Reject and project protest, via Flickr
Whether it calls the program “responsible resource development” or strives to become an “energy superpower,” Canada is digging up vast swathes of the earth and selling them as quickly as possible at the expense of the environment and aboriginal rights. In many of the treaty territories and unsurrendered First Nations across Canada, the constitutionally protected rights of indigenous people—including the right to hunt, fish, trap, and be consulted with and accommodated when new development is planned—are being increasingly overstepped by rapid industrial growth. After a frenzy of environmental de-regulation, undertaken by the fraudulently elected Harper Government at the request of oil lobbyists, indigenous rights remain as a last line of legal defence for the environment in Canada.

“This is not an Indian problem anymore. If you breathe air and drink water, it’s about you,” said Crystal Lameman, a member of the Beaver Lake Cree. Her band is suing for an injunction in their traditional territories, which, if granted, could prohibit a third of planned oil sands development from moving forward without their consent. Theirs is one of the largest lawsuits of what the Canadian Press calls 2014’s “aboriginal legal onslaught” against the tar sands.

This wave of litigation responds to Canada’s new regulatory climate, in which many major energy projects no longer require environmental assessments, millions of waterways are now unprotected, and those looking to participate in public hearings on energy projects need to endure a prohibitive and time-consuming application process to (maybe) be heard. Most recently, oversight of Alberta’s oil industry was handed over to an industry-funded corporation, and habitat protection requirements for the humpback whale were loosened, likely to permit the construction of the Enbridge Northern Gateway.

To justify this stream-lined regulatory regime, Stephen Harper said in 2012 that: “We cannot allow valid concerns about environmental protection to be used as an excuse to trap worthwhile projects in reviews-without-end.” Instead, the government and industry now face lawsuits without end.

“As we’ve seen with bills C-38 and C-45, the problem with environmental assessment tools is that they can essentially be legislated out of existence,” said Robert Janes, a lawyer representing a number of First Nations. “They are created by the legislature or parliament and they can be abolished or limited by the legislature or parliament.” In contrast, Janes said, “what treaty and aboriginal rights have is constitutional protection. So the government can’t wish them away.”

Accordingly, Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, with support from Neil Young, has filed four lawsuits that challenge specific Shell projects and allege that entire land use policies were developed without proper consultation. The Mikisew Cree and Frog Lake First Nation are suing the government over massive changes to the country’s environmental assessment and water protection laws. The Lubicon Cree, a non-treaty nation lacking a reserve and basic amenities like running water, allege that billions of dollars in minerals, oil, and gas have been removed from their territories without consent. They are suing the government to nullify thousands of current oil and gas extraction permits and pay $700 million in compensation, while also seeking an injunction against a fracking company called Penn West. In B.C., Tsleil-Waututh Nationhas just launched a lawsuit against the government over the immense Kinder-Morgan export pipeline, while in Ontario the Chippewa of the Thames First Nation is suing the government over inadequate consultation regarding Enbridge Line 9.

Outside of the courts, indigenous activists are pledging to keep blockading unwanted fracking projects in New Brunswick, to physically obstruct construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, and to blockade major gas and tar sands pipelines through British Columbia. Each of these lawsuits and actions reinforces the others, threatening the fuel supply, extraction sites, and distribution network of the tar sands and amounting to many billions of dollars of risk.

Government officials know about this risk and how their economic policies trample indigenous rights. Leaked reports from the Ministry of Aboriginal Affairs, obtained by Martin Lukacs and the Guardian, warn government insiders that the assertion of indigenous rights and new legal precedents set by successful indigenous lawsuits pose “significant risks” to the federal government’s policy agenda and may result in “economic development projects [being] delayed.” One of the documents quoted in Lukacs’ report suggests that “there is a tension between the rights-based agenda of Aboriginal groups and the non-rights based policy approaches” of the federal government.

In pursuing “non-rights based policy,” the government is betting that it can violate its own constitution—so long as it can crush blockades, outspend First Nations in the courts, and authorize projects faster than First Nations can sue. It’s a calculated gamble launched from shaky legal ground, sustained by the ignorance of investors, enforced by the RCMP, aided by the poverty of First Nations, and bankrolled by the infinite wallet of the Canadian taxpayer. In 2013 alone, the government spent $106 million defending itself from aboriginal litigation, while the province of New Brunswick spent $9.5 million policing the Elsipogtog blockade.

   

Crystal Lameman and Neil Young, photo via Jamie Henn                                                                                                                                  
Anatomy of a Tar Sands Trial: The Beaver Lake Cree Nation

A look at the Beaver Lake Cree’s litigation, one of the many active aboriginal tar sands lawsuits, reveals the enormity of the government’s policy bluff. With a population of about 900, this First Nation is moving forward with a lawsuit that draws a third of planned tar sands extraction into question. Like BLCN’s traditional territories, an area approximately the size of Switzerland, this legal action is gargantuan—or “so large as to be unmanageable” to use the words of Canada’s lawyers.

The defendants, Canada and Alberta, are accused of authorizing over 20,000 permits that collectively threaten the Beaver Lake Cree’s treaty rights. BLCN charges that the governments have failed to adequately monitor the cumulative effects of development, failed to consult with them in good faith, and failed to take measures to protect the abundance, diversity, and habitat of wildlife.

“When industry and development is destroying our right to hunt, trap, and fish, that’s in direct violation of Canadian law. So we have grounds to challenge,” said Crystal Lameman, a member of the band who fundraises for their litigation.

At the centre of the trial is Treaty 6, an 1876 agreement between the Crown and the Beaver Lake Cree. It outlines the territories relinquished by the Cree, but ensures that “the said Indians shall have right to pursue their avocations of hunting and fishing throughout the tract surrendered,” except in “such tracts as may from time to time be required or taken up for settlement, mining, and other purposes.”

“That language allows for development. It anticipates development, it anticipates that there’ll be settlement. But, at the same time, it can be read in the context of a promise that in the treaty negotiations, a way of life would be protected,” the BLCN’s lawyer Robert Janes said. Accordingly, “there is some limit to the ‘taking-up’ process that means it is not just an open-ended process of extinguishing the rights by slices. What the courts have said is that at some point you cross a line where there’s a danger that there’ll be no meaningful right to hunt, and at that point there’s a limit to the Crown’s conduct.”

“A right to hunt or a right to fish or a right to carry out a cultural activity is absolutely meaningless without a proper habitat in which there are animals, fish, and land. So what the courts have recognized is that what comes with those rights is some kind of protection for habitat,” Janes clarified.

“My hope is that this litigation will set precedent on the protection of our ecosystem, our water systems, our air, our land—everything. The ecosystem, in its entirety,” said Crystal Lameman. “We have to leave something for our children. It doesn’t matter what colour they are—all of our children, the world’s children. And right now, the way this industry is moving about, we’re leaving nothing for our kids but oil they’re going to drink and money they’re going to eat.”

Protesters hold up a map of Treaty 1876 at Reject and Protect in Washington, D.C. via Beaver Lake Cree Facebook
Lameman also hopes that BLCN’s lawsuit will rebalance the relationship between her nation and the Crown, resulting in “true and honest consultation—not before the pen is going to the paper, but consultation from the get-go—defined by us, the citizen members.” When I asked what kinds of efforts industry has made to consult with the Beaver Lake Cree, Lameman clarified that “consultation for me is not a company coming into my community for half an hour, setting up a fancy table, raffling off an iPad, and saying ‘OK, consultation, check.’ That’s their idea of consultation. That’s really what happens.”

The BLCN’s traditional territories already host about 35,000 oil and natural gas wells, a Canadian Forces base, and thousands of kilometres of pipelines, access roads, and seismic lines. These territories are 38,927km² and cover large parts of the two largest oil sands deposits. While the Beaver Lake Cree say the ecosystem is rapidly declining, the government has plans to triple bitumen extraction in these territories to 1.64 million barrels per day.

“I want it to be stated clearly that I’m not against development. I’m not against this industry,” Crystal Lameman said. “What we are asking for is to show us there’s such a thing as sustainable development, show us that our treaty rights are not being infringed upon, and show us that you are abiding by your obligation to consult.” Lameman believes that if the Crown was confident that they could win this case, “we would be in court already.”

“A lot of the old people, they talk about how the fish don’t taste good anymore—they taste different,” Lameman said. “Hunters have been seeing deer with green meat,” and “there’s been evidence of moose with puss bubbles under their skin.” She noted that ducks are increasingly scarce, “we don’t have very many frogs anymore,” blueberries are “becoming harder and harder to find” and “in about two, three weeks, the Saskatoons are dry. It wasn’t like that when I was a kid.”

Most significantly, caribou herds in the Beaver Lake Cree territories are disappearing fast. “This is an animal that we used to subsist on—thousands and thousands of caribou. As of 2011, we had between 175 and 275 caribou,” said Lameman.

A report by the Cooperative Bank of Manchester, who provided BLCN with funds to launch their case, concluded that “oil and gas exploration and development” and associated roads, pipelines, and seismic lines have resulted in “physical loss of habitat, avoidance of areas by caribou, and increased caribou mortality.” Avoided caribou habitat now covers “51% of the Cold Lake herd range” and “66% of the East Side Athabasca herd range,” with roads acting as “semi-permeable barriers” to caribou and above-ground pipelines “completely impassible.” Saving local caribou herds, the report argues, means issuing “a moratorium on all new industrial developments.”

Instead of a moratorium, Canada and Alberta have developed widely-criticized plans to save the region’s caribou. A federal caribou recovery strategy mandated that 65% of threatened caribou habitat must be left undisturbed, though this threshold has already been exceeded and the government keeps handing out industrial permits. Meanwhile, Alberta is considering building gigantic, outdoor caribou pens, and has been poisoning thousands wolves with strychnine and gunning them down from helicopters to stop them from preying on caribou. A series of reports by Carol Linnitt of DeSmog Blog explores these policies in detail, driving Linnitt to conclude that “according to this strategy, caribou and wolf alike fall prey to another kind of predator: multinational corporations.”

The BLCN’s traditional territories have also been impacted by several oil spills that nobody knows how to stop, with heavy oil and tainted water are oozing up from fissures deep in the earth. This includes the infamous Cold Lake spill which is ongoing after eleven months with no end in sight. “In the south-west portion of the lake we have ancestors buried,” Lameman said, noting that this burial site is a part of her nation’s litigation. Friends of Lameman’s who were employed to clean-up this spill told her they saw deer and moose drinking from the polluted lake, and dead ducks and frogs littering the scene.

“We’ll be pulling together evidence to show just how the land has been disturbed, what land is no longer available for harvesting, how certain kinds of physical disturbances affect wildlife patterns, how certain kinds of physical activities limit hunting,” said lawyer Robert Janes, noting that the case will argue that the indigenous “right to hunt carries with it a substantial cultural component.”

“A lot of these things are personal accounts,” Lameman said. “These systems we have placed upon us, they don’t recognize oral history. But that’s our history. We don’t write our history down in books, so that makes it less valuable to this system.”




Caribou herds in Beaver Lake Cree territories are disappearing fast. Photo via Flickr user Rich Durant
With this in mind, the BLCN’s legal team is unearthing evidence that will verify, through a court-approved European optic, the oral history of development as told by the Beaver Lake Cree. This amounts to a herculean research project that their lawyer estimates could involve upwards of 250,000 documents—a collection of satellite images and old aerial photographs, ecological and anthropological studies, testimonies from elders, and “getting the government to choke up the information out of individual sources.”

Robert Janes explained that “every farm has a land title deed and has a history, every project has authorizations, every road has a history. And those documents exist inside the government, it’s just that the government never actually tries to establish how those come together.”

“The really hard part is actually establishing the baseline picture of what the environment was like before the disturbances, and that is a very challenging process,” Janes said. “But there is data out there and we do know that at some point in time the land was in fact undeveloped.”

Beaver oil sands lease, via Raven Trust
Time, money, and the burden of history                                                              

While the law moves at a snail’s pace, industrial development is ceaseless and rapid. While the government’s coffers are unlimited, indigenous communities face endemic poverty. While First Nations’ rights are now the strongest environmental protections in Canada, the weight of history obstructs aboriginals from easily having these rights recognized in the courts.

Up until 1951, aboriginals in Canada were not permitted to hire lawyers. As a result, while other areas of law have had more time to develop, many basic concepts in aboriginal litigation are not yet clearly defined. First Nations across the country charge that the government or industry have failed to consult with and accommodate them, but the law has only begun to define consultation in the last decade and “the courts have barely started to scratch the surface” of what accommodation means, Robert Janes said.

As a result, Janes said, “it is not uncommon for the Crown to raise very difficult legal issues at very early stages of the process.” Complex preliminary issues “can consume the First Nations’ ability to litigate and can introduce so much delay that often there’s nothing left to fight over.”

“Aboriginal litigation raises some of the most important and complex and difficult and therefore expensive issues to resolve. But at the same time the people who raise these issues are in fact some of the most impoverished people in Canada, in many cases because of the very issues they’re trying to raise,” Janes summarized.

Yet, under the growing weight of aboriginal litigation, procedural roadblocks for indigenous plaintiffs are beginning to unravel. As an example, the BLCN’s lawsuit overcame a major legal obstruction faced by indigenous communities impacted by large industries. Theirs is the first case to look at the impacts of development as a whole on their treaty rights, rather than the impact of one particular project.

“When we filed the litigation in May of 2008, we claimed over 17,000 treaty right infringements and violations. [Canada] wanted us to go to court 17,000 times,” Crystal Lameman said, laughing. Instead, the courts ruled that the Beaver Lake Cree “are entitled to access to justice uncircumscribed by limits imposed by the scope of Canada’s alleged misconduct,” and struck down Canada’s appeals.

“This has very significant implications for other First Nations,” said Robert Janes. In many First Nations “it’s not that just one project looked at in isolation is bad, it’s that their lands have been affected by hundreds, in many cases thousands of impacts. It’s the totality of those impacts, which are supposed to be regulated by the government, which has really changed their life and has interfered with their aboriginal rights, their aboriginal title.”

This precedent was hard won. It took almost four years for the Beaver Lake Cree to be granted a trial and now, almost six years since the case was first filed, BLCN is still a few years away from a court date. As the case has grown to include thousands of new permits, Janes explained, it reflects the reality that “the world doesn’t stop while the case goes on.”

While in court, Janes said, “the practical reality is that Beaver Lake has to continue to fight on other fronts as a part of trying to avoid excessive development.” He offered the example of “an oil sands project that is in progress right now, where Beaver Lake is trying to participate in the regulatory process to have the regulator limit or delay or ultimately not approve the project.” Development might be slowed, too, by the investor uncertainty created by a lack of customers for, and endless litigation against, Canada’s tar sands infrastructure.

Robert Janes noted that another of his clients, Grassy Narrows, has successfully deterred development while fighting their legal battle “for 12, 13 years.” They have done this by being “very involved in the regulatory process, they have had blockades, they have also had a very effective grassroots boycott campaign that a number of organizations have helped them with. When you look around at successful cases, aboriginal people have to fight these cases on a number of fronts—political, legal, regulatory, and it’s a bit of a hearts and minds campaign as well.”

Winning hearts and minds, the BLCN lawsuit has drawn support from lawyers and donors from around the world, as well as charitable organizations, and the Cooperative Bank of Manchester. They’ve also crowd-sourced donations online, gathering more funds than they asked for.

Susan Smitten, the executive director of a charitable organization called RAVEN Trust that fundraises for BLCN, said several lawyers and law-firms have worked on the case at half of their normal rate or “put in hundreds of thousands of dollars pro-bono.” A prominent UK lawyer, Michael Mansfield, wanted to represent the Beaver Lake Cree for free, but was not permitted to do so by the Alberta courts—instead he sent lawyers from his firm to work behind the scenes. “Lots of people have put in time in lieu of money,” Smitten summarized.

Smitten noted that in addition to RAVEN’s fundraising, “people in Beaver Lake Cree community are digging as deep as they can. Their resources are so limited, and they have other issues as well, but they all believe in this strongly.” Overall, she said, “the band is putting in hundreds of thousands of dollars themselves… at a recent open band meeting they raised about $4,000 just from the people in the room.”

And still, Smitten told me, as legal challenges like the BLCN’s are increasingly seen as one of the most tangible ways to challenge unchecked tar sands growth, more and more donors seem to be reaching out to help.

“People are starting to really awaken, in the sense of a global awareness, to how indigenous led strategies based on their treaty rights are really forming one of the key ways that tar sands expansion can be at least limited,” said Susan Smitten. “In everything I read these days, everyone is tuning into the fact that this rate of expansion is unviable. It’s untenable because within less than a decade they want to double the current production.”

“All the voices seem to be saying ‘don’t we need to freeze this for a minute? Do we even need this and if we do isn’t there a better way? And shouldn’t we be consulting with First Nations and making sure their rights aren’t completely trampled in the process?’” Smitten said. “As more and more people tune into that and become aware, there are more and more voices saying ‘how can we help?’ and there’s more and more people reaching out to us.”


@M_Tol

Illustration by Molly Crabapple

Two weeks ago, Jezebel published un-retouched outtakes of Lady Gaga's Versace campaign.

Without Photoshop, Gaga's wig was more wig-like, her makeup flat beige, but she was the same skinny, strong-nosed chameleon that Stefani Germanotta has always been. The outtakes were not interesting, but showing celebrities without Photoshop is Jezebel's brand.

Jezebel exploded in popularity in 2007 by offering a $10,000 bounty for originals of Faith Hill's Redbook cover. The raw photos proved the magazine had liquefied the star's waist, softened her nasolabial folds, and brutalized her elbow into a bendy tube. This January, with more controversy, Jezebel paid another $10,000 for the originals of Lena Dunham's Vogue cover shoot. Those revealed only a tidied dress.

Jezebel's is a feminism that seeks its scapegoat in altered images. To refrain from Photoshop is girl-positive marketing gold. Dove Campaign for Real Beauty delights itself by putting out fake filters that chide retouchers. Magazines sign “No Photoshop” pledges. Clothing companies crow that they've never taken a clone stamp to their models' thighs.

To these feminists, Photoshop is to blame to unrealistic body standards, poor self-esteem, and anorexia in teenage girls. The campaign against Photoshop is the perfect cause for white, middle-class women whose primary problem is feeling their bodies do not match an increasingly surreal media ideal. 

Photoshop, the belief goes, takes a true record of a moment and turns it into an oppressive lie. 

But fuck Photoshop. Photos are already lies. 

I'm a former model and current artist. I've learned this every second I've stared into the camera's insect eye. 

Anyone who's been at a photo shoot knows that even untouched photos bear only the scantest resemblance to a subject. A photo is frozen. A model sweats and bloats, ages, and dies. Framing is a lie. Lighting is a lie. Cropping is a lie. When you suck in your stomach, or turn your head so the light washes out your laugh lines, you're lying as much as any liquefy tool. Untruth is baked into the process: Photographer Syreeta McFadden writes how the chemical makeup of some films is biased against dark skin tones. Even snapshots often don't look like you, because you are not static. You are a three-dimensional being, torn by time. Photos are pixel ghosts. 

Photos are lies because art is a lie. Art is artifice. Art makes things as they are not—occasionally in the service of greater truths. 

“The subject desires flattery, the viewer desires truth, the photographer must decide what each means,” tweeted photographer Clayton Cubitt. To pose is to be vulnerable. Because of a photo's presumed reality, viewers experience the subject as the image-maker crafts her to be. The model's beauty can be the product, as in a fashion shoot. Other times, as in a Diane Arbus photo, the product is the model's freakishness, her marginalization, her pain. The relationship between photographer and model is war as often as love. The winner is the person who holds the release. 

Those who see Photoshop as a misogynistic corruption of photography seldom have interesting ideas on what a feminist photo would be. DOVE's famous ad showing “Real Women” in their underwear (by “Real”, they mean smooth-skinned, able-bodied, fleshy but not fat) is as wholesome as vitamin-enriched Wonderbread. Blogs denounce American Apparel for showing pubic hair, but if minimal Photoshop makes you feminist, they're as feminist as Audre Lorde. 

Without photographic artifice, women who are conventionally perfect remain so. Photoshop's victim is supposed to be a “Real Girl,” femme and insecure, who does not work in the sex, performance, or fashion industries. Does trickery-free hotness make her feel better or worse? 

Photoshop is often done badly. In deadline hell, humans get spliced into chimeras. Models lose limbs, their ribcages are broken, and they gain additional thumbs. Photos in glossy magazines are often little more than paintings: Posed meatspace is one shade of paint. Perhaps impressionable girls would feel better if magazines printed drawings instead, to make unreality explicit. It would certainly be better for my bank account. 

Photography was no sooner touched than it was retouched. Photoshop's scalpel and airbrush are the descendants of real tools used to pretty up printed photography. Back then, images of stars seldom ran untouched. Columbia Pictures plucked back Margarita Carmen Cansino's hairline to erase her Mexican heritage. She became Rita Hayworth. Now, she's immortal in silver gelatin. You don't notice how Vaseline, airbrush, and darkroom manipulation worked on her miraculous bone structure. Anything extraneous dissolved into black-and-white.

To get a “true” photo, you need to remove artifice. This means removing art. Art's opposite is bulk surveillance. Drones, CCTV, ultra-fast-ultra-high-res DSLR, our fingers stroking our iPhones or tapping at Google Glass. Omnipresent cameras suction up reality without curation. We're at the finest time in history to see stars, or anyone, photographed looking like hell. 

For women, this surveillance is far harsher than posed artificiality. Under the regime of phone cams, you must be ever photo-ready. Never wrinkle your forehead. Never let your belly out. When Jezebel pays for leaks of raw photos, they mirror tabloids that mock famous cellulite. Noble justifications aside, both rip away a woman's control over her own image. Both profit off nonconsensual exposure. Behind both is a nasty whisper: “You pretended to be perfect. We caught you. You are not.”

Like art, glamour begins as pretending. It's lips painted red, waist corseted thin. Historically, glamor was as distrusted as witchcraft. It could deceive a man into thinking the woman he chose was beautiful, fertile, and young. Beauty is born. Glamor is made. For a woman to remake herself was to sneak above her place.

Retouching is post-hoc glamor. Pixels shellac images like makeup on a face. From Photoshop to Instagram, each tech iteration has made retouching more democratic—and more despised. The self-facing phone cam is a master class in how posing affects perception. Media concern-trolls Photoshop's effect on teen girls. Meanwhile, teen girls use iPhone retouching apps to construct media of themselves. 

A teen girl knows the lies behind photography best. When she takes selfies, she's teaching herself what were once trade secrets. Now she's the one who angles, crops, and blurs. 

The girl she leaves onscreen is and is not girl who took the picture. Like all photos, the girl on screen is a shadow. She is a lovely mirage, to replace those that corporations once sold to her creator. She is false. But also, she is true. 

Follow Molly Crabapple on Twitter.

Louie and his dad, Big Lou

Once upon a time, parents did not want their kids to be skateboarders. In the 80s and 90s, skating was reserved for a rebellious and unsavory lot of outcasts and misfits with no futures. Today, thanks to big-money contests and endorsement deals, skateboarding is seen as a “real” sport and a possibly lucrative career. With that mentality comes the very ugly segment of society known as stage moms and soccer dads who force their kids to train like Olympic figure skaters—anything less than perfection is unacceptable. That sort of competitive parenting has always been around in skateboarding to some degree, but with payouts exploding from $100 in the 80s to $150,000 in 2014, the lecherous parents far outnumber the passive ones who just want their kids to have a good time.

Lucky for Louie Lopez, Flip Skateboards’ newest pro, his father was not one of those dads. Big Lou never imagined that 14 years after his son first picked up the little toy at age five he would be skating professionally for one of the most respected companies in the world. Despite having the last ten years of his life documented in photos and videos and making enough money to buy his own home before his 20th birthday, Louie has somehow managed to remain grounded and avoid the toxic mix of shitty attitudes and inflated egos that often plague young people who are really good at balancing on pieces of wood.

I caught up with Louie at his New York hotel room on a recent press junket to discuss his newest part (above) and a number of other interesting topics from the life of Louie Lopez.

VICE: Was your dad one of those soccer dads who forced you to skate? Did he ever kick you off a vert ramp?
Louie Lopez: No, my dad has always been mellow. He’s always been supportive with what I wanted to do. He definitely didn’t expect me to skateboard. I think he expected me to play soccer or something, but he’s always been down for the cause. It’s sick that he got to come on so many trips with me until I turned 18.

What’s the secret to not kooking it as a child star?
I think for most kids it’s just when they’re young and on trips the older guys can’t really handle them—but that’s how it is with any young kid. Obviously they’re going to be annoying if they’re 12. I guess if you don’t grow out of it, that’s when you blow it.

Were you a shitty little kid?
Nah, I’ve always been super shy and quiet, so I learned to keep my mouth shut.

You’ve been on Flip for a long time with Geoff Rowley and Arto Saari, two of the most legendary skaters of all time. Have those guys given you solid guidance throughout the years?
Yeah, I can always go to Geoff or Arto if I have any questions or need help with something. Those guys are great. But the best advice came from my dad. He taught me to never be mad at myself for not winning a contest or missing a trick or something like that. As long as I tried my best, that’s all that mattered.

Louie and the fam

That’s not a very soccer-dad mentality at all. Was there a time when you’d freak out over contests?
I haven’t really freaked out, but I have definitely been super nervous. I just turned pro, and skating these pro contests is pretty nerve-wracking. It’s cool, but you look around and you’re skating against P-Rod and all of them and you’re like, God dammit! I try not to think about it too much.

Have you ever asked P-Rod for his autograph during a contest?
Yeah, like last week. I had to hit him up for an autograph as he was walking behind the ramp.

I heard your dad got you strippers for your 18th birthday, but that it didn’t work out as planned. What happened?
It worked out for a little bit, but yeah, my dad got me strippers for my 18th birthday, and they were hot. Their gimmick was that they were school teachers.

Like dressed in business-sexy attire and glasses?
No, real school teachers. So they were all like, “No one can take photos of us doing anything because we have to teach on Monday, and we can’t have it get out that we strip.” That’s what they said; that they were actual school teachers. So a bunch of my friends were there, and people kept showing up and taking photos with their flashes on, and after about 30 minutes the strippers had had enough. They did some crazy stuff, though. They got hot candles and melted them all over my body and were burning me in front of everybody. They pulled me aside and made me do this whole show in front of everybody.

So you didn’t get any private time?
I did. After they got pissed about the photos they kicked everyone out and gave me a private dance. That was sick.

Did they let you finger-bang them?
Nah, I didn’t get to finger-bang them, but they were making out and going down on each other in front of me. It was pretty tight.

I’m blown away at how easy it is for young skaters to get laid these days. I’ve been on recent skate trips where guys will post on social media that the van is 30 minutes outside of town, and by the time we get there girls are waiting at the hotel.
Oh, yeah, it’s insane. I don’t have it like that, but someone who is crazy like that is David Gonzalez. I was rooming with him last year at Tampa Pro, and I remember he had girl after girl after girl coming to the room. They were crossing paths in the elevators coming up and down; it was insane! I would say he had at least five girls over the weekend—at least.

My favorite thing about David is how he says, when he retires from skateboarding, he wants to take his money and go back to Colombia and open up a whorehouse.
Yeah, I don’t doubt that he’ll do that.

If times get rough for you would you consider going down and working at David’s whorehouse?
Yeah, I would hit that up if all else fails.

Curren Caples and Louie Lopez

We talked about skate dads, but let’s discuss hot skate moms. There are quite a few of them in the new crop of young skaters. Curren’s [Caples] mom is pretty hot. I’ve always wanted to do a calendar of hot skate moms in bikinis. Who would you say is the hottest?
Maybe [Ryan] Sheckler’s mom. I haven’t seen her in a while, but I always remember she used to be pretty hot. I’ll stick with that as my answer.

Yeah, I’m backing Gretchen for sure. She’d be a great Ms. February. The newest thing on your plate is that you’ll soon be officially on the Converse team. Why did it take two years?
I had talked to Converse a while ago, and since then they got rid of their team manager and have been doing a bunch of cleaning up around their offices. They took a little while to get that sorted out, but once they did they said, “Let’s do it.”

I heard they didn’t want to put you on because they were scared you were never going to grow up.
I haven’t heard that one, but I wouldn’t doubt it. For a while there I didn’t even know if I was ever going to grow.

Photo by Arto Saari

Were you nervous that you might actually be a midget?
There have definitely been times where I was like, Damn, this isn’t looking too good. But my dad always told me to just wait, it’ll happen. He was the same way. He was the shortest kid in high school, and out of nowhere he just grew.

What would you do if your old man stole all your money and footage like Nyjah Huston’s dad did?
I’d have to call him out, and we’d have to take it outside.

Your dad is big. He’d kick your ass.
I’d figure out a way to give him a good one.

You just dropped a Goosenectar part this weekend. Tell me about that.
The people in that video are all my friends, who I skate with every day. We worked on a video a while ago called Disorganized Fun, and this is the new one. We’ve just been skating together, and my friends Ryan Lee and Andrew Freeman made the video. I didn’t get to focus on this one as much as I would have liked, because I was always traveling. But when I was home and free I was out skating with them. Alec Majerus and I have a shared part, and I’m stoked on how it turned out.

Curren and Louie in their younger days. Photo by John Bradford

What have you got lined up for the rest of the year?
I have a Flip part dropping in the next couple months with Curren and Alec. I’ve been going out and skating with Arto a bunch because he films, so it’ll be pretty sick. It’s rad filming with him because he’s one of the best skaters ever, and you’ll get scared and see him standing there and think to yourself, Damn, this guy backlips through double kinks. I have to try this.

I saw Alec was in Tampa pro. Is he officially going pro?
Yeah, he’ll be pro sometime this year.

Are you pissed that you put in all those years and he’s been on Flip for five minutes and already turning pro?
No, I’m not mad at him at all. Everyone knows how good he is. He’s one of the gnarliest skateboarders. He’s so comfortable on rails it’s ridiculous. He deserves it.

I agree. He’s my favorite new Canadian skater.
Ha! I’ve heard that one before. Dane Burman always gives him crap and calls him Canadian. Alec just laughs. He does look Canadian, though. I’m not going to lie.

What’s a harder stigma to beat in skateboarding: being Canadian or being Brazilian?
I’d say being Brazilian. I don’t know. That’s a tough one. They’re both about the same.

One last question. If you’re all grown-up now, when are you going to stop calling yourself Louie and start going by Lou Lopez?
A few of my close friends call me Lou, but I guess I’m not grown-up enough for everyone to start calling me Lou. Hopefully when I get a mustache or something people will start calling me Lou.

More stupid can be found at ChrisNieratko.com or @Nieratko.

Adam Carolla is being sued for $3 million by a company called Personal Audio, which claims that the funny man has violated a patent from 1996 that covers podcasting. On a balmy Thursday night at the end of March, Carolla held a live event called "The Show to Benefit The Legal Defense of Podcasting” to raise funds.

Inside the venue was the usual Carolla swag, including his trademark Mangria drink along with his books and merchandise that fans can purchase to support the cause. I spoke to Carolla before he took the stage. “I don’t see myself as some sort of champion to save podcasting,” he explained. “I don’t know what my alternatives are. They’re suing me and I have to fight back. All I can do is try to raise a bunch of money and fight these guys.” 

Calling upon longtime pals like Kevin & Bean, Jimmy Kimmel and Dr. Drew, Carolla was relatively subdued at the event. With two large “They Hold the Patents/We Hold the Power” logos adorning the stage, the night felt like any other live podcast that Carolla has hosted. However, the vibe was a bit more tense, with fans in the three-quarter filled venue knowing what’s at stake.

Carolla is well aware that many will roll their eyes and question him for trying to crowdfund his defense, but so far he’s plunked down well over $50,000 of his own money towards the initial filing as well as attempts to get the venue moved. So far, Carolla has raised nearly $400,000, which is significant, but he acknowledges that it’s still only a fraction of the approximately $1.6 million that the litigation will cost. 

While the Adam Carolla Show has been recorded by the Guinness Book of World Records as the most downloaded podcast in the world. It isn’t the cash-generating machine that the company that’s suing him evidently thinks it is, let alone one that can survive a $3 million shakedown. 

“I’m flattered they think we make that much money from the podcast,” Carolla said. “I have no idea how they came up with that number, but if they think I’m coming back saying ‘Not a penny over $2.75 million!’ they’re mistaken.” 

In 1996, Jim Logan created Personal Audio with the intent of offering up magazine articles customers liked on the Internet, converting them into the equivalent of a book-on-tape and sending them to the customer on cassettes. It’s safe to say that the idea didn’t go very far. However, that didn’t stop the company from claiming that this was the precursor to modern day podcasting.

Spoken word audio delivery does bear a superficial resemblance to podcasting. Podcasts, however, are almost never transcripts of written material. Most often they consist of content originally conceived for online streaming. As for delivery, the podcaster and distributor don't send the audio anywhere. Podcatchers—apps that organize and play podcasts—actively retrieve the audio, rather than having it delivered by something like email, let alone snail-mail. In 1996, all of this was science fiction.

According to Daniel Nazer, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontiers Foundation, putting together the discovery documents to present a case before a judge is financially burdensome and can cost around $1 million, but he said that Personal Audio’s control is questionable since they rewrote the patent in 2009. He also notes that they didn’t contribute to any of the development of the technology and code associated with podcasting.

“The basic technology that they claim was invented before they filed their patent,” Nazer explains. “This one is a bit complicated because the patent system allows you to write claims many, many years after you file the patent. If the claims bear enough relationship with that old application you can claim priority all the way back. They’re writing claims for what the technology looks like today and are pretending they invented it back in 1996. That explains why these guys never did any podcasting: because it wasn’t really on their minds. It’s a pretty strange thing and they didn’t invent what they say they invented.”

Other podcasts, like WTF with Marc Maron, the Joe Rogen Experience, the Dennis Prager Show, and Chris Hardwick’s Nerdist broadcast were hit with cease-and-desist letters in the middle of last year. After several months of not hearing anything, Carolla and his podcasting friends thought they were out of the woods. 

Things changed in late January, when Carolla was served with the lawsuit. While the lawsuit caught him off-guard, he had a feeling something was bound to happen.

“I’m never surprised by any disappointing feature of humanity,” the comedian said. “When I hear that somebody slips and falls at Chili’s and bangs their head, gets up, rubs it, and doesn’t demand a free dessert, that’s when I’m surprised.”

Many of the podcasters who I sought out either declined or didn’t respond to interview requests due to the complex nature of the case and fear that they could be next on Personal Audio’s hit list. But Marc Maron is standing at the front line with Carolla. Though he hasn’t been sued, Maron has been outspoken railing against patent trolls. He’s invited Carolla onto his podcast to publicize the issue and has been imploring his listeners to get involved by donating to their FundAnything campaign.  

Like Carolla and a number of other podcasters, Maron received four cease-and-desist letters from Personal Audio. However, having not received one or heard of someone getting one in a while, he thought he was out of the woods. When Carolla was served with the lawsuit, Maron sprang into action, knowing what his colleague’s downfall could mean to the community. 

“They’re predators and shakedown artists going after people who can’t defend themselves,” Maron said over the phone a few weeks before Carolla’s show. “They use a loophole in the patent system to be a legally-based extortion racket. What they’re banking on is reality. In order to litigate anything like this, it costs a significant amount of money, so they work this angle and know exactly what they’re doing, which is looking for quick cash.”

The WTF host, along with Doug Benson, joined Carolla for the second half of the live show, riffing on the stuff comics usually give each other shit about. They barely spoke of the September trial date that Carolla faces. But the men have all been targeted by Personal Audio.

Maron believes that the intent of the letters is no more than a cash grab. “They’re coming after the little guy and Adam has to fight this,” Maron said. “The EFF has filed a re-exam and we have to hope for the best here, because this can go on for years and cost a ton of money. It’s straight up mob tactics.”

“Podcasting began earlier than the date of their 2009 filing,” Carolla’s Associate Producer Mike Altier said. Altier is helping spearhead the campaign. “Now he’s suing us years later after the technology was already successful, and his idea didn’t go through. 

Even if Carolla emerges victorious, he won’t gain anything financially. If he’s lucky, he’ll be able to recoup the attorney fees for this undertaking. For now, his team is focused on moving the case forward, and settling isn’t an option. Still, if he does win big in court, it’s possible that Personal Audio won’t be able to go after any other podcasters.

Carolla maintained that it’s all about business. “I don’t really take it personally, and I assume they’re a nameless, faceless conglomerate of jackoff attorneys who go out and make money,” he said. “They just do what they do. People go to me, ‘Aren’t you pissed?’ and no, not in the least. I don’t take it personally. I’m flattered that I made their list of people they think have money.”

Even though President Obama mentioned the pitfalls of patent trolling in this year’s State of the Union, it doesn’t appear to be going away. If nothing else, Carolla hopes his case sheds some light on the trend.

“A lot of people had never heard of this,” he said just before he’s about to take the stage at his fundraiser. “But if this is the point in history where people went, 'What’s a patent troll?' or 'What’s a podcast?' and now they know, then it maybe it’s a turning point.”

Follow Daniel Kohn on Twitter

Photos by Megan Koester

Rory Scovel is one of the most dynamic stand-up comedians performing today. He's gone on Conan multiple times with fellow comic Jon Dore to do a complex, yet flawless two-person stand-up routine. He employed a thick Southern accent for an entire bit while continually taking swigs from an empty beer bottle. And we can't forget the time he dressed up in a tuxedo in front of a guy playing a Liberace-style piano throughout his routine, which was all about marijuana.

This unique presence and willingness to play with the form got him noticed by none other than Jack White, whose Third Man Records released Scovel's latest album. Currently, he's editing his live special which he recorded last year. I sat down with Rory—a couple days before he headlines a show I run with other VICE LA writers—to discuss the process of making a special from start to finish, his TBS sitcom Ground Floor, and comedy in general.

VICE: So what's going on with the album. What stage are you at with it right now?
Rory Scovell: Well, the thing that I just did is a special.

Oh, OK. Sorry, sorry, sorry.
No it's totally fine. What if I got super angry?

No, I'm sorry for you.
Jesus Christ, you know what? Go get the car. Uh, we just started editing it. So we shot it in late February in Charleston, South Carolina. Scott Moran directed it.

Scott's great.
And he put a team of guys together to help shoot it and I got some friends to kind of help out doing different things. I was gone for a while, and I also wanted to not look at the footage, but as of just yesterday I kind of started putting the introduction of it together, which is cool. I can't say as of now if i'll love it or I'll hate it. I think that's kind of hard. I think with any art form, someone could see it and say, “Oh wow, that was great” and you can be like “C+” you know what I mean?

Has it always been hard for you to watch yourself?
When I first started ten years ago, I was doing the tape recorder and mini-tapes which I still have. I would go back and listen to it, but I didn't really like listening to it. Also I didn't like that I couldn't see it. Then when I started videotaping myself, I was too lazy, because at that time that was like a mini-DV camcorder where you would hope your friend would press record at the right time and not leave. I only did that a couple times because I felt like, ugh I gotta carry all this. It ruined the simplicity of just going to a show where all you need is your notebook.

So I only did that so many times, and I was able to watch those sets OK, and then I just didn't really record at all for a while. Then I'd say probably like three, four years ago I started recording a lot with a flipcam, and I was able to watch it but not only watch it but like, enjoy it and laugh. I was so happy—as weird as that sounds—I was so happy that I could watch a set and laugh at it like I was in the audience. I felt that it was really important to be able to do that.

I think that's huge.
To be able to laugh at yourself. It's like, well now you have full confidence that you really do believe in the comedy that you're doing. I'm laughing it at, I'm genuinely laughing at it even though I'd feel like a psycho if you catch me and say, “are you laughing at your own self?” Like how ego driven could you possibly be? But now I don't record myself as much because I'm not using a flipcam anymore. I don't want to leave my phone or ask a friend. I feel horrible like, “Hey Allen could you hold this phone for 10 minutes while I...” When someone asks me to do it, I'm like, “ugh, God."

I voice record all the time, every show; just in case I improvise a line, or a joke finally comes together, then I know I can go back and see exactly how I got it right. So strangely enough to make this answer even longer, I don't really do it now. The old me would have dove right in to watch that special. I am curious to see what it looks like and excited to chop it together and make it look better than it even was before, through the power of editing. It doesn't excite me as much now, and I think I'm at a point where I'm a little bit over the material. So I'm like, well I don't want to go back and I haven't written anything super new.

Right. I remember doing Hot Tub [with Kristen Schaal and Kurt Braunholer] with you, and it was like a while after you had taped it so you were saying, “I feel like I just now cracked the code on some of these jokes.” It's like, “can I do it again?”
I know! That is so the disease—disease? Why would I use that?

Cause we're dying.
Yeah, that's the horrific disease we have. A lot of those jokes I actually do really like now and I'm like, “Oh that joke is really where it should be now.” But I recorded...

How long is the master footage from the special and how long are you trying to make it?
It was two shows, but I'll probably cut it to try and make it 40 or 50 minutes. I did a lot. Over the course of ten years I've set up cameras and told people “I'm recording.” But I was too stupid to know I didn't even have a product to record. But doing this one on my own, I was like “Alright, we're going to really pay people. We're going to really do a budget. I'm going to really do it on my own.”

However this thing turns out, I could end up loving the product or I might end up just liking it. I don't think I'll hate it, but the thing I am going to walk away with is I feel like I definitely learned a lot about what I want to do for the next thing. To me, that's what we do; even when you get on stage the first time. People are like, “I want it to go really well." Well, it's probably going to go okay, but it might show you enough information or teach you enough so that the next one is even better. Yeah it's weird. I don't know, I think I'm going to be really proud of it in the end.

It sounds like the shows were different. One show was 80 minutes. Does that mean, you have your tight jokes you want to talk about but does that mean if anything happens in the crowd you were just going to go for it?
Yeah, I was super loose about it. I was super loose because there were a lot of things that I...this is why I did it on my own, because I wanted to make sure that if those moments happen I didn't want someone else telling me what my set had to look like. In my times performing on television, I don't like someone trying to fit what we do into like, “Well you're a comedian so when you come on the show, this is what comedians do.” It's like, well what? Do you tell every band to play the same song when they come in? No, it just so happens they're all different. People don't see stand-up as, “oh all of these people coming in are completely different.” Just because they have a microphone and a stool doesn't mean they're doing the exact same thing.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it just seems like you've got a lot going on right now. Right? You got the show on TBS, that got picked up again right?
Season two starts taping I think in August.

How grueling is it?
Zero of it is grueling. It's fantastic. I mean for someone whose main income—only income—for however long has been doing stand-up and going on the road. The fact that I get to be in town and sleep on my own bed for 3 straight months or four months. That alone gives me no room to complain, but also the hours are great, the whole cast is great, the staff is great. Everyone is fun. I really have no complaints.

Does that mean you really scale back on the road?
During that time, I try to. I mean I love stand-up, but I go in and out of it. My love for stand-up goes up and down. If I have something new and exciting that I really like, then it's really fun or if I'm playing really fun clubs. I also want to be able to learn how to be an actor, and be a good actor. The only way to really do it is to take myself out of stand-up, even locally I wouldn't get up as much as I usually would, just to be like, “my job right now is this show and I really want to be good at this show."

Coming from stand-up being my only income, when I see an empty weekend, I panic. Oh my god, I've got to fill it. I need the paycheck, I need the work. If I stop performing, I'm going to lose whatever it is that we do. My sense of humor will be gone. I won't remember how to perform. Stand-up gets inside you like that—when you're not doing it, you have that fear that you're never going to be able to do it again.

Yeah.
Which is weird. I heard on that Seinfeld documentary, Comedian from like ten years, fifteen years ago...

That was a while ago. It was like 40 years ago.
It was 300 years ago. Right after the Roman empire had just collapsed. Watching that right before I did stand-up, I heard someone say, “If you stop, you feel like you're going lose your ability to do it." I thought that sounded so stupid, and after doing it, I see what he means. I don't think you'll forget how to do it but you'll have to legitimately start all over and remember your pace again and get your confidence.

On the other hand, when you're doing it every night—even if it's just a little set—every night blends together that kind of messes with your head a little bit.
It's weird for 10 straight years I feel like I've just been on this train. You just get on it you start performing and you forget who you used to be. Your normal rhythm of life is completely gone, because you're doing shows. You even surprise yourself with your willingness to work for so cheap, or even free. You would have never thought you were like that but you end up loving it so much that even early on when someone's like, “You need to drive out here for two hours and I can give you $40,” and you're like, “Okay, I'll be there.” It's weird, but it's also great to know that's how fun the job is, and that's how much you love it.

Even all those painful times of starting over; those times you have to find new material and go on stage, and work for it—to know how painful it is to know that you're good at this, but you have to go up five straight times in a row and bomb. That's how much you love it, you're willing to feel absolutely miserable for it.

It is true, that's the "job" part of it. I even think about that with driving around open mics and shows. That's part of the job. Hanging out with people, that's part of the job. Being nice.
That's also why it's hard to complain about it because my job is hanging out with my friends. That's why when there's a show that I'm on, and I don't really know anybody on it, no matter how the set goes I don't really enjoy it. What I enjoy, and where I think more material comes from, is hanging out with friends before and during the show. That's when you start riffing things, and you're like, “That's a good idea,” and your friends are right there with you to help you write it.

I've never understood comics who have a competitive attitude or don't socialize. The people who are actively like, “No, no, no I'm trying to make it. Just trying to make it. There's one job available.”

Yeah, you've got to be a good person on some level.
I don't know how people aren't. It's like, even in a manner of competition, how are you not wired to just not want to have friends? Why would you be wired to look at someone and just status judge them?

Yeah well some of it is like—I'm not saying every comic had a bad high school experience, but I would say 90 percent of them at least profess to, “I didn't have any friends growing up and no one got me." Well it's like, now you have been given a gift. You have family. You can have the biggest family in the fucking world if you want it. All you have to do is be funny and nice. Do you have anything else beside the special and the show, going on? On the horizon, or just things you're thinking about trying to do?
You know, I want to write a short film. I've always wanted to since high school to make movies. My aunt had a camcorder. It never occurred to me what you could do with a camcorder. There was one vacation my aunt had just gotten a super 8 and she said we should make a movie with it, and it was like all of a sudden my brain exploded. Oh yeah, we could make a thing with this—it's not just for family events. On vacation I made a movie with all my siblings.

Follow Allen and Megan on Twitter.

Earlier this year I traveled to Nou, a fishing town on the north coast of Japan, to visit a sumo training academy. The country’s unofficial national sport dates back over 2,000 years. Rigorous daily training must be upheld in order to prepare the fighters for bouts that can be won or lost in seconds, and this school is where that regime starts for the sport’s future champions.  

I arrived in Nou on the first day of the school year and was introduced to the students, some of whom were as young as 12, who had moved out of their family homes to be there. I joined the group at 7AM for their first walk to the training dohyō (the ring where the wrestling takes place), a pretty anonymous building surrounded by the beautiful snow-capped mountains of the Japanese Alps.

 
For the next hour or so the new students joked around, helped each other fit into their mawashis (loincloths), and reminded themselves of the words used in the recitals during training and bouts. Once they entered the dohyō, bowing out of respect to the gods, the smiles turned into frowns of concentration. Then began a gruelling three-hour training session, each student pushing their bodies as far as they could go.

These children and teenagers eat, sleep, train, and study together 24 hours a day, with sumo training and preparation taking up their mornings and other studies their afternoons. They will remain at this school for six years, preparing building their minds and bodies in the hope of becoming professional sumo champions.

See more of Daniel's work on his website.

Follow Daniel Ali on Twitter.

We're thrilled to premiere our brand new show devoted to the awesomeness of La Belle Province: Quebec Is Perfect. If you're only familiar with the poutine-devouring, late night decadence lifestyle of Montreal, you should press play on this rural slice of life that will shed some light on how French-Canadians spend a polar-vortexed winter. Follow our host (and renowned rap DJ) Tommy Kruise to his family's farm in Northern Quebec to drag a dead pig onto a hill (to lure some coyotes) while spraying buckshot at dozens of skeet shooting discs just to pass the time. Anyway, there's more of this show coming. So, enjoy.

A soldier trying a PTSD treatment that is way more complicated (and expensive) than just letting him smoke weed. Photo via Flickr user The U.S. Army

We Americans love to send our armed forces, often recruited from black and Hispanic neighborhoods devoid of real economic opportunity, to fight in exotic foreign conflicts while we relax at home and consume things, unconcerned about the impact all that combat has on those citizens' lives. So it should come as little surprise that the House of Representatives last Wednesday rejected an amendment to the annual bill funding veterans' health care that would have permitted military doctors in states with medical marijuana already on the books to discuss pot treatment options with their patients.

The vote was tantalizingly close, however, with the amendment failing 222–195. In fact, 22 Republicans crossed over to join the majority of Democrats in favor of the proposal, which, according to medical studies, could help some of the millions of vets suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the aftermath of the protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The bipartisan tide of momentum for drug legalization, it seems, is reaching the highest levels of the federal government—and even threatening to rope in our sacred troops, whom we are apparently fine with risking life and limb in the desert so long as they never, ever get high.

But one vote in particular stood out even as reformers cheered the broader political winds continuing to move in their favor: Florida Representative Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and a close ally of both President Obama and 2016 presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton, voted no, drawing jeers from the legalization crowd.

"It's shocking that the chair of the DNC would stand with so many Republicans in voting to censor doctors from discussing medical marijuana with US military veterans who are seeking relief for their pain," said Tom Angell, founder and chairman of Marijuana Majority, a legalization advocacy group. "This vote from someone who is supposed to be a shrewd political operator is made all the more inexplicable by the fact that poll after poll shows voters in her state favor medical marijuana by huge margins. She's way behind the times on this, and she's going to find that out in November, when Florida voters overwhelmingly pass the medical marijuana initiative that's on the ballot."

Indeed, medical weed seems virtually certain to arrive in the Sunshine State one way or another by this time next year: The ballot initiative to amend the Constitution and permit medical use has an excellent shot at passage in November, with a Quinnipiac University poll last week finding 88 percent support. Even Tea Party favorite Gov. Rick Scott has felt compelled to jump on the bandwagon as part of his re-election drive (presumably in hopes of winning over libertarians), albeit with tentative support for a much weaker alternative proposal.

I reached out to Wasserman-Schultz's office to ask why a leader of the nation's premier center-left party would vote against something like this.

“Congresswoman Wasserman-Schultz felt that it was premature to vote for such an amendment given that HHS has approved a new study to look at marijuana’s potential effects on PTSD," Sean Barlett, her spokesman, said in a statement after indicating his boss was not going to make time for an interview. "While there is evidence that medical marijuana is effective in providing relief in some medical conditions, the Congresswoman looks forward to the results of that study before making a policy determination.”

The problem is that even if you have your doubts about the usefulness of medical marijuana as a fix for the woes that come with a condition like PTSD—which seems perfectly reasonable—denying doctors employed by the Veterans Administration (VA) the permission to even discuss those options is crazy, not to mention something of a civil liberties issue.

"Veterans Affairs has made it clear they don't want any doctors inside the system recommending cannabis," says Michael Krawitz, the executive director of Veterans for Medical Cannabis Access, who was injured while serving in the Air Force in Guam in the 1980s. "The VA's General Counsel has weighed in on this and said the DEA has been right on their shoulder, essentially threatening the VA that if doctors recommend cannabis, they'd be aiding and abetting criminals. And since VA doctors don't have free speech, they are in no position to argue."

Just as important, Wasserman-Schultz is going to have the ear of Clinton if and when she becomes the Democratic Party's 2016 nominee. Given the former Secretary of State's tendency to embrace the safe, establishment course rather than stake out new territory, one can't help but wonder if Wasserman-Schultz's vote is an indication of what to expect from a President Clinton (Part II) when it comes to drug policy.

"My read is that there's still some caution in the air on this issue," said Tad Devine, a longtime Democratic strategist who served as a top advisor to Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004. "It's an issue that could very easily be taken by Republicans and thrown back against them and imputed not just to one member of the Congress but all Democrats. But I don't think it's a loser, and the veterans' dimension of it makes it more acceptable to more people."

Put another way, it's one thing for many Democratic Party officials to refuse to publicly embrace all-out legalization given the experiments still playing out in Colorado and Washington. But nixing the very possibility of treating veterans suffering from everything from psychological conditions like PTSD to chronic pain with pot makes no sense. It's not like this is some radical new drug that we have to test to make sure it won't kill those who dare consume it. Worst case scenario? A few veterans get baked out of their minds and go back to feeling miserable a few hours later. 

Follow Matt Taylor on Twitter.

Urban Outfitters T-shirt (Inspiration)

STYLING: THOMAS RAMSHAW
Styling assistant: Parveen Narowalia
Hair and Make Up: Lydia Warhurst
Hair and Make Up Assistant: Esme Carpenter

Models: Ade Yusuf, Liam O'Sullivan, Grainne McLister, Omar Philips, Jo Wells, Parveen Narowalia, Aaron Lewis, Flynne Horne, Courtney Mullen, Topher Taylor, James Thomas

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Thomas: The Kooples jacket, COS T-shirt, Hall of Fame hat - Parveen: Rokit jacket , Topshop jeans, Dr Martens shoes (Inspiration)

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T-Bone

Last year I spoke to a guy named Shaun Attwood about making millions on the stock market and ploughing it all into a new career as a rave-organising ecstasy kingpin. One unfortunate side effect of selling drugs on a large scale, I discovered during our conversation, is that if the police find out about it, they’re probably going to want to send you to jail.

While serving time for his offences, Shaun saw or heard about numerous rapes of inmates by their fellow prisoners – a major problem that he claimed isn’t getting nearly the amount of attention it should from prison authorities. However, he told me about a friend he made who believes it’s his Christian duty to protect weaker inmates from being sexually abused, and has been stabbed and beaten to within an inch of his life for doing just that.  

T-Bone is a 6'5 ex-Marine who’s become something of a legend in the west coast prison system for taking a one-man stand against rapists in American jails. He’s currently serving time for robbery (he maintains his innocence), so I sent him some questions about his anti-rape crusade and the issues of sexual assault in American prisons. 

VICE: Hi T-Bone. When did you first decide that you were going to make a stand against rapists in the prison system?
T-Bone: It was in 1986, when I saw a young kid of 18 being pushed around for food and being told to smuggle crystal meth and heroin into prison inside his butt. When the kid brought the dope in, the two guys who'd made him do it both got high and raped the kid, which made me decide to take action.

How common is rape in American prisons? As prevalent as TV and movies would have you believe? 
It’s very common, and it happens in a variety of ways. When I was in one particular prison here in Arizona, every single night someone was getting raped. All night long, I heard male flesh pounding against male flesh, guys getting fucked up the ass. Anyone who couldn’t fight back was game. The rapists were the size of apes. They’d put the victim in a chokehold to make them unconscious. Regular guys – not homosexuals – were getting punked and were scared to admit it. I also saw big guys kissing little white boys on the lips and neck like they were women. Gang members would sometimes hold someone down and stick things in his ass – stuff like cans, soda bottles, shampoo bottles, broom handles or metal shanks.

Shaun has told me that your Christian faith played a part in inspiring you to take action against rapists. 
My belief in God gives me the divine power to do all things through His spirit. Some people say that God doesn’t hurt people and that I hurt those rapists on my own because I wanted to run things in prison, but I believe that God didn’t tell the rapists I encountered over the years to force themselves on young inmates just because they could. I never ran across the yard and jumped on people because of their behaviour; I prayed, I talked to a lot of people on the yard who felt the same way I did, and I asked God for protection.

I'm not a Superman or someone special. God’s power is much stronger than mine, and His will will be done. Making rapists stop hurting other people was God pushing and guiding me. I didn’t win all of my fights with rapists – I almost lost my life more than once when I was stabbed and smashed in the skull with rocks in socks. I believe the only reason I’m alive is by God’s grace.

Yeah, I’ve heard that you sustained quite a few injuries after sticking up for weaker inmates. 
As well as being shanked and hit with rocks, I’ve hurt my hands a lot. I’ve been hit hard and had to take it easy for weeks until my body healed from blows and hits to the back of my head. I have several large scars, including one on my shoulder where I was sliced open. I’ve hurt my feet, knees, elbows, fingers and toes. I’ve had contract killings put out on me for being outspoken about issues that are common in the joint. I’ve been asked to leave yards. I’ve been locked down because certain people didn’t want me around. I’ve found notes in my cell saying my life is in danger.

How did you end up in prison in the first place?
When I got out of the marines, I set myself up as a bodyguard and the cash started rolling in. I invested in the cocaine business and got addicted to it. I’ve lost over 20 years of my life due to the dumb decisions I made on drugs. I’ve hurt my wife and children by putting myself in here. Every time I’ve been released, I’ve come straight back. I’m not making excuses for myself, but most prisoners have drug problems and the prisons offer no help, drug counselling or rehabilitation. The system is designed so that prisoners come right back because it keeps the prison in business. That’s part of the reason why there are more black guys in prison throughout the entire USA than are in college and more than were held under slavery before slavery was abolished.

Why do you think the US prison system has such high levels of sexual assault compared to other nations?
It boils down to human nature – people don’t care about prisoners. Prison is a smaller version of what our society is like, with its extremes of power and poverty. There are laws in place to protect people in society, but in here, if a guy is forced to have sex, he has nowhere to turn, because if he tells the guards he’s considered to be a rat, and that’s worse than being labelled a punk. Rats get killed in here. That’s why so much rape goes on but no one reports it.

T-Bone with his granddaughter in Tucson prison

Do you think the prison system could do more to protect weaker inmates?
The prison system does nothing to protect weaker inmates. It’s a system that encourages evil.

There are a lot of racial politics within the US prison system – do you ever get any trouble for helping inmates of other races?
Yes, I’ve had to defend myself many times against gang members for helping inmates of other races. Here in Arizona’s prison system, blacks are a minority. I experience pure hatred because of the colour of my skin. People seethe with vile contempt and want to kill me because I’m black, but I’m wearing the same clothes and doing the same time as them.

When I first came into the prison I'm currently in, glad to see a black man stop by, I said, "Hey, what’s up, brother?" He replied: "Some of the white boys here are mad at you for smashing some whites who were raping a youngster at another yard. They said that was white-boy business and you shouldn’t be interfering."

"How many brothers are on this run?" I asked, referring to black inmates. "You’re looking at him," was the reply. "I guess I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place then," I said, wondering how best to defend myself.

Did they come after you?
Later that day, I was let out for a shower. Two whites approached me at the steps, making noise to attract my attention. Then, out of nowhere, another white inmate jumped on my back and put me in a strong chokehold – a precision attack. Another guy grabbed my legs and pulled me down. I tried to kick and pull, but someone laid across my legs and twisted my body to an angle that hurt my back. Another inmate held my arms down while lying across my middle. I could tell they’d done this before.

The first guy said, "Pull his pants down."

They started to yank my pants down, and I couldn’t stop them. One produced a wooden broom handle shaped like a penis at the end. The sight of the phallus made me struggle with all my might, but I was pinned down too strong. Luckily, two Mexicans ran up the steps. One kicked the first guy in the face and I broke loose of the chokehold. He then spun around and stabbed a Mexican in the stomach. I leaned forward and hit the guy holding my legs down in the neck with my right hand. He tried to grab me, but I got a hold of his wrist, turned him over, pushed his arm up behind his back, dislocated his shoulder and snapped his wrist. I smashed his face into the pavement. I hit another guy in the oesophagus and he went down, then 20 cops materialised from nowhere.

Jesus. Finally, if you could change one thing about the US prison system, what would it be?
The prison system here has been set up not to allow God in. That needs to change, because God is love, and where there’s love, there’s peace.

Thanks to Shaun Attwood for putting me in touch with T-Bone. You can read about Shaun's own prison experiences in his new book, Prison Time.

Occupy Wall Street protesters are led away by police in early October 2011. Photo via Flickr user Adrian Kinloch

On Monday Occupy Wall street protester Cecily McMillan was found guilty of felony assault on a police officer in a New York City courtroom. The way McMillan tells it, on March 17, 2012, during a protest in Zuccotti Park that marked the six-month anniversary of the cops violently clearing that space of activists and their tents, she elbowed officer Grantley Bovell in the face because he grabbed her breast from behind, surprising her and leaving a bruise in the process. McMillan says she was beaten and arrested along with 70 fellow protesters, then was hospitalized after having a seizure—something doctors couldn’t officially confirm. Bovell suffered a black eye, and, he says, a continued headaches.

The conviction seems stunning and ridiculous to many who have been following the trial closely, including the Guardian's Molly Knefel, who wrote:

“In the trial, physical evidence was considered suspect but the testimony of the police was cast as infallible. Despite photographs of her bruised body, including her right breast, the prosecution cast doubt upon McMillan's allegations of being injured by the police—all while Officer Bovell repeatedly identified the wrong eye when testifying as to how McMillan injured him.”

The judge, Knefel noted, also refused to allow evidence about Bovell’s past behavior, including discipline problems and his involvement in a ticket-fixing scandal. It’s a bizarre and grim postscript to the story of the Occupy Wall Street movement—few activists have been charged with any wrongdoing, and some even won settlements after being the victims of police brutality. But McMillan, a 25-year-old grad student and advocate of nonviolence, is now facing up to seven years in prison because she refused to plead out to lesser charges and thought she could win a fight against city hall.

You can’t help but wonder if the authorities looked at her case as the chance to set an example. As her attorney told <a href="https://news.vice.com/article/the-case-that-could-rock-the-occupy-movement target=" data-cke-saved-href="https://news.vice.com/article/the-case-that-could-rock-the-occupy-movement target=" _blank"="">VICE News in March</a>, “It sends a chilling message to those who are engaged in non-violent protests… It says, ‘Watch out. You could be snatched up and sent to jail for a long time.’”</p><p></p> <p> Now for the rest of this week’s bad cops:</p> <p> -On Thursday, police in Prince George’s County, Maryland, Police Department <a href="http://motherboard.vice.com/read/live-tweeting-prostitution-raids-is-a-terrible-idea-but-its-happening-anyway" data-cke-saved-href="http://motherboard.vice.com/read/live-tweeting-prostitution-raids-is-a-terrible-idea-but-its-happening-anyway" target="_blank">announced their plan to live-tweet a prostitution sting</a> sometime this week, provoking a ton of backlash because it seemed like a creepy publicity stunt meant to shame sex workers, who are hardly dangerous criminals. In response to the negative reaction on the internet, the department clarified in a <a href="http://pgpolice.blogspot.com/2014/05/message-to-our-community-about-upcoming.html" data-cke-saved-href="http://pgpolice.blogspot.com/2014/05/message-to-our-community-about-upcoming.html" target="_blank">follow-up post </a>that their vice squad “will target those who choose to solicit a prostitute, not prostitutes themselves. The intent all along has been to put on notice and/or arrest the very people who exploit women and even young girls in our community.” Still, as the <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/05/why-police-shouldnt-live-tweet-prostitution-stings/361564/" data-cke-saved-href="http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/05/why-police-shouldnt-live-tweet-prostitution-stings/361564/" target="_blank"><em>Atlantic</em>’s Conor Friedersdorf noted</a>, it’s a bit aggressive to shame people who haven’t been convicted of a crime—and anyway, “Given all the serious crime that happens in Prince Georges County, involving clear-cut victims, are low-level johns and prostitutes really the criminal element that calls for a shaming campaign?”</p> <p> -Speaking of the puritanical instincts of cops, on <a href="http://lasvegassun.com/news/2014/may/04/metro-have-premarital-sex-risk-death/" data-cke-saved-href="http://lasvegassun.com/news/2014/may/04/metro-have-premarital-sex-risk-death/" target="_blank">Saturday in North Las Vegas, officer Regina Coward, president of the Nevada Black Police Association spoke</a>—in uniform, gun at her side—at a “Choose Purity” event held by her church, where 125 parents and kids were told that premarital sex could lead to meth abuse, sex trafficking, rape, gang violence, and other horrible things. Basically, Coward and a few other cops who volunteered their time helped tell a bunch of children that if they have sex they’ll die. This type of fearmongering is always going to be present in America, but it is too much to ask that the police don’t use their badges and uniforms to lend some authority to messages like these? Apparently, it is.</p> <p> -Here’s something pretty bad: Two reportedly <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/nypd-allegedly-shoots-gun-drunk-chief-article-1.1774643" data-cke-saved-href="http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/nypd-allegedly-shoots-gun-drunk-chief-article-1.1774643" target="_blank">drunk off-duty New York City cops shot two people in two separate incidents.</a> On Tuesday night officer Brendan Cronin fired his service weapon 13 into a truck lingering beside him at a stoplight, hitting a man six times. Cronin, who obviously had no business driving, much less randomly firing his weapon at strangers, was arrested for the assault he claims to be too drunk to remember. Several hours later, around 3 AM, Sergeant Wanda Anthony shot at least one round at her ex-boyfriend and his new lady outside a New Jersey strip club before fleeing by car and getting picked up by local cops. Both officers were suspended for a month while the events are investigated. (Normally, if someone shoots someone else six times, he’s immediately arrested. It's sometimes pretty sweet to be a cop.) These shootings happened less than a week after an NYPD detective shot his partner in the wrist after throwing back a reported 11 drinks. NYPD commissioner Bill Bratton told the press that he is “very disturbed about...a long-term problem of inappropriate use of alcohol” among his officers, but the bigger problem is probably the inappropriate shooting of people. Maybe NYPD officers should take a class on why it is not appropriate to drink until you black out and drive around with your gun looking for a fight.</p> <p> -On February 20, 2013, <a href="http://fox6now.com/2014/05/01/sober-driver-arrested-for-owi-when-deputy-crashes-into-her/" data-cke-saved-href="http://fox6now.com/2014/05/01/sober-driver-arrested-for-owi-when-deputy-crashes-into-her/" target="_blank">Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Deputy Joseph Quiles ran a stop sign and plowed his patrol car </a>into 25-year-old Tanya Weyker’s car. Weyker suffered a fractured neck during the accident, and was too injured to take a breathalyzer test, but nevertheless she was charged with drunk driving. Blood tests soon showed that she was sober, however and a surveillance video revealed that Quiles lied when he said he had come to a full stop at the stop sign—still, the charges weren’t dropped until <em>ten months</em> had passed. Weyker may file various lawsuits in order to pay her enormous medical bills and hopefully get some of the officers involved in this mess fired.</p> <p> -<em>Mother Jones </em>just came out with <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/05/sudan-fbi-informant-naji-mansour-terrorism" data-cke-saved-href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/05/sudan-fbi-informant-naji-mansour-terrorism" target="_blank">an article that details how in 2009 the American citizen</a> Naji Mansour was repeatedly harassed and detained in Kenya and South Sudan because of loose ties to terrorism—ostensibly all of this happened at the command of US officials. Mansour was repeatedly prevented from traveling and eventually held in South Sudan for 37 days. His mother, brothers, and grandmother (some of whom who live in the US) were also allegedly interrogated. If the man had substantial ties to terrorism, he should have been arrested and charged; harassing an American citizen’s family as a way of blackmailing him into doing dangerous work for the FBI is an abuse of power (albeit a not particularly surprising one, given how the federal agency operates).</p> <p> -Video from last week <a href="http://www.8newsnow.com/story/25404466/video-shows-nye-co-assist-sheriff-pulling-up-signs" data-cke-saved-href="http://www.8newsnow.com/story/25404466/video-shows-nye-co-assist-sheriff-pulling-up-signs" target="_blank">shows Nye County, Nevada, Assistant Sheriff Rick Marshall </a>taking down signs supporting his opponent in an upcoming race for sheriff. (The signs technically supported “Anybody but Rick” which might be the reason Marshall was so pissed.) The footage was shot by Marshall’s opponent, Steven Lee, who also filmed deputies arresting their boss for possession of stolen property. (Marshall, who swears he had permission to remove the signs, also got hit with a resisting arrest charge when he began kicking and blocking the police cruiser door with his foot.) Unfortunately the current sheriff, Tony DeMeo, will not release—or even watch—dashcam video of the event, and he told a CBS affiliate that he still supports Marshall in the race to take over for him. If nothing else, this story explains why there’s a need for an “Anybody but Rick” campaign in the first place.</p> <p> -A police officer in Calumet City, Illinois, <a href="http://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/Cop-Saves-Baby-From-Burning-Building-257752101.html" data-cke-saved-href="http://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/Cop-Saves-Baby-From-Burning-Building-257752101.html" target="_blank">saved the life of a six-month-old infant on Thursday</a>, making him our Good Cop of the Week. Officer Adam Zieminski was the first responder to a house fire on May 1, and in response to the crying mother’s pleas to save the child, he crawled, then ran inside without any protective gear and grabbed the baby. Zieminski was treated for smoke inhalation, and the infant is reportedly fine.</p> <p> <em>Lucy Steigerwald is a freelance writer and photographer. Read her blog</em> <em><a href="http://thestagblog.com/" data-cke-saved-href="http://thestagblog.com/" target="_blank">here</a></em> <em>and follow her on </em><a href="http://twitter.com/LucyStag" data-cke-saved-href="http://twitter.com/LucyStag" target="_blank"><em>Twitter</em></a><em>.</em></p> <!--{cke_protected}{C}%3C!%2D%2Drecommended%2D%2D%3E--><p></p><p></p><p></p>

Screenshot via YouTube

Inevitably, if you are the kind of person who reveals your thoughts and feelings to the internet—which is to say, you are anyone who has ever updated your Facebook status or reblogged something on Tumblr—you will make someone angry. Occasionally you will make a lot of people very, very angry, and they will write about you and call you names while others rise to defend you. If you are exceptionally star-crossed, your name will be bellowed from all corners of the internet as commenters both famous and obscure craft hot takes about you. Inevitably, you will be called an idiot and a racist and a symbol of America's decline. You may even end up on cable news—suddenly locking eyes with Greta Van Susteren as she asks you to explain yourself—before your moment in the spotlight is gone and you are returned to your previous life as another person who has said something on the internet takes your place among the blogs and tweets and tumbls.

This is called a “news cycle,” a phrase that always reminds me of the Hindu theory of the universe being destroyed and reborn again and again. There is something strangely calming about thinking of news as some great cosmic entity that is constantly eating and excreting and then eating the excrement—it is a self-replenishing outrage machine that hums along, screaming about each new offense against INSERT NAME OF IDEA OR GROUP HERE as if it were the most vile transgression of all, then abruptly but seamlessly moving on to the next uniquely obscene gaffe or theory. Once you realize that this cycle/machine/beast (which is also a collection of websites, TV channels, and individuals who fill the air with hyperbole about the topic du jour for a living) will hum along without your participation, you can more or less ignore the individual yelled-about items and relax in the knowledge that none of it matters—unless, of course, you happen to be one of those items.

Tal Fortgang, a gloriously named freshman at Princeton became news-cycle fodder last week when an opinion column he wrote—which was originally titled “Checking My Privilege: Character as the Basis of Privilege” when it ran in the Princeton Tory, a student-run conservative publication, in early April—was republished by Time and Fox News on Friday.

The gist of the piece is that Fortgang, a 20-year-old white guy, is upset at some fellow student who apparently told him to “check your privilege,” an especially grating collegiate way to say, “I think that your opinion is invalid and/or shitty because you are a white guy who doesn’t care and/or consider the perspective of others.”

Fasten your seatbelts, you’re in for a self-righteous ride. Writes Fortgang:

The phrase, handed down by my moral superiors, descends recklessly, like an Obama-sanctioned drone, and aims laser-like at my pinkish-peach complexion, my maleness, and the nerve I displayed in offering an opinion rooted in a personal Weltanschauung.

[...]

I do not accuse those who "check" me and my perspective of overt racism, although the phrase, which assumes that simply because I belong to a certain ethnic group I should be judged collectively with it, toes that line. But I do condemn them for diminishing everything I have personally accomplished, all the hard work I have done in my life, and for ascribing all the fruit I reap not to the seeds I sow but to some invisible patron saint of white maleness who places it out for me before I even arrive.

Fortgang goes on to inform the check-your-privilege crowd that his grandparents survived the Holocaust and built a business from nothing, and that for 25 years his father worked “from the crack of dawn” to earn a living. And what privilege Fortgang has—cue the patriotic horns—is passed down to him by not just his family but by the Founding Fathers. “I recognize that it was my parents’ privilege and now my own that there is such a thing as an American dream,” he writes, “which is attainable even for a penniless Jewish immigrant… It’s not a matter of white or black, male or female or any other division which we seek, but a matter of the values we pass along, the legacy we leave, that perpetuates ‘privilege.’ And there’s nothing wrong with that.”

As Upworthy might write, “This opinion-havin’ guy expressed unironic belief in the idea that America is a meritocracy… you’ll never believe what happened next.” Actually, you would: He got lionized on the right by everyone from the American Conservative to the Blaze, while people on the left straight-up called him a racist. It’s sometimes hard to figure out why some piece of writing or video goes viral the way Fortgang’s essay has, but I can think of a couple reasons it spread so far:

1. He expressed something that many conservatives feel on a deep level, which is that the discourse of “social justice” (the current catchall phrase used to describe pretty much everyone to the left of the Democratic Party) warps language and belittles their views. When a leftist talks, wealth means greed, masculinity means sexism, pride means racism, traditional values means homophobia, and rural America means a bunch of idiots. Phrases like trigger warning and microaggression circulate on college campuses thanks to an epidemic of overly sensitive liberals who say things like “check your privilege” when they really mean “fuck yourself, white boy.” I think there is some truth to this line of complaint, actually: It can seem like left-wing activists have built their own vocabulary and grammar, and if you don’t use their language and agree with them on everything you are scorned and insulted. When they call you “ignorant” they don’t mean that they want to educate you into enlightenment; they want to shame you into shutting the fuck up.

2. Fortgang is not a bad writer for a 20-year-old, but he makes a lousy argument that’s easy to dissect. Having a family history that includes horrible hardships and an inspiring immigrant story does not mean that you haven’t benefitted from your race, gender, and class, or that you shouldn’t contemplate the role those things had in shaping your “Weltanschauung.” (Princeton students, who are all privileged in one way or another, tend to drop $20 words like that when other people would just say “worldview.”) It’s nice to praise an America that allowed your Jewish immigrant grandfather to build a business, but it’s useful to recognize that that at the same time in America, black people were being denied loans and forced to live in racially segregated slums—you’re meant to check your privilege by considering other people’s stories, not your own. Just as conservatives could read Fortgang’s words as empowering and an antidote to the liberal thought police, lefties could quickly throw together takedowns and attract readers by pointing out all the ways that this college kid is a big dumb wrong jerk.

Combine those reasons with Fortgang’s authorial smugness/confidence (you say to-may-to, I say to-mah-to), and you’ve got a viral essay that set the op-ed world on fire and landed the author on Fox News—which is a shame, because this conversation should have stayed on campus.

I like to believe that colleges are still places where you can actually learn something. Fortgang’s column stirred things up at Princeton—hopefully it started a dialogue about what “privilege” means and who has it, and maybe also about the right and wrong way to have debates about values. Hopefully Fortgang read this New York Times article about the confabulation in which Briana Payton, a member of his school’s Black Student Union, is quoted as saying, “I concluded after reading that he had been ultimately unsuccessful in examining his own privilege… He doesn’t know what it feels like to be judged by his race.” In an ideal world, Payton and Fortgang would have a chat about how they both get offended when people prejudge them, and how they view race and class and equality.

We’re not in an ideal world, of course; we’re in the news cycle. In the above video, when Greta Van Susteren asks Fortgang what “check your privilege” meant, he replies, “I don’t think the people who are saying ‘check your privilege’ really know what it means.”

That’s a bad way to start a dialouge, but it's how you talk when you’re inhabiting the world of cable news—you claim your ideological opponents don’t understand the words they use, you scoff and gloat your way through two-minute segments until everyone who agrees with you is convinced you’ve won the argument. These “debates” are all empty calories, and the people who publicize them move on to the next thing as soon as they possibly can, because there’s a cycle to feed with anger and elation. Current candidates for outrage include a black teacher suing a school after being mocked for her race, a Republican senate candidate who once worked as a drag queen, and a California school that asked students to write papers about whether the Holocaust actually happened. That’s a lot of privilege to be checked!

The cycle will soon return Fortgang to Princeton, where he and his Weltanschauung will no doubt continue to irritate his peers and where he'll continue to write things that will one day make him cringe as he looks back on them. Hopefully now that he’s no longer on television he’ll be able to learn something.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

When the above video (start at 5:00)—featuring a Canadian passport set ablaze by a bearded, four-eyed jihadist who, at first sight, looks like your average college classmate—was uploaded to YouTube in April, Canadian media had a field day, with only some dismissing the threat as theatre.

In the video, the young man who identifies himself as Abu Turab—not likely his real name—threatens not only the United States, but The Old True North as well, before burning his passport a symbol of abandoning his former identity and embracing Islamic extremism. “This is a message to Canada and all the American tawagheet [false idols]. We are coming and we will destroy you, with permission from Allah the Almighty…”

Over the years, extremists groups and terrorist organizations have mastered the art of psychological operations—DVDs of suicide bombings and attacks edited to appear devastatingly successful have been available at bazaars in Kandahar and hundreds of those videos can also be found online, notably though their own social network accounts. The Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL) is among them, active in Syria and one of the groups in which Canadian jihadists join their quest for martyrdom.

Are those propaganda messages hollow threats, or should Canadian authorities gear up and get ready to thwart eventual attacks? Are security agencies well-prepared? What would be the proper response?

I asked former Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) senior officer and counter-terrorism expert Michel Juneau-Katsuya if we should be concerned about the recent extremists' threats to Canada and why he believes that our "front door has four massive locks, but we let the back door open."

VICE: Jihadists have threatened Canada numerous times in the past few years, but never in the context of the war in Syria. Why is Canada now on Syrian extremists’ hit-list?
Michel Juneau-Katsuya: It’s particularly interesting. They likely target Canada not necessarily because the country has engaged in direct action against them in Syria, but rather because they either come from Canada or know about it. Overall, it’s nothing new. Terrorists have threatened to carry on attacks in Canada ever since we became part of the international coalition in the War on Terror.

There are numerous reports of those extremists combatants coming back to Canada with a vast array of fighting experience, high-level training and new tactics. What kind of actions are they most likely to carry on?
Mostly bombings. We can expect them to strike in areas where we are the weakest and where security isn’t prepared to respond—open-area events, sporting events, public transit systems. These are all “opportunity targets” which are usually favoured by terrorists, the best recent example being last year’s edition of the Boston Marathon. That kind of public, open-area event is highly vulnerable to such attacks.

Intelligence sources estimate that approximately 80 extremists from Syria might have already made their way back to Canada. Is that number accurate?
It might be more around 100, but it would be unreasonable not to count all the fighters also coming back from Afghanistan and Maghreb countries—that makes their numbers escalate. And more of them are expected to come back to Canada to try and bring their war over here. They do present a clear and present danger to Canada and its citizens, which implies that the Canadian government is expected to deploy its best and biggest investigative assets to thwart the threat.

Those numbers suggest they would not be likely to carry on suicide bombings. Are they expected to try to recruit and train fighters on Canadian soil?
It already happened. Last year, four young men were recruited in London, Ontario. Others tried to carry out attacks in Victoria, British Columbia. A few years ago, 17 young men were arrested in Toronto with weapons-grade fertilizer. Canada is already on the map and there have been terrorist activity for quite a while now and there are several trials currently ongoing. So far, no attack has been successful, but we have been lucky.

­­

There have been temporary installations in remote, isolated areas, which were used as terrorist training facilities, but no permanent camp has been established so far because it would be easily traceable.

Canada’s military counter-terrorism units such as Joint Task Force 2 are unarguably top-level, but their mandate is mainly international, not domestic. Are civilian authorities ready to respond?
Domestic counter-terrorism is an intelligence and law enforcement issue. In Canada, CSIS is tasked with gathering and analyzing information, then turns it over to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police who carries out interventions when necessary.

Arresting and dismantling terror cells is one great achievement, but that only takes care of the symptom and not the cause. It’s about time governments, including Canada, start addressing political and economic issues fueling terrorism.

Photo courtesy of Hillsong NYC

It’s a Sunday afternoon at Hillsong NYC, and the crowd inside Irving Plaza is ready for the Word. The ballroom is packed, as it is for most of Hillsong’s Sunday services, with people hanging over the balcony and crowded near the stage. But Hillsong and its congregation don’t fit easy stereotypes of Evangelical megachurches. The people worshiping this afternoon are young, beautiful, and tattooed—a multiethnic cross-section of downtown cool. Bearded 20-somethings dance in the aisles. An 11-piece band warms up the congregation with a thumping born-again anthem infused with hip-hop and electronic dance beats. Long-haired girls in ripped jeans sing along, closing their eyes and lifting their palms to welcome the Holy Spirit and raise the roof to Jesus. No one looks over 35.

“What we need to understand today is that God has given us much in this city—you have more than you think you do,” says Carl Lentz, Hillsong’s tattooed celebrity pastor, stepping into the blue-silver glow of an enormous disco ball. Today’s sermon is a riff on the parable of the faithful servant, from the Gospel of Luke, in which Jesus tells his disciples that “to whomever much is given, of him much will be required.”

Moving restlessly around the stage in his Sunday best—a Kevin Durant tank, tight black skinny jeans, and YSL boots—Lentz shifts seamlessly from the Bible to self-deprecating personal anecdotes, combining feverish Evangelical populism with Southern street slang. His message is upbeat and optimistic, peppered with tweetable one-liners like “It’s not about what you do—it’s about what HE did,” “Discouragement will drag you away from your destiny,” and his signature hashtag “Church in the Wild.”

“What if your time was now?” Lentz closes, bellowing in a final crescendo as the music picks up again. “What if your dream season was now? Because the requirement of your life is not to wait to have it all together—it’s to realize that Jesus put it all together today.”

Despite the L-train aesthetic, Hillsong NYC is actually an extension of a much larger Australian megachurch movement and multimedia conglomerate by the same name. Globally, the Hillsong brand is best known for its youthful congregations, stadium concert tours, and chart-topping Christian worship songs that are used by contemporary Evangelical churches worldwide. The church, which took in more than $58 million in revenue in 2012, has satellites in 11 countries, and plans to open another branch in Los Angeles this year.

With his magnetic charisma and supernatural swagger, Lentz is the face of Hillsong’s first push into US church-planting, and the driving force behind the church’s explosive growth. Just three years after its launch, Hillsong NYC is the city’s fastest-growing megachurch, a Pentecostal powerhouse that draws about 6,000 attendees to its six services on Sundays and recently added an additional service in Montclair, New Jersey. Hillsong outgrew the Irving Plaza location this spring and now hosts bigger services at Manhattan Center in Midtown. This past Sunday, a visiting sermon from Hillsong Global’s senior pastor, Brian Houston, drew such a big crowd that the service was temporarily moved to the Best Buy Theater in Times Square to accommodate the flock. “I think we’re here for the long haul,” Lentz told me. “When people see what’s happening here, they just shake their heads and go, 'This is crazy.'”

Photo courtesy of Hillsong NYC

A 35-year-old Virginia Beach native, Lentz has cultivated an unorthodox brand of Christian cool, which he shares both onstage and online through social media. He has 98,000 followers on Instagram and almost as many on Twitter. Those impressive numbers have no doubt been boosted by a growing cadre of celebrity fans that includes Spring Breakers star Vanessa Hudgens and Ja Rule. Justin Bieber, who tweeted last fall that he “broke down” during one of Lentz’s Hillsong sermons, reportedly spent the Saturday before the Super Bowl searching for a pool where he could be baptized by Lentz (he was unsuccessful, according to the New York Post). On the day I interviewed him, Lentz had just finished a meeting with Hugh Jackman, and was getting ready for a trip to Oklahoma City to visit NBA MVP Kevin Durant, a good friend whom Lentz baptized in the pool at the Gansevoort Hotel last year.

“New York has famous people in it,” Lentz said, shrugging off his new proximity to stardom. “We knew what we were getting into. We just believe that our church would be a home to everybody. The faceless and the famous.”

Still, Lentz’s branding savvy—and his celebrity endorsements—help explain why Hillsong continues to attract a growing number of young New Yorkers, even as national studies suggest young people are leaving the church in a mass exodus. According to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Forum in 2012, one third of Americans under age 30 do not identify with any religion. Among Christians, the numbers are even more stark: A report released last year from the Barna Group, an Evangelical research firm, found that 43 percent of once-active Christian millennials have stopped attending church, and 50 percent say they have been frustrated by their faith.

While other Evangelical leaders bemoan the “unchurched generation” and try to lure twentysomethings back into the fold with multimedia gimmicks and coffee houses, Hillsong appears to have struck a chord. Although the church doesn’t keep statistics on member demographics, Lentz estimates that most of his parishioners are in their 20s and 30s. “We didn't come in here to try to be a New York church or try to be cool,” Lentz told me. “We're just being who we are, staying in our lane. I think authenticity is so void in New York, so if you can just be yourself, people relate to that. Any time a church tries to be something, I think they lose the battle before they even start.”

Photo courtesy of Hillsong NYC

Hillsong NYC isn’t the first New York City church that's tried to reach a younger, hipper crowd. Once considered a graveyard for church-planting, in recent years the city has become a hub of startup churches aimed at disrupting traditional religious models. “We’ve seen a number of different congregations throughout the city sprout up around the idea of just doing church in a different way,” said Melissa Kimiadi, deputy director of the research project Journey Through NYC Religions. “Younger generations in New York City aren’t as closed off to religion as their parents were, so they are more open to different types of belief and worship.”

Treating the city as its personal mission field, Trinity Grace Church has opened five branches across the city since 2006. Q Ideas, a TED-style conference for postmodern Evangelical leaders, recently relocated from Atlanta to the Upper East Side. In Brooklyn, St. Lydia’s Dinner Church conducts services over a communally prepared meal, and North Brooklyn Vineyard Church meets at a place called Trash Bar in Williamsburg. Bushwick Abbey, the borough’s newest spiritual offering, recently began Sunday services at Radio, a new bar on Jefferson Avenue, conducted by Rev. Kerlin Richter, an ordained Episcopal priest with a blue fauxhawk who describes herself as a “feminist mama madly in love with Jesus.”

“As much as I love the church, I’ve never felt like there was a church that I could invite my friends to,” says Richter. “We’ve had a hard time reaching people where they are in their day-to-day, busy lives. Our church is not that different in terms of the liturgy and what the service is about, but it’s by and for people who have not had access to churches before.”

Even among this most recent crop of New York churches, Hillsong NYC stands apart, both for its young congregation and its rock-concert worship. “Hillsong is Hillsong—they’re totally doing their own thing,” said Kerrick Thomas, who pastors at the Journey, a contemporary Evangelical church that meets at the Hotel Pennsylvania in Manhattan. “They are a completely different animal than almost any other church in the world.”

Theologically, Hillsong is an Evangelical movement of the Pentecostal persuasion, which means they believe in baptism by dunking and gifts from the Holy Spirit, including speaking in tongues. In Australia, the church’s leaders have faced a barrage of criticism for their conservative worldview, including their positions on abortion and homosexuality. In our interview, Lentz told me that gay people are welcome at Hillsong NYC, but declines to discuss his views on gay marriage. "I don't talk about it from the pulpit, because I don't want to add to the polarization,” he says. “We adhere to a policy of love, but we also don’t negate the truth.”

In his sermons, Lentz avoids the moral hectoring and uglier Christian talking points that have turned so many 20- and 30-year-olds off of modern faith. Instead of discussing parts of the Bible that offend rational people, he presents a sunnier Evangelical endgame, emphasizing themes like love, acceptance, and total surrender to God's grace. It's a simple, PR-friendly message, seemingly designed to be as unoffensive as possible. But behind the scenes, Lentz's personal views are still something of a mystery. "If someone were to come to me and say, 'Carl, what do you think about gay marriage, or homosexuality?' the first thing I would say is, 'Are you a member of our church?' And if they were, I would say, 'Before I tell you what I think, what do you think?' What's their background, what's their story? And then we would have a private conversation."

"Our generation ran from church because it was about what you can't do," he said. "If you go to church and all they talk about is sin, then they aren't talking about the whole Gospel. Jesus said to go give the Good News, and that's what we're doing." In that way, Hillsong is a lot like the BuzzFeed of Christianity.

Lentz sees his church, and its don't-ask-don't-tell mentality, as a rebellion from mainstream religion—one that embraces, rather than rejects, secular life. "The heart of that message is, wherever you are living, whatever you do for a living, it's valid. Who you are is not defined by what you do. That's new in New York, because we love to put that label on people."

I am a resident of Phoenix, Arizona.

If you count all the surrounding districts, more than 4.1 million people crowd into this sprawling, suburbanite wasteland, yet no one really likes it here. We really try, but every boring list we dominate (we’re safe drivers, apparently, and we’re a top city for “entry-level jobs.” Whoopee) and every whine for relevance smacks of some deep, inner denial. 

This metropolis is squatted in subtropical desert. It shouldn’t even exist. It’s spitting in God’s face. Yet rather than owning our survival prowess like some badass Road Warrior tribe, we’ve allowed ourselves to become complacent, as vapid as the arid air around us, too numbed up on prescription narcotics and reality TV to reach self-actualization. There’s also a negative side.

Here are a few reasons why Phoenix sucks:

Everything Is Beige

Like a giant, concrete version of The Thing, Phoenix is a bloated tangle of tasteless architecture that never seems to stop ballooning outward. 

The one thing you’ll notice is everything looks exactly the same. It’s an ever-replicating mirage of beige skies, beige walls, beige houses, beige cars, beige people. Sometimes you’ll see a flash of color, but it won’t last long before the local HOA stamps it out like a cigarette butt. 

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Shopping Malls And Movie Theaters Are Cultural Landmarks

Forget that Phoenix nightlife is so barren you can stagger downtown at 11 PM and find everything empty. “Snowbirds” (rich, white morons from Canada and Michigan who visit during the two weeks of winter) only come here for the fucking malls anyway. Chandler Fashion Center, Desert Ridge Marketplace, Tempe Marketplace, Scottsdale Fashion Square—they all have the exact same names, the exact same stores, and the exact same idiots who wear sunglasses indoors.

Screencap via Pitchfork

Politics Takes Precedence Over Culture

When Arizona SB 1070 passed, allowing cops to demand proof of residency based on “suspicion” of immigrating illegally (read: having brownish skin), there was a national uproar. A laundry list of musicians, including Rage Against the Machine, Sonic Youth, Conor Oberst, and Kanye West refused to tour here for a few years.

But that was a while back and that’s all over now, right? Not really. Earlier this year, the local government threatened to pass SB 1062, a sort of anti-gay bill that nobody really understood, probably because it was written in crayon by stoned squirrels. The fallout was extremely similar to SB 1070, and our governor vetoed the bill only after the NFL threatened to take the Super Bowl elsewhere.

Even now, when you look at most band’s tour dates (which I do quite often), it’s something along the lines of LA, Boulder, Houston or Austin, Albuquerque, and San Diego. Phoenix is still often skipped over, and the general public’s perception of Phoenix as a bunch of racist, gun-toting, fag haters hasn’t helped.

The Local Government Pisses All Over the Public Like Drunken Apes

Really, this is true wherever you go, but it’s extremely blatant in the Valley of the Spun. Every six months or so, in a greed-driven mentality still wrought from the days of Manifest Destiny, our legislature pens some Orwellian bill that clearly aims to rip off or jail anyone who isn’t rich or white.

Even if independent voters make up the biggest bloc in the state, their input is drowned out by constant bickering between useless Democrats and violent Republicans invested in the drug war. In rare instances when the public does have its meek voice heard, as in the case of medical marijuana, the state is quick to turn around and sue over it. The dumbasses we call “leaders” constantly lose these fruitless court battles, but in the process, millions of tax dollars are wiped up with shit and flushed down the john.

Our state's governor, Ms. Jan Brewer, grins like a sad, melted puppet whenever she tries to feign solidarity with the public, but it’s clear that she and her best bud, civil rights abuser Sheriff Joe Arpaio, are more interested in keeping local prisons full of nonviolent offenders. Makes sense that Brewer is making boatloads of money through her connections in the incarceration industry. Legalizing pot or allowing immigrants to coexist would cut into profits! Keep that drug-war money rolling in!

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Sheriff Joe Arpaio

Speaking of Joe Arpaio, the civil-rights-abusing sheriff has been elected six fucking times.

This is a man who claims Obama’s birth certificate is forged, has his critics arrested in the middle of the night on trumped-up charges, and has been accused literally dozens of times for abusing inmates, many of whom were beaten to death or had their necks broken, all while failing to investigate hundreds of sexual abuse cases.

Then, “America’s Toughest Sheriff” treats his inmates like his personal court jesters, emasculating them with pink underwear as he watches them sweat in his “Tent City”—a jail made of Korean War-era tents that reaches temperatures of 150 degrees in summer. And all of Joe’s stupidity and callous disregard for justice has cost the city more than $50 million so far.

Also, Arpaio might run for governor. So we have that to look forward to.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Everything About Westgate

A shantytown of bars for freshly divorced Glendale dipsticks, Westgate City Center also houses stadiums for our sucktacular sports teams. The only use this whole area ever served was the time we hosted the Super Bowl. But despite bringing in a record-breaking $500 million to the local economy, the city actually ended up $2 million in the hole on that one. Cool.

Phoenix from the air via Google Maps

No One Is From Here 

Phoenix natives are rare as vegan sharks. As a result, everyone acts like a permanent tourist with a distinct lack of generational identity. Instead, everyone whines about how much better it is in California or Illinois or where-the-fuck-ever.

A photo of Phoenix in the summertime. Via YouTube

The Environment Is Actively Trying To Kill You

Phoenix summers start in April and don’t end until October. The first three months are bearable, so we collectively laugh, asking ourselves why we complained so much about the heat last year. Sure, it was 109 degrees the other day, but we have our air conditioning and our TVs and we’ll survive, even if the electric bills average $400 per month. “It’s a dry heat,” we mutter through our blistered, sunburned lips, blandly reminding ourselves of our trademarked postcard platitude.

But then mid July rolls around. The monsoon season is lackluster, as usual, and does nothing to combat our “urban heat island,” which cooks the asphalt like a pierogi, blasting scorching waves back out at night. Now, even after sunset, the heat won’t escape, and suddenly it’s 105 degrees at 1 AM. This is worse than humidity, because at least humidity cools down in the evening. The heat is in your clothes. It’s in your hair. You feel your dreams evaporating as you sleep. Even swimming or air conditioning provides only brief relief from the perpetual sauna before you’re glossed in sweat again. And you have another two months of this to look forward to.

Plus, the entire urban void is surrounded by an ecosystem of death. If the sun’s UV rays don’t smite you, the scorpions, Gila monsters (the only venomous lizard in the entire US), rattlesnakes, mountain lions, bobcats, javelinas (murderous warthog things known to attack humans), tarantulas, and other deadly spiders sure as fuck will try. If that weren’t enough, we’re all doomed because…

Phoenix Is (Supposedly) The Least Sustainable City Ever

Phoenix imports almost everything—food, gas, and especially water. Depends on whom you ask, but it doesn’t look like that equation is gonna work too well for us in the long run. We often experience record highs of 120 degrees or more, but climate change could make those temperatures even more common, topping 100 degrees from April to January. These heat waves mainly affect the poor, mostly killing homeless people, so it’s not something most people worry about. Yet.

Plus, the state is in perpetual drought and all that water we trickle in from the Colorado River, the Salt River reservoir system, and underground wells, continues to dry up. Eventually this place could resemble a ghost town like Tombstone. Some claim these scenarios are exaggerated, so maybe we’ll survive. Fear or denial, pick your poison. It’s all we got here.

Follow Troy Farah on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Craig Dietrich

For the entirety of the eight decades Donald Sterling has been alive, he has been, logic would dictate, an atrocious human being. Sterling, however, isn’t the only piece of shit on the planet. Nor is he the first person in the public eye to have been caught expressing himself in an unsavory manner. By all intents and purposes, he is your industry standard old, white, capitalistic owner of the proverbial company store. There’s one thing that differentiates him from his comparably crapulent kin, though: he’s actually being punished for his antiquated attitude.

With a seemingly endless list of famous folks who have gotten away with essentially (and in some instances, literally) murder, the vast majority of whom have never been penalized in any profound manner, the fact that Sterling’s recent racist remarks elicited a lifetime ban from the NBA appears to be unprecedented. Which begs the question, why him? And why now?

The internet, in its infinite wisdom and indignation, has presented us with the following facts, which we’ve heard a million times at this point: a few months ago, the Los Angeles Clippers owner made a handful of racist, soundbite-friendly comments to his personal assistant and alleged mistress, a woman with the tabloid-friendly and self-appointed moniker of V. Stiviano. Once an undisclosed source leaked said statements to TMZ, they instigated a veritable shitstorm of consequences, up to and including Sterling’s aforementioned ban from the NBA. Sterling can no longer attend games played by the team he, in spite of it all, still owns.

This isn’t Sterling’s first taste of racially tinged controversy. In 2009, he settled a housing discrimination lawsuit with the Department of Justice for $2.765 million, the largest such settlement of its time. In court documents, Sterling was quoted as saying he didn’t want to rent units to black people because he felt they “smell and attract vermin.” This was not his first suit of this nature­­—over the years, he has paid out millions on similar cases. I guess the fact that he doesn’t want black people attending his basketball games somehow carries more weight than the fact that he doesn’t want them living in his apartment buildings? That must be the case—otherwise the NBA would have kicked him out of the league for being a bigot sooner, right?

We’ve known about Sterling’s prejudiced beliefs for years, but looking up court documents and pulling out choice quotes like “Just evict the bitch” (which he said, incidentally, about a legally blind elderly African-American woman who wanted to be reimbursed for water damage sustained after her Sterling-owned apartment flooded) is harder than turning on TMZ and hearing a salacious soundbite played over an unflattering photo of the man alongside his beautiful, no doubt long-suffering assistant. When it came to managing his real estate empire, Sterling focused his prejudice on old black women and Section 8 holders. He was allowed, apparently, to hate them, but once he focused his vitriol on Magic Johnson, well, then, we had a problem. In order to give a shit, we needed a soundbite, not to mention a victim we cared about.

Pot shots about professional sports stars, apparently, is where we as a culture draw the line—where someone’s actions can result in demonstrable consequences which prohibit them from continuing to keep on keepin’ on despite their incendiary indiscretions. But out of all the awful guys who have said and done awful things, why is Donald Sterling the only one we've chosen to make an example of?

Photo via Flickr user Shaun Merritt

After all, Mel Gibson, a man whose ex also shared damming voicemails out of spite, voicemails in which he referred to Latinos as “wetbacks” and hoped she’d “get raped by a pack of niggers,” wasn’t barred from making movies because of his offensive remarks. (In fairness, his career has reached a standstill since, but not due to an overt embargo.) A leaked recording of Toronto mayor Rob Ford drunkenly ranting about “fags” and “dagos” hit the presses two goddamned weeks ago and he's still running for reelection, albeit while taking a much-needed break to dry out. No one, however, is banning him from running for political office, although the powers-that-be arguably should.

In July of last year, Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver Riley Cooper was caught violently yelling the n-word, on camera, at a Kenny Chesney concert. Less than a year later he, signed a five-year, $25 million deal with the team. Why wasn’t he banned from the NFL? Is it because he’s good at throwing the ol’ pigskin around? Or is it because he called a stranger, not a fellow teammate, the n-word?

Photo via Flickr user Keith Allison

Is the fact that Sterling looks like the sort of guy who would make racist comments why we’re so comfortable with causing him discomfort? Or is it the celebrity of the subject he spat his vitriol at? Dan Snyder, owner of the Washington Redskins, refuses to change the name of his team, in spite of the fact that it’s grossly offensive to Native Americans. No one’s banning him from owning a team with a racist name, though. Maybe because Native Americans don’t have enough political pull to force the NFL into acting ethically.

I'm not saying we should all band together and pity Sterling—at least, not any more than one can pity a racist, billionaire slumlord. Nor am I saying that he shouldn’t be banned from the NBA. The argument could, and should, be made that a line needs to be drawn into the sand; that we as a culture should no longer allow men like Sterling to desecrate professional sports, and our country as a whole, with their bigotry. I have no problem with shaming him. I only ask why he’s the one we’ve chosen to shame. And why we didn’t do it sooner, and why we don’t do it more often. Because we can hem, and we can haw, and we can sit on our high horses. But the horses have been sitting in the stable for years, waiting for us to mount them. We’re just, it seems, too chicken-shit to ride them.

Follow Megan Koester on Twitter.

As the Ukrainian military launches an offensive on the rebel-held town of Sloviansk, members of the self-proclaimed state of Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) are continuing a campaign of government building takeovers.

On Sunday, DPR protesters were able to take the military prosecutor's office and a local council building. VICE News followed the group as members burned the Ukrainian flag and arrested a suspected provocateur. The man was seen being bundled into a car while covered in blood, his destination unknown.

DPR protesters headed to a government debt collection office on Monday and delivered an ultimatum to freeze the discovery of listed debts by PrivatBank—Ukraine's largest bank—in Donetsk. The bank has stopped operating in the Donetsk region, citing alleged intimidation of its staff. This has led to long lines outside branches as people desperately try to withdraw money.

When approached by the protesters, the manager of the office very calmly said he would get back to them in the next few days—at which point the men, some with guns, withdrew.