The AmIUgly subreddit homepage

Do you have deep-set insecurity issues? Are you constantly looking for validation from family members, colleagues, and retail staff? Instead of bothering your mom or your Instagram followers—who are already exhausted of commenting on your photos every time you go fishing for compliments—you should give the “Am I Ugly?” subreddit a shot. It’s a page that allows you to post a photo of yourself and get immediate honest feedback from over 40,000 faceless strangers.

To me, this sounds like a fucking nightmare. It’s the bedroom equivalent of standing in the center of a football stadium with every person taking a stab at your appearance. “You’re overweight!” shouts one. “Your eyes are too far apart!” adds another. “Your forehead is disproportionate to the rest of your face,” says a Brazzers subscriber in a Megadeath T-shirt. “But, tbh, you do have great tits.”

Unless you’re a keen masochist, it would seem, that this place is the last corner of Reddit you’d ever want to visit—a venue for people you’ve never met to write incredibly mean stuff about your nose, a cyber-cemetery of self-worth. However, despite the ability to be honest without repercussion, most of the anonymous comments on r/AmIUgly are remarkably nice.

“I’m always honest—I try to make my responses detailed and never, ever rude,” explains a 37-year-old American Redditor who visits the forum often. “My main motivation is [the idea that] my words can help brighten someone else’s day, or maybe give them that little spark to keep going.”

In fact, in a recent poll of over 70 r/AmIUgly users, nearly 60 percent of respondents called the forum “a good thing” for self-esteem. Over half said it boosted their confidence and 40 percent said they were pleased to finally get an honest opinion on their looks.

Whether it’s 21-year-old Matthew Towers from South Africa, who was thrilled to be compared to Alex Turner (presumably minus the unbearable smugness and pompadour), or Kaylan—a 21-year-old American who was ecstatic to be described as beautiful—the subreddit seems to have a much more positive effect on its users’ lives than you’d expect. Just under half of posters even claim that the comments on their pictures helped them to improve their appearance.

But why do people post in the first place? Ninety percent of respondents uploaded their image because they were “curious”, with 80 percent claiming they just didn’t know how attractive they were. This sounds like brazen narcissism, but it also makes sense; can you really claim to objectively gauge how attractive you are to others? Despite one study finding that humans have an “enhancement bias”–meaning we recognize our own faces as being more attractive than they actually are—for many men and women, appearance is a daily worry.

Joonas Broodin, a 30-year-old from Sweden, has suffered from body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) from the age of 12. His motivation for posting on r/AmIUgly was to help others who have BDD but may not know it yet. “BDD makes me constantly aware of my appearance,” he confessed. “I simply can’t stop thinking of how I look. And the answer is nearly always the same—hideous.”

Joonas Broodin. 

For Joonas, r/AmIUgly was a place to turn for help with his condition, and an opportunity to help others himself. “I think AmIUgly could help people with BDD if the people there are sincere and genuine,” he said.

“Your brow looks a bit heavy, your nose looks heavy also,” typed one commenter in a reply to Joonas’ picture. You might think this would be the last thing a person with a traumatic disorder focused entirely around their appearance would want to hear, but he was extremely thankful.

“I’m grateful to hear people point out some of the details I’ve been obsessing over for nearly 18 years,” he said. “In the past, if I pointed out the things I obsess about and people told me, ‘No, I don’t see it, you’re fine,’ it made me feel more crazy and lied to. When someone points out the things I hate about myself, it makes all the difference. The truth is a beautiful thing, and the truth is that I only see details, while others see a person. What I’ve failed to realize until recently is all these features I see do exist, and people do see them but they don’t experience them as I do.”

Joonas is not alone. Nick, a 16-year-old from the US, also suffers from BDD and turned to r/AmIUgly for help. “I’ve had self confidence issues about my appearance for a while,” he admitted. “When I had a breakdown due to other issues, the first thing I found myself doing was locking myself in the bathroom and verbally tearing my appearance apart.”

Unlike Joonas, however, Nick didn’t find solace in r/AmIUgly. “I found a few of the responses to my post unnecessarily harsh, especially considering I feel many people with self confidence issues will post here,” he said, before adding he was flattered by commenters who compared him to Ryan Gosling. “It would have ruined me to have been called ugly,” he continued. “I wouldn’t have handled it well. But curiosity got the better of me and I posted.”

Mostly male users on the AmIUgly subreddit. 

If you scroll through the subreddit you’ll see men behind the majority of the posts. User Santhonyj, a 17-year-old from the US who posted a picture of just his chin on the forum, was quick to point out that men are also held to high beauty standards. “It’s important to be attractive. If you are a 6ft tall white male with a strong jawline, you have a higher chance of being a CEO,” he said. And where girls can turn to their girlfriends for reassurance and advice, it’s not often you’ll hear guys critiquing each other’s appearance, so it makes sense that r/AmIUgly is male skewed.

Claire—a 21-year-old from the US who first posted as an 18-year-old with self-esteem issues—told me about her experience as a girl posting on the site. “I had some constructive critique that helped me shape my image,” she says. “But then I also had people be very mean to me. I had several people make horse jokes about my smile, which still really upsets me. I was 18. I was still developing mentally. It makes me sick that there are people out there who can explicitly know how young I am and still call me names."

Claire and Nick’s experiences of r/AmIUgly demonstrates, unsurprisingly, that among the compliments, the site can have a darker side, and constructive criticism can be damaging for some—especially the site’s younger users. Twelve percent of respondents to the recent survey admitted to finding people on the subreddit “mean," with another 15 percent stating that the comments they received lowered their self-confidence. These numbers may seem small compared to the positive responses, but that’s still around 6,000 people walking away worse off than how they arrived.

It's hardly a shock that people are visiting r/AmIUgly just to be a dick to strangers. But it is kind of unexpected that others frequent the subreddit to talk kindly about other people's appearances. It's a page designed to give you feedback on you, but in the end you almost leave learning more about others than yourself.

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David Aldridge interviewing Gregg Popovich. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

In a recent conversation on Twitter about NBA free agency, Elias Isquith of Salon expressed amusement at the fact that mainstream NBA reporters turn into “total class-war hippies when it comes to sports league economics.” This has particularly been true since the NBA lockout of 2011, which ended with what can only be described as a resounding victory for owners, and it’s fascinating when considered in the context of broader political and economic journalism in the United States. In fact, journalists covering Wall Street, or labor issues, or tax policy could learn a lot from how NBA reporters have stepped up and covered their beat with honesty, integrity, and an adversarial spirit that has long been missing in the news media.

The most high-profile basketball journalists, almost to a person, are firmly and openly pro-player. Andrew Sharp, of Grantland, wrote in SB Nation during the lockout that players were “getting screwed,” and that the owners were unreasonably intent on trying to “squeeze” the players despite having already won several significant concessions. Sharp derided the owners’ behavior as “disgusting,” accusing them of “greed,” “deception,” and a determination to “humiliate” the players. 

David Aldridge, formerly of ESPN and now with NBA.com, recently wrote about the one-sided argument regarding free agency, which “always centers on how the player should sacrifice for the good of the team,” as opposed to expecting sacrifice on the part of the owners, many of whom are grotesquely rich. And business is booming in the NBA, as evidenced by the fact that the small-market, superstar-less Milwaukee Bucks recently sold for an astonishing $550 million. The league has to “beat away billionaires who want to buy NBA franchises with a stick,” Aldridge notes, so the current owners’ cries of poverty cannot possibly be taken seriously.

Bill Simmons of Grantland. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Grantland’s Zach Lowe recently spent an entire column deriding the double standard that demands perpetual sacrifice from players, while owners are “swimming in cash” and “laughing all the way to the bank.” Lowe writes—very matter-of-factly—that the “league’s primary goal” during the 2011 lockout period was to “transfer cash from players to owners.” Even Lowe’s boss Bill Simmons, the golden child of Bristol and someone who has always sedulously avoided politics, has unequivocally sided with players (and against owners) when the situation has called for it. In a 2012 piece on the Oklahoma City Thunder trading away James Harden for financial reasons, Simmons mocked the “Billionaire Dudes Who Hit The Jackpot With Durant, Hijacked The Sonics From Seattle And Have Been Raking In Money In OKC Ever Since” and illustrated the absurdity of the “small market” excuse for cutting costs and trading away popular players. The disingenuous owners should “can it,” he wrote.

It’s important to note that these opinions are being espoused squarely in the mainstream. ESPN, which owns Grantland, is a global behemoth, owned by Disney and worth more than $50 billion: hardly analagous to some radical political site. And as for the journalists themselves, these are not the Matt Taibbis of sports reporting. They’re not fiery polemicists who went into journalism so they could take aim at billionaire sports owners. These are mostly mainstream, outwardly apolitical journalists whose work is more straight reporting than any kind of explicit opinion writing. Except these journalists are actually willing to call out powerful people when they are being dishonest or when they’re acting like bullies, unlike virtually all of all their peers in the news media.

Contrast these NBA journalists’ caustic criticism of team owners with the often fawning coverage of someone like JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon in the media. Dimon is known as a "media darling" despite the fact that, under his leadership, JPMorgan Chase paid more than $20 billion in fines in 2013 (which, incidentally, did not prevent him from receiving a massive raise in 2014). Dimon has engaged in more shady and nefarious behavior than all current NBA owners combined (Sterling is gone, right?)—so why don’t we see more mainstream journalists write about him with similar sarcasm and contempt?

There is no single, obvious reason why these sports journalists are able to be so openly combative toward the plutocrats on their beat, while writers and reporters in the news media—whose responsibility to the public is far greater—engage in reliably sycophantic coverage of the wealthy classes. Indeed, explanations for the existence of such an obedient and dutiful Fourth Estate in the US have been offered for decades. Chomsky and Herman thought it was mostly economic: mainstream media outlets must cater their coverage to investors, advertisers, and the business class in general, so therefore the coverage must be tailored accordingly. Chris Hayes recently advanced the concept of "cognitive capture": the idea that even those who are naturally opposed to the elite, corporate world will eventually, with enough time spent in this environment, end up submitting to its orthodoxies.

The key factor, however, in this disconnect between news reporting and sports reporting may just be the simple pull of careerism which doesn't apply to the same extent in sports as it does in news. Journalists covering politics and the economy for corporate outlets are most likely committing career suicide if they call important members of the ownership class "disgusting" or accuse them of trying to "humiliate" their employees. We all know how intertwined the elite classes are in this country, and if some billionaire or corporate entity is regularly being thrashed in a mainstream outlet, someone is surely getting a phone call with instructions to make it stop. At the very least, there will be a social cost, with major networking-related setbacks. Furthermore, those who write about the wealthy in such antagonistic terms are unlikely to be hired by corporate news outlets in the first place, so most of the journalists who believe strongly in "punching up" have already been weeded out. In sports journalism, though, class and labor issues are so marginal to what these people write about in a given year, that no one really notices. If one of the aforementioned journalists decided to turn attacking owners into a full-time gig, instead of something worth saying only during the occasional lockout or free agency drama, things might be different. But, for now, they can get away with it, and at the very least deserve credit for respecting their readers enough to value truth over "balance."

There is no doubt that covering sports is a different animal than covering Wall Street. Obviously railing against NBA owners in a piece for Grantland requires less courage than, say, risking one’s career and connections at the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times by exposing the limitless avarice of the super-rich, or by explicitly siding with workers in any major labor disputes. But substance aside, just consider the language these NBA journalists employ—“Greed.” “Deception.” “Swimming in cash.” “Laughing all the way to the bank.”—it's pure class warfare. Mainstream journalists covering business or labor issues would never dream of speaking about the wealthy in such shrill terms. But with NBA free agency creating a bigger buzz than ever, many of these reporters could stand to learn a thing or two about what journalism is all about.

Editors note: You probably shouldn't try this at home.

Vulvovaginal candidiasis, commonly known as a “yeast infection,” is experienced by at least 75 percent of women in their adult lives. Most people treat their yeast infections with over-the-counter creams like Vagisil that use an applicator to insert into your vagina overnight. As many women know, this usually leads to the cream leaking out into a massive, irritating mess.

Alternatively, there's the oral medication Diflucan, which is supposed to cure a yeast infection in 24 hours, but requires a prescription. These treatments are effective for a lot of women. However, none of these medications work for all women, and for a large minority of women, none of them work at all. Women with chronic yeast infections are forced to take the same medications over and over as they continue to suffer from this uncomfortable condition, while most doctors tell them there's no other choice. 

I have had chronic yeast infections since the age of 12, when I spent almost a year feeling too ashamed and scared to even tell my mom. I tried everything. The over-the-counter and prescription medications available would only help temporarily, if at all. I've found ways to deal with it over the years, but sometimes a bad one still comes along and I'm flung right back where I started, with no idea how to proceed. 

Last year, during a particularly disabling infection, I went to see a new gynocologist, an old Indian woman in the East Village. She had a curt and strange bedside manner and stuck things in me without warning, barely talking to me. Feeling somewhat violated, I left with a few prescriptions, vowing to never go back. Then I went to an alternative pharmacy the next day to pick up the boric acid suppositories she'd prescribed me. 

I used them for a few days and WHAM: no more yeast infection. I was floored. Nothing I'd ever used had worked as well as that.

A few weeks ago, like clockwork, I had yet another infection. I don't have health insurance, so the idea of paying hundreds of dollars to go back to this doctor and have her tell me what I already know seemed aimless. So, I began researching boric acid.

Boric acid suppositories used to be commonly sold as an over-the-counter treatment for yeast and bacterial infections. But in 1990, boric acid was banned by the FDA for lack of sufficient evidence of its effectiveness. Because boric acid is naturally occurring, you can't patent it, and major drug companies have no reason to invest in testing to meet the FDA's requirements. It's unlikely to ever be reinstated as an over-the-counter drug if these rules remain the same.

The average vagina falls at the acidic end of the pH scale. Your skin is a neutral 7, whereas the vagina has a pH of 3.8 to 4.5—your vagina is more acidic than black coffee and just a little less than a can of soda. Boric acid, however, has a pH of 3.8 to 4.8. So when you stick it in there, it restores your vagina to its natural pH, making it an unfriendly place for yeast and bacteria, which both require a more alkaline setting to flourish. Aside from killing your yeast infection it can also cure any bacterial infections (also known as bacterial vaginosis or BV) you might have. To be honest, you don't even need to know which—boric acid will just make it go away. 

There are many online guides to making your own boric acid suppositories. Boric acid, which comes as a powder, is readily available online, but I was desperate and wanted to get rid of this infection ASAP, so I needed to find it locally. Since I didn't have a prescription, I resorted to desperate measures.

Ostensibly, your local pharmacy does not carry boric acid. But actually, they do—it's in the pesticide section, marketed as roach killer. 

The first store I went to was a bigger chain store so they only had name-brand products, like Raid, which all contained actual poison. Since I didn't feel like having my drive shaft fall out of my uterus, I decided to look elsewhere. In my case, a local hardware store. It was one of those mom and pop places that looked like it'd been frozen in time—a time when our pesticides weren't stepped on with loads of other shit that you couldn't stick in your vagina.

Among their wares which looked like they hadn't been touched in ages was an enormous bottle that read ROACH KILLER 100 PERCENT BORIC ACID. Perfect. I handed the guy behind the counter a couple bucks, he offered me a few words of roach-killing wisdom, and I got the fuck out of there.

Next, I needed something to house my vaginal enema, so I went to the nearest vitamin store and bought a bag of size 0 gel caps. With all the necessary ingredients and my dignity still somewhat-intact, I went home and got to work.

Using the top of an old (but clean) take-out container as a surface, I poured out a small mound of the white powder. I read online that the acid could burn my skin, so I was careful to avoid getting it on me (gloves are recommended). The instructions also said to use size 00 gel caps and fill them all the way, so I researched and discovered, as observant drug dealers will know, that size 0 are twice as big, so I filled them up halfway. That night, I popped one in before I went to sleep. In the morning, I felt substantially better and experienced the same minor side affects (watery discharge) that I had when previously using the prescribed suppositories. After three nights of using them, my infection was gone. The whole thing had cost me about $11, didn't require a doctors visit and left me with enough supplies to last a few years. 

Overall, the experience was liberating. With my roach poison in hand, I'll never, ever need to purchase some irritating, overpriced brand name cream again.

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Mortensen with Electric Bromoil Apparatus, Mortensen works on a print of his paramour, actress Jean Harlow

Editor's note: One of the most exciting inclusions in the VICE 2014 photo issue is a pair of images by William Mortensen. Don't feel bad if you haven't heard of him—he was written into a footnote by the “straight photography” school of the 1950s, and referred to as “the Antichrist” by Ansel Adams, a tag that stuck after Anton LaVey dedicated The Satanic Bible to him. Primarily known as a Hollywood portrait artist, he developed a myriad of pre-Photoshop special effects to craft grotesque, erotic, and mystical images. This fall, Feral House will release American Grotesque, a monograph on his occult photography. The book is edited by Larry Lytle, a fine artist and photo instructor in LA. Larry knows more about Mortensen than anyone, so we asked him to tell us a bit about his first enounters with this forgotten master.

I’ve always left myself open to the possibilities afforded by chance encounters. This is a key lesson I teach my students: be prepared to open doors, even when there may be tigers lurking behind. There’s an equal chance that a fair lady or handsome lad will be there to greet you instead. It all depends upon your outlook.

In 1980, I’d travelled with some students on a field trip to the municipal art gallery at Los Angeles’ Barnsdall Park. There were two shows hanging in the cavernous space; we were there to see a large and comprehensive retrospective of the well-regarded LA abstract painter Lee Mullican.

By chance, the smaller exhibition—tucked away at the opposite end of the gallery—was another, though belated, retrospective of a photographer named William Mortensen. I’d never seen his work, and couldn’t have guessed that my brief time spent with this extraordinary imagery would affect my life so profoundly.

The Mark Of The Devil, an image from Mortensen's "Witchcraft and Demonology" series

Mullican was a living painter at the height of his popularity. Mortensen, on the other hand, was long dead and, though once famous, his achievements had been consigned to the purgatory of deposed art stars. Yet it was Mortensen’s photographs rather than Mullican’s paintings that haunted me. Perhaps I was there on a day when Mortensen, a ghostly Lazarus, was wandering the gallery. It’s possible, because that traveling show was the beginning of his artistic resurrection.

Mortensen’s unfamiliar and challenging images stuck with me. As a neophyte, the photography I’d been exposed to was typically Ansel Adams-esque representations of the world. I was attending California State University, where I’d finally found a teacher, Jerry McMillan, whose ideas about photography were revelatory. McMillan espoused the sacrilegious notion that a photograph had possibilities beyond the well-chewed cud of photographic fodder, and could instead thrive in the rarified air of conceptual art. And so I’d been reveling in the photographic constructs of Les Krims, Jerry Uelsmann, and Robert Heinecken, to name a few. It shocked me that Mortensen’s work, which seemed so conceptually contemporary, had been done a lifetime before.

Untitled (Experiment), one of Mortensen's many unpublished experimental images

Part of the reason his work has stayed with me is the trompe l’oeil effect created by his technical processes. These were photographs; the labels next to the frames said so. But without that information, one really couldn’t tell if they were drawings or etchings. They seemed to be both and yet were neither. It wasn’t until some years later that I came to understand that the images were a confluence of complex but photographically generated elements. It was the combination of those difficult and arcane techniques that so well served the singular and outré constructions of Mortensen’s pictorial narrative.

I held on to the memory of Mortensen’s work over the months and years after my initial exposure to it. About five years later, another encounter with chance offered itself. I was at my favorite used bookstore and stumbled upon a color reprint of Mortensen’s fabled 1936 book Monsters & Madonnas. This was a version produced in 1967 two years after his death. On the back flyleaf, I saw to my delight that there were more Mortensen books waiting to be discovered. With Monsters & Madonnas as the beginning of my collection, I began a concentrated effort to obtain all nine of his books and acquire all of his articles printed in the myriad photographic magazines of the period. (There are just over a hundred Mortensen articles, with no complete list available, it’s difficult to know when you’ve truly found the last one.) I became a ubiquitous presence at paper and ephemera conventions, and doggedly attended events—such as Photo LA—to pester every seller and dealer for Mortensen books or prints for sale.

In Off for The Sabbot, Mortensen shows us the uncomfortable task facing a witch riding her broom

As my collection of his writings grew and I religiously read them all, I still didn’t know much about him. His life remained a mystery. I had absorbed A. D. Coleman’s essay about Mortensen’s relegation to the backwater of photo history by the Newhalls, Adams and the rest, and, thus understood why there was little mention of him in photo history books. I’d even tracked down the booklet printed by Deborah Irmas and The Los Angeles Center for Creative Photography, who had put together the show that I’d seen. However, when I found any biographical information, the sources repeated the same story line, which came from the brief autobiographical section in Mortensen’s book The Command To Look. Beyond those slim facts there seemed to be nothing more. William Mortensen appeared to be more myth than man.

My mission became clear—I needed to find out about the life of this artist whose writings and photography had so deeply affected me. While working on my own photographic career I put aside time to travel to those places where I hoped he had left something of himself: Park City and Salt Lake City, Utah, where he was born and then raised; Hollywood, a few miles from my home, where he honed his early photographic skills; Laguna Beach, California, where he lived and taught in his latter life; and finally, Tucson, Arizona, where his archive resides at the Center for Creative Photography.

Mark of the Borgia, the fate of an unfortunate who defied the powerful family

In the past couple of decades since that 1980 exhibition, I’ve devoted much time, research, and thought to Mortensen’s life and work. In a nutshell this is what I’ve discovered.

He was a trained and talented artist who had initially wanted to be a painter, then a print maker, but who ultimately fell under photography’s spell. A canny showman, he observed Hollywood’s PR machinery, and understood that he could control how others perceived him. He used this knowledge to become an art celebrity.

During the 1930s, through the popularity of his books and articles (which were coauthored with his brilliant friend and model George Dunham), along with his photographic imagery, he became one of the most sought-after photographers and writers about photography. He was also an astute businessman who parleyed his fame into a series of Mortensen-approved and branded photographic products, one of the first artists to do so.

A Family Xmas 1914, done about 13 years after the war, finds Mortensen at his most grotesque and sardonic

Although his imagery was grounded in the 19th century romanticism of Symbolist art, Mortensen had a modernist sensibility for line and composition, and a postmodernist’s interest in the symbolic nature of photography. He was the first American visual artist to thoroughly explore grotesque imagery. He pushed the bounds of commonly accepted photographic subject matter, which enraged his foes and ensured his obscurity by the purveyors of photographic history. Happily, however, all of these factors also meant that Mortensen’s work would have importance long after his death. Although the forces of photographic change savaged him in the mid 20th century, his unique vision and methods foretold the momentous upheavals facing photography at the turn of the 21st century.

Because of that chance encounter in a gallery three decades ago the course of my life changed. I’ve learned much about myself, about photography and about the world of William Mortensen. There are many doors for us to open. We need only turn the handle and push.

Shannon Maureen Conley and Basit Javed Sheikh planned trips to Syria to join up with jihadis.

One is a 19-year-old citizen from Arvada, Colorado, named Shannon Maureen Conley. The other, a 29-year-old, Pakistani-born permanent US resident who lived in North Carolina named Basit Javed Sheikh. Both—entirely separately—planned to travel to Syria for love and jihad, according to public records, and both came under close scrutiny of the FBI and were eventually arrested.

But in Conley's case, the FBI gave the would-be jihadist every available out. Overt agents who identified themselves as being from the FBI repeatedly cautioned her against going through with her plans to travel to Syria and join the Islamic State in Iraq and al Sham (ISIS). According to a sworn affidavit, they warned her she would be arrested if she tried to board a plane to the region, but to no avail. Few, if any, targets in federal terrorism investigations have been given such apparently blunt warnings from openly identified agents. “That's a first as far as I know,” says Trevor Aaronson, author of The Terror Factory: Inside The FBI's Manufactured War on Terrorism.

Sheikh, however, wasn't so lucky. The FBI didn't openly try to talk him out of boarding a plane allegedly to join Jabat Al Nusra, the al Qaeda-linked militant group fighting Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria. Sheikh has even gone so far as to claim that an FBI informant, posing as a nurse in Syria, engaged in a romantic relationship with him, and he was traveling to marry her. An undercover agent—as opposed to an openly identified one, like in Conley's case—told Sheikh he didn't have to go through with his plan, something investigators often do to prevent an entrapment defense. Both cases are currently in the pre-trial motions phase.

Though the FBI is often criticized for foiling terrorist plots of its own making, the cases of Conley and Sheikh are examples of what US officials repeatedly say is a growing problem: Americans traveling to Syria, training with militant groups, and returning as battle-hardened terrorists. Attorney General Eric Holder reiterated that threat last week before European officials in Oslo, and claimed there are “dozens of Americans” fighting in Syria and Iraq. The former head of the UK intelligence agency MI6, by contrast, said recently the threat of Islamist-based terrorism in the West has been dramatically overblown.

An FBI spokesperson told VICE in an email that in the last year FBI-led task forces have “arrested at least six US persons for attempting to travel to Syria to join extremist groups.”

Conley first attracted attention from law enforcement after roaming the grounds of a Faith Bible Chapel while taking notes. Church staff confronted her, at which point she allegedly became antagonistic. She told law enforcement that after the altercation, she thought: “If they think I'm a terrorist, I'll give them something to think I am.”

FBI agents met with Conley on a nearly weekly basis for a period of months. Conley never had a lawyer present, though she was advised of that right, according to the affidavit, and repeatedly made incriminating statements to the agents. “Conley was reminded, and acknowledged, that she had made statements to overt law enforcement about waging Jihad against the US,” according to the affidavit. “Conley was further advised, and acknowledged, that what she wanted to do is illegal.”

In another meeting, an “overt attempt to dissuade Conley from violent criminal activity,” an FBI agent “admonished Conley twice in the conversation that travel with intent to wage Jihad may be illegal and result in her arrest.” Conley was arrested roughly two weeks later, attempting to board a Turkey-bound flight to connect with a Tunisian ISIS fighter with whom she had begun an online romance. Conley was charged with material support of a terrorist organization, and faces up to 15 years in prison. In the affidavit, Conley comes across less as a sophisticated threat and more as a hapless teenager.

The FBI became aware of Basit Javed Sheikh, the North Carolina man, after he made repeated statements on Facebook praising Jabat Al-Nusra. In August 2013, according to court documents, Sheikh contacted someone through Facebook who claimed to be a nurse affiliated with al-Nusra, but was in fact an FBI informant, also known as a confidential human source (CHS). Sheikh was arrested three months later.

The exact nature of their relationship isn't yet clear, but according to court transcripts reviewed by VICE, Sheikh may have thought he was traveling to Syria, at least in part, to marry the “nurse”—that is, the FBI informant. “Did the defendant ever show interest in marrying this confidential source, CHS?” Sheikh, representing himself, asked Special Agent Jason Maslow at a pre-trial hearing last November.

Maslow, the FBI agent who swore the affidavit against Sheikh, didn't offer a clear answer. “I'm not aware of any,” Maslow responded initially, then added “there may have been” romantic interest from Sheikh “towards the end,” as well as “towards the beginning on some of the initial contacts.”

Apparently not satisfied, Sheikh pushed the issue. “There may have been?” he repeated.

“Yes,” Special Agent Maslow said.

Moments later, Sheik—not aware of criminal trial procedure—demanded that “that the full nature of the relationship between the CHS and the defendant be known so that the defendant's true motive of [sic] traveling overseas can be determined.” The judge stopped him and said that's called discovery, and happens later in the case. Like Conley, in court documents Sheikh came off as bumbling and perhaps depressed, obsessed with a fantasy of jihad as much or more than the real thing.

Regardless of the veracity of Sheikh's marriage claims, there were never any attempts by overt agents to dissuade Sheikh from traveling to Lebenon, then to Syria. Rather, a clandestine, undercover agent at one point told him, “You don't have to do this,” and “If you are scared and don't want to [travel to Syria] then make jihad in other ways.” Sheikh responded that he wasn't scared, said “I'm ready,” and shortly afterward bought his ticket to Lebanon, according to the affidavit. (The undercover agent had previously suggested Sheikh ask his sister for money for the plane ticket, which Sheikh couldn't afford on his own at the time.)

The FBI did not offer comment on the seeming discrepancies between the two investigations despite multiple requests from VICE. Lawyers for Conley and Sheikh have previously declined to talk to the media.

For some observers there is a larger problem of how the FBI investigates terrorism cases, including the signs that make a person a threat. “The FBI has a problematic theory of radicalization, where someone goes from speaking out about an issue to becoming violent,” says the ACLU's Mike German, a former FBI agent, who was speaking about the FBI generally and not about the Sheikh or Conley case specifically. “They describe it as a funnel, and once you're in the funnel, there's no coming out of that.” He says the strategy is built on a fallacy that “if we just leave them alone,” they'll wind up radicalized and violent anyway. The result, in many cases, is a plot that almost certainly couldn't have happened without FBI involvement.

Lake Ontario, image via WikiMedia Commons.
Partially treated sewage flows into Toronto's water systems on a regular basis, but officials aren't concerned.

Documents obtained by the Lake Ontario Waterkeeper (LOW) through freedom of information requests, show that in 2013 and 2012, sewage bypasses—a euphemism for when untreated, or partially treated, poop water is spewed into the lake—occurred every two weeks on average. In 2011, the average was weekly.

Bypasses occur when wastewater plants are unable to process the volume of sewage reaching a plant and have to let it pass without fully treating it. In the July 8 storm last year, over 1 million cubic metres (or 1.19 billion litres) was bypassed into surrounding water systems.

Water samples taken by LOW staff four days after last year’s storm show E. coli levels were more than three times the provincial standard near the Toronto Harbour and 20 times the standard in the Humber River. No special alerts concerning water quality were issued.

LOW, a charitable watchdog organization founded after deadly water contamination in Walkerton, Ont., began requesting documents pertaining to sewage bypasses after the lack of response from the City.

"We just assumed that the city would say something and then when they didn't... that was a moment when we realized that they were actively resisting the idea that the public should have more information," said LOW cofounder Krystyn Tully.

The general manager of Toronto Water, Lou Di Gironimo, claimed water quality was unaffected and director of water infrastructure management Michael D’Andrea downplayed it days later. (Di Gironimo was unavailable to comment on this article.)

Tully and LOW staff have been lobbying the city to institute a sewage bypass alert system for about two years as part of their Swim Guide—an app that allows users to see water quality in locations all over North America.

But Tully said they've met with resistance at every stage: "We could spend the rest of our lives trying to negotiate internal politics or we could just go straight to the province and maybe get it done a little faster.”

So almost a year later, on July 7, LOW filed an application for review with the Ontario Ministry of Environment requesting that Toronto be required to alert residents when sewage bypasses occur. LOW even made a model alert based off Toronto's weather advisories. To Tully, it's a reasonable, quick-fix that municipalities like Ottawa and Kingston already do. The goal is to have information accessible so a year-long research project like LOW undertook isn't necessary for people to decide whether or not to go for a plunge or paddle along Toronto's waterfront.

Toronto Water and Toronto Public Health, two separate divisions of the municipality of Toronto, say their responsibility only extends to 11 designated official beaches. Non-designated areas, like the sites of LOW's July 2013 samples, are outside of their scope.

Tully feels the city goes astray in limiting their responsibility to those 11 beaches: "There are all these places in Toronto where people are using the water that aren't official beaches and that aren't monitored and those are the areas that we're concerned about."  

Though the City is required by law to inform the Ontario Ministry of the Environment promptly of bypasses, both ministry and city officials say sewage bypasses are, in fact, part and parcel of the wastewater management system. They say the plants are SUPPOSED to bypass.

The decision to bypass is a conscious choice made by plant operators in order to avoid damage of plant equipment or flooding in streets and residential buildings, according to Toronto Water's statement to VICE. "Bypasses are a necessity in a combined sewer system."

Tully disagrees. "It reflects Toronto Water's tendency to defend a poorly designed, aging system... Toronto Water describes bypasses unapologetically, as if they are an unavoidable way of managing any sewage system."

In October 2013, a report to the city's executive committee revealed Toronto Water was facing a $10-billion funding shortfall over the next 10 years.

Of 12 cities rated by Ecojustice in 2013 for its annual review of sewage systems, Toronto was in the bottom three. Only London and Windsor fared worse. Toronto would have surpassed many other Ontario cities if it hadn't scored so poorly in the category of bypasses.

The ministry acknowledges bypasses are a necessity "during significant wet weather events" but a bypass only warrants a charge under the province's Environmental Bill of Rights if caused by non-natural causes, like human or mechanical error. The ministry did not charge the city for the July 2013 bypasses.

LOW's request is now in front of Ontario Environment Minister Glen Murray. He has 60 days to respond officially, however in a statement to the Toronto Sun last week he wrote: "I feel that the public has the right to know when bypasses occur."

@ek_hudson

A miniature pony chuckwagon race. Photo via the author.
Before the chuckwagon races, Marley Daviduk and her friend Samantha Baskerville ran across the track in front of a very full Grandstand at the Calgary Stampede and bicycle-locked their necks to an infield fence. The two members of the Vancouver Animal Defence League unfurled signs in violent red: “BLOODSPORT” and “NO MORE DEAD HORSES.” They’d been planning this for more than two years.

People noticed. There were laughs and boos. It didn’t take long for Stampede staff to see the women and cover them with a tarp.

Police came and the locks were cut. Baskerville, it turned out, had locked herself to an unwelded post. The women spent four hours in police custody—then hit the road after promising to appear in court in August. The chuckwagon races went on as though nothing had happened.



Marley Daviduk (R) and Samantha Baskerville (L) protest at the chuckwagon races on July 4th. Photos supplied by Marley Daviduk and Samantha Baskerville.

On July 6, two days after the incident, Daviduk called me from a campsite nestled in the safe mountain bosom of BC.

“We’re vegan animal rights activists—we don’t like rodeos,” she said. “But we really feel that with the chuckwagon races, there’s a chance at ending this… the risk of injury and death is way too high.”

She’s got a point. Chuckwagon racing, a distinctly Canadian sport that was first showcased at the 1923 Stampede, is the Stampede’s most deadly. In it, heats of 1,300-pound, four-by-four horse-wagons race around a one-kilometre track at full speed. I’m talking race times of less than 1 minute 20 seconds as contestants vie for prizes of over $1.15 million. There have been broken legs, heart attacks, and burst aneurysms. And imagine it: rigged in and going fast, one horse faltering means the others and the wagon coming down in a tangled mess of metal and flesh. More than 60 chuckwagon horses have died at the Stampede in the past 28 years, and this year marked the tenth straight year that a horse has died too. A driver was even hospitalized after a serious crash during training.

Chuckwagon racing isn’t the only part of the Stampede raising activists’ ire. Anita Virginillo and the Calgary Animal Rights Effort have been holding anti-rodeo demonstrations near the Stampede’s main gate throughout the event with signs that say “CONTEST OF CRUELTY,” “BUCK THE RODEO,” and “STOP THE BLOOD SPORT.”

Responses have been mixed. Most folks just smirk or nod and keep walking by, but there are also a lot of laughs and shouts like “get a job!” When I showed up on Sunday, a cowboy-hat-wearing firecracker of a facetious blonde was even giving the 20-or-so demonstrators shit for making signs with inks that contain animal by-products.

“We’re opposed to the exploitation and abuse of sentient animals that are used in the rodeo and subjected to a tremendous amount of piercing pain, stress, injury, and death all for the sake of entertainment,” Virginillo told me. Calf roping, she added, is particularly egregious.

“We’re proud Calgarians, but we’re ashamed of the Stampede,” she said. “It just seems so barbaric to us.”

I talked to a Stampede spokesperson who gave me a well-rehearsed PR spiel:

“The rodeo is a celebration of the skills that happen every day on ranches on five continents of the world,” Bonni Clark said from a media booth.  “These skills are rooted in best practices for animal care, and the rules at the Calgary Stampede are far more stringent than at other rodeos.”

Clark, who was in head-to-toe western wear, talked with a sort of smiling disingenuity as though a TV camera was pointed at her. When I asked her about all of the animal injuries and deaths at the Stampede, Clark didn’t move an inch. “Any time that you get a large volume of animals in any one place… you may have a catastrophic health issue,” she said. “It’s all a matter of perspective in that these animals are in a very public venue.” The Stampede, she added, is being used by animal rights activists to further their own interests. “They have a right to express their opinions,” Clark said. “They also have a right not to attend our event.”



For some reason, Stampede offiials placed signs near animal rights demonstrations. I found this funny. Photo via the author.
I guess Clark didn’t like my line of questioning, because she soon accused me of having a preset agenda (which I didn’t). She then tried to make me feel like an ignorant urban candy ass—or maybe I just felt that way already from being around all this leather, sweat, and swagger. Who knows.

“Ninety-eight percent of society have no contact and no context around large livestock… which makes the Stampede more essential than ever,” Clark said. “As a reporter, I get to go and ask the experts questions and really delve in deep, versus you—you might ask a few cursory questions here and there.” Could she tell that this offended me? Maybe not. “Look at our rodeo as a whole,” Clark added, “and judge it by its entirety.”

So that’s what I did.

The Stampede is a spectacle: 18,000 people, most in cowboy hats, seated and standing and drinking in the early afternoon around an arena that smells faintly of hot tarmac, beer, hay, sweat, and shit. There’s a lively announcer, rodeo clown antics, and plenty of plugs for sponsor. There are even beautiful blonde women in bright outfits who ride around the ring between events while people shout, talk, cheer, and laugh in the summer sun.

My media pass gets me close to the action. And if you’re the type who’s looking for cruelty, you can find it. There’s a guy standing next to the chutes in calf roping (called ‘tie down roping’ in Calgary to make it sound more humane) who pulls the little three month-old animals’ ears and slaps their heads before the gates open (Clark says that the slap-happy dude is only making sure that the animals run out head-first to be hogtied by a cowboy chasing it down on a horse). Then there’s steer wrestling, where a cowboy leaps off a horse and grabs a bull’s horns and pivots the animal by the neck until—wham—it hits the ground. No surprise: a steer was euthanized the other day after suffering a serious neck injury in the event.

Calf roping is raising activists' ire. Photo via the author.
Saddle bronc, bareback, and bull riding all operate on a similar premise: tighten a flank strap around a wildly bucking animal’s hindquarters (not its balls as a lot of people believe), then hang on for dear life.

For Stampede animals born and raised on a ranch, you’re bred to buck. Then you’re sent down to Calgary and squeezed into a tiny chute. Then suddenly some guy jumps on your back and the chute opens and—bam—the strap tightens and spurs dig into your sides and you jump and kick while people in the stands cheer when all you’re really trying to do is get the fucker off and get the strap loose. (“The flank strap,” PR lady Clark says, “is fuzzy sheep’s wool” that “tickles” the horses “sensitive underbelly” to encourage bucking). God forbid you break a limb or don’t perform, then it’s off to the processing plant. Mmm horse meat.

I see this, and part of me wants to see at least one rodeo cowboy get his teeth kicked in. And then I see a bareback rider get his hand caught in a rope and dragged under the mad bucking bronco until he’s cut free. Gasps and cheers. It was terrible. And there was another bull that attacked a horse after throwing off its rider. If the bull’s horns hadn’t been trimmed (how unfair), it would have been a goddamn bloodbath.

I ask spectators how they feel about this all. No surprise that most love the sport—they’ve put down good money (as much as $267 for an infield seat) to be here. There are audible gasps when calves get body-slammed in the roping event, but it doesn’t bother anyone enough that they get up and leave. Ultimately, however, it’s hard to gauge what average Calgarians think about the rodeo, because if they find it distasteful, they just won’t go. Still, rodeo attendance remains steady at the Stampede, and I’d hazard to guess that most Calgarians don’t give too much of a shit about the sport either way.



A three month-old calf is hogtied at the Calgary Stampede. Photo via the author.
So I see and experience all of this, but—believe it or not—I also start to get it too. The rodeo is one of our last true bloodsports, a distinctly North American nod to the chariot races and animal hunts of ancient Rome’s coliseum. It’s man vs. nature at its most primal, a reminder of what kind of skills it took for our species to come out on top—a domineering sport pioneered by wild west daredevil cowboys who probably couldn’t have cared less about what the bull felt when they jumped on its back. And today’s competitors are skilled—there’s no denying this. So skilled that rodeo can be an art. I’m talking about Fred Whitfield swinging a rope or the perfect grace of a one-handed bull ride, the cowboy in control (not flapping around like a pathetic ragdoll), and riding in his crisp John B. Stetson hat, even after the buzzer goes, then jumping off the raging animal and landing on his feet with the bull calming right down and trotting out of the arena as though it’s all in a day’s work. That’s the ideal, I guess, but rodeo usually isn’t so graceful and smooth.

There’s a paradigm split as wide as Alberta is long between those up in arms for the animals and those who darn well are gonna rodeo until the cows come home. And it’s funny too—continued protests only seem to spur on the Stampede’s “we care so much about the animals” rhetoric. OK, they take protective measures and mitigate risks, but let’s not deny it: rodeo is cruel. How could it not be? Call a spade a spade, I say—rodeo is as mean as it gets, but it’s also a hell of a lot of fun.


@dsotis

If you ask the linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky, the Arab Spring did not begin in Tunisia in 2011—it began with the October 2010 protests in the town of Gdeim Izik, in Western Sahara's occupied territories. The former Spanish colony has been illegally occupied by Morocco since 1975. Its territory is divided in two by a 1,677-mile long sand wall and surrounded by some 7 million land mines.

The native Sahrawis, led by their independence movement the Polisario, are recognized by the International Court of Justice as the rightful owners of the land. However, Morocco hijacked Western Sahara's decolonization process from Spain in 1975, marching some 300,000 settlers into the territory. This triggered a 16-year war between Morocco and the Polisario, which forced more than 100,000 Sahrawis into exile across the border in Algeria. Technically, Western Sahara is still Spanish and remains Africa's last colony.

Whether adrift in refugee camps and dependent on aid or languishing under Moroccan rule, the Sahrawis are still fighting for their independence in an increasingly volatile region. Meanwhile, the UN has no mandate to monitor human rights in occupied Western Sahara. VICE News travels to Western Sahara's occupied and liberated territories, as well as the Polisario-run refugee camps in Algeria, to find out more about one of the world's least-reported conflicts.

In the first part, we attend the 38th anniversary celebration of the proclamation of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic. The Sahrawis celebrate this anniversary every year despite the facts that Morocco controls a third of their homeland and the parade takes place in Algerian refugee camps run by the Polisario.

At the celebration, we meet Sahrawi activist Sidahmed Talmidi, who, in October 2010, helped mobilize the Gdeim Izik protest camp near Laâyoune, the capital of occupied Western Sahara. Chomsky refers to the thousands of Saharwis who gathered there to demonstrate against both their unequal social and economic status and the brutal denial of their human rights as the real beginning of the Arab Spring.

Then Ahmed Salem, a war veteran and commander of the Polisario's 2nd Battalion, shows us around the makeshift refugee camps in the arid desert, where more than 100,000 Sahrawis who have escaped the Moroccan occupation have lived for nearly 40 years, relying on humanitarian aid and waiting for the chance to return to their homeland.

The Macedonian capital of Skopje saw its second angry Albanian demonstration in as many weeks on Friday. A week earlier, on July 4, the city’s Albanian minority rioted against the outcome of a politically-charged murder trial, dubbed the “Monster Case.” So, come the weekend, everyone was expecting another round of hurled concrete, baton swings, and burned trash cans.

Macedonia is a divided country. Slightly less than two thirds of the population are ethnically Macedonian. The second largest ethnic grouping, accounting for just over a quarter of the population, is Albanian.

In 2001, tensions between the two groups escalated into an armed conflict between government security forces and the Albanian National Liberation Army (NLA). The conflict was short lived and brought to a close with the Ohrid Agreement, a peace treaty that saw NLA commanders rebranded as legitimate politicians and enhanced social and political rights being granted to Macedonia’s Albanian citizens.

While armed hostilities ended nearly 13 years ago, relations between the different groups are still not all that friendly. Albanians still feel disadvantaged, neglected, and that their rights are unequally applied.

The “Monster Case” has become the latest shitty banner for disaffected Albanians in Macedonia to rally around. The case saw seven Albanians tried for the execution-style murder of five ethnic Macedonians. The prosecution framed the murders as acts of Islamic terrorism, designed to destabilize the country.

On Monday June 30, the court found six of the seven guilty, sentencing them to life imprisonment. The verdict enraged the Albanian community, who saw the trial as a mockery. Commentators from both sides of the ethnic divide have observed that the evidence against most (some say all) of the defendants would not have held up in any other court.

"The NLA is not DUI. The NLA is with the people." Essentially, what they're saying is "Even if the DUI's leadership is made up of former NLA members, you no longer represent us. The NLA represented us."

The Albanian community was even more pissed off by the support lent to the case’s outcome by senior Democratic Union for Integration (DUI) politicians. The DUI was formed from the ashes of the NLA, and since 2008 has been in a ruling coalition with the Macedonian nationalist VMRO DPMNE. For many Albanians this is seen as a betrayal, which is manifested in endless neglect of Albanian interests in the party’s governance. Support for the conviction of the six Monster Case defendants was seen as typifying the sellout.

So, on Friday, July 4, the city exploded. Thousands marched the short distance from a mosque in the city-center Albanian neighborhood of Bit Pazar to Mavrovka shopping center. They were met by dozens of armored vehicles and row upon row of body-armor-clad, riot-shield-bearing, faceless-under-visor riot cops.

Fighting soon broke out between crowd and cops. Tear gas and rubber bullets were deployed. Protesters responded by hurling crates of beer bottles and chunks of concrete. The police pushed the protesters back into the narrow alleyways of central Skopje’s Albanian neighborhoods. Every street was bitterly fought for until the protesters had been spread so thin throughout the labyrinth of side streets that all momentum was lost.

Macedonian-language media was joined by DUI and VMRO politicians in denouncing the violence. However, DUI’s leadership acknowledged that a repeat of that violence would be even more damaging than making concessions to its actors. So, while the protesters planned another Friday of protest, DUI officials began denouncing the trial and its verdict, while calling on protesters to refrain from further violence.

Meanwhile, ethnic-Macedonian soccer fan groups, known for being militant supporters of VMRO, planned a counter-protest. Many feared the Macedonian protesters would clash with their Albanian counterparts.

So it was that last Friday, July 11, Skopje city center was once again full of police and armored vehicles.

Lunchtime prayers ended and thousands of Albanian men gathered once more outside the mosque in Bit Pazar. Many concealed their faces. Those whose faces weren’t hidden displayed bitter anger. Red and black flags bearing the Albanian eagle were waved high alongside banners bemoaning the DUI and the Monster Case. As they marched forward it looked certain that things would kick off.

After less than half a mile police and protesters were toe to toe. More precisely, nose to riot shield. Angry nationalist slogans were screamed and chunks of concrete were sent hurtling over police lines and into the gathered press pack, which found itself scrambling for cover between photographs.

Unlike the week before, however, the legions of police with their panzer division of riot-suppression vehicles remained remarkably calm. Behind the scenes, officers dashed back and forth with preparatory fire extinguishers; but at the frontlines, cops maintained poker faces.

Then, after an hour or so had passed and sufficient anger had been displayed, the protesters started marching back the way they came, with only a handful of testosterone-pumped adolescent stragglers lingering to throw a few last taunts at the police and assemblage of journalists. Strangely, the Macedonian counter protest had failed to materialize also.

Just 30 minutes later and no one would have been able to guess Skopje had been on the brink of chaos.

A tight lid, manifested in the detention of political prisoners, is kept on dissidence in Macedonia for an important reason. This is the second instance in as many months of ethnic issues boiling over into violent action. The first, in May, saw Macedonians destroying Muslim and Albanian property following the fatal stabbing of a young Macedonian. During the 2001 conflict it seemed at times as though the only solution would be federalization, effectively splitting the country into two nations. Now, as tensions rise to the surface again, there are commentators that fear federalization—or worse, war—might be the ultimate outcome.

If that happened, the repercussions could spread beyond just Macedonia, across the Balkans. If Macedonia’s Albanians are allowed to form their own state, why not the Serbs in northern Kosovo, or Bosnia’s Republika Srpbska?

As with Macedonia, there has never been a proper resolution to these divided countries that emerged following the disintegration of Yugoslavia. And just as Yugoslavia began to fall apart following seemingly innocuous secessions, there is a fear that boundary changes in Macedonia could trigger serious unrest across the Balkans.

Click here for last week's episode.

Exclusive photos courtesy of Paris Hilton

Paris Hilton is better than you. This is an indisputable fact. You might think she's “famous for being famous,” but while her trust-fund-kid peers lived off mommy and daddy, she used her primo last name to build a business empire that includes fragrances, a hotel, and a chain of Paris stores in countries around the world. Along the way, she essentially invented the reality TV star, setting the stage for Kim Kardashian to possibly make a reported $200 million off a video game. 

Oh, and Hilton's also one of the greatest pop stars of all time. 

If you don't believe me, watch Hilton's new music video for “Come Alive,” the long-awaited lead single of her new album on Birdman's Cash Money label. Like Cher’s “Believe,” the song's electro sound and romantic lyrics make it the perfect track to dance to both after you get married and after your boyfriend dumps you for a boy he met on Tinder. Hilton shows this in the video by playing with a unicorn and lying on a giant pink, fluffy thing that looks like both cotton candy and a cloud. 

Like Madonna during her early years, Hilton understands that pop music is purely about having fun. This is clear throughout her short but brilliant discography: the campy  “Drunk Text,” (sample lyric: “I went out to the club the other night / To, you know, / Dance with my bitches”) and her debut album Paris, which gave us the now classic song “Stars Are Blind.” Instead of squashing metaphors into three-minute songs Lady Gaga–style, Hilton sings catchy hooks about nothing over fun melodies, which is all anyone ever wanted from a pop song. 

The best part is that Hilton never tries to seem “just like us” the way Jennifer Lawrence brags about pooping or Hillary Clinton claims she understands poverty. “Maybe 'cause I'm hot, hot today / And I'm so, so, so, sexy / All the boys, all the silly boys, / They want to fight over me,” she brags on Paris’s “Fightin’ Over Me.” For years feminists have dreamed of a Hollywood that produces more than “relatable” female stars and actresses, and Hilton the Pop Star is that girl.

Interested in learning more about the ideas behind Hilton’s pop music, I called her last week while she was cruising down Mulholland Drive to talk about her new album, her theories about music, and unicorns.  

VICE: “Good Time,” your last song, had more of a hip-hop flavor. This song is electro-pop. Why did you decide to change genres?
Paris Hilton: I love all types of music, and the whole album is very eclectic. It has all different types [of music]. For the first single, I want it to be more of a party song—this one is a song about love. I think summertime is about love, so I really wanted to write a song that just conveyed the feeling of love and how amazing it feels and how it makes you happy and come to life. I just thought it would be the perfect summer song.

Although the song is clearly about summer love, it gets a bit dark during the bridge. Were you trying to capture the ups and downs of romance?
Yeah, love is not always perfect—things happen. So I just wanted the song to also have that there as well.

What's the perfect summer song?
I think the perfect summer song is something that has beautiful lyrics that make you happy, has a fun beat, and puts you in a good mood. That’s why “Stars Are Blind” is such a summer hit and still to this day an iconic summer song

How does this song fit the Cash Money brand since you’re attached to their label now?
What’s great about their brand is that they not only do hip-hop; they also do other artists who do other types of music. Birdman loved the song when I first played it to him. He had me play it for him like a hundred times in a row at his house, and he was loving it—I think they love it too. It’s something new for them because they mostly, obviously, do hip-hop, and he’s loving getting more into this electronic world.

Why are there unicorns in the music video?
Because I wanted the music video to be a fantasy dream world and just be frilly and magical, and I think the unicorn is the epitome of magical creatures—and I’ve always wanted to have one.

If you had a unicorn, what would you name it?
I do have a little pony named Lady Coco Chanel, but if I had a unicorn, I would probably just name her Princess Unicorn. 

Is making music for you therapeutic? Other artists, like outsider Farrah Abraham, say recording can have that effect.
I think being in the studio and writing down your feelings is kind of like writing in a journal almost, so I’d say it’s therapeutic. Music is for anyone—you listen to it. It can just change your mood in a minute and make you sad or happy, and it’s just such a powerful thing.

With the exception of Farrah’s noise album, you’re the only reality star whose music has been critically acclaimed. Why do you think your music has succeeded when other reality stars have failed?
Because music is something that’s always been a huge part of my life. I played the piano and the violin since I was three years old. I was in chorus my entire life since I was a little girl, and my mom was an amazing singer and just always grew up doing music, and it’s always been a passion of mine. So I think that’s why. Maybe other people just do it just for whatever—fun—but I’m actually really serious about it.

You take everything from music videos about unicorns to your fragrance line very seriously as a businesswoman. Do you ever go on vacation?
Not really. Everything I do is always work. I can fly somewhere, get paid, then do the event, and then—if I want, if I have time—I can stay for like an extra couple of days and vacation. It’s just I’m booked so much. The offers are so amazing that I don’t want to turn things down, so I do all of the best things. It doesn’t really leave much free time for me. I don’t mind, though. I love it.

What audience has kept your music and brand popular?
I will look at that when I do certain signings for a fragrance. I will get the little kids coming who are like four or five years old, and then the teenage girls, and then of course my gay boy fans, who I love. The moms, the grandmas, and then the other guys who are just there to hit on me. It’s all ages—girls, boys, men, women. It’s really awesome, and that’s around the world. They call themselves the Little Hiltons, and I meet them around the world, and I really care about my fans, and I think that’s something really important because those are the people that mean the most in this business.

Unlike a lot of celebrities—such as Hillary Clinton, who recently said that she had been struggling for money when she left the White House—you’ve always been very upfront about being born privileged. Why is that?
I’m just always honest with everything, and that is a truth. Yes, I’m very fortunate. I did come from a wealthy family, but at the same time I didn’t have to work, and I chose to. I’ve done this all on my own, so I’m very proud of that fact. I easily could have been like all these spoiled trust-fund kids who never work a day in their lives, but I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to make a name for myself, and be independent, and not have to ask my family for anything. I’m very proud of what I accomplished and created. 

Follow Mitchell Sunderland on Twitter. 

Eric Holder has often seemed unsure of himself when tackling white-collar crime. Photo via Flickr user North Charleston

It's not especially controversial to say that the American legal system has taken a major step backward under the stewardship of Barack Obama, who by most accounts was a brilliant constitutional law professor in Chicago before he became a politician. Once-unthinkable measures like drone assassinations, extraordinary rendition, and the prison at Guantanamo Bay are now widely accepted—during the Bush years, at least, these tools of the war on terror could be lambasted as evils that might soon be corrected, whereas now it's obvious they're here to stay. In the eyes of Attorney General Eric Holder, corporate crime seems to exist solely in the form of relatively trivial insider trading schemes, while the powerful men (they are almost invariably men) who wrecked the economy in the years leading up to the crash 2008 and desperately want Hillary Clinton to become president walk the streets of New York like kings. Wall Street bankers routinely do things in the spirit of "disruption" that normal citizens simply can't get away with, while our judges and prosecutors target the working poor for incarceration in an increasingly for-profit prison system. Shamelessly destructive innovation is the name of the game, a reality many of us have begun to accept as the way the world works now.

But it didn’t quite fit that dystopian picture when, on Monday, the Justice Department took Wall Street behemoth Citigroup to task for its role in hawking shady, mortgage-backed investments in the run-up to the financial crisis. Touting a $7 billion settlement that includes the largest civil penalty ever imposed, Holder might as well have been thumping his chest as he celebrated this alleged triumph for the little guy.

“Citi is not the first financial institution to be held accountable by this Justice Department, and it will certainly not be the last,” the attorney general said at a Washington, DC, press conference. “The bank’s misconduct was egregious. As a result of their assurances that toxic financial products were sound, Citigroup was able to expand its market share and increase profits... The bank's activities shattered lives and livelihoods throughout the country and also around the world.”

Could it be that at long last Holder is giving us a legitimate round of score-settling? Thus far in the Obama era we’ve heard more about populist rage from former president Bill Clinton—he always did have his pulse on the electorate, that Arkansas hick—who privately suggested to former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner that the only way to really appease the angry horde would be to slit the throats of guys like Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein. Does the Citi settlement, when taken together with some other hefty fines recently slapped on banks like JP Morgan ($13 billion) that played the mortgage repackaging game, mean Obama’s lawyers are ready to answer the bell and finally take real steps to prevent another financial catastrophe?

If the performance of Wall Street banks on the stock market in the hours after the settlement was announced serves as any indication, not so much. Citigroup shares were on the upswing by the afternoon, suggesting that the fine wasn't enough to seriously harm the company’s brand or its profits (it'll take just one quarter’s corporate earnings to pay that huge cash settlement, by the way). In addition to absolving Citigroup for its relatively minor dabbling in the mortgage-backed security market, the government is also letting it off the hook for its much more systematic exploitation of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). And unlike BNP Paribas, the French bank the Feds actually extracted a guilty plea from recently, Citi doesn’t have to formally plead guilty to a crime so much as cop to amoral errors and pony up dough.

Of course, Holder did his best to inspire fear when he suggested at his press conference that criminal prosecution of Citigroup employees is still not completely out of the question. But who believes him when he suggests even a single American might one day go to jail for trying too hard to make money too fast? Deterrence requires an element of raw fear, and there’s just no reason to be afraid of the Obama Justice Department, which has been paralyzed with anxiety of its own about prosecutorial failure from day one.

"DOJ's thick packet of self-serving public relations spin cannot hide the fact that it has again failed to disclose any meaningful information about Wall Street's massive, systemic, illegal fraudulent conduct," Dennis Kelleher, CEO of the non-profit financial reform advocacy group Better Markets, said in a statement in response to the Citigroup settlement. "Today’s actions again confirm the indefensible double standard of justice DOJ established of treating Wall Street’s biggest, richest, most politically connected banks more favorably than anyone else. History is going to judge DOJ harshly for not only letting Wall Street off, but for letting the American people down."

In fact, taken with NYC US Attorney Preet Bahara finally losing an insider trading case last week after cruising through his previous 85, one might argue the entire legal system’s legitimacy is reaching a crisis point. When the government can't even successfully prosecute insider trading cases, a crime that seems laughably old-school in comparison to the complex derivative swapping schemes masterminded by the guys who ruined the economy, you know we're in trouble.

That the attorney general is still pursuing the mortgage scheming is something, I guess. The banks are paying large sums of money. Great. But Holder is displaying a special brand of ignorance when he drops rhetorical gems like this one about charging big fines rather than putting people in jail:

"It boggles my mind that this would not have deterrable impact, but if it does not we will hold people accountable yet again," he said Monday. In other words, companies that make massive profits off of illegal activities have to pay some of those profits to the government in the form of fines, which should be enough to scare them from breaking laws in the first place. We can expect another round of this game when the government (almost) inevitably reaches a deal with Bank of America in the coming weeks for its own mortgage trickery. And if that doesn't do the job, Holder will try the same thing over and over again and see how that works out. 

Follow Matt Taylor on Twitter.

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Last week, in Beyond “Existentialism," the first installment of this series, I told the story of how I first encountered Terence McKenna. This week, I’ve organized a list of my 30 favorite Terence McKenna memes. McKenna defined a meme as “the smallest unit of an idea that still has coherency” and said he was very conscious of creating them during his talks. He explained in 1996:

What a gene is to biology, a meme is to ideology ... Madonna is a meme, Catholicism is a meme, Marxism is a meme, yellow sweaters are a meme ... rainbow-colored dreadlocks are a meme. Launch your meme boldly and see if it will replicate—just like genes replicate, and infect, and move into the organism of society. And, believing as I do, that society operates on a kind of biological economy, then I believe these memes are the key to societal evolution. (memes, drugs, and community)

The King George Brothel in Berlin opens at 4 PM, Monday through Sunday, excluding the Christmas Holidays. For €99 ($135) you can stay there until dawn, when the first street cleaners are passing, and drink as much as you like and have sex as much as you like with Klaudia, Katja, Petronella, Alina, Barby and whichever of the 27 staff members are perched on the velvet stools or the leather booths beneath the many red lights next to the bar.

The King George is Germany's first flat-rate brothel. It's the sex industry's answer to the global recession. In Berlin there are about half a dozen of them. The brothels themselves prefer calling it "all-inclusive" rather than flat-rate. As owner Sascha Erben says, “this is sex after all, it's not text messaging or long distance calls.”

Alina works the door. She's wearing this pink tube dress. It covers her body like a bun covers a hotdog. When she gets up from her chair, the dress zips up over her ass until she jigs it down again with her fingers. The rest of the girls wear the same dress in different grades of pink. It's like a house uniform. Zipping up and down, flashing bare bum and bits of crotch as they walk around on stilettos that make them look like those fishermen's houses built on stilts—the ones that don't outlast storms or oil slicks. They all smoke cigarettes. Marlboros or Chesterfields with health warnings written in Cyrillic. And everything inside from the drink in your hand to the seat you lean on smells like candy floss.

As soon as I tell them I'm just writing a story, they take out their phones, start eating pizza, and pluck stray hairs from their bikini lines—the same things they would have done if I'd told them I was gay, I guess.

The layout of the building is an homage to the penis itself; a long narrow bar leads into two tight networks of small rooms with wipe-clean beds and showers and lighting that you'd never want to read a book under. Europop plays from tiny speakers, hidden high up in the shadows. I've never been to a nightclub in Dubai but I imagine that beyond the mirrored dance floors, the Swarowski glasses and the $5,000 table reservations, the DJ's got the same bad collection as the King George.

"Do you like the music?" I ask Alina. "What music," she says?

The majority of the women are from Eastern Europe. Klaudia is from Austria and she's something of a celebrity in Berlin. Men request her for €200 an hour. Alina says she's from Napoli and that she misses the sea and her home. But both Alina, me, and her accent know her home isn't Italy. It's probably Romania. The same goes for the other girls speaking Spanish like Petronella and Barby. They learn it growing up in Romania watching Spanish telenovelas and they speak it because it's fun, she says. And it is fun pretending to be Spanish, but in Germany where being Romanian is the only thing that makes people as mad as kiddie fiddling it's good sense, too.

Obviously they lie about their age. Someone who looks in their 40s is in their 30s and the 30-year-olds are all 19. But I guess that's just a symptom of  the dishonest premise brothels are built on. The women act like the men are interesting and desirable, and the men convince themselves they actually are. 

The men start arriving as the factories and shops close for the day. They're in uniform too: steel cap boots, Snickers work pants with some grey t-shirt tucked in so best to highlight the arch of their gut.

Sascha knows his clientele well. “We cater for taxi-drivers, the unemployed, guys who aren't making much more than €1,500 a month.”

Sascha bought the King George over six years ago. It was a strip club before that. Sascha grew up in East Germany where his first taste of the oldest job in the world was renting out apartments by the hour for a family friend. When the Wall came down, Sascha moved south to Bavaria before deciding on a return to Berlin. “A smile is the most important thing in a prostitute,” he says, “they don't have to be pretty, in fact it's often better if they're not. What you want is the sort of girl who can still turn on some charm after twelve hours sitting down with nothing to do.”

Sascha comes across as likable. The girls support the argument. Klaudia tells me he's too kind. He loans the girls money. He bought her a €300 handbag. But you can't tell the other girls that.

But does he fuck them too? “No," Sascha says. "The minute you do that you're not respecting them as an employee. And it can cause problems between the girls.”

But who does he fuck then? “I do have a girlfriend, but finding someone to build a family with me considering my business is hard.”

The girls have families though. Klaudia has a 17-year-old. She picks her up from work at night and they go eat kebabs together. Klaudia is also a nurse. She's useful to have in the brothel, but less so in the real world where she only earns €1300 a month. A good night at the King George gets her €600. She does OK as a prostitute. She holidays in Ibiza in summer, the Alps in winter.

“A lot of the money isn't even from sex. The men just want to talk or share a bottle of champagne with me,” she says. “I'll often have three of them here at once sitting in the jacuzzi and laughing.”

It isn't just about sex. Sascha's got it all worked out. The average flat-rate customer fucks 2.7 girls. The rest of that time, he's drinking at the bar, feeding coins into the poker machine, maybe even having a lie down in one of the rooms on his own.

“Traditional brothels,” Sascha explains, “are uncomfortable for a lot of men. They rush you in and out and some guys get nervous and can't perform. Here, a customer can treat it like his own pub and they have time to talk to the girls.”

The King George is open seven days a week but the girls are allowed to work a maximum of five days a week. “To regenerate,” Sascha says, “Mentally and physically.”

A woman might have sex twenty times in a night. I can't and won't ever begin to imagine how a person regenerates mentally from that.

The girls leave and come back. Katja from Hungary has two children and is a qualified care worker who can't find work right now, so she's back at the King George for the moment.

Does she like it? “Sometimes but not really. You're not supposed to like work, though,” she says.

Sascha doesn't have a problem hiring. Some days there are even lines outside. “In other brothels a girl might not even make her cab fare,” he says.

There are more red lights inside the King George than all the junctions in Germany. On a bad night, a girl will come away with €100. For every euro that a customer spends they make 50 cents. Extras—like blowjobs without condoms, anal, kissing—earn them extra. Because it's Germany and prostitution is not illegal, they will pay tax on that, and their contribution will go to building schools, hospitals, bridges, boots for German soldiers in Afghanistan. Hydra, an organization that fights for prostitutes' rights in Germany, estimates there are close to half a million sex workers in Germany. Two thirds of them are not German. Klaudia the Austrian is as close as it gets. She has a weathered tattoo on her shoulder. It was her first one as a teenager and it says "Love."

“It's silly,” she says. Love? I ask. “No, just the tattoo.”

Follow Conor Creighton on Twitter

Screencaps via streaming episodes on the MTV site

“Not based on a true story. Not inspired by true events. Just true.” 

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Thanks to its thriving sex industry, cheap beer and even cheaper accommodation, Riga—for tourists, at least—is synonymous with the kind of bro holidays that end in black eyes and disorderly conduct convictions. Understandably, people in the Latvian capital aren't too happy about this, which is possibly why the city has opened the doors to a building that will attract a very different kind of visitor—the former KGB headquarters, which haven't been accessible to the public for the past 20 years.

If you didn’t know what had taken place inside the building you’d probably pass by its taped-up windows without suspecting a thing. But it was a place that provoked fear from thousands during the time of Soviet rule in Latvia; for more than 40 years, this was where those who were thought to have defied the state were imprisoned, tortured and, in the worst cases, killed.

Photo via Flickr user Barnaby Dorfman

Good Golly, Miss Molly. Thousands of Central American children who have illegally crossed the border into the US sure are causing a lot of problems over in Capitol Hill. Headlines describe the “flow,” “flood,” and “tide” of selfish little brats who dared to risk their lives in the hope of a better future. What are we gonna do with all these whippersnappers? The New York Times recently ran, in its opinion section, a debate entitled “How to Stop the Surge of Migrant Children;” in it, six immigration experts discussed the issue. They hemmed, and they hawed, but came to no concrete conclusions. I have, though.

Want to stop the surge? First, you’re going to have to barricade the doors. Use whatever you have handy. My suggestion? Your great-great-great grandfather's—the one who valiantly fought on the side of the good ol’ boys during the Civil War—trunk filled with rebel paraphernalia. Because the enemy will try to enter your home, operating under the auspices of wanting work cleaning said home and parenting your children for a sub-living wage. Don’t let them.

Or, failing that, do, but make a solemn promise to your God that you won’t respect them and their sacrifice. No matter what, don’t treat them as people. Because, by the same God I just name-checked, your ancestors came on a boat, which is far more dignified than swimming across a river, so that inherently makes them better people, more deserved of rights.

Photo via Flickr user Brian Kelley

Next, go to your PC. Note I said PC, not Mac. MAC, as we all know, is an acronym for Minority Amiable Computers, of which you want nothing to do with. Register your fear and revulsion for the other on a message board of some kind, or in the comments section of a YouTube video that has little to nothing to do with the issue at hand. Having done so, microwave yourself a meat treat, because you earned it.

Surround yourself with the safety that is your guns. Note that I said guns, with an “S.” Plural. The more guns you have, the safer you, and by proxy your family, are. That is, after all, the last advice God gave to us before he died. Note that I said he, with an “H.” It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and “Eve-qual Rights Amendment.”

Think about the good old days. This isn’t necessary to the cause, per say, but it will make you feel better. Doesn’t it feel nice, just rememberin’? Rockin’ in your favorite chair? Drinking a lemonade your long-suffering wife mixed for you, in spite of the fact that you haven’t spoken to her in a non-aggressive tone since the Carter administration?

Photo via Flickr user Xavier Badosa

Unlearn any Spanish you may have picked up by virtue of being an American human being that exists in the 21st century. Un-like that Santana song you awkwardly danced to once in 1978. Santana’s one of the good ones, sure—he’s got his own brand of tequila, which in spite of its ethic origins, sure as shit can get your second wife Amber turnt the fuck up, emphasis on fuck. But his ethnicity colors (yeah, you went there, but hashtag sorry not sorry) his gifts. This ain’t about Carlos. This is about your tax dollars. Being used on bleeding heart, socialist rhetoric.

Unbarricade the doors, but only for a minute. You need a smoke break. I mean, you could smoke in your own home, but why do that when you have such a nice deck? Everyone knows how much you spent re-staining it. I mean, you got a sweet deal from your buddy Brian, who’s a fucking grand wizard when it comes to staining wood, but still. It wasn’t cheap.

Because nothing’s cheap in this goddamned country. And you know why? ‘Cause you’re paying the bills for all these illegal immigrants, and welfare queens, and motherfuckers who are unwilling, unable to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and make something of themselves like you and your parents and your parent’s parents did. Oh, your God. Thinking about it’s making your blood boil again. You’re gonna need to go online soon. Finish your cigarette, then rebarricade the doors.

Go back to your PC. Read the comments on your comments, and comment on those comments. Get a dialogue going! Someone disagree with your opinion? Tell them that they deserve to get brutally murdered in front of everyone they love. It’s the only way to affect change!

Photo via Flickr user Kevin Dooley

It has probably, at this point, occurred to you that you do not own enough guns. This is a common realization and one, thankfully, that can be quickly rectified. Short story long, you’re going to need to buy more guns. But you already knew that. The race war is imminent, after all! And if there’s one thing you love more than your guns, it’s war. So stock up! The enemy is Catholic, and if you know one thing about Catholics, it’s that they love making more Catholics.

After stocking up on heat, look your own child in the eyes and distance him from the non-English speaking children you hate on spec. Reconcile the fact that he is as innocent, as pure, as deserved of a future as the son you hate fucked into your second wife’s womb on a night you got too loco (Damnit, there’s that infernal language again!) to put a rubber on it. Because, I mean, Amber was looking good that night. Not to say that she still looks as good, but when you got together? That bitch was slammin'.

Think about the good old days, again. Think about the days in which Amber’s pussy wasn’t all stretched out. GodDAMN. She was nice, huh? You could almost resent your sons, if you didn’t love them so fucking much, for what they did to that sweet snatch. But you do love them. You’d do anything for them. Which is why you’re willing to sacrifice it all, sacrifice your life, sacrifice your future, for their future.  You can’t stomach them being persecuted for nothing, for being born into an alleged patriarchal white male society, without you taking a stand. Without standing up for  their rights, which are being infringed upon, apropos of nothing. Wait, did I talk too big? With my usage of "apropos"? I apologize.

Unbarricade the doors, again. Come out, all barrels blazing. Go out in a hail of police gunfire, courtesy of pigs on the payroll of Barack Hussein—think about it—Obama, because your country has abandoned you. Because you are a martyr for your cause, the cause being the status quo. Know that you died, as you lived, unwilling to accept the tide that is change. Because you were a patriot. For a dead republic. 

Follow Megan Koester on Twitter.

Mexico's narcocorrido music genre and subculture openly celebrates the most extreme aspects of the country's drug war. The songs are filled with catchy, detailed narrations of beheadings, executions, coked-out nights, and a strangely consistent obsession with Buchanan's whiskey.

With lyrics like "We're bloddy and a little twisted / We love killing / Mass kidnappings are the way they should be done / All my crew with gold-plated AKs / Shooting up their bodies until they fall to pieces / A sharpened knife on hand for beheadings," the movimiento alterado—literally the "altered movement"—is more of a "we're-fucking-crazy-and-we-will-cut-you-up" movement.

The music scene originated in the old cartel citadel of Mexico's western Sinaloa state, and it's an open secret that most of the artists identified with the genre are tied to the local cartel.

VICE went to Mexico to talk to some of the genre's major producers and see whether they're as hard as their songs suggest.