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Building Homemade Laser Guns and Flamethrowers for Fun and Profit

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Building Homemade Laser Guns and Flamethrowers for Fun and Profit

This Mortician Wants You to Take a Hands-On Approach with Corpses

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Photo courtesy of Caitlin Doughty

As the creator of the popular and informative “Ask a Mortician” video series on YouTube, Caitlin Doughty has explored death related questions such as: Do corpses soil themselves? What happens to someone’s breast implants when they get cremated? How prevalent is necrophilia in the funeral industry?

VICE interviewed her back in 2012, but since then Caitlin's ambitions have moved forward and shifted. Starting this November, she’s embarking on a new project, called Undertaking LA. It's an alternative funeral practice that would give people the tools to take the undertaker out of the equation altogether. Or, as she succinctly described the concept to me, “The idea is that myself and another mortician just teach people that you don’t really need us.” Caitlin certainly speaks from experience. She is a licensed funeral director and mortician who spent several years working in the traditional funeral industry. Her recently released New York Times best-selling memoir Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory chronicles her first six years in the industry. I decided to reach out to her for a follow-up.

VICE: Reading the book, I got the impression that you’re not a fan of the “I don’t care what happens to my body when I die” mentality. This leads many people—often my fellow atheists or non-religious folks—into selecting cremation as the default option. Is that the case?
Caitlin Doughty: Yes, that’s what my mom says: “I’ve thought about death, it’s not that big a deal. It doesn’t mean anything to me, the body doesn’t mean anything. Cremate me, do what you want, put me in a hefty bag on the curb, doesn’t matter.” I don’t think that’s true. I am also completely secular [and] irreligious, but I think ritual is still really important. Ritual and religion are totally different things. They can be connected, but atheists get married all the time, atheists have birthday parties all the time.

Do you feel like it’s a cop out to say that? 
Yeah, I completely do. Because it’s also a privilege to be able to say that. We live in a world now where bodies can magically disappear and be disposed of and cremated without any interaction from the people who are in the immediate community of the person who died. It’s only been like this for 75 years or so where you can have the luxury of saying, “You know what? The body’s not a big deal, just take it away and cremate it.” The “just take it away and cremate it” part was not something you ever got to do prior to that. Having the burden of the body just completely lifted away from you is actually this huge privilege—maybe it’s not such a privilege, though, because you’re not getting any real sense of your own mortality.     

So would you say it’s better for people to take more control of the process and get creative?
Right now, if you feel like you just have to go with the status quo—the casket, the embalming, the flowers, and the graveside service—then there’s no incentive for you to push yourself with the rituals, push yourself in terms of creativity, and to find something that’s meaningful for you. But if you go back to a much more basic template, where you’re in charge of the body, and you’re in charge of the service, and you’re in charge of how things go, then you kind of have to find new ways to create ritual and to create things that are meaningful around the body. 

And why do you think that hasn’t happened yet?
Because we are entrenched in the myths of the funeral industry. We are entrenched in the idea that dead bodies are dangerous, and we are entrenched in the idea that it is better to have professionals do it. Entrenched in the idea that how death is done is how it’s always been done, even though American death is a really recent invention.  

Image courtesy of The Good Death

So that’s where Undertaking LA comes in?
The idea [of Undertaking LA] is that myself and another mortician just teach people that you don’t really need us. Here are all the laws, here’s all the tips and tricks, here’s how to take care of the body yourself, file paperwork yourself, basically go around the funeral home. If you want to. You don’t have to, but it’s an option.

Would you say that “DIY funerals” is an accurate term?
I think so, yeah. That makes it sound like “trendz” with a Z, but I think it is, yeah. When you’re with a dead body of someone that you knew really well, we’re saying, one, Here’s a chance to say your goodbyes and realize that this person is really dead and see the little physical changes in their body and feel them go cold and be like, “OK, this person’s not here anymore.” This person’s out of the picture and out of my community and out of my life. And then, two, be able to look at this dead body in person and say, “Wow, I’m mortal too. I am doomed to die and let’s see how that plays into my life." 

Once people are made aware that they can take control of the funeral and burial process, does that often lead to them to think of possibilities they wouldn’t previously have considered?
Oh, totally. Though probably only one-twentieth of people who say, “Oh my God, that’s so amazing, I had no idea” are actually going to do any part of that. It’s not like as soon as someone finds out they can take care of the corpse themselves they’re like, “Ah, I’m going to run out and do it, get me a corpse, sign me up.” There’s still going to be fear, there’s still going to be societal misconceptions, there’s going to be stigmas built up around it in their mind. But even just knowing they have the option probably empowers them when they go into the funeral home. [Even] if you want the funeral home to take care of the body you might say, “Hey, I don’t want you to embalm the body because I know that I don’t need that chemical preservation and maybe I want to come and sit with the body for two hours. Where’s my two-hour block where I just come in and hold its hand?" Knowing that you have those options is a good thing even if everyone’s not running out to become the most hands-on body caretaker in the world.         

In the book you write: “The great achievements of humanity were born out of the deadlines imposed by death.” That might seem counterintuitive to some. 
Death is the fundamental motivator of all of the achievement in our lives. If we end up writing a book or building a building or we have ten children or whatever we are doing in our lives, death and the knowledge that we are going to die is the thing that’s looming over our shoulders and causing us to make these decisions. And if we are not acknowledging that then we have less of a sense of self-awareness about our world. We’re just kind of walking around bumping into walls. 

It sounds like you agree with author Susan Jacoby that longevity is overrated.
There’s talk of extending life, and there’s this magical unicorn of “cell reversal” and going back in age or preserving life at a young age which is some sort of magical future. But the reality is right now that all we are doing with life extension is extending life far beyond most people’s threshold for an enjoyable life. And this is Susan’s point too. In the media all we get is this image of “I’m a 95-year-old nun who still coaches soccer and plays with puppies and is skydiving and I’m so amazing.” When in reality, the vast majority of elderly women are holed up in nursing homes with an incredibly low quality of life. The money runs out and so they just go on government subsidies and—especially as the baby boomers get older—we are not going to have the money or the resources to take care of them. And that’s a societal problem. We shouldn't be radically trying to extend people’s lives until we’re actually taking care of the people that we actually have alive. 

What are your thoughts then on transhumanists like Ray Kurzweil who would like to see death become a thing of the past?
I think that the people who are into life extension tend to be very outspoken about the fact that it’s for them specifically. It’s not to help save children in the third world, it’s not to help build our society in a positive way—it’s because they like themselves, they like their lives of privilege, and they want to extend them. Which is fine, but the fact that these are men who already have a great deal of power and money to begin with... I don’t know if that’s the right place to start a longer-lived society. If your template is these men of incredible wealth and power—men, pretty universally—I don’t know that that goes well long-term. Just in general trying to extend life when, again, we’re not taking care of the people we have—even in this country—where are our priorities? How can you stand up there and say that? 

Should people be afraid of dead bodies for health reasons?
No, they totally shouldn’t. [Even] with Ebola, for instance, all we’re hearing is, “Oh my God, this is so deadly.” The virus doesn’t live that long. If you bury a body and you bury it well, the virus dies off, and it’s not like if those bodies were to be flooded or something and come out of the ground they would continue to shoot off Ebola for years to come. It’s not the way that science works. We know how science works on these bodies now. We know that anybody that would die at home or in a nursing home in America is totally safe. Cancer, lung disease, heart disease, accidents, HIV—all of these create completely safe corpses. And in fact safer than a living body because it’s not sneezing or pooping or doing any of the things that transfer any sort of disease. If you’re worried about the body decomposing a little bit or gases building up or anything, the bacteria involved in that are not the same bacteria that cause decomposition. Decomposition bacteria and disease bacteria are totally different.   

Why do people think then that there is a health risk? Where does this misconception come from? Are people taught this in mortuary school?
I sat right there as the professor said, “We embalm bodies for the public health. We are sanitation engineers for the good of the public.” I think the reason we were taught that is that it was the secret ingredient that made funeral directors professionals. That made them sort of “medical-ish.” That made them have this thing that the rabble couldn’t do with dead bodies. And if you take that away, that takes away the fundamental principle of morticians, or funeral directors, or the funeral industry. So you have to keep that perception up. To the point that I think a lot of [funeral professionals] don’t even really know. They’re not trying to pull one over on you, they just genuinely don’t know that that’s not the case.

Do you think describing the appearance of an embalmed body as “natural” is appropriate? Anecdotally people have told me looking at one has freaked them out. 
Tale as old as time. That’s another reason why people don’t want to be involved with death ritual. Because if the one body you’ve seen was your grandfather and you were ten and he was chemically preserved within an inch of his life and had makeup on and looked like wax, never again are you gonna be like, “It’s important and I know it’s good for me to go to a funeral.” Because the last funeral you went to was a horror show. So why do that again?

I think it’s better to have them look like their “dead version” than not like them at all. If you let someone be natural—no chemical intervention or anything—after they die, then they look like like the dead version of themselves. And that’s not a bad thing because they are dead. And you’re supposed to be getting used to the idea that they are dead. 

Sure, but how “natural” are such viewings even without embalming? 
If you have a funeral home do it, they probably have some tricks that they’ve used. There’s probably some wires, there’s probably some eye caps and some Super Glue involved if they’ve prepared the body. But if you’re preparing it at home, it can be as natural as you want. Essential oils, candles, rolled-up towel under the mouth, it can be as completely natural as you want it to be. But it’s all cultural. The eyes being a little open, the mouth being a little open—the fact that we’re not comfortable with that is cultural. It’s not an innate human thing to not want a [dead] person’s mouth to be open a little bit. Most people don’t hang around with their one eye open and their mouth hanging open, so we have to do that a little bit so they look relaxed and groovy. But the complete horror we experience at the really natural processes of death is very much part of modern culture.

How can a non-mortician spend time with a corpse or corpses? Outside of going to a funeral or something, could someone do that?
Not really, which sucks. That’s not the answer I want to give you. I’ve thought about like, What if I donated my body to decompose in a glass coffin? And people could just come by and take a look.   

Like performance art?
Or just a public service: “Are you 40 years old and you’ve still never seen a real dead body in your life? Come on down and experience it in a realistic way.” 

The fear of God is put into people in the funeral industry, and in the medical examiner’s office, so much that if they let anybody in behind the scenes that they’re going to get fired and it’s a violation. So it’s hard to get somebody to do it. 

So it’s not a legal issue? People just don’t want to?
Yeah, which is a shame. I think the coroner should give tours. And I think that we should have a lot of public outreach from funeral homes, where even if they don’t get to see the bodies, people get to see the cremation machines. Or see an embalming room without bodies in it. 

Sounds like a great idea for a school field trip.
There’s a really awesome set of pictures I found from the 1970s of high school students visiting a morgue. And they’re just hangin’ out in the morgue. You would never see that anymore. 

Follow Simon Davis on Twitter.

Pork Knuckles and Weisswurst: MUNCHIES Presents Oktoberfest

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Pork Knuckles and Weisswurst: MUNCHIES Presents Oktoberfest

Six Ways to Tell Your Lover Doesn’t Actually Exist

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Images by Marta Parszeniew

Until last weekend, Brooks Newmark was just your average Conservative (or Tory) member of the British parliament. Face like foie gras? Check. Job title no one really understands? Check. But then the minister for Civil Society was forced to resign from the government due to a classic tabloid sleaze sting.

His crime? Being flattered into embarrassing himself on the internet by an attractive young woman who didn't exist. As you may have read, someone at The Sunday Mirror decided to invent an imaginary "Tory PR girl" called Sophie Wittams, pinching their picture from a Swedish model. Wittams would occasionally tweet to tell some junior minister how much she admired their strong stand on knife crime, or how sexy she found Prime Minister David Cameron’s rubbery jawline, and gradually the Conservative men started circling.

At some point, Newmark and Wittams got talking and the member of parliament (MP) was sent a nudie shot. In response, the father-of-five apparently “sent explicit photos of himself wearing paisley pyjamas” to her–or, as the world now knows, to the freelance hack cowering in anonymity behind the fake Twitter account. And that was the end of Brooks Newmark's political career.

Yet Newmark is by no means the first to fail this latter-day Turing test. All over Britain, people are having imaginary relationships with photos and lies, caught up in newspaper stings, classic catfish schemes, mutated 419 scams and Chatroulette blackmail jobs. In one case that concluded last month, six Nigerian fraudsters were convicted of conning nine women out of about $350,000 after posing as a slightly psychotic-sounding Casanova heir named "James Richards" on match.com.

So, while most guides to romance concentrate on personal grooming, gifts, and what to do to which parts of whose genitals, I decided to answer the burning question: How do you know if your lover is real?

James Richards's fake passport. The man pictured has absolutely nothing to do wtih the trial.

1) ARE THE NAMES ON THEIR PASSPORT ARRANGED THE RIGHT WAY?

I've already talked about James Richards, match.com's wholly imaginary figment of burning priapic lust. Via an elaborate chain of documents and photos, the fraudsters' plot was established: Richards' dad had just died, leaving him $162 million, but—due to complex political reasons—he could only possibly access it with the help of a woman he'd seduced on a dating website.

When Richards asked his various online flames to wire him the money he needed to be reunited with this vast fortune, he sent a copy of his passport as proof of identity. Confusingly, instead of "James Richards," the name on the document read "Richard James." James Richards is a man who doesn't exist. Richard James is Aphex Twin. 

Oddly, none of the women involved in the match.com scam noticed that the first and last names of James Richards's passport had been switched. This should be the first warning sign. While the UK government is capable of losing the personal details of millions of people, it is usually really, really good at getting your first name and last name arranged the right way round on your passport.

2) ARE THERE LOTS OF PEOPLE WHO LOOK EXACTLY LIKE YOUR LOVER ON THE SAME DATING WEBSITE?

Yuliana Avalos was part of a "huge" group of actors, military personnel and Facebook users that filed a $1.5 million awsuit against match.com late last year. She did so after allegedly finding more than 200 profiles on the site using her picture. She accuses the site of knowingly approving false profiles for spammers in order to make their pool of users as vast as possible.

So, if you ever find yourself scouring the internet for a soul who can bear to share the night air with you, make sure they don't seem to have the exact same physical features, clothes and holiday photo selection as another human being.

If they do, it is likely that one or both of these people—or all 200 of them—do not exist.

3) IS YOUR LOVER’S NAKED BODY DIFFERENT FROM THE ONE WHERE THEIR FACE IS VISIBLE?

Eventually, the chats between Brooks Newmark and his imaginary new sex friend went graphic. This posed a problem. Unhelpfully, the Swedish model in Wittam's Twitter picture hadn't uploaded any naked photos of herself for journalists to steal and dupe politicians with. Undeterred, the journalist behind the sting found nude pics of totally different girls, and sent them to Newmark over WhatsApp. He then wrote back: “You took my breath away! I will send you something in return—that way we each have a secret.” Then he was completely fucked.

The Wittams Twitter account also used the image of another woman sunbathing topless. Twenty-six-year-old Charlene Tyler has since been traced, and seems to have a rather lighthearted take on the unsolicited recycling of her bronzed boobs: “I think grown adults can do whatever they like as long as both of them are over the age of consent. I don't think it's something to resign over. I hope the MP is OK. It makes me feel really awful that this will ruin his life. The fact that a newspaper was stealing my photo is quite wrong. The newspaper’s taken it too far.” Remember: if the tits on the box don’t match the tits in the box, something is wrong.

4) DOES YOUR LOVER TREAT FLIRTING LIKE A TEXT ADVENTURE GAME?

Text adventure games are great. You face east. You see a large wooden door. You walk towards the door. You pick up a remote control. You must imagine yourself being burnt to death by a dragon. Who wouldn’t want to enjoy the thrill of that? But when your love life starts to resemble one of these escapades, things can quickly take a turn for the sticky.

We hear a lot about the "gamification of dating" inherent in things like Tinder. By engaging in James Richards’s continuing quest to "secure an inheritance," his nine victims were essentially taking part in something just a level up from that. Every so often, Richards would drip-feed them updates on his situation, which we now know were entirely fabricated.

The trail of documentation expanded as Richards worked his way through the narrative stages. The passport. The solicitor’s letters. The Indian affidavit guaranteeing the cash but misspelling "pounds sterling" as "pounds starling." You take the affidavit. You are in a room. You are facing east. Behind the desk an Indian bank manager is withholding the money until he receives his fee. Press (a) to pay the fee. Press (b) to walk away forever from a rare beacon of reciprocal love. Not a great game, all told.

5) DOES YOUR LOVER PERSISTENTLY USE ODD WORDS LIKE "THUNDERING?"

One email in the James Richards case, reproduced to many of the same women, became known to the court as "the thundering email", mentioning, as it did, “The love thundering in our hearts that only we can understand…” 

This is fine in itself. I’m sure even Keats got a bit carried away sometimes and described his love as "a flock of marzipan egrets flying into a cloud of butt sexy sherbet," or whatever, and then thought better of it after he’d pressed send. Once or twice can be dismissed as drunken flamboyance. But if it persists, it is highly probable that your online lover is a handful of Nigerian men living on the outskirts of Portsmouth.

“I love your generous kindness to me. I love your eye and lips, your sense of self-love. I want to be with you now."

“I feel like a complete man. The thought of your hands on my body, particularly when you hold me when I am sleeping.”

Be wary of purple prose like this. It's unlikely that you deserve it.

6) DOES YOUR LOVER DO VERY LITTLE EXCEPT WAVE, BLOW KISSES, REVEAL THEIR GENITALS, AND ENCOURAGE YOU TO MASTURBATE?

We all enjoy a lover who waves, blows kisses, reveals their privates and encourages one to jerk off. Masturbation is natural and healthy. Kisses are intimate gestures. An ass can be visually stimulating. But sometimes things that are too good to be true are just that. And a relationship—a real adult one—should be based on more than this, even if it is just a mutual hatred of some techno song.

In recent times, a second great social media sex scam has joined the mutated 419s described above. It involves meeting an attractive female stranger on Chatroulette. She then waves, blows kisses, makes banal emoticon-based conversation via the text box, reveals her ass, and encourages you to jerk off. This is somewhat dishonest of her, as, after excavating the darkest sexual tunnels of your psyche through your keyboard and relieving yourself into your monitor, your screen fills with a Moldovan gangster’s face and he tells you that he's going to send this video to all of your Facebook contacts if you don’t pay him a couple of grand. That sounds fucking terrifying.

This is well-documented in forums, and there are already crude-woman simulators commercially available that enable you to joystick this pre-programmed woman's actions, from "she types" to "flashes tits."

The method might be relatively new but the lesson remains the same: There are evil people everywhere and most of them are on the internet, just waiting to break your heart.

@gavhaynes

Someone in the US Has Ebola: Now What?

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Screengrab from the CDC press conference. Via FOX 4 News - Dallas-Fort Worth

If you follow Ebola news, you've already heard about the patient in Dallas who had some extremely Ebola-like symptoms, and how the CDC was preparing to take action in the event of a horrifying diagnosis. Well, the diagnosis came in yesterday around 4 PM Eastern time, and there is officially an Ebola case in the United States.

I contacted Laura Seay, a professor of government at Colby College specializing in African politics, who writes authoritatively about the politics of the Ebola crisis. She told me that, in contrast to what's happening in Africa, "the response [in the US] is rapid and it’s comprehensive. We have hospital facilities here that are well-equipped to deal with infectious diseases, and we have health workers who are trained for this and practice for these kinds of incidents on a regular basis." 

If you're the patient with the Ebola diagnosis, you have good reason to panic, although, as Seay told me, "hopefully they get the patient back to health. That’s the ultimate hope: with good quality care, he or she can be saved." If, however, you're literally anyone else in America—chill out. What's about to happen will almost definitely not include people all over Dallas wandering the streets vomiting blood. Even though this is a first—and a person with Ebola was out there in the world before they went to the hospital—the steps being taken right now by the CDC are more systematic than you may think.

Still, what happens next depends on who you are.

Photo via Flickr user Jason Scragz

The Patient
If you're the patient, you should be pretty unhappy, and pretty scared, but the good news is you're in America. The health care here isn't cheap, but it's pretty good, and you might just live through this. Unlike in Liberia, where doctors are a limited and shrinking resource, you'll be surrounded by more doctors than you'll know what to do with. You'll be in quarantine, so your doctors will be wearing protective clothing, and your environment will be clean and relatively comfortable. Best of all, they'll most likely inject you with ZMapp, the cocktail of antibodies that, in the best of circumstances, seriously brings down the chances of you dying. Typically, the odds are about 50/50 without the serum. We don't have good statistics about the odds with the serum, but in the handful of cases where it's been used, it seems promising. So in other words, there's cause for optimism.

If you want to prepare for the worst, though, here's what Ebola essentially does, according to VICE News' report on Liberia's Ebola outbreak: It causes your capillaries to separate slightly, and this lets blood leak out. You may get something called conjunctival injection, which is where your eyes fill with blood. You might not see the kind of terrifying full-body bleedouts that became part of the Ebola myth in the 1990s. Often, rather than visible signs of bleeding, you get low blood pressure, which eventually leads to organ failure. Dead and infected tissue inside of you can result in sepsis. Any of these possibilities can be deadly.  

People the Patient Came in Contact With
Seay told me "the process of what they call 'contact tracing' has already begun." This process, she explained, is when "public health workers track down everybody who came into contact with this individual and start monitoring them for symptoms." So if you came in contact with the mystery patient, you're in for some attention from the CDC. We know that the patient was traveling from Liberia. According to the CDC's press conference yesterday, the patient departed on September 19 and arrived in the US on September 20, so the airport (likely DFW) is probably one place that will be swept for signs of infection, but since it takes some pretty intimate contact to spread Ebola, it's unlikely anything will be found.

Moreover, the person had no symptoms until around the 24th, which is when the disease would have become contagious. Between then and the 28th, when the CDC says the person was admitted to the hospital, people who encountered this patient could have been affected, specifically those who—and this is really important—came in contact with the patient's bodily fluids, which, according to the CDC include, but are not limited to, "urine, saliva, feces, vomit, and semen." As for cinematic quarantine scenarios, it's conceivable that people who may have been exposed could find themselves in quarantine, like the unnamed doctor, currently being observed in Bethesda, Maryland. However, Seay told me, "I don’t know to what degree that was voluntary or involuntary."

One way or another, the CDC will be watching potentially exposed people like a hawk for 21 days. According to VOX's Susanna Locke, officials will "suggest various options for these people, depending on the level of risk, including watching and waiting, isolation at home, and testing for infection." 

The City of Dallas
A single patient with Ebola is a localized problem, and precautions should keep it that way. No one wants to use the word "outbreak" unless it's necessary, but the CDC will no doubt take some of the precautions that they would in the event of multiple patients. Residents should expect a public awareness campaign all around Dallas, instructing people about what they need to do if they think they have Ebola (namely, get the fuck to the hospital). Unfortunately, everyone with flu-like symptoms and every hypochondriac in the Dallas-Fort Worth area will be extremely susceptible to panic. I'm a hypochondriac in Los Angeles, and even I'm about to be on high alert for the next three weeks.

Creative Commons image via Global Panorama, as posted on Flickr

Say what you will about America, but we have a ton of money, and this kind of event is why we've been funding the Center for Disease Control and Prevention for all these years. Professor Seay was clear that this couldn't be more different from what's happening overseas: "The amount of resources that will be mobilized just for this one individual—both to get him or her back to health, and also to protect the community—that’s going to be a lot of money, and way out of proportion to what the Liberian authorities can spend on a per patient basis."

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter

The Real: The Real 'True Detective'

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Ten years ago, the town of Ponchatoula, Louisiana, was traumatized when a local church's secret Satan worship, ritualized child molestation, and animal sacrifices came to light. Rust Cohle may be a fictional character, and time may not really be a flat circle, but that sounds an awful lot like the events of the first season of HBO's hit True Detective. In this episode of our brand-new series The Real, we went down to Ponchatoula to meet Stuart Murphy and Tom Tedder, two law enforcement officials who helped put these terrible, true events in Ponchatoula's rearview mirror.

Photos of Beer, Beards, and Broken Heroes at Oktoberfest

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Boasting over 6,900,000 liters of beer, 75,000 pork shanks, and who knows how many bierleichen (German for ‘beer corpses’ AKA pass-out drunks), annual "folk festival" Oktoberfest has a reputation for excessive drinking and boozy debauchery. But Swedish photographer Christian Nilson sees past the purely hedonistic notoriety of the event. 

 

"Obviously the good beer is a plus, but not the main attraction," he says. What pulls Nilson back year after year is the jumble of different characters that the festival attracts. "The history of it spanning more than 200 years, the masses of people, the mix of ages—from newborns to the elderly, the melting pot of different nationalities and cultures all gathered together."

 

Check out his photos from this year's Oktoberfest above.

 

 

Fuck, That’s Delicious: Episode 5, New Orleans

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Fuck, That’s Delicious: Episode 5, New Orleans

The New Film 'Bypass' Offers a Raw Look at Life in Post-Industrial England

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George MacKay as Tim in Duane Hopkins' new film Bypass

Bypass is the second full-length film from British director Duane Hopkins. His first film, Better Things, is a sprawling exploration of heroin use in central England, where the director grew up. The film featured real people Hopkins encountered during his extensive research and received the Critic’s Award for Best Film at the Stockholm International Film Festival.

The seed for Bypass was sown when Hopkins was working on Better Things. He interviewed three kids who were about to break into the houses of people they knew in the area and steal their stuff. One member of the trio seemed more conflicted than the others and Hopkins found that this figure stuck with him after making Better Things. Had he gone through with the crime? And what had become of him since?

Hopkins' new film follows Tim, played by George MacKay, as he struggles to provide for himself and his sister by selling stolen goods in an anonymous satellite town. I spoke to the director about his motivations for making the film, his creative process and the realities of working class life in post-industrial Britain.

VICE: First of all, can you talk me through the research process for Bypass?
Duane Hopkins: I spent about six months researching the film before I started drafting. Part of the point of doing this project was to broaden my experience of what life is now like in these working class towns, because it seems to have changed so much from when I was growing up. What struck me was how generous these people are in telling you what they're up to. It felt like they didn’t really have any outlet to discuss these things. One kid in particular, who'd recently been released from prison, talked me through his career as a car thief. He reckoned he'd stolen 300 cars and, at one point, was doing three cars a night.

How do you go about forming a narrative from all of that information?
The narrative came quite naturally because I heard so many similar stories. It was amazing how many kids I met who were between 17 and 21 years old and were responsible for holding their family together. What I’ve made isn’t a documentary, but at the same time everything I’ve used in the film comes from the research. I wanted to make a film that showed what these kids’ lives were like in a sensitive but also a compelling way.

Do you see Bypass as a work of social realism?
No, I wouldn’t say so. My work needs to be extremely authentic, but it has to be emotionally and narratively honest. Even though I use ingredients of social realism, I want to make something more poetic, more lyrical, with them. Those ingredients are just a starting point.

The camerawork in the film is almost intensely intimate. Is that a way of bringing out this lyricism?
It’s way of trying to put some beauty onto the top of the hardness of what you're seeing, because all the characters have internal lives and their internal lives are very different from their external lives. Even though their circumstances are tough, there’s still hope for them. Tim and Lilly are characters trying incredibly hard. I wanted to try and articulate that as much as possible and move away from the realist register.

An excerpt from Bypass

The intensity of the soundtrack plays a big role in suggesting this interior life. How closely did you work with the guys who scored the film, Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans?
They were involved with the last third of the editing, which is quite unusual. I wanted the composing to be part of the editing itself and for it to shape the narrative.

I also put a lot of emphasis on sound design, which I think a lot of films underuse. We worked with a guy called Chris Watson, who used to be in Cabaret Voltaire and then moved into field recording. He now does sound recording for David Attenborough’s shows. I used a lot of material from his archive to bridge the gap between sound design and the composed music.

These elements all come together to produce something quite raw and harrowing. Why do you think British directors in particular seem to be drawn to the grittier, bleaker aspects of life?
I actually don’t find my films that bleak. I find them sort of romantic in the same kind of way as the Romantic art movement. For me, the most interesting thing about film is the same as what's interesting about music: you can experience an emotion without actually having to go through it. The dark in cinema space is a safe place to go in order to see how other people live and what their experiences are like.

I’m not sure why Brits have the tendency to go to this place, though. In some way it must be a reflection of what our society is like and something that needs to be shown. It always surprises me that people in London will react to these types of films by questioning if this is really what the rest of this country is like. And you have to say: “Yes, there are these people leading these other lives.”

Yeah, the lack of a specific location for Bypass struck me as positioning the town to be anywhere that isn’t London.
Yeah, I’ve lived in and out of London, and when you’re in it there is this idea that it's only London that exists. The film is basically set anywhere that manufacturing has disappeared and the communities still haven’t recovered. What's developed there is a new class of people and a new kind of identity.

In Better Things, the elderly and the young are both united in their suffering. In Bypass, the older generation seem to pity the young. Is this a response to how things have changed since you made Better Things?
I made Better Things because some of my friends started dying through drug use and I needed to find out why my other friends were still doing heroin when they could see the mortal end of it. I found that their drug use was a way of providing themselves with continuity, like being in a relationship. So within Better Things the younger and older generation are after the same thing, they just have different avenues to get to it. 

The attitudes of the older people in Bypass are a reflection of what I found when I spoke to people during my research. The older generation often said they had had a job for life, but their grandkids now have a job for a few weeks on some shitty zero-hour contract. They all have sympathy for these kids because they don’t have the stability they had.

Even in the past few days we’ve seen more cuts to benefits, and to justify this politicians attempt to ascribe agency to people, suggesting a life of crime or a life on benefits is a choice. Do you see your film as working against that falsehood?
The thing is that these guys in power know that these kids are depoliticized. So the politicians know there’s no reason to appeal to them because it won’t get them votes. I don’t think it’s conspiratorial to discuss these things; it’s just actually how it is. I hope my film shows this reality. 

Bypass is political in this way. but I didn’t aim to make something dogmatic or didactic. It comes back to authenticity. When I meet these kids and set a film in their environment, I have to be true to the subject matter and I have to be respectful of what their lives are like.

Thanks, Duane.

@AllHorne

What Happens to the Cuban Baseball Players Who Never Make It to the Major Leagues?

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What Happens to the Cuban Baseball Players Who Never Make It to the Major Leagues?

Comics: Flowertown, USA - Part 21

Live from Hong Kong

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Live from Hong Kong

Meet Alykhan Velshi, the Man Who Allegedly Fed Paul Calandra His Non-Answers about ISIS

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Alykhan Velshi, enjoying some delicious hookah smoke. via Facebook.

Canadians with an interest in preserving democracy were shocked last week after Paul Calandra, Stephen Harper’s parliamentary secretary, made a mockery out of Parliament’s question period by answering Thomas Mulcair’s questions about Iraq with an attack against the NDP for their stance on Israel.

Mulcair, at first, made light of the situation—calling Calandra’s attention to the fact that they were discussing a different country starting with ‘I,’ but after Calandra doubled-down on his bullshit, Mulcair ended up calling out the Conservative Speaker for being biased, as there was no interference to stop the insanity.

To further the frustration, Calandra’s petulant refusal to answer very valid questions, pertaining to Canada’s new military operations, were often met with a standing ovation by his fellow party members. While the argument can certainly be made that the governing party is there to govern, and does not need to call a vote or even hold an open discussion to engage in a new military operation—to disrespect Mulcair and the Canadian public at large by ignoring the questions in such a juvenile manner has struck a chord of discontent.

This embarrassing farce eventually led to a tearful but inadequate apology from Calandra (as he stated this would all probably happen again soon) and a refusal from the NDP to support the ISIS mission.

But clearly it’s not just Calandra who is making a mockery of Canadian democracy. As the CBC reported on Sunday, Alykhan Velshi, the 30 year-old “issues management” director for Stephen Harper’s office, handed Calandra “material” with the instruction that he “was told to use it in his answer no matter what question was asked in the House.”

While Calandra has denied that Velshi put him up to his buffoonery in the house (like someone who toes the party line would) Velshi has stayed quiet on the subject. Alykhan Velshi ignored two emails from VICE to respond to these allegations.

So who is this political dynamo, allegedly, going to great lengths to deliberately interrupt the flow of democratic conversation in Canada’s Parliament? Well, not only is Alykhan Velshi within Stephen Harper’s inner circle, he is also a very vocal champion of the tar sands. He founded Ethical Oil, an organization dedicated to slamming Saudi Arabia and Neil Young, while simultaneously championing the ethical methodology of Canadian oil.

Ethical Oil’s most recent PR stunt, the website and campaign ‘Neil Young Lies,’ sidestepped the discussion of how oil companies infringe on First Nation land rights that Young meant to focus on, and went straight to a 'Neil Young is a hot shot California rockstar who loves private jets' takedown tactic. The organization’s ethos is based on Ezra Levant’s book, Ethical Oil, whose author you may know from such defamatory statements as “Pierre Elliott Trudeau is a slut.”

It’s no surprise, then, that Alykhan Velshi is close with Enbridge lobbyists. Velshi reportedly met with Enbridge recently, possibly to ‘manage’ the ‘issues’ surrounding the Northern Gateway pipeline. But given Velshi’s neo-conservative advocacy of Canadian oil, it’s unsettling that our highest office’s representative, who is supposed to be negotiating the controversial nature of Enbridge’s pipeline projects, is a fanboy of natural resource-extraction expansion to the highest degree.

On top of all that, Velshi has also been an active supporter of George W. Bush’s calamitous military strategies. While he studied at LSE, he published academic papers supporting the “preemptive” war in Iraq. And, during his time in the States, he worked alongside Paul Wolfowitz, former President of the World Bank and one of the Iraq War’s key architects, at a neoconservative think-tank called the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). To give you an idea of the type of pedigree the AEI attracts, David Koch sits on the AEI’s national council, and the AEI itself receives generous funding from Charles Koch’s foundation.

Given Velshi’s support of a failed war that Chretien kept us away from, the allegation that he is deliberately derailing Canada’s parliamentary discussions about ISIS is disheartening.

Joining Calandra, and possibly Velshi, in obfuscating the conversation about Canada’s ISIS mission is the Speaker of the House of Commons himself—Conservative party member Andrew Scheer.

Scheer, at 32, is the youngest Speaker the country has seen, and his reasoning for not intervening in Calandra’s stream-of-bullshit is unsatisfying. He told the press: “...It is called question period, not answer period,” which as Michael Den Tandt pointed out in the National Post, is “astonishing balderdash”—as logic like this could permit Calandra to “speak in Sanskrit, or in tongues; he could say “Lalalalalalalala” while plugging his ears, the way kids do. He could read his grocery list…”

With such stubborn, manipulative individuals as these directing the flow of conversation in Parliament, it’s no wonder Canadians are kept in the dark about so many key issues. While the world recoils in horror at the beheadings of American journalists by ISIS members, and at the threat of Jihadists (from Canada no less) striking North America, it’s crucial that we hold our government accountable and push for as much transparency as possible.

Sure, we can’t let the cat out of the bag entirely when it comes to military operations, as there are reasonable national security concerns to consider, but for the governing party to ignore and insult, instead of answer direct questions, is an embarrassment to the nation.

Clearly there are individuals in the Conservative party who aren’t happy about these political games either. The CBC was told by “several Conservative MPs… [that] they were furious as they listened to Calandra's answers in the House,” and the control over the party at large by the Prime Minister's office has been an issue in the past, as backbenchers complained about being muzzled by Harper’s HQ.

So, it seems as if Canada’s parliamentary carnival is being run by individuals who are purposely trying to derail the national conversation into a den of secrecy, without any respect for the opposition party or the public at large. This trend does not bode well for the future of rational political discourse in Canada regarding pertinent national issues, but moreover it seems to be splintering the Conservative party itself, which begs the question, is this even an effective strategy?


@patrickmcguire

Facebook Could Become Drag-Queen-Free Tomorrow

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San Francisco performer Sister Roma has led a campaign against the proposed Facebook suspensions

Several weeks ago drag performers began discovering that their Facebok profiles had been suspended because they didn't use their legal names. Now the social network is warning that it will be deactivating the accounts of hundreds of drag performers around the globe tomorrow, October 2, unless they change the names used on their profiles to their “real” names. 

The company’s name policy says the name on your profile “should be your real name as it would be listed on your credit card, driver's license, or student ID.” Facebook doesn’t actively enforce this policy, but relies on users to report such incidences. With the large amounts of drag performers being targeted over the last few weeks, many are seeing this as form of discrimination.

Today a group of drag activists are meeting with Facebook representatives for a second time with the expectation that the social network will make an official public statement regarding the policy. And on Thursday drag performers and their supporters are taking to the streets to protest outside San Francisco's City Hall.

Sister Roma was one such performer who logged into her Facebook account a few weeks ago only to be told that her account would be suspended unless she started using her legal name. She entered her name to stop the suspension, even though she’d used "Sister Roma" as her profile name since 2008.

“It was very confusing, and I felt violated. I do not identify by my legal name. My name is Roma," she said. "That's how everybody knows me, so it's just been very confusing to me and my friends."

A member of the fundraising and activist nonprofit Sisters of Indulgence, Roma started the #MyNameIsRoma hashtag in an effort to spread her story on social media. Once the campaign began to generate attention Facebook invited Roma, along with other drag activists, to a meeting.

“It was very disappointing to be honest. We brought a cross section of the community who'd been affected,” Roma said. “So we brought about eight to ten people with us and they had another five or six people in the room. They just gave us one hour, so by the time everybody got to say their two bits, the time was up.”

After the meeting, Facebook announced that they would be reactivating several hundred profiles belonging to members of the LGBT community that had recently been deactivated. This was to allow the site users two weeks to decide whether to confirm their real name, change their existing one, convert their profiles to fan pages, or allow their pages to be deactivated.

A spokesperson for Facebook told VICE: “Having people use their real names on Facebook makes them more accountable, and also helps us root out accounts created for malicious purposes, like harassment, fraud, impersonation, and hate speech. While real names help keep Facebook safe, we also recognize that a person’s real identity is not necessarily the name that appears on their legal documentation, and that is why we accept other forms of identification that verifies the name a person uses in everyday life.” 

While a user doesn’t need to go by their birth name on Facebook, they do need to have some form of identification that has this profile name upon it, such as a driver’s license, identity document, or a bill. That sort of verification process is absent from other social networks like Twitter or Reddit, where anonymous and pseudonymous users can roam free. This insistance on "real" names seems to be deeply entrenched within Facebook's culture; according to the 2010 book The Facebook Effect, founder Mark Zuckerberg once said: “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

Roma believes that because Facebook’s name policy is enforced by users it actually makes the site less safe. 

"That is to say, hello, we're being targeted and bullied by a policy which you claim is to be in place to promote a safe, friendly, and genuine user environment, but is actually being used as a weapon against us,” she said. “Even though it is 2014, we still have a lot of people out there that just don't dig us gays. And I think they've basically found a way to try and erase us and our community from Facebook.”

According to the hundreds of emails Roma’s been receiving, there are many groups that would prefer to keep their legal names private and will therefore be affected by this policy, including “political activists, survivors of domestic abuse, bullied teens, trans men, trans women... [and] performers.”

Sister Roma and other drag performers would like to use a platform that allows them to go by their chosen names without the need to verify them with the authorities and threat of harassment. Perhaps if Facebook does not step up to the challenge, then other social networking sites will. 

Follow Paul on Twitter.

The Smartphone App Fueling Protests in Hong Kong

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Protesters marching towards the home of Hong Kong Chief Executive CY Leung (Photo by Jeff Cheng)

For whatever reason, mobile networks just aren't reliable when more than 5,000 people congregate in one specific place. Ever tried calling your friends at the end of an arena show, during a festival, or in the middle of the West Indian Day parade? Then you know exactly what I mean.

Another increasingly common gathering of this size would be a street demonstration, just like the one currently going on in Hong Kong, where hundreds of thousands of pro-democracy activists are protesting against Beijing’s involvement in the semi-autonomous state’s 2017 Chief Executive elections. But a slightly more pressing problem there is the fact that authorities have been blocking mobile networks, making it even harder for protesters to organize.       

Fortunately, alternative technology exists. On Sunday alone, over 100,000 Hong Kong accounts were created on FireChat, a clever smartphone app that manages to connect to other smartphones without the use of WiFi or cellular networks, allowing users to bypass traditional means of connectivity. The app takes the power away from governments that look to block the spread of information (it's also been used in Taiwan, Iraq, and Iran) and instead empowers those on the ground. Though, as Motherboard pointed out, it's not fully secure or protected from government surveillance.

I gave Micha Benoliel, one of the individuals behind FireChat, a call to talk about how the app is helping protesters in Hong Kong.

Micha Benoliel

VICE: Hey, Micha. Tell me about how your app is helping protesters in Hong Kong.
Micha Benoliel: People in Hong Kong are using it to exchange information on what is happening—very practical information, basically. For example, areas that are blocked, where the police are, or where people need help. It’s a very efficient way for people to coordinate and organize. The app is proving popular because there's such a large density of people gathering in Hong Kong that the cellular networks cannot work. Or, on Sunday for example, authorities shut down the networks.

Was FireChat designed to be used in this way?
We didn't create the application for that purpose. We created it to enable people to communicate during large events, such as conferences and festivals. We realized in Taiwan this year that people were using it during the Sunflower Movement. Students were using it to communicate with people inside the parliament and outside the parliament. It was a big surprise with Hong Kong, though, because while we only had a few hundred installs a few days ago, Sunday saw 100,000 account creations just for the city of Hong Kong.

A pro-democracy activist being pepper-sprayed at point blank range in Hong Kong

Wow. So I'm guessing that was all just word of mouth among activists.
It was younger students who really raised their voices. One of them, Joshua, said there might be an outage of the cellular connection, caused by the government, so everyone should use FireChat to keep communicating. 

Are governments around the world looking to control the application?
From time to time. We've seen China, for example, blocking access to our server. This is the case for many different social networks. It’s very random, so sometimes they try to, sometimes they don’t.

Have you seen the app used by other protesters outside of Hong Kong or Taiwan?
Yes, it’s also used in Iraq when the government tries to shut down access to social networks. It is broadly used and very active in Iran, and people are supporting people in Hong Kong via the app from many different places around the globe by creating groups. On Monday, we had even more installs than on Sunday.

A pro-democracy activist in Hong Kong explaining why and how protesters are using FireChat

So how are you guys looking to develop this for the future?
The app is at the beginning of its life. We're investing a lot of time to improve the user experience, even during the protest, as we want to make it easier for people to use. We're introducing accounts for opinion leaders and people with a large audience, as we don’t want misinformation to be spread.  

Can the governments you're helping people circumvent realistically hope to control the distribution of the app at all?
In Hong Kong there is nothing the government can really do. Once people have installed the application it cannot be stopped. So there's nothing that can be done. We don’t go and tell people they should protest; we help people in situations where they cannot connect. We created this application for our entertainment and we're going to improve it for everyone. It’s a new generation of social network that is far more resilient to being shut down. 

How so?
It's a decentralized network, which we believe to be the future of the internet. With FireChat’s architecture it makes it much more difficult for communications to be stopped. So we believe it's only the beginning of this new internet age. Mobiles provide the opportunity to create a new dynamic network. People can create their own local internet, and we believe that this is, if you like, the beginning of the "new internet" in this sense.

Cool, thanks Micha. Good luck with the development.

@TBreakwell


Is Jumping on Someone's Head OK? Musicians Weigh In on the Great Stagedive Debate

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Is Jumping on Someone's Head OK? Musicians Weigh In on the Great Stagedive Debate

I Went on a Strange, Propaganda-Filled Press Junket to Moscow

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St. Basil's Cathedral, Moscow

It’s hard to get a Big Mac in Moscow these days. The city's McDonald's are closing in quick succession, though nobody seems to know exactly why. Both the driver who picked us up from the airport and the receptionist in our hotel mentioned cutting trade ties with the West, but the official from the propagandist organization that flew us out to Russia said it was due to "sanitation reasons which I’m sure will be resolved soon," and wouldn't be drawn into a longer conversation.

It’s true that some of the McCafes, as they’re called in mainland Europe, are clearly still doing a steady business. But many others—too many for it to be sanitation-related coincidence—stand in symbolic darkness. Twenty-three years ago, the first Russian McDonald's—its "window to the world"—opened in central Moscow, with five-hour lines for a Happy Meal snaking through Pushkin Square. Ever since the US and EU publicly condemned pro-Russia rebels’ actions in Ukraine, however, McNuggets have been leaving a bad taste in Muscovites' mouths.

Backing up for a moment: When I first accepted an invitation onto a press trip to Moscow from a somewhat mysterious organization called Rossotrudnichestvo, I did so with a raised eyebrow. Nobody I knew had heard of the company before and I only got hold of the invitation through a Facebook message from a person I didn’t know. When I turned up at their large office in London to inquire about the trip there were seemingly only two people working in the entire building, surrounded by darkened rooms that clearly hadn't been inhabited for months.

Standing in the middle of this weird half-lit maze, the woman helping me with a last-minute visa application could only tell me that the trip was being run to "foster relations between influential young journalists," and couldn't be tempted to expand on that. Hours of googling and questioning other journalists drew a blank. No one could say exactly what Rossotrudnichestvo was doing, or why. The only conclusion I could draw was that it was affiliated strongly but mysteriously with the Russian government and the country's most powerful media agencies. 

Two weeks before I left for Moscow, a Malaysian Airlines flight had just come down in flames over Donetsk, EU sanctions had recently been imposed, and the Russian government had responded with an embargo on imported Western food. Some of my journalist friends were talking about a "new Cold War," which struck me as hyperbolic. Anyway, I’d already made my decision that I wanted to join the trip, mostly because the whole thing was confusingly but delightfully weird—no other media trip in the history of my short career had invited me through Facebook, failed to tell me what I was supposed to cover, or invited journalists out for what I assumed to be a propaganda tour right in the middle of a political crisis.

I'd done the Trans-Siberian Railway from Saint Petersburg to Beijing, via Moscow and Siberia, six years before with minimal culture shock, and felt then like Russia wasn’t half as dangerous as everyone suddenly wanted it to be. It had seemed to me then that Russia was just another European country.

But in 2014, that no longer feels like the case. In fact, things have rapidly begun to go backwards, USSR-style. Take the case of Russia’s massive news agency ITAR-TASS, which has 74 domestic offices and 65 bureaus throughout the world. During the Soviet era, this agency was known only as TASS (the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union). It was renamed by decree from Boris Yeltsin in 1992 after the dissolution of the USSR and the creation of the Russian Federation, thus gaining the prefix ITAR (Information Telegraph Agency of Russia). This is how it was known for the following two decades.

And then, recently and unexpectedly, Putin effectively reversed this decree and turned ITAR-TASS back into the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union. It’s hard not to read political intent into symbolic actions as pointed as that.

I found out about ITAR-TASS and the other playgrounds of Moscow’s media elite because our time in Russia was strictly structured, though our trip had no clear overall objective. The mornings would begin with monologues from impeccably dressed middle-aged men wearing sunglasses indoors. They were the heads of the government’s most cherished publications and broadcast networks, and would usually cover a small amount of necessary information about their own organizations before casually mentioning that the "regathering of Russian lands" was imminent.

"The Western media lies," we were informed, again and again: a strange thing to tell people who are there as representatives of the Western media.

Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, where members of Pussy Riot played the show that led to their arrest in 2012

Ask a member of the All-Russia State Television and Broadcasting Company why they have never featured Alexei Navalny—Moscow mayoral candidate, leader of mass protests against the Kremlin in 2011 and 2012, and the only Russian to be named in Time magazine’s 2012 list of the 100 most influential people in the world—on national TV or radio even once, and they will tell you that he's "unimportant to Russians," a self-involved egotist with "a face for the Western media."

Ask anyone in the mainstream Russian media what they think of their Western counterparts and they will answer you with one word: "propagandists." Again and again, we were told in this exact phraseology that Russia was aiming to "win the information war." There is no objective truth, we were informed by one official; there is only narrative. A teenager studying journalism at Moscow State University told us that "democracy is an illusion."

Outside of the media agencies, Moscow has been transformed. During my visit, lush new parklands sprung up in front of my eyes where abandoned car parks had stood 24 hours before. The streets were newly paved, the polished stones literally shining, and many were lined with charity tents asking people to give money to the soldiers in Ukraine. Public memorials to Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine were a common sight; they were being hailed as the heroes of a new Russian struggle to take back land—and people—who rightfully belonged to Moscow.

That weekend, people came out for Moscow City Day in droves, swarming into open spaces like the Park of the Fallen Idols (or, depending upon your perspective, Park of the Heroes), which was once a place for abandoned Soviet statues and quiet reflection and now is a manicured space where free yoga classes are held and complimentary orange juice is given out among figures of Lenin, Krushchev, Brezhnev, and Stalin.

Some of the T-shirts on sale in Moscow's Red Square

T-shirts were on sale in Red Square that featured images of Putin and Medvedev walking arm-in-arm with the caption: "THEY ARE PATRIOTS, YOU?" and reproductions of the infamous "Putin topless on a horse" photo. The faces of the vendors told me that none of this was intended ironically. A member of our group spotted a man whose young son was proudly sporting one of these garments—a T-shirt featuring Putin staring into the middle distance, his abs decorated with the Olympic rings.

Later, traversing the ridiculously beautiful Moscow Metro, a fellow journalist and I experienced one unexpected effect of this rejuvenated patriotism: We were grabbed by a local man who had overheard us having a conversation in English. "This is Russia. Speak Russian!" he demanded, before adding, eloquently, "In fact, if you’re American, I’ll punch you." 

(My colleague—who, luckily enough, was fluent in Russian himself—managed to persuade the man that we were Serbians on holiday, at which point the man threw his arms around him and proclaimed that they were "brothers.")

This escalating sense of national pride had reached levels of hysteria; it was touching the drunk man on the subway as much as it was Putin—who openly sobbed during a rendition of the Russian national anthem while we were there—and the news agency heads, who were provoked into slamming their fists on the tables in rage when told that most of us saw the Ukrainian crisis as a Russian invasion rather than a humanitarian expedition.

The design on one of the many Putin T-shirts being sold in and around Moscow's Red Square 

At each bar and restaurant I visited, I spoke with as many Muscovites as I could under the watchful gaze of the Rossotrudnichestvo staff. Each one had the same story: Russia is a fantastic nation, Putin is popular, the West unfairly persecutes their media and their government.

"There is censorship here," some conceded, "but we are only 25 years into the Russian Federation. We need time to grow."

What’s strange, though, I suggested, was the fact that no passing Muscovite will criticize Russian media or politics in any way, shape, or form. That isn’t the case with any other European country, especially the UK, where it’s basically compulsory to hate the government.

"We have a duty to represent Russia positively," I was told. "The West spreads so many lies among its citizens that we have to respond this way."

No airing your dirty laundry in public, keep your mouth shut, watch for foreigners, do what’s right for your country. It was what you might call a war mentality.

After five or six days in Moscow, everyone within our small group began to feel the invisible strain of what was happening internationally. On the evenings we sat in the dining hall of our small hotel—ordering expensive beer, following the rolling news reports of Russians killed on Ukrainian battlefields, watching the buffet slowly change its produce from French to Russian cheeses as supply ran out—we speculated about why we had been accepted onto the trip. Some of us were food critics, or theater writers. Only one of us was a Russian correspondent. What did they want with us? How much were they watching us? What was the point of these back-to-back meetings, where we were expected to sit through three-hour-long diatribes about why and how our countries supposedly lied about Russia?

The Moscow Metro

One of the delegates started sleeping with his lights on. I began checking through my cupboards and behind the shower curtain every time I went back to my hotel room, half-convinced that I’d find an actual Russian agent curled up in between my dresses, holding up a machine to record the tiny noises that the spy devices surely installed in my smoke alarm might miss.

Whether or not we were being tailed as we navigated Moscow remains a mystery. We could have been distinctly significant or wholly unimportant to the people who brought us to the place and then left us, disheveled and bemused, back in London’s Heathrow Airport after seven days of what had felt suspiciously like attempted indoctrination. We’d been told that we could return to Russia any time, that their doors were open to us and that the organization would happily pay for us to learn Russian and complete a PhD in the country if we so chose. I suppose it’s an option if I ever plan to disappear after a particularly bad breakup or come across a situation that calls for faking my own death. Outside of those circumstances, however, I no longer see myself returning to Moscow any time soon.

In a city that only Vladimir Putin and his Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev are allowed to fly above—no commercial airliners; no tourist organizations; not so much as a traffic helicopter—everybody looks up when the night sky is lit by the single red light of one of these impenetrable politicians’ helicopters. Putin reportedly hates Moscow and spends most of his time in a house outside the city, so it’s not unusual to see him airborne between governmental buildings and the suburbs. Still, it feels strange to be enjoying a cocktail in a riverside bar and to spot that physical manifestation, however small, of his existence and his influence over this metropolis and the sprawling reality of Siberia beyond.

When that red light becomes visible, the people in Moscow—especially in Red October, home to many of the diminishing liberal elite—do the same as what anyone in the Western world does right now. You feel it most acutely when you’re in Russia, but its diluted remnants are alive and well in London, New York, Paris, or Tallinn. We stand on the ground, looking up at the faintest proof of a man who none of us can quite make out. And we wonder what on earth he’s going to do next.

Gordon Holden's Photos Create Memories You've Never Had

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Most dreams tend to have major attachment issues. You wake up and the details are gone. Your mind leaves you one sole image of the world you’d been floating around in all night, until that too falls away when you start washing your face and worrying about vastly screwing up at work for the sixth day in a row.

All of the photos Gordon Holden just sent us look like they could be one of those transitory mental images. Freeze-frames from a movie you’ve never actually seen, or snapshots of a memory you never even had. Mind you, that could just be us; Gordon titled the set CAREFREE, and described the process of looking at them as a “means of discovery through reflection." He even included a link to the Rod Stewart song "Every Picture Tells a Story," though we don't want to assume the track offers any extra insight into his work.

So take from that what you will.

Gordon is also an artist and product designer. If you are on the hunt for fun T-shirts and customized skateboards, you might wanna try this and this if you live in the UK. And if you're not, take a look at the gallery above as well as his website and blog because his work is beautiful.

 

Canada Is Ignoring Netflix and Google During Broadcast Reform Hearings

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Canada Is Ignoring Netflix and Google During Broadcast Reform Hearings

Does the US Prison System Expose Transgender Prisoners to Rape?

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American jails aren't safe for transgender inmates, but might be on the road to reform. Photo via Flickr user Daniel Oines

Last Friday, a district court judge ruled that D.B., a transgender former prisoner who was incarcerated in Orlando, had no right to sue Orange County, Florida, for putting her at excessive risk and showing deliberate indifference to her safety. After she was arrested on charges of unarmed burglary right before her 38th birthday, she told guards that she was afraid to be tossed in with the general population, but her cries were ignored, and she was subsequently raped by her 18-year-old cell mate, Josh Bailey, in December  2009.

According to court documents, D.B. asked to be put in protective custody almost as soon as she was jailed awaiting trial. (She would ultimately be sentenced to five years after pleading no contest.) After an investigation conducted by the prison found no reason to grant her request, she was housed alongside the male inmates, who began “shaking their penises” at her and issuing threats.

Most states don't have prison facilities for people like D.B., and her case raises a question that was first asked 20 years ago when a trans woman named Dee Farmer won a Supreme Court case that allowed people to sue prisons for deliberate indifference. Of course, it's not an easy thing to prove. But as a slew of news stories, lawsuits, and studies build the case that trans people are especially vulnerable, corrections departments across the country are poised to re-evaluate their protocols.

US District Judge Gregory Presnell, however, said that D.B. can't sue Orange County for negligence. In doing so, he ignored years worth of mounting evidence that trans women are at extreme risk when placed with the general population.

“I'm a little baffled by it,” says Valerie Jenness, who gave a deposition in the case and is perhaps the foremost academic expert on prison violence against trans women. “But it's gonna get increasingly difficult to deny that trans folks who are locked up in a whole host of facilities are differentially vulnerable.”

Jenness is the author of a 2007 landmark study called “Violence in California Correctional Facilities: An Empirical Examination of Sexual Assault,” which showed that 59 percent of transgendered women housed in men's facilities are sexually abused in prison, versus just 4 percent of cis men. 

Although awareness of trans issues has increased dramatically since the study's release, the same lack of accountability is still rampant within corrections departments. The same day that the ruling in D.B.'s case came out, BuzzFeed published a horrifying account of a trans woman in Georgia being forced to share a holding cell with her rapist, who then assaulted her again in May 2012. (Jenness will be deposed in that case as well.)

In a lot of ways, D.B.'s story is one that has played out in courtrooms across the country. After being diagnosed with gender dysmorphia, she removed her scrotum, got breast implants, and started taking female hormones. Even though she presented to the world as female and altered her genitals to reflect that, she was still housed with male prisoners. 

Yet her case was unique in one key way: Bailey, the man who assaulted her, was ultimately convicted of rape in April 2010 and sentenced to 25 years. That's something that Jenness hasn't seen happen. Usually, she told me, the cases revolve around proving the assault occurred in the first place. 

“We don't have to say 'alleged,' because it's been determined,” she tells me. “We're finally beyond whether she's been raped or not. It's a stunning case.”

But given that D.B. had expressed fear multiple times before the rape happened, it could have been prevented. The judge, in deciding that D.B. couldn't prove the jail had put her at "excessive risk," relied on depositions from guards there, as well as a deposition from Jenness, who said that trans inmates are at 13 times the risk of assault as that faced by other inmates. According to the summary judgment issued Friday, “Some of the corrections officers deposed for the case agreed with D.B. that transgender inmates were at greater risk for assault, but others disagreed or testified that transgender inmates faced varying degrees of risk, just as the rest of the population did.”

The judge concluded that, despite the overwhelming evidence that jail is very dangerous for trans people, Orange County is innocent because officials there were unaware of that evidence. Still, there's clearly a need for prison workers and policy makers to come up with a housing solution that doesn't add sexual assault to trans people's sentences.

That might mean removing trans prisoners from the general population, although the National Center for Lesbian Rights reports on its website that “administrative segregation also results in exclusion from recreation, educational, and occupational opportunities, and associational rights.” While that might not be ideal, other versions of this solution go way, way too far. Solitary Watch, a site devoted to prison reform, reported in August that at least seven trans inmates in New York were forced to endure long-term solitary confinement. And about half of the women interviewed by the site said that the isolation made them prime targets for sexual assault by guards.

What's more, Chris Daley, who works for an organization called Just Detention, told me that some trans women wouldn't necessarily feel safe in a women's prison either. And while LA County has a separate pod for trans women and gay men, it's gotten mixed reviews. Clearly, there's no one-size-fits all solution.

Also troubling is that the judge had to force the defense counsel to stop laughing while cross-examining his own client, D.B., according to a report from the blog CourtWatch Florida. So not only did the prison guards not take her warnings seriously,but the victim became an object of ridicule when seeking justice. It's just another part of a vicious cycle in which prison guards discount trans people's fears and transphobia from attorneys and jurors keep them from getting justice after they come forward as victims of assault.

But Jenness is hopeful the tide is turning. As for shifting public opinion, trans people are more visible than ever in American culture. Laverne Cox from Netflix's wildly popular Orange Is the New Black was on the cover of TIME this past May, for instance.

And things appear to be shifting in the corrections world as well. In 2012, the Federal Bureau of Prisons implemented the Prison Rape Elimination Act, which calls for transgender inmates to undergo individual assessments to determine what housing solution would make them feel most safe. The Department of Homeland Security has asked Jenness to prepare training materials so Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers know how to deal with trans inmates. In her role as an educator, Jenness also noticed that people are more cognizant of these issues than they've ever been before.

“I predict in the next three, five, seven years you'll see some trans folks prevail,” she says. “I show slideshows to officers now about trans issues, and people don't even blink. In fact, I think I'm boring them.”

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