For VICE's True Crime issue, Magnum Photos was kind enough to let us look through their dizzying archives for unpublished photos of the UK's criminal element. We came across a folder of slides from Chris Steele-Perkins's 1980 project on Manchester’s infamous prison, Strangeways, now officially renamed HM Prison Manchester (not nearly as good a name, if you ask us). 

Steele-Perkins’s iconic work on the UK's urban plight of the late 70s, and his genre-defining 1979 book The Teds, places him among the greats of British photography—so it was especially nice to get to print these previously unpublished portraits.

Screengrab from the Telegraph's John Grisham interview

While touting his new novel about the terrors of the coal industry to the Telegraph last week, bestselling writer John Grisham offered up some unwise remarks about American pedophiles being locked up . He told an interviewer that "We have prisons now filled with guys my age. Sixty-year-old white men in prison who've never harmed anybody, would never touch a child," but who "got online one night and started surfing around, probably had too much to drink or whatever, and pushed the wrong buttons, went too far, and got into child porn."

After what were no doubt a tumultuous few hours for the legal thriller author, he realized that showing up in headlines next to the words "defends pedophiles" was a bad look, he was like, "Sorry everyone!" The notion that there are a bunch of innocent men out there who are in prison because they got drunk and typed nakedchildren.com into their computers seems, ah, a little shaky, but child porn cases can take odd legal turns.

Take the British man who recently received the dubious distinction of being the first UK citizen convicted of a crime for possessing cartoon child pornography—he had Japanese-style drawings of underage girls in school uniforms, exposing their cartoon privates, and having cartoon sex. (America's first such conviction was in 2009.) Many comics fans are up in arms about the UK case, since no actual children are harmed in the making of dirty pictures. Though everyone agrees that sex with children is terrible, and kiddie porn is also awful, there's a fair amount of legal gray area when it comes to child pornography, and a lot of excuses that accused pedophiles can make when the contents of their computers is uncovered by the cops. For instance:

"It's just a cartoon!"

Greece is OK legally because it has artistic and historical value. Image via Wikimedia Commons 

Some drawings of children in sexual contexts are illegal, but the law has loopholes—for a crime to be committed, the illustrations must have no artistic merit and therefore be considered legally obscene. Art featuring minors in sexual contexts that doesn't pass the somewhat capricious Miller Test for obscenity was banned in 2003 under the PROTECT Act.  

For a sample of what's not obscene, Wikimedia Commons has a section titled "Erotic activities involving children," and it's full of stuff like Greek plates painted with pictures of placid, blank-faced children being molested by equally placid, blank-faced men. All the stuff in that collection presumably can be said to have artistic merit or historical, but a lot of it is suuuuuuper fucked up.

"They're not really minors!"

In 2002, when the Supreme Court killed the overbroad Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996, Justice Anthony Kennedy famously pointed out that the law's prohibition against depictions of kids gettin' it on would rule out Romeo and Juliet, not to mention Traffic and American Beauty.

So to be clear, there are models out there who look young—very, very young—who could choose to act like children being molested, but as long as the product is correctly labeled as a depiction of adults having sex, you're legally in good standing. 

Interestingly, if someone labeled their fake child porn as real child porn for some weird reason, that would be a crime. The Supreme Court decided this in a very strange and convoluted 2008 case, US v. Michael Williams, in which the defendant claimed he had porn of his two-year-old daughter and was trying to trade for other child pornography with an undercover FBI agent in a chat room. 

"I stumbled upon it!" 

John Grisham's nightmare scenario—accidentally landing on child porn while drunk—was factored in by Congress when the federal law banning child pornography was written; legislators included the word "knowingly" before every new phrase. It's worth noting here that the legal framework for prosecuting child porn generally catches pedophiles dead to rights, because they usually have it in such enormous quantities—like, tens of thousands of images—that there's no ambiguity. 

"It's art!"

Say what you will about the sheer volume of Michael Jackson's collection of underage nude photos—they were contained within art books with titles like In Seach of Young Beauty. Judging from the fact that you can order that title on Amazon, it looks like they're considered legal, if not socially acceptable, to own. 

There are also some movies that get a pass, such as Louis Malle's 1978 film Pretty Baby, which is about a 12-year-old prostitute, played by 12-year-old actress Brooke Shields. Most of these films are from the 1970s, and they often contain depictions of nude children in fairly sexual contexts that would never make it to the screen today—not because such things are or should be illegal, but because everyone would get super upset and theaters probably would refuse to show those films.

Obviously, ever since the days of VHS, movies like this can be screened at home. Now they can also be streamed instantly on Amazon, where the "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought..." section can get a little, well:

"It's just words, no images!"

Did you know that there's an entire genre of fan fiction known as "Snarry"? That's where people write about Severus Snape and Harry Potter getting down to business—which is probably not your cup of tea, but it's totally legal thanks to the First Amendment.

There have been close calls. In 1998, a guy named Brian Dalton pled guilty to child pornography when what he had in his possession was a journal full of his sexual fantasies about kidnapping and raping children. After he was convicted, the ACLU appealed the verdict and the case made it all the way to the Ohio Supreme Court in 2003, where Dalton was allowed to retract his guilty plea. In 2004, his case was dismissed.

So if you're one of Grisham's imaginary 60-year-old white guys who downs a few IPAs and starts running wild with the "sexy kids" Google searches, be sure to stick to short stories, Grecian urns, and gritty urban dramas from the 70s—or just don't look at child porn? 

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

There's more competition in the art world than ever before. There are more artists, more artwork, more movies, and just more media in general. The problem of obtaining recognition, praise, and the ever elusive monetary support has always been hard for artists—now that we are awash (drowning?) in social media, the problem has grown more complex. 

It's never been easier to get some kind of press for your work, but it's never been harder to truly stand out. Sure, that museum retweeted you, sure some blog covered your opening, but did anyone buy anything? Did anyone read the post?

Artist Sam Newell has built an interesting solution to the unique problems of an attention economy approaching its limits. His Algorithmic Tumblr Noworkflow is a Javascript and Applescript bot that randomly downloads images from imgur, modifies them, and then posts the results, creating an overload of abstract digital collages of varying degrees of interest.

Currently Noworkflow is on version number three, and Newell plans on updating the system soon based on popular posts. While Newell is still very much the artist, albeit of the system rather than the individual posts, he would like to eventually remove himself entirely from Noworkflow by using machine learning.  

The project was inspired by artist and writer Brad Troemel’s essay “Athletic Aesthetics,” which describes an “aesthlete” as a creative who expertly responds to a saturated market with hyperactive productivity. Troemel precise definition is, “a cultural producer who trumps craft and contemplative brooding with immediacy and rapid production.” Newell, taking Troemel’s essay as a dare, took this idea further by automating production: In just over two months of existence, Noworkflow has produced over 5,000 images.

The question here is, can an algorithm better navigate our oversaturated social media landscape than us humans? While some of the posts are surprisingly enjoyable, we are still a ways from great art made by machine. Bots are writing sports reviews, making listicles, and even fact checking, but artists are a long ways away from being replaced.  

Newell isn't alone in asking these questions. In 2013, Swedish new media artist Jonas Lund created The Fear of Missing Out, an exhibition of algorithmically created artworks based on art market trends. While Newell leans on his bot for massive production, Lund bets on algorithms and big data to reveal hidden paths to success. As conceptual pieces they are both genius, even while the finite artworks they produce are often rather boring.

Newell wrote me saying that Noworkflow and other projects like it represent “a very posthuman way to think about art and the artist... It could be possible that certain modes of artistic production be replaced with automated ones.” But the piece is a better commentary on the efforts artists go through to gain recognition. 

As Troemel writes, “In the cases of Tumblr and Facebook, the information piling up in a newsfeed flows past viewers almost automatically into a virtually bottomless well.” When you consider growing student loan debt, a growing reliance on unpaid interns, and the lack of monetary rewards for art-making, artists—aesthletes—are rightly scouring the net for new ways to rise to the top of that ever-growing pile. While algorithmic production may give us a superhuman ability to create, the artist is still integral to a successful piece.

As algorithms continue to permeate our culture, certain questions will only growing more pressing. How do we stand out? What makes us humans unique and interesting in an oversaturated media landscape? Newell has built a playful but dark future for art-making, one devoid of passion, more akin to a gambling strategy than creativity. While new forms will arise from algorithmically produced content, defining what is lost will be harder.

Ben Valentine writes on art, technology, and social practice. Follow him on Twitter.

The Serbian capital of Belgrade recently held its first gay pride parade in four years. The previous march in 2010 was marred by bloody clashes between anti-pride rioters and police, leaving 150 people injured.

Serbian nationalist groups amassed hundreds of their members ahead of the gay pride parade to protest LGBT rights and attempt to prevent the march. Fearing a repeat of the violence in 2010, several thousand anti-riot police and armored vehicles mobilized on the streets of the city in anticipation of this year's procession.

VICE News was in Belgrade to monitor the anti-LGBT protests and meet members of Serbia's gay community who were determined to defy the intimidation and march through the streets, regardless of the risks.

The Pink Pistols. Photo via Flickr user InSapphoWeTrust

Tom Palmer, a gay libertarian, was walking to dinner with a co-worker in 1982 when he was told by a group of passing homophobes that he would be killed and nobody would ever find his body. Walking slowly away, and then running, Palmer was pursued by the gang for about a hundred feet until he turned to face them with the handgun his mother had given him. His aggressors retreated when they saw the gun, and Palmer was safe—the gun may very well have saved his life. Today, Palmer, now a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, is fighting to tear down Washington DC’s prohibition against carrying handguns. 

Palmer isn’t the only gay pro-gun libertarian activist out there. In fact, there are thousands of LGBT individuals  who are skeptical of the government and love shooting things—or are at least prepared to do so in self-defense. I wasn’t aware of this subculture until I attended LibertyFest NYC—initially, I was taken aback when Marcel Fontaine, a speaker at the convention and creator of the “LGBT for Gun Rights” Facebook page told me that the “more guns, less crime” argument often referenced by opponents of gun control can apply to hate crimes, too. “Armed gays don’t get bashed” is how they often put it. 

“If you want to harm someone because they’re an LGBT person,” Fontaine told me, “they can defend themselves against that by open carrying.”

If you find the “gay libertarian gun enthusiast” identity perplexing, you’re not alone. Former Texas Republican Congressman Ron Paul, a demigod among liberty enthusiasts, supported the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act. And while his son, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, seems to be resigned to the fact that the debate over gay marriage is all but over, for now he remains in the "one man, one woman" camp. Beyond that, the staunch libertarian belief in free market capitalism usually includes embracing the right of businesses to discriminate based on sexual orientation.

But since its first convention, the official Libertarian Party has affirmed LGBT rights—in fact, the party’s first presidential nominee, in 1972, was openly gay. Arguing against the idea of federally sanctioned marriage altogether, the party platform takes the position that individuals should be free to marry whomever they want, stating: "Sexual orientation, preference, gender, or gender identity should have no impact on the government's treatment of individuals, such as in current marriage, child custody, adoption, immigration or military service laws."

Like most libertarians, gay and lesbian members of the movement don’t fuck around with gun rights. Mike Sibley, chair of the Libertarian Party’s LGBT caucus Outright Libertarians, survived being assaulted by two homophobes with baseball bats, and although he wasn’t armed at the time, he told me he firmly believes that self-defense is a natural right. Outright’s outreach brochure boldly asserts that the group “is unequivocal in its support of the natural right of self-defense for all LGBT youth.”

Sibley commends Palmer for successfully defending himself against a homophobic attack and then “using the experience to push back against hoplophobia” or fear of weapons. A startling 1,600 hate crimes are committed against LGBT individuals each year.

“Pick on someone your own caliber,” reads the motto of the Pink Pistols, a gay libertarian-leaning gun rights organization. The group, which reaches out to gun-loving LGBT people and trains them in handling firearms was inspired by an article that ran in Salon in 2000 that argued that “if it became widely known that homosexuals carry guns and know how to use them, not many bullets would need to be fired.” The author, Jonathan Rauch of the Brookings Institute, added, “In fact, not all that many gay people would need to carry guns, as long as gay-bashers couldn’t tell which ones did.”

With 31 chapters and around 10,000 members, the Pink Pistols advocate for gay people to acquire concealed carry permits. The group brings in NRA-certified instructors to train LGBT individuals at shooting ranges, and has even offered opinions in high-profile gun-rights cases like Silviera v. Lockyer and Heller v. District of Columbia.

Pink Pistols spokesperson Gwendolyn Patton, a registered member of the Libertarian Party, told me that members don’t join the Pink Pistols “for club perks and privileges. You're joining an organization that shares a common ethical belief.”

Patton mentioned that a member of her own chapter in Philadelphia was followed by a group of people armed with pipes after leaving a gay club. When the Pink Pistols member displayed his gun, the attackers dropped their pipe and ran for it.

“You are the absolutely first responder to your own assault,” she said. And like many Second Amendment activists, Patton takes issue with the argument that 32,000 gun violence deaths in the US each year is linked to the country’s high rates of gun ownership.

But solidarity in sexual orientation hasn’t convinced the majority of the LGBT community that expanded gun ownership is the solution to the greater issues underlying homophobic hate crimes. So far, the larger LGBT community has been wary of the Pink Pistols and other gay libertarian gun-rights advocates. Patton has said that the Pink Pistols receives far more negativity from other LGBT organizations than from other gun-rights activists. According to the Pink Pistols manual, few LGBT community centers will host Pink Pistols meetings because “they will frequently have ‘no weapons’ policies that make concealed carry on the premises problematic.”

Shelby Chestnut, a media spokesperson at the Anti-Violence Project, which targets LGBT community members, argues that guns are tools of hate crimes, not a way to prevent them. Citing the case of Cece McDonald, a transgender woman who was sent to jail after defending herself against a homophobic attack, Chestnut noted that carrying a gun can often subject LGBT people to even greater violence.

"We need to look at the systemic inequalities that are causing people to be victims of violence,” she said. “The solution to that is definitely not creating violence to end violence."

Bruce Willis in Armageddon, about to blow himself up (spoiler alert!) to save the world from an asteroid

If you think about them long enough, comets can be a cause for concern—they're pretty enough streaking through the sky, but if one ever flew straight at Earth, we'd presumably be in a lot of trouble. But how likely is that? Should we actually be worried, or could that anxiety be better directed elsewhere, such as toward our personal appearance and poor life choices?

On Monday, Australia’s Siding Spring Survey—the only dedicated comet/asteroid-tracking program of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere—closed due to a lack of funding. Brad Tucker, an astronomer at the Australian National University in Canberra, told the Guardian that this new blind spot could put Earth at risk. Which sounds like something we should potentially be worried about.

I called Tucker for a thorough explanation.

Brad Tucker next to the Uppsala Telescope, which was used in the Sliding Spring Survey. Photo courtesy of Brad Tucker

VICE: So what's your link to the Siding Spring Survey?
Brad Tucker: Well, Mount Stromlo Observatory runs two sites—Mount Stromlo, where I'm an astronomer, and Siding Springs, which is their dark site. My interest is in finding exploding stars. But one of the things I do is work with the public in outreach and education. I’m involved with the Siding Spring Survey by trying to attain funding for Robert McNaught, who's running it, to keep the survey operational.

One of the things I was doing last year was lobbying in Washington, DC to try and get funding for the project. NASA were actually the ones operating the Siding Springs Survey in Australia.

So what happens now that the survey's been closed down? We're left with a big blind spot in the Southern Hemisphere?
That is certainly part of the issue. There are surveys operating in the Northern Hemisphere, and NASA has invested in some new projects. There was a meteor explosion over Chelyabinsk, Russia, last year, which most people remember. That was partially due to budget cuts at NASA, and specifically cuts to the Near Earth Object Program, which funds a lot of asteroid detection surveys. A lot of these surveys have been cut and it snuck through.

The explosion in Russia actually triggered the US government to start refunding some of these surveys. The problem with Siding Springs is that when the NASA money was reduced, it was the first to be cut due to being out of sight and out of mind in Australia. There are no other programs running in the realm of what Siding Springs was doing—so yes, there's now a blind spot in the Southern Hemisphere.

A meteor exploding over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in February 2013

So NASA's chosen to focus almost exclusively on the Northern Hemisphere?
They have. There's a project in Hawaii called ATLAS that was funded, and there are a few other ones, but really there's nothing in the Southern Hemisphere. There are a few surveys looking for them, but they're not efficient at finding the objects we need to find. It’s easier to find large asteroids, say 100 kilometers (62 miles) wide. But for comet and meteors that are five to 50 meters [16 to 32 feet) wide—which won’t destroy a planet, but will do a lot of damage—you need a survey like the Siding Springs Survey, or something like it, to be productive at finding them.

So you're saying these detection surveys need to be seen as an early warning system, rather then a purely academic pursuit?
Definitely. We're interested in studying asteroids and comets for scientific value—for instance, (the unmanned spacecraft) Rosetta is landing on a comet, and that’s very cool and exiting. But tracking asteroids and comets is no different to tracking cyclones, hurricanes, or tornados. There's a clear interest in studying the science behind it, but really it's about trying to allow for an early warning system. And it shouldn’t be seen as a research endeavor or the responsibility of a university. There needs to be global view. There needs to be a change in how we view it.

Have we come close to impacts recently?
Quite often a survey will find a small to medium-sized object measuring a few meters or feet. They have, largely speaking, passed by the Earth. But we're talking skimming it—around 20,000 to 30,000 kilometers[12,000 to 18,000 miles] above the Earth. Given how large space is, that's actually relatively close. We're talking about the distance between the Earth and the moon. Quite a few of these have happened recently. We do expect something like the size of the Chelyabinsk meteor to hit Earth once every ten to 20 years. That's not too often, but when something like that occurs you're essentially detonating a nuclear bomb in the atmosphere.

That doesn't sound good.
Yeah, if you detonate a nuclear bomb over a city... it's pretty self-explanatory. But if we know it's coming we can get people out of the way. For example, the comet Siding Spring was detected by a survey 22 months before it could potentially crash into Mars. When Robert McNaught discovered it, it had a possible trajectory that could see it smash into Mars. If you have a 22-month notice that something is headed for Earth, there's a lot of investigating that can be done to find possible solutions.

Could we ever hope to alter a comet's course if it was headed for Earth?
Well, you have Hollywood clichés, such as Armageddon. However, while its clichéd, there is a good example in John F. Kennedy—who, in the 1960s, challenged the US to land on the moon, and within a few years the space program had been revolutionized and we had landed someone on the moon. If you have a challenge and some pressure, things can get done, so it’s not out of the realm of possibility that we could avert an impact. 

Is there anything in the works to that end?
There are some projects we're working on to deal with man-made space junk floating around Earth. The Australian government has been investing in a program to track small objects with a laser thousands of miles above Earth, then tune the laser so we can deflect objects. We're practicing on small man-made things, but if it works there's no reason why it can’t be ramped up to target larger objects.

A few years ago, China demonstrated they could send a missile and destroy one of their defunct satellites. People are working on these things. If there was something potentially dangerous, astronomers would no doubt work with the military and defense agencies to come up with a solution. We're a creative bunch, but again it goes back to the fact that we have to know it's coming. We're not just having fun naming comets; it serves a purpose. And people need to realize that, as if we're not looking then we're blind.

A time sequence of Shoemaker-Levy 9’s collision with Jupiter

How destructive are events like the Chelyabinsk meteor? Could we be looking at extinction?
Well, what actually happens is that these meteors essentially do a belly flop. Imagine someone traveling fast as they dive into the water—you have that initial impact when you run into a surface, and that's what these meteors do. They run into the atmosphere at tens of thousands of miles an hour, then explode in the air and rain down debris. But it depends—in 1994, comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashed into Jupiter and we were able to monitor it with telescopes. 

It was pretty cool, but that created a hole 7,000 miles wide—the size of Earth. Life can certainly be wiped out by these kinds of objects. Smaller objects can impact, create a crater, block out the sun, and create an extinction-level event that way. Large ones aren't as big of a concern, as we largely know where they are. It's smaller asteroids that won't destroy the Earth, but can cause bad localized damage, which are of concern.

Is there a protocol if you discover an asteroid like that? I'd imagine putting the news out into the public sphere would cause mass panic.
It would certainly cause panic. So, for example, with the comet Siding Spring, Robert McNaught discovered it, followed it to establish its trajectory, and it was announced to other surveys who followed it for a couple of months. Its size and orbit were well defined, so we knew where it was going to go. There are a large number of things to establish before we announce it widely. We're careful with what we do. But again, this kind of thing requires funding for telescopes to operate, and we can go from there.

Follow Tom Breakwell on Twitter.

Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images

We’ve now had a day to really digest Renee Zellweger’s new face. I realize that sounds kind of gross, like I’m eating her face or something, but I truly wish my body could process this whole nonsensical debate and expel it as though it were a haute couture kidney stone. Reactions to Zellweger’s appearance at the Elle Women in Hollywood event on Monday ranged from “OMG is that really Renee Zellweger? She looks totally different” to “How dare you point out that this person looks different!” Zellweger responded to the haters via People magazine, saying, "I'm glad folks think I look different! I'm living a different, happy, more fulfilling life, and I'm thrilled that perhaps it shows." She owned it, which is a very reasonable response, especially after websites like The Stir referred to her new appearance as "shocking," a word usually reserved for college basketball upsets and home invasions gone wrong.

If you tilt your head to the side, squint, and gargle water simultaneously, she looks a tiny bit like a kinder, gentler Robin Wright now. I think that qualifies as "different," whether or not it is the result of plastic surgery. If my cousin showed up to Thanksgiving after I hadn't seen him for five years and had drastically different facial features I would say something. I'd probably ask him what he did to achieve such a dramatic change. I might ask him for the number of his "guy." I might even make a joke about it in the kitchen while he was off taking a leak or staring at his cutlery. Celebrities are like our weird cousins, except we can easily, thoroughly examine their face from ten years ago in Bridget Jones’s Diary.

In the last 24 hours, seemingly everyone with a keyboard has chimed in, as they are wont to do in our era of instant global communication. It’s no longer a novelty to say that these sorts of media firestorms happen quickly. Gawker’s Caity Weaver got a lot of attention for snarkily posting photos from the Elle event with the matter-of-fact title, “Here Are Some Pictures of Renee Zellweger.” 

The notable thing isn't that outlets that cover celebrity news are talking about how celebrities look—they've been doing that for hundreds of years and will continue doing so after all "news" is delivered through whatever replaces Snapchat—it's that people felt compelled to defend Zellweger and condemn the press scrum. The Guardian's Jennifer Gerson Uffalussy used the occasion to denounce the Hollywood-industrial complex's latent sexism:

To be a female celebrity is to lose at every turn. Dare to age? Face-shame at best and be out of work at worst. Get noticeable plastic surgery on your face to combat the inevitable ageing? At best, you will be mocked for your narcissism and delusional attempts at hanging on to your youth; at worst, you’ll be out of work again. 

To rail against snark and superficiality, though, is to deny the very opiate the masses seem to have an insatiable appetite for. I'm not exposing a heavily guarded trade secret by saying that celebrity gossip, cynicism, and sarcasm drive lots of traffic. Why was Miley Cyrus on the front page of CNN.com after the VMAs last year? Because you clicked on it. Why did I write this article? Why are you reading it? Why do I love Skittles? Why did I binge-watch Chrisley Knows Best last night? Let's just stop asking questions, shall we?

Photo via Flickr user David Shankbone

Perhaps this is the moment we as a society have decided to draw the line on shaming people for their appearances. Maybe hundreds of years of snark, smarm, and cattiness can just be wiped away. What a lovely world full of rose petals, free champagne, unicorns, and whimsical Pixar movies that would be. Unfortunately for all you fans of gratis alcohol and mythical horse creatures, that’s not reality. People are mean, and that's a basic law of the universe that's not likely to change soon.

In the interest of full disclosure, I am the guy who wrote this article, but I also don't think making jokes about celebrities is anyone's grand ambition in life. As Jalen Rose might say, you've got to give the people what they want. In a supply-and-demand world, it's hard to force people to take their medicine when all they want is to mainline heroin straight into their eyeballs in the form of wisecracks about famous people. Comedy Central roasts, late night talk shows, Fashion Police (RIP Joan), whatever the fuck Chelsea Handler does on Netflix, and every single gossip website on the planet are going to have something to say whenever a famous person leaves his or her house and there's always going to be an appetite for more of that. 

Human beings use the internet to pass judgment—whether it’s on Renee Zellweger for looking different or on those people who choose to make fun of her for looking different. It’s been a good long while since we all had a story to play rhetorical hacky sack with. We’re four months into GamerGate and pundits are running out of things to write about it. Bloggers are now in agreement that men suck (we do) and internet culture is toxic (it is). It's time to move on to the next piece of fluff the media can worry into nothingness—and here comes Zellweger walking out onto a red carpet with a face that could launch a thousand thinkpieces.

Sometimes, outrage is healthy. Our collective ability to chastise someone in power is one of the few remaining checks we have against those in the gilded world of the global upper class. Other times, that outrage can be used as a bludgeon for self-interested or partisan goals. Moral objection is a powerful rhetorical tool because it cannot be dismissed by facts. It's all about how something makes you feel. The truth, in these cases, is totally relative. I can be horrified by the Fappening celebrity nude leaks because of the invasion of privacy and sexual violence it represents, but then the other side of the equation, I can be disgusted that I am infringing on their right to free-flowing information. Who's right? I am, of course!

This binary of "right" and "wrong" is the Muscle Milk for mass media's six-pack abs of self-righteousness. We can debate if it's right or wrong to mock someone for their appearance until the day the sun dies and all the celebrities go back to their home planet in the Marcab Confederacy. The only sane reaction in a world where everyone wants to accost you with their opinion is to refuse to participate. 

Follow Dave Schilling on Twitter.

Photo via the 'Hacker Wars' Facebook page

The surveillance state and those who fight against it have become a bona fide hot topic in the last two years, during which Wikileaks's Julian Assange was examined in We Steal Secrets, Edward Snowden's NSA disclosures found a cinematic home in Laura Poitra's uneven Citizenfour, and the history of "hacktivism" and Anonymous was traced in Brian Knappenberger's We Are Legion.

With Vivien Lesnik Weisman's Hacker Wars, we're given a look at a collection of hackers and trolls who have been persecuted in various ways by the US government. Weisman is unquestionably loyal to her film's subjects, and it shows, to the point where you might describe Hacker Wars as a little more than a valentine to those subjects who gave her access.

From start to finish, the film largely elicits the opinions and impressions of a small, tight-knit group of agitators including Joe “subverzo” Fionda and Jaime “asshurtmacfags” Cochran. These and other subjects color the events surrounding the trials and convictions of infamous internet troll Weev (real name Andrew Auerheimer), Anonymous spokesperson and Project PM head Barrett Brown (who has written for VICE), and Jeremy Hammond (a.k.a. Anarchaos), the hacktivist who leaked a treasure trove of data from Stratfor, an American intelligence firm.

Their observations, along with the film's bro-step soundtrack, probably won't counter the perception that activist hackers tend to be puckish pranksters with an anti-authority complex rather than serious people using hacking to achieve noble political ends. Weisman's pile-driving approach to the film's soundtrack and editing, with its quick cuts and graphics, leaves little room for nuanced thoughts on state and corporate power.

That's not to say the the film isn't occasionally informative, funny, and even terrifying. When footage is shown of the raid on Brown (Anonymous's de facto spokesperson), with feds aggressively shouting amid a total blackout, it highlights how reactionary and fearful the American state can be. But, in lingering too long on Brown's persona, Weisman doesn't give enough time to his attempt—with Project PM—to bring transparency to the US intelligence contracting industry. 

Weisman also errs in giving too much screen time to Weev, who speaks intelligently about hacktivism in some scenes, but his main function—as far as I can tell—is to celebrate the troll's role in internet culture. That leaves Jeremy Hammond as the one true hacktivist out of the film's central characters.

The film presents Hammond's hack of Stratfor, which led to him getting ten years in prison, as an act of political disobedience against the surveillance state. It fails to address the flaws in the operation that led to his arrest, however—which as everyone who has been even casually following the story knows went tits up as a result of the FBI flipping hacktivist Hector Xavier Monsegur, a.k.a. Sabu, who fed Hammond a flaw in Stratfor's security that enabled him to get in.

Weisman has nothing to say about Hammond diving headlong into trouble without knowing if Sabu had been flipped, even though the hacker Virus had accused Sabu of being a stool pigeon back in August 2011. Hammond also gets a free pass for his decision to leak data from 60,000 Stratfor customer credit cards, resulting in $700,000 in fraudulent donations to nonprofits. There, and in other places, the film seems overly reluctant to criticize its subjects.

Still, Hacker Wars has its moments of illumination, however fleeting they may be. Thomas Drake, who blew the whistle on NSA's internet and phone data collection program Stellar Wind, and Daily Dot reporter Dell Cameron (who has written for VICE and Motherboard) both speak intelligently about hacktivism being a legitimate counter to state power. The two get significant screen time, but both play second fiddle to Weev's trollish persona. 

Does Hacker Wars want to add to the debate over hacktivism's role in checking state and corporate power? Or does it just want to be a love letter to its characters? Either way, when the closing credits roll atop the bro-step beats, the audience will likely be left wondering about the hacktivists who don't appear in films and are even now trying to dig up corporate secrets while trying to avoid being caught. Hacker Wars has nothing to say about them.

Image of Parliament Hill via Twitter.
This morning I contacted one of my favourite freelance writers, Justin Ling, to see about a story on drone regulations I was expecting. Ling’s office is literally inside parliament.

I casually texted him something like, “Dude, when will your story be ready?”

His reply: “Turn on the news.”

Twitter was already erupting with images of a shot soldier who was standing guard at the National War Memorial. A crowd of bystanders feverishly performed CPR on an unseen victim lying next to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, national war memorial.

Reports were circulating that a gunman, hijacking a car at gunpoint, made his way a few blocks north to Parliament Hill where a shootout took place. The gunman reportedly then ran into parliament.

I called Ling to see what was happening, hoping that he’d been up the night before, and had not made it into the office early.

We used to work together in the Parliamentary Press Gallery covering Canadian politics. I knew full well that Wednesdays were caucus days, where all of Canada’s major political parties have their weekly meetings and journalists harass them as the exit—and Justin Ling harasses with the best of them.

Ling answered the phone and said he was in the cafeteria being sequestered by Parliament Hill security guards. I could hear running, then Ling went silent for a few breathless moments.

“I gotta go, I gotta fucking go.” Click.

In or around that time, the active shooter fresh from attacking and gunning down a soldier at the National War Memorial, stormed into parliament with similar intentions. He’s been described as carrying everything from an assault rifle to a double-barrelled shotgun, with long hair and a bandanna.


 

Nothing is completely confirmed, but we do know this video is allegedly what happened inside parliament as journalists scrummed politicians. I spent many tired Wednesdays there listening to the smooth baritone of Thomas Mulcair or Justin Trudeau, so the scene of RCMP storming in and firing on a gunman was surreal.

Ling has been live-tweeting the whole way through, because he’s a hell of a journalist. Considering the circumstances, I was surprised he even answered his phone to tell me he wouldn’t be filing.

This horrific attack comes on the heels of Monday’s hit-and-run incident that left one Canadian soldier dead and another in the hospital. The attacker, 25-year-old St-Jean-sur-Richilieu native Martin Rouleau—who recently converted to Islam and referred to himself as Ahmad LeConverti—was known to federal authorities as someone who had been "radicalized," according to the RCMP and the Prime Minister's Office. Witnesses say he was shot multiple times by local police after emerging from his overturned Nissan Altima brandishing a knife.

For now, it sounds Ling is safe and sound, but being protected by armed soldiers and police who are swarming parliament as we speak. Everyone in Ottawa—from friends I have at law school, to my sister who teaches at a rural school outside of the city—is under some sort of lockdown. It’s important to remember that this is a city known for suburban tranquility.

For now, police have an enormous chunk of Ottawa cordoned off. Everywhere Parliament Hill, the Chateau Laurier, to Sparks Street is crawling with armed law enforcement. One shooter has been confirmed dead by the CBC, with another potentially on the loose. There’s even social media reports more shots were fired down the street from parliament.

This is big news for Canada: a shootout in the halls of the most important building in the country. What this means for future anti-terrorist legislation in Canada and the potential pitfalls that come with it remains to be seen, but the feeling that things won’t ever be the same is inescapable.

@bmakuch

Cowboy poet and former South Dakota Senator Larry Pressler looks for his post-partisan comeback. Photo via Facebook

“I’ve been standing about four feet away from somebody who was shot in the head. I’ve seen the white gray of a human brain,” Larry Pressler tells me. The year was 1968. Then an Army lieutenant, the future three-term Republican Senator was in an outfit escorting supply trucks during the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. A fellow GI, whom Pressler won’t name, was right next to him. “He was so hot he took his helmet off for a bit,” which proved to be bait for snipers hiding along the route. It was the stuff of Apocalypse Now. The stuff of PTSD.

It’s a little-discussed side of the man who’s shaking up the Senate race in South Dakota, where former Republican governor Mike Rounds, a once-popular conservative, was long considered a solid favorite to win the red state's open seat. But Rounds fell behind in fundraising and began losing support amid headlines about a mushrooming investigation into the state’s handling of a foreign investor green card program during his governorship. The slippage was compounded by a $1.25 million ad campaign against Rounds from Laurence Lessig’s anti–political money Mayday PAC, opening up an opportunity for the once-dismissable Democratic candidate Rick Weiland, and also for Pressler, who is running as an independent in this four-way contest (Gordon Howe, a conservative independent, is also in the mix). 

Now, a race that was considered all but locked up for the GOP has turned into an unpredictable free-for-all. Recent polls have shown Weiland and Pressler gaining ground, trading off for second place behind Rounds. Democrats and Republicans have sent in their cavalries to prop up their respective candidates, with the senatorial campaign committees from both parties each committing $1 million to flood the South Dakota airwaves in the final weeks of the campaign. But it is Pressler, an underfunded relic from a bygone political era, who is the real wildcard, turning South Dakota into an unexpected battleground that could potentially determine which party controls the Senate after the midterms. He’s also easily the most interesting candidate running for office in 2014.

When I called Pressler’s campaign office last week to see how things were going, the candidate answered the phone himself and we chatted for 26 minutes. A major fundraiser during his four terms in the Senate, Pressler is bootstrapping his current campaign. He has just a single campaign staffer, and relies on his wife Harriet to drive him to campaign events, which usually include recitations of cowboy poetry. You might ask, what's cowboy poetry?

“I’m doing a reading tonight about what it means to be a friend,” Pressler told me. “You might brand the calves differently but you can be friends across the fence.”

That message has been central to Pressler’s comeback campaign. A reliable conservative who won five state-wide victories as a Republican before losing a race for his fourth Senate term in 1996, Pressler won’t say whether he'll caucus with Democrats or Republicans if elected this time around. He claims to have voted for Barack Obama twice, but also says he backed Mitt Romney in the 2012 primaries, and might have supported the Republican nominee had it not been for his position on healthcare for veterans, particularly those with PTSD. The issue is personal for Pressler, who was diagnosed with that condition after Vietnam.

On paper, it’s hard to believe that Pressler himself was never a serious candidate for president (he ran once, but the campaign was short-lived). He's got the resume for it: He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of South Dakota, where he was president of the student body, and went on to become a Rhodes Scholar. He served two combat tours in Vietnam, then graduated from Harvard Law School before being elected to Congress where he represented South Dakota for more than two decades.

Working to Pressler’s advantage this year is the fact that he is recognized and liked in South Dakota, with a 55 percent favorability rating that is higher than any of his opponents'. But at age 72, he is also a bit of a political antique. His campaign ads are mostly period pieces, including two that feature footage of Pressler declining a bribe he was offered in the FBI’s infamous ABSCAM sting depicted in American Hustle. Pressler tells the camera: “American Hustle shows the FBI making real-life bribes to American politicians. I know because as your US Senator, I turned them down.”

But there are other, less flattering, details of Pressler’s past political life. Such as the fact that everyone wondered (maybe uncharitably) what led the FBI to target Pressler in the first place, or the stories about him using campaign money to pad his lifestyle. Or the (perhaps apocryphal) anecdote about him mistaking a closet door for the exit in a Senate hearing room. Or the fact that in 1998, the year after he lost his Senate seat, he considered running for mayor of Washington, DC, and—in a moment that has come back to haunt him—said, “I have lived in D.C. since 1971, longer than anyone running.”

And if If Pressler sounds post-partisan today, his voting record in his last years in the Senate was not, the Weiland campaign says. According to VoteSmart.org, the National Education Association gave him a zero rating in 1996, as did the Human Rights Campaign and NARAL Pro Choice America, while National Right to Life gave him a perfect 100. Despite recently saying that he would consider overturning Roe v. Wade, Pressler told me that he supports the ruling, then added, perhaps hedging, that he supports it in the context of a South Dakota abortion law that he described as predicated on it. Pro-choice advocates have pronounced that law as one of the most draconian and invasive in the country. He also makes much of the fact that he supports legalizing gay marriage.

Critics say Pressler just makes your head spin. “If Larry’s changed on all these things he’s voted on in 18 years in the United States Senate, that’s fine,” Weiland told me in an interview. “He can explain why he voted the way he did.” But even with such a metamorphosis, Weiland added, “You can’t talk entitlement form like that and flip-flop in a year, and Roe v. Wade and flip-flop in a week.”

“Larry’s telling people he’s Independent and I don’t doubt he’s changed positions on some things, but Larry’s record when he was in the Senate—he was more extreme than Jesse Helms. That’s not unimportant. Zero percent on women’s issues. You go right down the line. Zero percent on seniors,” said Weiland advisor Steve Jarding. “Maybe he’s changed on some things, but only Mitt Romney tried to change on everything—and that didn’t necessarily get him where he wanted to go.”

It’s unlikely, though perhaps not impossible, that Pressler will win back his Senate seat, given that he’d raised only $108,000 through June 30, about half of which he borrowed from himself. But he will probably take in a number of votes that might otherwise gone to Rounds or Weiland. The question now is which candidate will benefit.

“In South Dakota, it’s not completely clear who’s spoiling whom. If either Weiland or Pressler got out, I think the remaining candidate would beat Rounds,” said political science professor Larry Sabato, who runs the Center for Politics at University of Virginia.

Pressler, of course, has an answer for that. “I’m not attacking the press because you guys buy ink by the barrel, but the press will report on an independent candidate as a spoiler: ‘Are you a spoiler?’ Or, ‘Who are you stealing more votes from?’ Well, who’s to assume they belong to someone in the first place?”

Follow Timothy J. Burger on Twitter

Register to Vote on VICE

Image via Flickr user Noé Alfaro

Florida is like a parfait. The bottom layer is made up of Miami, gays, and rich people; the middle is basically Disney World, stucco palaces, and suburban sprawl; and the top is more or less South Georgia run-off. In the mind of the average citizen, the state is essentially three different places with distinct cultures—or lack thereof. But what would happen if a man with a vision decided he wanted to make the idea of multiple Floridas a reality?

On October 7, the city of South Miami's vice mayor proposed just that. His resolution, which passed 3-2, suggests that the new state of South Florida would start from Orlando and go all the way to the Keys. And although the city of North Lauderdale passed a similar resolution in 2008, that version was largely symbolic. This one, according to its author, Walter Harris, is deadly serious. But Harris’s determination doesn’t make the split any more plausible, and the likelihood of South Florida becoming the 51st state are slim, to say the least. As the Sun Sentinel notes, “In order for secession to be enacted… the measure would require electorate approval from the entire state and Congressional approval.”

Nevertheless, one can’t blame Harris—or anyone, for that matter—for at least trying to secede from Florida. And his issues with his northern neighbors are valid. One of the main themes in the resolution is that, despite generating 69% of the state’s revenue, southern Florida doesn’t feel the government in Tallahassee is doing enough to address the unique problems that climate change pose to them. “South Florida’s situation is very precarious,” the resolution reads, “and in need of immediate attention. Many of the issues facing south Florida are not political, but are now significant safety issues.” One of those issues, of course, is the sea-level change that some say will soon cause places like Miami to sink into the ocean.

Harris, 71, told me he was inspired by the recent push for Scottish independence. And he says that current Florida governor Rick Scott, who is running for re-election in November, poses a public safety issue. Scott, a Republican who is currently neck-in-neck with opponent Charlie Crist, implied in May that he doesn't believe in climate change because he's “not a scientist.” Scientists, however, are pretty clear about where they stand on climate change. Just last month, the Union of Concerned Scientists published a report that said by 2030 Miami will contend with about 45 “sunny day floods” per year as opposed to the six they deal with today.

“In most of the big south Florida counties, the average sea level is 15 feet or less,” Harris told me. “In the lowest parts, it's about five feet. We have very serious issues that need to be handled locally without dealing with the bureaucracy in Tallahassee.” He adds that the Turkey Point nuclear plant is of particular concern because it's in Homestead, which is in the southern part of Miami-Dade county. The plant is already dealing with issues from rising temperatures in its cooling canals.

Image via Flickr user Shawn Rossi

Originally, Harris wanted to make the cut-off at Melbourne, a beach town on the Treasure Coast near Cape Canaveral. But the headwaters of the Everglades ecosystem begin in Polk County and the South Florida Water Management District, which is in charge of sending clean water south, has its service center in Orlando.

But if this new state of South Florida encompassed both Miami and Disney World, what would be left to support North Florida's economy? Dr. Sean Snaith is the director of the University of Central Florida's Institute of Economic Competitiveness. He says that bifurcating the state in the way Harris suggests gives South Florida the three largest metro areas in the state: Tampa, the tri-county Miami Area, and Orlando. “The panhandle is not very developed, but there'd be the fishing industry. There's Jacksonville with its port and financial sector. And then there are places like Gainesville that are supported by the university system,” he told me. “[North Florida] wouldn't flourish, let's say that.”

Snaith added that Harris's resolution is “silly” and that using the climate change excuse is a red herring. “If Scotland can't agree to independence from the UK, how could South Florida agree on independence? You've got a history and a lot more homogeneity in Scotland than in South Florida, where everybody is from everywhere else and there's no dominant culture.”

But Harris, who sees himself as a Don Quixote character, believes the state's cultural differences will only help his resolution. Generally speaking, southern Florida is much more liberal than its northern counterpfart. Since January, for example, courts in Miami-Dade County and Monroe County, which is home to the Keys, have decided that the state's ban on same-sex marriage violates the federal constitution, and Fort Lauderdale in south Florida has the highest concentration of gay couples out of any city in the US. On the other hand, north Florida’s beaches are known as the Redneck Riviera, and the surrounding areas have much more in common with the culture of Lower Alabama than southern Florida.

But these cultural divides aren’t the primary issues. Harris adamantly believes that if Florida doesn't split in two, the part where he lives will fall into the Atlantic.

“I can't even begin to tell you the danger presented to Miami-Dade County by global warming and the government in Tallahassee,” he says. “I don't know the next step, so right now it's about getting the word out. The powers that be say it's not gonna happen, but it can happen and it needs to happen now. I'm not gonna just lay down and die.”

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Whenever people are asked to name the greatest atrocities of the 20th century—while making small-talk at a dinner party, say, or on Family Feud—the usual suspects will invariably be trotted out: Nazism, the Stalinist pogroms, the Khmer Rouge, sundry African dictators, and Latin American juntas. All fine, of course, but somewhat missing the mark. No, the single greatest atrocity of the 20th century was without question the Virgin Film Guide’s decision to award the Coen Brothers’ comic masterpiece The Big Lebowski a one and a half star rating out of five.

Only four movies—four—of the hundreds and thousands in that rainforest-devouring tome were given a lower score: Pokémon: The First Movie, Babe: Pig in the City, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, and Howard Hughes’s The Outlaw. Films considered to be Lebowski’s equals include such cinematic high points as Smokey and the Bandit, Showgirls, and The Blob. “What a reversal of fortune,” begins the wisely anonymous critic, “two years after Fargo, the film that will probably stand as Joel and Ethan Coen’s finest moment, they followed up with what is, without question, their worst.”

Well, Virgin Film Guide, you are wrong.

The story—which, I think you'll agree, ticks most of the boxes of classic Aristotelian Poetics—is set into motion when our protagonist, a happily unemployed stoner and keen amateur bowler, Jeff Lebowski (Jeff Bridges), a.k.a. the Dude (or El Duderino, if you’re not into the whole brevity thing), has his valued rug peed upon by debt-collecting thugs in a case of mistaken identity. After inveigling reparations from his millionaire namesake, he’s subsequently embroiled in a ransom handoff for the return of the eponymous Lebowski’s trophy wife and part-time porno starlet, Bunny (Tara Reid), who may or may not have been abducted by some techno-pop purveying German nihilists. Anyhow, Dude’s somewhat volatile Vietnam vet bowling compadre, Walter Sobchak (John Goodman), hatches a plan to keep the dough that backfires more than Dude’s soon-to-be-stolen banger, forcing these two unlikely detectives to track down the whereabouts of Bunny, money, and car. It’s a very complicated case.

Not to worry, for the plot of Lebowski—much as with life, despite our vain search for the safe anchorage of meaning—is entirely secondary to the ride, a fact that seems to have escaped our establishment-development-resolution of a reviewer, for whom “the Coens’ vision of LA’s kooky underbelly is simply convoluted, and desperately so.” Ludicrously, this human traffic cone finds no leavening humor in the shaggy-dog-stoner-farce-hardboiled-detective-noir-pastiche, dismissing its nod to Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep as the film’s “one and only joke.” Fuck you talking about?

Lebowski’s comedy froths from every pitch-perfect moment in a script as taut as catgut. Scarcely can two dramatis personae (three, if you include Steve Buscemi’s hapless Donny, the other member of a bowling team built on short fuses and cross purposes) have been so well rendered through such absurdly fatuous dialogue. And, at bottom, this is a buddy movie, with Walter and the Dude—hothead and pothead—forming a symbiotic yin-yang of calmness and rage in the face of the workaday intrusions of the world.

While first (and second and third) viewing was a symphonic hoot of curveball narrative twists, screwball set-pieces, and oddball characters—Julianne Moore’s glacial conceptual artist, Maude Lebowski, rasping “coitus” at an imperturbable Dude; John Turturro’s pedophile bowling artist, Jesus Quintana; Philip Seymour Hoffmann’s button-down factotum, Brandt—this was only the courtship in my relationship with Lebowski.  

Later, when watching with popcorn rather than pot, the belly laughs rippled out to a less visceral, more cerebral response, and I came to appreciate the film’s hidden depths, its oblique sociopolitical satire, its allegorical richness. Or perhaps I projected all this. Anyway, I wasn’t alone—the film’s cultic status can be averred from its having spawned a fan site, dudeism.com, where you can be ordained as a Dudeist priest (who may or may not have a fatwa out on the Virgin Film Guide’s publishers) while perusing esoteric essays untangling the movie’s homespun wisdom. For instance, the film’s Taoist lessons, its complex use of the F-word, or what it teaches us about cricket (disclosure: by yours truly).

What had not occurred to me, I came to realize, was its subtle skewering, its soft subversion, of the American Dream, the greatest control mechanism yet devised. Keep working, keep striving, and you will ascend the social strata. Zero to hero. We can all win! Of course, Dude eschews the stress-inducing hamster wheel of aspirationalism, happy to drive around, bowl a little, have the odd acid flashback. Indeed, he rejects the very idea of social hierarchy, showing no uneasiness in pornographer Jackie Treehorn’s palatial Malibu pad and no deference to the Chief of Police (“fuckin’ fascist”), while remaining blithely unimpressed by the other Lebowski’s “various awards, commendations, honorary degrees," to the extent that, when forced to endure Brandt’s parroted commentary, he repeatedly touches what he’s been asked to leave alone, transgressing those invisible yet real social barriers. And it turns out that the film’s model achiever, its self-made man, is a sham, embezzling money from the charity he’s been appointed to manage. Behind the meritocratic mythos of the American imaginary lie corruption and cynicism.  

At the time of figuring all this out, I was doing a Master’s or PhD—to tell you the truth, I don’t remember a lot of it—and sinking slowly into a personal crisis, an unhappy tumbleweed drifting toward a future I didn’t particularly want or couldn’t ever see being useful. Motivation was an issue—where others merely procrastinated, I meta-procrastinated: I was always working on working on working—and I’m sure the Virgin Film Guide would tell you that without motivation you have no character development. Yet Lebowski was teaching me to “just take it easy, man,” to live life enjoying the journey, not fixating on the goals. Even so, such lessons were only the nuptials. The lifelong bonds, the film’s absorption into my very being—my "becoming-Dude," if you will—would only be sealed a few years later.

In July 2006, a few weeks after my laptop was burgled—and with it, 65,000 words (that is, 100 percent) of my PhD thesis, as well as all backup copies—three months before a deadline I was never going to make, I found myself in Turkey selling advertising to real estate companies on the website of a cable TV channel under the amateur tutelage of a best friend teetering on the edge of a break-up-induced breakdown who had taken a sabbatical from his job in video production after making $2,730 commission on his first day in sales. As you sometimes do. I was in a deep funk, pretty sure the goddamn plane had crashed into the mountain, yet "Mr. Sling" (not the handle his loving parents gave him) airlifted me from my three-match-a-day, wake-and-bake World Cup vigil with the promise of either making some clams or, at worst, having a free vacation on him. Nothing is fucked. 

As with Dude’s reinvention as a sleuth, I was distinctly out of my element—what salesman “flown out from London to solve an urgent problem” does so in $16 Matalan strides and George by Asda shirt?—and yet, despite this, I "earned" $5,940 in eight days, no mean windfall considering I’d spent the previous 12 months, my "writing-up" year, collecting a fortnightly $175 from the state in return for the charade of job-seeking so as to maximize the time available for getting further behind with my work. Next thing I know, I was in Altinkum, selling the sizzle (not the steak).

Both Sling and I were staunch Lebowskites, and, despite our affectionately chipper interactions, lived out a cathartic buddy movie there on the Aegean coast. There was, it seemed, a line (verbatim or tweaked) from Lebowski to fit almost every scenario: a sarcastic “that’s fucking interesting, man” (our "paddle of rebuke," if you will); “new shit has come to light,” when a stalling client registered interest; “who’s in charge of scheduling?” or “do you have any promising, uh, leads?” when the day’s appointments came through; and, when we thought we’d be taking 25 percent commission from a $160,500 TV ad deal ($2,000, man!): “our fucking troubles are over.” 

See, Lebowski’s quotability is unlike the geekery you get with many other cult movies, where the banal repetition of circle-jerking fanboys is designed only to out-aficionado other devotees, to be the alpha male of the omegas, akin to catching butterflies and pinning them to a cork board. Essentially dead and deadening. Here, the lines emerged from, and enhanced, a new context, putting the butterflies to flight. 

Anyway, one of Sling’s first deals was with a waiter-turned-property developer called Deniz, in which he’d bartered us up from the boxy, apologetic, coarse-toweled functionality of our package-holiday twin room at the Seabird Hotel into a spacious duplex apartment. Trouble was, the washing machine didn’t work—that, and the fact that Deniz was being evasive about writing out the check. So, after six days hand-washing shirts, six days being fobbed off, six days wheelin’ and dealin’, we swaggered into his office and asked: What the fuck? Sling went the full Walter Sobchak, dropping a few F-bombs, at which point Deniz lost his shit, turfing us out of "our" pad, threatening to notify the police that we didn’t have work visas, and informing us he’d be complaining to the TV channel.

We skulked out of there in a reduced, sick-stomached quiet, a little vexed that the party was over, the consequences of our frankly unnecessary bravado slowly sinking in. After a long beat, I broke the silence: “I dig the way you do business, Jackie.” Back he flashed: “Fuck it, let’s go bowling.” And that was it: the hardest laughter I ever knew. We made our way back to the Seabird, abiding.

That day I understood that it’s not what happens to you that counts; it’s how you perceive and process life’s strikes and gutters. Having a nervous breakdown? Lost 15 months’ work? Nothing is fucked…

Follow Scott Oliver on Twitter.

Left to right: Jorge Soto, Chief Technology Officer at Miroculus, Foteini Christodoulou, Chief Science Officer, and Alejandro Tocigl, CEO

The thing about cancer is that you need to catch it early. Once it spreads, it becomes harder and harder to treat. But part of the problem is making yourself go to the doctor in the first place; a lot of people would rather avoid finding out really depressing news, in some cases via invasive poking.

But what if you could detect cancerous cells and various other diseases in 60 minutes using your phone? A new start-up named Miroculus has made a device, "Miriam," that hopes to allow you to do just that. In hugely simplified terms, cancer happens when a cell mutates and begins to multiply. MicroRNAs are the things that regulate how many cells your body creates, so by identifying MicroRNA patterns in your blood, Miriam can work out if anything abnormal is happening, and therefore whether you’re likely to have a disease.

You should, obviously, definitely, 100 percent still suck it up and go to the doctor if you think anything is wrong, but it can't hurt to have something easily accessible that can give you a head start if you have a feeling that something's up. I got in touch with Jorge Soto—Chief Technology Officer of Miroculus—to talk about Miriam and the new era of cancer diagnosis that the machine is looking to usher in.

The Miriam machine

VICE: Hi, Jorge. Tell me how this device came about.
Jorge Soto: Our chief scientist and co-founder, Foteini Christodoulou, has been studying the relationship between microRNAs and cancer for the last eight years. She explained the potential of microRNAs and how promising they are as biomarkers. But she also illustrated the challenges about how they are detected these days. So we thought that if we could come up with a device with a low cost solution to detect microRNA and correlate them with specific diseases, we could accelerate the clinical uses of microRNAs as biomarkers to detect disease. Specifically, cancer and metabolic diseases, but also psychiatric diseases.

What were the technological advances that made this possible?
MicroRNA was discovered 20 years ago. But we discovered they are secreted freely in the blood stream five years ago. We used to believe that microRNA was found only in the tissue and organs, but if we find a specific microRNA in the blood we can link it to various parts of the body, as each microRNA tells a story.

For example, if we find microRNA 21 in the blood, it means that something is wrong with your liver. So then we can start asking questions about that. The relationship between microRNAs secreted in the blood and the presence of specific diseases was discovered recently, which allows us to link certain patterns to metabolic diseases such as diabetes and cancer, and psychiatric diseases such as Alzheimer’s. Think of it as a biological fingerprint.

So it’s as simple as placing your blood in the machine and allowing your iPhone to detect the patterns?
Yes. Today, that is how we're doing it. We use 96 well plates [little indents to put blood in], and each well plate looks for a specific microRNA. For example, well A1 is looking for microRNA 21. If you have that microRNA present in your blood when you put your sample in the well, the well will shine green. By measuring which wells are shining and how much they are shining, these parameters allow us to locate the presence of specific diseases. Not only this, but we're able to tell which stage the disease is at. We do it with an iOS app, but by the end of this year we'll have a new version of the device that won't use a smartphone app any more and instead we'll integrate that function into the machine.

What kind of cancers can the machine detect?
There are a lot of scientific publications that detail specific patterns to look for in diagnosing certain cancers with the use of microRNA. At this stage, we're focusing on breast cancer, lung cancer, pancreatic cancer, and eventually ovarian cancer. We wish to start exploring the presence of metabolic diseases such as gestational diabetes, which affects women during pregnancy. It’s treatable and important to detect as early as possible.

How do you see people using it?
Our main objective in the long-term future is for people to include our machine in addition to their annual check up, so you can look for specific diseases at the molecular level. But at this stage we're working with people in clinical trials, as the process we use allows for us to ascertain whether medications used to combat various diseases work. We can see if patients respond to the medication they are on. So, in this sense, it's also a companion tool, which allows you to see if your medication is working.

The wells for the microRNA are patented, but the design for the machine itself has been made open source so people will be able to 3D print it themselves. What's the thinking behind that?
Well, we know that there are people out there smarter than us, and in the past we've seen the benefits of making software open source. We want the best and the brightest to help us—critique us—which, in turn, will allow us to be scalable. We want the device to eventually be cheap for everyone—free, essentially, minus the bimolecular component. We're looking to democratize it. Our strategy is to accelerate the innovation process.

What are your plans for the near future?
The plan is to carry out more clinical trials and evaluations. We're doing some in Germany and starting in Mexico and many other parts of the world. By the end of this year, we're looking to introduce a crowdsourcing element, but this will be announced at a later date. We're confident with the accuracy of the machine, but we're doing work to ensure that we can detect even more microRNAs, which in turn will allow us to correlate and diagnose more diseases with the machine.

Follow Tom Breakwell on Twitter

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett signing the law on Tuesday. Photos via Flickr user Joe Piette

America has long held a fascination with its criminals and convicts. From Charles Manson to John Gotti, prisoners have held court from their cells, mesmerizing the public. And as long as the obsession has held, there’ve been detractors in the government determined to prevent cons from capitalizing off their crimes or notoriety.

On Tuesday, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett signed into law a measure to curtail what he called the “obscene celebrity” cultivated by prisoners at the expense of their victims. The Revictimization Relief Act authorizes the censoring of public addresses of convicts and ex-offenders if a judge agrees that allowing them to speak would cause mental anguish to the victim.

The victims’ rights bill was passed to target prison celebrity Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was convicted and sentenced to death for shooting and killing Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner in 1981. His sentence was commuted to life without parole in 2012, but the case remains controversial. Abu-Jamal has become an award winning journalist and author by writing from his cell block. His thought-provoking books include Live from Death Row and All Things Censored, which have won him international fame and a dedicated audience. 

Of course, people like Abu-Jamal tend to make law-and-order types very, very angry.

“Nobody has a right to continually taunt the victims of their violent crimes in the public square,” Governor Corbett said Tuesday. “This unrepentant cop killer has tested the limits of decency. Gullible activists and celebrities have continued to feed this killer’s ego.”

Standing near the spot where Faulkner was killed, and with the cop’s widow at his side, Corbett signed the bill, which aims to stop “conduct which perpetuates the continuing effect of the crime on the victim.” The measure was fast-tracked through the state senate and passed on October 16, 11 days after Mumia delivered a pre-recorded commencement address to graduates at Goddard College in Vermont.

“To be in your car, driving along in California, only to hear him doing a commencement speech on the radio... it rips open a scab,” Mrs. Faulkner told reporters. As Corbett signed what critics are calling the Mumia Bill, 40 protesters in orange jumpsuits chanted, “Free Mumia.” But State Representative Mike Vereb captured the crux of establishment disdain for Mumia’s infamy by likening him to “Paris Hilton in a prison jumpsuit.”

The whole episode stinks of political sensationalism. Corbett is languishing in the polls ahead of next month's elections. In that sense, the new law seems like a cynical ploy for votes.

“This is a political stunt by a failing politician who is seeking support by using fear," Abu-Jamal told the Prison Radio Project this week. "Politicians do it all the time.” The law can be seen as a collective punishment inflicted on all prisoners, but Mumia already won a case in 1997, Abu-Jamal v. Price, which gave him the right to pen prose. It’s a case I leaned on during my own tenure as a prison writer.

After all, Mumia Abu-Jamal isn’t just a news story to me—he’s an inspiration and hero of sorts. When I read his book, Live from Death Row, in 1995, it gave me the ambition to pursue a career as a journalist myself, despite my incarceration. So while I respect the state of Pennsylvania, the widow, and their concerns, officials there are seriously overlooking the value of Mumia’s success and what it means to other inmates who want to see writing and journalism as a viable career choice as they come out of prison.

Prisoners all across the nation are writing articles and books, obtaining skills that could help them move on from a life of drugs and crime. Denying them that opportunity is practically Orwellian. Society needs to know what is going on in the netherworld of corruption and violence that is the American prison system. Censorship is wrong, and by taking away Mumia’s voice under the guise of victims’ rights, the state of Pennsylvania is robbing the public of their First Amendment right to be informed. These are the tenets our country was founded on.

The benefits that come from prison writing outweigh the mental anguish of one person. To wit, the Supreme Court decided in Snyder v. Phelps that the First Amendment trumps emotional distress. But our nation’s correctional facilities continue to shut down prisons to journalists and to punish prison writers. I was thrown in solitary confinement many times for my writing. The rules state that prisoners are allowed to write, but once a prison writer achieves success and actually earns an audience, that’s when the trouble starts.

I went through several battles during my incarceration, fighting for my right to be heard and recognized. Prison writers like Mumia, Jack Henry Abbott, Dannie Martin, and George Jackson showed me that I could make productive use of my time despite the many years I had left to serve. Mumia is a fighter. He will not give in or lay down. Do we really think another attempt to censor him with a victims’ right law will silence the guy? I, for one, look forward to his continued journalistic endeavors. That’s the only way he has left to reach the world beyond the prison walls that confine him.

Seth Ferranti, author of Prison Stories, the Street Legends series, and The Supreme Team, has written for the Daily Beast, the Fix, and other outlets. Follow him on Twitter.

St John's Jelly Bean Road, via Flickr user kwl.
Earlier this month, media organizations across the country trumpeted the headline, “Newfoundland sex workers given warning amid gang-rape reports.” The warning about the 20 or so rapists was from an outreach centre, not police, and it was issued via Twitter. Despite the widespread caution (escorts: don’t get raped!), police still have not begun an investigation. And not a single sex worker was quoted in the story—only police and an outreach worker.

The reason an investigation has not begun, and the reason no sex worker was heard on the matter, is that sex workers in the province are afraid to talk. They’re afraid to report to police, afraid to speak to media. They’re afraid of being found out and stigmatized in a tight-knit community. They’re backed up against a wall by a leering three-headed beast of threats: criminal charges, gang violence, and public scrutiny.

In many ways, it’s not a new story. In a country in which government is cooking up laws that are clearly to the detriment of sex workers (see: Bill C-36), of course they don’t want to speak up and report their rapes.

It took me over a week to find a Newfoundland escort willing to talk. Finally, I found Krista  (which is not her real name) through reaching out to workers listed in the escort section of the St. John’s Backpage, a classified ad site that operates similarly to Craigslist. Krista is new to sex work. She’s only been doing it for about a month. She needed a job with flexible hours so that she can finish her degree in civil engineering and take care of her kids. While one sex worker cannot speak for all sex-working people in the province, she explained the culture of fear that exists in St. John’s for those in her profession.

She told me she doesn’t expect anyone will report the rapes and that she wouldn’t, if it happened to her.

“I only do in calls, never out calls,” she tells me. “I want to avoid the gang rapes. That, and I don’t want to be charged for prostitution.”

She heard through other girls on Backpage and Facebook that the 20 rapists are foreign workers in town on business for a construction firm, although this could not be confirmed. Several messages left for corroboration from the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary (RNC) were left unanswered.

Sex workers across the country are afraid of police coming after them, and of being ostracized by their communities. As I said, this is nothing new. But in Newfoundland, they’ve got a third fear to contend with: biker gangs.

Biker gangs have been active in the province in recent years, and people in those gangs, Krista says, often see escorts. If escorts report one kind of crime to police, those clients may feel under threat, making it unsafe for the escorts to work with those clients.

“If these escorts went out and made these situations known, they’d find themselves in trouble in the end,” Krista says. Due to the combined threat of the gangs and the police, she says, escorts rely on DIY security.

The girls she knows who do out calls go to a client’s residence with a driver, and if they’re not out within the agreed-upon time frame, the driver comes to the door. A kind of informal policing is in place, with the RNC effectively relegated to the sidelines.

Police insist that, if the crimes were reported, they wouldn’t charge the sex workers, and are only after those who try to harm them. I almost want to believe that, as there were zero prostitution charges in Newfoundland last year.

But regardless of decisions made by the RNC, the justice system in this country as a whole does not care for those who are sexually assaulted, or for those who do sex work. Put a sex worker who’s been sexually assaulted in front of it, and you’re not likely to have much success.

Bill C-36 passed its third reading last week, and now it only has to be approved by the Senate and receive royal assent. I spoke to Valerie Scott just after it happened, and she said she’s sure it will become law. She also said, though, that it’s likely to wind up back in court for the same reason as the old laws: it’s unconstitutional.

What makes the situation even worse in Newfoundland, in the interim, is that there’s nowhere for sexworkers to turn if they have questions about taxes or a dangerous client. Right now, there’s only one outreach group dedicated to helping sex workers in the province.

Krista had no idea which parts of her work were legal, which speaks to an overwhelming lack of support in a province where the demand for sex workers is on the rise.

I call Laura Winters at Safe Harbour Outreach Project (SHOP), the group that issued the gang-rape warnings via Twitter. SHOP is not run by sex workers, and it doesn’t project their voices either. I ask if Winters could connect me to someone, anyone, currently doing sex work in the province. She tells me they don’t, under any circumstances, connect sex workers with journalists because it hasn’t gone well in the past. Sex workers in Newfoundland, she says, are more vulnerable and more marginalized as a group than they might be in larger, more urban areas, and SHOP doesn’t want them to be hurt by having their voices misconstrued.

I can understand her reasoning. But while it’s a good thing that SHOP issued a warning, what exactly are sex workers supposed to do? Stay at home, decline clients, and starve? According to a piece in the Labradorian, that’s exactly what’s been happening.

Clearly, sex workers are feeling threatened from all sides, and yet, their work is still technically legal in this country. What happens, then, if Bill C-36 becomes law?

The gang rapes reported in Newfoundland this month are emblematic of what will happen to sex workers all over this country if Bill C-36 passes. If clients are made full-on criminals, it will push sex workers underground and into a vulnerable situation where they will be less able to properly screen clients. Right now, they protect themselves by obtaining a client’s personal information, like their real name and cell number. Clients will be unlikely to provide this information if they are criminalized. If clients are anonymous, violence will be more likely to occur—and go undetected.

Further, there are loopholes in the law dictating that sex workers cannot work where someone under the age of 18 could be present. Because minors could plausibly be present just about anywhere, sex work could be seen to be illegal just about anywhere. If their work is illegal, there’s no chance sex workers will try to hit up police for help. They’re going to run in the opposite direction.

The government claims the bill’s purpose is to help “victims of human trafficking.” A bill to help those who are trafficked is a great plan—but not in its current iteration, which only serves to punish, infantilize, and endanger all sex-working people. There is a stark difference between someone who chooses the work and someone who is forced.

There is also the argument that, under the Nordic model, instances of rape actually decreased by 15 percent between 2008 and 2012. But that study is not enough to convince me the Nordic model is suddenly the right move. Number one, sex workers say otherwise. And two, the 2008 numbers reflected occurrences of rape throughout a sex worker’s entire career, while the 2012 numbers reflect only occurrences of violence since 2009. Also, the study, like police departments, only has self-reported numbers to work with, and those do not illustrate the true frequency of a crime.

Sex workers will be raped and murdered under Bill C-36, and their rapists will get away with it because the workers will be more afraid than ever to report.

If Bill C-36 becomes law, sex workers countrywide will be in the same position Krista and other Newfoundland sex workers are in now: feeling endangered, operating as though their work is illegal, and unable to reach out for support.


@sarratch