Since leaving HBO's Silicon Valley in a public spat with the show's creator, comedian T.J. Miller has gone on to star in the Emoji Movie and be accused of sexual assault. Now it seems the star has found himself under FBI investigation after getting drunk on an Amtrak train and allegedly phoning in a fake bomb threat.
According to a press release from the Department of Justice, Miller called in a bomb threat on March 18 during an Amtrak ride from Washington, DC, to New York City. He allegedly told the cops that a woman on his train "has a bomb in her bag." But Miller allegedly got the train number wrong, leading Amtrak investigators to stop and search another NYC-bound train, unable to find anything onboard.
When investigators called Miller for more details, he was allegedly slurring his speech and told cops a different description of the woman who he'd originally called about. This time, he said that the woman was carrying a “black bag carry-on suitcase with a handle" and that she kept checking it without taking anything out. The cop then inevitably asked if Miller if he was drunk, and the comedian told the officer he'd had "one glass of red wine."
"This is the first time I’ve ever made a call like this before," he said, according to the complaint. "I am worried for everyone on that train. Someone has to check that lady out."
Investigators then stopped the train Miller was on and tracked down an attendant in his first class car. The attendant said Miller seemed drunk when he boarded and tossed back several drinks during his trip—two glasses of wine and two double scotch and sodas, according to TMZ. By the time he'd reached New York, the attendant said, he was booted off the train because he was intoxicated.
According to the complaint, the attendant added that Miller had been arguing with a woman a few rows away from him during the trip. Investigators interviewed the woman and found that—aside from being innocent of the accusation against her—she didn't even have the kind of bag Miller had described. Instead, they allege that Miller called in the bomb threat because he was "motivated by a grudge against the subject female."
Miller was arrested at New York's LaGuardia Airport Monday night, according to the press release. He's since been released from jail on a $100,000 bond and charged with intentionally giving the cops false information about an explosive device—a crime that could land him with up to five years behind bars.
Miller was arrested not long after finally putting his last run-in with the law to bed: After he allegedly slapped an Uber driver during a ride in 2016, he finally settled with the guy last month, Page Six reports. Meanwhile, he was accused in December of sexually assaulting and punching a woman back in college.
Miller's stayed pretty quiet after the arrest, though when he was phoned for comment, his voicemail sure had a lot to say:
Joel Osteen is one of the world’s most famous televangelists. The Houston pastor fills arenas, draws more than 20 million monthly viewers to his televised sermons, and has sold millions of copies of his Christian self-help books. He also has a doppelgänger.
On this episode of Fame-ish, VICE meets Michael Klimkowski, a struggling LA comedian with an uncanny likeness to the famous pastor. He’s turned the resemblance into his most successful bit—impersonating Osteen in public, at the pastor's own book signings, and, most famously, at a sold-out Osteen event in 2017 where he managed to make it all the way up onstage. We sat down with Klimkowski to hear when he realized he could pull off the impersonation, what it’s taken to perfect it, and how his 15 minutes of fame have affected his comedy career.
One of the great disappointments of my life—probably the greatest disappointment, really—is that snap-crackle and pop people keep doing snap-crackle and pop theatre shit. Focus on the screen be damned, I’ll still leave with popcorn-chewing memories from the guy two rows behind behind me.
In an era where theatres still play short videos telling you not to act like assholes by talking loudly or using your iPhone enters last weekend’s box office champ A Quiet Place—as much a shut-up-and-watch shame-fest as it is a horror film.
Set in yet another dystopian future, creatures with acute senses for noise stalk humans. Evelyn and Lee Abbot (real-life married couple Emily Blunt and John Krasinski, also the director) spend their days amidst this silent hell, scavenging and surviving with three children, one of whom is deaf, played by Regan (Millicent Simmonds).
Much of the film zeroes in on eyes and faces, with actors communicating through sign language and facial expressions amidst muted scores and sound. The film feels quiet and fresh, but throughout the 90-minute length of silent tension, I had another kind of fear in the theatre. Folks chew noticeably slower, people’s whispers sounded louder and suddenly, a film about silence managed to let me know where every shitty moviegoer was sitting.
Which raises the question because I have a dark imagination with a need to rant—what kind of theatre goer would be the first to get killed in the world of A Quiet Place? Here’s a select few that came to mind.
The In-Between Laugher
These are the hysterical sorts, who go off on blast. Most see funny jokes, and they see the funny in the the stuff that leads up to the funny joke, and for some reason they can’t tell the difference. They’ll laugh at the awkward, the stupidly savage and giggle at the disturbing—which is just about all of A Quiet Place—until they’ve pretty much choked on their own cheap laughter, because they’re dead.
How long this person survives in A Quiet Place: Seconds before first jump scare.
The Anticipator
The visionaries, bootleg-psychics, Nostradamus lites of the group. They’ll want to blab out what’s going to happen before it happens—classic horror movie fodder. With sweaty palms and fists clenched in a need to maintain a know-it-all-rep, they’ll predict the woefully predictable jump scare to all those within earshot. Horror flicks aside, The Rock will eventually do the eye thing in Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, Denzel Washington will ultimately rub his forehead, and Channing Tatum will at some point remove his shirt to the tune of the the anticipator...who's thankfully now dead.
How long this person survives in A Quiet Place: The first jump cut
The Announcer
These are the barkers of bad jokes. Their whole shtick causes collateral damage for those around them. So obsessed with their own hipster-coolness, they’ll shout “Don’t go up the stairs, you stupid fuck,” things. Like an Alien chestburster that chest-busts without command, they’ll echo the dumb-as-hell things, expecting laughs in return. Instead, he’ll get a few shut-the-eff-ups and sit downs, before being deaded with everyone that had the nerve to go Hannibal on that ass.
How long this person survives in A Quiet Place: After character death #1
The Sleeper
Listen, it happens. It’s dark, quiet, warm, and that damn memory-foam chair is way too cozy, perfectly wrapping itself around that stationary butt. You probably came in having eaten a whole dog so you wouldn’t be shamed into being quiet during a movie called A Quiet Place. And then it happens, eyelids close and you snore a deep sleep kinda snore that you can’t achieve in the comforts of your own home, and painfully but wistfully, you’re dead.
How long this person survives in A Quiet Place: 26 minutes in.
The most self-hating victim here. This is a person that views film so damn much that he no longer loves anything or himself. It’s within his undying mission to ensure that he takes his surrounding audience all the way down with him. He’ll blurt out personal opinions, point out plot holes because movie mechanics are his way. In another life, he was a film student, maybe even a budding Rotten Tomatoes downvoter. He views A Quiet Place as a terrible piece of art that can hardly compete to the unease of Psycho. And he’s now beyond dead.
How long this person survives in A Quiet Place: The halfway point
The Screamer
Some dudes may view this as a women-only problem, but no my friends, men can be the worst offenders. It’s one of the more horrible things that one can experience. Not because their decibels can rival a Dolby 7.1 surround system, but because they’ll grip, and physically scream at every minor sound that escapes a sea of silence. My ears still hurt from the homie that no longer watches horror flicks with me because he’s dead to me.
How long this person survives in A Quiet Place: First jump scare
How long this person survives in A Quiet Place: The trailer previews
The Husher
In the context of A Quiet Place, they mean well, but they aren’t the heroes of the group. They’re just the passive aggressive announcers-in-training. Their saliva-infused ssshhhes deafen, completely ignorant to every other ear that’ll feel the warm wind blow. They could have survived but a husher can’t help the self-righteousness of the hush.
How long this person survives in A Quiet Place: right after the announcer
The Talk About Everything But The Movie-Moviegoer.
Movie theaters are mistaken for phone booths for these folks. The hell with the film about silence and shit, I’m busy hearing the whole story about the head boss Todd Wilson refusing to give up the raise, or why little Timmy can’t seem to behave himself and keep his diaper on. Chatter and chatter about everything but the horror film in question, just a breakdown of a very boring life forced down everyone’s throats.
How long this person survives in A Quiet Place: Immediately murdered by group
On Sunday, three guys tossed some gear in their car and drove to Loch Leven, Scotland, for a good old-fashioned camping trip with their three pre-teen kids and a dog named Jazz. They hopped in a rowboat, paddled out into the water, and set up camp on a little island, where they built a teepee and cooked up a meal around the fire. It was a beautiful, innocent stint in the great outdoors like any other.
But as far as the police were concerned, it might as well have been the next Jonestown Massacre. It turns out that the men, Panagiotis Filis, Ross Anderson, and David Henderson, are all big-time metal fans and they were decked out alongside their kids in face paint and black clothing like a KISS cover band. Some passerby apparently thought that meant the campers were going out on some sort of suicide pact and alerted the cops, even though they were just looking to spend a little quality time with nature.
"For some reason the police had received a tip that we might be in grave danger and they came to rescue us," Filis, a university lecturer, told the Guardian. “They really did a great job of rescuing us. The only issue is that we didn’t need rescuing."
By nightfall, the campers found themselves at the center of a massive rescue operation, the Scotsmanreports. While a chopper swirled overhead, two lifeboats jetted out to the island with their police lights flashing, and cops shattered Anderson's car windows looking for a suicide note. There were about 20 fire trucks, ambulances, and police cars waiting for them on the shore, staffed by roughly 50 emergency services personnel, the Guardian reports.
"The amount of resources they threw at it was just ridiculous,” Anderson told the Guardian. "It felt to me that they were all pumped up and ready to take on something when there was nothing to take on."
Eventually, the cops realized the campers weren't actually some kind of suicidal, Satanist cult, and let them get back to their metalhead vacation. But their time in the great outdoors was pretty much ruined: They'd put out their fire, packed up their tent, and—since the guys had a few beers, and couldn't drive home—decided to spend the night sleeping in their cars, presumably to the tune of Black Flag's "Police Story."
"They rescued us from an environment which was absolutely safe and comfortable," Henderson told the BBC, "to an environment that was freezing cold [with] broken windows on our cars."
Last summer, sheriff’s officers in San Joaquin County, California, were combing through an area known for illegal grow operations to “eradicate marijuana,” as one officer put it later at a county board of supervisors meeting. Then they came across a farm they described as 500 acres—through the county later acknowledged it only spanned 26—with signs that workers had placed out front for trespassers and cops to clearly see: “This is not marijuana. This is hemp.”
When the officers approached, a worker on the premises gave them a binder that he said contained paperwork that explained why the crops that looked like marijuana were not marijuana, and why he thought the state and federal laws allowed him to grow it.
The hemp farm was operated by William Bills of the Winnemucca Shoshone nation, though the farm wasn’t on the reservation, which is in Nevada. Bills had planned to start a business extracting cannabidiol, or CBD oil, the non-psychoactive cannabis chemical used as medicine by many but not recognized as one by authorities. He had rented a plot in California and partnered with a company that claimed to be a university, as well as cannabis consulting firms that tout their own research in press materials—an attempt to comply with federal and state laws that only allow hemp to be grown for research purposes.
The officers left, but sheriff’s department officials later argued to the board of supervisors that the hemp farm would cause problems, in part because it looked too similar to a marijuana farm. “People driving down the road come across this field and see this and think, ‘Oh, look at all this marijuana somebody's got here,’” an officer said in a public meeting that was streamed online.
Citing the regulatory confusion in California over whether it is allowed to be cultivated in the state, the San Joaquin County Board of Supervisors subsequently passed an ordinance in late September to immediately ban hemp farming in the county. Every day that the farmers continued operating, they faced a fine and a risk of a raid.
Finally, early in the morning hours of October 10, several sheriff’s deputies arrived at the hemp farm with a search warrant for “Marijuana/hemp” and uprooted the hemp plants and topsoil. In response, Bills and his partners sued the county, claiming the raid cost them $77 million.
“What was once a thriving agricultural parcel is now barren, dry, and essentially dead,” they say in their suit, filed in the Ninth Circuit federal court.
The suit is ongoing, but in December a judge tossed the farmers’ request to overturn the county’s ban on hemp, which the county extended in November. (Because of the pending litigation, the San Joaquin Sheriff’s office referred questions about the cases to the county attorney, who did not respond.)
The case shows the strange place would-be hemp farmers find themselves in. As weed evolves into a legal, multibillion-dollar industry in California and elsewhere, some farmers are questioning why they can’t start freely growing hemp, marijuana’s non-psychoactive cousin in the cannabis family that is thought to have thousands of uses.
Hemp was popular among early North American settlers, and it was even grown by George Washington. But after the 1850s, hemp lost out to cotton, petroleum, and other resources that were cheaper to produce, according to research conducted by Kelly Rippel, a Kansas-based hemp advocate. A final burst of hemp production allowed farmers in rural states to profit during World War II under the USDA's Hemp for Victory campaign. But the 1970 Controlled Substances Act lumped all cannabis crops together and banned their growth in the US.
Those draconian restrictions on hemp farming have been lifted in many parts of the country thanks to a measure in the 2014 Farm Bill that allowed hemp farming for “research” purposes in states that decided to legalize it—marking the first time in decades that federal laws noted a distinction between hemp and marijuana.
But law enforcement’s war on hemp is far from over.
The Drug Enforcement Agency still considers it to be a controlled substance, for starters. “Hemp is a contrived name,” DEA spokesman Rusty Payne told me. (The Farm Bill defines hemp as a cannabis crop containing no more than .03 percent THC).
In California, a state law passed in 2013 allows for the growing of hemp, but in 2014 Kamala Harris, then the attorney general, ruled that federal law restricted the growth of hemp to research purposes only. (Hemp advocates have at times voiced frustration with Harris but also blamed the California Department of Food and Agriculture for being slow to create pilot growing programs.) Other states have taken a looser interpretation of federal laws, with Maine, Washington, North Carolina and Colorado among states that allow hemp to be commercially grown—though US hemp growers are constrained by strict federal regulations. A total of 34 states have launched hemp pilot programs under 2014 Farm Bill rules.
Even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell seems to have come aboard the hemp bandwagon. The Kentucky Republican announced plans last month to introduce a bill that would finally remove hemp from the federal controlled substances list, lifting the DEA’s grip on the crop once and for all.
McConnell's backing of hemp is likely due to how popular the crop has become in his home state, where multi-generational tobacco farmers are switching to hemp under a relaxed state regime that has cleared 12,000 acres for hemp. The state is also the planned site of a $30 million CBD extraction facility. Representatives from McConnell’s office, the Kentucky Department of Agriculture, and state lawmakers joined investors from China and California at the facility's ground-breaking ceremony in March, where one local official said that the the booming hemp and CBD business in the state “blesses my heart... we get to bring something that really means a lot in a farming community and the things that can come off of the hemp industry.”
Vote Hemp, a collection of hemp industry interests formed in the 1990s, has been lobbying the government for years to lift a ban on growing the plant domestically. The 2014 Farm Bill, despite its limitations, was a major victory. "A lot of people who are smaller farmers are jumping into the game,” Vote Hemp President Eric Steenstra told me.
But the encouraging news for some hopeful hemp farmers and CBD extractors comes as others have faced raids or the threat of raids. Most cops, like the sheriff’s deputies in San Joaquin, aren’t often inclined to distinguish between hemp and will-get-you-stoned marijuana. John Lovell, a lobbyist for the California Narcotics Officers Association, used to print out images of marijuana and hemp that he found on the internet and distribute them to lawmakers, to stop earlier attempts to legalize hemp in the Golden state. Distinguishing between the two is “not something that can be done visually,” Lovell told me.
It’s an argument that Diane Goldstein, a former lieutenant in the Redondo Beach Police Department, described as “crazy stupid.”
“I call the issue of industrial hemp the dumbing down of law enforcement,” Goldstein said. She is now on the board of Law Enforcement Agent Prohibition, a pro-drug reform advocacy group of former officers (“Her rhetoric is cute but I don't take it intellectually seriously at all,” Lovell responded.)
The notion that it’s too tough to tell hemp from marijuana has had real policy consequences: In Kansas last year, a proposal to allow hemp farming passed the state House but didn’t get a vote in the Senate, with law enforcement groups claiming that lab tests to distinguish between hemp and marijuana were too expensive. The state is now poised to pass a more restrictive bill that would limit hemp farming to research purposes only.
And Native American reservations, where tribes are searching for a high-yield crops as a way to supplement or replace falling casino income, were completely left out the Obama-era Farm Bill.
"The feds, for a long time, have been discriminating against first nations and tribal lands with regard to hemp cultivation and hemp agriculture,” said Lauren Stansbury, a Vote Hemp spokesperson.
In 2015, the Menominee Indian Reservation of Wisconsin wanted to establish a legal hemp operation with a research component, just as nearby states were doing at the time. “We were trying to figure out another economic venture that could sustain us,” Marc Grignon, a farmer and agricultural researcher with the College of the Menominee Nation, told me. The tribe said it met multiple times with Department of Justice officials in the Obama administration in 2015 to be transparent about their plans and to be sure they were complying the law. Instead, the feds raided the facility after the plants had already grown a foot tall later that year.
Grignon remembers driving to work and seeing county officers, tribal officers, and federal agents wielding guns and paratrooper gear as they ripped the tribe’s 30,000 hemp plants from the ground.
“The Obama administration sent agents to destroy our crop while allowing recreational marijuana in Colorado,” the tribe’s then-chairman Gary Besaw said in a statement at the time. The tribe filed a lawsuit, arguing that it was following the law as stipulated under the Farm Bill, but a judge tossed the case, issuing a ruling that only states, not Native American tribes, have authority to establish hemp regulations.
More recently, the Navajo Reservation in late 2016 announced a partnership with CannaNative, a Native-led cannabis consulting firm, and plans to grow 70,000 acres of industrial hemp. But the firm says that tribes must take a slow and cautious approach to getting their grows approved, as they did with gambling. “The destruction of Indian crops, that’s been going on for hundreds of years, and we don’t want it to continue anymore,” CannaNative founder Anthony Rivera told me.
The DEA doesn’t take a position on proposed laws, according to agency spokespeople. It does maintain that CBD production is in violation of current federal drug laws, and that hemp can only be grown for research. That said, illegal CBD production generally “isn’t a priority right now,” according to DEA spokesperson Payne. “We're so focused on the opioid epidemic. We've got to focus on the biggest fish.”
For Bills, the stymied California hemp farmer in California, CBD production is the entire reason why he wanted to start his business. The DEA has not made the chemical available to researchers, but Bills is one of many people who praise it for its medical benefits. His case has its next hearing in federal court later this month. But for now, he can’t grow hemp in San Joaquin.
Overnight the bus, the subway and my internet experience were plastered with ads for something called the Real Estate, Bitcoin And Wealth Expo, headlined by noted economic experts Sylvester Stallone, Pitbull and Alex Rodriguez.
“What the fuck could that event possibly be like?” I’d wonder as I gazed upon their imperious stares. As someone who has spent his life in various stages of brokeness and for whom money has always seemed less an asset and more an uncontrollable force like the weather, I knew had to discover what secrets of wealth and power could be gleaned from these fat, meaty heads. Maybe a podcasting class with Adam Carolla was just what I needed to turn this whole goddamn mess around.
I checked on the website, maybe the ugliest website I’ve seen since my high school band’s MySpace page. I’d seen online ads offering VIP tickets for 60 dollars but it said those were now 250 bucks. “Damnit, deal must be over,” I thought but within moments a popup arrived shrieking a very, special limited offer identical to the one I was looking for. What a steal! Many thanks and offerings to the fickle gods of luck and commerce for smiling down on this humble pilgrim.
The email invite informed me that the expo begins Saturday at 8 AM but encouraged me to show up at 6:45 AM. Like many of the ideas I would encounter, this seemed psychotic. After chowing down on what I assume is the plucky entrepreneur’s traditional breakfast of a Burger King sausage and egg croissant sandwich, I arrived at the Metro Convention Center at 10 AM, a slightly hungover and greasy vessel ready to be filled with the ancient wisdom of the markets.
It was my first time at the Metro Convention Center. It’s one of those bland, behemoth buildings whose function is to provide inoffensive space to sterile bazaars dedicated to all manner of society’s subcultures, whether it’s small-town, golf-shirt dads gawking at the auto show or gangly cosplayers living their Mountain Dew daydreams at Comic-Con. In testament to the non-discriminating, omnivorous appetite of the Convention Center, on the other side of it during the Wealth Expo, there was a World Wildlife Federation Conference. The building is so huge the events were separated by a physical space nearly as large as the ideological gulf between them.
So who were these people half-filling the dystopian grey, cavernous space, which subcultures were represented there? There were people who look like they miss partying with Patrick Brown. There were people dressed like assassins from the John Wick movies. There were mulletted Over The Top loving Stalloneheads, human toolboxes who never met an arm-wrestle they could turn down. There were slick douchebags and schlubby losers and people whose first dance at their wedding will be to a Chainsmokers song.
There was a DJ, a home renovator who proselytized about the merits of going to the gym before work as it helps him provide a better product to his customers and who was there in hopes of getting pumped up. There was Sadiq, a kind man who watched over my charging phone, childishly excited to see Stallone. He handed me his card suggesting maybe I could write copy for his marketing agency after I told him I’m a writer.
There were influencers, drivers, mentors and life-coaches; persuaders, house-flippers, mom-preneurs, deprogrammers and real-estate all stars. In a word, there were entrepreneurs. Fools and frauds infused with the spirit of commerce, tugging at the reins of self-doubt, regulation and social obligation that restrain the flowering of their gilded lives and a richer society for us all.
There were also some fellow wiseasses laughing in the safety of our ironic remove. I meet up with one such a prankster, a comedian friend and we head to our first two seminars of the day, Coach Yourself To Success with Shanda Sumpter and Billion Dollar Marijuana Market with Sara Gullickson. Fantastic picks. Both seminars made clear out of the gate that the expo was dedicated to, first and foremost, bullshit and stupidity, a convention comprised of Coen Brother-type idiots and hucksters spewing out a meaningless drivel of empty rhetoric and inflated numbers.
To the strains of gym instructor techno music, we filed into the old mayo coloured seminar room and were greeted by the sharp featured Shanda Sumpter, Entrepreneur Coach. Sumpter had been a broke, Vegas nightclub manager. Well, broke in the way where you own three properties one of which is being foreclosed upon. Sumpter was desperate to avoid foreclosure and did everything she could to avoid it including praying, hustling and journaling before she stumbled onto entrepreneur coaching.
Even after her blitz of suspect figures (“I got this client’s Facebook Chat show up to 60,000 views a month”) and absurd name drops (the Chicken Soup For The Soul author, the creator of Spanx) I’m still not quite sure what that job is. As far as I can see it’s mostly about inflating the egos of similar delusional idiots with meaningless buzzwords and hollow strategies like making sure your email subject lines will be appealing to both drivers and influencers. This was my introduction to an entire economy whose contours I had never seen before made up of a vast sea of small-time slumlords and shaky investors who, desperate and fantastical, were convinced they were one of hot deal away from becoming a titan of industry and the strata above them of con artists, phony gurus and silver-tongued devils that made millions off exploiting the unlimited resource of people who completely missed the point of Wolf of Wall Street.
Sumpter had the confidence and meanness to deflect any questions from the audience that demanded specifics instead of platitudes. Not so the speaker at Billion Dollar Marijuana Market Sara Gullickson, whose bullshit was hilariously inept. Gullickson, a Fox-News anchor type, was detailing how much money could be made in the wide open field of marijuana when she was challenged by a kindly old lady, who informed her that the government would be in charge of selling weed here in Ontario. A flummoxed Gullickson responded with an early comedic highlight, “I know that here it’s different from providence to providence.”
After getting lunch at a hilariously beleaguered taqueria, unprepared for the avalanche of impatient douchebags, we entered the main hall ready for the big names. Up first was Alex Rodriguez, baseball legend, Shark Tank judge and someone whose high school was five miles away from Jeff Bezos’, a factoid he was very proud of. Rodriguez uttered blunt statements that were only tangentially related and interspersed with bizarre, long pauses that gave the listener the opportunity to really dig into how stupid and funny they were. After talking about all the women that he has hired at his companies and decrying those who didn’t think he had business savvy because he was an athlete, he said, “Never let anyone tell you you can’t do it just because you are a woman or an athlete or a firefighter.”
One thing I learned at the Expo is that entrepreneurs are never just entrepreneurs. No, they are rock stars, fighters and athletes. Speeches throughout the day were belaboured with ‘investing is a sport’ metaphors. Perhaps this is why people nodded and clapped along to Rodriguez’s completely unrelatable and unhelpful advice. When a struggling gym owner asked A-Rod, who was boasting about the success of a newly-purchased gym franchise, how he could get business up at his gym, A-Rod responded by telling him he needed to make sure he got influencers in there, like how smart gym owners would let the Yankees train for free back when he was one of the greatest baseball players ever. This fact, his athletic glories, never factored into the explanations of his success. No, that was due to guile and sound hiring practices, certainly not his dinger-hitting abilities.
This is another main lesson from the Expo, wealth is never a product of history. Things like inheritances, fame and other advantages have nothing to do with any of the speakers’ miraculous successes. No wealth is purely the result of a quest to rid oneself of the fears and doubts that are holding you back, the ultimate expression of a completed self. The wealthy and their desires are unencumbered by the restraints of scarcity and geography and have developed a belief system and a creation myth that reflects that. As the next speaker Marshall Sylver put it, “Wealthy people don’t determine what they want by what they can afford. They know what they want and figure out how to afford it.”
Sylver is a hulking, bald multi-millionaire public speaker and hypnotist and also the most clearly-a-super-villain person I have encountered. A rich, bald hypnotist? That’s some Lex Luthor shit. When not boasting about the pleasures of owning a private jet and preaching about the power of his techniques of irresistible influence and selling a weight loss DVD called I Am Permanently Slender, Sylver was saying some truly bonkers, evil shit. When asked what the youngest person he had hypnotized was he claimed he had hypnotized babies still in the womb. Quick to proclaim himself an expert in relationships, he stated, “I control my wife, she controls me back. It’s a healthy relationship.”
And the crowd ate it up, cult of personality style. People flung their arms in the air like it was the Bhagwan himself. They vigorously responded, “Yes!” whenever Sylver asked them if they would they want him to teach them how to be happy all the time, work less, and get out of their own way. “Yes!” they cried. Their desperate eyes imploring him to deprogram them of all things that are holding them back from success. Take my credit card and financial information please you bald-headed monster man who is guaranteed to hypnotize me. Because if there is one thing I’ve noticed about strong, successful individuals it’s their susceptibility to hypnosis.
When Sylver finished after an hour and a half of ‘wealth and greed are good’ sermons and teaching a woman to swallow fire, I was sad. Sad because this cult of money shit works. People like Sylver are rich, powerful and in control of the world. This room was packed with people aspiring to be like the clumsy tyrants raging against their own impotencies and inflicting their insecurities on the world they see on TV. This was a world made for and by fascists and idiots, it was hopeless.
Then Pitbull showed up.
I didn’t know anything about Pitbull. I thought that song he does with Ne-Yo was by Macklemore. But I’m here to tell you that Pitbull rules. He swore a bunch, and railed against our narcissistic culture, calling Mark Zuckerberg a motherfucker before chastising Apple for bragging about having 3 trillion dollars, when they could be building schools with that money. He also said he loved babies but, importantly, nothing about hypnotizing them. He ended his rags-to-riches story with, “Millions, billions, trillion, it don’t mean shit. There are always more zeroes. Don’t mean nothing if you don’t help people.”
Comrade Pitbull then left the stage only to reemerge in a storm of pyro and confetti with his dancers and proceed to blow the motherfucking roof off. 4 PM, dead sober and we were all losing our minds. People were dancing on chairs, women in tank tops came out of nowhere and started handing out Pitbull-Stallone noisemakers which I started smashing together like salvation depended on it. When he started doing the Ne-Yo hit about enjoying life I was jumping around giddy, and feeling connected to the people around me like I was on MDMA. Pitbull literally got me high on life.
Fun times.
Pitbull levelled the place. He was followed by a slick-haired trader who bombed trying to explain stock market strategies to people who had just been through the return of the Lord. All that was left was Stallone. I toured around the booths in the back and feigned interest about investing in Kitchener condos and luxury hotels in Buffalo. I bought a cold twelve dollar ham sandwich and watched young, acned jocks toss around a round business card like it was a Frisbee.
I read some people were disappointed in Stallone’s speech. Not I. No, I fancy myself lucky I witnessed the absurd, ramblings of an old Hollywood legend drunk on adoration and stage fright. He “Yo Adrian-ed.” He randomly yelled words at the end of sentences, like when he told a little girl that for her to be an actress she, “had to find her NICHE!” He talked about lying awake in bed fantasizing about beating up Arnold Schwarzenegger. At different points, he described life as war and as huge slab of raw meat. He told us having idols is stupid and called his fellow Italians “Goombas.” He looked like if present Al Pacino was inflated with air.
“ Cliffhanger?” he asked, staggering around the stage, “You want to talk about a scary experience...Oh my God,” delivering the OMG like some sort of irradiated Broad City character.
That's Stallone behind me.
He talked a lot about fear. That he loved it, claiming if he had another son he would name him Fear. But also that it was constantly with him, that he woke up everyday afraid. Afraid of losing it all, of not mattering, afraid that he had been a bad father. He was afraid right in that very moment because he hadn’t written any of this and was winging it, a claim I very much believed. Fear had driven Stallone to the peak of success but he was telling us, that even there he can’t escape it.
I don’t know if anyone realized but Stallone was laying out the whole lie right out there in front of us. This expo was about fear. Fears that grab at us all: that we aren’t successful, that we don’t matter, that we are working too hard, that we are letting down the people we love. The con was the promise that people like Shanda and Marshall Sylver have the answer to relieve you from fear. That a new, successful you is there just beneath all that fear and you just need to fork over enough dough and you’ll be reprogrammed and emerge fresh and shiny like a recently flipped house. But even the Demolition Man gets afraid still. No, as I learned when I sang along to the hook in “Give Me Everything,” the only salve for the fear, the only wealth and real estate that matters is helping and being with each other.
And now, I wait patiently for Brother Worldwide to give the signal for when we seize the means of production.
It's no secret that violent American extremists—from alt-right foot soldiers to militia movement diehards to archetypical skinheads—tend to be men. And that's who Michael Kimmel studies. The sociologist at Stony Brook University has written extensively about masculinity, and just dropped a new book, Healing from Hate: How Young Men Get Into—And Out of—Violent Extremism, that explores the process by which young men latch onto fringe world-views. His central idea is that the people who gravitate toward violent ideologies are often those who haven't been given a chance to prove their value in more typical—and mainstream—ways, like taking care of a family. Employing some of the same language he and others in his field have used to explain Donald Trump's appeal to white, rural America, Kimmel argues a sense of "aggrieved entitlement" and a longing for community are much more integral to radicalization than any particular political issue or stance.
I called the author up to prod him on exactly how young men are lured into dangerous belief systems—and, just as important, how they might be saved. The good news is that, because the ideology itself does not seem to be the main draw here, there really is a roadmap for redemption.
VICE: Almost invariably, the guys in your book are looking for a clique. But lot of where this radicalization is happening nowadays is on the internet. How does the increasingly large amount of time people seem to spend online shape far-right recruitment? Michael Kimmel: I honestly don’t completely know the answer to that yet because part of it has to do with the effectiveness of online communities who actually give you the visceral experience of community. Some of these Reddit arenas and you know, Stormfront chat rooms and stuff, and some of the other, like, sort of male men’s right groups—these are places where people do feed off each other. Whether that's enough is an open question. It's initially very exciting and there’s a lot of energy, but I think the energy dissipates when you’re not asked to show up in person. And so what you may have is a constant number of people, but they’re streaming in and out. The entry and the exit are much more truncated than they used to be. Like, after a few months of it, it's like, Oh, OK, I know those guys. They never ask anything of you existentially. It's just, "Show up and yell at people."
Also, if you blend in with everyone else, it doesn’t help you toward the type of identity of opposition, a kind of sartorial display of the old skinheads. The Doc Martens. The suspenders. The white T-shirt. Or in Europe, the blousy silk bomber jacket. Camo cargo pants. That look brands you. And guys in Sweden, especially, would tell me that when they had joined up and they shaved their heads and they got all the gear and they went back to their high school, people were just, like, frozen. They were fearful, and that gave them a real rush. For that reason, skinheads—that aspect of skinhead style—sort of remains popular for guys for whom this is not sort of an ideological movement but also an identity movement.
Is it fairly routine for these guys to cycle into the far-right—whether online, IRL, or both—and then cycle back out to more mainstream circles? Yes, many of the guys who get out quietly slip back into society. I suspect that will be even more true of the guys who are sort of assimilationists. It will be a lot easier for them to have a job, have a family, go to work and all that.
I was surprised to read that some of the people who go through some of these programs to leave the far-right lifestyle don't do it because they renounce the ideology, but because their friend let them get beat up or something particular happened to upset them. Is it better for these people to harbor abhorrent views in secret—and function as part of mainstream society—as opposed to being overt skinheads? It’s a good question. You go in because you want that kind of camaraderie and connection and brotherhood, and then the ideology is sort of added late. So when they want to leave, then the ideology can fade away. [Some guys] spend a lot of time going all over the country and talking about their experiences and what they believed and why. I think there’s a kind of redemptive value in that. Other than that, I think these guys say it was a phase and go out to get a job.
What was interesting to me was the difference between the guys who were flirting on the boundaries of white nationalism here in the US who are still very right-wing, anti-environmental, and anti-immigrant [after their "phase" and] the guys in Sweden. Many of them now vote Social Democratic because they are very strong environmentalists. They want to protect the beautiful Swedish countryside, but now it’s not necessarily from these immigrant hoards and the Jews who manipulate them.
You talk a lot about emasculation being a motivating a factor for joining the far-right, but I feel like you don't explore sexual failure and the fact that a lot of these people who flirt with white nationalism are just dudes that can’t get a girlfriend. Look, in Angry White Men, I talk about [2009 Collier Township shooter] George Sodini and [2014 Isla Vista shooter] Elliot Rodger and these guys who start murdering women because they couldn’t get laid. Elliot Rodger was furious because he was a great looking guy and he was still a virgin, and George Sardini hadn't had a date in ten years. Yes, of course, there are those kinds of cases where you can trace it directly from sort of a sexual failure as a failure of masculinity.
I didn’t really hear much of that side of things when I interviewed these guys. What I heard instead was that one of the things that was attractive was, "Hang out with us, we have awesome parties, everyone gets drunk, and there will be girls." But that could be a fraternity advertisement to a young freshman at a large public university. It's appealing to a few adolescent guys who think they aren't having as much sex as they think they are supposed to or want to.
I guess I’m just curious how you would address that if you saw that as a motivational factor for drifting to the far right or even engaging in mass violence. You also can’t say to women: If you put out a little more, then these guys wouldn’t join the Nazis. And by the way, that worked on the left as well. There was this poster in 1959 of Joan Baez and Mimi Farina, both sort of the beauty queens of folk music, and the poster said, "Girls say yes to boys who say no," and it was an ad against the draft. So [those kinds of appeals] can work on both sides.
On that note, do you think anarchist punks are also seeking to retrieve or restore masculinity? Is it kind of a different side of the same coin? Sometimes I do. Some of the Swedish guys told me that at night they would all party and get drunk and they would all take painkillers and they would go out on the street and look for a group of immigrant guys, or antifas, or a bunch of anarchist punks who were also drunk and on painkillers and looking for a fight. My guess is that all of those groups would be seeking to engage in this same kind of identity quest or identity demonstration just from different sides of the ideological spectrum.
Why join one versus the other? They’re in many ways diametrically opposed but as you suggest, they seem to attract a similar type in some cases. Similar in process but not in the substance. One guy did tell me directly, he said, "In my high school you couldn’t be alone because everybody had to have a group, so I looked around and there were the punkers, and the hip-hoppers, and the antifas, and the skinheads. People were really afraid of the skinheads, so I joined them." And to pretend for a minute that this is an elaborate ideological commitment is going to kind of disappoint.
Is there any way that we as a society could do more to make this an unattractive option for disaffected young men? Obviously some of the ways to do it are media, some of the ways to do it would be to tell the truth about how many of these guys are in jail for violent crimes and what percentage of all hate crimes are committed not by Islamic terrorists but actually by white nationalists. Some of the media representation making these guys who are out of the lifestyle into media stars would be a nice thing. I think American History X and some of the films that have been made about these guys are really useful in showing the way that that dilemma kind of works out. What the risks really are.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
There was once a time when living with housemates was just a phase. Maybe you'd spend a few years in a sharehouse with them but then you'd be off!—being able to afford your own home, becoming an adult etc. etc.
Now though, housemates can be a reality deep into your 30s and beyond. Bleak.
But there are good housemates and there are bad housemates. The good ones leave you alone and know the secret to keeping houseplants alive. Bad ones clog the drains, love psy-trance as much as they do kick ons, and seem to have a near endless supply of mates who need to "crash on the couch, if that's okay? They're just in a really tough spot right now. Should only be for a couple days, or a week or two."
If you're looking for bad housemate stories, where is better to start than Sydney—a city where you'd be hard pressed to find a shoebox room for less than $300 a week. We headed out to Pitt Street to ask for people's grossest housemate stories. Warning, there are many, many mentions of cockroaches in this piece.
Todd, 23 and Isabella, 22
Tell me your gross housemate story. Everybody has one. Todd: There was this old as fuck bottle of tomato sauce in my house. My housemate pulled it out of the cupboard and when they opened the lid it exploded, it actually hit the roof. There were still stains there when I moved in, and apparently it had happened like six-eight months before. So that proved how much they wanted to clean it.
Can you still picture the stain? It was just like red. Well, not even red anymore, it was more like brown stain all over the roof. It shot everywhere, not just straight up. It exploded out of the nozzle. It was really gross.
What that as bad as it got? I found a nest of cockroaches under our toaster. Because they ate the crumbs and they liked the warmth. I lifted it up one day and there was like 40 of them underneath there.
What was your reaction when you found that? “I need to move out of this fucking house.” Nah I was like, “Man, I’m just not making toast anymore hey?” I cleaned the entire house and within like two weeks, it was back the same it was. I was like, I’m not really interested in cleaning this house every week.
I found loaves of mouldy bread down the side of the fridge. It’s just disintegrated because there was so much fucking mould... you couldn’t even see it. It was like vaporised. Everything inside was just powder.
Did you ever go off at your housemates? I mean I tried to but they just try to pin it back on you. Like, “This is your shit.” I’m like, nah, this is not my shit. Like, kick ons worth of MDMA encrusted plates and shit. They would be left there for like two weeks and they’ll be like, “Clean up your plates!” I’m like, ahh do you see my pupils? I’m fine bro! That house was disgusting.
Graham, 34 Newtown
What’s the most disgusting habits your room mates have had? Graham: I used to live in a warehouse that had 12 people. A bunch of different people—uni students, drug dealers, sex workers, strippers, artists. And because there was no responsibility taken we probably had, per weight, more cockroach than people.
Please don't tell me you woke up to one crawling on your face? That's genuinely my worst fear. You’d get up at night and if the ground didn’t move when you got up, it was a strange experience. There were that many there. I actually know what the smell of cockroach shit smells like. I’ve seen what happens when a cockroach breaks down, they turn into this white fuzzy matter.
Tell me some of the other places you've seen cockroaches. I’ve seen a saucepan that was left for three months because the owner, who had used it last, couldn’t be bothered cleaning it up. So after three months, someone threw this cockroach infested saucepan away and the owner got really irate. They said, “I can’t believe someone did that, that was my grandmother’s!” I just started laughing and he’s like, “It’s not funny man!” Actually it was funny, because if that was such an important item, you should have done something about it. It was sitting there for three months.
Was that the grossest thing about the house? We’d be living with 12 people and we’d buy bulk toilet paper. Toilet paper would run out, no one was bothered to buy more. You’d shit and shower.
And, let me guess, no one would ever clean the shower? Nah, no one would clean the shower. One of the girls that lived there, her cat brought home a dead bird. It literally stayed in the middle of her floor for three weeks. She didn’t want to move it, it was too disgusting.
Meri, 21 and Andrea, 25 Spain
What’s the most disgusting habit one of your room mates have had? Meri: The first night that she [their new room mate] live in the house, she come with one boy and she… Andrea: She fuck in the couch
In the living room? Both: Yes!
In front of everyone? Meri: No, but we hear them. And after she come to my room with this guy, and the guy in the night [Meri makes snoring noises] so I have to go sleep on the couch. Andrea: (Laughing) He snored a lot!
Vicky, 23 Newtown
What’s the most disgusting habit your room mate has ever had? Vicky: My ex-boyfriend used to cut his toe nails. Not over the toilet, he used to just cut them on the floor. So they’d be all over the carpet. I’d be walking and have something stuck to my foot and there would be a toenail on the bottom of my foot. That was disgusting.
Did he ever try to justify leaving his toenails everywhere? He said he could get a better angle when he sits on the end of the bed than if he does it over the toilet seat.
You can't argue with logic. Also, my old room mate used to have this habit where if she’d been to the shops, she hated going again, which is understandable. But it would mean you'd would go to make a cup of tea for everyone right, and you’d be like, "Do you want a cup of tea?” And this person would obviously know that there was no milk in the carton and yet would agree to having a cup of tea, so that you, the tea brewer, would have to go to the shop to buy more milk.
That’s psycho. Did you ever say anything to her? I used to leave notes around the house, saying like “When milk is gone, what do we do? We say something!”
Passive aggressive. I love it.
Rhees, 29 Narrabeen
What’s the most disgusting room mate you have ever had? Rhees: So I had an English room mate and he wouldn’t do his dishes for about eight or nine days. They would be piling in the sink to the point where you couldn’t fit a plate on the sink. We’d get cockroaches and it smelled really bad.
Did you do anything about it? I got really annoyed one week and I bundled them up in a plastic bag and I put it out the front of his bedroom door. He got really angry and wanted to beat the shit out of me. He said, “You want to take this downstairs? I’ll fuck you up!” I’m like, “Oh man, it’s just dishes.”
What happened next? Did you take it downstairs? After this whole dish thing, my room mate decided he couldn’t be bothered doing his dishes anymore. So, what does he do? He goes and gets paper plates. He and his friend, who lived with us for a month, ate every single meal out of a paper plate with plastic spoons, so he could throw it away and he didn’t have to do any dishes.
How did things end up? We weren’t too tight after that. I moved out shortly after, I met a girl and we just moved in together. She turned out to be worse.
Why? Well, she’s actually my partner and the mother of my child so I probably shouldn’t say anything too bad... She’s just messy! She’s got a wardrobe and just leaves all her clothes on the floor. We are talking like 20 centimetres high all along the bedroom floor.
Just the right height to make clothes angels hey? I bought her a guitar once for her birthday and I hid it in the back of the cupboard behind all her clothes once for three weeks. It’s a tiny apartment so there’s nowhere to hide a guitar. [On her birthday] I pulled it out and she says, “Where did that come from?” I replied, “It was hiding underneath all your clothes and you didn’t even know.”
Jason, 20 Blue Mountains
What’s the most disgusting habit one of your room mates has had? Jason: I had a room mate who used to floss his toes with his socks
What was he hoping to achieve with that? Getting rid of itchy dead skin, I guess.
Did he do this outside or inside? Just inside, normally on the lounge.
Did you confront him about it? It was just one of those things where you eventually just kind of look at him and go, “What the fuck are you doing?”
What did he say? He thought it was pretty normal.
Did he clean it up or did he wait for you guys to do it? He kind of just left it for the vacuum, didn’t he?
There are many sides to LA. But few people travel between the realms that were separated during the first half of the 20th century when the Great Migration and post-war Mexican immigration changed the face of the city.
Photographer George Rodriguez is the rare artist who has thrived between Hollywood and Chicano LA for more than half a century. Born in 1937 to a Mexican immigrant father and a Mexican-American mother, Rodriguez has spent his life creating a body of work that captures the many facets of life in LA—from the glittering stars of music, TV, and film to the leaders and activists of the Civil Rights, United Farm Workers, and Chicano movements.
From an archive that includes everyone from Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, and the Brown Berets to Jimi Hendrix, Michael Jackson, and N.W.A., Rodriguez has partnered with author Josh Kun to publish his first career retrospectiveDouble Vision: The Photography of George Rodriguez (Hat & Beard Press, April 10). An exhibition of photographs from Double Vision will open at The Lodge in Los Angeles on May 26. I spoke with Rodriguez about creating art of the fabled city during some of its most incendiary years.
VICE: What was life like growing up in South LA during the 40s and 50s? George Rodriguez: My dad opened a shoe shop in the Skid Row section of LA. We lived there until 1949 and then moved to South Central. South Central is a tough place to grow up—it might even be worse now, but it makes you stronger.
Fortunately the school in my area, Fremont High School, had a great vocational photography course. It all began when I needed an elective and one of my classmates told me to take photography because it was easy, so I did. The school turned out a handful LIFE magazine photographers—that was like the Holy Grail for photojournalists. I think that’s what inspired me.
I got a job after school in a photo lab. We were struggling, so I had to go out and start making money. That’s how I started working my way through different photo labs in the Hollywood area.
Could you speak about your first professional job? I was lucky to get a job working with Sid Avery in 1957-58. I drove a friend to Hollywood because he was going to apply for a job at a camera store. I parked in front of a photo studio and it was Sid Avery’s. I saw someone inside the building setting up a camera and I walked inside to see what he was doing.
We started talking. I didn’t know Sid Avery at all, but he was aware of the Fremont photographers. He told me they were hiring and he had a photography lab, which was ideal for me. He used to have me assist him and that was so much fun, because I was learning so much.
Sid shot for LIFE, Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, and Look. I remember once we went to shoot Lucille Ball, and he was doing a home layout for Family Circle and one of her eyelashes fell into the barbecue pit. It just burned up so quick!
Could you tell us what the conditions were like for Mexican-Americans at this time? In the Hollywood area, it was tough because you didn’t have the luxury of your parents working in the entertainment industry. Hollywood was organized by unions when I was trying to get a job in the 1950s—and when you don’t have that background, you work in different areas.
I started working on the Columbia Pictures lots after this guy who used to bring film to the labs asked if I wanted to set up their photo lab and run film. While I was there, my boss asked me if we could make prints. I asked a friend of mine, who was Mexican-American, to join me: I was developing film and he was making prints. A few union people showed up and told my boss he had to fire me because we were not in the union. The fact that we were Chicano didn’t help any. But we already had enough days so they had to take us in the union.
When I finally got into the union, I used to ask how many Latinos were taken in or promoted and the answer would always be: “None.” I don’t know how it is now, but for the past 50 years, the question that always came up every decade was: “Where are the Latinos in Hollywood?”
My perspective on things is always, I am a photographer. I am not a Mexican or a Chicano photographer, and I hope people do not misunderstand that, because I am very proud of who I am. That’s how I look at things.
In the book you state, “I was really living two lives.” Could you speak about that? I never thought about that. It was just my life. While I worked at Columbia, there were walkouts in East Los Angeles. I would grab my camera and take off on my lunch hour—and because I was the manager, I could go down to East LA, shoot as much as I could, and then come back to work.
The only times that I was aware of being Chicano was when I worked with another one, which was rare. I remember doing publicity photos for Mario Lopez when he was eight years old and I could relate to the parents because we had so much in common. That’s when I noticed the difference. Or when I shot someone like Cheech Marin of Cheech & Chong or Freddy Fender. On television, it seems like Latinos are invisible, but if you live in LA or California, we are all over the place.
How did the Chicano Movement influence your sense of the people and the culture? The Chicano Movement was fascinating to me. When things started happening, I knew I had to cover all of this stuff, so I did. You do the best you can for people who aren’t there, so you can give them an idea of what was happening, but even in photographs it is difficult to do that.
Meeting and knowing Cesar Chavez [was how I realized] that what was going on was really exceptional. The people involved were my friends like Sal Castro, so I had inside information on what was happening, like the Moratorium March. Whenever I heard of anything, I would try my best to be there. I knew that for Chicanos, there really was no formula, so I really respected all they were up to. It seemed like a dangerous situation, not physically so much as people could go to jail for their beliefs.
My original intent was to do a book on the Chicano Movement and the whole Mexican-American experience. That’s why I have so much photography on those moments of the 60s, 70s, and 80s. I never realized people would label that as Civil Rights. I thought it was about neighborhoods and people, but then people put labels on it and that makes a lot of sense, but I never saw it that way.
What was it like going back through your archive to select the works for this book? I realized that I had so very much to choose from, especially local history. In my photographs I see politicians and people growing up, the beginning, and now having come and gone.
I love the end result, and I think it will be very educational for people. I hadn’t realized that until I started getting feedback from people. It’s almost like I have done some homework for them. I’ve always been very protective of my images, so a lot of it has never been published before. It’s almost like I was looking at someone else’s work—and I thought, “Wow, those are really good!” ( Laughs).
Did you discover things you hadn’t previously seen, or see your work in a new way as a result of experience and age? I found things that I had forgotten about. I used to hang out at the Whiskey A-Go-Go a lot and one night I went there to shoot an album cover for Van Morrison, and the Doors were the house band. For the last set, both bands were on stage so there were both Morrisons, Jim and Van, singing “Gloria.”
When things are happening you don’t appreciate them as much as later, like meeting people like Cary Grant. That’s why I am aware to concentrate on what is going on, because tomorrow you are going to realize you had a great time [Laughs].
It’s like when Elvis Presley made his comeback special. I was in the recording studio and this was an historical milestone. Or hanging out with Cesar Chavez in the height of the grape boycott—you are exactly where you want to be. Photography takes you there.
Back in 2004, four students at Kentucky's Transylvania University hatched a plan that would become one of the craziest art heists in American history. Funded in part by a fake ID business and inspired by repeated viewings of Guy Ritchie's Snatch, the friends managed to pull off a messy robbery at their school's rare book room, escaping with an original copy of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and other rare books worth around $10 million.
The four guys may have successfully made off with the rare books, but selling them was another story, and in the process of trying to get their score appraised by Christie's, the FBI caught up to them and shipped the whole gang off to prison. The whole thing was, as Vanity Fairput it later, "one part Ocean’s 11, one part Harold & Kumar."
Now, 14 years later, the heist that was inspired by heist movies has become a heist movie itself.
American Animals, the new film from writer/director Bart Layton based on the bizarre saga of the Transy Book Heist, pulled in massive praise when it hit Sundance and SXSW earlier this year. Variety called the film "sensational" and Hollywood Reporterpraised Layton's first foray into narrative filmmaking as one of "the most accomplished and fully realized big-screen debuts of recent times."
On Wednesday, The Orchard released the first trailer for the upcoming film, starring a murders' row of young talent—from Dunkirk's Barry Keoghan to American Horror Story's Evan Peters to Blake Jenner of Everybody Wants Some!!—and the trailer does a fantastic job of capturing the sloppy and exhilarating feeling of the heist. What the trailer doesn't show us, though, is way Layton periodically interrupts the film's narration with first-hand (and sometimes contradictory) accounts of the saga from the kids who inspired the movie itself—one of the pieces that makes American Animals such a unique entry into the heist genre.
Their insane true story hits theaters on June 1. Until then, give the trailer a watch above.
In lieu of any actual gun control, folks around the country have been coming up with some pretty innovative ways to protect students from mass shootings after 17 people were gunned down at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Kids at the Parkland, Florida, school are sporting clear backpacks, one school district is arming students with buckets of rocks, and other schools have been buying up bulletproof shelters for their classrooms.
Since it looks like we're getting nowhere on any actual federal gun control measures, yet another school district in Erie, Pennsylvania, has been forced to get creative when it comes to protecting its students: arming each of its 500 teachers with mini, 16-inch bats.
According to the Erie Times-News, teachers at the Millcreek School District were handed the cheap baseball souvenirs at the end of a training session on how to defend against school shooters, which ostensibly included a few rounds of batting practice and multiple viewings of that scene from The Warriors. Sounds like a surefire deterrent against an onslaught of bullets, right?
"It is the last resort," Millcreek's Superintendent William Hall told Erie News Now. "But it is an option, and something we want people to be aware of."
According to Hall, the bats "are more symbolic than anything"—a visible reminder that instead of just doing their jobs for meager pay, teachers are now expected to protect their classrooms from active shooters.
"It’s not about just hiding and waiting," Hall told the Erie Times-News. "There are options, and one of those is to fight."
Money doesn't have the same value in prison, so inmates rely on outside runners to transfer cash from one person to another, which releases items to inside buyers. And if you need a money transferral, Hakim* is your guy.
I met up with Hakim at a TAB deep in the Western suburbs. He was pulling $50 notes from a bundle he had in an EA7 messenger bag. He passed me a handful of notes and nodded in the direction of the Big Red pokie machine. “Don’t put in more than $100 at a time," he told me. "The machine jerries [catches on] and fucks you over.” Then I watched his diamond studded Hublot rhythmically pound the buttons as his credits shrunk to zero.
The prison world is separated into two economies. There's the public one, which is an image controlled by guards and state justice departments. And then there's the underground economy, which is a system that prison intelligence tries to disrupt. This market runs on cash in exchange for luxuries that emulate freedom: mostly cognac, gambling, USB sticks loaded with porn, and methamphetamine.
I sat down with Hakim to understand how he manages the flow of money from the underground to the real world.
VICE: Hey Hakim, let's start at the beginning. How did you get into this job? Hakim: My cousin went to prison and stood over a guy who had access to beup [Buprenorphine is a opiate used in prisons to counter heroin addiction]. I wasn’t working at the time so I was visiting him heaps. He told me about how much money was being turned over in jail, some guys were making at least 10 grand a week, so we worked out a way of getting in on it. You can get shard outside for about $4k an ounce, while in prison you can get up to $20k for it. My cousin started divvying up the buep to the Asians because they were the most reliable and I would meet their contacts on the outside to pick-up the coin.
I built a reputation for being very reliable and I always distributed the profit we made with the families of the other inmates in my cousin's unit. They all look after each other and I get to make a living off it on the outside as long as I’m available whenever they need me. Before I knew it my cousin was being approached to collect money for all the other rorts inside; gambling, ice, buep, whatever. If it involved money, I was getting in on it. Now I work seven days a week.
Does it get dangerous? Sometimes. I’ve been stabbed in the arm once, because some junkies tried to roll me. They set me up, thinking that I drove around with a car full of cash.
What happened? I met them at the carpark of Southland shopping centre, near the cinemas on a Wednesday night. There wasn’t anyone around which made me suss. They kept asking me to get out of the car and walk towards them. I was like, “Get fucked just bring me the money because I’ve got boys waiting for me at the gym.” He walked over to the car with one hand in his pocket and a hoodie on. I still thought, he’s probably just paranoid walking around with cash, but I left my car on and when he got close I rolled down my window and asked him what was going on. He just shoved his hand into the car back and forth several times.
I thought he was punching me but then I saw blood on his jersey and hit the accelerator. I couldn’t find where I'd been stabbed so I just kept driving. They kept calling me saying they were going to have my cousin offed in jail. But the guy who organised it jumped the fence the next day and went into protection.
How do you ensure your safety nowadays? I've got a couple of guys on call. I ring them and they rock up straight away. I’ve got five spots where I do pick-ups and the guys live close by so they show up ready whenever I call. They get paid a weekly retainer and we promised to sort their legals out if shit gets messy. They are responsible for making sure we get interest if cunts take too long to sort their debts. We give them an extra week on the house, every week after that it’s 15 percent, and that’s if we haven’t had their cars and jet skis signed over. The banks do that shit all the time, and we are supposed to be the corrupt ones so why shouldn't we take a cut? As my boss said, “We are criminals and this is business not charity—too much heart will make you bankrupt.”
Cars and jet skis. Tell me, how lavish are some of these guys? Look, if we do our homework on someone inside, and they are known to have mad cars and boats on the outside, we’ll put them in a spot they can’t get out of. Shout them a few points or whatever they’re into. Get them hooked and flood them with gear they can’t pay for. Sooner or later they'll slip up and we will take them for all they've got. Kind of like when banks give you a loan you can’t dig yourself out of. I’ve seen guys sign over Lamborghinis and AMGs. They act like we are doing them a favour, we are in a way, by keeping them safe from a situation they don’t know we started. Prison is like the world outside, except we don’t front like we are all nice and stab you in the back. We just stab you in the chest and we tell you we're doing this because the world is about survival of the fittest. Jump in or get dropped off.
What if those guys decide to roll you? I never think like that because I still believe in loyalty. The code is still out there if you pick the right associates. We don’t associate with crumbs anymore. These guys have all done a lot of jail and don’t fuck around, it's strictly business. Act first, ask questions later—those types of blokes. The thing that separates us from other crews and so-called gangsters is that we only associate with jail heads. I’ve served three years in a maximum security prison. If they haven’t been part of the system we don’t trust them. And the people dropping cash have to be family of whoever owes, or else no deal.
What’s the most amount of money someone has paid you? The most I’ve picked up in a week has been about 80k in cash. That was because someone in jail paid another guy to give him a pass. From what I understand he was a major coke dealer that had made a statement to the police about another inmate so one of the bosses of the yard brokered a deal to keep him alive. He had to pay 50k to settle the score. About 25k went to the guy running the unit and we were given 5K.
What is the weirdest thing that's ever happened to you? I was picking up money for a series of ice deals. The bloke in jail had told us his wife was going to front with the money but when I got to her place she said she was broke. She straight up asked if she could fuck me instead of paying. I don’t know what planet she was living on because the debt was five grand, so I put her on a payment plan and helped her as much as I could. She eventually told me her boyfriend had told her to do it, which was pretty fucking sad. We ended up getting into each other and fucking pretty regularly. I didn’t feel bad though because her boyfriend was the sad cunt using her as currency and she was a really lovely bird, just lonely as.
There was another time that my cousin told me a guy wanted me to fuck his wife. He was facing 15 years for importing a ton of MDMA. She lived in an upmarket penthouse off Chapel Street. I was collecting money off her too, but apparently she had seen me in a visit and needed a fuck buddy while her husband was in jail. I could never understand that shit but the other guys told me he gets off over the thought of her fucking other men he knows. Just he has to know them or else it's cheating. Explain that to me.
Anyway, I dropped some Kamagra and had a couple of lines to g me up and buzzed up to the room. Then I get there and there was an old man who looked like a fucking accountant in a suit. He was holding a folder he'd stuffed a few bundles of cash into. I asked him where old mate's wife was and he said she was busy with the kids. My cousin didn’t give any explanation and I spent the rest of the night picking up money from people with a boner.
Do you ever feel guilty about what the other side of your money looks like, the addictions, stand-overs, and the stabbings? I’m a religious man and I will pay for my sins. If I have done wrong and I’ll have to deal with it. But this kind of money is a funny thing. It doesn’t last, and honestly I don’t know where it goes. Dirty money corrupts you. I never gambled until I got into this business, work that out. But the more money, the more problems. I just think the more money you have, the more opportunity you have to fuck yourself, with drugs, hookers and gambling. You take bigger risks.
Over the course of sorting millions of posts from the conspiracy subreddit, many things surprised researcher Colin Klein, but perhaps nothing as much as what one particular user posted.
Well, it wasn’t exactly what they posted—it was how much.
"I kept looking at it thinking, this can't be right. I looked to make sure it wasn't a bot or something,” Klein told VICE with a laugh. “You look at this and just think, 'my god, man, you're more productive than I am' and he's not ranting either, that's the thing.”
Klein’s incredulity comes from the fact that one user posted 896,337 words over 18,000 posts on the conspiracy subreddit. That is almost twice the length as the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
"The sheer energy that people put into this, even though I should have known, was surprising even to me."
Klein found this Tolkien-level redditor over the course of a study in which he and fellow researchers attempted to find out what a conspiracy theorist really is. The research was conducted by Klein, the acting director of the Centre for Philosophy of the Sciences at Australian National University, Peter Clutton, a graduate student at ANU, and Vince Polito, a postdoctoral research fellow in cognitive science at Macquarie University. The study was published in Frontiers of Psychology in February.
In doing so, they found that what we thought about conspiracy theorists is, at the worst, wrong and, at the best, misguided.
To understand why Klein, Clutton, and Polito put themselves in the way of several million Reddit posts, you have to understand the traditional way conspiracy theorists are viewed. When most people talk about conspiracy theorists they think of people who have a "monological" belief system connecting everything to everything else—think of the Conspiracy Charlie meme from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia—and this is usually considered pathological.
It’s no secret that conspiracies and those who peddle them have become more visible in the past few years. In some cases, such as pizzagate, they’ve led to real-life violence, and overall they have an immensely negative effect on our culture. So, with online theorists leading the way, Klein and company decided to test this caricature.
"We were a bit suspicious of that, we had been around the internet,” Klein told VICE. “We thought that might characterize some of the more extreme views but it's unclear. After arguing for a while we decided the best thing we could do would be to look to actual people involved in conspiracy theories."
So, look to them they did, using the data that Reddit has made public—2.2 million posts from 130,000 unique users over eight years—and a method of analysis called topic modelling which is a way to linguistically sort things. When they did, they found these these pathological “true believers” but also much, much more.
"There are a lot of other subgroups that don't seem to fit that pattern. Many in these groups seem to have a particular focus,” said Klein. “The anti-Semites are probably the clearest on this—they are people whose main interest is some sort of racist belief insofar as they can connect things to that racism they're fine with it but if they can't, they won't."
In fact, Klein and his fellow researchers were able to take the data they found and break the subreddit posters into 12 different subcategories. They are anti-authoritarians, patriots, anti-Semites, indignant posters, skeptics, truthers, downtrodden, anti-imperialists, redditors (described as “people as much concerned with interpersonal drama on the site as they are with any particular conspiracy theory”), posters obsessed with pseudo-science, and two types of true believers. Klein told VICE that he wasn’t all that shocked with what they found.
"None of them I was particularly surprised by in retrospect but I don't think we knew what we were going to find,” Klein said. “A lot of them you say, 'oh, of course, there are a lot of gun control people on here.' The ones that kind of surprised me the most was what we called the downtrodden in the paper who were just cynical in the face of power."
Put another way, there are people who fit the typical conspiracy caricature, but they’re not the majority, in fact they’re heavily outnumbered by single issue users—they’re just loud as fuck—and it’s a mistake to paint them all with one brush. Many are attracted to the social aspect of discussing conspiracies and may not fully believe it or use it as a way to express discontent. Furthermore, they found that these users weren’t solely obsessed with conspiracies, that this wasn’t their whole life (at least online) and they would post to subreddits about cute cats and shit.
In the paper, Klein and company dubbed this the “iceberg theory”—that what we think of conspiracy theorist is only the tip of a much larger iceberg. Frankly, if we’re going to attempt to fight the long-term toxic effects that conspiracies can have on our culture, we have to start viewing the theorists in more nuanced ways. People take from the conspiracy what they can which then works to grow the same conspiracy.
“Consider a thread about (e.g.,) secret CIA prison camps. One person might care about its relationship to 9/11, another might use it to fuel their anti-Semitism, a third to make a point about gun control. Each gets what they need, and each contributes to the larger whole,” reads a portion of the paper.
When asked to take a step back from Reddit and what he thinks is causing the obvious increase in conspiratorial thinking, Klein said that there is no solid answer but he believes the massive amount of information ushered in by the internet has something to do with it. This includes seeing more mistakes made by traditional sources of newspapers, people sowing distrust from positions of power (a la Trump) and people peddling fake information. But, like most things, in the end it goes back to a lack of trust.
“Unfortunately a lot of what you see in conspiracy theorizing is a symptom of this larger breakdown of trust in things like the government and, in many cases, it's not entirely unjustified.”
Lara Croft the Tomb Raider is back and once again the "explorer" is pillaging and desecrating sacred sights as a coming of age and nail-biting Summer blockbuster. Tell me something. Why does no one ever go and desecrate Abraham Lincoln's tomb and cause irrevocable damage to the burial site in order to stop the imminent destruction of the world? I mean if we are trying to be historically factual in films where the main leads are either anthropologists, archaeologists or historians I think it's more likely that disaster would lie in the Tomb of say Lincoln, Churchill and most definitely Columbus. And not a revered god/goddess held in high regard by any number of unnamed African, Asian or Indigenous people.
It's no secret that when it comes to artefacts and the collection of of tangible history, colonialism whiteness and Eurocentrism are part and parcel of the excursion. It never ceases to amaze me how the success and/or infamy of Indiana Jones was upheld in the foreground of a temple or grave that he entered in search of claiming treasure that never belonged to him. (“It belongs in a museum of the country he is culturally invading!”) Why has Hollywood always found the pillaging of non-white sacred sites alluring and what does it say about a mainstream culture which consistently purchases tickets to these cinematic extravaganzas making Croft, Jones and The Mummy’s Rick O´Connell an extremely lucrative business?
In an interview, anthropologist and author Eric Jolly called Hollywood´s tendency to dramatize plundering, “an example of Eurocentrism with the glorification of the white hero in the context of exotic adventures.” He continued by saying that this was just another manner of ‘exoticizing non-white cultures.” Jolly is also the director of the Institut de Mondes Africains (Institution of the African Worlds), one of the largest African studies laboratories with a focus on “African globalization, representation and the politics of art.” It is located in France.
This month the Brooklyn Museum will have new curators of African Art. The two white people will “organize an innovative, freshly conceived temporary installation showcasing the breadth and depth of the collection.” I would laugh (I did) because they are serious and I am pretty sure the politics of representation and how this looks did not really seem like that big of a deal because when you are white you are allowed to be an expert in anything.
Except racism.
Then, you are just the unwilling victim/participant of a reality that was created by people you don't know, in a time you didn't exist in, and which you don't even really benefit from because black people have Obama, Oprah and Lebron James. I am not saying that non-black artists are not allowed to be purveyors of African art, but it's a problem when they are the only ones seen as being capable of being experts. But then again maybe that is what I am saying. The legacy of whiteness as the voice of culture on the African continent is ironic because of the unending persecution of the originality, wealth, skill and intricacy directed towards African art. There is a cultural and historical legitimacy that has always seemed to evade African relics when they are handled by a white gaze, seen more as happenstance than an intentional marker of a civilization. Nothing exists in a political and racial vacuum, and the politics of space are white as fuck when two white people are handpicked to innovate an African exhibition in a city where its predominantly black neighborhoods are now filled with wealthy young whites who can afford to gentrify places that were largely criminalized because of the blackness of its previous inhabitants.
With films like Tomb Raider, The Mummy and Indiana Jones wealth or imminent doom is always found at burial sites. For most non-white people whose lives are not influenced by Christian norms of Heaven and Hell, culturally and traditionally, death is never an end but simply an avenue into the next life. For ancient Egyptians death was not feared but met with with calm, resolve and promise. It is inevitable and so plans were made for the spirit to be well in the after-life. In Shona culture, the traditions of my people state that madzitateguru (our ancestors) have never left us. They walk among us as spirits or in the bodies of living things we see around us. An antelope, a bird sometimes even in the rain. What happens to their calm of mind when their graveyards are run down by the entitled footsteps of people who call themselves explorers? In life, peace evaded them because while they were trying to feed their families anti-blackness and neo-colonialism had other plans. And then too even in death whiteness intrudes to once again lay hostage to the legacy and memory of the people haunted by its constant presence. It's only a film, I hear you cry. But films always come with context and they also create and shape conversations on consumer culture, race and politics.
Claudie Voisenaat, an anthropologist who specializes in “intangible cultural heritage,” talked about the ways Tomb Raider makes the destruction of venerated sites an inevitability in the quest for white heroism. “What is problematic, it seems to me, is that in this story, the whole world and the sacred sites of other cultures are only the scene of a fight between white people: on one side the bad guys who want to enslave the planet, on the other, the good ones who want to save her. As for the natives, enslaved or abused by the wicked, they will voluntarily serve the good [people] who will rescue them. But they are always in a position of subalternity.” She continued by highlighting the dissonance of the main characters, where cultural destruction is made obsolete by victory against evil. “The dramatic destruction of a prominent archaeological site becomes a happy ending that saves the world while the hero or heroine (and the spectator) leaves with the clear conscience of an accomplished humanitarian duty.” In film non-white people have always played a supporting role to the experiences of whiteness but it's a hell of a thing when whole places are relegated to the same role.
As I write this the two white curators will be starting their jobs, Tomb Raider has made a worldwide total of almost 250 million dollars and the Ethiopian government is negotiating the long term loaning of Ethiopian artefacts stolen by British soldiers in in 1868. Their previous claim in 2007 was denied. They are basically asking for the shit that was stolen from their country to be “possibly” loaned back. One Guardian columnist thinks said artefacts “ may not be in the right place.” Gee whiz, you think? Tomb raiders were real people who looted objects that now find themselves at the center of a diplomatic negotiation even though there is nothing diplomatic about how they were taken.
We do not see films featuring heroes raiding Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s grave searching for his pocket-watch because ultimately there is a respect for the life he lived and a deference to his memory that is not allowed to those of a darker hue. There is no glory or adventure to be found from disturbing his peace because he is seen as deserving of such. And while we are on the subject of pillagers and stolen shit, maybe the Queen can give back the largest clear cut diamond in the world set in the Sovereign sceptre, which was stolen from South Africa.
Doug Ford is like a deep-ocean fish. His campaign has no bones and its shape is only held together by the sheer force of water pressure—in this case, Ontario’s comical level of hatred for premier Kathleen Wynne. The minute he meets the open air, he’ll collapse into a shuddering mound of goo.
This, presumably, is part of Ford’s rationale for keeping journalists at arm’s length by axing his campaign media bus. It’s not the worst idea in the world given his reflexive tendency say dumb shit into microphones. Doug got all his late brother’s (non-drug related) drawbacks and none of Rob’s unholy charm.
It’s a high-risk, high-reward strategy. If Ford spends most or all of the provincial election hiding in the journalistic shadows, he is going to get ruthlessly roasted for it in the press. But let’s assume that there is more method to the madness than just keeping the man safe from himself. Let’s take Doug Ford seriously as a political phenomenon.
The Ontario PCs are campaigning primarily on the (real or imaginary) grievances of their religious, rural, suburban, and self-identifying middle and working class base. This is a large and unwieldy group of people, which is why there is less focus on policy than on perpetuating the inchoate sense of outraged alienation that currently drives North American conservative politics. Every time Ford goes off about carbon pricing or abortion rights, he is not disclosing that his platform is braindead (it is) so much as he is giving his voters something sufficiently soft and fuzzy to pin their angst on. Fuck the carbon tax! Fuck the new sex ed! Fuck those thieving Liberals and their greasy activist premier! Fuck you snowflake, and fuck your feelings! Augh I’m gonna fuck this ballot box!
Anyway, we shouldn’t be too shocked about this development. Beyond the fact that losing a dedicated media bus on the campaign trail isn’t the end of the world, this is a logical progression of conservative practice. If Ford is taking the attitude that the media itself is a hostile partisan actor, he is reading as much from Stephen Harper’s hymnbook as Donald Trump’s. Harper’s method of strictly controlling media appearances and curtailing questions is the low-charisma crusader’s sword and shield.
Of course, that strategy works even better in 2018. The Canadian media ecosystem is still grappling with the transition from the 20th century heyday of print and broadcast journalism to a no-man’s land of decentralized social networks that are routinely weaponized to sow misinformation and discord. Doug Ford’s lazy populist politicking might wither and die in the full glare of a scrummage, but it can work pretty well if he can cultivate a direct media relationship to voters that bypasses the corrupt and biased Establishment Media. Every phlegmatic fact-check or scathing polemical takedown then only further deepens the delusional structure it is trying to root out. This problem gets exponentially worse in areas without good local journalism.
It takes a reasonably skilled politician to pull something like this off. Donald Trump is not good at many things, but he is a master of playing to the fatal flaws of American media. He was helped by a breathtakingly unpopular opponent.
Fortunately, Ontario is not the United States and Doug Ford is not a famous reality television star. He may very well melt into a pile of fish guts behind the podium at a leader’s debate and spare us a national nightmare. But the fact that we’ve sunk to this level at all should scare the shit out of everyone.
A Toronto lawyer who violently attacked a family with a baseball bat and yelled racist slurs at them has been given a conditional discharge after his defence said his behaviour was caused by smoking too much weed.
Mark Phillips, 37, the heir of former Toronto mayor Nathan Phillips, pleaded guilty to assault causing harm Tuesday. Phillips was charged in December with aggravated assault, and three counts of assault with a weapon, after he was caught on camera wielding a baseball bat in a St. Thomas, Ontario strip mall and screaming “Terrorist. Terrorist. We have a French terrorist here," and "ISIS! ISIS!” at a family of three and their friend. Phillips hit one of the family members, Sergio Estepa, with the bat, cracking his rib. The video went viral.
The family is from Colombia and had been conversing in Spanish when Phillips began yelling at them to stop speaking French.
According to the Globe and Mail, Phillips’ lawyer Steven Skurka argued his client’s actions were the result of a weed-induced “psychosis.” The defence presented expert testimony from Peter Collins, a psychiatrist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, who said Phillips had smoked three or four joints that day prior to the attack, the Globe reports. Phillips’ parents also said he had gotten kicked out of the Air Canada Centre the same day for yelling about North Korea, and that he was paranoid about Muslims and Nazis.
“In my professional opinion, Mark Aaron Phillips suffered from a drug-induced psychosis in and around the time of the event that led to his arrest,” he said.
Lisa Defoe, the Crown in the case, accepted Phillips’ defence, noting that while Phillip’s actions seemed like a hate crime, “it’s important for the Crown not to react emotionally.”
She asked for Phillips to be given a suspended sentence, which would have resulted a criminal record but no jail time. However, Ontario Court Justice John Skowronski decided on a conditional discharge with three years of probation, which means Phillips will not have a criminal record.
Describing the attack as an “aberration,” Skowronski reportedly told the court, “this is something that took place because of a mental illness.”
Phillips, who is a personal injury lawyer, said "I'm horrified and embarrassed and I feel ashamed."
Ottawa-based defence lawyer Michael Spratt told VICE with cannabis about to be legalized these kinds of defences need to be closely examined. While he said it seems the Crown acted reasonably in this case, factors like the privilege of the accused have to be taken into account.
“Not only does he come from a place of privilege, not only was he a lawyer from a good background, but he had the resources to produce the report and mental health evaluations,” he said. “Otherwise, clearly term of imprisonment and a lengthy term of imprisonment would be appropriate for a case like this.”
It’s not clear if the Crown reviewed the defence’s expert testimony on Phillips’ weed psychosis or simply accepted it on its face, but Spratt said there should be consistency in the approach when it comes to perpetrators of different backgrounds.
Spratt said the facts of this case are troubling because the attack appeared to clearly be racially motivated. He said the court needs to be able to differentiate between when deep-seated hatred is the motivation versus potential mental health issues.
In his victim impact statement, Estepa told the court how it was traumatizing for his son to be told “You don’t belong here.”
Human rights advocate Amira Elghawaby said the decision raises major concerns over how hate crimes are treated in Canada. Hate crimes in Canada are underreported and are rarely prosecuted.
“Even where a perpetrator is found to have suffered mental illness or temporary distress, will courts essentially overlook the racist or discriminatory undertones of their act?” Elghawaby told VICE.
She said these types of violent assaults erode a person’s sense of safety and belonging.
“A case like this leaves those of us who belong to particular communities feeling even more vulnerable. This case means that if we are targeted for our racial, ethnic, or religious identities, the justice system may not even weigh the impact, nor ensure the perpetrator faces meaningful consequences that matches the seriousness of what they have done.”
The decision could also potentially be used as a political football for those who don’t support cannabis legalization, but public health researcher Rebecca Haines-Saah told VICE that would be misguided.
She said while substance-induced psychosis does happen to some heavy users or people with limited cannabis experience who take a high dose of THC, the research on it is thin.
“The argument around ‘increasing THC content is linked to psychosis’ is actually a reason to legalize, so that people will be able to avoid high THC products. We don't have the ability for the most part in an illicit market,” Haines-Saah said.
Most of us have done prettyinsane things for love, but some people really take it totheextreme. But perhaps no one looking to make a relationship work has gone quite so far (or failed quite so hard) as Bruce Rowley, a Connecticut man who allegedly told the cops he robbed a bank, drove to Taylor Swift's house in Rhode Island, and tossed a bunch of cash over her fence to impress her.
According to the Hartford Courant, Rowley allegedly held up a bank in Ansonia, Connecticut, for $1,600 last week. But instead of spending the spoils on himself, he apparently high-tailed it to Taylor Swift's $17 million mansion in Watch Hill, Rhode Island and chucked some of it over the fence, despite the fact that Swift's property is worth literally 10,000 times more than what he stole.
Now cops say that the bizarre money toss was Rowley's way of trying to convince the singer that, you know, she belonged with him.
"It seemed he wanted to propose to her,” the Ansonia Police's Lt. Patrick Lynch told the Courant. "But she wasn’t home when he went there. He said he threw some of the money over a fence to impress her."
Saddled with the unbearable weight of his unrequited, uh, love story, Rowley tried to shake it off with a lonesome drive home in his getaway car. But he wasn't—what's the phrase? Ah, yes—out of the woods quite yet. Before he could make it back, a few cops stopped him with a set of spike strips and arrested him. He then fessed up to the crime, telling the officers he'd done it all, not with any bad blood or whatever, but because he had a "crush" on the artist.
"We didn’t know about Taylor Swift until our officers picked him up from state police to drive him back to Ansonia," Lynch told the Courant. "He began to talk all about it in the cruiser."
Short of actually getting Swift to marry him, maybe Rowley just wanted to get written into one of her innumerable songs about a failed romance. A hit song about a runaway fugitive, robbing banks and leading the cops on a high-speed chase for love could be good inspiration for Swift's next pop record, or at least a music video. Then again, maybe only in Rowley's, y'know, wildest dreams.
“They die too young these days,” said one Reddit user. “When it becomes Vice's favourite meme it becomes everyone else's least favourite,” wrote another.
In fact, the original format has now shifted into a conversation about the nature of memes themselves.
Turns out, the American Chopper argument meme is itself a perfect medium for discussing some of the various arguments and theories around meme optimization. Check out some prime examples below.
In some ways, the meme isn’t ideal for mobile users...
...but also proves challenging to desktop users.
So, point-blank, does it work or not?
Is corporate use of the meme OK?
👀
Like the format, but not the source material?
Then there’s this idea.
And THIS idea.
In closing.
So, that’s where we’re at right now. In fairness to all you meme speculators out there, I actually think one meme economist got this one quite right. “I suggest just freezing your assets short to medium term,” wrote Reddit user someoneinmyhead in the previously-mentioned thread. “It was a blip and didn’t get any real interest or attention yet. Vice attempted to normify before it even took off, so this format is dormant and stunted, not dead.”
Well done, someoneinmyhead. Better luck next time, everybody else.
Eight Argentinian cops have been “dismissed” after they almost half a ton of pot went missing from a police storehouse.
The cops excuse for this missing weed? Well, it was some hungry-for-the-sticky-icky mice of course.
The Guardian reports that the missing pot was discovered during a check of the Pilar storehouse—located about 60 kilometres outside of Argentina’s capital, Buenos Aires. The 6,000 kilos of pot had been stored there for about two years but, during this check, the inspectors noticed that roughly 500 kilos was missing. Suspicion soon fell on Javier Specia, the former police commissioner of Pilar, and some of his subordinates.
When being hauled before the court, the excuse the officers and former commissioner used was identical—”it was eaten by mice.” Well, this excuse was tested in a court of law which hauled in some experts. The Guardian reports that a spokesperson for the judge ruling on the case said that the experts found there were many things wrong with this excuse, one big one being the lack of mice corpses.
“Buenos Aires University experts have explained that mice wouldn’t mistake the drug for food, and that if a large group of mice had eaten it, a lot of corpses would have been found in the warehouse,” said a spokesperson for the judge.
Now, at the moment, we don’t know exactly why the weed went missing—other than it was almost certainly not from hungry rodents—but Specia will be going before the judge on May 4 when the judge determines whether the missing weed is the result of direct action or negligence.
It is not yet known if those before the court next month will attempt to blame the missing weed on 10,000 rats or 50 eagles.
