The VICE News Capsule is a news roundup that looks beyond the headlines. This week, Spanish border police are accused of excessive force against migrants in Melilla, pro-Russia rebels capture Ukrainian troops to renovate an eastern city, Kosovo rescues a boy whose father took him to Syria in June, and a new device could mean speedier medical attention to elderly people who suffer falls.

The Arcata 420 bash was still raging in 2008. Photos via Flickr user Bob Doran

For about a decade, thousands of people swarmed the tiny town of Arcata in Humboldt County, California, to celebrate 420. Arcata, which is about five hours north of San Francisco, is home to about 15,700 people, meaning that the pothead fest represented a huge surge in population.

But after an A&E documentary called Pot City, USA portrayed Arcata as a Norman Rockwell painting invaded by a weed cartel, mysterious events befell the park that hosted the bash. In 2010, paths leading to its entrance were blocked off. One year, the grassy area where stoners would gather to celebrate cannabis culture had conveniently been covered in fish emulsion. By this past April, no one was showing up anymore.

According to a lawsuit filed Thursday, that's exactly what the police chief and city manager wanted to achieve.

Plaintiff Gregory P. Allen, head of the the ACLU's Redwood Chapter, says that public records requests revealed a long-standing plan to shut the event down within five years. And just because it's worked for now doesn't mean the medical marijuana activist will let the bureaucrats win in the long run. He says the right to assemble and celebrate weed is protected by the First Amendment.

“The city didn't like the documentary, so they started trying to interfere with these gatherings,” he told me. “And they kept kinda ramping it up every year. I'm an eyewitness.”

Kevin Hoover, who ran a weekly paper called the Arcata Eye from 1996 to 2013, contends that the event posed legitimate problems, however. “It was a tradition that got out of hand,” he says. “Nobody applied for permits. There was no sanitation and no security. There were lots of petty crimes like shoplifting, and neighbors would find poop in their yards and runaways in the woods.”

Much of the documentary, which was hosted by Meredith Vieira, focused on the city's grow house epidemic. Although California passed the Compassionate Use Act in 1996, allowing residents to grow weed for personal use, one out of seven homes were being used just to grow the plant, according to the documentary. Arcata is the sort of quaint Northern California town where day-to-day life can be almost painfully quirky; Hoover used to write the news roundup as a poem. But soon after industrial marijuana came to town, he was reporting on gun-toting grow house operators.

Though it makes perfect sense that the city would want to attack marijuana-related crime by cracking down on Arcata's 420-friendly image, the strategy used was undoubtedly flawed.

Allen, the ACLU official, says that one method the city used theoretically caused many transient pot-lovers to face felony charges down the line. The police would liberally use tickets for smoking cigarettes, which is illegal in much of the town, including the park.

“When you're dealing with transients, they don't really believe in paper, and they're not the most responsible people,” he explains. “So they would get an infraction, not show up to court, and force the judge to issue a warrant.” As a result, Allen told me, a hippie could get pulled over in another state, booked for the outstanding warrant, and charged with a felony if he were carrying drugs.

Hoover says that grow houses aren't much of a problem in Arcata anymore. That's because last year the city enacted a 40 percent surcharge on any residence who was consuming three times as much energy as a normal Arcatan. Still, between getting rid of the festival and passing the act, weed permeates this rural area of Humboldt County. On October 14, police pulled over a U-Haul containing 200 pounds of harvested marijuana—hardly an amount for “personal use.”

Regardless of whether or not grow houses still plague the city, Allen from the ACLU says his case is a slam dunk. “This event was a celebration of medical cannabis,” he tells me. “And the city just made it impossible to attend.”

Police Chief Thomas F. Chapman says he can't comment on the litigation, although he did say, “There's so much more to this.” Former City Manager Randal J. Mendosa didn't respond to messages left at his home.

"This event's about free speech," Allen says, "and it's always been about free speech.”

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

In 1997, the longtime British colony of Hong Kong was handed over to China with the understanding that it would retain relative autonomy under the concept of "one country, two systems." But last month, as part of the so-called Umbrella Revolution, Hong Kongers began vocally demanding Beijing to stay out of their political affairs and grant the democracy they say they were promised with the handover.

VICE News traveled to Hong Kong and embedded with the students leading the pro-democracy movement. As protestors marched through and occupied city parks and streets, police fired tear gas and became physically violent. Hong Kong, long a reliably stable world financial center, was being rocked by unrest.

Everything filmmaker JB Ghuman Jr. creates looks beautiful. His cult film Spork made a dance-off look like a queer Bollywood film, and his music video for Double Duchess's “Good Girl Freakout” transformed Kelly Osbourne into a character from a 21st century Jem and the Holograms. When he emailed us asking if we wanted to premiere “ALIENPU$,” iRAWniQ’s new music video he directed, we were like, “Hell yeah.” The stunning music video stars Tatum O’Neal—the camp icon and youngest Academy Award winner ever—and features an alien Rosa Parks. We weren't sure what actually happened in the music video, so we asked Tatum to explain what the heck was going on. 

Chapter One: REPTILIAN DAY DREAMS

Hearing Rosa Parks speak is so powerful. Honestly, I could listen to her retell her moment on the bus every day. So calm and collected. Unafraid. 

I think that gold symbol flashing on her neck is the gold disk Carl Sagan flew out into space. It gave a map of how to find Earth in case the gold disk found life in deep space. Also, iRAWniQ is an alien now on Earth in the form of Rosa Parks.

This cartoon book cover, I believe, is the same as the Teddy Ruxpin lullaby book cover, so this is like a grown-up lullaby adventure, but it's JB on the cover. So cool. I love this.

Oh. Now she's crying milk on the bus, which is good if she wants cereal. (Kidding!) It's actually beautiful seeing mixed-animation medium again. She's letting the tear drip down her face... into the air. She's driving to a better place in the car. Gosh, iRAWniQ is beautiful: strong in her big, muscle car and unafraid on the bus. Now for this thing about the Earth, JB tells me it has something to do with the planet growing in size and how, if you shrunk Earth, all the continents would fit back together on both sides. It sounds strange, but apparently there's some science behind it. It's referred to as the "Expanding Earth Theory." I'll let JB deal with that, or just google it. 

Chapter Two: HALLOW EARTH

Look at all this grass! 

I hope she's not barefoot in that. JB, is she barefoot in that grass? I'd have demanded shoes. OK. Lots of green. Chapter is called "Hallow Earth." JB is now saying something about a theory of the North Pole being some entrance to the center of Earth. Gosh, this video is weird. iRAWniQ has the deepest eyes.

Oh, there I am... in that dress. Why am I in that dress? That's what I don't get. First time I'm ever seeing myself in a music video. Feels fun though. Very different.

Rosa Parks alien is off the bus, wandering the planet now. Now I'm fanning iRAWniQ's mind. I'm supposed to be some sort of spirit guide or something—like I'm the force that pushes her to evolve her spirit. "A storm is coming," it says. Well, I'd better take that dress off then!

Chapter Three: EMERALD TABLETS

More green. Lots of green in this video. Love Cringer the green tiger from He-Man. JB is saying Dave Woodman, who did all the animation in the video, animated He-Man. Oh, I get it. How fun! Wait. JB is yelling at me saying to add he also drew stuff for The Little Mermaid. Well, that's fun. Moving on.

OK, so she's preparing. I guess these EMERALD TABLETS give readers all universal knowledge if they have the right DNA. Again, I'll let JB deal with this.

She's reading, mediating, and getting ready for the storm. I remember filming this. iRAWniQ is an amazing dancer. Free and so fluid.

There I am. Love my MARCO MARCO tights! OK, so she remembers. I guess the EMERALD TABLETS worked. All the ancient knowledge of where the humans species comes from is revealed.

Chapter Four: ENTERING THE PHOTON BELT

Here's some grid-like cage. I really love JB's shots. She reaches out. JB says in the center of our galaxy is a giant black hole that emits photons that our planet passes through every 11,000 years. Each time we do, our species' DNA supposedly evolves faster as we move through it. Again, I'll let JB describe what the heck that all means, but it looks cool from here. I'm in a gorgeous fur coat now with this beautiful siren girl next to me holding what JB calls his "Slick Rick Teddy Ruxpin."  We're getting ready to wake up iRAWniQ.

We see the think graphic JB always uses. That kid is obsessed with the word think. It's basically in all his videos.

Space helmet… She just wants to fuck. Well, that's good. Space helmet with an afro stuffed inside. I LOVE THIS VIDEO!

iRAWniQ is gorgeous. Her voice is so attached to her stomach. Oh, wait—it's out of sync. Still out of sync. And bam—we're in sync with iRAWniQ. I think here she takes our hand and pulls us with her into some DNA-upgrade dance. This is tripping me out. Here we go. CARTOON EYES!!! iRAWniQ is now using her imagination to see vs. only think. Gosh! Her and JB are weird, but I get it. It's really out there.

Hidden Chapter: PASTEL PUSSY

My goodness! This is moving fast. I'm upside down now holding that Slick Rick Teddy Ruxpin. (I hope Teddy heals fast!) There's lots of wind.

Nature. Maybe she's not an alien. She seems to be a part of the Earth or something. She's naked now. Sheesh, she's stunning! She's free in the flesh and ready to face this world. She wants to spread her DNA and wants to fuck. Go for it, iRAWniQ.

Everything is pastel now. Oh, I'm crying cartoon tears now as well. JB had to ask me about five times to say the "I just want to fuck" line till I did it on set. Lol. Only for JB. My eyes are like amber. So cool. We see iRAWniQ in Stevie Boi's shades. There's a man breakdancing in the shades. (It's actually JB.)

Now iRAWniQ goes GOLD. I guess her DNA was finally upgraded. I feel dizzy just from watching all of this.

Chapter Five: RETURN TO THE NORTH POLE

She made it. We see her walk in the grass. She IS barefoot in that grass, JB! She's walking back to her space suit. We see Rosa "Alien" Parks staring at the sun. JB is saying that a race of humans can get nutrients by looking into the sun. iRAWniQ stares, remembering where she comes from. She's not an alien at all, I guess. She's part of this Earth from its hollow center, I guess. She turns to us and then decides it's time to return home.

These shots are beautiful to me—so delicate the way she connects to the camera. Like I said, I love it when JB and iRAWniQ connect. I love this shot of the seed sprouting and showing us the tears on it, like, as if to evolve and grow, we must let go, cry, or release.

I take it the cartoon tears connect to this shot? (JB nods.) I knew it! That's pretty. We see her press her womb to the camera letting us into the center of her world. iRAWniQ's name comes up. 

BOOM. We're done. I hear the Zelda game music now. 

Wow. What a bizarre and thrilling ride! This video points out many aspects of the galaxy that I've never known about. JB does it all with a whimsy that keeps it away from jacuzzis and popping champagne. It's all about beauty, cartoons, and light. I saw JB and iRAWniQ's first video together. They have a really beautiful symmetry when they work together. I've become friends with iRAWniQ as well. She has a very tough exterior in the world; JB has a very soft perspective of the world. Seeing them together is a real treat. I love being a part of it and am actually in JB's next film, so it was wonderful to get to connect with him on set and experience this with iRAWniQ's unique music and energy. 

Peace, love, and future videos for me... and JB.

Mostly movies though. (Laughs.)

Judith Regan. Photos by Amy Lombard

If you’ve read a literary novel, listened to conservative radio, or jacked off to your mom’s favorite erotica in the past 30 years, you’ve probably consumed media that’s passed through the hands of publishing legend Judith Regan.

Over the past three decades, Regan has revolutionized the book business. The single mother became the first publisher to transform popular radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh into best-selling authors while at the same time editing and publishing books by authors who would make Limbaugh squirm, among them Michael Moore, wild child–era Drew Barrymore, Howard Stern, and Jenna Jameson. In between sparking various controversies, she edited Douglas Coupland’s best-selling literary novels and Wicked, the novel that spawned one of the most popular musicals of all time, all the while acquiring a reputation for saying aggressive, blunt, often politically incorrect things and not being afraid of a fight.

Media critic Michael Wolff called Regan “hands down, the most successful editor in the book business” in a 1999 issue of New York magazine. In 2005 the New York Times reported her imprint, ReganBooks, brought in $120 million dollars worth of revenue, or eight to 10 percent of publisher HarperCollins’s business. The next year, however, she was fired after giving the green light to OJ Simpson’s notorious—and, naturally, best-selling—memoir If I Did It. She sued HarperCollins’s Rupert Murdoch–owned parent company News Corporation for wrongful termination; News Corp settled for $10.75 million. Thus ended her contentious and sometimes bizarre relationship with the company, which was documented in an extensive New York piece.

Since then, Regan has stayed out of publishing, hosting a Sirius Radio show and appearing on an episode of Millionaire Matchmaker—that is until last fall, when, out of nowhere, Regan announced her return to publishing and started a new multimedia company under the umbrella of art publisher Phaidon.

For nearly a year, Regan has shrouded the company in mystery. The company’s website appears blank except the huge Regan Arts logo and a Kenneth Rexroth quote: “Against the ruin of the world, there is only one defense—the creative act.” Meanwhile, Regan has poached Simon and Schuster editor Michael Szczerban, the Daily Beast’s popular book blogger Lucas Wittman, and former HarperCollins senior art director Richard Ljoenes, who had previously designed Regan Arts’s best-selling celebrity memoirs and literary novels.

Rumors have swirled about Regan Art’s book acquisitions. Publishing journalist Sarah Weinman tweeted that she had purchased the English rights to Valerie Trierweiler's memoir, but when I spoke to Regan this week, she denied Weinman’s claims—“There are so many false things out there,” she said.

That shouldn’t be a surprise. When you make as big of a splash as Regan routinely does, industry scuttlebutt trails naturally in your wake.

Virtual Reality Beginner's Guide, the first release from Regan Arts

Regan grew up in a middle-class Catholic family in Long Island, reading “dirty” books like The Happy Hooker, My Secret Garden, and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying. Many in the publishing and literary communities put a certain brand of high-brow novel on a pedestal while dismissing celebrity-penned or women-oriented books as “trash,” or “chick lit,” but Regan made her reputation by turning supposedly low-brow books into best sellers that demanded attention.

“I never associated shame with sex. I always thought it was an interesting subject,” she told me. “I thought you could do it in a smart way—I was the first one to publish a lot of erotica. I published 25 years ago Sex Tips for Straight Women from a Gay Man, which is still selling [and is now a off-Broadway production]. I did The Surrender by Toni Bentley, which was a memoir of this very twisted relationship and focused on anal sex. I’ve done a lot of them, but I try to take what people consider to be low culture—and I don’t agree with that at all—and elevate it.”

In 1993, Regan captured the cultural anxiety of the era perfectly in Howard Stern’s Private Parts, which is a beautiful book resembling an expensive art history textbook crossed with a manifesto. Each chapter—“Black and Blue Like Me,” My Sex Life,” and “Mein Kampf—My Struggles” (about the start of Stern’s radio career)—describes part of the comedian and radio host’s philosophy; the words are set next to gorgeous images of women that could have come from the golden age of Penthouse. Call Stern juvenile or crass or a pig, but the book is far too well crafted to be merely a sleazy joke.

That’s what it’s easy to miss about Regan: Far from churning out crappy tabloid fodder, she’s aimed for years to build a legitimate no-brow media empire. In 2005, when she moved ReganBooks to Los Angeles, the New York Times wrote that she “would like to create a cultural center,” describing a “sort of salon” where her authors would have meetings with Hollywood executives and the public could visit a “bookstore and cafe, space for readings or other cultural events.”

That never happened thanks to the OJ fiasco, but with Regan Arts, she seems to have that goal once again within her grasp.

A few weeks ago, Regan Arts finally announced its first release—the Virtual Reality Beginner's Guide and Smartphone VR Tool Kit, TechCrunch writer Frederic Lardinois’s history of virtual reality. The 40-page book comes with a cardboard VR kit designed by Regan’s son Patrick Buckley, a co-founder of DODOcase. (The idea for the mother-son collaboration came during a “typical Regan family vacation” with the family attorney in Las Vegas to watch a UFC tournament.)

The project may seem like a counterintuitive way to launch Regan Arts, but it fits in with Regan’s ambitions to create a platform-agnostic multimedia company, not just a publishing house—and in a world where Facebook paid $2 billion for Oculus Rift, coming out with a VR kit seems like a guaranteed way to generate headlines.

Regan and her son trying out the cardboard VR goggles

This week I visited Regan and Buckley at her New York office, which resembles a high-end art gallery or a tech office. Shelves full of expensive art books line the austere white walls. Regan wore a suit with a pink collared shirt, and her son wore flip-flops, a baseball cap, and a shirt that said #DodocaseVR. Right away, Buckley started assembling a cardboard VR case in front of me.

“It’s very therapeutic to tear up cardboard,” Buckley said. He turned on an app on his phone, then slid it into the case and Velcroed it shut. The device looks like a piece of retro kitsch—the case is made out of the same material as a Happy Meal box—but the VR viewer is surprisingly sophisticated and supports several different games.  

When I put the glasses on to play Dive City Coaster, a rollercoaster game, in the conference room, I looked into a virtual world that looked like an actual theme park. As I moved my head up and down, I felt like I was riding Space Mountain at Disney World.

“It’s accessible because it’s low-cost, and it’s totally hackable,” Buckley said, sounding like his mother. “I hope [this project] drags [VR technology] into the mass market.”

“I like the cartoon world,” Regan said. After her son showed her an asteroid game and Moorente, where you shoot birds, she became obsessed with blowing up virtual targets.

“I got one! Whoo!” she screamed as she fired away. “It’s not just for adolescent boys. Do you run out of bullets?” Her son told her no. “This is so satisfying, unlike other things in life,” Regan said.

As Regan continued killing virtual objects, Buckley showed me a VR app where you stand in a foreign country and turn around in a circle to get a 360-degree view of the city.

“I’m in a Zen garden; she’s shooting things,” Buckley said.

“I love shooting people,” Regan said. “It’s very satisfying!”

For all the talk about Regan being a terror, she came across as pleasant, relaxed, and quick with a joke during our interview. When I asked Regan about the possibilities for what a book could be, however, she turned serious.

“I really believe that virtual reality is going to take over how people consume information, because it’s so original and encompasses so much that the possibilities are really endless,” she said.

“If you think about it, books were the first form of virtual reality,” Buckley added. “The book was the first thing that enabled people to disseminate another form of their ideas and storytelling.”

Like Private Parts, the Virtual Reality Beginner’s Guide is an appealing physical object. It also suggests that Regan will be focusing her attention on projects that defy traditional logic in a publishing industry she says has been dominated by old ways of shallow, profits-and-losses-based thinking. She’s going with her gut, and her gut has a long track record of hits.  

“I think it’s a difficult world to make noise in because the cacophony is so great. It’s difficult to be heard,” she said. “I’ve never been somebody who publishes based on, ‘Oh, we need two diet books and two mysteries on the list.’ Other people are better at that kind of thinking than I am. I like to find and discover and uncover and create. I think there’s real artistry in what we do… I think, more than ever, the need to be creative is urgent.”

Follow Mitchell Sunderland on Twitter.

Want to try our the incredible Virtual Reality Beginner's Guide and Smartphone VR Tool Kit? Order a kit from DODOcase.

Illustrations by Dan Evans

A traumatic event in one’s childhood is capable of inspiring exactly three things: shitty debut novels, self-absorbed blog posts, and dark jokes that make your friends feel weird around you. Case in point, the last conversation I had with my father, who’d been off work with the flu for a couple of weeks.

“How are you feeling, dad?” I asked.

“Better,” he replied. Then he stood up and made his way to the bathroom to die.

A big part of me hopes that, vision fading and lips turning blue, my dad's final thought before submitting to the cold grip of extinction was a gleeful, Haha, I got you, you little shit. If that final word really was the last in his lifetime of unwavering sarcasm, it was—for my money—the single greatest burn I’ve ever heard.

Three weeks later, I celebrated my tenth birthday. A few months after that, I took home the title of “funniest pupil” in a classroom awards ceremony. Deflecting my grief into something that made others laugh felt much better than breaking down crying several times a day—which, in reality, was what I wanted (and probably) needed to do. People latch onto any kind of positivity after something so painful, and I guess I found validation in the laughter of my peers. Plus, let’s face it, no one wants to be the kid constantly crying about their dead dad. That guy is always a total fucking buzzkill.

When the coroner was finished rooting around inside the vessel that had, for 51 years, housed my one-time Mensa member father (he was too tight to renew his subscription after the first year), a fatal heart attack was recorded, and off went dad to his fiery conclusion in the Loughborough crematorium. But the post-mortem also revealed significant scar tissue indicative of a previous attack sometime in the months or years previously. That was news to us all. Apparently, near-fatal chest pains weren’t something that he deemed worthy of professional consultation. Classic dad!

After he died, jokes took preference over sincerity in almost any situation, because the idea of picking at wounds and revealing the fragile human beneath was about the most terrifying thing I could comprehend. It’s a trait I now recognize as one of my father’s greatest flaws, ultimately contributing to his downfall. It’s also an inherent characteristic of so many men, especially those in the UK.

The stubborn, lost-husband-refusing-to-ask-for-directions man might be a handy caricature, but it’s also rooted in a very real, very destructive notion of masculinity. We’re conditioned from an early age to believe that acknowledging weakness is somehow a weakness in itself, and there are plenty of depressing statistics to confirm what a huge problem this is.

Even accounting for reproductive health, in any given year men are half as likely as women to visit their doctor in England, which doesn’t make a lot of sense. I’m pretty certain women don’t get ill twice as often as men. In the UK, the rate of premature deaths (under 50) is one and a half times higher among men than women, primarily due to cardiovascular disease, accidents, suicide, and cancer—the latter cause offering perhaps the strongest evidence of men’s reluctance to seek help. While affecting men and women equally, skin cancer kills four times as many men in the UK because we avoid addressing the issue until it’s too late.

This month’s "Feeling Nuts" initiative is encouraging male social media users to post selfies where they’re grabbing their own crotch. Raising awareness of testicular cancer is clearly a noble intention, but I can’t help but feel it’s playing into awareness as a public spectacle, rather than being something that will truly impact how men deal with their worries. Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart posting selfies might earn them a mention on CNN, but how likely is it to spark conversation in the bar? The truth is, many of us are too afraid to even admit our feelings to ourselves, let alone others. We’re terrified of talking, and it’s killing us.

The disparity in suicide rates is another eye-opener. In spite of depression being more common in women, men are three times more likely to take their own lives in the UK. A 2012 Samaritans report concluded that the social constructs of masculinity were a major cause of this imbalance, noting that “the way men are taught, through childhood, to be ‘manly’ does not emphasize social and emotional skills,” and that, in contrast to women, “the ‘healthy’ ways men cope are using music or exercise to manage stress or worry, rather than ‘talking.’”

Alcoholism is also significantly more prevalent in men, linked largely to self-medicating mental illness. My paternal grandfather fought at Normandy and survived by technicality alone, the untold horrors he’d seen gouging away at his sanity until he was able to do little else but drink. Born six years after D-Day, my dad grew up like so many baby-boomers, with a father whose deep emotional repression left him unable to love, let alone talk about any of his feelings. It’s a hereditary condition—men raised by men unable to communicate emotionally, the symptoms of what we now know as PTSD becoming synonymous with masculinity. This is wildly fucked up when you stop to consider it.

Of course, the destruction doesn’t end there. While widowed mothers deal with the fallout of our distrust for doctors, men are doing a terrific job of sabotaging any attempt at romance in the first place because of our inability to communicate. Not content with merely reliving my father’s death for this piece, I came up with the definitely-not-terrible idea of asking my ex-girlfriend Megan to reveal the specific problems that arose during my tenure as her shitty boyfriend.

“I think the biggest thing was that your lack of communication made it difficult to process your emotions within your own self,” she said. “Even more than your inability to communicate it to me, you were so practiced at pushing things down that you’d lost touch with the reality of your emotions, so even when I could identify a problematic situation, you would deny it. In addition to having to work through difficult issues, I first had an insurmountable task of getting you to acknowledge they were issues in the first place.”

Communication is the key to a successful relationship, as any happily married person will tell you (also, not sleeping with your colleagues; that helps, too). The worst part is that we know this. It’s been drilled into us by every book and TV show and film that deals with these kind of issues, but still we ignore it, forging ahead under the misconception that those rules only apply to others.

So what can we do? It’s easy to write the problem off as a lost cause, too embedded in our culture to ever truly change. You can’t alter the personality of half the world’s population overnight—and thankfully so, as there’s a lot to be said for self-deprecation, cynicism, and low-level passive-aggression. But you can always start trying by doing one simple thing: talking. We do it every day, so why not do it when it comes to stuff that really matters? You’ve had a lot of practice opening and closing your mouth to make sound come out of it; just slightly alter those sounds and it could end up doing you a lot of good.

If he’d learned to open up a bit more, maybe my dad wouldn’t have spent his life avoiding help and would still be here. To think he could have spared the world yet another gratuitously self-indulgent piece penned by a millennial about an emotionally distant late father, and I’d have someone to mutter at me disapprovingly every time I mentioned how my career and housing situation and life was going.  

Hypotheticals will get us nowhere, but until we address our inability to open up, we’ll continue to die early and needlessly, as well as destroy the relationships we have while we're here.

So please: Start talking. I don't want to have to write a whole book about this stuff.

Follow Jack Urwin on Twitter.

Dir: Joanna Angel
Rating: 1
BurningAngel.com

In my former life I spent 25 years mastering the art of heartlessness. I’m not proud of the fact that I’ve broken up with many women in the most abhorrent ways, and if I could undo my past I would. There was the false-positive HIV test in 1999 that led me to leave a dozen messages on lovers’ answering machines saying they were probably infected. There was the blue-skinned OD in 2000 whom I left on the sidewalk outside the emergency room. There was New Year’s Eve 1993, when I stood my girlfriend up to go skate and drink in New York City. There was the note to a girlfriend in my wallet (the place she’d always steal from) that told her to “get the fuck out.” The laundry list goes on and on, but one thing I’ve never done is break up with someone in print—until today.

While I have never had physical contact with porn star Joanna Angel, she has been a close friend and confidant for more than five years. She was the focus of an episode of my online documentary series Skinema, and we hosted a radio show together. I’ve consoled her when she was down, and she nearly had to help me deliver my baby. And most important, since I am infinitely funnier and more creative than she is, I’ve been a sounding board for her numerous screwball-comedy porno scripts over the years. My comedic genius has, on many occasions, saved her characters from sounding like Neil Hamburger and, in my opinion, helped her win many awards. It’s as if I were Bob Gaudio, writing the hits for a nympho Frankie Valli. But in their 55 years of working together, Valli never double-crossed Gaudio the way Joanna betrayed me with her film BBQ Titmasters. For many years I’d been pushing her to make my pet-project porno Pussy on Rotisserie, a barbecue-themed adult video that would culminate in a threesome with Joanna bound to a spit, with a wang in her mouth and ass, as she is rotated over coals. If you search VICE.com you’ll see that the phrase “pussy on rotisserie” appears two other times, as far back as June 2009. It’s a genius idea! It would have sold millions! What is more American than sex and food?

Every time I pitched it, Joanna would shoot down my idea with baseless reasoning. “No one wants to think about food during sex,” she’d say, and then I’d respond by citing the Seinfeld episode in which George eats a pastrami sandwich in bed. She said the human rotisserie would make people think of cannibalism. I told her she must not be very good at sex if watching her fuck made people want to eat her rather than fuck her. It went on like this for years, until one day this bullshit video, BBQ Titmasters, showed up in my mailbox. I immediately texted my ex-friend and told her, “By making this movie you’ve admitted I had a brilliant idea, you loved it, were jealous of it, stole it, and subsequently ruined my great idea!”

“Your idea was bad, and mine was good,” she said. “That’s why I did mine and not yours. Who really has a rotisserie anyways? Unless you’re Boston Market.” 

“Sophisticated folk!” I said. “That’s who! You couldn’t even spell rotisserie without your spell-check!”

She replied with a pathetic attempt to defend her plagiarism: “I’m sorry, but I think it’s hot when girls grill meat. Something your idea lacked!”

“That was in my first draft! Right on page five! WTF?” I said.

“I never got a draft!”

“Right. Says the woman with the cavernous inbox...”

“Man, that is so low. What kind of person insults another woman’s inbox?!?”

“A person who hates your guts and hopes you choke on boner marrow. We’re through!”

More stupid can be found at Chrisnieratko.com or @Nieratko on Twitter.

Cary Grant, who championed LSD's therapeutic qualities. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

My first experience with LSD was not pleasant. Six hours spent staring at bugs on London's Hampstead Heath were punctuated by a fat man calling me a prick and someone showing me a book of autopsy photos. It was harsh and boring, and I didn’t gain one new bit of insight—no secrets of the cosmos were revealed; I just learned that looking at human corpses while you’re tripping makes you feel kind of weird and upset.

I think the main problem was that I’d heard so many people crediting acid for their profound understanding of the world—musicians, authors, Steve Jobs, a man with a ponytail I met at a music festival, and, strangely, a couple of stars from Hollywood’s golden years. In fact, in the 1950s Tinsel Town provided fertile ground for early LSD experimentation, with Cary Grant, among others, using it as an aid during therapy sessions.

Albert Hofmann discovered the substance in 1943. Having messed around with fungi while working for Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland, he synthesized Lysergic Acid Diethalymide-25, his 25th attempt at creating a stimulant for the central nervous system. Five years later, he got some on his fingertips by mistake and “perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors.” On his 100th birthday, he would call it “medicine for the soul.”

Dr Albert Hofmann in 2003. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Among psychiatric practitioners it was initially considered to have psycho-mimetic properties—in layman’s terms, it simulates psychosis. This idea was scoffed at, then replaced with the notion that it could be used, at least experimentally, in therapy. In the UK, it was used modestly and in low doses in what became known as psycholytic therapy, a means of breaking through to greater insight when patients had reached a plateau.

Dr. Ben Sessa, a psychiatrist and proponent of the use of psychedelics in therapy, told me, “In the US, there emerged a different model: ‘psychedelic therapy.' In-patients took a single large dose and had a full-blown mystical experience, followed by non-drug integration sessions in which they explored the material that had emerged in the drug session.”

When LSD eventually made its way over to the US, a Dr. Oscar Janiger managed to get his hands on a shipment. In exchange for using it on his patients and reporting his findings back to Sandoz, the company would keep him in stock. The experiment’s participants included everyone from dentists, housewives, and students to Andre Previn, Aldous Huxley, and James Coburn.

Anaïs Nin visited Janiger’s house and wrote about it in her diary in 1955:

I watched a shoreline of gold waves breaking into solid gold powder and becoming gold foam, and gold hair, shimmering and trembling with gold delights. I felt I could capture the secret of life because the secret of life was metamorphosis and transmutation, but it happened too quickly and was beyond word. Comic spirit of Anaïs mocks words and herself. Ah, I cannot capture the secret of life with WORDS.

In its pre–Ken Kesey days, LSD posed a strange question for shrinks and gurus alike. It could be used to help troubled people feel normal, but to those who were aware of its full potential, the real value was in how it could help to transcend ordinary reality. Huxley, Nin, Janiger, and others were only too aware of this. They would discuss for hours the possibility of the drug having a place in society, and thought of the good that “just a few healthy magnums of LSD in the Beverly Hills reservoir,” in Cary Grant's words, could do.

Janiger compared his experiences with the Eleusinian Mysteries, an ancient ceremony conducted outside of Athens. Participants would drink something called Kykeon, believed to have hallucinogenic properties, and get collectively out of their minds in service to the gods. The doctor wondered whether such an outing could have a place in society 2,000 years later.

While Janiger’s interest seemed mostly experimental, the clinical basis of LSD’s therapeutic use remains fairly strong. Dr. Sessa is not alone in maintaining that psychedelics are very useful in helping to treat anxiety disorders, OCD, and PTSD, among other conditions. Dr. Mortimer Hartman, at the very least, would have agreed.

Having undergone years of probing analysis himself, Hartman was enthralled by the fact that instead of chipping away at the tough layer of ego, LSD melted it entirely and gave way to the molten subconscious underneath. He described the drug as intensifying “emotion and memory a hundred times.”

Hartman opened the Psychiatric Institute of Beverly Hills in the late 50s and, having secured a line of supply from Sandoz, started charging $100 a hit to indulge the inner tortures of the outwardly perfect. His patients would recount experiences of gender transformation, rebirth, and revelation, all while watching themselves as if they were both audience and actor. 

It was Cary Grant, Hollywood’s great leading man, who would declare his love for LSD the loudest. Grant had initially gone to Hartman looking to find out what his then wife Betsy Drake had been saying about him. However, he was a neurotic on a pedestal; any high-rent shrink’s dream. Soon enough, he succumbed to the possibility that LSD might cure the things that had haunted him for so long—what Dr Hartman had diagnosed as “prolonged emotional detachment.”

Of course, it’s not like you could blame him: Grant’s father had institutionalized his mother when he was nine and told him she was dead. He joined the circus the next year, when his father abandoned him to start a new family. A move across the Atlantic and three marriages later, in 1957, Grant found himself on Dr Hartman’s couch with the blinds closed, trying LSD for the very first time. 

Cary Grant in Notorious. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Marc Eliot, Grant’s biographer, thinks the drug did a lot for him. “Through what he described as his ‘controlled dreams,’ he was able to ‘connect’ with himself,” he said. “LSD, I believe, took the locks off the prison doors that he had lived in, emotionally, for most, if not all of his life.”

It was the beginning of a long relationship with the drug and the doctor.

Grant’s experiences seemed to veer between calm, psychotropic lessons in life and the kind of nightmarish horror trips the police tend to describe when they come to your school for one of those apocalyptic drug talks.

On the former, he wrote: “I learned many things in the quiet of that small room. I learned to accept the responsibility for my own actions and to blame myself and no one else for circumstances of my own creating. I learned that no one else was keeping me unhappy but me; that I could whip myself better than any other guy in the joint.”

On the latter, he said: “You know we are all unconsciously holding our anus. In one LSD dream, I shit all over the rug and shit all over the floor. Another time I imagined myself as a giant penis launching off from Earth like a spaceship... I seemed to be in a world of healthy, chubby little babies’ legs and diapers, smeared blood, a sort of general menstrual activity taking place.”

Grant would become one of the drug’s greatest proponents, encouraging his friends and subsequent wives to take it. He would give interviews to Ladies Home Journal and Good Housekeeping on its transformative effects. On occasion, things took a slightly darker turn. A couple of decades after their messy divorce, Grant’s fourth wife, Dyan Cannon, told the Daily Mail that he had tried to “force-feed” her LSD and change her into the “shiny new wife who could effortlessly meld as one with her husband.”

Timothy Leary on a lecture tour in 1969. Photo by Dennis Bogdan, via Wikimedia Commons

Some say that it was Grant who told Timothy Leary all about the drug—and Leary, of course, set off to tell everyone else. However, Leary's ensuing appeals for everyone to “turn on, tune in, and drop out” were met with contempt by Janiger and Huxley; they felt the message was too assertive and confident, as the truth the drug revealed was too acute to unleash on an unprepared mass of people.

When acid got popular, the authorities started to take notice, then it began to become widely available as a street drug, inviting all the horror stories and gossip that inevitably comes with that.

In the early 60s, the Food and Drug Administration started to look a little more closely at the Psychiatric Institute of Beverly Hills, eventually forcing Hartman to close in 1962. With its reputation safely ruined in the eyes of the establishment, users were pushed into the shadows. By 1968, the drug was illegal—a bad decision, thinks Dr. Sessa: “Ever since then research has been difficult and the authorities have found themselves embroiled in an unwinnable drug war, which has served only to fund the mafia, criminalize otherwise law-abiding drug users, and, crucially, hamper all research into these safe and efficacious substances.”

Hartman had left California by then, and  Janiger had shut down his practice and quickly stopped his studies after the government had started investigating him. Cary Grant would continue to take LDS, albeit a little more quietly, and left $10,000 to his “wise mahatma,” Hartman, in his will.

There may well be a great deal of good that psychedelics can continue to offer us. “Traditional drug treatments [like antidepressants] tend to merely mask symptoms,” said Dr. Sessa. “In this respect, the psychedelic drugs can be used as tools to allow a deeper, more focused, and more effective route to helping the patient explore their problems with their therapist... they allow a person to reflect upon existential issues. This can be very useful, for instance in cases of drug addiction and possibly personality disorders, in which the patient could benefit from an opportunity to challenge ingrained, rigid behavioral patterns of deeply held negative belief systems.”

Things are changing. In 2012, an analysis of studies done in the 50s and 60s showed how helpful the drug was in treating alcoholism, and the first two papers on the effects of LSD since the 1970s were released this year. So who knows—with enough time, we may yet see what Grant was talking about.

Follow Max Metzger on Twitter. 

Helicobacter Pylori, a common stomach bacteria. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Jeff Leach is a former anthropologist and the founder of American Gut and the Human Food Project, initiatives aimed at a far-reaching insight into our relationship with our gut fauna, the microbes that live in our digestive tracts. Ever since his daughter was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes ten years ago, Leach's been on a quest to right whatever microbial wrong he believes he unwittingly committed by allowing her to be born into an environment without enough bacteria and other microorganisms. 

Late last month Leach's journey took an odd and controversial turn, when he announced that he was replacing all the microbes in his intestines with the microbes belonging to the Tanzanian hunter-gatherers he was living with. According to a blog post pened on September 30, he "inserted a turkey baster into my bum and injected the feces of a Hadza man."

Hunter-gatherers, Leach told VICE, are "connected to the world in a way that we’ve always been until recently: the children are born in the dirt, they’re breastfed for an extended period, and men are covered in the blood and feces and stomach contents of animals. They haven’t been overrun by medications of the modern world. These people are the microbial Noah’s Arc."

Over the past two years or so, others have tried similar projects, giving themselves enemas full of the poop of healthy people; they claim the DIY procedure provides almost instant relief from the symptoms of diseases including ulcerative colitis and irritable bowel syndrome.

The ideas behind these sort of treatments are challenged by some. The anthropologist and pseudoscience debunker John Hawks called Leach's experiment "just wrong," and on October 2, Jack A. Gilbert, a sometime colleague of Leach's, published a paper warning that sloppy science, or sloppy science journalism, might cause people to perform risky and inappropriate procedures on themselves.

But at the same time that this field is being taken over by "citizen scientists," real strides are being made. As the New York Times reported recently, Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston just developed a pill that provides effective relief for sufferers of Clostridium difficile, or C. diff, a common and painful bacterial infection. The pill contains human poop, but swallowing shit that way is a much simpler and more comfortable than full-on fecal transplants.

These treatments are about helping a favorable community—for lack of a better term—of bacteria grow inside of you in the hope that it will overwhelm the nasty C. diff bacteria. In other words, bacteria don't simply make diseases disappear, and putting other people's poop up your rear end isn't a cure-all.

"I think people have grabbed onto this as sort of magical thinking: If I could just get a fecal transplant, my Crohn's disease would be gone!" said Dr. Elizabeth Hohmann, who helped develop the poop pills. But while there's good science behind fecal transplants, Leach's experiment sounded dangerous, she added. "Taking some bushman's stool and injecting it up your butt, especially if you're not an ill person, that doesn't make any medical sense to me and I certainly wouldn't recommend it."

The problem with ordinary people shooting poop up their anuses, Hohmann said, is that there's not enough data on these procedures and the benefits and risks. "We get into the questions of, Is this something you would need to repeat, how many times, what is the minimum dose?"

Leach was aware of the dangers of his experiment, and did try to be as safe as one can be when injecting a stranger's poop into one's bottom in the middle of Tanzania.

"We took the [poop donor] to a small hospital and had [HIV] tests done. The risk was I didn’t know anything about his parasites but I’m not necessarily overly concerned with parasites," he said. "There’re a lot of bad parasites out there, but there are parasites that maybe my immune system would appreciate."

In the six weeks since the procedure, Leach has been collecting stool, blood, and urine samples from himself to track what's happening to him. He didn't report suffering from any illnesses, but he has lost 16 pounds without changing his diet. When VICE spoke to him he was in good spirits.

"I think the fecal transplant stuff is going to become very mainstream," he said. "We used to not talk about marijuana and now that’s front and center and acceptable."

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Sara Fancy and her horses. All photos by the author

“Will you be my father?” Connie asks with the twisting posture of a nervous child. We just met half an hour ago. She’s old enough to be my mother.

“I’d be honored,” I reply.

She places her hands gently on my shoulders. “This is my father,” she affirms, smiling sweetly.

Connie hasn’t spoken to the real man in 20 years, making this a tricky role to play. Rounding out the family is a Jack Russell Terrier named Jack (her daughter), a chestnut mare named Jackie (her grandmother), and a few other human strangers in various roles.

The matriarch of our little clan is Sara Fancy—a former competitive bodybuilder and ex–punk rocker who developed a love for horses in midlife. She was particularly fascinated by the animals’ apparent intuition, their ability to read and respond to human emotional cues. This sensitivity, she believed, could be harnessed for therapeutic purposes. Building on the work of psychoanalyst Bert Hellinger, Fancy bought several of the animals and a desolate plot of land in Southern California. She erected stables and a yurt, and named her new homestead the Silver Horse Healing Ranch. I drove down from LA this summer to experience Fancy’s horse therapy firsthand.

The cars arrived in clouds of dust stirred up from the dirt road. We all met one another inside Sara’s kitchen. There was Connie, a longtime Silver Horse client, and her friend Kay, who was there for support. After them came Christopher Rutgers and his wife Stephanie. Like many visitors to the ranch, Christopher had been referred here by a traditional therapist.

“We also get a lot of recovering alcoholics and drug addicts from the clinics,” Sara added in her cheerful British lilt.

After several cups of tea and slices of watermelon, we strolled to the stables under a blazing blue sky. A horse named Pretty Boy sauntered to the edge of the corral, pushing his cheek into Sara’s hand. “Pretty Boy’s owner was going to shoot him in the head and throw him in a landfill,” she explained, rubbing his muzzle. “Luckily, the man called me first and asked if I wanted him. I can’t use Pretty Boy with clients because he’s a little mousy, but I took him anyway. Ironically enough, some time later Pretty Boy’s owner ended up shooting himself in the head.”

All the horses at the ranch are rescues. “Have you heard of the drug Premarin?” Sara asked. “It’s a hormone replacement therapy for menopausal women like me and Connie. It stops you from growing a beard and makes you feel young and virile again. Premarin stands for ‘pregnant mare urine’ because that’s where they get it from. They keep the horses in these tiny spaces indoors under artificial lighting with bags to collect their urine. They give them as little water as possible to keep the urine concentrated. Anyway, in 2003, scientists discovered that Premarin can give you breast cancer, so a lot of these places closed down. There were suddenly 30,000 pregnant mares on the rescue circuit. I took as many as I could.”

Sara gestured to a mare whose ears had perked up. “She likes it when I talk about this stuff. You want people to know—right, Jackie?”

Sara and her horse Silver

We joined Sara on blankets in the shade of a tent. “I’ll give you some background,” she began. “What we do here is a version of Family Constellation Therapy. The premise is that whatever issues you’re having, they could be related to an ancestor. It’s not just immediate family. You can go back generations and generations. We’re looking at what didn’t get resolved back there. The dead need resolution too.”

She talked next about Hellinger. He had been a German solider during World War II before becoming a Catholic priest. His religious work brought him to South Africa where he lived for years with Zulu tribesmen, and he borrowed heavily from their practices in his later career as a psychoanalyst.

“Indigenous cultures all do the kind of work we do here,” Sara claimed, “but maybe slightly differently. There’s one tribe where they take you to a place, and they say that the mountain is your father and the tree is your mother. They use nature as representations of your family.”

In Hellinger’s version of Constellation Therapy, human volunteers rely on intuition to embody a client’s relatives, whom the volunteers have never met and know little about. Their interactions with one another are believed to be influenced by those absent individuals, allowing them to resolve their issues through enactments.

“Some of Hellinger’s first patients were Holocaust survivors and perpetrators,” Sara said. “If you’re Jewish, and you have ancestors who died in the Holocaust, the Nazis who killed them become part of your family system—and vice versa. It’s the same with slave-owning ancestors here in America. There was a woman who had slave owners in her ancestry, and she had a strong desire to be an activist. She wanted to help unprivileged black kids, but it always backfired. She was continually being attacked by them.

“One great thing about using horses,” Sara continued, “is that they’re super hyperaware of all of those connections because they’re prey animals. We are predators to them.”

The ability of horses to read the humans around them is well documented. A prime example is the famous German horse Clever Hans. Around the turn of the 20th century, Clever Hans toured Europe to great acclaim, performing arithmetic. People would pose math problems to the horse and he would stomp his foot to indicate the answer. It took a psychologist months of careful study to discover that the horse was simply reading and responding to the expectations of the crowd—he would stomp his foot until he sensed from the people around him that he had reached the correct number.

Sara thinks this ability can be put to better use than creating an equine sideshow. “If the horse thinks that this person needs to get together with that person, they will nudge you together. Or if you need to be apart they will nudge you away,” she said. “Horses are continually looking for balance. They’re able to tap into the energy field to find out information. Take this hat, for example: There’s information in the field about who designed it, who wore it, and the workers that made it.”

After the briefing, Connie assigned us all a role, and we headed to the corral. We didn’t know much about her history, just that she hadn’t spoken to either of her parents in many years. Her goal was to have a better life in every way. Sara brought out Jackie, the mare we had met earlier, and the session began.

“Feel into your feet,” Sara prompted. “Just feel the weight. How do you feel in your body?”

“I feel firmly planted,” I replied, trying to channel Connie’s father. “I’m feeling something behind me.”

There was nobody there, so Sara instructed Christopher to stand behind me to be that something. She asked what he felt when he looked at me.

“I feel a lot of aggression,” he said through tight lips. “I want to slap him. I’m really angry at him.”

“Are you breathing?” she asked him.

“No.”

Just then, Jackie walked between us. The mare stopped and held firm.

“Any different?” Sara questioned.

“It’s diffused a bit,” Christopher replied.

Sara speculated that Christopher must be channeling Connie’s abusive grandfather.

Connie herself was played by Stephanie, who isolated herself inside a circle drawn in the dirt. She told Kay, who was representing Connie’s mother, to stay away. Jackie trotted over to Kay, slapping the woman’s face with her tail.  

For an hour we all stood like duelers in the sun, engaging one another in drawn-out emotional exchanges. At the end, Sara presented the real Connie with a rock.

“Feel the weight of this burden that you’ve been carrying from your mom,” she instructed.

“Oh, it’s much heavier than this,” Connie replied, shaking her head.

“Well,” Sara countered, “it’s a representation of something that you’re carrying that you don’t want to carry anymore, right? And, your mom is acknowledging that she’s willing to take it back. Go ahead. You can give it back to your mother.”

With tears streaming down her face, Connie passed the rock to Kay.

“I want to be done,” Connie said.

“We can be done,” Sara confirmed. “Keep in mind that you might get some information in the next few days. You might get a call. It’s affecting your parents and your grandparents too.”

Sara gives instructions to Stephanie

Christopher’s constellation came next.

“I’m the first person for generations of my family who isn’t a drug addict or an alcoholic,” he began. “There was violent abuse throughout my mother’s and father’s families. My father left when I was four, and I didn’t have a relationship with him until my adult years. My mother was an alcoholic and my stepfather was fully checked out. The huge trauma was that I was horribly abused by the father of the stepfather to the point where I barely survived. I was a very suicidal kid.”

Stephanie gently grasped the hand of her husband as he continued. “I left home at 18 and started skiing, eventually becoming a professional skier and climber, and my whole life got amazing. Then, in my mid 20s, I broke my back, which ended my skiing career. After that, I had the great blessing to start a nonprofit organization that has helped thousands of kids by giving them the same kind of experiences that I had. After 15 years of building this amazing worldwide organization, I’ve started to transition out of it. Ever since I made the decision to transition, my back injury has been really flaring up. I want to address that, and also the need to disconnect from the old survivor story that I’ve been carrying with me all these years. One of the issues that I think it’s really affecting is that I have resistance to starting a family. It’s something that Stephanie and I have talked about a lot. I’m worried about continuing a bad legacy.”

Back in the corral, Sara had swapped Jackie for Silver, a stallion. Christopher was clenching his fists, pumping himself up. “I feel like I could do a back-handspring into the ring!” he remarked.

Sara told him to stand wherever he wanted, so he hopped onto a tire in the center—the only high ground.

I had kept my role as a father—Christopher’s this time. Kay was the mother again, and Connie was Christopher’s back pain. The animals, Jack and Silver, would be left unassigned. This would allow them the freedom to find their identities as the therapy progressed, Sara explained.

The session started out slowly until Jack the dog began racing furiously around the corral. I thought that it looked like fun, so I tore off after him. We took turns chasing each and being chased all around the ring. When I returned to my place, panting, Sara turned to Christopher.

“Does what he did mean anything to you?” she asked.

Christopher seemed disappointed. “My father’s not a very vital, athletic person at all, so that’s interesting that he would want to do that.”

Just then, Silver walked over and stood between Connie (Christopher’s back pain) and me. I ran my fingers through the stallion’s mane.

“What you want to do to Connie?” Sara asked Christopher.

“I want to squash her like a pancake,” he said.

“Say, ‘I want to pancake you!’” the therapist directed.

“I want to pancake you!” he shouted.

“How does that feel for you, Connie?”

“I just felt strong, and like am going to be here for you,” Connie responded.

“Connie, say, ‘You can’t pancake me!’”

“You can’t pancake me!”

Sara next turned her attention to Connie and me—standing on either side of Silver. “You seem like a couple to me. The horse has an erection, which makes me think there might be a sexual relationship between you two.”

Sara turned to Christopher. “Does that make sense to you?”

“My father is a martyr,” he replied. “He’s a victim. He’s masochistic. Both of his wives brutalized him. I could see there being almost a sexual charge around suffering.”

In a series of exchanges, Sara connected the back pain to an intergenerational lack of emotional support.

Sara lined us up behind Christopher. “I’m going to do seven generations,” she explained. “Connie, get behind Roc. You’re going to be the grandfather.”

When we were all lined up, Sara turned to Christopher. “Now, I want you to slightly lean back.”

Silver began to whinny.

“You’re feeling fear,” the therapist concluded. “The horse is picking up on that.”

“I don’t feel that I’m going to be supported,” Christopher stated. “I feel like he’s going to buckle.”

Sara next began to inquire into Christopher’s religious beliefs.

“I have a very strong spiritual connection that I’ve pulled from all sorts of different things,” he replied.

“I know it’s silly,” the therapist said, “but I’m going to play God now, okay?”

The session ended with Sara as God being cradled by Stephanie who was playing one of Christopher’s distant ancestors. The ancestor was an unknown evil individual who killed many innocent children.

“I caused all of this suffering,” Stephanie announced, gesturing towards Christopher’s entire lineage. “All of them belong to me. You can’t save them.”

“I’ve spent my whole life trying to save innocent children,” Christopher said, wiping at his eyes.

At the end, when we were ourselves again, we all shook hands and embraced.

Two months later, I called Christopher to ask if anything in his life had changed. He said his back hurt less, he was more aware of his own inherent wholeness, and he was committed to starting a family. Still, he was cautious about attributing those developments to our day at Silver Horse.

“I’ve been on this spiritual journey for a long time,” he stated, “and along the way, I’ve had help from many different places. I know that I had a real authentic and insightful experience with this woman named Sara, and my wife, and a few other people—but from a narrative standpoint, it’s challenging. Trying to making sense of it all is a bit of a fool’s errand. Like so many experiences in my life, that day at the ranch is one more drop in the ocean of who I am.”

Follow Roc’s latest project collecting dreams from around the globe at World Dream Atlas.

Russian fighter jet SU-27 closing up on a Swedish signals intelligence plane. Photo by FRA

Russia seems to be pretty angry with its neighboring countries in the Baltic Sea—especially Sweden. A couple of weeks ago, on October 2, Sweden's authority for signals intelligence (FRA) leaked a photo of a Russian fighter jet flying only about 30 feet away from a Swedish Armed Forces intelligence plane.

Russian warships have threatened a Finnish research vessel in the Baltic Sea on two occasions—August 2 and September 2, and on October 7, armed NATO fighter jets followed Russian fighters above the Swedish island Öland in the Baltic Sea. 

An unnamed Swedish government official told newspaper Svenska Dagbladet that "the actions of the Russians are sometimes aggressive and their behavior against signals intelligence planes has been unnerving. It's like during the Cold War.” When Russia invaded Swedish air space with their fighter jets, Swedish former minister of foreign affairs Carl Bildt wrote on his blog that it was "the most serious air violation from Russia" in a decade.

Trespassing in the Baltic Sea isn't the only strange behavior Russia has exhibited lately. Last year the country simulated a nuclear attack against Sweden, and Russian jets have been showing off their weapons by exposing their undercarriages when approaching Swedish aircraft.

These recent events are eerily reminiscent of the Cold War. If we're going down that road, what does that mean for Sweden? Confused and terrified, I called up Tomas Ries, a lecturer at the Department of Security, Strategy, and Leadership at the National Defence College in Stockholm. I wanted to know what the heck is going on. 

Tomas Ries. Photo by Rickard Kilström

VICE: Why is the Russian military behaving so aggressively in the Baltic Sea?
Tomas Ries: There are different interpretations about this. One essential thing is that Russia has a ten-year plan to build up their military forces. So they are increasing their military budget to an extreme extent, which means that there are more Russian forces in and around the Baltics than ever. 

But the main reason is that Russia is sending a message to the outside world, saying that the "old" Europe is over. What I mean by that is with NATO and EU dictating everything—with EU preaching [to Russia] about things such as democracy and respect for human rights—that isn't something that Russia will agree to anymore. Putin wants to emphasize that this era is over and that it's important to understand that Russia is strong. And that we [the rest of the world] need to respect that. I think that's the fundamental explanation of Russia's behavior in the Baltic Sea.

But if you want to look at each case individually, it's obvious that Putin doesn't like it when Finland and Sweden cooperate with NATO. So Russia is sending signals that it could get dangerous if you operate on military exercises with NATO. For example, they simulated a nuclear attack against Sweden at the same time as Sweden was undergoing NATO operations. 

You could also question their actions as if they're testing the readiness of the Swedish military. They’re using classic tactics that they used during the Cold War era, when they would fly close to the border, or precisely over the border, to see what kind of surveillance system Sweden had and how fast the military could react.

Could you interpret their actions as a build-up to a new Cold War?
I think it's problematic to use analogies like that because things are different nowadays. But one thing is similar: Russia is going back to their old European security agenda as an independent player with interests that often differ from the rest of the world—for example the ongoing war in Ukraine. So we're going back to a Europe where the tensions between Russia and the rest of Europe escalate and where Russia will increasingly use their growing military capacity.

What exactly does it mean when Russia violates Swedish airspace? And what can Sweden do about it?
It’s a very serious action basically. It means that they're violating Sweden's territorial integrity. Sweden's answer to an air violation is to show Sweden’s resources by sending out fighter jets to dismiss Russia's actions. Afterwards Sweden will send a diplomatic message, explaining that Russia’s behavior is not appreciated.

How serious is it to simulate a nuclear attack against another country?
To violate airspace is one thing, but to simulate a nuclear attack against another country—even if you don't violate airspace—is something I interpret as very serious and enormously unfriendly. What scares me the most about the Baltic Sea situation is events like this.

What's Sweden's relationship with Russia like?
If you look at it historically and go back to the Cold War, you will see that Sweden has always been something of a disguised partner with NATO. Sweden would have taken NATO’s side if a war broke out. Russia looked at Sweden as a false player, someone who would be on their main enemies' side if war became reality. This is still virtually how Russia sees Sweden today. 

You could also add that Carl Bildt, brought an activist foreign policy relating to Russia. He was openly critical of Russia on many occasions.

What can we do to stop their actions in the Baltic Sea?
This is part of Russia’s new action pattern. I don’t think it's possible to get them to quit their behavior. The important thing is not these individual incidents, but rather the long-term military power shift in Europe.

What do you think will happen during this long-term power shift?
Well, we know for sure that Russia started a serious rearmament back in 2011. And their military power is going to grow substantially during the next ten years. This means that we will once in which have a very big power right next to us. Russia wants to create a new status quo in Europe, where countries respect it. It's probable that Russia will use military action against what it thinks are important areas.

Sweden has completely disassembled its defense capabilities. That obviously increases the chance of pressure from Russia.

What would happen if Russia made their intentions reality now that Sweden doesn't have a defense?
I can’t speculate on that. But what I can say is that Sweden isn’t as vulnerable as you may think—we have Finland, the Baltic countries, and the Baltic Sea between us. However, Gotland [a Swedish island to the east] is very vulnerable. An attack is very unlikely. What is likely, is that one of the Baltic countries could be next. That could lead to crisis in the Nordics where Sweden could get involved. 

What would Sweden normally do in situation like that?
We have never done anything like that. The worst thing is that I don’t believe that anyone is thinking about the possibility of that happening. This is still something too new for Sweden to get involved in. It was just a few months ago that Swedish politicians woke up because of the war in Ukraine. That's when they raised the issue of the current problematic situation: What would happen to Sweden’s neighboring countries? The new generation of Swedish politicians have no experience in power politics.

So what would happen if Russia nuked Sweden?
I can't really say, but one thing is for sure: as long as you don’t have a military defense you’re very vulnerable. And if they wanted to do anything against us, we would be in great danger.

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Protesters call out the Milwaukee Police Department. Photo via Flickr user Light Brigading

On April 30, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, police officer Christopher Manney fatally shot 31-year-old Dontre Hamilton after an alleged scuffle. Manney reportedly fired 14 shots at Hamilton, who suffered from schizophrenia, and on October 16, Police Chief Edward Flynn fired his officer.

Now the police union and at least 100 other officers are voicing their displeasure at this decision. Meanwhile, Hamilton’s family and various supporters call the firing a “political” move intended to placate them. The Milwaukee PD has had its share of controversies over the years, including Flynn’s David Petraeus–style affair with a journalist who profiled him, and officers performing illegal cavity searches that sound more like sexual assault. Yet, with all that going on, the department had not fired an officer for an on-duty incident since the 60s.

Local District Attorney Kent Lovern has yet to decide where to file criminal charges against the ex-officer. It seems likely they’re not forthcoming because Flynn officially fired Manney not for the 14 shots but for the initial patdown that lead to the confrontation. Hamilton, according to the chief, violated standard operating procedure both with the pat downs and his general interactions with a homeless, mentally ill individual.

Manney was conducting a welfare check on Hamilton, who had recently gone off his medication and was sleeping the park (though he was not, in fact, homeless). Flynn said that Manney’s antagonizing pat down, which was done from behind—which might alarm a paranoid and mentally ill man—was performed “for no reason” and set off the incident. Other officers had checked in on Hamilton earlier, and since he was obviously not well, Manney should have called back-up or held off entirely.

According to Manney, who filed for PTSD-induced disability days before his firing and will therefore likely end up with exactly the same salary he previously enjoyed, Hamilton punched him and at one point had his baton in hand, necessitating the shooting. He also testified that Hamilton had “bulges” under his clothes that might have been weapons. Flynn backs this story up, despite firing the guy. Hamilton’s family counters that while he may have been sick, he wasn’t violent, and they would sure like to see photographs of the officer’s injuries.

It seems that the punishment for killing schizophrenic men who don’t submit to police in the United States is merely a firing—if that. The Fullerton, California, officers who killed the homeless Kelly Thomas in 2011 lost their jobs but avoided any charges. The Albuquerque officers who killed the schizophrenic James Boyd  in an error-ridden confrontation earlier this year are still on administrative leave. 

It’s tempting to think the system worked here after the tragedy of Hamilton’s death. No, Manney wasn’t fired for excessive force, but someone died by his hand and his gun, and he won’t be a cop anymore. That’s both a hell of a start and the absolute, shameful minimum that the public should demand.

Now for the rest of this week’s bad cops:

-VICE News’ Jason Leopold reported on October 17 that the Washington, DC police have had a Stingray device for more than a decade, and have been using it since 2008 without public accountability in order to investigate basic drug crimes, among other stuff. Stingrays, or IMSI catchers, can be used to search for individual cellphones, and even track people’s movements, often without a warrant, and while picking up numerous other cellphones from innocent bystanders. Their use (and even police department possession of them) is jealously guarded on grounds of national security, corporate security, and other nonsense.

-Holy crap: In 2014, there have been ten convictions for murder tossed out for various reasons in Brooklyn. Many were based on what turned out to be false confessions, but also some obvious they-got-the-wrong-dude situations.

-Facebook annoyed some folks when they began cracking down on users who picked different names. On Friday, they also sent a scolding letter to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), telling them that setting up fake profiles under the name of suspects is a violation of their terms of service. Sondra Arquiett, whose identity was seized by the DEA without permission and used to communicate with suspected criminals in 2010, is suing for $25,000 on the grounds that her privacy was violated and she was and endangered, so she’ll be pleased about this.

-On Saturday, around 60 protesters in Saratoga Springs, Utah, demonstrated against the September 10 shooting of Darrien Hunt by police. The 22-year-old was carrying a blunt but life-sized samurai sword when he was killed. The DA says Hunt waved the sword at police, and then was chased. A private autopsy seems to show that Hunt was indeed shot in the back, but the official autopsy is still pending. Hunt’s funeral included some anime drawings he had made, and his family confirmed rumors that the young man was a fan of cosplaying, which explains the whole sword thing. Not unlike the August fatal shooting of John Crawford in an Ohio Walmart, this incident began when someone called 911. His family thinks the initial confrontation and the fatal conclusion both had a racial basis. Along with the protesters, they're demanding body cameras be placed on local cops, and the creation of a civilian review board with some real muscle.

-A federal judge wrote that the government's secrecy in its campaign against the Las Vegas Cobb family was "constitutionally abhorrent,” which sounds about right. The Cobbs, who are accused of running an illegal bookie operation, have been investigated for ten years by the Vegas prosecutors, the IRS, and the Secret Service. They have had $13.2 million dollars taken from bank accounts and even a private safe. If you thought civil asset forfeiture was too easy for local and state governments to engage in, get a load of civil asset forfeiture proceedings put under so-called "super seal." Not only did that mean the 82-year-old Edwin Cobb and his family’s millions were taken without a trial and without charges being filed, but the documents relating to the forfeiture actions were hidden from them and from the public at large. There is no justification for this, except a desire to avoid accountability.

-On Wednesday, a 26-year-old Boston man was handcuffed and had his phone taken by an as-yet-unnamed officer with that city’s police department. According to the blog Photography Is Not a Crime, Max Bickford was cuffed for only about five minutes, but his phone was wrenched out of his hands by the officer, and Bickford says it was damaged. In video of the incident, the cop has cuffed another man who is face down on the street with his shirt over his face. Bickford obeys the initial police order to move his bike, as the cop sarcastically tells him “good job” and “thanks for your help.” Eventually, the officer actually drags his perp closer to Bickford before snatching the phone away. The excuse for taking it was that the phone contained “evidence of a crime,” but the officer had already complained that Bickford had no idea about the reason or the context for the arrest, so that one doesn’t really work.

-On Tuesday, a California Highway Patrol officer was driving near Big Bear just in time to see a smoking Subaru that had gone off the highway and tumbled 25 feet down a hill. Officer Jason Holzberger’s fortuitous timing, and his fast reaction, lead to the successful rescue of trapped driver Wallace Henderson. The airbag was blocking Henderson’s way out of the car, but Holzberger opened the door and told him to get out only moments before it burst into flames. This makes Holzberger our Good Cop of the Week. 

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