Protesters greet President Obama in Austin, Texas. Photo by Todd Dwyer

It was never going to matter how many people Barack Obama deported, how many families he was willing to tear apart because someone crossed a line on a map without filling out the proper paperwork. It was never going to matter because the President of the United States is a Democrat, while his chief political opponents are Republicans, and the debate goes by a prepared script, not reality. He could have deported all 12 million undocumented immigrants by airlifting them back home via Predator drone and he still would have been labeled a blame-America Marxist who wants to give half the country back to Mexico.

But Obama did it anyway. With two-and-a-half years left in his administration, he has already surpassed George W. Bush—and every other president—when it comes to forcibly removing immigrants, having deported more than two million people so far (which comes out to around 1,110 people each day). Rather than welcome refugee children fleeing violence in Central America, his administration has requested billions of dollars to speed their deportation, while blaming his predecessor for signing a law that allows them to seek asylum. Several of those who have already been deported were murdered upon their return.

But according to the partisan script, Obama, deep down inside, does not want to do this. It breaks his heart, which comforts his liberal supporters while enraging the conservative opposition. Both camps have been so convinced of this that they’ve missed the reality right in front of their eyes, which matters much more to those being deported than what’s inside a cynical politician’s hypothetical heart.

On the liberal side, it’s been enough to quiet much of the dissent. Before his election, there were huge rallies for immigrant rights, but after Obama was inaugurated in 2009, many thought they finally had an ally in the White House. Indeed, the president promised that achieving comprehensive reform of America’s broken immigration system would be one of his top priorities. That’s why he had to be so tough and deport-y, he claimed: to convince Republicans to work with him.

Of course, outside of propping up the financial sector and bombing the Middle East, Republicans have never shown much willingness to work with this president on big-ticket legislation. But Obama—either naïve or just playing his base—wanted to keep trying, so earlier this year he begged those calling for “no more deportations” to give him some more time.

A father and son at an immigration rally in San Diego, California. Photo by Michael Righi

In March, the president asked advocates of immigration reform “to stick with him another 90 days, and press hard on Congress,” according to the New York Times. “If those efforts failed to lead to reform, Mr. Obama said he would work with them on administrative relief.”

To that end, the president asked his staff to draw up a list of things he could do that would allow him to enforce immigration laws “more humanely.” Throughout his first term, Obama denied he had the power to do anything of the sort, but in the summer of 2012 he acted unilaterally to grant “deferred action” status to some young people who had been brought to the United States illegally as children, making them the lowest enforcement priorities for deportation (while not altogether removing the threat of it).

Activists (and the AFL-CIO) had hoped the president could, if not halt deportations altogether, at least extend that “deferred action” protection to others, such as the parents of those children. By May 2014, however, Obama asked his staff “to hold off on completing a review of US deportation policies until the end of the summer,” according to the Associated Press.

By June—90 days later—the administration had backtracked altogether, responding to the influx of refugees by announcing a unilateral plan to “detain more [immigrants] and to accelerate their court cases so as to deport them more quickly,” the New York Times reported.

As for taking administrative actions to make the immigration system “more humane”?

“There is the chance that it could be before the end of the summer,” White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters this week. At the same time, “There is the chance that it could be after the summer.” No one can really say.

“I would like to know and to think that our president is trying his best,” said journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, perhaps America’s most famous undocumented immigrant, when I spoke to him earlier this summer. “But on this issue, I don’t think it’s been that personal or urgent for him.”

And why should it be? According to the script, he’s doing his best and if there’s anyone to blame, it’s the Republicans in Congress who won’t play nice and work with him. And while Obama may be objectively worse for immigrants than any Republican ever was (Ronald Reagan granted amnesty to millions of undocumented Americans) it’s not like those who support reform are going to turn to the GOP.

The way some Democrats tell it, he only stands to lose by keeping his promise.

“It would have the unhelpful consequence of putting the issue in the news in a way that doesn’t help Democrats, while also not accomplishing anything,” a Democratic strategist told Time magazine. While immigrants in US detention centers might quibble with that assessment, Democrats fear that acting so close to an election could hurt their chances at the polls, which is everything to them.

The president could have acted sooner, of course—months ago, or years even—but now those hoping for change have no choice but to wait some more. Is it time, then, to shift some of the blame for inaction from congressional Republicans to the man refusing to act? Not so fast, said Andrea Cristina Mercado, campaign director at the National Domestic Workers Alliance. Like many, she holds out hope that the president will in the end prove to be an ally.

“While there are some rumors that the president is not going to act, we have no reason to believe yet that that is true,” Mercado told me. “This is not the time to squabble over who is responsible for a failure to act." Nonetheless, she said, “We know that GOP leadership in the House blocked reform to date.”

While the president has of course reneged on his promises to act before, he probably will do something on immigration at some point in the near future—even if it's after an election his demoralized base won’t turn out for, because he hasn’t done anything for them. Still, those future actions will come too late for the hundreds of thousands of people he has deported while his self-imposed deadlines to act came and went. And with few in leadership roles really willing to blame him for that—contrasting starkly with what the public sees in the streets, where Obama is known as the “deporter-in-chief”—the president likely believes he can get by offering the bare minimum.

People in power tend to act when they fear the people beneath them, when they think there might be a real downside to not acting. When the people think they have a friend in power, the powerful feel little incentive to act on their behalf for there is almost no downside. When you can just ask people to wait patiently another 90 days for action, and they largely do, why even act at all?

Of course, that act is wearing thin and more and more people who once thought Obama an ally now consider him something of an enemy.

Jacob Swenson of National People's Action, a grassroots network of social justice organizations that has lobbied for immigration reform, told me he’s “disappointed that President Obama continues to stall, rather than take immediate action to protect families.” Since his group rallied outside the White House back in April, “over 135,000 people have been separated from their families as a result of deportations that the president could have prevented.”

“Ultimately,” said Swenson, “both Republicans and President Obama are failing our families.” When more people recognize that both are to blame—that Republicans blocked comprehensive reform while the most powerful Democrat unilaterally deported a record number of immigrants—they may start seeing the change they were promised. At the very least, politicians will stop taking their support for granted.

Follow Charles Davis on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr. 

Preparing for death was a much cleaner affair back in those disconnected days of the late 1980s, when a World Wide Web was just something bad that could happen in a Choose Your Own Adventure novel. You wrote your will, said your goodbyes, slammed Tiffany’s "I Think We’re Alone Now" into the cassette player, shut your eyes and just died already. It was that simple—except for the printed obituary and the obligatory slurred toast in your honor at the next family gathering. You might have left a pile of unwashed clothes, a dank apartment, and two unread copies of Neuromancer behind, but that was about the extent of it. That could all be tossed. These days, things are much messier because the biggest mess you leave behind is no longer tangible: it’s your digital footprint.

Death and the internet have always had a loveless and legislative relationship, marked by court cases in which families have and haven’t managed to gain access to deceased loved ones’ online accounts. Email and social media accounts outliving their human counterparts is a very real issue, as they have the potential to become gold mines of identity theft. Yet, they have also become a key part of the modern grieving process, and it wasn’t until 2009 that Facebook made its first big move in dealing with this by introducing a method of memorializing accounts. Memorial pages try to tidy up and protect that puddle of life you left online, by preventing your digital self from continuing to do things like "make new friends" or telling everyone it’s your birthday.

Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia, Dropbox and most other big websites have all followed suit in the last two to three years, creating policies and tools to aid the families and friends of those who have passed away. But, as the legal company Saga warned customers via the Telegraph late last year, not enough people are aware that this is something you need to take seriously. Saga’s Head of Wills, Probate and Lifetime Planning told the newspaper, “accounts registered with everything from social media pages, email providers, online retailers and online banking contain sensitive information that should be removed. This is especially true where banking information is involved.”

Google was the first multinational internet corporation to actually try to tackle the wider problem of ghosts in the machine. Their "Inactive Account Manager," a typically prudish and death-denying Western name, is an ambiguous service that focuses on granting your Google account and all its contents to a named inheritor, but doesn’t really cater for the way in which most of our lives have supernova’d across at least 20 accounts in the last decade or so. It comes as no surprise that a more direct and focused attempt to service the digital afterlife should come from the death-accepting cultures of the Far East, where cremation simulators are regarded a little like theme park attractions.

Photo via Yahoo! Ending Japan.

Enter Yahoo! Japan’s realistically named "Yahoo! Ending" service—your one-stop shop for a clean shuffle off this mortal e-coil. It’s visually introduced with an animated video that shows a few unlucky customers receiving messages on their phone to the effect of: “YOU’VE GOT POSTHUMOUS FAREWELL MAIL!” And I do not exaggerate the strange morbidity of this cartoon scene, in which a family, sitting in their living room, check their beeping phones to see: “If you’re reading this now it means I’ve already left this world ... I promised that I would never die before you, my wife, so I’m sorry. I had a really happy life thanks to you.”

That is just the beginning of Yahoo! Ending. Before you die, the service works with local funeral companies to help you write your will, pick your burial spot and plan the funeral. If decisions aren’t your thing, then you have the option of choosing from the set menu, as the Washington Post describes: “A basic package offered through Yahoo! Japan costs about $4,500, including the funeral, embalming and cremation, plus a wake for 30 people. Feeding guests at the wake costs an extra $30 per person, and for an additional $1,500 you can get a monk to perform at the funeral.” You can then set instructions to delete internet histories, pass social media account details on (or close them) and cancel any direct debits made through your Yahoo! wallet.

Aside from their more peaceful approach to mortal salience, there are other reasons why it’s no surprise that this is being tested in Japan. Almost a quarter of Japan’s population is over 65, and the birth rate has halved in the last six decades. With Yahoo! charging 180 yen per month, it means Japan’s "death industry" is approaching a boom era. Here in the UK, average age and birth rates might be a little more positive, but it’s not like people aren’t dying. Untended and inaccessible social media accounts can plague bereaved families with haunting notifications about how you once liked a "Polar Bear Humps Seal" video or endorsed Dominos Pizza, with worst case scenarios leading to creepy, virtual resurrections. And the eventual automatic deletion of inaccessible accounts can lead to the loss of work, photos, blogs, writing, music and any other stuff you stored online.

So, what are our choices in the Anglosphere, and are we paying enough attention?

Our hesitance to draw up wills for ourselves is "indicative of the way that we do not want to think or talk about our own deaths or dying,” explains Selina Ellis Gray over email. Selina works at the University of Lancaster—specializing in digital remains, ghostly presences and "end of life" technologies. “Therefore, its not surprising that in a recent survey, only 20 percent of people had even considered their digital legacy.”

With Google’s offering being quite restricted, and Yahoo!’s exclusively available in Japan, you need to move away from the big corps to find the perfect solution. But in doing so, you enter a realm of independent start-ups who are looking to service, and even gimmick, your digital legacy in some pretty peculiar ways.

For instance, DeadSoci.al looks to distribute your social media farewells—allowing you to create text, video and image rich content to be posted across Facebook and Twitter. These guys are proactive lobbyists in the death stakes, running very melancholic awareness workshops with snappy sadcore titles like "You Only Die Once," and hosting bizarre parties with celebrity DJs. The question is: how much do you really give a shit about maintaining a social presence once you’re dead?

Deathswitch.com is a much more robust service, with a website that looks like a real life Ballardian SkyNet. It doesn’t tidy up behind you, but it does offer to hold onto a spare pair of keys. The service routinely prompts you to reply over periods of weeks or months, and if it doesn’t get a response, it makes the obvious assumption that you’ve kicked the bucket, and sends all your stored data—like how to memorialize or shut your social media accounts – to chosen recipients in a nice, tidy bundle. It seems like one of the most efficient packages out there for UK customers; just don’t forget to respond to that prompt or you could have a scene on your hands.

Then there's the fame-hungry IfIDie1st.com, which is probably the social experiment byproduct of a crappy dissertation somewhere, but has nevertheless managed to clock up almost 300,000 sets of "messages." The idea is simple, but the appeal is not: send your last words to the website, and if you're the first person to do so to die, you get your message posted via a Mashable.com news story for all the "world" to see (Mashable’s traffic for July was 2.4 million). Based on the data they have collected, there is even a live calculator, estimating when the first person who's submitted their farewell missive should die. (Two and a half months, apparently, so there is still time to enter.)

If I Die 1st on YouTube

But these services clearly lack the pragmatism of Yahoo! Ending. There’s also no way of knowing whether these independent websites will bite the dust before you do. As Selina Ellis Gray emphasizes: “A big issue we face for our digital legacies is digital loss: the decay and deletion of what constitutes our footprints. In the course of my research, I watch sites go dark or decay every day. Memorials, tributes and social networking profiles are lost.” The internet is dramatically beginning to redefine what it is to die in a most clinical and unflinching way, and we need to be on the ball to leave a digital legacy plan behind. If you don’t, you might find yourself criminally repossessed, senselessly regurgitated or worse, perhaps, entirely forgotten.

Follow Joe Zadeh on Twitter

The term “The Fappening"—in reference to that recent celebrity nude photo heist—seems to have stuck. It was named that by a small subset of poindexters, operating primarily on Reddit and 4chan. Like so many things that start in those places, it went viral, and now even Yahoo News is using the term. It's a portmanteau of the M. Night Shyamalan movie The Happening, (obviously) and “fap,” a euphemism for overlubricated male masturbation. This kind of viral catchiness is relatively easy to manufacture. Trying to spin the event into positive PR, however, has been a massive blunder.

Within hours of the photos leaking, a subreddit devoted entirely to these nude photos had not only sprung up, but acquired over 100,000 subscribers. As of this writing, the subreddit had grown to over 140,000 subscribers. In many ways, these connoisseurs of fapping are behaving in ways you’d expect them to. They’re posting tons of celebrity nudes, desperately asking for verification on others, and doing the math on how much jizz has been expelled as a result of the celebrity photo leak. But these math-and-jizz-loving Redditors also have a surprising goal: to raise money for charity, and in the process, improve Reddit’s public image.

Their first idea was to raise money for prostate cancer, with the reasoning that Jennifer Lawrence had at one point donated to a prostate cancer research foundation. Fappeners were excited about the potential headlines. One Redditor named TheJanders wrote, “Holy shit the news would be amazing. ‘spreaders of leaked celebrity nude photos raise millions for prostate cancer!’” “Hoorah,” the forum intoned, and thus began the flood of donations to the Prostate Cancer Foundation. On September 1, “Reddit The Fappening” was the top fundraiser for PCF. Our merry fappeners rejoiced.

But then, all at once, the PCF caught wind of where these donations were coming from, denounced the Reddit fundraiser, and returned all the donations that had come from the Reddit post, saying “[they] would never condone raising funds for cancer research in this manner.” And that, gentle readers, is the story of when I laughed so hard I pulled a muscle. Don’t laugh, you damn kids, it will happen to you one day.

Having exhausted their male-physiology-specific charity ideas, these fappuccinos now needed a new charity to jerk off to. But which charity?! Then one Redditor was like, “hey, what about water, I guess?” and the rest of them were like “oh yeah, I guess everyone needs water,” and so the board turned its attention to water.org, a charity whose mission is to bring clean water to communities without it. Everything was going just fappingly, until Water.org found out where these jizzy donations were coming from, and, like the Prostate Cancer Foundation, rejected them for being too gross. Water.org shut down Reddit’s donation page, which now displays the hilariously insulting message “you’ve changed 0 lives with access to safe water.”

Sadly, as of right now our Fappeners are jism-covered orphans without a charity to call home. Will any charity accept their disgusting money?

A better question might be: why do these Redditors care? Just like with 4chan’s creation of video game character Vivian James, these Fappeners are operating as though good PR for Reddit would directly benefit them. I don’t doubt that some of them want to donate as a good deed. But the forum boasts a disproportionate number of posts and comments extolling the virtues of creating a positive image for Reddit. Reddit is a community manager’s dream: a huge group of unpaid people who have made the company’s PR their personal concern. Do they know they aren’t Reddit shareholders? Do they think their passionate defense of Reddit is going to lead to job offers?

More likely, they just want to think of themselves as good—some vague definition of good—like most of us do. They probably spend a lot of their time on Reddit, and if the public at large thinks Reddit is good, then they, the individuals who comprise Reddit, must themselves be good, right? The problem is that their charity work doesn't undo the sexist, aggressive violation of privacy that was the celebrity photo leak. Subscribers to The Fappening forum universally condone the leak—it’s an unspoken requirement for subscribing. One user posted a screenshot of a Huffington post tweet that read “here’s why you should absolutely feel guilty for googling Jennifer Lawrence’s leaked photos.” The user titled his post, “No, no I feel pretty good thanks.” The post has 1673 upvotes.

There is no question that this forum is pro-leaking celebrity nudes without the celebrity’s consent, pro-looking at them, and pro-driving traffic to the sites that published them. Turning around and donating money to a charity does nothing to offset that sense of entitlement, and it doesn’t undo any of the damage that was done. You still did something reprehensible, and you don’t get to feel better because you then did something irrelevant, even if that irrelevant thing was nice. You can’t punch a guy, give a present to a different guy, and call it even. 

Plus, if no one will accept your irrelevant olive branch, you can’t even say you did anything nice.

Follow Allegra Ringo on Twitter

A couple of years ago I applied to be an actor at one of Edinburgh’s haunted house-style tourist attractions. How I got the job, I don’t know. I guess, thanks to my complete lack of acting experience, I was perfectly suited to the style of theater they espoused. That, and the big woman at the head of recruitment fancied me (she really should have said, as I’d have been on it in a heartbeat). Turning up for my orientation I stood outside the tacky-looking building in the former station car park, with no money in the bank and nothing to do all summer, and walked into my first day of the job.

The overall commander of this dump was John. John was one of the worst kind of managers. One of those folks who is truly defined by what he does, which—in this case—is to manage a branch of a popular chain of what I would call “haunted houses.” Everything he talks about relates to the job that we all hate, and consequently everyone hates him.

Another morning beset by a collective sense of hangover and John wouldn't stop talking about sales predictions and quarterly profit margins. The actors sat, stunned, in the neon room. They dreaded the distant squeaking of European college groups that heralded the arrival of another hellish day spent underground, frightening people for a living.

Next door to the staff’s quarters was the make-up room. Festooned with a plethora of cheap comedy clothes that made a mockery of the $35 entrance fee, the make-up room was the saddest place in the building. The morning ritual of caking oneself in low quality daub really brought home the prospect of where you were and what you were about to do. It effectively locked you in behind a wall of eye shadow, sealing your fate for another endless day.

The mathematics of the place were mind-boggling. On a busy day—that being a day when it was raining a little more than normal, and thus folk flocked unimaginatively to a haunted house built in an old station parking lot—we could expect to “serve” at least 1,900 people. One tour of the attraction could take a maximum of 30 people due to the temperamental nature of the boat ride, which tended to not function very well when crewed by an excess of 30 people.

Of course, in practice people tend not to wander about in packs of 30, so you'd find yourself “performing” to crowds of three or four when company policy dictated it. Incidentally, company policy stated that tours were to leave every six minutes in the busy months, meaning you were looking at up to 100 tours per day, playing all the parts from mad doctors to cannibals, hamming up a Scottish accent for the benefit of anyone and everyone.

The place was literally falling to bits, as one would expect from a car park-turned tourist trap. Symptomatic of the decay that infected the place was the boat ride, four and a half minutes of simulated nautical horror with some strobe lights and occasionally functioning water jets. There was also a witch in there. (when I say “witch,” I mean a coat hanger wearing a torn dress and a witch’s mask). Two minutes into the boat ride the witch would move about three feet down a chain and ostensibly frighten those below.

The only issue was that the light didn’t really work in that room, so you couldn’t actually see the terrifying flying sorceress above. One day, I suppose after she’d grown tired of the unprofessionalism of the place, the witch broke her moorings and sailed off the chain, over the oblivious heads of those below and into the fetid water of the ride.

The worst thing of all was when the boat broke down with passengers aboard. Essentially a large block of fiberglass being pulled to and fro by a chain, the boat was simply not built to cater to the amount of people management wanted to dump in it on a daily basis. Midway through summer, she finally gave in.

It was the screaming that alerted us to the potential difficulties. The ride was many things, but scary was not one of them, so any cries of anguish probably pointed to genuine peril rather than the efficacy of the attraction. Mind you, it was only after some garbled communication that it became evident the vessel’s hull had been breached and that it was indeed sinking.

The decision came from above to turn the lights on. In darkness there was the tiniest chance that visitors wouldn’t notice the crappy nature of the place, but illumination vanished any such mysteries. Those who’d been screaming in terror mere seconds before soon saw the true nature of their plight in halogen reality. The “ride” was a pool of stagnant water, 12 feet long and one foot deep. In the water we counted a condom, a plethora of anti-legionella pellets and, confusingly, a loaf of bread. Through this puddle waded the techie, who brought with him a large board so passengers could disembark from the craft without the risk of contracting Legionnaires’ disease and an STI, or bumping into floating baked goods. The management then forced us to continue the tour so that the intrepid travelers couldn’t get their money back at the end.

By this point I’d started drinking on the job: lunchtime beers and a flask to keep me going through the day. "Never break character," was the mantra of the mid-level management. A mantra that’s hard to abide by, especially if the mother of young children is reprimanding you for smelling like whisky at 11AM while you're dressed as a cannibal.

Another huge issue was the cabin fever. Being locked underground all day with the same people led to an uneasy sense of proximity between colleagues. This, coupled with the stress, boredom, and constant drinking, meant that it took little time for members of staff to start fucking each other. Tourist groups would weave in and out as sheepish staff scuttled off, their deeds belied by a distinct lack of make up around the mouth. Everyone paired off, switched, then paired on again without ever really thinking about it or how it affected the job. For whatever reason, when you’re drunk and occasionally fucking in the disabled bathroom stalls, the idea of doing a badly scripted show for 30 Italians doesn’t jump to the forefront of your mind.

August came around and brought the added joy of the Edinburgh festival, with more and more people seeking an expensive thrill at a generic tourist attraction. In an act of final desperation some of the acting staff began to hook up with the management in search of a better deal. Unfortunately, not being a woman, I found myself on more and more of the terrible shifts until the pressure became too much.

After a night of drinking, drugs and a handjob in a nightclub, I found myself on the bus, heading to work. I don’t remember going into the haunted house itself, but the trail of puke down the stairs is testament to the fact I did. For some reason I have a fairly decent ethic when it comes to doing whatever job it is I’m employed to do; no hangover or crashing comedown has ever inspired me to pick up the phone and play hooky (for this due diligence, I have been fired no less than three times so far). In this case, I’d even attempted to put my makeup on. If Alice Cooper could do it after two bottles of bourbon, I thought, what’s the issue? The issue was that Alice Cooper had neither a line manager nor a gross misconduct clause in any contract he ever signed. I did, and was promptly sent home with a disciplinary meeting scheduled for the next day.

Disciplinary meetings always follow the same format. I sit there with the big boss and one of his lackeys. Usually the lackey has once been at my level of employment, but through a committed campaign of brown nosing has been elevated to this position, now earning $1 more an hour and gaining a yellow T-shirt in the process. This particular meeting was no exception.

From what I’ve been able to gather from these disciplinary hearings, the accused is supposed to grovel and grope for a last chance at resuming their job—a job they hated enough to find themselves in this position in the first place. In this case the furor revolved around the fact I was supposed to be operating the drop ride, despite the fact I’d consumed a bottle of vodka before coming into work. Apparently “drinking and fairground rides don’t go hand in hand”—a statement I knew to be untrue, having recently attended Leith Links carnival.

After 20 minutes of being demeaned by the big boss while the lackey nodded along like some bastard Churchill dog, the immortal words were uttered: 
“Do you have anything to say on the matter?”


There are many things that one could say on the matter, and no page is long enough to list them all. In any event, I stuck to my old standard, telling the man his job was shit before calling him a cunt. I was fired immediately.


My locker was just full of empty cans, giving me no need to empty it, so I ascended the stairs that a few months before I had tentatively descended, escaping into the torrential rain of Edinburgh in the late summer months.

Conveniently, the following year I spotted a job vacancy doing exactly the same thing for another haunted tourist attraction, and they took me in with open arms. After all, I had experience.

Photo via Flickr user David Berkowitz. Other photos are by the author.

The ongoing government crackdown on drugs is the talk of the town here in Beijing. Foreign English teachers and bar owners are bugging out over the campaign, sent into a frenzy over a sting operation on a club in a popular raving district which resulted in the rumored deportation of five foreigners. They sealed off the exits and made everyone pee in a cup. Those with traces of illegal substances in their system were taken downtown. The state-media meanwhile is having a field day with the arrest of several Chinese celebrities on drug-related charges, including Jackie Chan's son. “The celebrities have money so they can afford it. Taking drugs is something rich people do, not the common folk,” remarked one Beijing waitress to me. A booming homegrown meth industry has also been the target of government law enforcers.

China has 2.6 million drug users according to the country’s Ministry of Public Security. This latest crackdown has seen a 72 percent rise in drug related arrests over the past year, said state-run news agency Xinhua. That’s a big percentage. Up until the start of the campaign, authorities have mostly looked the other way on drug use in China’s gritty capital, and most had been able to indulge themselves to his or her heart's content (see “snorting ketamine off tables”). But things are changing and a lot of foreigners are up in arms over it. Existing laws don’t require one to have drugs on them to get busted; just having a bit of THC in your pee could get you thrown in the slammer and, if the recent sting operation is any indication, deported. 

But foreigners are always complaining here. What matters more is what your average Chinese Beijinger think about the government campaign and drugs in general. We spoke to some of the common folk to find out. 

"Peter Philadelphia," 23, third-year philosophy student 

VICE: So Peter, what do you think of this drug situation?
Peter Philadelphia: I think we must clarify the definition of drugs. I believe that some drugs can give you inspiration, such as marijuana. You can gain some inspiration through it. But in China the law forbids it, so we should think about whether drugs should be legal or illegal. We should think about it! Not just if it’s bad for health or for the body. Drugs are just a thing, an object. You can use drugs to do bad things. You can also use drugs to do good things. It depends on the person. 

What about testing whole crowds of people?
I think that urine tests are against personal rights. You should respect a person’s free-will. This is a dilemma, the public and the individual. Some people, like artists, have weird habits, like taking drugs for inspiration. From my perspective, these kinds of people should be able to do it, to improve creativity. 

So they should be legal?
I think the law is for the public, not the individual sometimes. People have their own habits. Drugs are not good for public security so the law is against it. I think if the country cares about the individual more they will respect the person’s choice. I think taking drugs is a personal choice, not a thing that is necessarily bad. It’s just a choice, someone’s freewill. But I think the country cares more about public security, so they ban drugs. 

Nowadays economic inequality is very big. The most important problem in China is the empty mind. No religion. No belief. The only belief is money. This is a very big problem for China nowadays. Drugs can make people live in a dream. Why do they want to be in a dream? Because they think the reality is not very good, so they prefer to go to a dream world.

"Wang Jin," 22, police officer 

VICE: Wang Jin, you're a policeman. Have you heard about the drug crackdown?
Wang Jin: Of course I’ve heard about the drug crackdown. It’s a part of my job. I think it’s the right policy. Drugs are bad for people. It affects your daily life and is terrible for your health. All drugs are bad. There are a lot of them. Heroin, marijuana, dolantin, speed. On my beat I’ve seen people who look like they're on drugs. They appear skinny with blotchy skin. When I see people like that I’ll take them into the station for a urine test. It’s mostly Chinese who we inspect. Foreigners are harder because they don’t have an ID card that we can easily scan into our system. But if foreigners are taking drugs then I also have a right to take them to the station. Everyone must obey the law of the land.

"One," 25, bass player in a punk band

VICE: Has this drug crackdown had an effect on your profession?
One: The drug crackdown is everywhere on the news. It’s pretty common in China, drug use, especially in the pop star scene. It’s not hard to get drugs if you have money. All kinds of drugs. I did some before. Cocaine, LSD, weed. Weed is pretty easy to get. I don’t like them though. When I did LSD I was sitting at a bar. I was scared. It was five years ago when I was 20, so drugs should be illegal. Weed is okay. Weed is not a drug. Medicine can be legal. Only the ones that darken our hearts should be illegal. Lots of people in the music community do drugs. Not cocaine, but heroin. I don’t know why. Asian people aren’t that strong. We can’t really stand that kind of thing. It ruins everybody. When I see people who do drugs they look really tired, they’re dizzy, they don’t really know what they’re talking about.

Where do musicians get their drugs?
Most of the drugs we can buy are from foreigners. Lots of black people selling drugs in lots of places. Weed and cocaine you can buy from the African people. But for the heroin you should probably buy from a professional drug dealer. They must be Asian. One of my friends was in jail for three years because he did drugs, and he also sold drugs. A musician. I know lots of musicians who are doing drugs now.

Someone told me they thought drugs might be good for creativity. Do you think so?
If you look at the 1960s and 1970s rock and roll music from the West, most of the musicians did drugs. It seemed like the drugs were helping them with the music. But in China I don’t think so. The musicians and pop stars are doing drugs because they have lots of pressures. They have to relieve them. I don’t think they do drugs to help them with the music because it seems like they don’t really make good music when doing drugs. It doesn’t get your brain clearer and doesn’t allow you to put 100 percent energy into the music. I think there are different chemical processes when Asian people do drugs and Western people do drugs. When we are doing them it’s all about the drugs. We can’t do anything else." 

"Tao Bei Shan," retired army officer, 60

VICE: The government is cracking down on drugs. Is that a good thing?
Tao Bei Shan: We should strongly enforce the drug ban. Drugs are bad for society, bad for individuals, bad for the heart. That they are good for creativity is a bullshit idea. If you want to get inspired, check out the real world. If you want to create something, check out the real world. Taking drugs is a kind of stimulation, but it’s bad for health, so it's better to stay far away from it. Drug enforcement is a global problem, not just China’s. Cracking down on drugs is good for the nation, the common folk and the world, so I support it.

Liang Wu Hua, 42, street side baker

“Drugs are faraway from my life because I’ve never seen them in the real world. Before, my family lived in the countryside and we didn’t have anyone doing drugs there. I am very busy with my bakery, so I don’t have time to do much else. The government should definitely crack down on drugs. The celebrities have money so they can afford it. Taking drugs is something rich people do, not the common folk.”

Gabriel, 24, student of Chinese medicine

VICE: What can you tell me about this drug crackdown, Gabriel?
Gabriel: All the drug dealers are getting arrested by the Chinese government. They’ve disappeared from Sanlitun [a popular clubbing district in Beijing]. That’s what I heard. And my roommate hasn’t smoked [weed] for a while now. I heard they shut down a club and asked all the foreigners to take a urine test. If you’d been smoking weed, you got deported. I think it’s normal. This is what the Chinese government does. Maybe the drug industry is too crazy, so the government wants to shut it down. But they can’t shut it all down. 

But do you think they should shut it all down?
I think drugs should be legal; all drugs. If you have a knife you can cut yourself. You can cut food. You can cut whatever. You can do whatever with the knife. You can commit suicide with the knife. So what’s the difference with drugs? You can take it as entertainment, you can be addicted, you can be killed by them. Smoking cigarettes is also addictive. If that’s legal, then everyone should know how to control themselves. Why are drugs illegal? Because too many people have overdosed. 

Jacking off is addictive. If you do it every day, three times, four times a day, you’ll be a dead man. You’ll be a zombie or something like that. Drugs are the same. You have to make a balance. You have to control yourself. But you cannot avoid jacking off because it has a function in society. If it had no function people would forget about it. Drugs have the function of helping people forget their troubles. Because smoking and drinking cannot take you to that state, only drugs can take you to that level. 

Sounds like you've tried some drugs.
I ate a brownie in Amsterdam. Crazy shit! It lasted so long, like five hours. Your body is so soft, everything is in slow motion and you keep smiling and seeing illusions when you close your eyes. I heard voices. I don’t know. That was my first time. And I went to see a Fucking Show as well. Like two people humping. It was boring. The man couldn’t even get hard. There are two things legal in Amsterdam; smoking weed and prostitutes. But I only did it once. 

Note: Interviews have been edited for readability. In some cases, interviewees submitted their English names and in others, fake names were given.

Follow Brent Crane on Twitter

The rebels in eastern Ukraine aren’t the first pro-Russian secessionists to kick up tension in the region. In 1992, pro-Kremlin rebels carved out a de facto state on a narrow strip of land between Moldova and Ukraine. Transnistria, the de facto state of half a million people, has since created its own currency, passports and a notoriously strong police force. In July, while fighting raged in Ukraine, I visited Transnistria to get a sense of what life is like once breakaway factions get their way. 

The territory is officially recognized as a rebelling region within Moldova’s international borders. The 1992 War of Transnistria is a frozen conflict, meaning there was never a peace treaty, and that it’s technically still under an incredibly drawn out ceasefire.

It’ll come as no surprise that it’s not exactly an easy place to get to; there are no commercial flights and its neighbors are fairly hostile. I entered from the west, via Romania and Moldova. Traveling through, whenever I mentioned I was on my way to Tiraspol—the rebel capital—people told me I was crazy. “It’s the Gaza Strip of Eastern Europe,” said one man. Another warned me I’d get my throat slit the first night if I mentioned I came from Europe, adding that the police would arrest me for no reason. None of these people had actually been there. 

I knew, of course, that this was mostly people parroting propaganda they’d heard from their own government—the war, technically still on, was fought between Transnistria and Russia on one side and Moldova and Romania on the other. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder if there was any truth wrapped up in their fears.

Twenty-four hours after I arrived in Transnistria I was arrested by police in full tactical gear and stuffed in a car that had been hastily parked up on the pavement. 

I arrived by train on a Monday morning and filled out an immigration form. Outside the station a wide boulevard led downtown. The street was lined with identical housing blocks, each with a small lawn of grass; all of it yellow and uncut. After a few minutes of walking the road became busier and the sidewalk better maintained. Shops began to appear on the roadside. Some of them had small black and white Cyrillic script above their doors. I had no idea what anything said.

The local currency, the Transnistrian ruble, isn’t recognized as legal tender anywhere else in the world, so if you want to change your money you have to do it at an exchange. I swapped over some Moldovan Lei and asked where I could find a hotel. Another customer overheard and pointed me towards a massive apartment block in the distance. 

Soviet nostalgia is strong throughout Transnistria; statues of Lenin and other Soviet heroes decorate main boulevards and leafy parks. But the USSR isn’t just a fond, hazy memory; Transnistria has maintained the same security infrastructure from Soviet times—the security intelligence unit is still called the KGB, and the state uses the same Soviet system of citizen informants to control the population.  

The Soviet military unit, known as the 14th Army Guards, played an important role in the 1992 war. Initially Russian military personnel defected to join the fight alongside newly formed Transnistrian militias; eventually, the entire regiment switched sides. The 14th Army Guards have evolved over the years and are now part of what Russia calls peacekeeping forces. Moldova, on the other hand, views them as occupying troops, which is maybe because there are 1,200 soldiers stationed there maintaining a vast stockpile of heavy weapons—the largest in Europe by many estimates. 

I spent my first day exploring Tiraspol. When I had trouble finding the address to Migration Services to register—required within 24 hours of entering the country—I asked people on the street. Some ignored me, or walked off as soon as they heard me speak, but others tried to help. I pointed at the address written on a card I was given when I entered the nation. Everyone scratched their heads, pointed vaguely this way or that and wandered off.

After eventually finding the place and registering, I walked through some of the city’s parks. Along the riverside there was a promenade, and across the water a sandy beach. At dusk, as the day’s heat began to dissipate, the parks and promenade filled with families and young couples. A couple of people even sat down next to me, smiled and tried to start a conversation – though since it was in Russian these interactions were always cut pretty short. 

After Crimea was annexed by Russia in March the parliament in Transnistria formally requested Russia also annex them. This briefly put the tiny republic at the top of the news cycle, with journalists claiming that Russia may open up a new front in their European takeover. The New York Times ran the headline: “Moldova Is the Next Ukraine”. 

The less spectacular reality is that Transnistria has been asking Russia to absorb it since before Russia was even a country, requesting that Moscow declare it a republic within the Soviet Union. Since the Union dissolved they have asked Russia to annex them multiple times. It’s possible that other parts of eastern Ukraine, where pro-Russian rebels are currently fighting Ukrainian military and pro-government militia units, will follow a similar path, becoming a pro-Russian de facto state rather than official Russian territory. 

The morning after my stroll I set out to change some more currency. The exchanges look like small banks, and the one I walked into had a security guard at the entrance and attendants sitting behind a thick wall of glass. When I handed over a £20 note the men behind the desk all began muttering amongst each other. One of them picked up the phone, while another—who spoke in broken English—told me, “One moment.”

Both seemed kind of nervous, but I didn’t think much of it at the time—it’s hard to predict that you’re about to be arrested when you haven’t done anything wrong.

A man wearing black boots and sunglasses walked in and started talking with the guard. Soon—less than two minutes after the man behind the window began making phone calls—two police officers rushed in wearing bulletproof vests, holding their batons out towards me. The plain-clothes officer rushed me from behind, grabbing my arms as the two uniformed officers flanked me either side.

As I was being pushed out the door, the man behind the counter yelled after me: “No worry. They think you bank robber.” 

I had no idea what was going on. “What’s happening? I didn’t do anything,” I said as the three police officers stuffed me into a car.

They responded in Russian. I wished I knew Russian.

After a short drive we parked up in front of a police station. The officers walked me inside and stood with me inside a large holding cell, while other police walked by and stared. Shit, this could actually be very bad, I thought. No nation recognizes Transnistria—there are no embassies or consulates. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to visit while the situation in Ukraine was so hot. Shit, I’m going to end up imprisoned in a rogue nation.

A new pair of police officers led me out of the room and up the stairs into an office, where two more cops were waiting for me, one sitting behind a bulky desktop computer that looked like something out of a mid-1980s office supply catalog.

“Is this about a bank robbery?” I asked, nervous, almost shaking. 

The man behind the desk stared at me. Then he laughed.

I laughed, too. 

He typed into his computer. I could see he had Google Translate open. “No bank robbery. You are suspect murder.”

I stopped laughing. 

“A murder? Someone was shot?”

The officer shook his head and ran his finger along his neck. “Knife.” 

“Where were you six July?”

“England. I only arrived in Tiraspol yesterday. Check my passport; it’s in my hotel room.”

The office phone rang and the uniformed officer picked it up, talked for a minute then hung up. He relayed some information to my interrogator, whose face immediately softened. “You talk truth. You were in England.”

The interrogation dragged on for another three hours, but that was mostly because of the language barrier. Once the phone rang everything became easier; the interrogator allowed me around to his side of the desk to type my answers into Google Translate.

“Man killed in robbery. Man have a lot of pounds that were stolen,” he told me over the shared computer screen. “Exchanges must notify police when pounds transferred.” 

Top tourist tip: if you're planning to go to Transnistria, take Russian rubles and change those up instead. 

The police asked me to write down everything I did on July 6. They also asked me to detail where I came into possession of the pounds I'd tried to exchange. Google Translate copied my statement into Russian and I signed both papers. 

When we finished, an officer walked me downstairs and out the door towards the street. He shook my hand, turned to me and smiled: “Freedom.”

All illustrations by Amy Deer

I think every person who plays games harbors at least some insecurity about being seen as juvenile, even (or especially?) if the kind of game they love involves shooting people’s limbs off instead of collecting cuddly monsters. From the outside, though, I reckon Pokémon is probably as impenetrable a video game as you can get.

If you’re not into it, it makes no sense at all. For a lot of people my age, Pokémon is all wrapped up in childhood memories of playing the games or watching the cartoons or playground fistfights over trading cards. For others—and for pretty much everyone I have ever met over the age of 30—it is completely incomprehensible.

So this is me explaining why, as a 26-year-old adult woman with access to booze and people who will willingly have sex with me, I still give a shit about Pokémon. 

The trailer for Pokémon Omega Ruby and Pokémon Alpha Sapphire

Pokémon is a classic children’s story.

This might not seem like a very good reason for a grown woman to care about Pokémon, but aren't adults capable of enjoying stories like Matilda and Charlotte's Web because they’re about children and childhood? Did you immediately forget what it felt like to be a kid the second you were old enough to walk around without a fake ID? If you did, I doubt I'll be able to get through to you here, but the vast majority of us must remember at least some of the first 12 or so years of our lives and all the complicated feelings they involved. And Pokémon, you see, is a classic story of child empowerment, set in a world that’s largely free of adults, in which kids go out into the world and make their own way.

At the beginning of every game your mom essentially gives you a packed lunch and sends you into the streets. At 10 years old. You’re given your first Pokémon by a kindly professor who’s always named after a tree, for some reason (Professor Oak, Professor Sycamore, Professor Birch), and you have your first battle. From then on, you're in charge of your own destiny and have to figure things out yourself. You go where you want, you catch and train whichever Pokémon you like, you pick fights. Your mom calls you all of about nine times over the course of the entire game and she never really seems to mind much that you’ve been setting animals upon each other for sport and following around international terrorist organizations (Team Rocket/Team Plasma/Team Magma, and so on—the games’ antagonists, who want to use Pokémon for evil).

Pokémon is an adult-free world, which is ultimately the fantasy of every adventurous kid. It’s one where children have agency and control and power, just like the Animorphs, or the Boxcar Children, or pretty much any great work of children’s fiction. That’s why it’s so powerful for kids, and for any adult who remembers being one.

Pokémon is also just an incredibly good video game

Like quite a few of Nintendo’s own game series, Pokémon has been honed and perfected over nearly two decades of very slight iteration to become a pure, polished orb of perfectly interlocking systems. There are no rough edges left. The more recent Pokémon games are basically perfect to play, to look at, and to inhabit. They are stunningly well made.

Here’s how it works on a basic level: you have your own team of Pokémon, made up of six creatures that you select from an ever-growing collection that you catch from the wild by wandering around in tall grass. Your opponents all have their own Pokémon, too, and you fight them against each other until they faint. (They never die. Nothing ever dies in Pokémon.) Each Pokémon can be trained (or levelled up, to use more traditional video game jargon), which will give it better stats and allow it to learn different moves. And each Pokémon has a Type, which makes it weak or strong to several other Types. This is where strategy comes in—you have to have a varied team that can take on anything rival trainers might throw at it.

It’s also where self-expression comes in, because your team of Pokémon is essentially an expression of you. You could have a team made up of cute fuzzy little things, or hard-as-nails rock creatures, or a mix of flying lizards, animated washing machines, electric mice, and an ice-cream cone. All of the systems work so well that, except at high-level tournament play, there is no accepted “best” Pokémon or selection thereof. You can get through with whatever you like to use the most, because the game’s systems are so flexible.

Now multiply all that by 719 different Pokémon, and you get a sense of the kind of scale these games operate on. Pokémon is an exploration-rich game that lets you do things how you want. Ironically, a lot of more adult-oriented games don’t give you that kind of agency.

Another thing: Pokémon is actually a pretty interesting competitive sport

I’m not into Pokémon to the extent that I play competitively with other grown adults. I don’t have the time for that. But I watch competitive Pokémon play, and it’s honestly pretty good as a sport (or an eSport, if we gotta be that way). Remember those basic principles I outlined a few paragraphs ago? When you go deeper down the rabbit-hole, shit gets real. Pro Pokémon players are into things like breeding Pokémon traits and personalities, Mega-Evolutions, hold items, and status boosters. They use terms like choice-locking, edgequake, and TyraniBoah. These people are serious.

But the great thing about competitive Pokémon is that you don’t have to know all that much beyond the basics of the game to enjoy spectating, and you learn the higher-level stuff pretty quickly. You see the same kinds of Pokémon and moves a lot in championship play, but every now and then someone comes along and shakes things up. This year, the Pokémon Masters (adults) division champion won the final match with a ridiculous little squirrel called Pachirisu. Nobody expected that. This tiny squirrel was sitting there among all these gigantic, intimidating-looking monsters, and he took them all down. It was great to watch.

The main thing that keeps me interested in Pokémon, though, is that it was so intensely special to me as a kid. However much I might try to explain how excellent it is as a game and as a piece of child-oriented fiction—and it is truly excellent at both of those things—I’m aware that if I hadn’t played and loved Pokémon as a kid I probably wouldn’t give a shit. I’ll probably play it with my own kids, if I ever have any and we haven’t all blown ourselves up by then.

Maybe they’d even get good enough to enter the Pokémon World Championships, which is a real thing that takes place every year. And if that happened, I think I’d faint with pride.

Follow Keza and Amy on Twitter

The ruse was supposed to unfold over a series of three tweeted photos. The first presented a blurry gun. The second showed a bloody victim. In the third, a young man lay on the ground next to a police car.

On the night of March 11, a Twitter user with the handle @StillDMC stood at a window in downtown Los Angeles and took a photo of his rifle, the barrel aimed at what appeared to be a couple of pedestrians standing on a street corner in the distance. At 12:09 AM, he tweeted.

The media painted McAnuff as either a lurking, latent murderer or a reckless jerk, and most outlets downplayed the fact that his gun was a toy. It’s not hard to see why. The tweet seemed to offer a flickered forecast of a disturbing future, one in which would-be killers are enabled by distant strangers on social media, morbid voyeurism collapses into mass complicity, and modern gladiators conjure their coliseum out of the ether. The gamification of murder, or something like that.

That, of course, is a matter of intense legal debate. The question of how and when threats made online should be considered criminal—and when they can be considered free speech under the First Amendment—is currently en route to the US Supreme Court in the case of Pennsylvania resident Anthony Elonis. On Facebook, Elonis wrote a series of ultraviolent rap lyrics in which he described, in gruesome detail, murdering his estranged wife and former colleagues. For those posts, Elonis spent almost four years in prison.

Last year, in Georgia, 20-year-old college student Caleb Clemmons was arrested for publishing what he says was experimental fiction on Tumblr. He wrote: “hello. my name is irenigg and i plan on shooting up georgia southern. pass this around to see the affect it has. to see if i get arrested.” Within hours, Clemmons was indeed arrested, and spent six months in prison before pleading guilty to a count of making terroristic threats. Police searched his home and found no weapons or any further evidence of intent to do harm.

Just months before that, a Texas teenager was put in jail for making what he says was a sarcastic remark on Facebook during a casual discussion about a video game. Justin Carter had issued a rather adolescent retort to a friend's insult: 'Oh yeah, I'm real messed up in the head. I'm going to go shoot up a school full of kids and eat their still-beating hearts," adding an "LOL" afterward. In jail, he became so depressed he was placed on suicide watch.

But there have been legitimate threats made on social media, too: In the UK, two men were arrested for making repeated threats to a female journalist on Twitter.

The Pranksters’ account holds that more than twelve hours had elapsed between the first tweet and the arrest—enough time, arguably, to contact the officer in the third tweet and to have a firearms expert determine whether the gun pictured was real. According to the LAPD’s statement, the officers discovered the tweet at 9:30 AM—and it was time-stamped from the night before. Even so, the arrest wasn’t made for another three and a half hours, according to Abbasi. So it seems that the department wasn’t treating the case as an emergency.

When the journalist and novelist Jennifer Egan discusses her research on young terrorists and mass killers, she explains that many "bumbled" into committing violence, whether through outside pressures, a psychological breakdown, or adverse circumstances. They fell into a vicious cycle of bias confirmation, and allowed the event to define their identities, eventually becoming the killers and terrorists they believed themselves to be. 

It's not too much of a stretch to imagine a deeply troubled kid, armed with his parents' gun, turning to anonymous enablers to solicit a final, fatal approval. Modern mass killers have turned to online gun forums, blogs, and message boards, perhaps in search of solidarity; Adam Lanza spent a lot of time on websites like TheHighRoad.org and GlockTalk.com. Norway's Anders Breivik found support for his extremist views in the ultra right-wing, nationalist blog community before he went on his killing spree. Eric Harris, one of the Columbine shooters, discussed weapons, vandalism, and pipe bombs with his Quake clan on AOL chatrooms.

But McAnuff isn't a killer, he's a prankster. It's a newish brand of stunt, sure, one that makes the crowd essential to its form and simultaneously exploits the audience to spread across the Internet. The thrill comes from a sense that the prank is at once a violent dare and its own megaphone. 

The CRA is coming for your funny money, Canadian left-wing charities. via Flickr user pagedooley.

Information accessed through the Access to Information Act shows that the think-tank Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) is being audited, and could lose its charitable status, because the government thinks material on its website is “biased” and “one-sided.” Meanwhile, other think-tanks that have decidedly right-wing agendas are operating scott-free.

And, hang on… charities can’t be biased?

What charity isn’t biased? Does UNICEF say “Listen guys, you could donate money to these starving children, which would really help them… but on the other hand, you could also use it to buy cocaine, which would be a lot of fun. And when you think about it, they’re gonna die eventually anyway.”

In order to get tax-free status, the Canadian Revenue Agency (CRA) rules state that a charity can’t spend more than 10 percent of its resources on political activity, but isn’t all charity work political activity? The whole purpose of charities is to channel money and power to places where they don’t think there’s currently enough. In a sense every charity is Kanye grabbing the mic and saying: “Canadians don't care about (e.g. ducks).”

Probably the best example of how silly these charity audits are getting is CRA’s ruling that Oxfam can’t make “preventing poverty” its goal because “relieving poverty is charitable, but preventing it is not.” Yes, you can’t be against poverty in principle because that kind of bias ignores its benefits, like character-building despair, the entrepreneurial spirit of crime, and the nutritional benefits of ramen noodles.   

That’s not to say defining a charity is simple. It will always be a challenge because the special tax status is so vulnerable to abuse. If we leave it too wide open we’ll end up with “Tom’s Titties & Wings & Charity” and if we make it too narrow we’re bashing the Terry Fox Foundation for their lopsided anti-cancer bigotry. At least one National Post columnist thinks we should just scrap the special tax status altogether, but since most Canadians can see good reasons for not making, say, Bereaved Families of Ontario pay the same tax rate as Rogers, it will likely be around for awhile.

The CCPA, however, is not alone in their struggle with the CRA. Far from it. PEN Canada, whose stated mission is to help create a world where “writers are free to write, readers are free to read, and freedom of expression prevails” was hit with a CRA audit after the agency decided some of PEN’s published material “contained editorials and/or articles that appear to promote opposition to a political party.” PEN then entered into an 18-month battle with the CRA that is exhaustively documented on their website.

Teaches them right trying to promote literacy!

Here's how it begins...

Beyond the CCPAs and PENs of the world, it’s worth taking a look at another think-tank that currently enjoys tax-free charity status, one that isn’t going through a political activities audit: The Fraser Institute. This is a “charity” whose heroic mission is to protect private profits from abuse and exploitation, and to lend humanitarian assistance to an ideology that suffered several atrocities at the hands of reality in 2008.

Its big-hearted donors include Exxon Mobil, the tobacco industry, and the Koch brothers, and its totally-not-biased-you-guys-we-swear-on-the-bible (if by bible you mean “Capitalism and Freedom”). Their publications include lesson plans for teachers who want to sow doubt about climate change in their students, papers denying links between second-hand smoke and cancer, and diatribes against the minimum wage.

Please sir, can I have some more justifications of unrestrained equality? via YouTube.

But if we’re really serious about cracking down on tax cheats, then charities—whether they’re bogus, righteous, or downright gnarly—are a mere Dollarama compared to the Club Monaco of offshore tax havens. According to Canadians for Tax Fairness, Canadian money in offshore tax havens in 2013 totaled at least $170 billion. Compare that to the $8.5 billion in total charitable donations reported by Canadians in 2011, and you may notice that one of those numbers is much, much bigger than the other one.

So if the government is unleashing a small, dour army of auditors on environmental and “poverty relief” groups, it must REALLY be taking the gloves off for something that’s estimated to cost them up $8 billion a year in lost tax revenue. But it appears they’re leaving those [suede driving] gloves on and rolling out a modest “not nothing” strategy. It includes a tax cheat whistleblower program and a requirement that any international transfers over $10,000 are reported by banks, which Canadians met with an enthusiastic “We didn’t have those already?”

The CRA also has a new team of “6 to 10” people focused on international tax evasion. But it’s helpful to remember here that the government and the truth have been in an abusive relationship for years. Some recently revealed documents show that over $300 million and more than 3,100 full-time positions will be cut from the CRA budget by 2017-18, including auditors.

So we know several wealthy sociopaths (including these 450) have money in offshore tax havens, costing Canada billions, and yet the government seems stubbornly fixated on charities.

Well I have a solution.

Let’s officially designate a new charity, OTHUBERA: Offshore Tax Havens Used By Extremely Rich Assholes.

We’ll make a logo (a tropical island shaped like a middle finger) and sign up some goodwill ambassadors (Sean Connery, Gerard Depardieu). Then on Halloween, little Swiss, Bermudan, and Liechtensteinian bankers, dressed up like blood-sucking vampires can go door-to-door in the most posh suburbs of Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal with their OTHUBERA boxes, collect donations, then run home, dump them out on their bed and dream about how many numbered shell corporations they’ll start up the next morning.

I swear that will work. That will totally work.*
 

*idea may not actually work 

Follow Scott on Twitter. 

Vlogger Alfie Deyes (Image via)

Vloggers have been around almost as long as YouTube itself. However, if you leave aside Wired writers, 4Chan bullies and anyone getting ready for the SATs, most people are lucky enough that they've never had one try to confiscate their attention span like a smug teenage cop.

Unfortunately, this is all about to change, and soon the entire media landscape will be as stuffed with these tedious pricks as the average 14-year-old's Facebook feed. The other day I received something awful in the mail—something worse than all the unsolicited garbage that traditionally gets pushed through your door (anthrax, repossession notices, flyers trying to sell you lots of chicken wings, etc): The Pointless Book, the debut print release from English vlogger, Alfie Deyes.

Alfie is a clean, gummy, harmless young man; basically the mealy-mouthed Alex-Zane-in-training of the British vlogging community. It's difficult to really pinpoint what his videos are about because, as with most vloggers, they're not really about anything. Here he is getting burped at and playing beer pong with some food (1.4 million views), here he is trying to process the news that a ten-year-old in Spain has given birth (4 million views) and here he is giving himself a facial with some poo (it's not, it's nutella; 953k views). Really, the subject matter is a side issue; the videos are just a vessel for a friendly face, one that laughs really loudly, constantly and for no reason, gurns like a dog on fire and feigns awkwardness in an attempt to disguise its own vanity. All set to a soundtrack of ukeleles and whistling (who the fuck is making all this ukelele whistling music? Where does it come from?)

In addition to regularly recording little films like these for nearly 3 million subscribers, Alfie’s a “Let’s Player”—someone who plays through entire video games and commentates as they go, before posting the footage online. When he's not busy doing things that would get him instantly fired from any respectable pub in Britain, he reportedly dates fellow British vlogger Zoe Sugg, known online as “Zoella." Zoe is one of three celebrity YouTube vloggers, along with Tyler Oakley and “TomSka”, who were recently recruited to present a new Radio 1 show in what seems like a pretty desperate attempt to entice younger listeners.

These publishing deals and radio contracts have created a jealousy divide in the world of shouty webcam folk. On one side are those bedroom chancers who persist with uploading their dull musings to a depressingly muted response. On the other are those who persist with uploading their dull musings to a perplexingly exploding fanbase, mostly made up of teenagers who are happy—eager, even—to spend eight minutes of their lives listening to some musical theatre student promote whatever brand it is they’re being sponsored by that week. In fact, once their subscriber list hits seven figures, some vloggers can make in excess of £40,000 ($65,000) per shout out. One prominent user recently put down the money for a house in cash.

So some kids are making money from nothing—who am I to thwart their hustle? What does it mean for me? Nothing, right?

It really shouldn't matter to me that these people have no great yarns, no real stories, no points of note; nothing, really, but webcams and internet hubs. People can waste their time online however they like. But thanks to the accepted wisdom that everything that happens on the internet is the future, they’re working their way out of that cyber niche, where you have a choice whether or not to subject yourself to their terrible jokes and inane dating advice, into the mainstream—where they’ll be much harder to avoid.

Their fame and promotion is symptomatic of a wider problem, too: the norms becoming the stars. Those with no charisma, no talent and no guile are being paraded through popular culture like a preening, self-obsessed Ark of the Covenant.

An example of original programming starring vloggers, including Alfie Deyes and three other popular YouTubers

It could be argued that their inception, and subsequent rise to prominence, is not their fault, but rather the byproduct of our increasingly anodyne culture. BBC3 sitcoms with sex jokes limper than a cigarette pack left out in the rain, pop stars whose only controversy is cropping a rapper who looks like a Slush Puppy out of an Instagram photo. In a recent interview with Evening Standard Magazine, English singer-songwriter and BRIT award-winner Ben Howard was painted as a sullen, moody creature of pained art; a kind of Leonard Cohen for the reality show generation. The evidence? He doesn't like speaking to songwriter Tom Odell backstage at festivals.

Our emerging cultural figureheads are distressingly bland. What people tend to forget about entertainment is that it’s an art form, the nuances of which have to be learned. Rodney Dangerfield, Tommy Cooper, Michael Barrymore, Harry Hill—love, hate or fear these British icons, you have to admit that there’s an inherent talent for showmanship in what they do. And the skills—the bare bones of it—are still something that have to be honed and crafted. These young bucks, these webcam frontiersmen, are learning on the job with no one teaching them. The result is a poorly edited mess of ego and quirk.

Of course, this is partly the appeal to their fans. Successful vloggers sell them the dream that normalcy can make you famous—that you can be adored just for blurting non-sequiturs at a camera with an upward inflection, and that with a few freshman film studies classes and a half-decent haircut you could be earning a hundred grand a year.

So where does that leave the rest of us? The news that Zoella and those two other vloggers are to be featured on Radio 1 is worrying. Sure, they might not be totally offensive in every instance, but the vast majority of the time you’ll come away thinking, ‘Who are these terrible dickheads?'

Last year, I wrote something about how contestants are ruining British game shows by attempting to become their stars. The basic premise was that the game is the star of the show, not the contestant. The contestant is a conduit through which the game flows, so that we can all enjoy it at home and join in. Because we—the viewing public—are the ones who are meant to be entertained here. But the contestants won’t stop trying to be funny, trying to be zany. Trying to eke a tear from your eyes by weeping about the fact that their son “really deserves a nice holiday to Florida” because their guess about which one of Henry VIII's wives was beheaded first miraculously ended up being correct.

The pageantry of the boring is a burden spreading through our entertainment industry, and its legacy and offspring reside in the vlogger community.

A page from The Pointless Book

Deyes' Pointless Book is the perfect example. It’s an absolute fucking shambles. An offensive cavalcade of non-jokes aimed at young people whom the vlogger has hugely underestimated. On page 130 it invites you to “turn to page 190”; when you reach page 190, it tells you to “turn to page 130." Hilarious!

There are about five “pointless pages” that you can “fill in with whatever you want!” One minute you’re being encouraged to make origami birds and pick flowers, the next you’re “drawing genitals” and deciding whether you want to have a “sexual attraction to fruit." Is it crass or is it cutesy? Why try to be everything to everyone?

Here lies another issue: there’s no identity. No flow, no consistency. Alfie Deyes is just a guy who can be sensitive and bawdy. He has a regular range of emotions and references. He is anyone. Someone who does have a solid theme is Sam Pepper—Big Brother contestant and incomprehensibly popular vlogger—but unfortunately his adopted online steez seems to be “awkward sex offender”, as he coerces women on the streets of LA into kissing him (but only after he’s lassoed them for the lulz).

But when you hear Zoella on the radio or see Alfie’s book in the shops, try not to be too angry at them. These vanilla humans, while calculated in their rise to success, are just whatever people. They deserve a modicum of ire for their sheer tyrannical self-aggrandisement, but not so much that it’s hurtful for them. They’re just wealthy young morons feeding people a fantasy.

Vanilla people like my mailman have always existed in the margins of our daily lives. They’re inoffensive for the most part, naturally. But when pushed in front of us their prosaic manner and dull personas have the potential to enrage, because you expect entertainment and what you get is shit.

This isn’t where we should want entertainment to go. These aren’t the people we should want on our televisions, singing our songs or acting in our films. They’re walking definitions of mediocrity, and the only way they’ll stay online where they belong is if you refuse to accept their presence anywhere else. The war on the vanilla people might be a long and bloody struggle. But at least I’ll be able to turn the TV or the radio on without some cunt trying and failing to muster the charisma of Lee fucking Evans.

Follow Joe Bish on Twitter.

Labor activists protest a right-to-work law in Indiana's state capitol in 2011. Photo via Flickr user UFCW International Union

Organized labor has been under assault for decades in this country, and if the Midwest offers any indication, a new breed of anti-union laws could be coming to your town next. In 2012, amid bitter protests at the state capitol in Indianapolis, Republicans voted to admit Indiana into the legion of “right-to-work” states, meaning that many of its unions could no longer require employees under their representation to pay dues. But even as that law has wound its way through a number of legal fights, another, largely unnoticed right-to-work battle has cropped up in the nearby city of Fort Wayne, where local officials have taken things a step further. This summer, the Republican supermajority in the city council pushed through a series of bills—including its very own local right-to-work law—that make it far more difficult for unions to represent government employees.

Conservatives love it when states to pass right-to-work laws, since they represent an existential threat to the power of unions, which rely on dues for both daily operation and institutional growth. Twenty-four states have adopted them. Stirring potent passions across the political spectrum, right-to-work laws act as both agent and symbol of the county’s declining rates of unionization and the fading clout of labor. While it remains uncertain which, if any, of the (relatively few) pro-labor states will join this trend, right-wingers are eyeing a potentially massive new battleground for their pro-business regime: individual cities and counties across the country—even those in strongly Democratic territory. 

A report released last week by the conservative Heritage Foundation lays out the basic vision: Localities across the country should “experiment,” Heritage suggests, with local right-to-work territories. The authors, who appear to be most focused on unions that organize private-sector employees, forecast that such laws could provoke a legal challenge ending up in the hands of the US Supreme Court, which they expect to uphold the right of cities and counties to determine the fate of their unions.

Heritage’s analysis may prove to be more than some academic exercise. Localities and politicians across the country are eyeing related legislation. For instance, Bruce Rauner—Illinois’ Republican candidate for governor, who is waging a competitive race against the state’s Democratic incumbent—cites the creation of local right-to-work zones as one of his top policy priorities for the Illinois economy. And earlier this year in Pennsylvania, the statewide association of county commissioners encouraged officials across the state to pass their own county-level laws restricting unions’ authority to collect mandatory dues.

But Fort Wayne offers a vivid example of what the bitterly divisive laws look like on the micro scale. In June, the city council approved a law that effectively eliminates the right of many municipal employee unions to play any role in bargaining, rendering most of the unions powerless. This did not apply to public-safety workers, however, who became the subject of a different law, passed in July, that imposes a more straightforward right-to-work ordinance on police and firefighters. 

“Now, we don’t even have a seat at the table,” says Lloyd Osborne, the business representative of the Local 399 Operating Engineers, which represents street maintenance and water utility workers. “We can’t go on [workplace] property to represent or even speak to our members—or who used to be our members. They completely did away with the unions here under a local ordinance.”

Sofia Rosales-Scatena at the local Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association—which is now subject to the city’s right-to-work law—says that while the union can still require members to pay “administrative fees," newer officers may balk at paying full, once-required dues that fund legal services, charity drives and other programs considered mainstays of their work. “The first thing to go would be our charitable activities,” Rosales-Scatena tells me, citing the union’s regular participation in the Special Olympics and food drives for hungry families during the holidays. 

Fort Wayne’s new laws—both the statues themselves and the style with which they were legislated—resemble those ramrodded onto employees in Wisconsin by the state’s Koch-friendly governor, Scott Walker, in 2011. By effectively eliminating state employees’ right to bargain and also mandating that due-paying by public employees become voluntary, Walker sparked the country’s most acrimonious labor showdown in years. The uproar brought tens of thousands of protesters to Madison and resulted in a particularly nasty recall election that Walker survived—thanks in large part to an infusion of unregulated outside cash. Epitomized by his epic assault on collective bargaining, Walker’s reign has put Wisconsin on the map as the country’s most politically (and, to a slightly lesser extent, racially) polarized state. (Walker’s campaigning activity has since become the subject of a large criminal investigation, though he is not directly implicated at this point.)

Even though Walker was able to hang on, labor organizers in Fort Wayne believe that overreach by the Republican leadership could galvanize voters to elect friendlier candidates in upcoming elections. A letter from a local Republican operative to the Fort Wayne Republican City Council members indicate that the party itself fears that its council members may have gone after local unions—which is to say workers—too bluntly. 

Ultimately, the Fort Wayne law, along with other local right-to-work statutes, could be decided in the courts. According to Kenneth G. Dau-Schmidt, a professor of labor and employment law at Indiana University, right-to-work regimes like that of Fort Wayne might be imperiled by both the state constitution, which requires “just compensation” for union representation, and also by a state law that governs police and firefighters unions. Before now, Dau-Schmidt had never heard of this sort of law being determined by cities and counties. “Generally we don't make labor law on the local level,” he says.

The Fort Wayne case would likely not qualify as a candidate for Heritage’s hoped-for Supreme Court win because state—rather than federal—laws often govern public sector workers, according to Lance Compa, an expert at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Compa argues that local right-to-work laws targeting private-sector unions would stand no chance in federal court.

“In the private sector this would be clearly pre-empted under the National Labor Relations Act,” Compa says. “States can enact these laws, but only states, and cities and counties cannot. I mean, they could do it, but it would only be symbolic, and it would be stopped in the court.” 

Some conservatives disagree, and the spirit of a recent Supreme Court ruling gives them cause for hope.

In June, in a 5-4 decision in the case of Harris v. Quinn, the Supreme Court held that public sector unions across the country could no longer mandate dues from certain employees. Although the ruling’s scope was narrow, some labor law experts see the decision as opening the door to an eventual wholesale nationwide right-to-work ruling. William Messenger of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation—the lead attorney representing the victors in that case—sat on a Heritage Foundation panel about local right-to-work laws held last week.

Messenger told the crowd that unions requiring members pay dues is “sort of a lot like a kidnapper, you know, saying that their victim should pay them room and board. Well, they don’t want to be there in the first place,” he said, adding that it is “the unions that are imposing their representation on those employees.”

Conservative ideologues hope that local right-to-work laws will, by their very existence, spread widely by placing pressure on neighboring localities to follow suit. In this view, once one town loosens its labor protections, it will become more attractive to business and thereby force nearby cities and counties to pass their own laws making it cheaper to hire people. Heritage hopes that this could ultimately filter up to the state, or even national, level. Andrew Kloster, a co-author of the Heritage report, cited Illinois and New York as states with right-wing localities that might pass such laws. (Of course, many economists have questioned the conservative gospel that right-to-work invigorates economies.)

“If you can’t get it at the statewide level,” added the report’s co-author, James Sherk, “the locality level is the next best thing.”

Follow Spencer Woodman on Twitter.

Photos by Megan Koester

Perhaps it's my advancing age, my predilection for playing the sourpuss, or merely my growing disinterest in ceremony of any sort, but I'd rather eat in the shit end of a strip mall than get gussied up for a night on the town in the kind of genericly chic hotspots that now litter America's cities. The lamentations of my colleagues as far afield as London over the insidious creeping dread of gentrification are now as familiar to journalism as Beyonce think-pieces, pointless aggregation of Daily Show clips, and Oxford commas.

We've bitched about gentrification's florid fare and prentitious air of exclusion, but what's the alternative? The aggressive gourmet flatulence of trendy urban neighborhoods makes me long for the affordable, bland, but comforting chain restaurants of my youth. I'm talking about the kind of place where the ads implore you to "let your hair down," "unwind," and "be family." 

Those sentiments seem trite, but are actually what we crave the most, especially here in America. We want to belong, we want to be accepted, and we want to get drunk on cheap liquor. Those aren't virtues anymore when fancy gastropubs charge $17 for a burger and $8 for a pint of beer. We are being robbed of the one thing that makes us American: our love of inexpensive, generic bullshit.

The first Denny's in Manhattan opened last week, and features a $300 version of their popular Grand Slam meal that comes with a bottle of Dom Perignon. We can't even pray at the altar of the classic American diner without being reminded of what we don't have. Are well-heeled day traders in Manhattan going to pop in for bacon and eggs, with a side of champagne? What's next, a Happy Meal that comes with an XBox? 

Reveling in popular culture, while also suckling at the sweet, sparkling teat of opulance is de rigueur these days. Restaurants sell gussied up versions of comfort food and charge through the nose for it. But what about just having normal comfort food? Can't I just pleasure myself on top of a greasy plate of "grub" while knocking back a few discounted Happy Hour beverages? That beautiful disaster exists solely in the safe, sanitized vortex of the suburban chain restaurant.

In order to enjoy the perks of the chain experience, one has to travel outside the city center, even in LA. Los Angeles is the prototypical American metropolis. Less a contained city, and more an ever-growing collection of discreet communities of single-family homes separated by wide boulevards and freeways. Nowhere is this more apparent than in what Johnny Carson called, “Beautiful Downtown Burbank.”

There are 104,391 people who live suburban Burbank—a town most famous for its TV and movie studios, and its high concentration of chain restaurants and big box retailers. Burbank is a place that has the foresight to dedicate an entire stretch of their city to a "mall district." Not a financial district, jewelry district, or warehouse district. A mall district.

On the blessed American holiday of Labor Day, I ventured to sample the best Happy Hours in walking distance of Downtown Burbank and bask in the death rattle of egalitarian, chicken-fried culture.

BJ’S RESTAURANT AND BREWHOUSE

My photographer, our friend Alison, and I arrived at the first bar around 3 PM, a faux-brewery famous for the Pizookie—a pie-sized cookie some nuclear physicist, zany futurist, or civil engineer thought to put ice cream on top of. Besides the brewhouse shtick, BJ's focuses its advertising on a sense of inclusion. The front page of their website features a crawling panorama of customers—babies, minorities, the aged, men, women, hep cats, and square pegs. During our visit, a Maserati was parked in a section clearly marked "No Parking," which meant that the extremely wealthy (and the shameless scofflaw) were also welcome for Happy Hour. 

Few things symbolize America like convenience, which is what places like BJ's are meant to provide. That unique trait in our DNA that demands that everything be simple is a modern phenomenon, one that came into favor after we licked the Nazis in World War II. Sorry that I’m too tired to wait an hour for a hamburger. I just got done saving the world.

Central air conditioning, TV dinners, supermarkets, drive-thrus, suburban shopping malls, freeways, cable, and mass-market pornography all came to prominence in America after our grand tour of Europe was through. These creature comforts assist in helping us forget the dangers of leaving the house.

True awareness of reality should mean getting up every morning and murdering your food, wiping your ass with tree branches, and praying your village isn't in the throws of the annual Viking rape and pillage/pagan blood orgy/block party.

Everything in America is artificially controlled—from the climate down to the traffic patterns—to distract us from how hard life is supposed to be. If we could mandate when the sun set every day, we'd do that too. We want existence to be safe, tidy, and easy to manage. Chain restaurants give us that, plus more stimulus than we know what to do with.

What unites all chain restaurant bars is the unquestioned primacy of the television. These establishments seek not only to mimic the traditional American bar’s focus on sporting events, but also try to improve on them by cramming enough TVs onto the wall to ensure that everyone gets to watch whatever the fuck they want, even if that includes reruns of Ray Donovan or those Adam Levine Proactiv commercials.

In the case of the Burbank BJ’s, that meant that there were monitors screening SportsCenter’s coverage of NFL training camp, a couple midday Major League Baseball contests, a monster truck rally, cable news reports on ISIS, and a very special episode of The Steve Harvey Show in which America's Favorite Black Funnyman helped some garden variety nerds score with the ladies. But we didn't come just to watch reenactments of bad dates. We came to drink... cheaply.

BJ’s offers a robust Happy Hour menu with beer, wine, and specialty cocktails. The arbitrary rule I set down for the day stated that we would only have one drink per person and a shared appetizer. I got a beer, and Alison chose to sample something called a “no guilt Cosmo,” which is a pink diet drink that tastes vaguely like alcohol. Despite my rule, I wasn't leaving BJ's without getting a little baby sip.

I ended up feeling plenty of guilt anyway, when I fully accepted the true horror of drinking a zero calorie alcoholic beverage at 3:00 PM on a Monday. If you don’t at least feel a twinge of shame sucking down pink booze from a novelty glass while the sun is out, you aren’t a real American. Our Puritan forefathers would have wanted it that way.

Befitting an establishment that seeks to make all feel welcome, we were pressured into keeping our menus after ordering, as though we might randomly want another helping of avocado egg rolls, a Pizookie, an entire pizza, or whatever was left in the fridge at closing time. Places like BJ's are expert at making their patrons reconsider their decision to eat with restraint.

When one chooses to abstain from gorging on fried items, it's usually not because they actually want to be healthy, so in most cases, it's not a long journey to ordering another round of potato skins. No one at BJ's is going to stop you from expressing yourself through food, so it behooves you to take advantage.

Again, "guilt" is the operative word. Society shames us into ignoring our baser nature, our inherent need to always have more. At an American chain restaurant, the Cosmos are guilt-free, but so is everything else. When I asked for the check, the waiter smiled broadly and asked, “Ready for the worst part?” He was right about that. The worst part was being forced to leave without feeling satisfied or ill.

As we waddled out the door, a server assured her table that they were “out of the splash zone.” What a comforting thought.

ISLANDS RESTAURANT

Islands is a chain of beach-themed family establishment with branches in California, Nevada, and Arizona. On that day, they were hawking Summertime Happy Hour, which offered "stress relief" from 3 PM to 7 PM. The tropical motif is more important than it might seem at first glance. The chain restaurant, at its core, must be reassuring, pleasant, and evocative of people, places, and things that make the diner feel content. The ocean is a great option for chain decor, because the vast majority of this sprawling, predominantly landlocked country doesn't ever get to see it. For a family in Nebraska, it's a novelty.

Couples ate quietly, marking time before their next awkward car ride or grocery store excursion. “Counting Blue Cars” by Dishwalla blared from the overhead speakers. "Tell me all your thoughts on God," the singer requested. I think I've found her, and she's a waitress at Islands.

Befitting my glorious surroundings, I ordered a glass of white wine. For the rest, a vodka soda and a cabernet sauvignon. Perhaps too classy for Islands, but certainly the exact drink I needed to relieve the remainder of my "stress."

We washed it all down with a quesadilla plate. Not exactly island food, but chain restaurants aren't beholden to irritating concepts like "theme" and "consistency." If people want Mexican food at a bar covered in Hawaiian memorabilia, they're going to get it. In our case, we also got a rubber band amongst the edible items. I gnawed on this for around ten minutes before acknowledging that what was in my mouth wasn't actually food. I still tipped generously. After all, was it my server's fault that I got a rubber band in my meal?

BUFFALO WILD WINGS

For some, the holy grail of chain restaurant bars is the decadence and sophomoric eroticism of Hooters. For others, TGI Friday’s commitment to whimsical approximations of Americana does the trick. Then, there’s the Applebee’s people. The Applebee’s crowd wants their drinks as blue as possible, to be able to "eat good in the neighborhood" without incident, and not much else.

B-Dubs, then, strives to be all things for all people. The female servers are clearly chosen partially for their attractiveness, but they aren’t as systemically sexualized as they are at Hooters (they even hire male waiters!) It's masculine without being threatening. The decor is fun, yet modest. There's not an impenetrable selection of colorful beverages. The food is not overly complicated or showy. There's burgers, fries, beer, and a TV screen for every man, woman, and child in the zip code. The menu asked the rhetorical question, “What is better than fried cheese?” Nothing, my friend. Nothing.

The televisions were even more omnipresent than at BJ's. Here, the food truly takes a backseat to the experience. There was an especially bloody fight on in one of the side rooms. For some reason, the sight of a man's blood makes me want to get drunk even more than usual. It's probably some primal expression of manliness that I can't ever hope to understand. It was still Happy Hour, so I decided to break my one drink rule and order two large beers to satiate my craving.

For the first time all day, our server carded us, which was a shock to the system after breezing through the previous two locations without a hint of concern for the legality of our enterprise. She informed us that a colleague at a restaurant across the street neglected to card what turned out to be an undercover federal agent. Her blunder cost her $15,000, even more for the restaurant, and sent her to jail. Pharrell’s “Happy” was our signal to depart, as our time in this establishment just couldn’t get any better. We’d peaked early.

CHEVYS

After its 1990s heyday, Chevys has slowly but surely lost much of its luster, but within its walls, there's still a bit of magic to be found. On their home page, they advertise the "Good Life," a noncommittal charge to chill the fuck out. Their greatest claim to fame is El Machino, a contraption that spits out fresh tortillas. Besides being a mini tourist attraction, it also makes really great tortillas.

Chevys can also boast that it is notoriously affordable. In my college days, a plate of nachos at Chevys cost around $6. Today, they cost $10. Considering the immense portions on offer, and the likelihood that what you ingest will not leave your system for a fortnight, that’s still quite a deal.

As a great man once said, "When in Rome, order a margarita." So we did. Chevys margs taste like they're mostly sugar, but their nutrition facts page sadly doesn't list their alcoholic beverages. Only in hindsight did I even care. In the moment, all I wanted to do was live that Good Life I'd heard about. 

CALIFORNIA PIZZA KITCHEN

I chose to conclude the evening at California Pizza Kitchen. There was no Happy Hour deal, but they did offer a free small plate if patrons signed up for their iPhone app. In many ways, CPK is the end of the simplistic chain restaurant, and signifies where American leisure habits started to change. The restaurant interiors are light and airy, and almost frighteningly clean. Giant floor-to-ceiling windows allow diners to look out onto the street, and for the street to stare back.

Conspicuous dining, random chrome accents, sparse decor, and visible kitchens are all modern high-end restaurant trends, but CPK and brethren like Cheesecake Factory have been able to replicate that design on a massive scale. CPK is a facsimile of a fancy restaurant, which is borderline cheating. It's still a chain, but it's a chain that's a tad embarrassed by its status. 

To eat, I got two flatbreads, one of which was gratis, thanks to the aforementioned small plate deal. They were modest, yet flavorful; a far cry from the ostentatious burgers and Mexican-inspired dishes we had at our previous destinations. I was pretty drunk, so everything tasted great anyway.

Based on the small diamond ring on her finger, I assumed that our server was married. I silently commended her for her willingness to start a family on what likely isn’t a massive income. I was sure to be extra friendly to her the rest of the night.

To drink, I ordered prosecco, a nod to the news story that birthed this adventure. Sure, it's not a $300 bottle of Dom at Denny's, but it was similarly an absurd affectation that singled me out as "one of those people." I felt like a prick, but isn't that why places like this serve silly drinks? Isn't that what has led to the farm-to-table, gluten-free, artisanal phenomenon—an aching, unceasing yearning to tell the planet where you stand? 

At California Pizza Kitchen, I stood—pinky out and head up my ass. Maybe I didn't earn this indulgence the same way my war-ravaged relatives did, but that didn't stop me from enjoying the spoils anyway.

This sort of prosperity, satisfaction, and material opulence became the birthright of all future generations of Americans to be born after V-J Day. I can, and I should, have my own car. I should be able to support myself with a stable job, buy a house, and squirrel away enough money to retire in my 60s.

Our birthright came to be known as the American Dream, a catchy marketing term to goose up the superiority complex of the nation. While the Germans, Japanese, British, Italians, and French were busy sifting through the remains of empire, the United States was stuffing themselves on Big Macs and McHale’s Navy.

The same sad bastards who had to queue up at the soup kitchen for his daily allotment of gruel could now warm up a pre-made meal, watch Donna Reed, and drink themselves to sleep all in the comfort of a room that was constantly 72 degrees. We did it because we were fed up eating dirt. A nation of poor, illiterate sharecroppers harboring a fierce obsession with superstition could at long last guarantee a certain basic level of satisfaction. Can you blame us for taking it a bit too far?

Follow Dave Schilling on Twitter.

Hey cow, you're gonna make me rich! via Flickr user fishhawk.

If you’ve ever been into a grocery store south of the border, you may have noticed that milk and cheese are notably cheaper in the Land of the Free. There are often more choices, too and fancy imported cheeses are easier to come by. If you ever thought this price difference was some kind of lactose-influenced hallucination, you’re not crazy—Canadians do pay more for dairy.

One of the main reasons we pay up to three times more for milky-goodness is because we’re living under the thumb of a powerful dairy cartel that enjoys the full protection of the Canadian government.

This seemingly bizarre arrangement has an appropriately Canadian, non-threatening title: Supply Management. Which of course means that the total supply of dairy in the country is constrained by a dairy board in combination with punishing tariffs (taxes) on imported milk, cheese, and so on.

While this system is nothing new, it’s certainly been flying under most peoples’ radar for quite some time. So let’s quickly unpack how it works.  

The system is underpinned by the Canadian Dairy Council, which sets bulk prices for milk destined for cheese, butter, ice cream, and yogurt. Provincial boards determine their own prices for fresh table milk. Dairy products from outside the country are restricted to a very small quota before they’re taxed out of the realm of profitability, which severely limits outside competition.

Cheese imports, for instance, are limited to about 8 percent of the national cheese market, which is itself smaller than it might be without price controls. This explains why you can’t find that nice French Morbier or Spanish Casin outside of a few specialty shops.  

Total supply is essentially capped by a system of quotas, or permits to legally produce milk for sale. Dairy farmers buy and sell these production quotas amongst each other. The permit to produce milk from a single cow now costs $25,000—and prices could be even higher, but they’ve been capped for the last few years.  Needless to say, this creates some perverse incentives.

Farmers who own these permits will usually oppose any expansion of production that could devalue their valuable assets. Meanwhile, anyone getting into the game had better come up with some serious (ahem) cheddar if they want to start herding dairy cattle.

Consumers, for their part, pay the costs of the quotas through higher retail prices, which is decidedly not very fun.

Why bring in such a system in the first place? Supply management had a few good arguments going for it when it was introduced in the 1970s. For one, it helped to insure small farmers’ livelihoods against price fluctuations. This price control supported a network of family farms, and everyone likes family farms. These farmers, the bulk of whom were (and still are) in Ontario and Quebec, came to be a powerful political bloc.

But much has changed over the years. As Bob Wolfe, Professor of Public Policy at Queen’s University wrote,

“In 1976, Canada had 96,909 active dairy farmers with 1,993,427 cows, or 21 cows per farm. In 2011, there were only 14,883 remaining dairy farms with 961,726 cows, or 65 cows per farm, but each of those cows produced more milk than her great-grandparents – milk output per cow in Ontario, for example, doubled from 1976 to 2012.”

In other words, a good number of the family farms are giving way to factory farms. Any small farmer looking to make a go of it today from scratch would need millions of dollars to get into the milk game. So far, Canadians have been happy to pay more to support the idea of friendly families churning butter. But there’s a growing disconnect between this bucolic perception and the gleaming, mechanized reality in the country.

This begs the question: is it worth paying extra to an ever-smaller set of large, wealthy dairy producers and firms? A Canadian family of four might just want their extra $276 a year back. The problem is compounded by the fact that Canada’s poorest people put the biggest fraction of their incomes towards food. Are these the right people to bear the burden of supporting dairy farmers?

If we were serious about fairness, it would likely make good sense to greatly scale back the price subsidies that dairy producers currently enjoy to relieve consumers. Then, dairy farmers in need could be helped out with direct transfers from government tax revenue, which is collected more progressively.

Of course, the above plan sounds a lot more like a handout. But in practice, it’s effectively the same thing as our current arrangement. And by dropping supply management, we could ease restrictions on imports of delicious foreign cheese or high-fat butter.

The current complicated wealth transfer is largely invisible to consumers, who are stuck wondering why milk feels expensive and the cheese selection for their dinner party is embarrassing. As the Canadian dairy sector has modernized and consolidated, supply management hasn’t kept up with the times.

Naturally, getting rid of Canada’s dairy cartel wouldn’t be easy. WIth the current value of all milk production quotas well over $28 billion, the government would have a tough time buying farmers out of their permits before enabling a free-for-all. This means that any moves to ditch supply management could leave a very sour taste in Ontario and Quebec.

External factors could potentially provide the push to begin chipping away at the milk monopoly. American agricultural interests are pushing for Canada to open up its dairy market as part of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a vast trade agreement among Pacific countries. Additionally, European countries stand to export moderately more cheese to Canada under the proposed Canada-Europe Trade Agreement. But, as Wolfe argues, neither of these deals is big enough to cause radical changes, and “the debate about the future of supply management needs to be conducted on other grounds.”

There’s no doubt that supply management has benefited rural Canada since its inception in the 1970s. But there’s a strong case to be be argued that it’s time for an overhaul—the program now often amounts to a payment scheme from middle and low-income consumers to wealthy producers. At the very least, if we’re going to keep living with our dairy cartel, we need a much more informed public discussion going forward.

Navigating strange subsidies is tough for governments—it’s hard to improve things for one set of people without screwing another over. Getting Canada’s dairy farmers off the public teet must feel like a chicken-and-egg problem. Indeed, it is just that—poultry and eggs are supply managed too.

Follow Chris on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Filippo Minelli

If you spend a lot of time on Twitter.com, a website that's sort of like a giant room where everyone shouts conversation fragments towards the ceiling, you’ve probably already come across the news that the social network is about to become more like Facebook. The site will soon roll out features that will “separate the interesting and timely tweets from the noise,” the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. This means that instead of a firehose of 140-character jokes, news items, mini-#thinkpieces, general complaints, links, and incredibly petty fights delivered in reverse chronological order, users will see a selection of tweets that has been filtered for their convenience and pleasure by a friendly algorithm.

Regular users hate hate HATE this, and they’re complaining, naturally, by tweeting:

.@twitter to ruin Twitter. Booooo. http://t.co/qC9oZLGpjr

— Clara Jeffery (@ClaraJeffery) September 4, 2014

Yup. RT @dloehr: No one signs up for @twitter looking for a middleman to curate for them. If you must, make that optional for users.

— Alan Sepinwall (@sepinwall) September 4, 2014

A @facebook style filtered ("curated") feed is the exact opposite of what I want on @twitter and from social media. http://t.co/jWHPFGNlFJ

— Sean Finnegan (@IMFinnegan) September 4, 2014

.@twitter: "Let's be more like the worst goddamn website on earth." http://t.co/zAmXozv8vG

— Spencer Hall (@edsbs) September 4, 2014

To understand why people are filled with such anger, you need to understand why they (well, really we, since I'm one of those lunks who spends too much on the site) like Twitter so much. We might as well start by admitting that it is incredibly unfriendly for new users. When you sign up you don't get to see anything until you follow some people, and it takes you a while to realize that Twitter isn't one big community, it's hundreds or thousands of little overlapping communities that are all talking within themselves, making in-jokes, and subtweeting their antagonists. It's also a place where everything is on the same level—celebrity tweets, people bitching about airlines, insane novels about Homer Simpson smoking marijuana in Iraq. You can curate this stuff by sorting your follows into lists, or you can just let it all wash over you, trusting that if something interesting or important is happening on the internet, Twitter will naturally put it front and center. 

The resulting diversity of shit you can look at by scanning Twitter stands in stark contrast to Facebook, where a mysterious algorithm picks and chooses which of your friends' statuses appear on your News Feed, resulting in ads showing up under wedding and birth announcements from people you met years ago and have since forgotten about. More annoyingly, your News Feed often seems to pick items to display based on how many likes they're getting, meaning that you get shown a bunch of junky videos that You Just Can't Believe and links to heartstring-jerking stories that Will Restore Your Faith in Humanity.

Twitter's fans, myself included, love that it doesn't hold your hand and show you things it suspects you'll be interested in. The act of sorting through a messy fountain of information and ideas is stimulating in and of itself, and you never know when you'll come across something that's fascinating but that you wouldn't have stumbled on except for a stray retweet you happened to click. Facebook's News Feed might be an easy way to check out your friends' social lives and keep up, in a vague way, with the biggest stories of the day, but it can rapidly become predictable and stale.

It's easy to dismiss complaints about social media sites as the grumblings of a few angry people who should probably unplug and go outside and/or read a book, but there are precious few places left on the internet where our experience isn't controlled by the invisible hand of an algorithm. Facebook, which provides so much traffic to sites like the one you're reading right now that minor changes in its News Feed can cause readership to drop drastically, obviously curates everything it shows you. But Google search results are also filtered, with similar consequences—earlier this year the online community MetaFilter had to lay some of its moderators off after a change in how the search powerhouse indexes hits sank their traffic. The internet you see is increasingly controlled by a few massive corporations, and they've been exerting themselves more and more lately, as the members of the Free Syrian Army—whose Facebook pages were taken down this year—could tell you. (Occasionally, this power is used for good; Facebook recently decided to crack down on sites that publish fake "news" stories and profit from the traffic.)

The change for Twitter seems pretty clearly motivated by the site's need to become more attractive to casual users, making it in turn more attractive to advertisers. It's a tweak that won't matter to those who aren't hardcore tweeters, and many people will surely like the new version of the site. If Twitter becomes more like Facebook, though, it'll inevitably get less weird as it grows friendlier and more welcoming—and that means another bubble of the web's strangeness will have been smoothed out by the forces of homogenization (and capitalism). The new Twitter will probably make more money for everyone. Unfortunately, it will look just like the rest of the internet.    

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.