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The Jellyfish That Holds a Key to Immortality

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By reversing its aging process when it gets sick or injured, Japan's tiny Turritopsis dohrnii jellyfish is one of the only known animals that has figured out how to defeat death. Motherboard paid a visit to Japan to visit a researcher who is studying the microscopic animal to see if humans can eventually do the same.


The Australian Golden Dawn's Rally in Brisbane Was an Embarrassing Failure

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Golden Dawn supporters protesting in Brisbane. All photos by Pak Yiu

I had never heard of the Australia First Party until they held a rally in support of Greek neo-Nazis Golden Dawn in Brisbane last Friday, so if their goal was to get my attention they succeeded, I guess. By any other metric the event was a complete failure: Only about ten supporters of the party, which has about 500 members, showed up to rally outside of South Brisbane's Greek Club (they had documentarian John Safran was in tow, for whatever reason).

The plan was to march across the city to picket the offices of the consul general of Greece, but that idea was scuttled by a counter-rally comprised of the typical left-wing mix of socialists, students, anti-fascists, and about 150 or so union members, all of whom were eager to shout down the "nazi scum."

Unimpressed counter-protesters mock the rally from across the street.

So on one side of the street was a rather forlorn looking contingent of Golden Dawn sympathizers plus John Safran and on the other was a sea of beards and dreadlocks, with police in the middle.

Outnumbered and faced with very vocal opposition, the Golden Dawn opted to take a cab (since there werent't that many of them, after all) to their destination rather than going to all the trouble of marching across town.

There were a few minor verbal skirmishes as the protesters departed, but the police were fairly proactive in keeping the two groups apart.

Counter-protestor Mitchel Rodwell, who followed the fascists on foot to the offices of the consul general said that "Pretty much as soon as [the counter-protesters] arrived we scared them off. There were a good 200 people shouting 'Nazi scum, off our streets!'”

OK so this was a pretty silly and disorganized event that mostly served to annoy police. But Andy Flemming, a longtime anti-fascist activist, told me "a successful rally in Australia, in Brisbane, would send a message to Golden Dawn in Greece that they have support elsewhere" and that it would "help legitimize Golden Dawn's presence in Greek politics."

That obviously did not happen. But what about Australian politics? Is the Austrailia First Party going to become a force to be reckoned with?

In a word, no. The party has had a limited, almost laughable, electoral impact. In the 2013 federal election it won 7,412 first preference votes or 0.06 percent of the total. One of its candidates, Maurice Girotto, managed to win a local council seat in Sydney, where most of the Australia Firsters are, but he quit the party a year after being elected.

Though the party is a pathetic failure, its leader, Jim Saleam, certainly has some sinister credentials: In 1991 he was sentenced to prison for helping to organize a 1989 attack on the home of African National Congress representative and anti-apartheid campaigner Eddie Funde.

The Australia First Party's Aaron Heaps addresses the rally.

Aaron Heaps from the party's Queensland branch concedes the group faces an uphill battle in terms of electoral success, and for that he blames the two major parties.

"They will censor us as much as possible,” he said. "The two parties ganged up to bring down [defunct nationalist party] One Nation—it's the tall poppy syndrome."

The party has a predictably anti-multiculturalism and anti-immigration platform, and the racist notions that underpin their policies are pretty much par for the course. According to Heaps, being Australian means being of European heritage. “We are a European people mostly,” he said. “Our people that have come to Australia out of Europe, that’s who we are.”

He doesn't think of himself or his party as racist, just made up of proud white people of European heritage who want to stop non-European people from coming to Australia.

"We like immigration from Europe, America, or those other countries with a shared cultural heritage because they're like us. The Chinese say we are proud to be Chinese, people go 'fantastic,' [but] if we say we are proud to be white Europeans people say you’re a racist.”

The Australia First Party gets support from StormFront, the openly racist site that has been dubbed the murder capital of the internet, and the Islamophobic Australian Defence League. Heaps has no objection to this sort of support as long as everyone works towards a “united patriotic front.”

So what is an Australian nationalist party doing supporting a Greek political party? Heaps said there's a degree of solidarity between the Australia First Party and Golden Dawn. But Australia First only agreed to support Golden Dawn provided the Greek right wingers don’t try to establish their own political presence in Australia.

“We are not prepared to deal with them coming into Australia and starting their own thing because this is Australia, not Greece,” said Heaps.

Golden Dawn does have support in areas of Melbourne with high concentrations of Greek-Australians, but professor James Arvanitakis, from University of Western Sydney, said that the party isn't viable. Golden Dawn is being largely ignored by the Greek community, just as Australia First is being ignored by everyone else.

That doesn't mean everything is fine in Australian politics. Flemming told me he thinks Australia First has performed so poorly because the two major parties are already tapping into xenophobic sentiment by way of their hard-line policies against refugees. He thinks if Australia First poses any threat it comes from community-based activism, not electoral success. “They have potential to influence things on the street,” he said.

At least, if they don't get shouted down every time they make themselves known.

Follow Lauren Gillen on Twitter.

The Cat Circus Proves Humans Are Obsessed With Watching Cats Do Dumb Shit

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Photos by Maggie West

The Cat Circus is a one-hour stage show where cats romp around across some stools and cat trees draped in velvet and glitter. If the set design resembles ordinary living room furniture, we're told halfway through the show, it's because it is actually the living room furniture of Samantha Martin, the woman who hosts the show, invented the show, trains the cats, and lives with the cats. She gets reliable laughs when she goes the “Can you believe I’m single?” route—though I hope it’s just part of the act because, damn, that’s a lot of cats to take care of by yourself.

I saw the performance on a Sunday afternoon, the second of three performances for the day, in an intimate but full theater in Santa Monica. The crowd was a mix of children, old people, and young couples in jean jackets—surprisingly light on douchebag hipster types chomping at the bit to blog about their experience there (just me, thankfully).

Nobody was there to be "ironic," at least not in the sense that they were making fun of the show. We were there because we all share a mutual interest in cats humiliating themselves for our enjoyment.

The lights dimmed and the music—"Everybody Wants to Be a Cat," from The Aristocats —swelled. When the lights came back on, our star cat left his carrier cage to reluctantly ride a skateboard down a ramp to center stage, and after some pleading, he clawed at a rope that raised a sign: "Welcome to the Show."

The cat-circus brand is a touring show that has been around for years. It seems to do pretty well. How could this be, I wondered? As the circus progressed, it seemed like a clear outline of every reason why kitschy cats have become such a popular enterprise. 

Cats are assholes.

One of the joys of seeing cats doing stupid things is that it openly mocks how cats want to be seen.

Cats strut arrogantly, displaying their superiority by rejecting most of your ideas on what they should or should not do, but they're also powerless puffballs. They're like old British men, and it’s satisfying to see them get pied in the face.  

The star cat is named Tuna, and he is a big-time diva. The only contribution Tuna makes to the show is pressing his bell, but his attitude is what makes him a star, and that’s why he’s on all of the merchandise. Throughout the show, I find myself alternating between loving Tuna and hating Tuna but never denying that Tuna is one magnetic cat.

Cats are cute.

Duh, a huge part of the fun of seeing a cat do anything is that they’re cute as shit. The eyes, the ears, the fur, the little paws—c’mon! They’re hot little fuckers, and they know it.

There were a few non-cats within the show. A chicken named Cluck Norris competed with Tuna to see who could ring their bell more. On this day, it was the chicken. Tuna gave up after the audience cheered more for the chicken, which I think was honestly only because they liked the name “Cluck Norris,” which was pretty lame. Being a master showman, Tuna started ringing his bell again only after the contest had been called for Cluck, which was one of the funniest middle fingers I’ve seen from a cat in awhile. “Oh sorry, did I not play your stupid fucking game the way you wanted me to, you cocks?”

There was also a groundhog that came out at the beginning of the show. They’re fun animals too, but they’re no cats. You wouldn’t have this be a chicken and groundhog circus, just like you wouldn’t have a Destiny’s Child stocked with only Kelly and Michelle.

Photo by the author 

Cats have stupid faces.

Cats are such dorks. They’re arrogant, they’re soft and cuddly, and they have the dumbest faces. Cats tend to have one of two faces: They either look pissed off, or they look completely empty mentally. Our most famous cats, Grumpy Cat and Lil Bub, are perfect examples of this.

Tuna is a cat that walks the line of both: He’s equal measures unamused and confused. His face looks funny blown up on the cardboard cutout, and anytime a trick doesn’t work out, Martin points to it as if to be like, “They’re cats—what can you expect from them?” and it’s good for laughs every time.

Creatures with dumb or empty faces tend to accessorize well, like George Bush in his cowboy hats, and it was pleasing when some of the aristo-cats wore hats. A cat in a hat is never unappreciated (almost never). 

Cats are too cool for school.

Throughout the show, cats wander freely between the stage and the audience. They make their way around getting pet by everyone. It’s cool because there’s ample opportunity to pet cats, but it’s also fun because it is a demonstration that cats plainly do not give a fuck about anything except what they want.

Cats aren’t afraid to cause bidding wars for their attention. Winning the cat over to me instead of the people sitting nearby wasn’t easy, and I’m not proud of some of my tactics (there was a little finger snapping and saying, "Here, kitty” thrown in there), but I was compelled to do it because cats also reward you with being very soft, and they purr.

Can we talk about how pleasing a purr is for a moment? A lady’s climax and a baby’s laughter are the only things that are even in the same conversation, and that’s being a bit considerate, frankly. It’s why we put up with a lot of cats' bullshit, because it is one of the greatest rewards available in everyday life.

The sound that the show ended with was kind of like the equivalent of purring for cat humiliation: It ended with a cat band. The Rock Cats are a five-piece—guitar, keyboard, drums, chimes, and Tuna on cowbell—and their sound is best described as “fuck you.” It was probably the most punk thing a band has done in 20 years. People will be saying years from now, “Man, the Rock Cats had fuckin’ balls, man. They didn’t give a fuck about the audience. Shame they all got too addicted to cat-nip to record another album.”

Hard to believe you just read a full think piece about why cats are fun to mock? You can catch the Cat Circus for yourself—its next stops are San Francisco and Denver. 

Follow Grant Pardee on Twitter.

Ontario Community Groups Are Still Fighting Suncor Over Wind Turbines

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Photo via Creative Commons
While the controversy swirling around wind turbines in Ontario may be a ticking time-bomb in the just-begun election campaign, Toronto human-rights lawyer Julian Falconer may have lit the fuse Monday night at a meeting organized by a Plympton-Wyoming community group near Sarnia. 

Speaking to around 400 people in a community hall, Falconer challenged all three political parties to declare a moratorium on turbine construction until a comprehensive study is completed by the federal health ministry. “None of these parties has done the right thing. A courageous, responsible political leader, would put a halt to any more turbine construction, until the Health Canada study is completed,” he told the approving crowd.  

Falconer was asked to the meeting by the organizers of a local group fighting plans by energy company Suncor to build 46 wind turbines in their area. The group has convinced their local council to fight Suncor by demanding turbines be placed at least 2 kilometers apart, as opposed to only 550 meters as decreed by Ontario’s Green Energy Act. Suncor took the municipality to court last winter to stop the by-law, claiming the provincial legislation trumps local by-laws A decision is expected soon, the local mayor told the meeting.

Since the Green Energy Act came into force in 2009, wind developments have sprouted around southern Ontario, and local opposition groups have been fighting them tooth and nail. The Act, meant to promote the growth of alternative energy sources, has created a political backlash which has been credited with partially reducing the governing Liberal party to minority status in 2012. With more than 50 citizen action groups across the province listed on the website of Ontario Wind Resistance, an umbrella organization for wind opponents, the protesters are stepping up for an even bigger fight as a new election gets underway. 

Challenging that law on behalf of wind power opponents, even as far as the Supreme Court of Canada, is Falconer’s goal. “It may be ‘a novel argument' to use the Charter of Rights and Freedoms for this purpose, but if people don’t challenge the Liberal government in court, “these turbines will be everywhere,” he told the audience.  Section 7 of the Charter protects Canadians’ rights to security of the person, and “the courts have recognized that health issues can be one means of being protected,” Falconer told VICE in an interview after his speech.



Julian Falconer in the crowd. Photo via the author
To effectively challenge turbine construction in Ontario, one has to prove turbines will cause “serious harm to human health,” according to Falconer. Building turbines without clear understanding of health effects is like the government saying, ”if you want to avoid swallowing this pill we’re giving you, you have to prove it won’t kill you,” he said.  He hopes to continue building support for the Charter challenge by appealing to other anti-wind groups across the province to join in the coming months.

 Wayne Couture, living just south of Kincardine, along Lake Huron, told the audience he has been forced to leave his home every day for a year by the effects of living near turbines: dizziness and ringing in his ears.  “You have to shut them (turbines) down. You are the guinea pigs,” he warned the group.

Health effects are at the heart of opposition to wind turbines, believes Carman Krough, co-author of a recent article in the Canadian Journal of Rural Medicine that reviewed previous health effects studies.   The study found that If placed too close to residents, industrial wind turbines can negatively affect the physical, mental and social well-being of people, and that there is sufficient evidence to support the conclusion that noise from turbines is a potential cause of health effects. Formal studies from around the world point to symptoms that repeat, she says; sleep disturbance, feeling of vibrations, tinnitus (ringing in the ears), and  vertigo.                                                                        
These studies, along with the personal stories of individuals, leaves Krogh with “no doubt” the effects are real.  “You don’t pack up and leave your home lightly,” she says.  With a background in “vigilance monitoring” of adverse effects of pharmaceuticals, Krogh found herself applying the same techniques in monitoring people who reported effects from living near turbines, when  she experienced headaches after being near the giant towers, she tells VICE.

The effects on children are especially worrying, Krogh says, as they have not been studied very well.  There is some evidence that conditions in children such as autism, asthma, migraine, or epilepsy can be affected by turbine noise, and that such effects could possibly by irreversible, she told the audience.

There is “credible scientific support” for a link between noise from turbines and health effects, according to a report commissioned by the Ontario Environment Ministry, Krogh claims; the same ministry that is approving wind projects across the province. 

Joining Falconer’s challenge will not come cheaply for the town of Plympton-Wyoming. The group is hoping to raise $300,000 to count themselves in. With a donation of $20,000 from Lambton County Council, and their municipal council already paying legal bills to defend against Suncor, the group is asking the 7,500 residents to dig deep in their own pockets. 

They’re hoping the money will give them a chance to avoid the noise and breeze of the wind turbines, while at the same time, they also hope the election will force politicians to feel the wind down their own necks.   

Seattle's $15 Minimum Wage Plan Is Probably Not Going to Crash Its Economy

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Seattle activists marching in favor of a $15 minimum wage this January. Photo via Flickr user pnwbot

Wherever there are fresh ideas about how to create balance in our dystopian society and reduce inequality, you can be sure trolls will emerge touting the Iron Laws of Economics and warning reformers to back off and accept the world as it is. We saw this with the Occupy Wall Street protests, during which fancy liberals at national media outlets couldn't help but lampoon a bunch of dirty hippies camping out in a park in lower Manhattan.

This truism has been on display over the past week as a series of columns have come out slamming the $15 minimum wage plan currently being considered by officials in Seattle, Washington—which if enacted would make that city arguably the best place to work on the planet. The authors use a few charts and economic studies to make the case that such a massive bump in the city's income floor could have catastrophic effects on its labor market, reducing employment and even speeding the trend toward automatization of fast-food jobs, which we've seen in high-tax locales in Western Europe. (One writer cites the allegedly terrifying specter of making the hiring of workers in Seattle more expensive than it is in France. Oh God, France! The HORROR.)

But before we start writing the obituary for one of America's largest progressive cities, we should keep in mind that the wage boost is being phased in over a period of three to seven years, a fact glossed over by critics but that is in fact the key detail here—a compromise that the most radical advocates of a generous wage increase like socialist City Councilwoman Kshama Sawant have opposed tooth and nail. Far from being the most aggressive proposal out there, the plan actually on track to clear the city council steers a centrist course between upsetting the local economy and keeping businesses happy.

"What is important is the phase-in period rather than the number," said Dean Baker, an economist and founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. "It's fair to say if we were going to make it $15 next year I'd be very worried. But if you make it [that] over 7 years, there's 15 percent inflation or somewhere around there, so in today's dollars a $15 minimum wage would be something in the order of $12.75 [by the time it takes effect]. Right off the bat that sounds less worrisome. You're not going to see firms going out of business because of this."

"It's not really a very radical experiment once you have these long phase-ins," agreed Jared Bernstein, former chief economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden. "The thing about these minimum wage increases is that predictions about their impact have historically been wrong."

So please, let's not start panicking about endtimes for Seattle and its utopian ideals of economic fairness. It's necessary to at least pause and consider research that shows minimum wage hikes can have a modest negative affect on overall employment—specifically among teenagers—but as Slate's $15 wage critic Jordan Weissmann himself points out, that side effect is perfectly acceptable so long as most workers are making out better in the long run. What data is there to suggest that will not be the case for Seattle?

Given the structural problems we have with poverty in this country, a movement in one northwestern city to tilt the conversation to the left on wages strikes me as not just a potentially good thing, but an obviously laudable one that might serve to dramatically shake up the conventional wisdom about how to improve the lot of the poor. After all, members of Congress aren't lifting a finger to hike the federal $7.25 minimum wage, which has been in place since 2009, despite President Obama's call for a meager bump up to $10.10. Seattle has the capacity to upset the status quo, boost the quality of life for workers, and make a lot of economists and political elites look stupid in the process.

Follow Matt Taylor on Twitter.

Why the Netherlands Weed Industry Has Gone Underground

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Why the Netherlands Weed Industry Has Gone Underground

Duplicating Jesse Eisenberg in a Dystopian World

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Duplicating Jesse Eisenberg in a Dystopian World

There's a Plan to Tax You for the Ability to Use Roads

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Image via Flickr user upupa4me

Southern California is hatching a plan to restructure the way all of America pays taxes for using gas, essentially reframing the whole thing as a tax on use of roads rather than gas. A powerful coalition of county governments in the most populous state is pushing for a Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) fee to be imposed across the land by 2025. 

On the face of it, the proposed VMT fee sounds like it’s meant to generate more revenue, be invasive, and make it impossible to hide from taxes by buying a low-mileage vehicle. Essentially, it’s designed to make tea partiers’ heads explode. But maybe there’s enough time in the next 11 years for them to cool off and consider that it might be for the best.

I called Denny Zane of Move LA, a transit-focused nonprofit, for more information. He said a VMT fee is one of many attempts to come up with a way to fund our highways that’s “Both reliable and fair, and increases rather than declines as a revenue stream while the use of the transportation systems increase as population grows. We need revenue streams that can help meet those needs. The VMT fee is better than the gas tax in that respect.”

Together, the six Southern California counties pushing for this make up an entity called the Southern California Association of Governments. Southern California is a car-centric community that spent decades fighting against public transit expansion. There is grave concern here regarding the recent news that the federal Highway Trust Fund is about to be completely drained in July. When that happens, the federal support we count on to keep our crumbling highways and bridges taped together will vanish.

As we see it from our state, we pay the highest taxes in the country for our gas thanks to the cleverly named “excise tax” everyone pays, plus our added 39.5 cent tax. Meanwhile, the rest of America still pays only 18.4 cents a gallon to fund highways at the federal level. That rate has stayed at 18.4 cents for 20 years, and I’m sure Grover Norquist would chain himself to an Arco pump before he would let lawmakers pass a tax hike, or introduce a new sales tax.

But here in "Carland," the existing tax evidently isn’t enough. If Congress can’t figure out a way to inject money into the highway fund from somewhere else, its disappearance means a loss of $46.8 billion for the local highway funds that need it. Mostly us in Carland. We’ll all be crushed to death by falling overpasses. Is that what you want?

Image via Youtube user LukkaVolkov

Meanwhile, not only have the costs of maintaining roads increased with inflation, but some people have switched over to driving hybrids and electric cars. Paying our highway taxes at the gas pump means those who need the highways a lot, but require little or no gas, theoretically aren’t paying their fair share for maintenance. A tax on the number of miles you drive, instead of how much gas you use means Uncle Sam is becoming agnostic about fuel efficiency. 

If there’s one aspect of this trend that might redeem this tax for conservatives, maybe it’s the fact that it will affect all the Tesla drivers currently getting away with murder. But it’s still going to terrorize Glenn Beck for a different reason.

“Most formulations of the VMT fee involve electronic monitoring of vehicle miles traveled, and voters resist any kind of electronic monitoring by government entities, and the NSA fiasco is a good illustration of why,” Zane told me, adding, “It’s become radioactive.”

Denny Zane. Image via Youtube user SmartpillJCD

It’s not clear how this is going to work. Which sounds better: Someone from the government poking their head in and reading your odometer, or a gizmo installed on your car that monitors how much you drive?

All that monitoring is one downside that might mean an old fashioned incremental sales tax could be more tempting than a VMT fee. Another is the anus-clenching moment when you’ll have to suddenly pay the fee every year. “Most likely, the public will pay their share at registration which means one lump sum.” Zane said. “The great advantage of an excise tax or a sales tax is that the public pays a small increment. That’s hugely advantageous for political acceptance.”

So far, all that’s happened is that the Southern California Association of Governments passed a resolution asking Congress to change the gas tax to the VMT fee, plus they’ve made it their agenda to create a pilot program for the fee structure in Southern California. 

It may not happen, but if it does, we here in Carland will experience the carnage first. We’ll let you know how it goes.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter


In Our Google Searches, Researchers See a Post-Snowden Chilling Effect

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In Our Google Searches, Researchers See a Post-Snowden Chilling Effect

How to Ruin Your Band Name

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How to Ruin Your Band Name

No, Navy SEALs Are Not About to Parachute In to Rescue the Kidnapped Nigerian Girls

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No, Navy SEALs Are Not About to Parachute In to Rescue the Kidnapped Nigerian Girls

'Splooshing' Is for Couples Who Love to Play with Their Food

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'Splooshing' Is for Couples Who Love to Play with Their Food

The VICE Reader: Behind the Big Eyes

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Christopher (Coop) Cooper, Walter Keane, and Adam Parfrey in front of Keane’s La Jolla bungalow in 1991. Photo by Scott Lindgren

Editor's note: Adam Parfrey runs perhaps our favorite small press, Feral House Books. If you're interested in pills, black metal, and apocalyptic death cults, they're pretty much your one-stop shop. So when Adam sent us a snippet of his new book, Citizen Keane, we jumped at the opportunity to run an excerpt. The subject is Walter and Margaret Keane, 60s pop artists who caused a weird sensation painting kids with big eyes. They're also the subject of Big Eyes, Tim Burton's new biopic, which will see wide release this Christmas.

Nineteen sixty-five was a year of bug-eyed glory for the former real estate salesman turned pop artist Walter Stanley Keane, who bragged to reporters that he “romped through life with the evident enjoyment of a terrier rolling in a clover patch.” He wasn’t exaggerating. Keane art was seemingly everywhere—from the sales bins at Woolworths to the gilded mansions of Hollywood royalty. As his income surged comfortably into seven figures, Keane decided he would keep things simple. “All that really matters to me,” he explained to an admiring Life magazine reporter, “is painting, drinking (which, the way I look at it, includes eating), and loving.” It seemed like the party was just getting started.

Keane’s fortune was made from a style stunning in its simplicity. Weeping waifs. Tearful children. All bearing hypnotic, saucer-size orbs. It was said that if you looked at them long enough, the distressed children seemed to stare at you, even if you moved about the room. “Let’s face it,” he boasted to Life magazine: “Nobody painted eyes like El Greco, and nobody can paint eyes like Walter Keane.” More discriminating art enthusiasts, critics, and academics didn’t quite agree, finding the paintings formulaic and sickening in their sentimentality. But the rest of America fell in love with Keane’s Big Eyes, and he became a household name.

Meanwhile, lurking in the background, and painting Keanes in a basement studio, was Walter’s long-suffering wife, Margaret, the true artist behind the Big Eyes. But more on that later.

As the Big Eyes grew in popularity throughout the 1960s, dozens of imitators moved to cash in on the Keane style. Big Eye prints sprouted like toadstools; “Gig” painted moony-eyed mongrels and alley cats; “Eden” did corkboard prints of Keane-like waifs dressed as moppets in tattered clothing; “Eve” transformed Keane-like kids into precocious go-go dancers. Even black-velvet iterations of Big Eye kitsch followed in their footsteps.

Walter Keane was quite the operator, a true American type. A “naïf” who seemed to buy into his own sales pitch. Keane hired Tom Wolfe, who used the pseudonym “Eric Schneider,” to write an over-the-top satire that portrayed both Walter and Margaret Keane’s Big Eye kitsch as furthering the work of great masters deserving of great accolades. Keane’s self-inflation later permeated his autobiography, The World of Keane, in which he felt the need to tell readers that in his dreams his grandmother called him a “great master” until he came to understand that, yes, he was deserving of this title.

The gratuitous sentimentality of weepy waifs combined with Keane’s claims of eternal artistic genius make for a particularly American type of salesmanship. Yet Walter Keane’s insistence that he was a rare artistic genius has a desperate quality to it in light of the lawsuits he lost to Margaret Keane concerning the real originator of the Big Eye style. As it turned out, Margaret became a victim of her scoundrel husband, and her despair seemed to actualize in her art in ways the copycat competition failed to achieve.


Early Big Eye art monograph circa 1960

Keane wondered, why sell just a handful of paintings to a few well-heeled collectors? That’s not how real estate moved in new suburban tracts or how TV dinners were sold in supermarkets. Keane thought, why not eliminate the middleman, open a gallery, and sell directly to the public? It wasn’t easy at first. “I never intended to become an artist in the garret existence,” Keane remembered, “but there were lean years when we started.” Paintings went for as little as $20. When money was tight, a picture or sketch was bartered to help pay the bills. “We just about furnished our house by trading canvases for furniture,” Keane later recalled.

Selling paintings was hard work in the early 60s, and Keane’s art enterprise took a few years to get off the ground. Handbills were made, paintings were shown at community art festivals, and some of the earlier works were even hung in a local nightclub. Fortunately for him, Walter had an innate gift for blather that played well with newspapers, magazines, and nightly news programs. Articles about the Keane Gallery began to appear in various Bay Area publications—Oakland Tribune, San Francisco Call Bulletin, Hayward Daily Review, and others. Soon enough, reporters from the major national papers were running profiles of the larger-than-life North Beach artist who painted weeping, saucer-eyed children.

Hardly a week passed without Walter Keane devising a way to get his name and photograph into the newspapers. All he’d have to do was call an old “school chum” at United Press International, and a photographer would hurry to Keane’s home to snap a few pictures of Walter posting in front of a half-completed canvas. Keane had also snagged guest spots on a few television shows like the Jack Paar Show, which helped him gain a few influential celebrity admirers and a direct pipeline into millions of American living rooms. He understood the power of the medium. “We’ve used television more than any other way of getting ourselves known,” Walter explained, “It’s beautiful how many people can be exposed to your work through, say, just one TV show.”

Walter Keane wasn’t your typical brooding artist. He knew how to connect with Cold War conservatives. He wore his windswept light brown hair short, and favored monogrammed shirts. If you saw him on the street, it wouldn’t be hard to mistake him for an insurance salesman on his day off. And Keane had a certain genius when it came to making friends and cultivating business connections.

“We don’t need New York anymore,” he once said. “Our real strength, anyway, is in the interior, in places like Boise. What a reception they gave us when we went to Boise!” If millionaires could buy quality art, why couldn’t kindergarten teachers, housewives, or forklift operators? So Keane mass-marketed waif images like so many coffee mugs. If some art critics called it crass commercialism, he wasn’t going to let them spoil the party. He sold lithographs, miniatures, collectable plates, greeting cards, and wall posters. Big Eye “Little Miss No Name” dolls were mass-marketed, and the only reason they didn’t bear the magic Keane name is that the toy company Hasbro didnt offer Walter enough money.

While Keane originals went for anywhere between $25,000 and $50,000 during the peak years, unframed lithographs were available for $3.50 to $25 for a first edition print. In 1964, Keane grossed $2,000,000 from prints alone. This was popular art in the truest sense of the word, and Walter didn’t just think of himself as an artist. He was introducing millions of people to fine art. “I’ve helped the art world just as Picasso and Modigliani have,” he once bragged. “I’ve made more people aware of paintings, which makes them buy more, just like they go buy more records and books once they’re exposed.”


One of the many weird Big Eye offshoots of Keane art. This one was painted on black velvet and purchased in Tijuana

So why were so many Americans enthralled by Keane paintings? America was a nation in transition when Big Eye art appeared. The GIs were home from the war, the economy was booming, and the country was awash in consumer goods. Disposable incomes were rising, and thousands of new homes were going up as an exodus of families spilled out of the nation’s major cities. The home with the well-manicured lawn and the two-car garage had become the centerpiece of the American dream. By 1960, one third of the population lived in the suburbsthat’s a lot of living room walls.

The US may have been enjoying a remarkable stretch of prosperity, but the world had also become more dangerous and unsettling. The melancholy waifs triggered an instant emotional reaction—and can any art that provokes an emotional reaction be called bad? “They drew you in,” says Bob Miller, a collector and longtime friend of Keane's. “There was just a certain magnetism about the paintings.”

Keane also maintained that the paintings’ children offered an underlying political message. “If mankind would look deep into the soul of the very young,” he once said, “he wouldn’t need a road map.” If Walter’s outspoken concern for the world’s children seems relatively commonplace today, it was uncommon in the early 1960s. The United Nations General Assembly had only recently enacted the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, in 1959, and child abuse, once considered a taboo subject, had entered the national conversation with the 1962 Journal of the American Medical Association article “The Battered Child Syndrome.”

Though Keane thought he had a powerful message, he was treated like a joke. As far as the art establishment was concerned, the millions of Keane fans only seemed to reinforce the image of America as a cultural backwater despite the heralded rise of abstract expressionist artists like Pollock, Rothko, and de Kooning.

The New York School artists were renowned for their brooding self-absorption. They weren’t just making art—they exposed their raw, naked, tortured souls. Many of them dabbled in Jungian psychology, adopting an air of humorless self-importance. At the time Walter and his wife began selling paintings, the pop art movement was rapidly displacing the action painters. The irreverent pop artists brought a lively sense of mockery to the creative process. It could be argued that the mass-produced Keane paintings were op art in the truest sense of the world. Satirically or not, Andy Warhol praised Big Eye paintings just for being popular.

Walter Keane wasn’t worried in the least what critics thought. A look at the sizeable sum in his bank book provided him with the last laugh. More than that, Keane paintings appeared in art museums in Spain and Belgium, and despite hate from a New York Times critic, during the World’s Fair of 1964, the United Nations itself purchased and hung a Big Eye painting, as did Madame Chiang Kai-Shek. The list of celebrity owners of Keane paintings was growing with each passing day. Natalie Wood, Red Skelton, Joan Crawford, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Eve Arden, Kim Novak—all became proud owners of dearly priced Keane oils. All in all, it was a charmed life for a star-struck native of Lincoln, Nebraska. Even politicos like George Christopher, who served as the last Republican mayor of San Francisco from 1956 to 1964, paid Margaret Keane $4,500 (a fairly large amount at the time) to paint his portrait. According to the Modesto Bee in December 1959, Margaret also painted portraits of members of the super-rich DuPont family as well.

This being the golden age of the cocktail, the three-martini lunch, and the living room tiki bar, Walter Keane was in his gassed-up element. Fifty years ago, alcoholism wasn’t considered a disease like it is today. If you were drinking too much, it just meant that you needed to go on the wagon for a while. Most social activities revolved around a few shared drinks. Once he became a celebrity, Walter’s carousing grew legendary. “He was just always a lot of fun to be around,” Bob Miller remembers. “Wherever Walter went, his persona was like a magnet.”

As Keane later recalled his rock star lifestyle:

“I knew all the big shots. Dalí, Picasso, they were all my friends. One time in Paris, Picasso was throwing a big party, and I was there. I took a canvas and put it up on an easel, and I laid down ten $100 bills. I said, ‘Master, that’s for you and your girlfriends. All I want you to do is X, Y, and Z on there and write ‘Picasso.’ He thought I was making fun of him. Joan Crawford, she introduced me to one of my first great loves, Miss Chivas Regal. And she threw parties for me, introduced all the Hollywood stars to my work. I had this long bar in my Woodside home; it came around the horn. Red Skelton tried to buy it for $4,000 bucks once. Seventeen people could sit around my bar room. The Beach Boys, Maurice Chevalier were guests there. Howard Keel and all those guys. We’d have parties until four in the morning. Dinner, drinks, anything they wanted. Always three or four people swimming nude in the pool. Everybody was screwing everybody. Sometimes I’d be going to bed, and there’d be three girls in the bed. I took a photo once of three of the girls there. Crazy, wild...”

When he wasn’t trading drinks with Hollywood royalty, going to parties, or boozing it up in some exotic locale, Keane could be seen knocking back a Chivas on the rocks at one of his favorite North Beach nightspots, or tooling around San Francisco in a gleaming white Cadillac convertible with a telephone installed in the front seat (a rarity at that time). And the money kept rolling in.

While Walter hit the bars and kept the reporters busy, Mrs. Keane was trying to start a new life in Hawaii. In 1965, Margaret filed for a legal separation after a decade of fulfilling the role of being Walter’s wife. She later claimed that Walter was simply impossible to live with. He constantly criticized her, stayed out late drinking, and at times could be a jealous man. Once a judge approved their legal separation, they each started new lives, telling the press that they’d forever remain friends and business partners.   

A southern blond with a gentle voice and a slender figure, Walter’s ex is an accomplished portraitist. Her paintings of winsome adolescent women, painted in a style akin to Modigliani, have earned her a certain degree of fame alongside Walter’s nationwide notoriety.

In the various media profiles of her husband, Margaret was usually depicted as the perfect wife: raising their two daughters, running the household, and painting in her spare time. If Walter was a gregarious, talkative extrovert, Margaret (who was 12 years his junior) was his opposite—polite, shy, withdrawn, and given to pondering spiritual matters. Walter’s soon-to-be ex-wife also harbored a well-kept secret that in a few short years would effectively destroy Walter’s well-crafted persona.

In the mid 1960s, at the height of Walter’s fame, Margaret was the only one who knew that he had perpetrated a humbug of monumental proportions. The man wasn’t a painter at all. Margaret was the creator of all the Big Eye art. Walter basked in the glory, partied with the celebrities, and reaped the rewards. As she would later relate, the tearful, doe-eyed children she painted had nothing to do with Walter’s supposed belief in children redeeming the world. The weeping waifs reflected her own sorrow.

Margaret played a part in Walter’s deception for over a decade, but after moving to Hawaii, remarrying, and getting her life back in order, she decided to end the charade once and for all. It wouldn’t be a clean break. Walter would not go away quietly. It required an ugly legal battle to finally settle the matter of who painted the popular Big Eye waifs. After all, Walter could display published art books featuring the Big Eye kids and Walter’s signature. Walter could also point to a hundred published news photos featuring him holding a paintbrush and a palette of acrylic paints dabbing at one painting or another. Why did she agree to the lies? “It was easier to agree to the lies than not” was Margaret’s simple answer.

Supported by her new husband, a sports writer named Dan McGuire, Margaret finally took it upon herself to challenge Walter’s lies in a substantial public forum. In a media splash, Margret organized a public “paint-off” in San Francisco Union Square, knowing that Walter wouldn’t be able to draw a circle or a straight line, much less an actual painting of a Big Eye waif. A photographer from Life magazine came to photograph the event, even though Walter stayed far away.

During a divorce court proceeding, a judge ordered both Walter and Margaret to engage in another “paint-off” to determine who was the rightful owner of all past, present, and future Big Eye paintings. Walter begged off, complaining of a hurt shoulder, and watched on as Margaret painted a Big Eye masterpiece in less than an hour. Margaret won back the right to claim to sign and sell her own art.

Margaret emerged from the ordeal relatively unscathed while she gained a new generation of fans, and the Keane Eyes Gallery opened in San Francisco. The gallery’s website claims that, in recent years, Margaret’s work has reflected her happiness and devotion to the Jehovah’s Witness movement.

After Parfrey’s “Citizen Keane” cover story appeared in the San Diego Reader, an angry Walter Keane wrote a letter to the editor, claiming that Parfrey was paid a million-dollar bounty by the Jehovah’s Witnesses to build up Margaret at his expense. Walter died in the year 2000 at the age of 85, while Margaret still paints prolifically, and her story will soon be the subject of a Tim Burton film, Big Eyes.

This article presents an excerpt from the book Citizen Keane: The Big Lies Behind the Big Eyes by Adam Parfrey and Cletus Nelson, published by Feral House, and available on June 1, 2014.

Comics: Blobby Boys - Part 10

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Check back next Wednesday for another episode of Blobby Boys!

VICE Canada Conversations: Ronald Deibert

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VICE Canada's Managing Editor Patrick McGuire sat down with Ronald Deibert, Canada's foremost cybersurveillance expert. They talked about CSEC, why many Canadians don't appear to be concerned by CSEC, and how Ronald became such a notable expert in the world of online spying. If you were ever curious about how and why the government monitors the internet, you should check this out.


How to Avoid Self-Incrimination via Smartphone

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This guy is having way too much fun on what is probably not his smartphone. Photo via Flickr user Steve Baker

David Riley was pulled over for driving with expired license plates, in 2009, when he got strapped with the much more serious charge of attempted murder. After finding two guns in his car, police started snooping through his smartphone. Using photos and call records as evidence, Riley was connected to gang activity and suspected of playing a role in a recent drive-by shooting. No witnesses could tie him to the scene of the crime, but the evidence from his phone was enough to land him a conviction.

Riley appealed, and his case is one of two the Supreme Court is currently hearing as it mulls a ruling on the broader question of whether police should be allowed to search the contents of a phone at the time of arrest without first obtaining a warrant.

Those arguing for the legality of these searches point to a 1973 high-court decision that legitimized a search after another petty traffic violation had turned up a pack of cigarettes found to contain heroin. Though smartphones are often no bigger than a pack of cigs, they contain a lot more than it was possible to carry on one’s person when such bodily pat-downs were deemed permissible. A 16-gig iPhone can contain 16 pickup trucks' worth of paper, according to a brief filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The San Francisco–based advocacy organization argues that amount of information stored smartphones is akin to what was once stored in a house or office—and so should require the same sort of warrant needed to search those places.

The issue has got Supreme Court justices debating all sorts of things that generally befuddle people their age, like airplane mode and cloud storage. Any ruling has to both keep up with technology and outlast it. Since it doesn’t look like they’ll be outlawing warrantless phone searches outright, here are a few tips to keep the contents of your phone from indicting you if and when it gets searched by cops.

Passwords

If you don’t have a pin or password on your phone already, set one up and have the thing lock automatically when you’re not using it. A recent study by ConsumerReports found that just over a third of Americans have a lock-screen password. The police can try to pressure you to tell them your password, of course, but if you refuse to give it to them, they’ll need to get a warrant and possibly break into your phone before being able to look through every photo you’ve ever taken of your cat and all the texts your mom recently sent you.

Close Your Apps

Take the extra precaution of logging out of apps when you’re not using them, rather than leaving them on in the background. It’s not just Fitbit that’s tracking your every move. Lots of apps that have nothing to do with your location are constantly tracking it to sell to advertisers. “[M]y phone shows that I arrived at work yesterday at 8:56 AM,” Adam M. Gershowitz, a professor at William & Mary Law School, said after digging into his own iPhone, noting that it also showed where he had lunch. Beyond location information, banking and communication apps are constantly updating with your personal information. One more password might help keep police a step away from knowing everything about you instantaneously.

Keep It in the Cloud

Though it might seem like a fine point to make, courts that have weighed in on the matter seem to agree that a search of your phone shouldn’t include data stored in the netherworld of a cloud. This means cops can’t dig through all the files you have on Google Drive or DropBox just because they have your phone. “So that’s a solution, [but] it’s probably not the best solution,” says Hanni Fakhoury, staff attorney with the EFF. That’s because if they have probable cause, police can still obtain a warrant or subpoena a network provider to get access to the contents of all of that stuff too.

Leave It at Home

If you have a good reason to think you might get arrested today, your safest bet to avoid a search of your smartphone is to leave it at home in the first place. “If you’re heading off to an Occupy protest, or it’s May Day and you’re going to riot in the streets or whatever, you’re better off taking a dummy phone that has no information on it,” Fakhoury says. The 20 bucks spent on a cheap flip phone may save you from a prolonged and possibly incriminating search in the event of an arrest.

Destroy the Evidence?

Deleting the contents of your phone after being arrested is a big no-no. According to Fakhoury, trying to remotely wipe your phone or otherwise remove data when you’re in the process of being booked is not a good idea. “It’s really, really legally problematic to do anything after you’ve been arrested to try to delete data on your phone or hide the fact that you have stuff on your phone,” he says. Not only may it be illegal, but it could be woefully ineffective too, since more and more police departments are dropping seized electronics into Faraday bags, which block all electrical signals and would likely prevent you from remotely wiping its contents.

Clear Data Regularly

“I’m not saying its foolproof,” Fakhoury says, and he wouldn’t offer this up as legal advice, but maintaining a regular habit of clearing your phone may serve you well if arrested. Setting a phone up to clear its contents every 30 days, for example, could leave police with less information to search at the time of an arrest. “I think the government would have a harder time to say you were trying to impede its investigation because your argument would be, ‘Nope, this is my traditional security practice. I put this in place long before I knew that I was even suspect to investigation.’ That’s less problematic.” iPhones can be set to automatically delete their contents if the incorrect PIN is entered 10 times in a row, and similar functionality is available for Android phones. Sophisticated police departments are well aware of this feature, and it’s mainly useful for protecting your info from thieves, but doing something like this to clear your phone may be another useful precaution.

There’s no clear prescription yet from the Supreme Court on whether and to what extent police can search cell phones at the time of arrest, but justices have already started debating the merits of allowing warrantless searches based on the cause of an arrest or else allowing for some aspects of a phone to be searched and not others. The decision will replace the various stances taken by individual states, with some banning such warrantless searches entirely and others allowing them for even minor traffic violations. From the extensive debates around these issues, it’s clear that police are eager to use the same technology that makes our lives easier to make their jobs easier. In the end, the limitless connection we have to our phones will make this decision from the Supreme Court—expected in June—that much more critical.

As the youngest Supreme Court justice, Elena Kagan, pointed out, “Most people now do carry their lives on cell phones.” Sure, it’s convenient to keep track of everything from the miles you run to the money you spend to the random photos you took while raging last night on your phone, but the personal nature of these activities means it’s a good idea to prevent your mobile device from triggering a police investigation the next time you get pulled over for speeding.

Beenish Ahmed is a freelance multimedia journalist and Eric Elder is an attorney and writer.

This New Deadly STI Makes Crickets Horny Before Killing Them

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The virus IIV-6/CrIV up close. Photo courtesy Don Stoltz.

A Canadian researcher has found a new sexually transmitted infection that uses mind control to spread to as many unsuspecting victims as possible before turning their guts blue and killing them. Luckily, the highly contagious and resilient virus has only been found to affect crickets.

Shelley Adamo, a researcher at Dalhousie University, says she accidentally found the virus—officially dubbed IIV-6/CrIV—while conducting an unrelated experiment with bearded dragon reptiles and some of the crickets from her lab colony. Not long after the experiment, what Adamo says looked like perfectly healthy female crickets stopped laying eggs. So she sliced one open to figure out what was going on.

“When I opened her up, I was shocked, because usually females are packed with eggs,” Adamo says. “These females had no eggs. Instead, they were packed with fat tissue. Not only that, the fat tissue looked a little odd. It had this iridescent blue sheen to it, so I knew something was really wrong.”

Adamo says it’s natural for animals, including us, to want to hunker down when we’re sick. Food and fun lose all appeal, but it’s not the sickness telling our bodies to be lame. It’s our immune system telling us to chill out and get some much-needed rest. The fact that these very sick crickets showed no sign of losing their appetites or energy is what got Adamo curious.

What she and her team found was a strain of something called iridovirus, known for its ability to turn bug innards different colours. She took the lead on a report called “A viral aphrodisiac in the cricket Gryllus texensis,” which shows how the virus uses the crickets’ courting rituals to spread.

Here’s how cricket lovemaking usually works: in the wild, a guy cricket will start rubbing his wings together around dusk to create a sound that draws in the ladies. (This part of the process is done artificially in Adamo’s lab by putting the crickets in a breeding bin together.) If a lady cricket walks his way, the two insects will feel each other up with their antennae. “They have chemical receptors in their antennae, so they’re sort of tasting each other to see if they’re the right species and good mates for each other,” Adamo says.

Once the antennae foreplay wraps up, the male cricket will start singing a different tune for the female called the courtship song (take that, John Cusack and your shitty boom box). This is the part where he’s trying to get the lady cricket to mount him. If she decides to hop on, Adamo says the guy cricket will give her “a little pouch of sperm.”

Here’s how the virus messes with all that: in Adamo’s experiments, the infected male lab crickets were much quicker to start singing the courtship song than the healthy males. In fact, it took the sick crickets only about three minutes to start singing their sexy tune, as opposed to the 10 minutes it took the healthy guys to heat things up. “It was quite a striking difference,” she says. However, she says she doesn’t know how the virus manages to do this.

According to the report, the virus spreads through the heavy petting that goes on before and during coitus. Adamo says she suspects that like other iridovirae, the virus gets in to the crickets through their mouths.

Once inside, the virus shuts down the immune system and the cricket-equivalent of white blood cells, offering no outside signs that anything’s wrong. Adamo says she and her team even tried to inject the infected crickets with bacteria that would normally slow down their appetites. “They just kept eating,” she says.

That’s why the virus is so contagious, she says. Not only do the crickets not lose energy, but they want to bang even more, which spreads the virus to other unsuspecting partners.

So how did her quarantined, healthy lab colony get infected? Adamo says one of the bearded dragons was carrying the virus, which it got from the mass-bred commercial crickets it eats on the regular, and gave it to her crickets while in close contact.

Adamo says the virus was so successful at spreading throughout her colony of about 2,000 to 4,000 crickets that not only did it kill all of them, but it also tainted the plastic and glass walls of the lab containers. She and her team spent weeks bleaching everything in the lab. “It was quite traumatic,” she says.

Adamo says that in a lab, the virus can spread in many ways. Crickets are kept in close quarters where they can bump into each other easily and contract the virus. Cricket cannibalism is to blame, too, she says. These circumstances don’t really exist in the wild, because the type of Texan cricket Adamo studies doesn’t like to socialise, nor do hungry predators give them much chance to chow on their friends’ dead bodies. The only instance where this kind of cricket comes into intimate contact is during lovemaking, so that’s why Adamo says the virus is sexually transmitted.

David Hughes, a biologist at Penn State University, says Adamo’s findings are surprising because her strain of the virus sterilizes the female victims. “There are a lot of reasons why you’re not going to see such an evolutionary route, that’s why Adamo’s paper is so remarkable,” he says. Normally, you would think that a virus that makes its victims have lots of sex would also want to pass on the infection to offspring.

Hughes is most well-known for his discovery of the zombie ant phenomenon. He also served as a consultant for World War Z, a 2013 blockbuster about a planet overrun with a zombie-like infection, and a video game called The Last of Us.

More than half of life on Earth is parasitic, but Hughes says only a few parasites and viruses have evolved to the point of mind manipulation—and mammals aren’t immune. Hughes says toxoplasma in rats, or “fatal feline attraction,” makes the rat attracted to its predator. “They go towards the cat, the cat eats the rat, and the parasite gets to where it wants to be, which is inside the body of the cat, the only place it can reproduce,” Hughes says.

He says we shouldn’t be worried about a new STI that takes control of our libido, though. Viruses and parasites can evolve to jump to humans, but won’t bring mind control along, as is the case with rabies. “It’s not going to sweep through and cause a zombie apocalypse,” Hughes says.

Bug brains and human brains are too different for viruses—even if they manage to evolve to jump the species barrier—to work in the same way on us. “They have perfectly evolved to fit their chemical keys into whatever lock they happen to be in. That key just won’t work in a different lock,” he says. “But [bug-borne viruses] still have the potential to kill us.”


@loopemma

Ukraine Is on the Verge of War, and a Presidential Election

A Choice Between Warlords: Lebanon Can’t Elect a New President

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A portrait of Michel Aoun, a candidate for Lebanon's presidency. Photo by Flickr user Thierry Ehrmann

Lebanon is a country with a long and bloody history of political ineptitude. But this year, the country’s politicians have done a surprisingly good job at keeping the fallout from the neighboring civil war in Syria at bay. Security plans implemented in the northern city of Tripoli and Bekaa Valley have curtailed clashes between pro- and anti-Syrian-regime militias and curbed the escalation of suicide bomb attacks that were an almost weekly occurrence this winter.

But the political wheels in Beirut may be beginning to fall off. Lebanon’s current president, Michel Suleiman, is set to step down when his term expires on May 25, and Lebanon’s two main political blocks are at loggerheads over his successor. Members of parliament elect the country’s president, who is constitutionally mandated to be from the country’s Christian community, which makes up roughly 39 percent of Lebanon’s population. The office of the president is largely ceremonial, but it plays a key role in stabilizing the government. The animosity between the Hezbollah-led March 8 Alliance and their rivals, another coalition of parties called the March 14 Alliance, is so high that MPs from the March 8 faction have boycotted the last three rounds of voting in the past fortnight —the latest round of voting was held today. The election is becoming a political proxy war between the Hezbollah-backed pro-Assad politicians and the anti-Assad politicians. And the two leading candidates were warlords from Lebanon's 15-year civil war. With more than a million Syrian refugees now in Lebanon, a country of only 4.5 million, and the concomitant strain on the country’s economy and ever-fragile security situation, the political crisis in Lebanon could have rippling effects across the region. 

Two weeks ago I took a battered 1960s-era Mercedes taxi through the East Beirut district of Ashrafieh. A triangular cedar tree, the symbol of a right-wing Christian political party, was glued to the dashboard. Camille, my taxi driver, supported the party, whose leader, Samir Geagea, is currently the presidential candidate of the Saudi-backed March 14 block. Geagea holds the distinction of being the only civil-war-era warlord to have faced jail time for his crimes. He spent 11 years in solitary confinement in a cell located below the Ministry of Defense in Beirut. In 2012 he narrowly avoided an assassination attempt when a bullet allegedly whizzed past his head as he bent down to smell a rose in his garden. Inside his house, Geagea is said to have a replica of the cell in which he spent 11 years.

In the early 1980s Camille had fought under Geagea’s command against the occupying Syrian army in Koura, a region north of Beirut, and the Chouf mountains. Camille recalled that period with an air of romanticism mixed with PTSD. But he was not confident Geagea would be elected.

“He is a strong leader, a principled man who objects to foreign interference in Lebanon,” said Camille in reference to Geagea’s presidential bid.

“But I don’t think he will be president,” he continued. “The opposition would never agree to his nomination.”

Relatives and allies of political figures Geagea is said to have had killed in the 1980s hold seats in the parliament, and old grudges are hurting his candidacy. Opposition figures wrote their names on blank ballots submitted in the first round of voting held in the Lebanese parliament on April 23. Geagea fell 23 votes short of the 65 required to secure the presidency.

But this is not the only factor against him. Geagea, who served in the country’s top military post, also based his campaign on a promise he can hardly keep: to bring Hezbollah’s extensive illicit arsenal under state control and end the Shia organization’s military participation in Syria alongside the Assad regime. Even if he could rein in Hezbollah, Geagea might start another war in the process.

Camille, my taxi driver weighed in again: “There are many political figures who committed war crimes, but because Geagea went to jail, people don’t forget his past.”

Michel Aoun is Geagea’s opponent. He’s a former army general with a comb-over and a very loud voice. He doesn’t’ actually have the official support of the March 8 Alliance but is their de facto candidate.

Aoun and Geagea fought against each other in intra-Christian wars in East Beirut between 1988 and 1990. Aoun fled Lebanon to Paris in the wake of a US-approved, Syrian-executed siege of the Presidential Palace in 1990. Before leaving Lebanon, he criticized the George Bush administration’s support of Syria and accepted arms from Saddam Hussein. But on returning from exile in 2005, Aoun quickly formed an alliance with his former Syrian enemies and their main representatives in Lebanon: Hezbollah.

In the buildup to election season, the Lebanese press reported that Aoun was America’s preferred man for the job. One US diplomatic source is even alleged to have said: “We are facing a clear equation: either Aoun or chaos.”

It might seem strange that the Obama administration would prefer the election of an ally of the Assad regime and Hezbollah, but potential reasons for a US preference of Aoun are quite simple: As an ally, Aoun is seen as capable of holding dialogue with Hezbollah rather than just alienating the Shia party—something that Geagea would likely do. Given the context of ongoing US-Iranian rapprochement, Hezbollah and their Iranian backers are increasingly viewed as forces capable of playing a role in a potential future settlement to Syria’s civil war. Israeli media has claimed that agents from the CIA fronted by US Ambassador to Lebanon David Hale recently met with Hezbollah operatives in Cyprus. At the same time it is hoped that if Aoun became president, he would be able to express his independence, away from the hegemony of Hezbollah, who in all likelihood would favor a president guaranteed to support their interests. Aoun has, in recent months, been busy making overtures toward the March 14 leadership in order to secure the necessary votes to make him a consensus candidate.

“America will favor the candidate who can serve their interests in Lebanon,” Imad Salamey, a political science professor at the American University in Beirut, told me. “By teasing out incentives for Aoun, America could seek to drive a wedge between him in and Hezbollah.”

In reality, neither Geagea or Aoun is likely to be elected. With both the March 14 and March 8 blocs lacking the seats in parliament required to generate a two-thirds majority vote, chances are a moderate, less polarizing, candidate will eventually win the election. But it could take some time. Then again, political vacuums and delays are pretty common in Lebanon.

In February 2014 a legitimate cabinet was formed in the country after a ten-month absence, right after the postponement of general elections for an unprecedented 18 months in May 2013. International oil companies are currently poised to bid for the right to extract an estimated $40 billion worth of oil and gas reserves located off the Lebanese coast—a potential revenue generator that could greatly help Lebanon confront the ever-growing Syrian refugee crisis and revive its economy. But the bidding process has already been delayed due to political infighting and accusations that certain groups, headed by Aoun’s son-in-law, were trying to monopolize the process. No one will be surprised if the bidding process is further delayed. Similarly, no one will be surprised if there is no president in place by the May 26 deadline.

Follow Martin Armstrong on Twitter.

How the Sunset Strip Went to Shit

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The unveiling of a new billboard in West Hollywood. Photo by the author

Bleach-blond women on stilts waving oversized fans waved me up the stairs to the second-floor balcony above the burger joint so I could get a better view of the upcoming unveiling. I was at a nondescript West Hollywood strip mall where smartly dressed young people who resembled Aaron Sorkin's idea of political staffers milled about with local business types and ate hors d'oeuvres served on platters by young women in white T-shirts that said “ACE.”

“This is wonderful,” said Genevieve Morrill, president and CEO of the West Hollywood Chamber of Commerce. “This is a great example of what we can do.”

A young man walked over with a pair of giant scissors. Words were spoken and a ribbon was cut, while across the parking lot three men in hard hats dropped a tarp, revealing the reason we were all there: a billboard with an ad for a high-tech thermostat—or rather, the pole holding it up. In fact, nobody mentioned the ad at all.

“When you think of a magnificent outdoor advertising space—it really begins with the pole,” explained Brad Yacullo, managing partner of ACE Outdoor Advertising, in a press release handed out at the April 16 event.

More than just a pole, its design provided “an opportunity to rethink conventional urban infrastructure,” according to architect Lorcan O'Herlihy. “The structure is a fluid gesture inspired by the stream of traffic coursing below,” he said in a statement, sounding like someone’s idea of a museum curator. “The billboard enacts an abstraction of movement and motion captured in space,” its color—“cobalt blue”—a “link to the ever-present surrounding blue sky.”

“It's really beautiful,” said West Hollywood Mayor John D'Amico in an interview with public radio station KPCC. “It's exceptional and I think it will reset the standard for new billboards and revised billboards on the Sunset Strip.” This is just the beginning, for the mayor believes “billboards are part of the Sunset Strip's cultural identity,” according to KPCC, and “he's ready to see more innovative billboards there: projected billboards, lit-up billboards, three-dimensional billboards.”

The dream of ACE and its ilk is to put billboards everywhere you rest your eyes—a full-on revival of what the mayor calls “billboard culture,” what once made the Sunset Strip “something that people would drive miles and miles to come and see.”

Perhaps some people will drive through Hollywood traffic to see a few ads, but the mayor himself was “running late,” according to an aide, and didn't get make it in time to see the dramatic unveiling. And why would he? It's just a pole that holds an ad. Those who did make it to the party acted as if they were all in on a joke, that perhaps with the push of a strong cocktail the flowery language about that wonderful pole would give way to a smirk and a confession: “Wasn't that some bullshit?”

As they likely knew, those assembled there weren't contributing to any real cultural achievement, but erecting a cobalt blue gravestone to mark where one used to be. And that bugs that hell out of some of the people who used to practically live on the Strip.

Billboards on the Sunset Strip. Photo via Flickr user Michael Dorausch

“I detest nostalgia on principle—it always includes historical amnesia,” said Carol Wells, founder and executive director of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, a nonprofit that collects, analyzes, and exhibits politically charged art. In the 60s, Wells and her husband would go to the Sunset Strip to hang out and be part of what was then a “burgeoning youth and counter-cultural scene.” Even in those days, the most iconic monument on the Strip was an advertisement, a 70-foot cowboy who used rugged masculinity to sell cancer. Still, Wells told me, back then Sunset Boulevard had a culture that wasn’t a result of crass advertising campaigns.

“I would walk along the Sunset Strip on a date,” she said, “people-watching, visiting a bookstore, occasionally being accosted by someone proselytizing for Scientology.” Young people flocked to a club called Pandora's Box to hear jazz and see the hottest rock bands. It wasn't a paradise, but it was nowhere near as obnoxious as it is today. Some billboards even stood for something back then.

In January 1966, for example, a “billboard-sized sign” was put up at a major intersection on Sunset Boulevard, as historian Jon Wiener recently recounted in the Los Angeles Times, announcing in three-foot tall letters: “Stop the War in Vietnam.” Vandals destroyed it, but the artists rebuilt, and a few weeks later they used that space to put up a “Peace Tower,” which featured 418 separate two-by-two-foot works of antiwar art. It didn't last for long.

“Night after night,” wrote Wiener, “would-be saboteurs came hoping to destroy the Tower of Protest, some of them active-duty soldiers and Marines from nearby military bases.” One evening, 300 “pro-war men” arrived at the structure and assaulted the 15 to 20 volunteers who stayed up all night defending it. When sheriff's deputies arrived, they sided with the saboteurs and got to beating some hippies. The owner of the lot where the tower was built had had enough and, just three months after it went up, the tower was gone. Today, next to where the tower once stood there is a tanning salon, a store selling hand-crafted cowboy boots, and a place to buy organic dog food. (In 2012, the tower itself was briefly commemorated with a similar structure on an empty lot down the street and off the Strip.)

What happened to the Sunset Strip is not that the kids just got old and sold out—the scene was intentionally destroyed by business leaders and city authorities, who in 1966 imposed a 10 PM curfew and forced the closure of several nightclubs. After a rally at Pandora's Box, one of the doomed clubs, LA County Supervisor Ernest Debs labeled the the young protesters “misguided hoodlums.” In the end, skulls were cracked, clubs associated with the counterculture were closed and torn down, the earth salted. The Strip was taken away from the rowdy kids, their culture stamped out and replaced with a lack thereof. Where once there was a lively spirit of rebellion, today there is a geriatric rock band on a reunion tour, a Hustler shop, and Dane Cook performing standup.

The average resident of LA might now go to the Strip for a concert once every other year, as a decent venue or two managed to escape the city's bulldozers, but unless soullessness is your scene, you’ll leave right after your show ends. These days, the only people really in their element on the Strip have black BMWs and an unjustified sense of entitlement. They wear the most expensive products advertised all around them—Diesel jeans, Prada glasses, bodily odors by Calvin Klein—and have a tab at the Standard, a luxury hotel so mindlessly hip it spells its name upside down and keeps a conventionally attractive young woman locked in a glass cube behind the check-in desk.

The modern Strip is also home to a den of pretentious insufferability called the Soho House, “a private members' club for those in film, media, and creative industries.” For $2,000 a year (or half that if the person is under 27), members are afforded the opportunity to avoid the riffraff by hanging out in a garden lined with olive trees on the top of a high-rise overlooking Sunset Boulevard. It's where Hollywood goes to network and the sort of place where you might see the back of P. Diddy's head as he chows down on some $18 quinoa or bump into that woman who used to be on the Daily Show but isn't anymore because she wasn't any good.

This is what the Sunset Strip is today: a quick stop for tourists looking to gawk at an eight-story ad for Game of Thrones and a hangout for the over-privileged refuse that falls from the Hollywood Hills. It's a juice bar next to a juice bar next to a boutique lingerie store, with photoshopped bodies scantily clad in expensive clothes everywhere the eye can see. It's just fucking awful.

A billboard installation by the Guerrilla Girls art collective. Photo courtesy of the Guerrilla Girls

“John D’Amico’s justification for the proliferation of billboards on Sunset Strip because it is 'known' for its corporate culture is very cynical and self-serving,” Wells told me. He's doing it for the money—the city gets $10,000 a month from that cobalt-blue pole alone—which could be justified if it went to a good cause, but claiming that billboards somehow enrich neighborhoods is a slap in the face to those old enough to remember a time when the culture wasn't so obviously soulless. Even the mayor recognizes this idea as politically toxic: D'Amico took time out of an interview promoting the Strip's “billboard culture” to stress that he wouldn't allow it to spread any further than it has. “None of us want more billboards along Melrose or Fairfax or Santa Monica Boulevard,” he said. Only advertisers do.

Of course, it's not billboards themselves that are loathed, but the purposes for which they are used and the messages they carry—all those reminders that we are ugly and inadequate and in need of some new and improved idea of perfection. A billboard is but a canvas; that the canvas is so often used to create a roadside blemish is a commentary on those who can afford to use them.

“Capitalism has always attempted to define our cultural values,” Wells said. But while “the system is able to co-opt most forms of dissent”—Forever 21 selling shirts adorned with the logo of the Black Panthers—“fortunately, new forms keep developing.” Some artists adopt the corporate aesthetic to make an anti-capitalist point, like designing a police riot shield using the colors and logo of an oil company.

There’s even a history of socially conscious billboard installations. The Guerrilla Girls, the famous anonymous art collective, has purchased space on a number of billboards in West Hollywood protesting the film industry's treatment of women. In 2002, they put up one that featured a flabby, middle-aged white man with the words, “The Anatomically Correct Oscar.” A similar 2003 installation observed that “Even the US Senate is More Progressive Than Hollywood,” a claim based on the number of women each institution employs.

But few artists can afford to outbid a corporation for space on a billboard; even ones as popular as the Guerrilla Girls can only do it occasionally, and then only for a short time. And even when they do manage to put something up in a place where people will actually see it, their work can be taken down if a corporation doesn't like it. In 1990, Los Angeles artist Robbie Conal put up a piece on a West Hollywood billboard critical of far-right senator Jesse Helms, who at the time was trying to slash federal funding of the National Endowment for the Arts. The work, Artificial Art Official, featured the senator's face on an artist's palette covered in paint—with the thumb hole in the middle of his head—and though he had paid good money to put it up, it “was soon ordered removed by skittish billboard company executives,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

Though it was put back up a day later after a public outcry, “The experience with that billboard taught me never to do anything legal ever again,” Conal was quoted as saying in sociologist Steven Dublin's book Arresting Images: Impolitic Art and Uncivil Actions. The point was made: If you want to display art in an American city through legitimate methods, that means opening yourself up to censorship from corporations and politicians, particularly if your work isn’t pretty and pleasantly apolitical.

By their nature, billboards exploit public space for private gain, something we take for granted in this age of austere capitalism; despite the democratic platitudes mouthed by politicians, few even think to apply democratic values to the commons. But billboards need not be platforms for brands alone. If anyone wants to build a true “billboard culture,” the community, not just corporations, should be offered a chance to contribute.

Joe Smoke, the director of grants administration for LA's Department of Cultural Affairs, pointed me to several organizations that have helped put art on billboards. And the Los Angeles Nomadic Division, a non-profit devoted to public art, is in the process of buying space on 100 billboards alongside Interstate 10, from California to Florida, and giving ten artists the opportunity to comment on the “extraordinarily influential (and often times destructive)” idea of “manifest destiny” and the brutal expansion of the United States from sea to shining sea.

Andrew Campbell, administrator of cultural affairs for West Hollywood, told me the city “actually has an agreement with two companies with billboards on the Sunset Strip.” On one, above the House of Blues, “we display the work of artists,” with the work rotating “every couple years or so.” On the other, an electronic billboard that displays video, the city requires there to be “nine minutes of art per hour,” with “no charge for artists to participate.”

While something is better than nothing, the fact is art is displayed on but two of the hundreds of billboards on Sunset Boulevard. And those with something to say that the powerful do not want to hear still have to turn to the street.

Indeed, street art, by virtue of the fact it is generally not commissioned by either corporations or politicians, may be the most authentic form of artistic dissent; anyone with a pile of posters or a can of paint to take back public space and offer a commentary on their city and society. But by their nature, these works are impermanent, always at risk of being covered up and their creators placed behind bars, not because they are obscene, but because capital views the free use of the commons by the commoners as an obscenity. You have to pay to express yourself, buddy.

A piece by Kira Lynn Harris that was part of the 2010 project How Many Billboards?, which put art on billboards around Los Angeles. Photo via Flickr user Alissa Walker

There is no going back to the 1960s, but the Sunset Strip could become a place known for more than just ads if the public demanded that the aesthetics of their neighborhoods be shaped by something other than advertising money. If companies like ACE are paying the city of West Hollywood $120,000 a year just to put up a single billboard, they are no doubt raking in plenty more. Why not ask them to give something back to the community in the form of a platform for art? Billboard companies could be required to hand over their canvases to local artists for one month out of every 12—you could stagger things so that there’s always art somewhere on the Strip, or turn all the billboards into installation pieces at once and call it a “festival” to bring in the tourists. Let the community vote on what goes up so as to avoid political interference. The only thing stopping us is the assumption that public space should go to the highest bidder.

Imagine instead of and ad on top of the cobalt-blue pole of tomorrow, a mural painted by a street artist or a political message from a local activist. The Sunset Strip could again enjoy the vibrancy of a culture formed from the bottom up, not placed there by an out-of-state executive. All we have to lose is an ad for the Gap.

Charles Davis is a writer in Los Angeles. His work has been published by Al Jazeera, Inter Press Service, the New Inquiry, and Salon.

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