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It's Time to Rethink the Crime Genre

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Everybody loves stories about crime, particularly murder, and the uncanny rituals and oddities that go along with any profane act. It’s so effective as source material that most books or shows don’t bother to play with the form itself at all—it’s enough to just have a dead white girl show up in a field somewhere, and let the thing play itself out.

But for me, the central act is never as compelling as all the arcana, and the twists hidden in the form. I would prefer to take the infernal kernel and let that be a conduit rather than a question asking to be solved.

Below are some recently released books that in some way poise themselves as crime-related, and yet go all kinds of different places from the holes where they began.

Cartilage and Skin by Michael James Rizza

This is easily one of the more creepy novels I’ve read in a few years, even though almost nothing traditionally “creepy” ever actually happens. Like most of the greatest examples of true terror, what’s so unnerving here comes from the perspective and the tone, carried in the strange dictation of the narrator, who is the archetypal model for a “creeper.” The narrator lives alone; stalks his reclusive neighbor, who may or may not star in fetish porn online; fixates on a homeless boy who hangs around outside his building in the street who eventually goes missing; and each day orchestrates his way into unnecessary interactions with total strangers just to spend time near them. Rizza has a mesmerizing ability to get into the brain of an Asperger’s-ridden loner who may or may not be giving us the whole story about his intentions and his past, which makes even the most banal and everyday actions and descriptions carry a tense, compacting weight.

What’s even more disturbing is how the narrator doesn’t seem aware of the entirety of the story he’s telling. At sudden points, the meticulous and driving prose of the narrator’s monologue will shift, opening the story into passages that seem disassociated from the present. Stories within stories read as if the narrator is making a puppet of himself, a truly psychotic-seeming dose of brutal fantasy, which, when buried in the regular narrative, takes on a meta-sense of something wrong. As we continue alongside the narrator while he fumbles to maintain the guise of a normal life both for himself and those around him, that sense of something wrong slowly grows, and the gap between what we know and what we don’t know tightens, like a clamp around the neck.

Rizzo is so good at layering the voice with logic, justification, and an almost unconscious sense of vengeance on the part of the loser, that by the time you begin to feel it aching it’s too late. If you ever wanted to walk around in the head of that weird white van-driving neighbor on your street whom you just know has something buried in his backyard, this novel is your ticket.

Brief by Alexandra Chasin

A counterpoint to the sociopath genre, Brief takes on a wholly different kind of criminal mindset—that of the intellectual criminal, one who knows precisely what they are doing and does it to prove a point. In this case, the crime is vandalism of a famous work of art. The narration here takes on the form of a legal plea, offering a lengthy and rigorous social justification for why our protagonist decided to go into a museum with a can of spraypaint and, copycatting Tony Shafrazi’s defacing of Picasso’s Guernica, writes “KILL LIES ALL” across a painting, left unnamed.

The result is a magnificently intuitive and conceptual negotiation of art’s place in history, and its influence on the brains of the people it surrounds. Each paragraph here is stuffed with a collage-like ream of related facts, including prior acts of vandalism as well as works of art that take defacing as their base, such as Rauschenberg’s Erased DeKooning Drawing. But also: the Cold War, Elvis Presely, the KGB, violence on television, the Daughters of the American Revolution, Walter Cronkite, and endless points of cultural influence, all together barraging the reader with context upon context framing the world in which we live. Like Patrik Ourednik’s Europeana, one of my favorite novels of the last 20 years, Chasin’s ability to synthesize so many historical factors into a relentless voice quickly takes on a monolithic sort of stature, the kind of book that you can get something from just by opening it and reading any page.

What’s maybe even more impressive is how strong a sense of self the narrator is able to establish among the noise. Wired alongside the gamut of cultural references are miniature recollections of the narrator’s own life, from remembering the smell of baby powder to walking in on parents having sex. The reams of information intertwine so causally, and so explicitly, that it is almost as if there’s no way to keep the world of art and war separate from the world of a child. The book seems to be awake and refuses to stop mutating. All in all it’s a high level act, and one that bears multiple readings almost immediately.

Expectation by Jeffrey Deshell

Perhaps one of the most under-accessed ways a text has to take on the feel of the meticulousness of a certain kind of crime is to have the form of the book do as much work as the words themselves. You see so much fetishization of the maniacal rituals often associated with crimes like serial murder, but so often works of art made in their image lack any kind of meticulous artifice themselves, relying instead on gore and putridity to drive the feeling home.

While Jeffrey Deshell’s Expectation is presented upfront as a murder mystery, the matter itself is a shell for the author’s predilection for totally reconfiguring the possibilities of what a form can be. This time Deshell chooses to mate detective fiction with Austrian expressionist composer Arnold Schoenberg. The formal constraint breaks the proceeding investigation into riffs, so that layer by layer we are led into a search that seems to be going nowhere. Crime scenes bleed into dossiers bleed into conversations, sending the plot of the book inward as if on a search for itself. The deeper we get, and the more the avenues of investigation are folded over onto one another, the more different sorts of windows are opened up.

Left Hand by Paul Curran

Easily the grossest of this list, Left Hand immediately brings the reader into its damage by giving him no choice but to interact. Opening to the first page, we find what looks like a set of instructions, spelled out as commands:

1.1

(a) Perch with your feet on either side of the bathtub.

(b) Stare at your cock getting hard through the rising steam.

(c) Hear your lungs sucking in the most air they can.

(d) Exhale and then thrust your mouth down at your cock.

(e) Slip under the water hitting your head and pass out.

The text goes on like this from there, leading you block by block through scenes of very gruesome abuse and sexual machination, like some kind of role-playing game penned by Sade.

Then, interrupting the lists of commands, longer text blocks appear, which seem to open the book into the room behind the room, into the mouth of the programmer. Suddenly we seem to be alongside the one directing all the hell. “To stop this novel occurring from this motel room is impossible,” the first non-command sentence states. The narrator appears to be at war with the thing he’s been designated to create, taking part in real life scenes as close to those we’ve been commanded through in second person. It is almost as if the narrator has been enslaved to his creation, forced to recreate things that should have never had a life. By the end, everything is so fucked it doesn’t even feel fucked anymore, and the private life of the narrator doesn’t seem strange either. It creates a truly terrifying feeling—recognizing that you’ve forgotten not to relate to what the book would have you do, which is maybe the rarest sort of power.

Follow Blake on Twitter


The Wide World of Bookies

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All illustrations by Skip Sterling

Betting on sports is only legal in four states: Delaware, Montana, Nevada, and Oregon. The rest of the country has to make its bets illegally, through bookies. As with any enterprise that holds the promise of easy money, there’s never a shortage of hungry gamblers looking to make a few dollars.

A few years ago, when I was working as a bartender in New York, I met a ton of bookies who’d ask me to “hold” envelopes stuffed with tickets and cash for shady customers who’d stop by later to pick them up. I quickly learned that those who operate in this world hail from all walks of life. Some were involved in organized crime, while others were independent operators who only took a few bets for friends and coworkers. Their clients were a varied lot who, for whatever reason, just liked to bet on sports: frat boys, athletes, waste-management guys, firefighters, cops, doctors, lawyers, and former felons. I spent a lot of time with a few bookies and customers in particular, through whom I became familiar with the less savory aspects of the business, starting with how the job actually works.

Illegal bookies base their lines (“money lines”) and spreads (“point spreads”) on calculations made by actuaries for Vegas casinos. These lines and spreads represent a handicapping that expresses which team bookies think is more likely to win. In the days and hours leading up to a game, bookies adjust their lines and spreads to account for the bets (“action”) in their books, fluctuations in the Vegas numbers, and any other unexpected events that could affect the outcome, such as player injuries.

There are many ways to use a bookie, but most customers stick to a few basic kinds of bets. To take this year’s Super Bowl as an example, when the Broncos were the obvious favorite leading into the game, the money line was set at Seattle +110, Denver -130. If you wagered $100 on Seattle and they won, you would get your $100 back, plus an additional $110 (minus the bookie’s “juice,” or commission, usually set at 5–10 percent). If you took the line on Denver instead, a $130 wager would net you only $100, but you would see the return of your $130 (less the bookie’s juice). But you also have to consider the point spread, which was set at 2.5 for this year’s Super Bowl. If you bet on Denver, you would need them to beat Seattle by more than two and a half points for it to count as a win. On the other hand, if you backed Seattle on the spread, you’d need them to lose by fewer than two and a half for your wager to become a winning ticket. Finally, on a “total wager,” gamblers bet on the total points scored by both teams combined. In this year’s Super Bowl, the “over-under” was 47.5, meaning that a wager on the under would pay off if the total points scored by both teams were fewer than 47.5. (This year the over was the winning bet, since the total point score was 51.)

Successful bookies make it their business to learn the habits and tendencies of each of their bettors, basing their observations on an archetypal matrix of sorts: “Sharps,” also known as “wise guys,” tend to do their research, wager larger amounts than most bettors, and generally wait until the last minute to place their bets. They are knowledgeable and unlikely to let sentiment influence their decisions. On the other hand, “degenerates” are often deeply sentimental bettors who place bets they can’t afford, struggle to pay on time, and compulsively wager themselves deeper into the hole. “Schnooks” are unsavvy bettors, more likely than others to get duped, and they rarely come out ahead of their bookies. Schnooks and degenerates are more inclined than other bettors to accept unappealing lines and spreads, and they’re more likely to put in an early wager than to wait for the lines and spreads to settle.

Sentimentality can be a very powerful guide for a gambler’s decision making, and when it comes to the Super Bowl, this sentimentality sometimes goes haywire. This year, New York and New Jersey bookies reported large and unexpected sentimental action on Denver from gamblers hoping to see Manning win another Super Bowl. When the lines first opened, Seattle was the favorite. But within 20 minutes the early action had been pushed out by emotional action, flipping the money line to favor Denver. Nonetheless, bookies reported that unpredictable winter weather could be the deciding factor for the game and for their books, that Seattle would win in cold weather or snow, and that Denver would win if warmer weather prevailed in New Jersey.

As game day approached, and the likelihood of having a snowy Super Bowl increased, the action started to turn back toward Seattle. In the two weeks leading up to the game, the weather was all my bookies wanted to talk about, which was annoying but also made perfect sense. Misjudging the expected outcome of the biggest football game of the year could be a very costly mistake for anyone running a sports book.

Some of the bookies I met came to be involved in the business after running a book for friends, which led to friends of friends and, eventually, a de facto gig. Most were employed, or at least trained, in some sort of legitimate profession; their bookie business was something on the side. A handful had lost their jobs during the financial crisis, with sports books becoming their only source of income.

Dom was the first New Jersey bookie I got to know well, and he lived up to the stereotype—a 6'4" Italian American with prison-yard muscles and a hefty beer gut who could’ve easily walked into Central Casting and stepped out with a bit part in a Scorsese film. He even had the right nickname, “the Two-Ton Gorilla.” He has enormous hands, a square and heavily scarred face, a flattened broken nose, a very loud voice, and a very hot temper. Dom had grown up around bookies and loan sharks, and when he was younger he enjoyed getting into fights. This eventually led Dom to run his own wire room, which he started after a few years in prison for unrelated convictions under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. He employed a team of clerks who handled customers and their bets. Clerking was seen as a very desirable gig. The hours were good, and it was possible for a talented clerk to be put in charge of a wire room or to open a book of his own one day. His right-hand man and unofficial head clerk was an old-timer called Sammy. While Dom set the lines and met with a few customers every week, Sammy and the other clerks would meet with customers daily.

To make a bet, a customer would call one of the clerks, the wire-room number, or Dom’s cell. Most bets came in on game day, because, like the bookies, customers know they can lose money due to unanticipated events, like player injuries. After each game, clerks tallied their books—though they all knew exactly where they stood during every minute of the game—and Dom did the same for the entire wire room. Once the totals were logged for each clerk and customer, they held meetings to exchange money and start setting up the action for the next game.

Sitting in a dive bar in a recently gentrified neighborhood in Brooklyn, I’d wait for Dom, watching as guys would wander in and order drinks, asking the bartender if Dom had been in yet. They’d wait, excitedly talking about how they’d fared in the past week and how they planned to pick winners for upcoming games. Dom would stride in and slam his gigantic hands on their backs. His booming voice would drown out the jukebox as he’d shout to the bartender, “Coors Light and whatever these guys are having! What’s good? How’s the family?” He once introduced me to a pair of customers, a local school-board official and a construction worker, by saying, “This is Rach, my nerd.”

Money would be exchanged, notes would be taken, and the conversation would flow from sports to the weather, politics, women, kids, work, employees, and then inevitably back to sports. Dom’s phone would vibrate incessantly, flashing with calls, texts, and emails. He’d pick up without saying hello, just “Yeah, I’m on my way,” or “Ten minutes, all right, pal?” Calls from anyone he wasn’t due to meet that night were sent straight to voice mail to be handled the next morning.

Then we’d head to his next pickups, where Dom would repeat the same performance with other customers. As night fell, the locations would switch to strip clubs. This was the scene every Thursday night, from about 5 PM to sunrise, as Dom seduced his customers into another week of gambling.

Occasionally he’d binge on cocaine, which would sometimes cause him to freak out, and he often drank heavily. One summer afternoon a few years ago, as we took a leisurely stroll through midtown Manhattan, I asked Dom if he had enjoyed the Memorial Day weekend.

“It was horrible, Rach,” he said. “Had to go to Jersey, Brooklyn, and the Island after work Friday. Then back to Queens before I went home. Got into it with someone I’ve known for years, a good friend. He owed us $30,000. Dumbass shows up at this diner, hands me an envelope, and there’s only ten in it. Ten. Fucking. G’s. What am I supposed to do with that?”
I shrugged.

“I grabbed a fork and stabbed him in his fucking eye, is what I did. You have any idea how difficult it is to poke an eye out?”

I told him I had no idea.

“Neither did I, but it is.”

Before I started hanging out with Dom, I assumed the world of bookmaking would be violent. But it isn’t, on the whole. Physical violence is very rare, and for the most part, the day-to-day is all about proving whose dick has the most swing. Maintaining control over the clerks, making the most money, not letting degenerates and sharps bankrupt the office, and making rivals look impotent are the bulk of the job description. Sometimes, when Dom made mistakes in setting adjusted lines, his unofficial head clerk, Sammy, would take great pleasure in announcing losses the wire room was taking on a game in play: “You see that field goal? That just cost the house $50,000, and it’s only the first quarter!” Despite their occasional quarrels, Sammy and Dom maintained a close friendship for many years until Sammy retired to Mexico. Even now, in retirement, Sammy occasionally returns to New York to help Dom out.

Every year around Super Bowl time, law-enforcement sting operations increase and bookies across the country get busted and thrown into jail, involuntarily forfeiting proceeds of the most lucrative week of their year. Considering that this year’s Super Bowl was held in New Jersey, local bookies were on high alert. Governor Chris Christie has made it clear that he wishes to legalize sports gambling in his state’s casinos, and local bookies were worried that the governor was looking to take down large betting operations to demonstrate the need to regulate a widespread—and very profitable—black market. With this ammunition, the bookies told me, Christie and his cohorts could more easily challenge the leading sports leagues and make steps toward legalizing and regulating sports gambling, in hopes that the collected taxes could rescue the state’s ailing economy.

Both sides in New Jersey’s fight over the legalization and regulation of sports gambling sorely misconstrue the real nature of illegal sports gambling. As anyone who’s spent time with a bookie knows, the wager itself is only part of the appeal. Aside from the amounts won or lost, customers ascribe other values and meanings to these transactions. The juice, or “vigorish,” is little more than a fee charged by bookies for the social experience they provide. The social rituals involved in betting with your local bookie could never be replicated by a state-regulated transaction at a casino or a racetrack, where tickets are processed by bored, nametag-wearing employees sitting behind bulletproof glass in an alcove conveniently located between the bathrooms and the ATMs. What is being proposed in New Jersey would be sterile, impersonal, and joyless: the DMV of the gambling world, which would resemble similarly boring legal gambling facilities in other parts of the country. But of course, the erosion of bookie culture is not a sound legal argument. More importantly, whichever side wins the legal fight, whether it goes to the New Jersey governor or to the sports leagues (which fiercely oppose state involvement in sports gambling), bookies and their customers probably won’t even notice.

This time things worked out for Dom. He didn’t have his most lucrative Super Bowl ever, but considering the difficulty bookies had in calling this game, he was happy to come out on top. The odds on the first score coming from a Seattle safety were +4,000 (or 40/1), meaning that the payout on a $100 bet would be $4,000. As unlikely as this outcome was, those were tempting odds, and some of Dom’s customers made the wager. A few seconds after kickoff, as Denver’s first offensive snap resulted in a Seattle safety and a 2–0 Seahawks lead, the Two-Ton Gorilla sent me a text message: “That killed us.”

But this was the Super Bowl, after all, and in the end Dom was spraying champagne around the bar as if he’d just won a ring of his own. Two days later, having avoided busts and losses, he jetted to Costa Rica, where he runs two online gambling businesses, leaving the wire room in Sammy’s safe hands until Dom returns for March Madness. He makes this trip down south every year, ostensibly to check in with his online sports-book operations at a time in the year when there’s less face-to-face action. Privately, however, he admits that these long trips are more about escaping the NYC winter.

“If I don’t have to be up in the cold, why the fuck would I be?” he said. And the answer is simple: If you’re a bookie who didn’t go bust or get busted during Super Bowl week, you can pretty much do whatever the fuck you want.

 

Epicly Later'd - Season 1: Ed Templeton - Part 5

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In part five, we take a look at Ed’s life as an artist. From being coaxed out of hoarding his early paintings in Huntington Beach to confronting the homophobia of the 90s New York skate scene and finally finding success with his Teenage Smokers series, Ed’s art career has been defined in much the same way as his skate career—Ed just does Ed until people get it.

Canada Is Surprisingly Chill About Commercial Drones

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Drone image via Wikimedia Commons.

Here’s a fun fact: Vancouver reports more UFO sightings than any other city in Canada. (Go on, Toronto: get judge-y.) According to a recent Canadian UFO survey, there’s been a steady increase in sightings all over the country, with big leaps in 2008 and 2012.

Perhaps most embarrassingly, Vancouverites tweeted a “close encounter” at a minor league baseball game last fall, which turned out to be a promotional drone hyping a planetarium. Still, It begs the question: how many UFOs these days are just drones?

Seeing a drone in the city is a jarring, inexplicable experience. I’ll admit I watched one cruise past my eighth floor office window in downtown Vancouver, with confusing and anxious results. They weren't military or police drones (which operate in Canada and the US), either. They were drones procured by private citizens. Unlike America, which bans the use of commercial drones, Canada has been handing out unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) permits to all kinds of businesses since 2007.

Wildlife scientists, filmmakers, real estate marketers, agri-businesses, college instructors and resource extraction companies have all legally put drones into Canadian airspace. For better or for worse, the numbers are expected to climb dramatically over the next few years as the technology becomes more accessible.

“The use of them is exploding across professions and among the public,” says Ethan Baron, journalism instructor at Langara College in Vancouver. Last month, Baron launched a training program that teaches a dozen students to pilot camera-mounted drones during breaking news events. Every Monday (weather permitting), Baron and his students venture out to a nearby park and practice navigating a UAV in groups of four.

High-end real estate promo is another unexpected drone market in Canada’s least affordable city. “I’ve been obsessed with quadcopters for awhile,” says Russ Macnab, who makes glossy MTV Cribs-style videos using a Phantom DJI drone.

Macnab says he didn’t get a drone until January because he noted most UAV footage turns out jittery and low quality. The Phantom—which includes a stabilizing “gimbal” mount for a GoPro camera—takes smoother, slicker shots. “As soon as I saw a preview video, I had to get one,” he says.

Finding a drone isn’t difficult or prohibitively expensive. While most in-person electronics stores only stock the dinkiest toy models, you can order a professional-grade UAV online or through drone dealers. Macnab says he bought his through an Abbotsford dealer for $500. He’s since invested about $3,500 in parts and add-ons. “A few years ago a set-up like this might cost $50,000,” says Macnab, “the technology’s changed so quickly.”

Sure, there are rules and paperwork, but the application process seems straightforward and speedy once you get the hang of it. “You need to get permission from Transport Canada every time you want to fly it,” Macnab explains. Commercial drone users have to submit a detailed flight plan and make painstaking efforts to reduce risks of damage or injury. That means flying far away from people and property.

Langara’s drone reporting program—the first of its kind in Canada—was only conceived a few months ago. “We started making plans during the fall semester, and then first started working with Transport Canada in January,” Baron recalls. Unlike the American Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which has shut down baseball photographers and beer delivery services and levelled $10,000 fines, Transport Canada is thus far taking a low-bureaucracy approach.

Of course, when a protest or natural disaster does occur, Langara students will still need to wait for approval from Transport Canada to deploy the drone. Baron says he’s waiting to hear back about a request for “blanket permission”—a designation given to RCMP drones for months or even a year at a time.

“We want to be able to fly it at a moment’s notice,” he says. “The law right now, or at least the policies around the law don’t allow for any kind of spur-of-the-moment use.” Baron expects to hear back from Transport Canada in a couple weeks.

Because news happens spur-of-the-moment, some drone users don’t play by the rules. Baron says he knows of at least one Vancouver news organization that is using a drone to capture footage without legal permits.

The drone I saw last summer was definitely breaking a few rules—flying over traffic and near building windows. Because I don’t trust my own memory, I interviewed a friend and colleague who spotted the drone seconds before I did.

I asked Nichole Jankowski what she remembers. “I sit in a desk that faces south down Hamilton Street, overlooking Victory Square Park,” she says. "It was a weekday evening; the sun was going down.”

“I was looking out the window and saw movement,” she explains. “Whatever it was flew by and changed direction. It wasn’t the same pace as a pigeon or bird that you might see... I feel like it flew over the building across the street—you can see over the rooftop—and I remember it exiting going west, down Hastings.” It was a dark, metallic grey, we guessed about two feet in diameter.

For Nichole and I, the experience raised privacy anxieties almost immediately. Neither of us were keen on some stranger anonymously ogling our office’s computer and camera equipment.

Baron readily acknowledges this tension. “There are tons of legitimate uses, and there is a huge amount of potential to operate unsafely, or to look into places [drones] ought not to look,” he says. “People concerned about civil liberties in Canada and the United States have reasonable concerns that agencies could be using drones to violate people’s rights, and commit acts of unlawful intrusion.”

Having worked under surveillance drones with Canadian Forces in Afghanistan as a journalist, Baron has also felt protected by drones. “For me, the drones were used in support of soldiers who I was with, so the sound of a drone up high in the sky was usually a little bit reassuring,” he recalls. “For local people in Western Pakistan and parts of Afghanistan, I would think that sound would be much more unnerving.”

While the commercial drone businesses may have a head start north of the border, Canada may not have a lead for long. The FAA plans to introduce wide-ranging drone regulations sometime next year, which will allow commercial eyes in the skies. A US federal court already ruled against FAA fines on commercial drone photography, which the FAA has since appealed.

When asked about rising UFO sightings, Baron says, “It wasn’t me!” with a laugh. Let this be a lesson to Vancouver eccentrics: you probably saw a drone.   


@sarahberms

Comics: Blobby Boys - Part 4

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Keep your eyes peeled for new installments of Blobby Boys every Wednesday from here until the end of time. Or until Alex gets sick of working with us.

The VICE Report: Snake Island - Part 1

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The highest concentration of one of the most poisonous snakes in the world is located about 90 miles off the coast of Santos, Brazil, on a small, craggy chunk of otherwise uninhabitable land. It’s known as Ilha da Queimada Grande, or Snake Island, and it’s the only place you will find 2,000 or so of the wholly unique golden lancehead viper, or Bothrops insularis.

When you step ashore, with a keen eye you spot one of these snakes roughly every 10 to 15 minutes after clearing the base of the island, and as many as one every six square yards in other parts of the island. This means, as you are walking through the waist-high brush, even with some good boots on, it’s like walking through a minefield that moves and, instead of blowing you into chunks, slowly paralyzes you and liquefies your insides, as the golden lancehead does to the migrating birds it feeds on in the treetops.

Well, “liquefying your insides” may be a stretch, but no one knows for sure because no one bitten has lived long enough even to be admitted to a hospital, or at least none of the researchers who accompanied VICE on their journey to Snake Island owned up to that fact. Nor did the Brazilian Navy, who allowed VICE exclusive access to document their annual maintenance inspection of Snake Island’s lighthouse—which has been automated ever since the 1920s, after the old lighthouse keeper ran out of food and disappeared while picking wild bananas in a small grove near the shore. According to legend, he and the members of his rescue party died one by one, all alone and in search of one another after each had been missing for some time.

The golden lancehead is so unique and its venom so potent that specimens procured by snake-smuggling “biopirates” can fetch up to $30,000 apiece on the black market (with prices going much higher depending on the location of the rich weirdo snake collector or, some have speculated, the black-market biopharmaceutical chemists attempting to beat Brazil on a patent).

Is that the craziest fucking description of a documentary you’ve ever heard? The answer is yes. So of course VICE’s editor-in-chief, Rocco Castoro, and senior producer, Jackson Fager, had to go there and nose around for themselves. On their return they said things like: 

“It was like a David Lynch movie through the prism of Satan’s asshole. The anti-Galápagos. Darwin in reverse." 

"[It's] cut off from the mainland and perhaps the land of a long-buried pirate treasure, according to the stories from local fishermen. But they also told us there were aliens on the island, so pretty much anything goes. It’s scorched earth. It's where I would send my worst enemies to live, and I look forward to setting up a business with the Brazilian government to do just that. After the World Cup, of course."

“What I can tell you is that there are stone fucking steps hand-carved into the face of one of the prominent cliffs, all the way up. But you can’t dock anywhere near there. There’s also the possibility that [the venom] could be used for an anti-cancer drug, or perhaps anti-aging. Maybe it could save mankind. Whatever. They wouldn't have saved my ass." 

"There are blue locusts and so many of these weird, prehistoric-looking cockroaches on the ground at night that it crunches when you walk. Place is fucked. No one is allowed there for a reason. Don't ever go." 

"All that said, great shoot. Great diving, too."

Fred Phelps Just Died—Fuck That Guy

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Illustration by Victoria Sin

So, Fred’s gone to live with the big fag-hater in the sky. America mourns. The rainbow flags are fluttering at half mast. Really, you can’t overestimate how cut up the nation is. Who, for example, is left to piss all over the country's dead soldiers? It's a responsibility everyone will have to shoulder together.

Saddest of all, the big ol’ flirt ended his days estranged from even the two dozen people he’d made it his life’s work to keep tame and mute. Excommunicated from his church and emotionally exiled from 99.9 percent of the human race, Fred Phelps died as alone as it is possible for a man to be. Pity him for his grim motiveless anger, but let’s at least remember him as he would have wanted us to: as a psychotic, sadistic life-wrecker and overall pretty bad egg. He certainly didn’t want your pity, as the following catalogue of ugh will show.

HE ONCE BLEW AN ALSATIAN APART WITH A SHOTGUN
A quote from his estranged son, Mark Phelps: “One of my earliest memories was the big ol' German shepherd that belonged to our neighbours. One day it was in our yard, and my father went out and blew it apart with his shotgun.”

BUT DON’T WORRY: HE ALSO WON AWARDS FROM CIVIL RIGHTS GROUPS
Back before there was Fred Phelps, evil’s real-world avatar, there was Fred Phelps, tough, respected civil rights lawyer. Phelps was remembered as an eloquent, determined opponent, and the same righteous, grizzled croak that hypnotised his small flock when he turned preacher was what hypnotised juries. Phelps Chartered Law, the law firm that still bears his name, retains an office in downtown Topeka, Kansas.

“I was raised in Mississippi. I knew it was wrong the way those black people were treated. I instinctively knew it was against the word of God,” recalled the man whose congregation once picketed the funeral of a murdered teen.

Partly because work was thin, Phelps took the cases no one else would touch. In 1960s Topeka, if you were black and trying to sue your employer for unfair dismissal, chances were you'd be recommended to consult Fred Phelps. He was so successful that he won awards from the NAACP for all that racial-equality advancement.

“He made a fortune on all those cases,” said Joe Douglas Jr, the black former Topeka fire chief and long-time civil rights activist. “All the businesses hated him because he was so successful. I think if they discriminated against Martians, he would have done those cases. He could make money.”

HE MANAGED TO AVOID LOOKING TOO BAD FOR AGES
Many former clients were gobsmacked when Phelps reinvented himself as the most hated man in America. “I see him out there, and I hear the venom that comes out of his mouth,” Joe Douglas noted. “If you had asked me in the 60s if he would do this, I would have said never.”

HE WAS A HYPOCRITICAL DRUG ADDICT
In the 60s, Fred Phelps wasn’t interested in turning on, tuning in and dropping out. He was that other, less attractive creature: the middle-class, priggish, self-denying, semi-legitimate drug addict using prescription uppers to get him going, and barbiturates to slam the brakes on at night. Eventually, though, his whole system unravelled. One day, he just didn’t wake up. An ambulance was summoned and it took a comatose Phelps off to spend a week in hospital. This was early 1968. Mrs Phelps told her kids that daddy had suffered an allergic reaction.

HE WAS GREAT AT NOT EATING
After his time in hospital, Phelps returned, dried out and then, in what may have been the unravelling of him, dived straight into a near-suicidal regime of water-only fasting for 47 days. His weight plummeted from around 16 to nine stone.

THERE IS NO MORE UNCOMFORTABLY BIZARRE SENTENCE AVAILABLE ON FRED PHELPS THAN THIS FROM JON MICHAEL BELL’S ADDICTED TO HATE
“Mark remembers the family coming back once to find Pastor Phelps jogging around the dining room table, beating the sobbing [Nate] with a broom handle; while doing so, he was alternately spitting on the frightened child and chuckling the same sinecure laugh so disturbing to those who've seen him on television.”

HE CELEBRATED THE DEATH OF HIS SON’S GIRLFRIEND
In 1970, Debbie Valgos was a sweet local girl who had the misfortune to fall in love with Fred Phelps Jr. The pair tried to elope, but were caught by Fred Sr. Discipline followed, but Debbie was then allowed to attend Westboro services along with Fred Jr. At each one of these, she was called a whore from the pulpit. Despite this, she repeatedly asked Fred Sr what she needed to do to be allowed to see his son. Not long after, Betty moved out of town and lost it. By 1972, she was dead of a speed overdose, having already taken half a jar of barbiturates earlier that evening. She was still only 17.

Mark Phelps: "I remember getting home from school the day it appeared in the papers, and my dad came dancing down the stairs, swaying from the knees and clapping his hands, singing: 'The whore is dead! The whore is dead!' He paraded around the house, singing and laughing with that maniacal giggle he has, 'The whore is dead!’” 

By 1994, Fred claimed not to recognise the name Debbie Valgos.

HE DID NOT APPRECIATE SLUTTY WITNESSES
The week when Fred Phelps noticeably went from merely conflicted and cruel into batshit and evil was in 1977. The event was a bizarre and recklessly unnecessary bit of malicious suing on his part. A stenographer had failed to prepare a transcript for one of his cases on time. So Phelps decided to sue her for the costs of the case he’d lost – $2,000, plus $20,000 in punitive damages.

Her name was Carolene Brady, and, during the trial, Phelps put her on the stand for three full days, had her declared a hostile witness, relentlessly badgered her and tried every gutter trick in the book to turn it into a show trial about her character, calling in her former boyfriends, and apparently dubbing her a "slut". When he lost, he immediately applied for a retrial. But district authorities were onto him, and when he falsified some of the witness statements for the retrial they had the smoking gun they needed. He was disbarred for two years.

HE SUED SEARS ON BEHALF OF ALL OF US; HE WAS A SEARS MARTYR
By 1974, an increasingly opportunistic Phelps seemed to ejaculate a fresh lawsuit every six and a half minutes. When a TV his sons had been buying on layaway at Sears was out of stock on the day they made the final payment, he duly launched a $50 million lawsuit against the company, on behalf of everyone who ever failed to get their TV/washing machine/bolt gun on time.

This being America, the legal shuffle then a) continued for six years, b) cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and c) resulted in a win for Phelps, although the amount settled on was ultimately $60 less than the cost of the TV they’d been trying to buy: $126.

Somehow, in all that kerfuffle, they never even got the original TV.

HE SUED REAGAN RE: THE POPE
As this vexatious litigant dragged himself into the 1980s, his lawsuits got even weirder. He decided he would sue the federal government for appointing an ambassador to the Vatican, because, he said, this violated the line between church and state. He lost.

FRED FIRST CAME TO NATIONAL ATTENTION WHEN HIS CHURCH PICKETED THE FUNERAL OF MATTHEW SHEPHERD, A BOY MURDERED IN A GRUESOME HOMOPHOBIC ATTACK 
Phelps then applied for a city zoning permit to build a bronze statue celebrating his entry to hell. It was denied.

THE HITS NEVER STOPPED
Phelps ruled with a literal iron rod. He regularly beat all of his kids, but the most extreme example available to us was when he nearly finished off Nate Phelps on Christmas Day. Nate and Mark had made the fatal error of acquiring some Christmas lights. Fred did not allow Christmas – it was yet more sodomite blasphemy, basically. For his crimes, Nate received more than 200 strokes from an adze handle. He was beaten in 40-stroke batches, alternating with his brother, Mark, who was receiving 20 at a time for slightly lesser crimes. Mark later said he was “hoping I'd be knocked out, or killed... anything to end the pain”.

APPARENTLY, ONE OF HIS FAVOURITE TACTICS WAS TO GRAB A KID BY THE HANDS AND PULL THEM UPWARDS, THEN REPEATEDLY SMASH HIS KNEE INTO THEIR GROIN AND STOMACH, WHILE WALKING ACROSS THE ROOM LAUGHING.
He continued to do this even when they were sexually developed teens. Bit weird, Fred Phelps.

HE CREATED A HIGH QUALITY LABOUR FORCE OF CHILDREN
One day, Phelps was stirring some melted chocolate when he remarked that the kids should try and sell the leftover bits of low quality chocolate in the neighbourhood. The kids jumped at the chance to get out of the house. But they couldn’t quite have envisaged that, from now onwards, they would be going round the city of Topeka and beyond every day from 3 till 8 on weekdays and selling industrial quantities of sweets door-to-door.

On weekends and during summer holidays, they’d be out from 5AM to 10PM, up as far as Omaha, St Joseph, Missouri or Kansas City, shepherded by their mother in the station wagon, while dad was free to practically give up work. Hanging around on the streets like that led them into all sorts of bizarre scenarios, like the time a teenage Jonathan Phelps was chased down the street and bitch-slapped by a knife-wielding transvestite.

AT LEAST RUNNER’S WORLD BLOODY LOVED THE GUY
Phelps forced his family on long and arduous physical exercise programmes, both as a sort of Hitler Youth control device and to get them ready to outrun any coming apocalypse. In this, as with much else in life, he was very successful. So much so that the family were occasionally profiled in fitness magazines. He’d first read about the new "science of aerobics" on the back of a Wheaties box, and had subsequently marched his entire tribe off to the local track, where, from his youngest – who was five – upwards, they were all forced to run five miles every day, no matter what the weather.

Soon, he upped that to ten miles a day. Then, they were being made to run a marathon every Saturday. This had two effects. One: getting a seven-year-old to run a marathon is child abuse, no question. Two: they actually became incredibly good at marathon running, and started getting national attention once they began entering races. In fact, so impressed were the hacks at Runner’s World that they featured the Phelps family on two separate occasions.

HE WAS BRILLIANTLY CUNNING 
An under-noticed fact when people sue the Phelpses is that many of them are lawyers. And that, because of how legal aid works, most of their fees are still paid by the state. So being sued can actually be a way to drum up business and profit for Team Phelps. “Being sued was kinda win-win,” agrees ex-cult member Lauren Drain. 

FRED PHELPS WAS A SEVERELY DAMAGED MAN, AND IN MANY WAYS HIS STORY IS ONE OFTEN REPEATED ELSEWHERE: THE RATHER ORDINARY DOMESTIC TYRANNY IMPOSED BY THIS BROKEN VESSEL SEEMS FAR MORE UNPLEASANT THAN ALL THE MORE PUBLICITY-SAVVY PLACARD-WAVING STUFF HE DID OUTSIDE THE COMPOUND GATES.
To cheer his demise would be to miss the point. Given how consumed he was by his inferno of projection, death is as much a release for him as it is for the rest of us.

But still – fuck that guy.

@gavhaynes

Finding Happy Endings on the Yelp of Asian Massage Parlors

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A strip-mall happy-ending spot in Phoenix, Arizona, one of nearly 5,000 Asian erotic massage parlors across America. Photo by Todd Huffman via Flickr 

From the outside, Oasis Spa looks like any drab Brooklyn bodega. To an untrained eye not accustomed to seeking out storefront massage parlors, the grimy red awning is virtually invisible among the artisanal coffee shops and Duane Reades in Park Slope. But to an online community of hand-job connoisseurs, the spa is a destination, one of thousands of neighborhood “rub-’n’-tugs” that have swarmed into suburban strip malls and commercial thoroughfares across the United States, opening up a brave new frontier in the Middle American sex industry.

Of course, “happy-ending” massages have long been the worst-kept secret of the sex trade. Operating as legitimate businesses, Asian erotic massage parlors—most of which are run by Chinese or Korean operators—charge a house fee for a massage, and customers then pay an extra tip for whatever sex acts are performed. Intercourse isn’t usually on the menu, although some of the seedier establishments do offer “full-service” options and blow jobs.

And evidently, there is no shortage of men willing to fork over $80 for a 30-minute massage and a hand job. Asian erotic massage parlors, or AMPs, have proliferated across the US in recent years and now make up a significant share of the sex industry in several major American cities, according to a massive government-sponsored study on the underground sex economy released last week by the Urban Institute. The landmark report, which examined the size and structure of the commercial sex trade in eight metro areas, found that the number of parlors in the US jumped to 4,790 in 2013, up from 4,197 in 2011. Once concentrated in coastal cities like New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, the report also found that massage parlors are rapidly expanding into the Midwest and the South, facilitated by highly organized networks that transport Asian women—many of them brought to the US illegally—through a “circuit” of massage parlors around the US.

Image courtesy of the Urban Institute 

Researchers for the study did not attempt to explain the explosion of massage parlors. But the growing popularity of AMPs is clearly visible online, in a growing cottage industry of review boards, forums, and blogs that cater to the men who frequent erotic massage parlors, a strange internet breed who refer to themselves as “mongers.” Dudes who previously relied on word of mouth to learn where they could get a good rub-’n’-tug can now find all that information on sites like RubMaps.com, EroticMP.com, and SpaHunters.com, which basically act as Yelps for massage-parlor hunters. Users on the sites post updated locations, review women, and recount in graphic detail the services rendered. (Yelp actually has search results for “happy ending massage,” at least in New York, but the results are much less detailed.)  

Like most creepy internet sects, “mongers” have their own social code, and many of the users appear to know each other and even track the whereabouts of their favorite massage providers. In a review for one of the top-rated spas on EroticMP.com, for example, one commenter notes that he received a hand job, a blow job, and kissing (no tongue) from a masseuse named Coco, adding, “The breasts were big w/ awesome nipples. The lights were dimmed very low but the kitty felt nicely groomed and not bald. Bald kitty is so easy to do. Getting a creative groomed one is my preference. I will repeat before heading north.” In the comments, another user asks whether the provider is “the same Coco that was at Palm Tree some months ago, or is it Coco from the closed Star Therapy?” Another responds: “You know it’s not OUR Coco because Fritzy saw her this week!” And so on.

“It’s a fascinating world that operates legally on the internet,” said Meredith Dank, the lead researcher for the Urban Institute study. “But when you delve into it, it is quite disturbing how openly these men comment on this stuff. Sometimes you’ll even see a man comment that [he] thinks [the woman] might be compelled into this, that she looked like she didn’t want to do it.”

Naturally, mongers have their own language, apparently designed to subvert law enforcement. A glossary of monger slang on RubMaps details an extensive coded language, including expected terms like "FOB" and "mama-san," but also “babyback” for “petite, young attractive Asians,” and "Italian" for “penis rubbing between buttchecks.” Men also share personal details about their lives, with a surprising number of users discussing how their wives and girlfriends would feel about their penchant for happy endings. “Many of us got into this hobby, because things dried up at home,” one RubMaps user wrote in a blog discussion on whether “mongering helps or hurts a marriage.” "Many of my married friends complain how blow jobs is the 1st thing to go when they got married. It even goes before the paycheck in some cases. When we go massage parlors, these needs get taking care of. There is no judgement from these ladies [sic]. They will tend to our needs with no strings attached.”

Mongering sites have “helped tremendously with guys looking for info on where they are going, provided you are willing to wade through the bullshit,” one prolific massage-parlor blogger, who would refer to himself only as Spanky, told me in an email.

But Spanky added that the sites could be unwelcoming to those outside of the mongering community. “One of the problems with monger sites is that they are ridiculously cliquish,” he wrote. “So if you ask a question, you are basically going to get [a] ‘fuck you’ response… A lot of what is being asked has been answered so many times that the old-timers get tired of seeing it and turn inward instead of remembering how they at one point were new themselves. You must grovel for real help or be vouched by someone. If not, good luck.”

But even for amateurs, the sites make it remarkably easy to find a local erotic massage parlor, lowering the barrier of entry for a new crop of men with disposable cash and an hour to spare. A quick search on RubMaps revealed 90 open erotic massage parlors in Brooklyn, at least 10 of which were in walking distance to my apartment. Interested to see what goes on inside the parlors, and perhaps get a glimpse of the famous table showers that mongers rave about in their forums, I selected Oasis Spa, which had gotten decent reviews and which users described as “clean and friendly,” and walked over on a Sunday afternoon.

Oasis Spa, one of 90 Brooklyn rub-'n'-tugs

At first, the place looked closed, despite RubMaps’ promise that it would be open until midnight seven days a week. The door was locked, and the windows were boarded up, although I could see dim mood lighting behind the screens. After a couple of knocks, though, a suspicious middle-aged Korean woman answered the door and reluctantly let me in. The parlor was quiet, with a bed right in the front room and four closed doors along the hallway. Human trafficking aside, it seemed like a decent place for a massage, although there were no cash registers—or customers—in sight. But apparently, Oasis Spa is interested in neither women nor reporters, because, when I asked about a massage, the woman told me that she didn’t understand English and proceeded to force me back onto the street.

My experience aside, the openness with which the mongering community discusses these massage parlors—and with which the parlors themselves offer their services—is surprising when you consider that most of these places are viewed as fronts for prostitution by law enforcement. While non-sexual massage parlors are usually regulated by state and local public health codes, the addition of a hand job is usually interpreted as solicitation, even if sex itself isn't on the menu. "Where the general activity ‘prostitution’ is illegal, every conceivable form of commercial sex can be treated as illegal," said Laura Agustín, the author of Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labor Markets, and the Rescue Industry. "It doesn’t make sense, but it happens because, where prostitution is demonized, society fears all forms of commercial sex as leading to prostitution."

The extent to which massage parlors are involved in sex trafficking is largely unclear. Most of the women working in the parlors are smuggled into the country illegally from China, Korea, Thailand, and other Asian countries and are forced to use their tips to pay off exorbitant snakehead debts. But while some of the women are thought to have been brought to the US under false pretenses, Agustín points out that many women are aware that they will be working in the sex industry. 

The setup puts the erotic massage parlor trade squarely in the gray area of sex trafficking, with law enforcement unable to determine which women are being coerced into performing sex acts in massage parlors and which women are having sex with customers voluntarily. "All undocumented women in commercial sex are not trafficked," said Agustín, who has spent 20 years researching the commercial sex industry. "Migrants weigh up many factors when undertaking risky life projects." While there is no formula for preventing employers from exploiting sex workers, she added, legalizing and regulating erotic massage parlors would at least give the women working in the parlors legal recourse to go to the police, change jobs, or quit. 

Even in the absence of looser prostitution laws, law enforcement officials are opting not to waste resources on busting ostensibly consenting adults who decide to trade sex behind closed doors, said Dank, the lead researcher of the Urban Institute report. “It’s clear that there is a lot of smuggling, but as far as women voluntarily doing this, when [the police] do actually do raids and arrest these women for prostitution… these women are not saying that they are being compelled, for the most part,” Dank said. 

As a result, federal and local law enforcement agencies still know very little about the way that Asian massage parlors operate, except that the networks are highly organized and adept at stashing their money. Officials quoted in the study described a nationwide network of massage-parlor operators who bring women into Flushing, Queens, or Los Angeles, and then rotate them through various AMPs in Atlanta, Seattle, Denver, and across the Midwest. 

“We’ve seen cases where a woman is quite popular with the clientele; then they will transfer her to a different spa depending on what events are going on in that city,” one federal law enforcement agent in Atlanta said in the report. “[In] Dallas, they are home to the Dallas Cowboys, the big stadium there, and if they have some event there they’ll transfer their money earners to those clubs. Whereas Atlanta has the SEC championship going on, they’ll have more girls come here.”

Meanwhile, the money earned by the parlors is eventually wired overseas, making the networks difficult to trace. "The question..., and I don’t know the answer to this, is, How organized is the system across all of the cities?" said one Dallas law enforcement official. It's a "very similar scheme you can see across all of the major cities around the country. Then the money goes back and we can pretty much get it to Hong Kong, but we’re not going to get it to China.”

And clearly, the business model is working. Without any real law enforcement action to crack down on erotic massage parlors, AMPs are continuing to multiply, expanding their tentacles into untapped markets of mongers. “Guys get horny and know they can roll into an AMP and get a known quantity,” Spanky explained. It’s “not rocket science. Where there is demand there are always enterprising people willing to provide a service.”


Sesame Street's Newest Muppet Is Obsessed with Pooping

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Image from a press release

The new Muppet movie isn't the only thing shitty coming out of Jim Henson studios this week; the latest Muppet to be introduced to the Sesame Street universe, an aquamarine six year-old named Raya, is fixated on keeping kids from coming in contact with poop. In a recent promotional interview, apropos of nothing, she steered the conversation toward feces:

Brian: I noticed that you wear your sandals everywhere. Do you know why that’s important?

Raya: Of course I do, Mr. Brian! I know lots of things. I make sure to wear my sandals everywhere—especially to the latrine.

Maya's verbal diarrhea is tied to the fact that apparently she "loves to learn and remembers every fact she reads or hears—whether they are useful or not," so she, naturally, blurts out scatological non-sequitors. The aforementioned disturbing conversational turn, however, was brought about by the fact that Raya was in India at the time, talking to a representative of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation about the need for kids to exercise conscientious bathroom habits in the developing world.

Hanging around latrines, and squatting over ditches puts kids at risk for some horrifying diseases, and Raya is here to educate kids about keeping all those worms and bacteria out of their digestive systems. I'm betting she'll save thousands of lives. Also, haha! Poop!

Image from a Youtube video uploaded by Unicef

If you were an NGO looking to save lives, you might come to the conclusion that the world needs Raya too. Every year, 60,000 people—mostly children—die from ascariasis, a disease caused by an intestinal worm. The disease is so rare in the United States, you've probably never given it a second thought, but by most estimates, more than one tenth of the humans on earth have these foot-long worms in their small intestines. Here's a link to a picture of these worms in action

And that's just one disease. A third of the world, and six in ten Africans live without proper sanitation according to UNICEF, leaving them vulnerable to diarrhea, cholera, schistosomiasis (another worm infection), and trachoma (which blinds millions of people).

So Raya will appear in public service announcements produced by Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit wing of Sesame Street tied to charitable groups trying to educate kids in devloping countries. You probably recall Kami (pictured above with Bill Clinton), the Muppet introduced on Nigeria's version of Sesame Street a decade ago to help kids deal with the fact that they were born with HIV. In the States, you might not have heard anything in a while from Kami, but she's fine. She's on antivirals. 

This is Sesame Street killing it as usual. The one for American kids might not save lives, but it did more than just teach me to read. It taught me about death, and through the character of Harvey Kneeslapper, brought the problem of invasive, cackling psychopaths to my attention at a very young age. I joke, but a study by the Univeristy of Wisconsin Madison shows that Sesame Street's efforts usually prove remarkably fruitful.

Image from a Youtube video uploaded by NantoVision1

Apparently Raya's appearances will teach kids important lessons about things like washing their hands before meals, something that seems innocuous to you and I, but in India, Bangladesh, and Nigeria, helps keep the eggs of parasites out of your food. She'll also teach kids to stay away from stagnant water, use toilet paper instead of hands, and probably a bunch of things I would have never guessed. For instance: Would you know to stay away from water with freshwater snails living in it? I didn't until just now.

By the way, while Raya's mission of education and awareness is nice and everything, I can't help pointing out that where charitable donations are concerned, sanitation in the developing world is an area where a little bit goes a long way. Interestingly, I ran around to the press rooms of major NGOs like Unicef, the World Health Organization, and The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation trying to get someone at one of those places to talk to me about sanitation, and for whatever reason, no one would get back to me with so much as a list of platitudes about how children are our future. 

So donate to smaller organizations who don't even have press rooms. They're the ones Peter Singer endorses anyway (other than Oxfam. They're huge). Here's a link to one of the little guys that I like. Here's another. Personally, I give monthly. 

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter

This Three-Eyed Fish Has Brought Attention to a Serious Problem in the Great Lakes Basin

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Third-Eye Louie, moments after being pulled out of Lake Nippissing. Photos via Chad Poitras.

Many theories have surfaced in the months since a three-eyed walleye fish affectionately dubbed "Third Eye Louie" was pulled out of Lake Nipissing. Some claimed the freak fish spawned from a nuclear spill or was the product of an old uranium mine. Others pointed to the cyanobacterial blooms in the lake and the sewage pollution from wastewater plants dotting its shores as the cause of the periscopic third eye.

While rare, it’s unlikely Louie is a Blinky—the character of a surreal Simpsons-like scenario. Since he’s the only one fished out of the lake to date, it stands to reason Louie’s third eye is simply a genetic mutation. Scientists agree. But something Third Eye Louie has helped do is drive attention to the larger issues at play in both Lake Nipissing and the Great Lakes Basin of which it is a part.

The Great Lakes Basin holds a fifth of the world’s surface fresh water and is home to more than 4,000 species, including 100 rare plants and animals, many of which are on the brink of extinction. It stretches 244,000 square kilometers, holds 5,000 tributaries and 30,000 islands. In short, the basin is the largest freshwater ecosystem on earth. And it’s under attack.

Each year, billions of litres of raw sewage are dumped into its waters by way of combined sewer overflows from antiquated wastewater systems and bypasses at municipal treatment plants. The latter process is a deliberate discharge that occurs during heavy rainstorms, spring snowmelt and power failures.

Despite proposed new legislation and large investments, including $653 million by the Ontario government since 2007 to municipal wastewater infrastructure upgrades, untreated sewage is still being dumped into local lakes at an alarming rate. Nipissing is no exception.

The issue at large, believes Liat Podolsky, is one that should make headlines more often. Ecojustice staff scientist and author of the organization’s latest Great Lakes Sewage Report Card, Podolsky says the goal of the research undertaken by she and her colleagues aims to bring awareness to an issue that rarely gets attention.

“Sewage is not a very sexy topic. It doesn’t get a lot of attention, which is why we want to get this information out there,” she says. “The fact that billions of litres of untreated or partially treated sewage are still going into the waters is a telling fact that the problem is not under control.”

In actuality, it’s out of control. Ontario government documents obtained by Ecojustice for the first report revealed that there were 144 significant bypass events in 2001 in Ontario alone. Many of these involved the release of hundreds of thousands of litres of raw sewage directly into the environment. The 20 cities examined in the 2006 report dumped more than 92 billion litres of raw sewage into the Great Lakes in one year. The statistics don’t seem to have improved.

Sewage pollution of the type infecting the Great Lakes Basin is a noxious cocktail of toxic chemicals, human waste, disease-causing pathogens, oils and heavy metals like mercury, cadmium and zinc. The effect this foul mix can have on humans, aquatic animals and the environment is concerning.

Another shot of Louie.

Equally alarming, perhaps, is the fact that chlorination is still the most common disinfection method used to treat wastewater. While a cost-effective measure that helps keep drinking water safe, chlorine and its byproducts are detrimental to aquatic life. Even in small amounts, chlorine can devastate the waters it saturates. 

Under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, chlorinated wastewater effluent was designated toxic. The new Wastewater System Effluent Regulations go a step further, imposing limits on the amount of residual chlorine that can be discharged in treatment plant effluent. Yet plants, like those on Lake Nipissing, continue to use chlorination as the primary means of treatment.

As pointed out in the Ecojustice report, municipal sewage treatment plants are inundated with wastewater from industrial operations, household cleaning supplies, and, perhaps scariest of all, pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs). Because there is no treatment for a significant number of these compounds, the ramifications of having PPCPs released into receiving waters unchecked is uncertain, though believed to be damaging to both humans and the environment.  

Dr. Reehan Mirza, chair of Nipissing University’s biology department, points out that because the Ministry of the Environment does not have methods to monitor the compounds in question, little is known about what impact PPCPs have on the ecosystems they infiltrate. What is known for certain, says he, is that the affected lakes will more than likely have an inordinate amount of female fish.

“A lot of these compounds tend to be estrogen mimics.  The major effect that you’re seeing in aquatic life is this whole issue of feminization, where the male organs are not developing and you see more either female-like organisms or organisms where testes and ovaries are not differentiated. When that happens, those fish are not viable and they’re not going to be able to reproduce.”

From a bio-chemical perspective, however, Mirza does not see sewage pollution as the lead threat to aquatic life in Lake Nipissing. Over the last few years, cyanobacteria, more commonly known as blue-green algae, has been found blooming in various parts of the lake.

“Basically, because you have these toxins in the water, your microsystems that are produced by the blue-green algae are highly toxic. It’s something that’s quite systemic all over different parts of Lake Nipissing,” says Mirza. “The microsystems will basically act on the liver and they can affect the nervous system as well.”

According to Health Canada, humans exposed to cyanobacterial toxins can develop long-term or chronic illnesses. Some neurodegenerative diseases, like ALS, have been linked to blue-green algae exposure. More common symptoms include headache, nausea and vomiting. Aquatic and terrestrial animals exposed to the toxins are likely to become severely ill or die.

Marianna Couchie, chief of the Nipissing First Nation, cites a laundry list of issues, including blue-green algae, affecting the waters of her beloved community. Invasive species, the depletion of the walleye fishery, fertilizers from surface runoff, 1,800 ice shacks in inter with no toilets and uranium mine tailings on the shores of Yellick all roll off her tongue with a tone that borders anxiety and anger.

In addition to having a staff biologist exploring what’s going on and wrong with the lake, the Nipissing First Nation has started hosting the Lake Nipissing Summit, which brings experts, scientists and other concerned parties to the table to discuss the issues at play. They are also working closely with Nipissing University and investing $250,000 a year to draft possible solutions for environmental sustainability. “No one else is doing that,” Couchie says.

To speak to the chief is to get a snapshot of the grave state of Lake Nipissing. Couchie reflects longingly of a time not so long ago when the lake was clean enough to drink, painting a pastoral picture of a more peaceful place.  “I remember when I grew up as child you could drink the water from Lake Nipissing. Never thought about it,” she recalls, adding: “Brought along a cup in your boat and when you were thirsty you picked up a cup of water and drank that. Today I wouldn’t do such a thing.”

Who Hijacked Aaron McGruder's 'Boondocks' Facebook Page?

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There is a lot of corporate and PR fuckery happening on the social media channels of our favorite shows and artists. Bob Marley has been dead for 33 years, so why the hell is he posting wacksteady songs by one of his illegitimate children in my feed every damn day?

One celebrity you can always count on not to dick you around in social media is Aaron McGruder, creator of The Boondocks comic strip and animated series. In the past, he used the Boondocks Facebook page for more than just promoting the show—he did everything from clowning Glenn Beck to creating awareness about instances of police brutality around the country. The direct relationship he cultivated with his fans was the key reason why The Boondocks has nearly 7 million likes. 

Earlier this month, however, the writer appeared to have lost control of his account. 

If Aaron isn't controlling it anymore, then who is? And why have they blocked him from using the account of his own show? These are question I tried to approach Aaron's team about, but they declined to comment on record. 

What we do know is that the Facebook post above comes from a new account Aaron created for his upcoming live-action show, Black Jesus(Like the BoondocksBlack Jesus will air on Adult Swim. However, Black Jesus will be produced by Time Warner—which owns Adult Swim—whereas the Boondocks is produced and owned by Sony Pictures.)

Since Aaron lost control of the Boondocks Facebook page, the posts have become remarkably corny. A post like this one is offensive, not because it quotes the inflammatory Uncle Ruckus but because it doesn't make any damn sense: 

A new season of The Boondocks is slated to air on Adult Swim on April 21. Like everyone who has been a fan of the show over the years, I was absolutely giddy when it was announced. Yet, considering that the man who created the show has lost control over something as trivial as the Facebook page associated with it, I have to wonder whether he still has control over the show itself.

Follow Wilbert L. Cooper on Twitter.

The Good, The Bad and the Ugly Behind 4479 Toronto

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The Good, The Bad and the Ugly Behind 4479 Toronto

Hitler Madness

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Graphics by Rodney Hazard

It happens dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of times every day: Someone compares someone else to Adolf Hitler. Sometimes this accusation is leveled as a result of a dictatorial strongman invading a country or a public figure advocating genocide—behavior that is, admittedly, at least a little bit Hitler-ish. But more often, the person accused of being Hitler just acted bossy or cruel while, for example, making Transformers 3.

Some who play the Hitler card are trying to be funny or controversial in order to get attention; others are just trying to say, “This person is very, very, very bad.” Usually, the comparison backfires horribly and the comparer inevitably has to issue a public statement that says something like, “That person who I said was like Hitler is very, very, very bad—but he or she is not Hitler-esque. I’m sorry.” A good rule of thumb is to never, ever call anyone Hitler, since you’ll end up apologizing and there are far more creative and specific ways to insult your enemies. (And anyway, Hitler is often just a generic term meant to connote ultimate evil rather than an accurate comparison with the real, historical German dictator.)

These individual accusations of Hitler-dom are pretty boring, but their sheer quantity points to an interesting question: Who in world history is the most like Hitler? That’s a complicated, subjective, probably unanswerable query, and like all such queries, it can only be solved through a March Madness–style bracket. In honor of the college basketball tournament that begins this week, we made just such a bracket, utilizing a complex formula to seed the potential Hitlers and an even more complex formula to determine the winners of each matchup (that is, we just sort of made the whole thing up).

Here is how that imaginary tournament played out:

DEAD PERSON REGION

Adolf Hitler (1) – What can you say about Adolf Hitler that hasn’t already been said? He's responsible for the deaths of tens of millions and started the worst war of the 20th century. People hate him so much that they fantasize about traveling back in time and killing him. A strong number-one seed.
VS.
Slobodan Milosevic (8) – This war-crimes-committing asshole was widely compared to Hitler in the lead-up to the NATO intervention in Kosovo in the late 90s, but he was more of a Hitler wannabe than anything—and being a failed genocidal maniac is almost worse than being a successful one.

Joseph Stalin (2) – Stalin never quite achieved the status of legendary evil in the popular imagination that the Third Reich's leader did, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. He murdered even more people than Hitler, through purges and starvation, and even changed the official version of history after he executed former allies for treason—a practice chillingly echoed by a modern-day Russian textbook that called the dictator’s acts “rational.” Maybe his mustache wasn’t distinctive enough for him to receive icon status?
VS.
Saddam Hussein (7) – Back in 1990, George H. W. Bush gave a speech in which he implied that the Iraqi dictator was worse than Hitler in some respects. Years later, George W. Bush picked up the Hitler comparisons where his dad left off, and that overblown rhetoric likely helped encourage the invasion of Iraq, which was one of the biggest foreign-policy blunders in American history. Whoops.

Mao Zedong (3) – Mao, Stalin, and Hitler are the top three mass murderers of the 20th century, and Mao is actually number one in terms of bodies buried, with 60 million. All three were evil, evil men, but Mao holds a special place in the minds of conservatives, who frequently remind everyone that a communist—a left-winger!—killed the most people of anyone ever. What’s more, that commie is still officially venerated in China, which once gave a blogger for the right-wing Heritage Foundation the opportunity to insinuate that Obama would have bowed before Hitler: “Would President Obama be so ready to kowtow to China if in the middle of Beijing there was a mausoleum of Hitler and, hanging from the gate to the Forbidden City, a giant swastika?”
VS.
Pol Pot (6) – The Khmer Rouge leader presided over a genocide that killed well over a million people, many of whom starved to death, but the event never acquired the notoriety of Hitler’s Holocaust—maybe because it was the Vietnamese and not Western forces who toppled the regime? Anyway, fuck Pol Pot.

Andrew Jackson (4) – The guy on the $20 bill is traditionally celebrated in the US—he was a champion of the common people and of giving the right to vote to all (White male) citizens! He had a big block of cheese that he let visitors eat! But he also really liked slavery and advocated Indian removal (the brutal expulsion of native peoples to lands west of the Mississippi River, a policy that amounted to massive ethnic cleansing). After a few decades of revisionist history, Jackson is sufficiently controversial that the Los Angeles Times once ran an opinion piece about him headlined “Hero or American Hitler?
VS.
Osama bin Laden (5) – Much like Hitler, no bogeyman dominated the American public imagination as bin Laden did when he was alive. On the other hand, it wasn’t like anyone was worried the al Qaeda leader was ever going to conquer the US.

In the Dead Person region, Pol Pot makes a strong showing thanks to his brutality and his disregard for human life—few can match that level of evil. Unfortunately for him, Hitler is one of those few, and the Führer handily out-Hitlerled Pol Pot on his way to the Final Four.

LIVING POLITICIAN REGION

Kim Jong-un (1) – North Korea’s glorious leader may not be nearly as powerful as Hitler was in his heyday, but there’s no doubt Kim’s regime has committed (and continues to commit) horrific acts—including, according to a February report from the UN, “extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons, and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation.” No one who hasn’t been brainwashed will shed any tears if Kim meets an end similar to Hitler’s.
VS.
Michael Bloomberg (8)
– The glorious former mayor of New York City sometimes made decrees like a dictator, but most of them were about banning trans fats and getting people to stop smoking cigarettes—hardly genocidal stuff. That didn’t stop Glenn Beck from depicting Bloomberg making what looked like a Nazi salute. (Beck later claimed that he was actually trying to compare the billionaire to Vladimir Lenin.)

Vladimir Putin (2) – Like Hitler, Putin is an autocrat who threatens neighboring countries; he recently caused an international outcry with his incursion into Crimea. Like Hitler, he’s also fond of using a marginalized group as a scapegoat for his country’s problems (for Putin it’s the homosexuals; for Hitler it was the Jews) and is considered by many to be a serious threat to world peace. So it’s perhaps natural that he’s been compared to the Führer by everyone from Hillary Clinton to protesters in the Czech Republic—but remember, he’s not responsible for the systematic murder of millions, which is a fairly important thing to do if you’re trying to be like Hitler.
VS.
Geert Wilders (7)
– The right-wing Dutch politician subscribes to a brand of Islamophobia that bleeds over into outright racism pretty easily—during a recent speech in the Hague, he said that voters in the capital of the Netherlands would like a city with “fewer Moroccans.” This led to a politician from an opposing party comparing Wilders to Hitler, and then, predictably, retracting his statement. Wilders may not be as bad as the worst man who ever lived, but there’s no doubt he’s a shithead.

Bashar al Assad (3) – OK, yes, the embattled Syrian ruler has a little mustache and has used nerve gas on his own people—the latter of which prompted Secretary of State John Kerry to compare him to Hitler. But while al Assad is a butcher, he’s not conquering other nations as Hitler was; he can’t even hold his own country (which he inherited from his father) together. Pretty weak for a strongman if you ask me.
VS.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (6)
– According to Wikileaks cables given to Der Spiegel, US officials once called the then-president of Iran “Hitler,” though it’s unclear what the context was—were the officials seriously condemning Ahmadinejad for his widely publicized view that the Holocaust was a “myth”? Or did the comments have a more sarcastic tone, like: “Pffft? That guy? Major Hitler. I mean, total Hitler.”

George W. Bush (4) – Remember the early 2000s? Staind was really popular, 90s nostalgia hadn’t really kicked in yet, and people on the left occasionally compared Bush to Hitler. You could argue that America’s 43rd president invaded another country just as the Führer did, but then you’d sound rather stupid—and the people who made that argument did the anti-war movement a huge disservice by making it look like it was full of nutjobs who couldn’t tell the difference between a murderous dictator and an American president who was merely really, really bad at his job.
VS.
Barack Obama (5)
– Of course, Obama has been accused of being like Hitler far more often than Bush ever was—by rich men who hate taxes, by Republicans running for governor of California, by talk radio hosts, by Hank Williams, Jr., and even by GOP presidential hopefuls. That suggests that there’s nothing special about Bush or Obama; we’ve just entered an era in which every president from now on will get compared to Hitler. Cool.

The top three seeds were in control of this region, and the only matchup worth really paying attention to is the showdown between the genocidal but relatively weak Kim Jong-un and the merely empire-minded but powerful Vladimir Putin. In the end, Putin’s annexation of Crimea was enough to give him the victory.

NON-HUMAN REGION

Patch the Dog (1) – The "owner says no one calls him by his real name any more and Patch is starting to obey orders as ‘Adolf’ or ‘Hitler,’” according to an article in the Telegraph.
VS.
Hitler Lotion Bottle (8)
This proves the old saying, “Pretty much anything looks like Hitler if you sit around your house eating nothing but magic mushrooms for long enough.”

Kitler the Hitler Kitten (2) – “We rehome five and a half thousand animals every year but we cannot find a loving owner for Kitler. We think her unusual markings [i.e., she looks like Hitler, which is why her name is Kitler] are putting people off.” So says the spokesperson for the shelter that’s home to Kitler, who was quoted in another article in the Telegraph, the UK’s best source for looks-like-Hitler news.
VS.
Adolfish the Goldfish (7)
– Patches, Kitler, and this fish are all from the UK, which makes sense—thanks to socialism, the British can spend their days sitting around and pointing out animals that look like Hitler until the sun has set and it’s acceptable to start drinking.

Hitler Teapot (3) – "Every time I see that JC Penny billboard with the teapot, I keep seeing Hitler. Seriously, the thing looks exactly like Hitler," says a Southern Californian commuter who would be right at home in the UK.
VS.
Hitler House (6)
– The homeowner told the press, “I don’t really think it looks like Hitler,” but obviously he has to say that, because if people believe your house looks like Hitler, there go your property values, amirite?

Satan (4) – It’s natural to compare Hitler to Satan—heck, a Vatican exorcist once even said most Nazis were possessed by the devil—but Satan isn’t real while Hitler, sadly, is.
VS.
Lord Voldemort (5)
– Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling once admitted that “Voldemort is of course a sort of Hitler,” thereby providing a helpful tip to would-be young-adult fiction moguls: Model your villains after history’s greatest monster.

Voldemort defeating Satan is maybe the biggest upset of the entire tournament. But he wasn't going to beat the Hitler Teapot, which—ha ha ha, oh, man, that thing looks just like Hitler. Even the Teapot, however, couldn't Hitler like Patch the Dog, who secretly hates Jews.

NOT-THAT-MUCH-LIKE-HITLER REGION

Jesus Christ (1) – “[Both Jesus and Hitler] could look you in the eye and have an answer for you. There are very few politicians right now that can look you in the eye and you believe it,” says Glenn Beck, who loves making Hitler comparisons.
VS.
A Flight Attendant (8)
– Beck is so fond of playing the Hitler card that he once accused an American Airlines attendant of treating him like he was “subhuman,” implying that he (Beck) had been persecuted like the Jews in Hitler’s Europe. :/

Feminists (2) – Remember “Feminazis”? Remember how that was a popular phrase that people said and talked about? Ha ha, politically active women are basically mass murderers. I love the 90s so much, you guys.
VS.
You (7)
– You’re probably wondering at this point if you’re like Hitler, so to answer your question: Yes, there is an apparently earnest online quiz you can take to see how much you resemble the Führer.

Republicans (3) – When Al Sharpton compared the entire GOP to Hitler in a 2012 soundbite that quickly made the rounds on the conservative blogosphere, it was probably just an attempt to gin up his ratings through controversy—but there are doubtless plenty of people without their own television shows who believe that anyone with a Romney bumper sticker is basically Joseph Goebbels.
VS.
Adolf Hitler the Child (6)
– In 2012, Adolf Hitler was taken from his parents, a pair of self-proclaimed Nazis who had themselves been victims of child abuse. Adolf’s upbringing was so fucked up that, according to a 2012 court report, the seven-year-old child “frequently threatened to kill people.” It’s odd being put in the position of feeling sorry for Adolf Hitler, isn’t it?

Jay Leno (4) – “Jay Leno, much like Adolf Hitler, is a master of making secret demands for foreign territory and then acting like the wronged party. First he pretended that he wanted to annex only the first half-hour of [Conan] O'Brien's Tonight Show. Here he was mimicking Hitler, who insisted that he merely wanted to annex the German-speaking Sudetenland, not all of Czechoslovakia.” That's Joe Queenan writing about the late-night show wars from a few years ago in the Wall Street Journal, a publication that is sometimes crazy as shit.
VS.
Michael Bay (5)
– The director “wants to be like Hitler on his sets, and he is. So he's a nightmare to work for," says actress Megan Fox, who has probably never worked with a real genocidal dictator.

There’s a major upset in this region thanks to the weakness of its top seeds. Though he’s essentially nonviolent, Jay Leno’s nearly sociopathic disregard for others in his rise to the top of the late-night-show dog pile was enough to defeat Adolf Hitler the child. As you can see at the bottom of the bracket, it turns out that you, the person reading this, are surprisingly like Hitler.

FINAL FOUR

If you combined them, Patch the Dog, Jay Leno, and Vladimir Putin might make a pretty good approximation of Hitler—Patch has the looks, Putin has the dictatorial authority and world-conquering ambition, and Leno is a world-class dick. But they were no match for the real Adolf Hitler, who was not only insane and genocidal but briefly threatened to actually conquer the world. There can only be one Hitler, thankfully, and it's Hitler.

Full results of the tournament below.

Lady Business: No-Makeup Selfies Can’t Cure Cancer, and Detroit Just Discovered a Ton of Rapists

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This week, women rallied to raise breast cancer awareness…by posting makeup-free selfies? While it’s commendable of them to defy societal expectations of female beauty…is the action really accomplishing anything?

On the other side of the spectrum (something for everyone!), it’s been reported that 100 serial rapists have been identified in Detroit, after their DNA sat in untested rape kits for five years. The latest in lady business:

Law and Order: SVU's Mariska Hartigay, at Detroit press conference discussing the untested rape kits. Image via YouTube.

100 Serial Rapists Identified in Detroit

If you care about the prevalence and eradication of sex crimes, read this piece by Stephanie Hallett at Ms. Magazine. A horrifying little excerpt for you: “Five years ago, 11,000 untested rape kits were discovered in a police storage facility in Detroit. So far, just 1,600 kits have been tested, but that small number has yielded startling results: 100 serial rapists have been identified, and the DNA of ten since-convicted rapists has been found.”

Why were these fucking rape kits sitting around untested? Women go through a lot of trauma, immediately after being raped, to participate in the production of a rape kit. They have to have public hairs plucked, vaginas swabbed, cold, mechanical poking and prodding. This just confirms what many of us already knew: it looks like the effort is often for naught.


Screenshot via the Belle Jar.

Teaching Is A Feminized Profession

The Belle Jar creator Anne Theriault wrote a piece that made me sigh with such relief this past week. She came out and said she’s sick of explaining feminism to men who don’t bother to listen anyway, and are just looking to get into a smug brawl. She writes: “I’m tired of explaining to men that the feminist movement will, in fact, benefit them as well as women. I’m tired of trying to hawk gender equality like I’m some kind of car salesman showing off a shiny new sedan, explaining all of its bells and whistles. I’m tired of smiling through a thousand thoughtless microaggressions, tired of providing countless pieces of evidence, tired of being questioned on every. single. damn. thing.”

I’m tired of it, too. It’s so fiercely aggravating to dig for the correct, careful words to explain something to someone with the opposite perspective of yours—without offending or blaming them. But it’s so much worse when that person clamors to open their mouth to refute you before you’re even done sharing your idea. Or when you can see in their eyes that they weren’t listening at all, only waiting to speak again. This kind of shit drives me insane and deserves the silent treatment every now and then. If you ask, listen, and if you don’t intend to listen, STFU.

Theriault is one of my personal heroes right now. She really doesn’t give a eff and is a truly inspiring bad bitch.
 


Screenshot via Instagram.

The Roses On Your Face Light Up The Sky

Lots of women have been posting makeup-free selfies lately in a quest to raise breast cancer awareness.

I’d like to say that’s an admirable, logical action, but that would be disingenuous. It’s actually wholly preposterous, as half of the products we so liberally apply to our skins are full of carcinogens. Putting your one-time naked face on the internet does not equal activism, in any way, unless you’re protesting our widespread adoption of cosmetics as a cultural norm that women will adhere to, lest we be ousted as slovenly, negligent, unattractive humans.

As I was procrastinating writing this very article, this pointless turd of an article surfaced on Thought Catalog (I know, I know): “Seventeen Basic Sephora Products Every Girl Needs.” The list includes “eyeshadow primer” and “a lipstick that makes you feel like a woman.” Case. In. Point.

Many women do feelmore beautiful with makeup on. And they have the right to wear whatever they want; I’m not criticizing them, and I celebrate that cosmetics can be a beautiful art, alongside the right of a woman to govern what happens on her own face. But I simultaneously reject the ideology behind the fact that people are being paid to tell us we need this goop to be beautiful, and many women, in turn, adhere to that messaging in order to feel worthy.

Further, I think such a close equation of makeup and breast cancer actually tends to trivialize the illness. Curing cancer and supporting those who have it is not as simple as putting down the eyeliner.

Australian TV journalist Tracey Spicer did a TED Talk in which she dismantled the notion of what female beauty should mean: “Today, I’d like us to assess the amount of time we spend on our grooming, and the effect it has on our productivity,” she said. “Imagine what we could achieve if we weren’t beholden to society’s unreasonable expectations of how we should look? It’s an absurdity that we get caught up in all this. We do this to physically protect ourselves.”

She committed to taking steps to correct some of this bullshit, including quitting self-tanner, wearing less makeup, and having a lower-maintenance haircut. Tracey also challenged other women to re-examine their routines, and calculate the amount of time they waste on maintaining a largely unrealistic appearance. Spicer stressed that she doesn’t mean to be prescriptive, and neither do I. But I do think we could benefit from asking ourselves why we spend so many grueling hours trying to shape ourselves into symbols of contrived femininity.

And if you want to make a difference when it comes to breast cancer: go on a walk or run and raise some money for research, or raise money in some other way. Write something educational, or organize an awareness event or site. There are so many ways to help, but using our appearances to get there isn’t the answer.

Screenshot via Buzzfeed.

Dudes: You Think It’s Easy Being This Sexy?

I’ve squandered as many hours diving through glassy-eyed Buzzfeed rampages as the next blog-obsessed millennial, and most of these online gorge-fests are wholly regrettable. (I got Marni in the Girls quiz?). But this post really stuck with me. It replaces ads where women are coyly and sexily peddling everyday objects, with men attempting to accomplish the same feat—with significantly more awkward results.

Unlike all of the “20 traits you have if you’re a self-absorbed 20-something” type posts, this one really illustrates how much we manage to idolize women, while at the same time reducing them and whittling down their characters to one-dimensional labels. So I don’t hate it…. High praise, I know.
 

@sarratch

VICE News: Russian Roulette: The Invasion of Ukraine - Part 15

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Just a few days after Crimeans overwhelmingly voted in a referendum to join Russia, the crisis across the peninsula has claimed its first life. In part 15, VICE News's Simon Ostrovsky attends the funeral of the young Tatar man whose body was found this week after he was beaten by Cossacks. Despite this death, residents across Crimea are hopeful that joining Russia will bring them a brighter future.


The Creators Project: Jim Campbell's Sculptural LED Light Installations

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Artist Jim Campbell details the inspiration and custom electronics behind his new series of light installations currently on display at Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery in New York City. The exhibition ranges from LED panels that project ultra low-resolution Kodachrome home movies to topographic LED sculptures created from molded transparent resin.

A Slap on the Wrist for a Handsy General

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Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Sinclair. Photo by Flickr user Arctic Wolves

Yesterday, I wrote about the high-profile court martial of Brigadier General Jeffrey Sinclair, who was accused of sexually assaulting a subordinate officer over the course of their three-year, extra-marital affair. The case against him fell apart when certain inconsistencies in the accuser’s testimony cast doubt on her credibility, and Sinclair pleaded guilty to lesser charges including mistreating his former mistress and misusing an Army-issued credit card.

According to the accuser, who was Sinclair’s Arabic-speaking adviser and a captain in the Army, the general was a handsy dude and allegedly groped her on an airplane in plain view of other soldiers and made her perform oral sex on him in her office even as she vocally protested. It’s all extraordinarily sordid and was perhaps the most attention-getting case of sexual assault in the military in years. Some of the stats about rape in the military are staggering. If you’re a woman in the US and you would like to DOUBLE your chances of getting sexually assaulted in your lifetime, join the military.

Anyhow, the general’s sentence was announced today, and to pretty much everyone’s chagrin, he’s getting off rather lightly. Although he could have faced jail time, he’ll instead be fined $24,100 and will not be demoted or even discharged from the army. He’ll be offered early retirement and will keep a general’s pension (which is probably over six figures).

From all accounts, Sinclair was an excellent war man. He helped lead the Army’s efforts in southern Afghanistan in some of the worst fighting of that war, and we can speculate that his laudable service could have influenced the sentencing judge to keep him out of the brig. I’ve never picked up arms for my country or stood strong in the face of a battery of mortar fire, so, for all I know, that’s how things should be.

But what I do know is that soldiers who do horrible things like treat themselves for PTSD with marijuana—and get caught—usually receive dishonorable discharges that disqualify them from health care and other veteran’s benefits, and any kind of pension.

Of course the difference is that it’s a lot easier to prove marijuana use than rape, especially in a system of military courts that keeps the prosecution of rape within the chain of command.

To echo the arguments of military commanders who were against things like racially integrating the military and letting gays serve openly, the armed forces should not be a laboratory for social experimentation. So why should it have its own rules that insulate its leaders from the real-world consequences of horrible conduct?

VICE News: The Devil Tried to Divide Us - Part 1

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The Central African Republic's capital of Bangui has seen its Muslim population drop from 130,000 to under 1,000 during the past few months. Over the past year, thousands across CAR have been killed, and nearly a million have been displaced. The United Nations recently stated that the entire Western half of the country has now been cleansed of Muslims.

CAR has never fully recovered from France's colonial rule, and it has only known ten years of a civilian government—from 1993 to 2003—since achieving independence in 1960. Coup after coup, often with French military involvement, has led many to refer to the country as a phantom state. The current conflict has now completely erased the rule of law, leaving the UN and international community looking confused and impotent.

In March 2013, the Séléka, a mostly Muslim rebel alliance, rose up and overthrew the corrupt government of François Bozizé, while bringing terror and chaos across the country—pillaging, killing, and raping with impunity. In response, mostly Christian self-defense forces, called the Anti-Balaka, formed to defend CAR against Séléka attacks.

Clashes grew more frequent throughout 2013 as the Séléka grew more ruthless. In December 2013, French and African troops went in to disarm the Séléka and staunch the bloodshed. The Anti-Balaka, seizing on a weakened Séléka, then went on the offensive.

CAR had no real history of religious violence, and the current conflict is not based on any religious ideology. The fighting, however, turned increasingly sectarian in the fall of 2013, with revenge killings becoming the norm. And as the Séléka's power waned, the Anti-Balaka fed their need for revenge by brutalizing Muslim civilians. 

"Too few peacekeepers were deployed too late; the challenge of disarming the Séléka, containing the Anti-Balaka, and protecting the Muslim minority was underestimated," Human Rights Watch said in a recent statement.

The bloodshed has not stopped. The UN is still debating whether or not to send peacekeepers. Even if a peacekeeping operation is approved, it will take six months for troops to be assembled. 

We Need Three Planets to Keep the Human Race Alive, NASA Scientist Says

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We Need Three Planets to Keep the Human Race Alive, NASA Scientist Says

Pen Pals: Rap Was My Lifeline in Prison

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Drawing via Flickr user Jeff Jacobson-Swartfager

Over the past few years, I’ve used this column to expound upon the many ways inmates pass the days locked up in the stinkin’ clink-clink. The boredom is severe for some ‘cause they don’t have any hobbies or interests—they’re stuck with most primal of activities, such as jerkin’ the giant gherkin, which luckily doesn’t take much skill or brainpower. Dudes in prison are the only remaining people in the world who read pornos. They stare at pictures, completely digesting each pic slowly…. They're at least flexing their imagination. Then there are those who fancy themselves intellectuals—they devote much of their time to reading and writing. There are also the dudes who work out all day every day and come out of prison looking like they’ve shoved snakes inside their arms. Then there are the inmates who make their time inside all about music.

I’ve met quite a few guys who are basically illiterate, yet can recite whole rap songs flawlessly. Some have awe-inspiring and enviable memories, while others study their asses off by writing down lyrics and reciting them until they are forever imprinted in their young, sponge-like brains. Dudes often start in their teens by copying popular raps and spitting them like their own inventions; in their 20s they’ll start writing their own raps, often in the precise cadence, voice, and style of whatever popular rapper (Jay-Z, Nas, 50) they jock. I’ve seen lots of guys in their 30s—my age—who have a bunch of their own songs, or at least verses, that they’ve perfected. Lots of the older guys are ridiculously well-seasoned and have whole catalogues of memorized songs from all the years they’ve spent in prison—at that point they’ve put in so many hours listening, writing, and rapping that they sound legit as shit.

Even though things are changing and some prisons are letting inmates use MP3 players, in some states, including New York, the only way guys can listen to music is on cassette tapes. When I was upstate, we were limited to 25 tapes per inmate, a rule that was strictly enforced in most prisons—for a music-obsessed cracker like me, it was extremely important to select the right repertoire of bangers. There are some companies in Harlem, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens that put out catalogues strictly for prisoners full of mix-tapes; when you do the math, there’s something close to 70,000 inmates locked up in New York State at any given time and around 12,000 on Riker’s Island alone, which means there is a pretty sizable market for these tapes. The last time I was in jail, Meek Mill’s Dreamchasers was everywhere. When I was inside, I ordered my tapes from a Californian company that supplies the whole country’s inmate population.

It’s not exactly iTunes, but I got Bootsy Collins’s Back in the Day: The Best of Bootsy and Zapp & Roger’s All the Greatest Hits for five bucks apiece, and I played those two tapes hundreds of times—Zapp’s beat-centric songs played in the background while I wrote countless thousands of pages. My other favorites included Kraftwerk’s Computer World, Redman’s Dare Iz a Darkside, Kool Keith’s Spankmaster, Parliament’s The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein, Larry Graham and Graham Central Station’s Greatest Hits, the Ohio Players’ Greatest Hits, and Leaders of the New School’s T.I.M.E. The prices in these catalogues vary a lot and the companies really take advantage of inmates on occasion—I once paid $22 for Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s Nigga Please, but I felt like I absolutely needed some ODB in my life at the time, and I got hundreds of plays out of that tape, which helped soothe me on the most unbonerable of days.

Over the years, I met some guys who I bonded with over music and rapping, and for the few months we were in the same lockup we’d exchange tapes and walk around the yard testing out raps we had just written. When we were in the same dorm it was like a weird middle-school sleepover where we’re sitting on one of our bunks geeking out over music all night and trading verses. During my time inside I worked out, played sports, watched TV, talked on the phone, played cards, and read—but some dudes were ALL music. They wrote down everything and they seriously thought of prison as a school where they’d learn how to rap.

Some of the best rappers I’ve ever seen in my life come from jail, and their amazing abilities are largely due to the amount of time they've had to practice. That said, it always blows my mind how many people completely waste their time in jail and prison. I feel like a moron ‘cause I didn’t get more accomplished. I penned dozens of songs and wrote enough to fill up a couple books, but in the outside world I’ve failed to translate what I created in there into something worthy. I guess the same can be said for all the clowns that memorized every Young Jeezy song and even replicated his voice…

I just recently learned about Rap Genius and the way that site lets rap fans obsessively annotate rap lyrics—that’s exactly what dudes in prison need to do. They’re talking and arguing about rappers and verses and beefs and individual lines 90 percent of the time anyway… Imagine what they could do if they had access to personal computers and the internet. I just got verified on Rap Genius and I’m going to try to speak for all of the inmates I’ve known and bring the knowledge I got thanks to my years being locked up.

Right now there are hundreds of thousands of men and women behind bars who are dreaming that they’ll be the next rapper to blow up after coming fresh out the clink-clink with rhymes filling up notebook after notebook. I know what that’s like—I never felt more productive when I was locked up than when I finished writing a song, and I never felt more relaxed than when I was lying on my back while listening to Bootsy’s Vanish in Our Sleep. Prison is awful, but imagining prison without music, fuckkkkk…

Bert Burykill is the pseudonym of our prison correspondent, who has spent time in a number of prisons in New York State. He tweets here.

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