends in a cafe, like the French, or go bowling together, or hang out somewhere they don't serve alcohol, like a swimming pool or the Apple store. For others, the only choice is to put down the bottle and address their social life when they can.
"For a real alcoholic, it’s a matter of life or death," Szajniuk adds. "So, do you want to live and change, or do you want to die? It’s a difficult choice to make."
In his 1925 poem “Heritage,” Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen bemoans Christ’s whiteness, admitting to “fashion[ing] dark gods, too,” gods “crowned with dark rebellious hair.” The intervening decades have made black Americans well-acquainted with black Jesus, black Santa, and all manner of dark gods from culture, and Marvel’s Black Panther is the latest. But Cullen’s poem is most famous for its refrain—”What is Africa to me?” a question that black people of the diaspora have been contending with for 400 years. Panther largely takes place in Wakanda, the hero’s fictional African home and a world designed for the screen by production designer Hannah Beachler. To take Wakanda from comic book pages to cinemas, Beachler had to learn what Africa was to her, and what it might become to viewers worldwide.
“I think of myself as a story designer,” said Beachler of her work. Production designers head films’ art departments, working with directors to create the visual worlds. Beachler served as production designer for Panther director Ryan Coogler’s prior films: 2013’s Fruitvale Station and 2015’s Creed. She also worked on Beyoncé’s Lemonade and 2017 Oscars Best Picture winner Moonlight. Over the past five years, Beachler—the only black woman at the top of her field—has been the mind behind some of black America’s most influential visuals. But Wakanda, an Afrofuturist Eden on a far-away continent, was an entirely new challenge.
“The question is, ‘What is it to be African, and how as African-Americans do we relate? How can we connect?’” asked Beachler. Africa has figured large in black American dreams of an existence truly and finally unencumbered by racism, and it’s no coincidence that Hollywood’s first major black superhero film isn’t about an American at all: Even in the Marvel Universe, with its frozen supersoldiers and warlock mystics, a film about black Americans who’d never had to contend with racism would strain credulity.
When Coogler and Beachler visited the continent for their research, they found not the “shithole” of “Save the Children” commercials, but diverse black nations where tribal tradition and modernity are complementary rather than opposing forces. “I personally have felt that I have been lied to about what the continent actually is,” she said, describing scenes of rural idyll and cosmopolitan modernity, including seeing Turkana women wearing traditional facial paint to their work on urban construction sites that would look at home in any Western city.
From their travels and research, they built an African utopia far removed from the usual Tokyo-New York architectural mashup that too often serves as a stand-in for urban futurism in film. A trip to Three Rondavels, a striking trio of South African mountaintops that resembles traditional circular dwellings called rondavels, emphasized local ties between nature and design, and became towering Wakandan skyscrapers topped with thatched rondavel roofs. Other regional and ethnic reference points abound in Panther, from the otjize that coats the hair of one elder in the style of Himba women of Namibia, to the Basotho blankets in which members of the film’s Border Tribe wrap themselves, to the lip disc worn by another elder, borrowed from Ethiopian groups like the Mursi.
For Beachler, it was important to treat her African inspirations with due reverence— "And by that I mean not just grabbing things that I thought were cool.” Still, the cosmetic significance of otjize or the social currency embedded in lip discs will have little contextual meaning to most American audiences, aside from their beauty. While black America has a long history with our imagined Africas, access to real-life African people’s opinions of our homeland fantasies are newer, along with terminology—like “cultural appropriation”—for describing them.
Black American perspectives on Africa can be “two-dimensional” and are “not without their problems,” said Dr. Courtney Baker, a professor of African-American studies at Occidental College. One example of this is the allegations by British-Liberian artist Lina Iris Viktor that the Panther team used her work without permission in the music video for "All the Stars" by Kendrick Lamar and SZA, a song from the movie's soundtrack. “But if one is looking at Black Panther, I think one will get more out of it by thinking about the project of Afrofuturism, which is about black possibility, black diversity, and black empowerment, and that has to do with a global condition of blackness," Dr. Baker added.
And to a continent that has already been painted with a cruelly broad and inaccurate brush, one indifferent to specificity or nuance and entirely ignorant of cultural context, perhaps a broad positive stroke can form part of a more accurate counter-narrative. Beachler hopes American children will look at the film and know that Africa is not the “dark continent.”
For her, creating Wakanda was a deeply personal endeavor. “I was in South Africa...looking at the land and thinking, ‘All of this has been stolen from my history,’” Beachler said. “I got really emotional, because I didn’t think it would hit me in that way.” It’s this emotional link that prevents Wakanda from being the kente-draped Apple Store another designer might have rendered. Recent strides in on-camera diversity in Hollywood have yet to be matched behind the scenes, so while Panther’s status as a blockbuster superhero film with a majority-black cast is astonishing enough, its behind-the-camera diversity is perhaps even more impressive. Though of course any director and production designer could travel to Africa and be awed by the continent, the emotional and historical resonance that Beachler brought to Panther’s aesthetics is specifically black.
“I remember walking onto the set for the first time and looking around, and it was one of the most diverse crews I’ve ever seen in my career, just plain and simple,” said Beachler. Panther’s crew included Director of Photography Rachel Morrison, whose work on Mudbound has earned her the history-making distinction of being the first woman ever nominated for the Academy Award for Best Cinematography. “Let’s just give it up for Ryan,” Beachler said. “Almost all of his department heads were female, of different sexual orientations, religions, colours, and creeds.” At this point in her career, Beachler can assemble her own similarly diverse teams, with her remarkable resumé as living proof of the value of varied visions behind the scenes. “I had to get myself through the door,” she said, “And then I can, like, put a brick and keep it open for other people.”
This story is a part of VICE's ongoing effort to highlight the contributions of black women around the globe who are making a difference. To read more stories about strong black women making history today, go here.
Black Panther, Marvel's highly anticipated film based on the first mainstream black superhero, has officially dropped, but it's already become a cultural phenomenon. It's an inspirational film for many, but for Black Panther star Chadwick Boseman, it was particularly life-changing.
On Thursday's Desus & Mero, the actor dropped by to officially welcome the world to Wakanda on the eve of the film's release. During their interview, the trio talked about grueling press tours, Boseman's Marvel transformation, and the film's powerful impact.
You can watch the latest episode of Desus & Mero for free online now, and be sure to catch new episodes weeknights at 11 PM on VICELAND.
