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Name! That! Horrifying! Disease!

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Some guy with yellow fever who's probably super pissed he wasn't born in the 21st century. All images courtesy of The Sick Rose

Old-timey diseases were the worst. Everything was fatal, all patients were essentially test subjects, the germ theory of disease was still in its infancy, and anesthesiology was just whiskey, a stick, and a shot of cocaine. The only good thing about medical practices in the olden days were the pretty pictures artists drew of the horrible flesh-eating diseases. Richard Barnett’s new book, The Sick Rose, collects some of the best examples of medical illustration from the late 18th to early 20th centuries. During this era artists played a huge role in medical education. The disease-riddled patients and body parts they illustrated were used to teach students how to recognize and treat every ailment known to man, which meant each vesicle and syphilitic ball bag had to be rendered with Blu-ray-quality detail.

But these drawings weren't just portraits of dying people. In the early 1800s doctors started cracking open dead bodies left and right and commissioning artists to document what they found inside. The realization that you can learn more from the inside of a body than outside stemmed from Marie-Francois-Xavier Bichat who, in 1801, wrote:

“You may take notes for 20 years, from morning to night at the bedside of the sick… and all will be to you only a confusion of symptoms, which, not being united in one point, will necessarily present only a train of incoherent phenomena. Open up a few bodies: This obscurity will soon disappear, which observation alone would never have been able to dissipate.”

When that advice took hold in the medical community at large, a catalog of illustrated internal body parts began to form, many of which are reprinted in The Sick Rose. Like the external drawings of disease, those illustrations were vital to the education of future doctors.

If you’re able to detach yourself from the knee-jerk reaction of “Oh my fucking God what’s wrong with that dude’s face,” these illustrations are really neat to look at. They offer a peek into a time when art and medicine were intimately connected and making it to 40 was considered a good run.

In the interest of testing our modern knowledge of disease against our ancestors, I’ve put 13 images from The Sick Rose below, paired with multiple-choice options for what terrifying thing you think you’re looking at. It's kind of like a BuzzFeed quiz, except it has nothing to do with Beyoncé and it might make you puke. Good luck!

(Some of these images might be considered NSFW.)

 

 

Follow Jonathan Smith on Twitter

Buy The Sick Rose here


We Went on a Fur Run In the Northwest Territories

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You’d think snowmobiling to the Arctic Circle solely to pick up a few bags of dead animals sounds like hell on earth, but it’s actually quite enjoyable.  Every year, wildlife officers in the Northwest Territories do just that, and this year I was lucky enough to tag along. It’s called a “Fur-Run,” and it’s a time of year when trappers from Colville Lake—the most remote community in the Northwest Terroitories—sell marten, fox, lynx, wolverine and wolf pelts to the territorial government. The pelts are then resold at auction to buyers in Seattle and North Bay, Ontario and then re-resold to fashion designers around the world and anyone else who simply likes to put animal hides on their walls and floors. For some reason the Chinese, in particular, have a hard-on for fur these days.

But before you tweet Ellen Degeneres or start a Facebook page for the civil rights of muskrats, do me a kindness and read on.

Colville Lake is a village of about 150 people smack dab in the middle of absolute nowhere. You’ve never been there and you never will. It is so far removed from any place you’ve ever heard of that even people living in Yellowknife—a city you already think is in the middle of nowhere—think Colville Lake is even more in the middle of nowhere.

As remote as it is, there are three ways to get there: by airplane year-round, by winter-road, or, when the winter road isn’t open yet, you can do what we did: i.e. freeze your face off on a snowmobile for 12 hours, driving from the historic oil town of Norman Wells over an ass-splitting bumpy trail past the Arctic Circle, until you reach the Lake. Along the way, you stop at a few shacks to melt your snotsicles, have a sip of tea and carry on. 

Colville Lake is a beautiful community when you finally get to it. Lined with cute little log cabins and homes with teepees scattered around—a trend started by the hamlet’s founder, Bern Will Brown. Brown is a loveable 93-year-old ex-missionary from Rochester, NY who smokes a pipe and watches Notre Dame football in his underoos. He also looks and sounds identical to Grampa Simpson. And his yarns stretch on forever.

“When I came here in ’58—or was it ’61? Maybe ’60?—aw hell, whenever it was, I rounded up a bunch of Hareskin injuns and some eskimos to help build those cabins out back,” he said. The cabins he referred to includes a beautiful church called Our Lady of the Snows, an RCMP detachment, and a museum filled with books, paintings, journals, Inuit carvings, dogsleds and of course, furs. There’s even a white statue of Brown’s head sitting on a table upstairs, which is funny. Anyway, either the area was too beautiful to leave or there was no way to get back home because when Brown’s winter wonderland was completed in 1962, his workers dropped their hammers, said ‘fuck it,’ and stayed there too.

With the fish being plentiful and enough caribou in the area to eat, a few more Dene families moved to the area. To this day it is one of the most traditional settlements in Northern Canada, whose economy relies almost entirely on fishing and trapping. Without it, men and women would be forced to work at mines and oilrigs elsewhere in the territory. And if they didn’t do that, they would be screwed. This place is Step One on the massive Fur Industry Ladder, and nobody has the time or money to philosophize about the stupidity of Chinese rappers wearing fox hoodies. The only thing on a trapper’s mind is buying groceries and paying for gas.  

Wildlife officer Marti Lys, and the manager of fur marketing and traditional economy for the territorial government Francois Rossouw, showed me around the community. We stopped and chatted with Modeste Eddibar, a trapper cleaning a wolf pelt outside of his cabin. Rossouw is a wiry little South African with an eagle eye for technique. “You’re doing it all wrong, you don’t want to mess it up," he said to Eddibar. Rossouw grabbed a knife from Eddibar and pointed at the hide. “You want to clean the claws properly or else nobody is going to buy this,” he continued. Initially, I found this conversation awkward: a hyperactive South African telling a full-on Dene man how to properly clean a wolf pelt. But Eddibar listened carefully because Rossouw was to completely right. Rossouw’s job is not only to subsidize trappers for quality furs, but also to educate them on what fur-buyers want and how to trap responsibly, using legal quick-kill traps and proper cleaning techniques. “If nobody buys it, it will be a waste of a beautiful animal,” he said. Trapping is kept sustainable but it’s monitored closely as well.

Lys retreated to the wildlife officer’s cabin to do paper work. Her job is to collect the furs, inspect, tag, record, and pay the trappers an advance—more is paid after the auctions. Depending on the species and the quality of the pelts they bring in, the top trappers can earn anywhere from 20 to 40 thousand dollars a season. This money goes back into paying the ridiculous costs of living here, like $10 cartons of milk and $7 loaves of Wonderbread. The rate at the local B&B (a portable trailer) is the cool price of $260 a night—per person. Needless to say, I slept in the wildlife officer’s cabin surrounded by potentially flea infested marten pelts that smell like wet cat. “If you see the fur move like ripples in the ocean, that means they’re full of lice,” Rossouw told me. And with that thought, I snuggled my stale pillow and drifted soundly to sleep.

The next day more trappers dropped off their furs, everything from marten to wolverine to wolf. A wolf can net $400 per pelt and Modeste Eddibar hauls in eight. Robert Kochon, one of the grand poobahs of trapping, brought in a few hockey bags full of fox and marten. Pelts were packaged, cheques were signed and more trappers lined up outside the cabin. It’s payday in Colville Lake and Marti and Francois are the bank-tellers.

I headed over to the Colville Lake School, a one-room building where literally every kid in town goes for an education. Sheldon Snow is one of the teachers and he was collecting pelts that his students have trapped as part of the Young Trapper Program. The money they receive will go back to help pay for field trips and other perks, like maybe a toilet that actually flushes.

“The older kids teach the younger kids and we all learn together,” Snow said. “Without this program the kids would get bored, maybe start mischief, but most importantly, they wouldn’t be on the land or learning their traditions.”

While precocious preteen twerps across the country get pissed of at their parents for distracting them from their epic Call of Duty sesh, kids in Colville Lake are outside setting snares with their parents and grandparents, engaging with their culture, learning biology, chopping wood, making bannock and generally being part of the beautifully remote landscape they call home. Don’t get me wrong, they are probably being shitheads too, but they are definitely not being pussies.

The last day of my visit, Marti and Francois packed the furs tight and I helpped get the sleds ready for departure. It’s been a good Fur-Run: the trappers in Colville Lake can support their families for a few more months, maybe even go on vacation and hit the beach at the West Edmonton Mall. We said our goodbyes and mahsi cho (thank you) to our new friends. I hate giving a place the old in and out but we needed to get going. And just like that, we bounce our chilly white asses back to the big town with a bunch of fur in tow.


@patkanephoto

Brunch Is America's Most Hated Meal Because We All Ruined It

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Photo via Flickr User specialoperations

Brunch is, without a doubt, the most divisive meal known to man. For everyone like myself who loves nothing more than crawling out of bed on a Sunday afternoon to eat a shitload of eggs, there's another two people who'd rather auto-eroticaly asphyxiate while watching Full House reruns than eat brunch. 

In major cities across the country, hoards of hungry, well-heeled eaters line up for hours to shove unhealthy food into their mouths and get day-drunk. To my ear, that sounds like a gravy-soaked dream come true. 

Unfortunately, brunch has become synonymous with upper class, yuppie assholes and urban tourists. More than any other dining experience, the leisure and excess of brunch typifies the gaping divide between America's haves and have-nots. A low-income, ethnic neighborhood is not truly gentrified until it has a trendy destination that experiments with kale.

A beautiful meal that involves both bacon and alcohol has been ruined by the afterbirth of our culture's rapidly escalating class conflict. If society implemented a few of the below suggestions, we could make brunch not only more egalitarian, but also significantly less shitty.

Photo via Flickr User Erica Firment

It Costs Too Much

The image of the typical brunch patron is that of a snob who spends most of their morning deciding what to wear to brunch. That's our fault. Brunch developed into an exclusively bourgeois activity because it's expensive, and middle class strivers are complicit in this sham. If I go to brunch, I'm probably going to spend at least $40. Entrees alone can cost up to $20. Drinks aren't far behind. It's the perfect meal for the oncoming rush of generic culture and gentrification because it's essentially elitist. 

The only way this will change is if we collectively start supporting shitty, low-cost diners where the wait staff is more sassy than dismissive. If enough city dwellers skipped the interminable lines and grabbed corned beef hash and a can of domestic beer for brunch, maybe we could save the world.

Photo via Flickr User Matt Biddulph

We're Inviting the Wrong People

Often, brunch is used as a tool for urban professionals to network. It's not a meal. It’s a goddamn circus with multiple rings, all teeming with needy, egotistical, starving animals. Satiating these beasts can either be a simple task (sticking a bloody mary in their hand and hoping for the best) or a Herculean effort riddled with potential social disasters.

I suggest we stop inviting colleagues or acquaintances to brunch. This should be a pleasant activity, not a rush to show off to your direct competition or a way to get ahead in your career. You should really only invite close friends who won’t mind if you embarrass yourself by throwing up brie-flavored vomit in the back of the cab on the way home. This is why certain people create “brunch clubs,” a cadre of trusted associates that appreciate you enough to tolerate you while you’re day-drunk. 

Photo via Flickr User snowpea&bokchoi

Restaurants Make Us Wait Too Fucking Long

OK, this has nothing to do with class. It's just a pet peeve of mine. I refuse to wait in line for over an hour for anything, unless we're talking about a machine that dispenses unlimited free hot dogs. You have to trudge through a mass of people also waiting for food, find the host or hostess who may or may not be completely frazzled, write your name down, and then hope to god you can find a comfortable place to sit. 

Most people spend this time having inane conversations or instagramming anything and everything they can find. At some brunch spots, you can drink while you wait for a table to open up. Drinking occupies that dark space between your ears that insists on generating thoughts like, “Why would I wait so long to eat?” or “I really hope I don’t end up with nightmarish flatulence after I’m done eating.” Alcohol keeps existence’s sorry truth from interrupting your good time, which is the second biggest reason why restaurants serve booze at brunch. The biggest reasons is, of course, monetary gain. Not only are the drinks pricey, but if you drink enough before you’re even seated, you’re bound to order more food. Yes, I will take an extra side of wild boar bacon. Also, can I get some ranch with that? In a to-go cup?

Find a way to alleviate this interminable purgatory, or I may never eat eggs benedict again. 

Photo via Flickr User dpotera

You Basically Can't Order Any Real Alcoholic Drinks

Drinking during a meal is one of those luxuries the well-heeled love most about brunch. That's why all brunch drinks are so goddamned fancy. It's yet another outward sign of success. If all you want to do is be in an environment where it’s culturally acceptable to eat pancakes at 2 PM, then just stay home (side note, some people have brunch at home with booze, and they're doing it right). 

That seems like the reason why only some beverages are OK to order. Most restaurants endeavor to foist a $15 bottomless mimosa or bloody mary on its patrons. Again, this is the height of conspicuous decadence, and it's alienating. The restaurants want you to binge-drink a silly cocktail that is easy to make in bulk. I’ve seen people try to order a beer at brunch, and the response from the wait staff is akin to telling a date your favorite movie is Triumph of the Will and you love ball torture. Let me order something cheap without my waiter throwing shade in my general direction. 

Photo via Flickr User Jamie McCaffrey

The Music Choices Are Shameful

Brunch became popular as a pseudo-meal because it was relaxing. You can eat brunch whenever you want, and you can do it outdoors in shorts and flip-flops (a.k.a "LA formal wear"). The music should reflect that lackadaisical tone, and it shouldn't get in the way of you actually having a conversation.

Most brunch places in LA don’t adhere to this simple rule, and instead choose to assert their musical choices as though the restaurant were a side stage at Coachella. The irony of playing old 2 Pac songs during the whitest meal known to man is lost on everyone but me. Either I get the band pictured above playing Gene Krupa's greatest hits or I walk.

Photo via Flickr User Roger Wollstadt

The Food is a Total Afterthought

Oh, have you forgotten about eating? By now, most brunchers have forgotten that they’re actually participating in a meal and not a Girls Gone Wild video shoot on Bourbon Street. What does one order? Does it even fucking matter? Food is food. If you’re drunk enough, sucking on a plastic bag full of silver dollars might satisfy your hunger. Eggs, bacon, and hollandaise sauce are almost a bonus. Also, eating too much might get in the way of the peacocking that has taken over brunch culture. The "brunch spot as outdoor nightclub" phenomenon will always keep a certain element of the population at bay. The concept of eating being secondary to being seen near food isn't relatable or egalitarian at all. It's alien to just about everyone.

That's why my most important suggestion is to ban fedoras, gladiator sandals, aviator sunglasses, beanies during summertime, cutoff shorts where the pockets are visible, and oversized watches from brunch. I look forward to my Presidential Medal of Freedom. You can just mail it to the VICE LA office.

Follow Dave Schilling on Twitter.

Our E-Cigarettes Are Going to Melt Our Faces and Burn Our Houses Down

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Why sugarcoat it? Judging from the heavily trafficked articles on the Daily Mail, and the Huffington Post, it looks like e-cigarettes aren't going to stop at poisoning children. They're coming after our homes and our faces. Long term studies on the health effects of vaping haven't been completed, and you know what else hasn't been studied? Whether they've been programmed by Al Qaeda to explode all over our old people.

Maybe you already know one of the stories: An old lady in England was severely disfigured on Friday when her face caught on fire in connection with the use of an e-cigarette. That there was a fire, and that it was sad aren't matters for dispute. It's just not clear yet how the e-cigarette attacked her or why.
 
 
Here are the facts: There was a horrible fire in a Manchester hospital, and a 65-year-old lady named Jean Booth received burns to her face. Booth was there for a routine hip operation. No one was watching when the ignition occurred, but there was some kind of explosion, which led to flames, which led to burns. The Sun, a print tabloid, received testimony from a relative who said, 'We're all in total shock. Her face is completely burnt. It's covered up with bandages. She might be blinded. It's absolutely horrendous.” 
 
The Daily Mail story implies that the woman’s breathing tube, or some part of her breathing apparatus, exploded somehow, and that the ignition occurred when she took a drag from her e-cigarette. Their exact words are “her e-cigarette is thought to have ignited her oxygen.” The Manchester Evening News is even less clear, saying, “An investigation has been launched after an electronic cigarette was discovered near to her hospital bed after the blast.” The Mirror, explains, “It is understood that she suffered sudden breathing difficulties and was given oxygen using tubes attached to her nose.”
 
What's the story? How does an e-cigarette trigger a fire? Was it the dangerous aerosol nicotine molcules, and their carcinogenic powers attacking the woman's breathing tube until it exploded?
 
 
I put my question to Gerald E. Loeb, Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Southern California. He told me that "Anything with a battery and a heating coil could ignite in the presence of pure oxygen, which would then feed the flames of everything around. This is why hospitals have strict rules on electrical devices where oxygen is used.​"
 
Indeed, responsible medical professionals provide literature to patients that would have made this clear. In other words, the patient, and nearby staff, should have known not to get electronics near the oxygen.
 
This tabloid story rhymes with an incident from last week in which a woman’s e-cigarette charger exploded, which points to the charger or possibly the battery as being hazardous, as opposed to the nicotine, or the internal heat coils. Here’s that video:
 
 
Then yesterday, a story broke that makes these others look like child's play. Daily Mail news rephraser Amanda Williams gives us the headline "Now e-cigarette explodes and starts flat fire leaving one woman in hospital after the device overheated while it was charging." Firefighters do in fact seem certain that the charger or battery caused the fire.
 
But as John Hartigan of Vapeology, a vape store in Los Angeles pointed out to me, there are countless types of e-cigarette form factors, models, and hardware combinations. E-cigarettes aren't a monolithic entity, but a bunch of different devices manufactured on different continents. When Sony discovered that some of its batteries were fire hazards last week, the press told us exactly which ones to avoid. But the coverage of this e-cigarette fire doesn't bother to mention exactly which e-cigaratte hardware might be faulty. 
 
I'd come to Vapeology, a sparse but welcoming e-cigarette hardware and liquid retailer in the Cypress Park area, to find out more about all the recent hysteria and the effect it was having on business. Hartigan told me he talks to the press a lot, and attends city council meetings. But overall, he shrugs it off. "There's going to be good news and bad news. That's just how it's going to be," he said. Later he told me, "It's still the Wild West."
 
As an example of a hazard, Hartigan showed me a style of atomizer he'd opted to stop selling, because it overheated due to a reliance on solder—I think. Things got a little technical. The fact that laypeople like myself don't know what electricity is made of is part of Hartigan's point. "If you're going to hot rod your equipment, and not pay attention to the natural, physical laws, then you're running a danger," he told me.
 
 
At the moment, it's up to responsible proprietors to perform this kind of quality control, since there's no governing body, and customers certainly don't give much thought to safety.
 
Worse still, have you met e-cigarette users? I'm sure there are plenty of nice ones, but the ones you notice are the douchebags. 
 
Hartigan is haunted by his customers' reputation for ruining bar scenes. Bartenders in Orange County, where vaping indoors is still legal, recently gave him a hard time about his job as a vape store owner. "They say to me 'so you're one of those assholes?'" he says. But that ostentatious public vaping, which Hartigan calls "cloud chasing," isn't just irritating; it sometimes borders on hazardous.
 
He told me there are three basic types of e-cigarette customer: 
  1. Cigarette quitters, who buy sensible equipment, and then return to thank him for helping them clean up their acts.
  2. The hookah crowd, who just want a new reason for people to look at them. They just want whatever's most expensive.
  3. Hobbyists, who are smart and creative, but also the kind that are most likely to get themselves into trouble.

The hobbyists, particularly the modders—aka: the type who buy body kits and big subwoofers for their Acuras—are getting into something called Sub-Ohm Vaping, which means cranking down the resistance on the atomizer in an e-cigarette to lower than one ohm.
 
Apparently once you get your resistance down that low, you're able to vaporize enormous quantities of e-cigarette liquid, and produce endless, fog machine-like billowing clouds from your mouth and nose, which I hear really impress the ladies. This is how the aforementioned "cloud chasing," is accomplished. 
 
I don't claim that I know the significance of less then one ohm of resistance, and that means I shouldn't try it. Don't take it from me, though. Just listen to this very reasonable guy talking about Sub Ohm Vaping:

It's excessive; it gets in everyone's face; and it's dangerous. So in other words, what makes Sub-Ohm Vaping obnoxious to reasonable people is exactly what makes it appealing to tools. It's this kind of dick measuring that's speeding up the backlash against e-cigarettes. When cloud chasers ask Hartigan about his modest equipment, he replies, "I just don't want anybody banning me from doing this."

While vaping culture, and vaping coverage in the media are both ramping up, so is the bummer machine known as our government, man. The latest is a California ban on online sales that might become law in a few weeks. Still, there's plenty that the pearl-clutching set have yet to freak out about, like the fact that you can vape hash oil in similar or identical devices. It might be a good idea for e-cigarette users to keep a low profile. But then, a lot of things might be good ideas.

So here's a big doff of my fedora to the modders out there striving to be the Wright Brothers of getting killed by an e-cigarette. The government really has no reason to ban these fairly harmless gadgets that can actually improve people's health. But you're out there making sure they find a reason! Nice going!

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter

Has New York City Stopped Spying on Muslims?

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Muslims protesting the NYPD's surveillance of their neighborhoods in New York. Photo via Flickr user Samantha Grace Lewis

After Bill de Blasio easily got elected mayor of New York City last November, the campaign promise he seemed least likely to follow through on was a vague pledge to rein in the local police department's sprawling surveillance of ordinary Muslims. The horror of the 9/11 terrorist attacks had been used by three-term oligarch Michael Bloomberg and his extremely popular police commissioner, Ray Kelly, to justify the creation of a global spying regime with outposts in European capitals as well as less exotic destinations like New Jersey. What was a calculating progressive political strategist from Brooklyn with no law-enforcement credentials going to do about it?

The skepticism grew only more acute when de Blasio appointed Bill Bratton to run the NYPD. Bratton, a relic who served a previous stint as commissioner under Rudy Giuliani in the mid 1990s, was known for his embrace of the discredited "Broken Windows" theory of policing, and you didn't have to be all that cynical to assume that the new administration would continue monitoring Muslims throughout the New York metro area, even without evidence that any of them had committed a crime.

But the NYPD took a major step forward this past week when Bratton and Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence John Miller formally disbanded the Zone Assessment Unit, a squad of plainclothes detectives who infiltrated Muslim communities in hopes of mapping where the population lived, ate, prayed, and shopped, among other basic human activities. (This team was previously known as the Demographics Unit until the cops realized that sounded rather... racist.)

Mapping was just one small piece of a vast intelligence-gathering operation that involves hundreds of officers, however, leaving Muslim and civil liberties advocates far from ready to declare victory.

"This isn't the end of the Muslim-surveillance program by any stretch of the imagination," said Faiza Patel, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at NYU's Brennan Center for Justice. "We already knew that the Demographics Unit wasn't producing any useful intelligence."

As investigative reporters Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman detailed in a Pulitzer Prize–winning series of damning stories for the Associated Press in 2011 and 2012, all that sneaking around in the name of developing some kind of comprehensive record of where the city's Muslims might be found at any given time not only didn't foil any terrorist plots—it didn't even lead to any investigations. So it's only natural that Miller, who promised to reevaluate all active probes when he appeared before the City Council last month, would put the kibosh on the useless mapping program.

The fear is that the dissolution of the most infamous piece of the spying apparatus might serve as a pretext for Bratton's NYPD to continue some of Kelly's worst policies, like designating entire mosques as terrorist organizations (and using that as an excuse for spying on everyone who frequents them) as well as infiltrating Muslim student groups on college campuses. After all, the NYPD's budget for counterterrorism and intelligence in 2010 was over $100 million, and the two divisions employed about 1,000 officers. The Zone Assessment unit itself never included more than about 16 detectives at any given time, meaning tens of millions of dollars and hundreds of bodies are still available to spy on targeted ethnic groups, Muslim or otherwise.

Fortunately for the reform-minded, relying on Bratton and de Blasio to do the right thing is not the only avenue for change. An independent inspector general will get to work within a matter of weeks with a generous mandate to explore the atrophy that took place under Kelly's reign, as well as some of his more, shall we say, innovative tactics. And a trio of lawsuits making their way through various federal courts could also help shine more light on what the NYPD is up to these days. In that sense, ending the mapping program was not just a no-brainer—it was an historical inevitability, one Bratton saw no reason to delay.

Follow Matt Taylor on Twitter.

Australia, It Doesn't Have to Be This Way

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Australia in the 1980s—a happier time, when political campaigns weren't based around keeping asylum seekers out of the country (Photo via)

I was born in Melbourne in 1978. My childhood encompassed the heady economic glory of the 1980s, my adolescence the crushing recession of the early 90s—the worst Australia's economy had been since the Great Depression. Next was my political awakening, which coincided with the beginning of what are now known as the Howard Years—the decade that conservative Prime Minister John Howard and his Liberal Party spent in power, beginning in 1996 and ending with the Australian Labor Party's election victory in December of 2007. 

Australia has, of course, never been an idyllic middle class wonderland (its short history is surprisingly bloody and brutal), but it has always enjoyed certain advantages. It's a continent rich in natural resources; it's never been split by the sort of entrenched ethnic and political divides that exist in most other regions around the world; and, most importantly, it's had the entirety of world history to learn from—it was colonized in 1788 and only federated in 1901.

There's no other country in the world that's as young and as blessed with so many advantages; it's not for nothing that 1960s social theorist Donald Horne called Australia "the lucky country," a reference to how its unique historical advantages have given it the prosperity and comfort that other nations have had to secure by revolution and bloodshed.

The Australia in which I grew up wasn't a perfect country by any means. But it was still a country that was coming to appreciate its luck. It was a country leaving its legacy of racism behind, a country that was looking out to the world. The year I turned 14, the High Court recognized native title, the first step towards acknowledging the hideous wrongs done to Australia's native population by British colonizers. The establishment of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC)—an economic forum for 21 Pacific Rim member countries—meant Australia was economically looking more to its neighbors and less to its colonial past. It was a society facing outwards, and on the whole one that was friendly, welcoming and tolerant.

And, perhaps most relevantly, it was a country that, by and large, had embraced the concept of multiculturalism. Mass immigration after the Second World War had brought a large Greek and Italian community to Australia, and a similar process after the Vietnam War resulted in the establishment of a significant Vietnamese community. Tiananmen Square and the impending Hong Kong handover deadline brought a rise in Chinese immigration (of which there is a long history in Australia). On my block there were Greeks, Germans, Indians, and white Australians. Our next-door neighbors were a multi-racial couple who had two adopted children, one black and one white. 

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott (Photo via)

I'm telling you all this because there are moments on which things pivot. Sometimes you know when those moments are happening, when a certain choice will influence the outcome of your life. But sometimes they pass by unnoticed, their significance revealing itself only in retrospect. The country I grew up in is still there, of course, and you might well think that it's the same as it's ever been. But Australia has changed. There's been a fundamental political shift to the right, one that's found its fullest expression in the ultra-conservative government of Tony Abbott, who was elected last year. Australia these days is known as much for its offshore detention camps as it is for its kangaroos and koalas.

But it doesn't have to be this way. We tend to see the world as a series of accepted truths, and, at the moment, these truths largely revolve around a fundamentally pessimistic view of humanity—that humans are self-interested, that given the choice we act in a way that benefits ourselves over benefiting others. It's a view that's rooted not in social theory but in neo-liberal economics, in Adam Smith's declaration that, "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages."

The fact that these truths are accepted on both sides of the political equation is one of the reasons that, since about 1980, there has been a general shift to the right in liberal democracies, a shift that coincided with the adoption of free market economics as the dictum of both left and right. in Australia, for instance, it was the ostensibly left-wing Labor government of the 1980s who deregulated the country's financial system, floated the dollar and started the process of privatizing utilities.

A solidarity vigil outside an immigrant detention center in Melbourne. (Image via)

Whether Smith's ideas work in an economic sense is a debate for another forum, but their implications have been catastrophic in a social sense. It's a short leap from Smith to Margaret Thatcher's famous declaration that "there is no such thing as society," and from there it's an even shorter leap to working on the assumption that your electorate is made up of a bunch of selfish assholes whose only interest is their own personal comfort.

The thing is, these prophecies are self-fulfilling. Of course, you can argue that it's Australia that's changed Australian politics, not vice versa. There are people who argue that the electorate gets the politicians it deserves, but I'd argue that it's as much at least the opposite as anything else—that the actions of politicians can have real and lasting effects on the nature of political discourse. If you treat people as adults, they behave as adults. If you treat them as spoiled children, they behave as spoiled children.

There were two moments on which Australian history pivoted during the Howard years. The first was Howard's reaction to the first stirrings of far-right sentiment. In 1996, former Liberal party candidate Pauline Hanson was elected to the federal lower house as an independent, on a platform based around your usual far-right rhetoric, and founded the nationalist One Nation party. Howard chose to neutralize the threat to his party's traditional support base by refusing to condemn One Nation's populist rhetoric, and instead adopting it as his own. If Australia had been drifting rightwards, Howard's embrace of the far-right was the moment it took a massive lurch in that direction, and it's never really moved back.

The second was sheer political opportunism. It came in 2001, when Howard was headed for a federal election defeat but was presented a political gift when a boat full of Afghani refugees foundered in international waters, northwest of the Australian territory of Christmas Island. Howard milked the crisis for all it was worth, claiming (falsely) that the unfortunate people on the boat had thrown their children overboard in a bid to force the crew of the MV Tampa—a Norwegian freighter—to rescue them. It was all horseshit, but it won him the election. If you're looking for a textbook example of the demonization of foreigners for political gain, you really couldn't do much better than that.

A camp in Manus, Papua New Guinea, one of the detention centers where refugees and asylum seekers caught entering Australia are sent (via)

But you can't dance with the devil like this without consequences. Anti-immigration sentiment has gone from being a political expedient for the Australian right to being its raison d'etre. Every election campaign since the MV Tampa incident has been fought on questions of "stopping the boats." Labor, to their eternal discredit, have embraced this anti-immigration fervor with just as much enthusiasm as the Liberals. The result is the ongoing national disgrace that is our incarceration and implicit criminalization—and flat-out abuse—of refugees.

It doesn't have to be this way. People have the capacity for altruism and generosity as much as they do for selfishness and greed. But if you pander to and legitimize their baser instincts, then it's those instincts that find expression in their behavior. Australia used to be a country that embraced the idea of altruism and equanimity. We used to be generous and welcoming. We used to take pride in it. Some of us still do. But not the people running the country—they're more interested in defending their right to bigotry, turning over national parks to loggers, and dredging the Great Barrier Reef.

It used to make me angry, this stuff. And there's still a spark of anger there. But now, as much as anything, it just makes me sad. Australia is as lucky as it ever was, but there are two ways to deal with luck—to share your good fortune, or to guard it jealously. Australia used to be a country that made some effort to do the former. I know, because I remember that country. But I remember it less every day.

Follow Tom Hawking on Twitter

An Armed Standoff in Nevada Is Only the Beginning for America’s Right-Wing Militias

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A standoff between federal agents and right-wing militia members came very close to bloodshed last week. Photo by Shannon Bushman via Facebook

For two decades the US government has tried to get Cliven Bundy to remove his cows from federal land, and for two decades the Nevada rancher has steadfastly refused, defying court orders and attempts to negotiate a settlement for the $1.1 million he owes in federal grazing fees. Finally, last week, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) took matters into its own hands and started seizing cattle that had been illegally grazing on government property. Things went downhill from there.

What began as an arcane land dispute rapidly escalated into an armed standoff in the desert. A ragtag band of anti-government militants, Tea Party politicians, and Old West ranchers descended on the area, responding to a call to arms posted by the Bundy family on their blog and circulated throughout the internet by conservatives and libertarians. Spurred on by YouTube videos of physical altercations between federal agents and the Bundys, the protesters aggressively confronted law enforcement, which in turn escalated things by gathering a huge force of armed BLM rangers and FBI agents. On Friday, the Federal Aviation Administration placed a month-long flight restriction over the ranch after the Bundy family posted aerial photos of the assembled authorities.

For right-wing militias and paramilitary groups founded around a collective paranoid belief that the federal government is just looking for an excuse to impose martial law, images of armed federal agents forcibly seizing cows basically means it's DEFCON 1. By Saturday, as many as 1,000 anti-BLM protestors from as far away as Virginia, New Hampshire, and Georgia had set up camp in Bunkerville, an arid patch of land where the BLM was rounding up the Bundy cattle. Packing handguns and assault rifles, the protesters carried signs featuring slogans like “Tyranny Is Alive,” “Where's the Justice?” and “Militia Sighn In [sic]," and many said they were prepared for a shoot-out with the federal government. The mood was such that even Glenn Beck was wary of the crowd, announcing on his show that “there's about 10 or 15 percent of the people who are talking about this online that are truly frightening."

“We were prepared to do whatever it takes to protect their cattle, and their ranch, and their home,” said protester Richard Mack, a former Arizona sheriff who is on the board of Oath Keepers, a militia founded by a former Ron Paul aide and made up mostly of current and former US military personnel and law enforcement. “The government was prepared to do anything, including shooting at unarmed people." (On Monday Mack told Fox News that organizers had been “strategizing to put all the women up front” in a firefight so that the image of the BLM shooting women would be televised.)

The government blinked first, announcing Saturday afternoon that it would stop seizing Bundy’s cattle because of "grave concern about the safety of our employees and members of the public." A few hours later, protesters stormed the BLM's corrals, demanding that the bureau release the 400 cows it had already captured.

"Everyone was up there trying to get the cattle back and the BLM and all of the agents kept yelling, 'Step closer and we'll shoot!' Everybody had their hands up, and we just kept moving forward," said protester Kevin Gillman, a 24-year-old military veteran who volunteered with the state militia coalition Operation Mutual Aid at Bundy Ranch. "They ended up releasing the cattle, because it was either that or shoot us."

The government described the situation slightly differently. “Due to escalating tensions, the cattle have been released from the enclosures in order to avoid violence and help restore order," BLM Director Neil Kornze said in a statement.

Bundy’s allies have cautiously declared victory, although most of the protesters I spoke to remain predictably suspicious that the stand-down was just another government “ruse” to lure them into complacency. "We don't want to be taken by surprise by another onslaught, so we're still being careful," Mack said. He estimated that about a third of the protesters had remained at Bundy Ranch this week to provide "security."

Emboldened by the strong showing in Nevada, right-wing militia organizers are now looking to capitalize on the momentum, hosting marathon conference calls in which hundreds of militia volunteers strategize and coordinate their next big move.

"There have been more organizations putting out the word about what's going on, how the [federal government] is taking away our freedoms and liberties," said Gillman, who is one of roughly 400 new volunteers to join Operation Mutual Aid in recent days. Gillman added that he hadn't known much about the militia movement before last week.

"Most of them are just citizens who want to go out and help the cause of other Americans in need who don't have backup," he said of his right-wing comrades. "I wouldn't necessarily say it's a militia, but we did bring our guns out there, because the federal agents went out there with their sniper rifles and their guns. We're just going to be prepared for whatever [the government] wants to do. It's hard to talk to someone who has a gun unless you have one yourself."

Meanwhile, the tenuous stalemate has basically put the BLM right back where it started. In a statement I was given on Tuesday, the agency insisted that it had not cut a deal with Bundy and that it would still try to force the rancher into compliance through administrative and legal channels. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, also weighed in on the conflict this week, telling Reno’s NBC affiliate KRNV that the conflict isn't finished.

“We can’t have an American people that violate the law and then just walk away from it,” Reid said. “So it’s not over.”

Legally, Bundy doesn’t have a leg to stand on. His disagreement with the federal government dates back to 1993, when he stopped paying federal grazing fees in response to new regulations aimed at protecting the desert tortoise habitat in Golden Butte, a federally owned 600,000-acre swath of land northeast of Las Vegas where Bundy’s family has been raising cattle since his Mormon ancestors settled there, in the late 1800s. In response, the BLM revoked Bundy’s permit and sued him twice in federal court. Both times, a judge ordered Bundy to get his cows off public land or face fines of $200 per head for each day that he refused to comply. The government now claims that Bundy owes $1.1 million in fines and grazing fees. (The right-wing website Breitbart has compiled all of the court orders—and provided a lengthy analysis—here.)

In response, Bundy has argued that the federal government doesn’t actually own the land in question, and thus doesn’t have the right to tell him what to do with his cows. The land, he says, actually belongs to the state of Nevada—a claim that is very obviously untrue.

“I think this is the sovereign state of Nevada,” Bundy told conservative talk-radio host Dana Loesch Thursday. “I abide by all Nevada state laws. But I don’t recognize the United States government as even existing.”

Bundy’s larger point—that the feds shouldn’t own 80 percent of the land in Nevada, or nearly 50 percent of land in 11 Western states—demonstrates the long-running tension over state’s rights and federal land-use policies that invariably pick winners and losers among environmental and business interests. Even if Bundy wanted to pay the government fines, he would still be forced to remove his cows from Butte Gold thanks to a 1998 conservation deal that eliminated grazing in the area in exchange for allowing the county to destroy desert tortoise habitats for private development. Bundy is now the sole surviving cattle rancher in Clark County.

At the same time, environmentalists have criticized the BLM for not dealing with the Bundys' trespass cattle sooner, and they were outraged this week when the agency called off the roundup. “The BLM monumentally failed to remove the trespass cattle, collect fees, or protect the land for more than 20 years,” Rob Mrowka, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement. “Now it backed down in the face of threats and posturing of armed so-called ‘sovereignists.’ This is absolutely pathetic and an insult to ranchers and others who hold permits and pay their required fees to use the public lands.”

For most of the Bundys' far-right allies, though, the showdown in Nevada wasn’t as much about the rancher and his land as it was a flashpoint in their growing beef with the federal government.

"Progressively, the federal government is just getting stronger," Gillman said. "I don't understand why they need to go out there with 200 federal agents and set up sniper positions. I don't see the need for the federal government to take up guns against its own people.

"We're willing to go as far as they are willing to go," he added. "We're not here for violence... But if they're coming in, guns blaring, to hurt citizens, then we're just going to defend ourselves. We're not going to go out and attack or anything. When someone goes in and takes away your freedoms, the only thing you can do is stand up against them. If you don't stand up against them, how far will they go?"

Follow Grace Wyler on Twitter.

Boston Bombing Hoaxer, You Have My Attention

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Screenshot via Kevin Edson's Youtube channel

Dear Kevin "Kayvon" Edson,

Nice to meet you. I regret that our introduction had to happen while you're locked up in a mental institution, but I'm sure you'll admit, you pretty much brought that upon yourself. 

Yesterday, on the one-year anniversary of the Boston Marathon Bombings, you saw fit to leave two backpacks (or maybe just one. I'm sure you'll clarify), one of which contained a rice cooker, at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. At 7:00 PM, police cleared people away from the scene, and at 9:00 PM, they detonated your rice cooker, which you had filled with confetti. Good thinking. When detonated, a little flag with the word "Bang!" on it might have been destroyed, which would've spoiled the effect.

The detonation. Image via Instagram user heyratty

My first guess, that this would all be a statement about the racist, haphazard vigilantism that spun out of control in the aftermath of the real Boston Bombings last year, was wrong.

You didn't conceal your identity at all. You wore no shoes and a floppy, veiled hat while you marched down the street shouting "Boston Strong! Boston Strong!" before you dropped off the backpack on Boylston Street. A lot of people filmed it all with their phones. You weren't hiding at all. After dropping off the rice cooker, you told a cop it was a rice cooker. 

Nearby, public transportation came to a halt, and people were told to go inside, and stay away from windows. Most of them knew the deal anyway, because they no doubt have fresh, year-old trauma, and the vigilance that comes with it. Many of the people at that marathon and in those homes would have suffered injuries during last year's attack. Some of them may have lost family members, so they probably knew how to take shelter during a bomb threat. Maybe their PTSD is worse now.

Fully knowing you were going to be arrested, you updated your website to include some pictures of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, with comments about how hot he is. Having a crush on Tsarnaev was briefly a news thing ten months ago, and I think you recycled the pictures from back then. Pretty avant garde of you.

It turns out you're a fashion designer and a performance artist, though without any obvious examples of success at either pursuit. Previous examples I mean. Your Twitter bio reads, "Kayvon is a total Avantgardster and a Fashion Dinosaur. He makes mad f@$h10n and will tell 'ya straight- even though he's a total fag," and you say in your introductory video, "I really need exposure." Indeed. You also point out that "it's all about making an entrance." Point taken. I didn't know who you were before yesterday.

In your video, you go on to say, "The clothes that I design are much less avant garde than the clothes that I wear. They're much more commercial." That surprises me, but then, you say that you "really hope that I can just show the world how to dress," and that your goal is to "bring the world to a more stylish, and freely dressing place." Cool. Someone should do that. We're too uptight about clothes, man. Also, fake bombings.

"Two weeks after attending Parson's School of Design, I was diagnosed bipolar," you admit, late in your video. That adds up. Bipolar disorder is rough. You can be well-adjusted and productive, but prone to moments of extreme darkness, like Stephen Fry. Or almost completely unable to function without constant care, like Daniel Johnston.

Screenshot via Edson's Youtube channel

I guess what I'm saying, Mr. Edson, is that I'm listening. Your Facebook profile is down right now, you never seem to have figured out how to use Twitter very effectively, and you might be getting studied in a padded cell, but I'm looking forward to the first time you get the opportunity to talk into a microphone that's plugged into a major media outlet. That's when we'll find out what your "performance art" is all about, right?

Stephen Fry and Daniel Johnston never accomplished anything on this scale during a manic episode. So no doubt, you've got a point of view to espouse with all this, right?

Otherwise, what would be the point of getting the attention of the international media, and re-traumatizing your city on the anniversary of a tragedy? What would be the point of seeking all this attention just because you need a lobotomy? It's like grabbing someone by the collar and screaming, "I like grabbing collars!" You wouldn't just leave us all shaking our heads, wondering what the point of all that was, right? 

So, Mr. Edson, you have my attention now. Dazzle me.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter


I Took My Fiancée to WrestleMania XXX

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Pro wrestling fans: never not "going for it." Photos via the author.
My relationship with professional wrestling is a lot like Michael Corleone’s relationship with organized crime in The Godfather III. Every time I think I’m out, they pull me back in. When I drove to WrestleMania in New Jersey last year with a buddy, I was able to justify that decision by convincing myself that I was motivated by nostalgia, irony and a careless disregard for disposable income (I opted for nosebleed seats, which were about 80 bucks each, but ringside tickets will set you back a few grand).

Once those tickets had been purchased, however, I found myself watching wrestling on a weekly basis again just so I would know all the storylines going into the event. Again, because of irony, and nostalgia, and not at all because a big part of me still thought wrestling was awesome. Much as I sometimes deny it, I’m actually kind of a ‘mark.’ That’s wrestling lingo borrowed from old time carny speak and a term used by wrestling promoters and performers in reference to audience members. It’s since been appropriated by Internet Wrestling Community enthusiasts (the IWC) and used to describe mega fans who are overly-invested in any one wrestler or the product in general.

Although my girlfriend previously had zero interest in the ‘sport,’ she started to watch it with me occasionally. And guess what? She became a mark, too. I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised that this outlandish spectacle of costumes and theatric violence spoke to her, a former roller derby girl. By the time I was headed to Jersey, she was actually a little jealous and disappointed that she wasn’t going, too.

And that’s how I ended up going to WrestleMania for a second year in a row, this time in New Orleans and with my fiancée in tow (how could I not propose?).

I arrived in NOLA on a Friday afternoon. The city was buzzing with activity and St. Paddy’s Day levels of public intoxication. Although Friday evening in the French Quarter is probably party central throughout the year, WrestleMania XXX (as in the 30th edition, not the pornographic parody) had kicked things into overdrive. With festivities spread over the entire weekend leading up to Sunday, many like myself had already arrived in town.

We checked in at our hotel and headed over to Jimmy J’s Cafe, a spot I had scoped out in advance of the trip. The sole waiter there told us there was a table in the back if we wanted it, but we’d have to put up with a rowdy group of drunk guys who were cursing quite a bit. I looked in their direction and saw that they were all wearing wrestling related t-shirts. 

“Yeah, it won't be a problem,” I told the waiter.

I could deal with them. These were my people. These were adult men who still cared about wrestling. And don’t kid yourself, there’s a lot of them too. In its 30-year history, WrestleMania has been held at several Super Bowl-sized venues and has drawn similar, if not larger, crowds. Think of it as a massive sporting event combined with the best and most hyper-specific geek culture convention that’s ever existed.

In the year leading up to the big event in the Superdome, I became more of a super fan than ever before, partially because, in explaining various facets of pro wrestling to my girlfriend, I was reminded of why I became enamored with this insanity in the first place. How at 9 or 10 years old, sick in bed, I was flipping through basic cable and landed on it. I didn't know what was going on, or who the wrestlers were, but the sight of men hitting each other with chairs and garbage cans was something that clicked with me. 

At that time, the industry was on the verge of entering a big money period marked by sex, vulgar language and explicit violence. Kids loved it. Today, the product offered by the WWE is sanitized and family friendly. Blood, bad words and boobs have been replaced by anti-bullying campaigns, role model wrestlers and Scooby Doo crossover films.

The affable speech impaired crime-solving canine was on hand for the whole weekend at Axxess, the official accompaniment event to WrestleMania, taking place at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Centre. Axxess is like a shrine to the WWE, complete with exhibits full of vintage memorabilia, a ring for exhibition matches and, naturally, more merch to buy. Although the WWE would be pumping a bunch of cash into New Orleans’ constantly recovering economy, they were making away like bandits themselves, charging fans $55 just to enter Axxess for a period of a few hours. Thousands were willing to do it, all for the chance of getting to meet and greet their favourite performers.



The masses outside of WrestleCon.
In stark contrast to Axxess was WrestleCon, a non WWE-organized gathering of indie league wrestlers and old timers located directly across the street in a much smaller venue. A true wrestling geek’s fantasy, WrestleCon featured guests such as Internet darling Colt Cabana, who recorded a live episode of his podcast The Art of Wrestling, for which I’m a huge mark.  

I spent most of Saturday at WrestleCon, but I was still curious about Axxess. Thankfully, it cost nothing to enter the ‘super store’ located directly next to Axxess. I casually walked through the doorway between the store and Axxess while staff members were busy checking other people’s tickets. Did I sneak in without paying? Yes. Am I proud of myself? Yes.

I took full advantage of the situation, getting a free sample of Totino’s Pizza Rolls (the only pizza roll endorsed by the WWE) and posing for a free picture with Scooby. It was all so wholesome (except for the Totinos). I missed the raunchiness of the late ‘90s. Where were the posters of a nearly topless Sable? Where was the barbed wire? Where was the crotch chopping?

Fortunately, this was New Orleans, and Bourbon Street was teeming with the kind of debauchery that served as a perfect antidote to WWE’s PG propaganda. On the nights leading up to WrestleMania, the party street was full of the same kind of boozed-up fans I had encountered at Jimmy J’s.

Many were dressed up as their heroes, with Hulk Hogan cosplay being the most common sight. All of the fake Hogans in the world, however, couldn’t prepare me for the Bourbon Street scene of a diminutive South American in full Hulkster regalia, posing alongside a quiet skinny guy dressed up like the Undertaker. Of course, they were charging for photos.



The view from our seats.
Like the rest of WrestleMania weekend, everything on Bourbon Street is a cash-grab, from the gift shop beads to the over-priced slices of pizza and the Lucky Dogs you WILL buy because you’re hammered. While many fans were already sporting large plastic bags full of pricy merchandise they had purchased earlier in the day at the WWE super store, they were still more than willing to drop considerable coin on huge novelty cocktails in and outside of sleazy bars.

The sickly sweet drinks only served to further fuel the wrestling fervor. There was constant chanting of ‘YES,’ a show of support for a wrestler named Daniel Bryan who would be in one of ‘Mania’s main events. It was a fun experience of bonding and togetherness amongst the fans but even I thought it was getting tiresome pretty quickly. I sympathized with the locals who didn’t give a rat’s ass about wrestling.

‘NO!’ screamed a stripper on break, standing in the doorway of Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club, in response to the never-ending chanting.

The chanting is something you need to experience in person to properly understand. It’s well and good to watch pro wrestling on TV and write it off as stupid and juvenile but try not getting pumped when 74,499 people around you are chanting the same word over and over again, all in support of the same person. I was raised Catholic and I haven’t been to mass in years, but if church was more like this, I’d probably still be going. Fireworks would help too.

And if you don’t want to be a sheep and chant what everyone else is chanting, you can yell and scream whatever the hell you want. For no apparent reason, the guy sitting next to me at ‘Mania started rhythmically screaming “Balls made of pussy” at no wrestler in particular.  Although I later found out this was a reference to Archer, it still made very little sense.

“I guess the world isn’t ready for it,” he said, disappointed that his chant was catching on with no one.

The vast majority of adult fans know that the fighting is choreographed and the outcomes of the matches are predetermined, but we’re fine with this fiction and we’re fully vested in the narrative. It’s often ham-fisted and the acting and dialogue doesn’t hold up to Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones, but the story lines are equally epic and offers new episodes all year. In that sense, WrestleMania acts as both a season finale and premier, constantly offering closure on drawn-out storylines and bringing new characters and feuds into the spotlight.

Earlier in the week, while at the Dallas airport waiting for our connecting flight to New Orleans, I sat down next to a fellow fan named Michael and asked him about how he was hoping ‘Mania would play out.

“I'd like to see the show end with everybody chanting ‘YES’ and Daniel Bryan holding up the title,” he said. “And of course, I don't want to see the Undertaker’s streak end, especially to Brock Lesnar.”

Michael would see his first wish come true but would be forced to bear the gut wrenching agony of witnessing the legendary Undertaker lose to the former UFC champion. It was the Undertaker’s first loss at WrestleMania and if you can’t understand just how big of a deal that is, just look up reaction photos from the event. Even Jon Stewart marked-out about the match during a recent episode of the Daily Show. It was wrestling’s ‘Red Wedding’ moment.

While we were watching the match (which occurred around hour four of the five hour event), my fiancée turned to me and said, “If they have Undertaker lose, it’s going to be the worst decision ever.”

When she said it, I thought she was naïve for even entertaining the notion, no way could he lose. Then, as if she jinxed it, it actually happened. I was torn between wanting to be a smart ass and being legitimately upset.  I wanted to laugh at all of the fans who stood there silently, mouths agape, staring at the ring in disbelief. I didn’t want to care that a fictional character purported to have supernatural powers had been vanquished by a really ripped MMA guy. But in all honesty, I was pretty crushed. As soon as the match was over, my fiancée got up to use the restroom. When she came back several minutes later, everyone was still standing in silence.

A random guy on the street who spotted my Undertaker t-shirt the next day encapsulated the sentiment of many:

“I’m still hurt from last night man... still hurt.”

The end of the Undertaker's fabled winning streak would have been the most shocking development to come out of the event had the Ultimate Warrior not dropped dead in real life at age 54 of a massive heart attack, only three days after being inducted into the WWE’s Hall of Fame. Suddenly, the scripted ending to a scripted streak didn't seem as important in the grand scheme of things. 

When shit gets real and actual people die outside of storylines, pro wrestling starts to lose some of its luster. Over the last 20 years, a crazy number of wrestlers have died in their 30s, 40s and 50s, mostly due to the abuse of steroids, prescription pills and illicit drugs. But it’s the unusual cases that get to me, like Owen Hart falling to his death during a stunt or the suicide of Chris Benoit after he killed his wife and son in 2007. I almost stopped watching completely after the later incident.

While the passing of the Ultimate Warrior wasn’t, perhaps, quite as tragic as these other deaths, the timing was still pretty jarring. I had seen him in person on three consecutive days before his demise. I had seen people buying his official, marked-up t-shirts and masks.  I had seen him with his wife and two young daughters.

Wrestling is for me, apart from anything else, an escape. If I have a shitty day, diving into the ridiculous, fantasy world of big dudes throwing each other around makes things better. It’s my happy place. When wrestlers die, however, especially as a result of sacrificing their bodies for this ‘fake’ sport, I’m reminded that real people are needed to make this silly world possible.

Sure I miss the attitude of the late 90s, but the current family-friendly WWE is also committed to the health and wellness of its roster like never before. I hope that will ultimately lead to less tragedy. I can live without endless cleavage, geysers of blood and salty language if that means I also don’t have to deal with wrestlers constantly dying and other depressing realities. There are enough smug and condescending people out there trying to push me away from wrestling that I don’t need the industry itself to do any additional pushing. Because if I’m not pushed away, I’ll never need to be pulled back in. I’d just be a mark for life, and I’m OK with that. 

@wallygoodtimes

Aaron Wynia’s Photographs Make You Long for an Endless Summer

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Aaron Wynia is one of our favourite Toronto photographers because he's just so goddamn nice. Aside from that, his sun-drenched snaps and wonderful eye for almost sculptural composition never fail to paint the subject in a beautiful, warm-washed light whether they be a beautiful woman or a literal garbage can. He also has a real knack for making the undiscovered seem familiar, and the worn-in nooks and crannies of Toronto that most of us have become so blasé about, seem fresh and new again. Did we mention how nice he is?

Aaron has also curated his first mixed media show (ranging from sculpture to paintings to photos), Cool Springs, with a bunch of his favourite (and coincidentally a bunch of ours, too) artists and photographers. It's tomorrow at Working Title in Toronto and it's gonna be great.

 

The Great Desert Hunt For Underbutt at Coachella

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The Great Desert Hunt For Underbutt at Coachella

VICE News: Life as an Illegal Immigrant in Greece

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Greece has always been a gateway for immigrants searching for what they assumed would be a better life in Europe. But many of those who have crossed illegally into Greece have found that they have traded one bad situation for another. Refugees from war-torn countries like Syria and Afghanistan are finding themselves stuck in a country that is not only battling an economic crisis but is witnessing a rise in anti-immigrant violence—exemplified by the a nationalist political party known as the Golden Dawn.

VICE News' Alex Miller travelled from Athens to the western port of Patras to find out what it is like to be trapped in a country you never wanted to be in in the first place.

Owning Porno Used to Mean Something, Damnit

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Photo courtesy of the author's personal collection

1. When I was in high school I kept my porn in a white box. Inside the box was a stack of magazines—almost entirely Playboys, because I liked the clean stuff—as well as a purple folder full of the images I liked best, so that I could spread them out on my bedroom floor and sit in the middle of them, kind of like a crude manual version of Tumblr. 

2. The internet really changed the way people masturbate. Today, if you want to see someone naked you just press the buttons and poof, there’s a boob. But as a teenager I remember thinking of pictures of naked women as a kind of secret relic, something you had to search out, anticipate and covet, which made them that much better when you got them.

3. I saw my first porn magazine in fourth grade when some kids in my class were passing one around under the lunch table. I remember feeling a weird sense of doom, like I was going to get caught the second I touched the paper, even though everyone else was laughing about it. I’m not sure what magazine it was, but the pictures were of naked women holding automatic weapons, dressed up like military personnel. I remember the feeling of seeing more than I actually saw.

4. The kid who owned that magazine briefly ran a business where you could buy a page out of other, similar magazines for a dollar. He carried them around in a duffel bag with a padlock on it. They were his dad’s magazines, he said, and there were more where those came from, if you had the money. I never bought one. Eventually he was caught and suspended. 

5. I used to occasionally go to work with my dad. I remember feeling an insane sense of agency whenever he would stop at this one gas station that had a rack of tattoo magazines with tits in them. I would stand in front of the rack and wait until I knew I had half a second with no one watching, and then I would open the magazine as if I didn’t mean to, in case someone caught me. So instead of full visions, I caught flashes and tried to embed them deep in my memory so that I would be able to see them for a long time afterward whenever I shut my eyes.

6. A very brief, insanely vivid memory from when I was probably four or five, of picking up a magazine my dad’s friends were passing around at a camp in the woods, and the men laughing as my dad took it away from me before I could see. I remember my uncle saying something to the effect of, “one day you can have that,” and everyone laughing. I don’t remember many other things from that early stage in my life.

7. One of the first full-frontal pictures I saw was in a modded version of DOOM for PC. A friend’s older neighbor had edited the program to replace the tapestries on the walls with a jpeg of Pamela Anderson. It meant nothing to him, but I couldn’t stop staring. I asked my friend for weeks after that to please get me a copy of the game, over and over. I lost sleep waiting. I asked and asked. When the 3.5” floppy disc finally arrived it was just the regular old version of DOOM. No Pamela, just blood and guns. I think I played it anyway.

8. Eventually, probably while snooping, I came across my dad’s small collection of adult magazines on the high shelf in his closet, covered with a t-shirt. This was probably the most common way for kids to find their first pornos back then. My dad had mostly Playboys, a couple Penthouses, and Penthouse Letters. I would wait for my parents to leave the house, then I would take the magazines into my room and look at them carefully, trying not to leave fingerprints.

Image via Flickr user FiDalwood

9. I was extremely worried about getting caught, of his knowing I had seen. I traced the images I liked best with tracing paper. That gave me a boner even more than looking at the pictures. Eventually I got the nerve to cut a page out of one of the magazines, tearing carefully along the seam so as not to leave jagged remnants. I stored the page in one of those plastic slips used to hold valuable comics. Even though my tastes were pretty tame, I was some kind of acquisitive weirdo.

10. I remember reading Penthouse Letters in the bathtub. In writing, the idea seemed more putrid to me—not glossy like the images. But it was also strangely compelling, like a portion of being a human I had yet to find the keys to, but that was buried somewhere in me.

11. There was a certain convenience store everyone knew sold porn to anyone without asking ages. Once I got my license I drove there many times, so nervous I was literally shaking. The first few times I went in I browsed, pretending that I was looking for gum or something, and ended up just buying the gum. Eventually I paid a kid who looked way older than me $20 to get me a Playboy, like a dork.

12. I remember sitting behind the bookshelf in my room for the first time with my own magazine. I had the door locked. I turned each page one by one, carefully examining the image before continuing to the next. It was an issue with Jenny McCarthy in it. She was taking a bath in a bunch of the pictures. I probably masturbated to that same issue more than 50 times. Each time was different.

13. After a while I finally got the nerve to buy one myself. I went to the Happy Mart, driving around for a while first trying to gather my nerve. I can still remember how my warbly voice sounded telling the 50-year-old man across the counter what I wanted. After that first time buying, feeling like I’d been just released from prison walking back out to my car, I pulled out and immediately drove through a red light and got pulled over by the cops. I was sure I’d been caught. I was shaking with the Playboy in the bag under my seat, like it was drug money.

14. Eventually I removed and mounted my favorite pages on cardboard so they wouldn’t get bent, unless the page was good on both sides, then I would slide it in another plastic sleeve. To supplement the images, I had a tape recording of audio from the Spice Channel, a pay-per-view cable station that blurred its visual stream but still had all the sounds of girls pretending to be fucked. With my white Walkman, surrounded with 2D cardboard icons, it almost seemed like they were alive.

15. I’m pretty sure the idea of having the thing was as exciting as the thing itself. Like I could feel a strange power in possession. And soon, with the limited range of what there was to see, I could see it in my mind without even the paper. Certain images are so burned into my brain I know they’ll be there until I die. Now, nothing online stands out more than any other for any longer than the seconds you spend with it before clicking forward to the next.

16. I only recently found the purple folder again. Looking at it now feels pretty weird, like entering a museum no one else knows has a door. Inside it are totems I used over and over to get off to. Each one has a little history that is all mine. I have no idea why I deemed the shot of Pamela Anderson in a cowboy hat washing her ass in a sink worthy of a plastic casing. Years of easy porn online have changed these relics into something more like comic books, clothes I used to wear, each of which seemed like mine alone. There was no address millions of others could type in to get the same secret. Despite a print run of millions, it seemed like a thing made just for me.

17. The girl in the orange bikini top spread on a life raft making a face that looks less sex-related and more like she’s dreaming about a buffet; the girl squirting cake icing on her tits; the girl pulling her Mickey Mouse halter top down with one hand and raising her glasses with the other; the blonde girl covered in soap in the bath: here it is again all in my lap, like a portable, defunct internet of its own, one I’ve kept stored in a closet for more than a decade.

18. By now, it’s clear the excitement was in the hunt. The day we got America Online the first thing I did was download a photo of Jenny McCarthy, not so different from the ones I already had, but now in countless iteration. It was suddenly always there, and always more than I could ever jerk off to. Pretty soon the folder got put into its box, crammed down under all the rest of the junk I never touch, like a blanket or a toy, left behind for a world where it’s so easy to get a copy of almost anything it’s hard to imagine how anybody ever remembers what they want.

Follow Blake Butler on Twitter

The Mob Justice of Kenya's Somali Stop-and-Frisk

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Police check IDs of ethnic Somalis in Eastleigh

Eastleigh, a bustling business district in the Kenyan capital Nairobi, is home to thousands of ethnic Somalis—both Kenyan citizens as well as refugees from Somalia and Ethiopia. Every time I visit Eastleigh, I want to come back for the colorful street scene, the outdoor cafes, the late night shisha bars, and heaping plates of rice and camel meat. But ever since Kenya invaded Somalia in 2011 to fight Al Shabaab militants, Eastleigh has become synonymous with terror.

Kenya’s government and its majority population have long viewed Somalis with suspicion. In recent years, there’s been a trend of underpaid police using anti-terror operations as an excuse to round up and extort innocent Somalis.

In the middle of March, there was another terror incident in Kenya. Gunmen shot up a church in the port city Mombasa, killing six people. Part of the government’s response was to order all refugees in Nairobi to report to refugee camps in the country’s north, apparently because refugees might harbor terrorists. There are over 500,000 Somali refugees in Kenya—mostly in the camps—but some 50,000 live in Nairobi too.

After the order, I visited Eastleigh to see the mood. My first stop was a community health clinic, where I met Dr. Abdulkadir Warsame. Dr. Warsame said he was shocked at the directive to send refugees to the camps, and people were nervous that the police would follow through. Already, many of his patients stopped showing up for appointments.

“People who need drugs are not here,” he said.  “We have seen soldiers going around with their guns, so people are staying in their houses.”

Besides the fear of being sent away, Dr. Warsame said residents were bracing themselves to bribe the police. Corruption among Kenyan police is well known across the country, but residents of economically thriving Eastleigh bear a bigger brunt. Police often take IDs from ethnic Somalis—Kenyan citizens, refugees, or illegal aliens—and refuse to return them until money is paid. Dr. Warsame has seen patrol cars from as far as Loresho, a wealthy suburb on the other side of Nairobi, driving to Eastleigh for a cut of the cake.

“Eastleigh is the ATM of the police,” Dr. Warsame said.


A Somali refugee shows a bruise on her shoulder she says was inflicted by police during the crackdown

Since the police are accustomed to taking bribes, real criminals can easily buy themselves out of trouble. That night, I linked up with “Hassan,” an undercover cop in who works in Eastleigh, as well as other parts of Nairobi.

Hassan is an ethnic Somali and an anti-terror hardliner. He picked me up at a restaurant and we drove to his latest stakeout, where he was trying to spot a terror suspect. We sat for hours chewing khat and peanuts and sipping Coke, waiting for the suspect to appear.

Hassan said his informers regularly feed him intelligence about activities in the apartment buildings we were watching, but despite reporting it to his superiors, police hadn’t taken action. Hassan blamed the culture of bribery.

“Getting intelligence [is] 100 percent,” he said.  “The biggest challenge is corruption. If there is no corruption you could do your job."

“You investigate a case like a gun runner,” Hassan continued. “To me, it's a small case to report to my boss... Arrest the guy for two days, then he goes to court, pays the judge, he’s released. He’s [either] given ten years prison, or free for 10,000 shillings ($115)."

The problem goes beyond crooks, or even terrorists, walking free. It also endangers the lives of straight cops like him.

"He returns to the same place,” Hassan said. “And you’ve created an enemy. You can’t do your work. We lost a guy in Dadaab [refugee camp]—they had a ceremony for the family, a 21 gun salute—if I follow that case, I’ll be the next person.”

After a few hours, no one had shown up except for a car of teenagers smoking cigarettes and listening to Lil Wayne, so Hassan decided to do some more basic investigative work. He walked over to the teenage hipsters and they pounded fists.

“You smoke banghi?” he asked, referring to the local variant of weed. They did, and gave Hassan the number of their dealer.

“I’m not going for them,” he assured me after getting back in the car. “You go up and up until you get the big fish. Drugs, guns, and terror are all related.”

We drove back to the center of Eastleigh, down Second Avenue. Even late at night it was full of people, including a line of non-Somali prostitutes on one corner. A police officer pulled a Somali teenager by the wrist past the women and into an alley. Hassan said the boy will pay a bribe and be released soon, but the police won’t bother with the sex workers.  

“The police will pass three or four [non-Somali] Kenyans but he will go straight to Kenyan Somalis,” he said.

A splintered door frame and ransacked room after a police operation

On March 31, a few days after my visit with Hassan, three bombs, hurled at some restaurants in Eastleigh, killed six and injured dozens.

I went to the scene the day after. Holes in the concrete showed where the explosions occurred, peeled back metal and crumbled brick showed their force. There was shattered glass and blood.

The authorities blamed Al Shabaab or its sympathizers. But a few of the Somali locals, gathering at the scene the next day, quietly took a different view. “These small bombings must be a local business rivalry, or a gang,” they said, “Just please don’t blame us.”

Already, reports of operations against Somalis had trickled out. I wanted to see for myself. so I linked up with Mohamed Noor Ismail, the chairman of Eastleigh’s volunteer community police. Mohamed described his position as “in-between” police and the community. He helps tip off cops to criminals, but also advocates for wrongly arrested Somalis. He’s the sort of guy who knows everyone, and who loves introducing you to yet another person he knows in Eastleigh.

We headed to Pangani police station. Trucks of paramilitary police called GSU rumbled past the station, where dozens of women wrapped in dark shawls waited to see relatives locked up inside. Every 20 minutes, police brought a fresh batch of detainees.

One distraught woman poked her head through our car window. She said she’d been waiting to see her son since 2 PM. “If I pay 30,000 shillings ($345) he is going to be released,” she said, with tears on her face. “But they’ll just arrest him tomorrow. What’s the point?”

30,000 shillings is a hefty bribe, but Mohamed said—with complete seriousness—that police accept wire transfers from relatives abroad. “They’ll even give you their phone to call your family,” he told me.

Mohamed’s phone rang constantly as people called him for help. In other days, he might be able to get their relatives out, but not during an operation like this. He wouldn’t even get out of the car, let alone step into a police station. “They have something called ‘obstruction of justice,'” he said, his voice trailing off.

Soon the cells filled up, and the police began loading detainees onto trucks to take elsewhere. Seeing some of their relatives, the waiting women rushed the gate, but police chased them away with sticks.

Nearing midnight, we left Pangani station. We went through three police checkpoints in two blocks, mostly manned by new recruits carrying truncheons instead of guns. We could smell the booze on their breath when they stuck their heads and flashlights into the car to check our IDs.

Unlike my last visit, Second Avenue was empty except for the police. Even the prostitutes’ corner was deserted. The only Somalis around were pulled into police vans by their shirt collars.

Mohamed shook his head seeing his neighborhood like that. “This is collective punishment,” he said. “Just because they look like Somalis. It’s mob justice.”

The operations escalated throughout the week. Police began carrying out daytime raids. I returned with Mohamed and we went to Dr. Warsame’s clinic.

Abdullahi, an 18-year-old refugee from Somalia, sat in the open-air waiting room. He said police entered his girlfriend’s home earlier in the week, taking her and her two sisters to jail. The family was trying to raise enough money to pay her way out.

Adullahi said he’d been arrested six times since 2011, despite his papers being in order. Each time he bought his freedom for 5000 shillings, or about $55. He won’t leave his house after 6 PM for fear of cops.

“They say all Somalis are terrorists,” he says. “They don’t believe in refugees. Even if you have a mandate [the UN-issued document that allows refugees to stay in Nairobi], they don’t respect it.”

At around 2 PM, Mohamed got a call that police were raiding an apartment building. We drove over, passing two checkpoints where truckloads of GSU fanned out into the streets.

Police streamed up and down the building’s stairwells. They’d been there the day before, but apparently hadn’t finished their work. Seeing our press badges and cameras, they quickly left, slipping IDs back to their rightful owners. One woman named Ubah Bile Omar who had been arguing with an officer didn’t take comfort though. “As soon as you leave they’ll be back,” she said.

Evidence of mistreatment was everywhere. People flooded onto the stairwell to tell us their stories. We saw big, dusty bootprints on doors and splintered doorframes. In one room, 18-year-old Yasmin pulled aside her long orange headscarf to reveal a massive purple bruise on her shoulder. The police did it, she said, when they tried to arrest her.

Farhiya Mohamed Ibrahim's husband shows where police broke through the metal door with their gun butts while he was away

On the top floor, a 20-year-old Kenyan citizen named Farhiya Mohamed Ibrahim said police smashed through the heavy metal lock on her front door with the butts of their gun. She said she was afraid to open when they knocked, because her husband wasn't home to protect her. Kenyan police have been accused by Human Rights Watch of raping lone Somali women during previous operations.

“They broke down the door,” Farhiya told me. “They went through our pockets, they checked our bags, they searched everywhere in the home, they broke my makeup kit. Then they see my documents are genuine and they say, ‘Why are you fearing us?'”

Corruption isn’t unique to Nairobi, and it’s not hard to get a fake ID after crossing the porous Somali border, so it’s understandable that police want to make sure Kenyan IDs are legit. But why did an anti-terror crackdown morph into a sweep for illegal aliens?

“We’re people who all ran away from Al Shabaab,” says Omar, a refugee from Mogadishu. “All of us [in this building] know each other. We wouldn’t allow Al Shabaab here. We’d report it.”

There’s no telling when the operation will end.  Kenya’s interior minister said they would continue until Nairobi is “clean.”

So far, over 4000 people have been arrested nationwide and 82 have been deported to Somalia. But police haven’t announced any charges in connection with the three explosions that killed six people on March 31.

New Zealand Students Can Buy Beers With Rats

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Jonathan with a future beer

For centuries New Zealand flightless birds and slow-moving reptiles lived without fear of native predators. This golden era ended when the British showed up on rat-infested ships. Since then, rats have become the key player in the destruction of native forestry and the extinction of nine native species of birds. Clearly the rats need to go, but how do you motivate New Zealanders into becoming active rat hunters?

Beer Trap is a program that lets time-rich and beer-poor university students to swap dead rats for free brews. Genius, right? We spoke to Jonathan Musther, one of the masterminds of the campaign, about the intricacies of fixing the environment with young Kiwis and alcohol.

VICE: So first of all, how do I get a free beer?
Gareth Morgan:
It's pretty simple, you bring a dead rat to Victoria University of Wellington’s Science Society, we supply the traps, and we exchange it for a voucher which you can use to claim a drink at The Hunter Lounge (the uni bar).

Other than beers, why are we killing rats?
It’s a twofold problem. For one they kill a lot of our natives. They eat skinks and lizards and they also eat insects like the Weta. Plus birds’ eggs—even tree-nesting birds like the Tui’s because rats can climb trees quite happily.

Rats can climb trees?
Yeah, absolutely. The other side of the coin is not only are they directly predating our species, they are also competing with them. In New Zealand, the ecological niche that rats occupy in Europe was solely occupied by the foraging ground-dwelling birds and large insects like the Weta. Rats forage more efficiently because they evolved with a lot more pressure from other organisms. New Zealand was a really cushy place to evolve—birds didn’t have to bother flying.

Why do you want students in particular killing rats?
Right now the Department of Conservation have a great trapping system in our parks and reserves, but they can’t just walk in and start trapping in the backyards of various people’s house. So we began thinking about how we can get people involved with urban trapping. It started as a project in the Wellington zone to create a buffer zone around the parks and reserves, so that the birds that hop across the fence don’t just get eaten.

We do have a bit more of an obligation up in Kelburn (near the University) because we have Zealandia and the Otari-Wilton Bush. Those are the two big breeding areas, and the birds go between the two, and while in transit they get eaten by a cat or possum, or they nest outside and their eggs get eaten by a hedgehog or a rat.

So we decided to get students involved, running Beer Trap from the Victoria University Science Society, and that the best way to incentivise them would be to get them a free drink. They are students after all.

Have you had trouble with offering alcohol as an incentive?
Some people have, but I don’t think it’s an issue because I don’t think anyone’s going to catch that many rats. No one’s going to catch ten rats and go to the Hunter Lounge and get sloshed.

If they did they probably deserve it. They did just kill ten rats.
Yeah, if they want to have a big night, sure.

So, what else are you killing?
The traps we’ve been giving away are mostly to catch rats, you’d probably catch a stoat as well. But I personally have some other traps out with Halo that can catch rats, stoats, and hedgehogs.

You’re killing hedgehogs?!
There’s not a lot of research out there on hedgehogs, but the Department of Conservation says that we’re only just beginning to realise how evil they are. They got away with it for quite a while now for being cute. But they have done some studies in the South Island which show that they are responsible for one in five fatal attacks on low-lying bird’s nests. They also go nuts over invertebrates and insects, one hedgehog was found with 283 Weta legs in its stomach. And they can eat 10 percent of their body weight each night—so about 100g in one night.

I think we have a lot sentimental attachment to hedgehogs, and they are very cute and lovely, but they’re eating our national icons like the Weta.

Is it hard to convince people that what is essentially a huge ugly insect should be saved over the life of a cute little hedgehog?
I think what it comes down to is that (Wetas) don’t live anywhere else. And we as a society have decided that somehow there is an intrinsic value in species, and when any species is close to extinction we give attention to that and try to bring them back.

People draw the lines in funny places. I can’t understand that if we’re going to value something cute like the dopey-eyed Kakapo parrot, because they’re rare, then we should also value something like the giant ugly Weta, which is also rare.

I can sympathise with people who say that you shouldn’t kill animals, and I can sympathise with the viewpoint that there is some intrinsic value in a species and that we should maintain it—but anything in between is weird. Your decisions are just ruled by emotion, and you’re letting that get the better of you. You say, “I want to save these because they’re cuddly and cute, but those I don’t care about because they’re ugly.” I can’t get my head around it. It’s one end or the other.

Have you been getting any opposition?
Yeah, with the Hedgehog people (Hedgehog Rescue New Zealand). The public feedback was mostly positive until the hedgehog thing came into play. We’ve now been dubbed, “remorseless hedgehog killers”.

That’s gotta hurt, what are the Hedgehog people doing?
The Department of Conservation spends millions of dollars poisoning and trapping hedgehogs, but then Hedgehog Rescue New Zealand comes along and finds those hedgehogs, nurses them back to health and release them back into the wild.

What’s the end goal of all this “remorseless killing”?
For now what we have to do is to keep those (predator) numbers down as far as we can so native species stand a chance. But the hope that all conservationists have is that you’d be able to eradicate these predators from New Zealand entirely , eradicate rats, possums, stoats, weasels, mice and hedgehogs. So instead of finding a rat or a hedgehog in your garden you might find a kiwi, and instead of a rat in your roof you might find a giant Weta—even though that would be terrifying.

Follow Laetitia on Twitter: @TeeshTeesh_


London Is Turning into a Depressing and Dumb Stock Image City

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"Fashion Couple Shopping"

Every city has its visual cliches. The stereotypes, falsehoods and cheery slices of xenophobia sold to us on cheap postcards and in crap films that reduce the world's great cities to a handful of worn out cultural cues. If you've never been to Paris, you'd be forgiven for thinking it's all girls who look like Charlotte Gainsbourg skipping along the Seine in Breton tops, doling out filter-less cigs to homeless accordion players. When in actual fact, it's more like a bunch of exchange students laughing at dachshunds and dudes who are still bang into Justice plying rich schoolgirls with shit MDMA.

For New York, the cliches are motor-mouthed cabbies and kids fucking around with water hydrants. For Barcelona, it's psytrance beachbums and animal cruelty on La Rambla. Tokyo? Weird fish, games machines and businessmen throwing themselves in front of bullet trains.

But what about London? Pearly Kings and Queens? Pie and mash? Foxtons Minis tearing down Brixton High Street, on fire? Rita Ora?

So I decided to pull back for a moment, and consult Getty Images' wide range of London stock photos. What do they see when they look at the UK's capital?

"London City Hall"

The vast majority of the London stock photos on Getty are scenic wide shots of the city's skyline, usually taken at sunset and very rarely from anywhere east of Tower Bridge. Of course, this makes perfect sense. If you're a journalist writing something about London's chronic housing crisis, or a body in the Thames river, or Millwall's terrible run under Ian Holloway, you probably want to illustrate your copy with a picture of the Shard and a few anonymous riverside yuppie-farms when the sun's going down.

From the outset, it's clear that this is the London that Getty are most interested in selling to their customers, the London with all the big glass buildings and shimmering water, the one that girl from your school has as her Facebook cover photo, the one on the opening titles to The Apprentice. Not the one where there's three Paddy Powers on a single high street, or the one of food banks, pigeons cannibalizing fried chicken bones and crack squirrels.

But this one, the nice one by the river with the big buildings.

"Couple Having Coffee At Sidewalk Cafe"

The people in Getty's pictures are predominantly happy young heterosexual couples who drink coffee, take selfies, and love life and London. And that's fine. It's not like they're going to embark upon an investigative social project about co-dependent heroin addicts crying and vomiting in each other's arms, or abandoned widows lying catatonic in single bedrooms in Catford.

But clearly, if stock images in any way reflected reality, there would be only one explanation for the behavior of these people: that they are tourists, and not the kind likely to find themselves caught up in the processing department at Yarl's Wood any time soon. Also, if the people in stock photos were real, Time Out would be bigger than the Daily Mail.

"Exuberant Couple Riding a Double Decker Bus in London"

I don't know about you, but when I'm peering into the endless blackness of the Holloway Road, shivering as I try to figure out if that's actually a 271 on its way to me or another "out of service" ghost bus, I'm doing it because I just really love buses. In fact, whenever I'm going over Westminster Bridge on one, I'm so overwhelmed by the majesty of London's public transport system that I often like to make my way up to the top deck to re-enact the "King of the World" moment from Titanic with an espresso in my hand. 

"Couple Riding Bicycles In Urban Park"

Much like drinking coffee outdoors, cycling is another thing that seems to have been sold to the rest of the world as a vital part of London culture. But while there are probably more bikes here than there are in say, Dubai, there was that time when six cyclists died on London's roads in 13 days, and then everyone blamed it on the Mayor.

"Smiling Woman Using Cell Phone On Bus"

That's not a modern London bus. It's not one of the new breed, with those split-screen CCTV monitors that make every journey seem like it's a Crimewatch appeal in waiting. Nah man, that's a Routemaster. It's a fucking Mary Poppins bus.

Secondly, what's she laughing at? A picture she's taken of the rain? 

"Businessman Looking Out Conference Room Window"

In the rose-tinted world of stock image London, City boys are not pictured as the fleecing, super-coke bastards everyone else sees them as. In Getty's world they're dreamers, dreamers who peer out of their 80th floor windows in Canary Wharf at all the tiny ant people beneath them, and wish that they too could be one of the tiny ant people, like Ed Harris in The Truman Show or something.

"Young Woman Having Fun In A Photo Booth"

Young people are reduced to mannequins moving through a succession of strangely depressing "good times"—dancing on their own, nuzzling into their friend's laps, laughing on buses at the rain. They are guffawing, gurning dickheads, attractive but resolutely asexual replicants who behave as if they're drunk when there's no booze in site. This girl is on her own, conceivably sober, in a photo booth, pulling these abstract expressions of glee, and nobody thought it looked weird or unconvincing.

These young Londoners are boring narcissists who are still in awe of the concept of the photograph, nearly 200 years since Joseph Nicéphore Niépce showed the world his "View from the Window at Les Gras."

"Three Young Men Walk Along Train Station Platform"

And as for the city's young men, they're reduced to this: vain jerk-offs who dress like a racist Australian beach gang. They wear graphic print vests, they carry skateboards on trains, they drink Magners, listen to Bastille, and probably take MDMA once a year at some festival. Gone are the punks, the skins, the rude boys, the barrow boys, the duckers, and the divers of old. We're just left with these London Fields frisbee pricks, on their way home from some abstract conception of a "good time."

"Woman Crawling Across Table To Boyfriend"

I can only imagine the terrible articles this picture has accompanied in its short life. ES Magazine reports on "the 50 Shades Of Grey phenomenon," stories about how "London's women are learning to wear the trousers in the bedroom," something about some new sub-category of cougar or young professionals on Tinder. The absolute bottom end of urban lifestyle journalism.

What it has to do with London, I really have no idea.

"Love London"

But when you get to this picture, you begin to wonder if Getty's pictorial analysis of modern London is actually pretty bang on the money. You wonder if maybe, just maybe, Boris has won. And his dream of a London where floppy haired wankers in three-piece suits bomb through the city on rented bikes like capitalist horsemen of the apocalypse has in fact become the defining image of this great city. 

Maybe that London spirit of old—the spirit of Michael Caine, "Mad" Frankie Frasier, Barbara Windsor ,and Crazy Titch—has finally been eroded to a distant cliche by Boris' new Londoners. The people who see the city as a kind of shit platform game where getting from one restaurant to another involves avoiding beggers. A platform game where a Boris bike is a power-up that allows you to plough through the streets and all their filth to get to the next 38th-floor pho joint.

Getty and the Boris administration cannot be in cahoots with their visions of London; there is no gentrification Illuminati stuff going on here. But the striking resemblance between the stock images and the ones that Borispeople like to put out in their campaign material—not to mention the idea of London sold to us in Tory-backing newspapers—coalesce because in essence these are all people who don’t understand the city, even though someone made it their job to look in on it and try to sell it back to a worldwide audience.

The difference is that while these pictures are just a small and understandable part of what Getty do, it’s Boris who's actually turning London into a city of grinning couples, coffee shops and pricks on bikes.

The saddest thing here isn't Getty's vision of London; everyone knows stock images are dumb. It's that Getty's vision of London might just be right.

Follow Clive Martin on Twitter.

Weediquette: The Cannabis Republic of Uruguay - Part 1

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At the end of 2013, Uruguay became the first country in the world to fully legalize marijuana. VICE correspondent Krishna Andavolu headed over to Uruguay to check out how the country is adjusting to a legally regulated marijuana market.

Along the way, he meets up with Uruguay's president, José Mujica, to burn one down and talk about the president's goal of a chicken in every pot, a car in every garage, and six cannabis plants per household.

VICE News: Russian Roulette: The Invasion of Ukraine - Part 26

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On Monday, pro-Russia protesters stormed a police station in the eastern Ukrainian city of Horlivka. VICE News correspondent Simon Ostrovsky joined them as they seized the building. Inside, the demonstrators attacked a police officer accused of pushing someone out of a window while the person was trying to display a Russian flag. Later that day, a video emerged on the internet showing a man purporting to be a Russian army colonel giving orders to troops in eastern Ukraine. This is the first bit of evidence that there might already be Russian boots on the ground in the country.

A Decade Under the Influence: On Seeing Taking Back Sunday at Age 26

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A Decade Under the Influence: On Seeing Taking Back Sunday at Age 26

We Went to Australian Indigenous Fashion Week

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Last week was fashion week in Sydney, and while the local ladies were glamming it up in whatever they bought for the occasion (an alarming number of birkenstocks with socks apparently), and comparing who had the best ombre color, across town a more diverse event was going on.

On Friday Sydney hosted Australia’s first Indigenous Fashion Week, showcasing the work of artists and designers from 13 different indigenous communities across Australia and the Torres Strait Islands. With runway shows, panel events, and a market stall set up in Town Hall, the event was an opportunity for designers and aspiring models, some of whom had never visited the city before, to network, meet buyers, and strut their stuff in some awesome outfits.

Along with professional models, both indigenous and non-indigenous, the festival featured a selection of competition entrants who were chosen from across the country to learn about the business. Marlikka Perdrisat, one of the models, grew up in a community that had just three houses, outside Broome in Western Australia. She said her only exposure to fashion was the magazines other girls showed her at boarding school, and those never had indigenous models. “You see what they want, and that's not black,” she said. “It's a hard industry, and it's particularly hard when your look isn't mainstream. We want to make our look mainstream.” Claire Cooper from Byron Bay spent her childhood in a combi driving all over the country. Now she's having meetings with Victoria's Secret reps.

Grace Lee's designs were one of the highlights, and one of her dresses was worn by supermodel Samantha Harris during the show. Grace had found herself in the final year of a university degree without quite knowing how it had happened or what she would do next. Lacking direction and passion she took a trip with her grandmother to the Torres Strait Islands and connected with family she’d only ever heard about (her Grandmother hadn’t been back in fifty-seven years). While she was there she watched the old men weave together palm leaves to make the decorations used in traditional ceremonies. She had some lessons and then moved to Melbourne to study design, wanting to incorporate what she'd learnt into contemporary fashion. 

Four years later Grace has launched two fashion labels and, using traditional weaving techniques and a process of trial and error, discovered the perfect lightweight materials to bring to life extraordinary designs inspired by the ceremonial dress of her people. They're complicated—one of the necklaces she designed uses 30 feet of cotton rope woven together.

Margaret and Gloria Torren, and Janelle Duncan from Casino’s Aboriginal women's artist group Wake-Up Time in the Bundjalung region have been working with local weaver Katrina Kelsey on a project to recreate designs that were common up until the 1870s. The Wurra Wurra, Boombi, and Dulloom bags are being made based on documents and samples found at the British Museum—our colonial forebears had a habit of taking culturally significant artefacts back to the motherland for "safekeeping." The ladies also do some pretty cool silk prints, and while they were happy to see their designs worn by the models, their highlight was the ripped male models in nothing but indigenous printed briefs.

 

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