Quantcast
Channel: VICE CA
Viewing all 38002 articles
Browse latest View live

The Pros and Cons of Being Black in America in 2014

0
0

[body_image width='1200' height='804' path='images/content-images/2014/11/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/26/' filename='the-pros-and-cons-of-being-black-in-america-in-2014-body-image-1416976834.jpg' id='6824']

Illustration by Nick Gazin

The year 2014 has not been great for black folks. In fact, it's been pretty much awful. I'm talking final-episode-of-How-I-Met-Your-Mother awful. Having to endure 365 days of George Zimmerman, Bill Cosby rape allegations, Will Smith's kids, and Real Housewives of Atlanta can do nothing but bring a brother down. The Ferguson grand jury decision was my own last straw, as I imagine it was for many African Americans. I've sat through enough miscarriages of justice and Tyler Perry movies for one lifetime.

Maybe you're thinking about getting out of this "being black" game? Maybe a system that constantly works against you, a collection of "civic leaders" who let you down at every turn, and a culture that keeps shoving Iggy Azalea videos down your throat has robbed you of your last shred of dignity? Ignoring the realities of genetics and biology, let's assume we could choose whether or not to be black in America. What if we could ditch this burden of prejudice and mistrust? Would we still choose to be who we are? I asked myself this question a lot over the past two nights and came up with the following pros and cons of being black.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/S4VoolvEsyQ?rel=0' width='700' height='525']

PRO: There Is a Black President of the United States

Can you believe it? MLK's dream finally came true in 2008. I get teary-eyed just thinking about it. The election of Barack Obama changed American history forever and ushered in a new era of racial harmony... for about a few months in 2009. I suppose we should be grateful. I can't wait to tell my grandkids about the couple weeks I didn't feel like a second-class citizen in my own country. That'll be a fun story while I outfit them with their bulletproof vests.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/O2BBAfWucaE' width='700' height='394']

CON: The First Black President Is Kind of a Wuss

It's been over six years, so I think we can finally be real here. This was not what we were hoping for. You can get mad, dude. You should be mad. I'm mad. What do you have to lose at this point? Are you hoping to get a late-night talk show? Good luck with that, man. The ​odds are not in your favor. The one time you really put yourself out was for healthcare reform and you backpeddled on the single-payer system anyway. We still have Guantanamo, more wars than I can keep track of, and a nation that is rapidly losing faith in its institutions. Keep it 100 next time, Barack.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/k4YRWT_Aldo?rel=0' width='700' height='394']

PRO: Beyonce!

She's so fierce! Her latest video, dropped without warning last weekend, set the internet on fire. I'm too busy staring at her ass shaking to be upset about Ferguson. Girl, I don't know what you got, but I like it.

CON: You Can Get Shot by the Police While Unarmed

It should go without saying that this is a bit of an occupational hazard. This is not what I signed up for when I decided to be black. I distinctly recall asking for a killer fallaway jumper, a new Maybach, and a pool full of champagne. I did not ask for the ever-present threat of a violent demise. I guess it's true that you can't always get what you want. 

The police have guns, tear gas, tanks, Tasers, billy clubs, helicopters, and the criminal justice system. I've got a scary face and some Skittles in my pocket. I think the deck is stacked against me on this one.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/GxgqpCdOKak?rel=0' width='700' height='394']

PRO: Drake!

He's always got a clean fade, his ​Instagram is on point, the ladies love him, and his last album was a legit banger. I mean, the guy can do it all. Let's try to forget him ​airballing during Kentucky's pre-game shootaround or his bizarre cameo in Nicki Minaj's "Anaconda" video. Instead, remember all the joy Champagne Papi has given us in 2014. The dude is untouchable.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/-m6UKS1L0YQ?rel=0' width='700' height='394']

CON: It Is Assumed That You Have Superhuman Strength

In some instances, this could be a plus. It's a lot less likely that you're going to get cut in line at the DMV. It only really becomes problematic when firearms and batons are in play. The LAPD ​almost killed Rodney King because they alleged that he had developed some comic book superpowers after doing PCP. That was supposed to excuse the fact that they clubbed him within an inch of his life. Ferguson PD officer Darren Wilson, on the other hand, didn't even have the PCP defense to fall back on. Officer Wilson only had the look in ​Michael Brown's eyes to go off of, and based on his evaluation of the situation, you'd think Brown was struck with a ​Gamma Bomb or fell in a vat of radioactive waste.

Personally, I'm a bit fed up with my friends and neighbors acting like I have freak strength. They're constantly harassing me to help them move, open pickle jars, and defeat ​out-of-control cyborg monsters. Memo to white people: I cannot lift a car with my bare hands. Also, bullets work on me just like they work on you.


[tweet text="Khloe Kardashian -- Kracks Klan Joke http://t.co/xhKdOru0IR" byline="— TMZ (@TMZ)" user_id="TMZ" tweet_id="532343644653514752" tweet_visual_time="November 12, 2014"]

PRO: The Kardashian Sisters

OK, they're not black, but they're the strongest, most vocal celebrity allies we have. They're constantly speaking out about their love of black people and are not ashamed of it. As we reflect on how far we've come with race relations in America and how far we still have left, we can point to the Kardashians and say, "at least they are doing their part to further the cause." Thanks, ladies.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/oufysydPP60?rel=0' width='700' height='525']

CON: People Think You Look Like a Fucking Demon

The above is a demon. Michael Brown did not look like that. Has Darren Wilson ever ​seen a real demon before? Perhaps one of the police academy tests should be an eye exam. "Is This a Demon or a Black Guy?" If you can't tell the difference, you have to go bag groceries or sell insurance.

PRO: Our Slang Only Gets Better Every Year

I just learned what a " ​fuckboi" is. What a useful, versatile term. I've already used it twice in conversation today, and I can tell you that my coworkers were all impressed with my linguistic dexterity. We did it again, people. Hopefully the rest of the world doesn't realize we have E-40 trapped in a basement with a car battery attached to his nuts, forcing him to invent new words every day. Let's keep that amongst ourselves.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/JrK8_HHJoUE?rel=0' width='700' height='394']

CON: Don Lemon Represents You on the News

Remember, he's doing the best job he possibly can. This is his A-game. This is his "Michael Jordan NBA Finals Flu Game." This is Don Lemon killing it, and he's still fucking terrible. Don Lemon is a human facepalm. He is a walking meme of cringeworthy nonsense. He must have the Looney Tunes theme playing in his head at all times. That's the only way to explain why he can't hear the voices in his head telling him not to spew bullshit on television. 

Being black is not a choice. It's something we have to live with forever, and unfortunately, it's not getting any easier. I can only hope that we all take this time to come together, not just as African-Americans, but as Americans. This country is not even close to being perfect, but it's all we have right now. Instead of embracing despair, it's time to do something besides ​burn down pizza restaurants.

Follow Dave Schilling on ​Twitter.


My Autism Doesn't Make Me a Robot

0
0

[body_image width='975' height='641' path='images/content-images/2014/11/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/26/' filename='autistic-people-have-feelings-too-377-body-image-1417000564.jpg' id='6874']

Illustration by James Burgess

This post originally appeared in VICE UK

If you were to ask strangers on the street what their impressions of autistic people are, you'd probably hear the same old crap: Autistic people are geeks, have amazing memories, don't have many feelings, can't show empathy, have few, if any relationships and/or friendships, and that essentially we're emotionless robots.

This prototypical autistic person would have the appearance of a Milhouse Van Houten–style dork and in terms of personality, be somewhere between Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man and Benedict Cumberbatch in Sherlock.

This is the pervading view of autism and autistic people. And it's a load of shit.

Autism specifically is a disorder (not an illness—autism on its own is not a mental health problem or a disability) where the main issue is an inability to understand emotions and non-verbal communication. Where most people can convey their mood by their demeanor, tone of voice and facial expressions, an autistic person will struggle to grasp that, especially at an early age. Autism is in effect mindblindness, making it hard to form relationships and get on other people's wavelengths.

I myself have Asperg​er syndrome. On the autism spectrum, which starts from being neurotypical on one end to full-blown autistic on the other, Asperger is nearer to autism than neurotypical—it's autism lite, basically.

When it comes to emotions—and I can't emphasize this enough—it is a myth that autistic people don't feel any. In fact, the opposite is true. In the words of Carol Povey, Director of the National Autistic Society's Centre for autism, autistic people "actually often feel emotions more intensely than their peers due to over- or under-sensitivity to sounds, touch, tastes, smells, light, or colors." So we do feel emotions—the alienation comes because it's very difficult for us to express or interpret them.

A lot of these mistruths derive from how autistic folk simply don't express much emotion. As Sarah Hen​drickx, an author and speaker on autism says, "I think a big part of this misnomer is that because we sometimes don't make many facial expressions or do much social smiling, people presume we are 'blank' or 'flat' inside as well." Impressions, truly in this case, can be deceiving.

For example: You might smile at autistic people and we won't smile back. Why? Not because we dislike you or that we don't have feelings or even that you have bad breath, but because we don't get the message, conveyed through a smile, that we're supposed to be friendly to you.

I have other, personal, examples of this sort of behavior. At primary school I once made a friend cry by saying his painting was "rubbish." I didn't understand that would upset him. Another time I didn't get my dad anything for Father's Day, thinking he wouldn't care. Well, he did care and was devastated that I didn't even get him a card.

On a daily basis I have stuttering conversations, worry I've upset people when I haven't, get confused when people don't specify things, nearly walk into people because I can't work out which way they want to go past me, and suffer from prolonged tiredness because of the mental energy expended trying to understand all this. All these things, to me at least, are part and parcel of having Asperger syndrome.

It's these issues that have a negative impact on the lives of millions of people who have autism. When you struggle to have normal conversations with others, or to form relationships and friendships, when you are mocked and ridiculed for your eccentricities and strange habits by those who don't know better, it catches up with you.

Often, people think you're just being rude. As Hendrickx puts it, "If you're an intellectually able person with autism and you make a faux pas the automatic assumption is that you are smart enough to know and therefore have done it on purpose." But speaking from my own experience, nothing could be further from the truth.

Autism is a hidden disability, invisible to the naked eye, so other people don't see what we go through. 

​It also means that we ourselves may not know which disorder we have, which can be crippling. Hundreds of thousands of people aren't diagnosed until late in life, if we're diagnosed at all, because autism is invisible and makes it hard to express how we feel to friends, family, and doctors.

Not knowing why we behave the way we do, when we behave so unusually compared to everyone else, can sometimes be devastating to our mental health and too often leads to varying states of sadness, loneliness, apathy, and depression.

The stats are bleak, upsetting and damning. According to Povey, "A shocking 63 percent of children and young people with autism we surveyed in 2012 told us they had experienced bullying at school." Other stats provided by the National Autisti​c Society state that one in five autistic children at school have been excluded, only 15 percent of autistic adults are in full-time employment, 51 percent of autistic adults have had no access to either full-time work or benefits.

Another st​udy, published in The Lancet psychiatry journal, came up with figures that stated 31 percent of the study's respondents (who had Asperger syndrome) self-reported depression and an astonishing 66 percent self-reported that they had considered suicide. Tony Attwood, the world's leading expert on Asperger syndrome, stated in his guide to a​utism that a third of people with Asperger had depression, which ties in neatly with the figure mentioned above.

Those figures show how easy it is to become nihilistic and depressed. It's understandable, too—when you struggle on for so long, out of work, out of pocket, having to rely on either benefits or your parents for money and a place to live, too poor to enjoy yourself and without a companion to share your experiences with, it's a vicious cycle. You end up giving up. Apathy sets in and cripples you.

I speak here from experience. While I don't believe I have ever suffered from depression, I have gone through prolonged periods where I felt lifeless, suffering with seemingly never-ending anxiety. For months on end after starting my first full-time job I was in a bad state—constantly nervous, worrying and unable to enjoy myself, my appearance and hygiene went downhill. I would only wash two or three times a week, wearing a huge fleece at work that was covered in both cat hair and my own filthy, unkempt long hair.

Christmas 2012 was a low point—I'd been feeling anxious for a fortnight, then had a panic attack a matter of days before Christmas, the worst panic attack I've ever had and the first one where I actually, for a split second, feared for my sanity. "Make it stop" was the phrase I kept on repeating in my head. Eventually, it did.

Even so, it was Boxing Day before I felt reasonable again, my feelings made worse by it being Christmas and having to put on a happy façade for my family. I was helped massively by the the National Autistic Society ​providing an anonymous email service, which I used to detail my state of mind. They replied with advice and a warmth that really, really helped.

I attribute all that to anxiety rather than depression—even at my worst, I could come up occasionally with positive thoughts. I always thought I'd improve, get out of the mess I was in. Luckily enough for me, I did. But without the love and support of my family, I may have just given up. It evidently happens to others and I'm fortunate, so far, to have avoided the same fate.

If we're to help future generations overcome these issues, we need more information and much more understanding of autism in the public domain so people can get the help they need. As Povey says, "We need to increase understanding of the condition in every sector of society, from health and social care to culture and media." 

[body_image width='1080' height='664' path='images/content-images/2014/11/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/26/' filename='autistic-people-have-feelings-too-377-body-image-1417002146.jpg' id='6875']

Misconceptions about autism often derive through what people see on TV and in film. Rain Man, for example, is probably the most famous picture of autism that's ever been painted, and yet it portrays autism about as accurately as Bra​veheart portrays Scottish history. It portrays sava​nt syndrome, not autism—a big difference, given that only around 50 percent of savants are autistic, or on the flip side, as Povey states, "Only about two in 200 individuals with autism have an accompanying special ability."

One of the biggest problems is, as Hendrickx says, that "TV and films will always go for the condensed super-concentrated version because that's more interesting than someone who doesn't have so many obvious 'quirks.'" Perhaps too there's an element of wanting to spell out that someone is autistic by signaling it very obviously rather than being subtle about it, which leads to inaccurate portrayals.

Thankfully there are more accurate depictions of autism in popular culture, Abed in Community, for example. Saga Noren in The Bridge is another favorite, as she's a great character accurately portrayed, plus she's female—females, on screen and in real life, are majorly underrepresented in depictions of autism. Generally, progress is being made on the small screen, which can only be promising for the big screen and for autistic audiences.

Looking to the media, autistic people need to be given a bit more hope. As debilitating as the disorder can be, it can also result in amazing human achievements. Autistic people are talented, gifted, armed with incredible levels of focus and concentration and a superb memory for facts, numbers, diagrams and other useful items. 

Albert Einstein, Alan Turing, and Isaac Newton have all been retrospectively diagnosed by experts with varying forms of autism: three of the most important scientists and pioneers the world has ever seen.

They show what those with autism are capable of. Autistic people naturally have higher than average IQs and tend to do well academically. If given the help, support, love, affection, and understanding necessary, people with autism won't face a life of unhappiness scaling to near-suicidal depression. We can form relationships, live happy and make worthwhile contributions to society.

Autistic people just need a bit of understanding. We're not emotionless robots. We are human beings.

Follow Jack Howes on ​Twitter

I Had an Arranged Marriage — But I'm Still a Feminist

0
0

[body_image width='700' height='525' path='images/content-images/2014/11/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/26/' filename='you-can-have-an-arranged-marriage-and-still-be-a-feminist-body-image-1416998684.jpg' id='6872']

Image by Zain​ubrazvi, via Wikimedia Commons

I fell in love with my husband after I married him.

We met only twice  before we walked up the aisle, after being introduced by a mutual family friend. Neither of us had been in a relationship before and we didn't live together before our wedding day. And, although the odds were stacked against us, we've been happily married for almost five years. It was the quickest and the best decision I ever made.

It's also one that I will probably never stop having to field questions about as long as I'm alive. The one that triggers knee-jerk judgement in strangers. The one that my friends—people who would never in a million years consider allowing their parents to pick their partner for them—described it as "a recipe for disaster," like I was suggesting mixing tuna with garbage juice and self-raising flour for my lunch. 

It's hard for people to reconcile that a woman like me can still call herself a feminist. But I am, unequivocally. I have a vagina and I refuse to let that make me any less powerful, ambitious, or successful than someone without one. It's that simple.

So how could I do it? How could I let my family facilitate such a defining part of my life? Well,  I think arranged marriages are considered. They're nothing like ​forced marriages, which are abhorrent, oppressive and distinctly un-Islamic. An arranged marriage—one that both bride and groom happily consent to—can actually be rather sweet. Hear me out. 

My parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles had all had arranged marriages. Many of them were successful and many ended in divorce, just like a lot of "normal" marriages. At the time of my own marriage being arranged, my friends thought I was insane. They looked baffled and disgusted every time I mentioned it, like I had smeared shit all over my face and licked it off, saying, "Mmm, delicious."

Marriage was the route toward love, rather than a tangible marker of its presence.

The way I saw it, though, is that I was just viewing marriage in a different light to them. We were all looking at the same reality—a pledge of commitment, honesty, companionship, support, all that—but I chose to interpret it differently. 

For me, marriage was the route toward love, rather than a tangible marker of its presence. It was about security, friendship, and adventure with a person who shared my values and was all in for the ride from the start.

My parents were a great example of a successful arranged marriage and I wanted the same for myself. My dad still makes my mom breakfast every morning. She still tells him off for eating cream doughnuts, dyes his hair, and prays for his health. He pretends that she's a nag in front of me but tells her that he loves her pretty much every chance he gets. Even when they're asleep, they snore in tandem. They're a wheezing, nocturnal orchestra of snuffles and grunts. That's what I wanted.

Finding a partner for me wasn't a decision that my mom and dad took lightly—their approach was methodical and rational, like many other parents who have done the same for their children. It had nothing to do with serendipity, romance and attraction. For them, it was more about finding a nice, humble man who would be kind and respectful to me.

My mom would usually do a background search of any guy in question, check for details of his education, career, age, and height as well as talk to his acquaintances to try and get a handle on whether he was a psycho or not. She wasn't an expert, but she fumbled her way through, like a little, curvy Inspector Gadget, gabbing away to to other Muslim moms in our family network and beyond.

In most cases, an email would arrive from a guy's parents, a mutual middleman or a matchmaker with a list of "bio data" and an attached photograph. This kind of arranged marriage is basically like a luxury OkCupid service, only your family is doing the matching rather than internet software. 

If  the guy's profile didn't get lobbed into the slush pile, a meeting was set up—almost like a blind date, but with a parental chaperone and no kiss at the end of the group rendezvous (or "randyboo," as my mum likes to call it). Most meetings usually take place at the girl's parents' home. I, however, met my future husband in a Travelodge. That's right. Let me be the first to say that little packets of fake sugar, sticky tabletops, and cheap, chipped crockery really can be a precursor to genuine romance. 

Nowadays, if people can't find someone to marry through their existing friendships, they join Islamic dating sites to make a new connection because, in Islam, premarital sex is forbidden. It means that marriage is pretty much the only route to getting some action.

Many parents like to meet the guy and his family first, before he gets to talk to their daughter, to guarantee that they haven't been catfished. All of this is done—or should be done—with the consent of the bride and groom to be. No one is forced into meeting or pushed into getting married because the parents like the potential suitor. That is a myth. Rather,  it's a relaxed meeting where they get to talk freely and see if there's a spark. All that said, it's still a massive gamble, regardless of how much research or time is put into it. You're talking about putting two people together to embark on a relationship from a pre-embryonic stage. It's a risk. 

There's no limit to how many times two families can meet before the marriage takes place, but usually the decision is usually made swiftly. The guy's parents will ask for the girl's hand in marriage—at which point the girl can still say no. She's under no obligation to agree. The final choice is hers. 

For me it was a done deal very early on—my parents were happy with their background check and my "suitor" spoke to me with genuine kindness when I met him. He was also the most handsome man I had ever seen in my life and so, having spent the majority of my formative years as a big, insecure fatty with a moustache and a double chin, I was fully on board to be betrothed to such a babe. I felt like I'd won the lottery, to be honest. 

Other women may look at the trajectory of my marriage with judgement, but my decision to have an arranged marriage was absolutely a feminist choice. 

I held all the cards. I was free to say no at any time. I felt in control of everything. My personal rights were upheld and I was never coerced into making a decision that I was unhappy with, so I'm often perplexed when others question whether you can have an Islamic arranged marriage and still be a feminist. To me, Islam and feminism are not mutually exclusive terms and the Muslim women—and men—in my life are fiercely feminist and conscious of building equal, fruitful relationships with each other.

I also never had to worry that I would be alone forever. As Bridget Jones as that sounds, the fear of potential spinsterhood is something that plagues a lot of women I know. I wouldn't be alone, sporing, smelling of fusty farts.  Marriage—or not, just a long, fulfilling relationship with another kind, funny, supportive person—was not something that I had to obsess over. I was able to focus on my education and career without the pressure of having to find my soulmate. In fact, the phrase "soulmate" doesn't exist in my family's vocabulary—I was taught that you have to make a marriage work through compromise, sacrifice and respect, so that a friendship can be transformed into a love. 

I like the think of my husband as a broader shouldered, stubblier version of Beyonce. He's a massive feminist, with an ass of steel. He is supportive of my every ambition. I didn't love him from day one, but his kindness built around me, like a moat, and I soon had very little desire—or ability, really—to escape. In the early stages of our marriage he would fill up my dad's car with gas in secret and listen to my forgetful grandmother repeat the same questions over and over again without looking bored. He was silly and fun to be around, and, eventually, I didn't just like him. I loved him. He became my comfort zone. I struggle to see how the path I took to get to where I am with him matters. 

Every every relationship—whether you're married or not—is undulating. Some last, some don't. I've been incredibly lucky with my back-to-front love story. Only, for me, arranged marriage isn't backward at all.

Follow Javaria Akbar on ​Twitter

These Guys Flew to Liberia to 'Cure' Ebola Patients with Homeopathy

0
0

[body_image width='800' height='533' path='images/content-images/2014/11/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/26/' filename='treating-ebola-with-homeopathy-393-body-image-1417004945.jpg' id='6903']

Various homeopathic remedies. Photo via ​Wikicommons.

This post originally appeared in VICE UK

Dr. Richard Hiltner is a really nice guy. He's in his 60s (but seems younger, in that way Californians often do) and has a very West Coast way of making everything sound super positive all the time, up to and including the fact that, a few weeks ago, he and three other practitioners flew to Liberia to try and treat Ebola patients using homeopathy.

Hiltner says, "We landed in Monrovia on the 17th of October, then had to spend three days training to use the PPEs—the personal protective equipment, those big suits you see everyone wearing—before heading up to the hospital in Ganta." 

It was only when they got to Ganta, a province hit hard by the Ebola epidemic, that problems arose.

The team suited up, broke out their homeopathic treatments and tried to get to work on some patients. At which point the medical staff and administrators at the Ganta Hospital realized what it was they were attempting, before completely banning them from the ETU (Ebola Treatment Unit).

It turned out that no one in the hospital—or, it seems, the entire Liberian medical administration—had any idea that this team would be using homeopathy. The Liberian government had approved the expedition and issued visas on the basis that all four were medical doctors coming to support local staff.

So, Hiltner and his colleagues got in their jeeps and drove back and forth to Monrovia in a continued effort to sort out the paperwork. "It took over five hours to drive 100 miles—it was probably the scariest part of the trip," he tells me. "We did that journey five times in all." 

But the authorities were clear: there was no way they were going to let Ebola patients be treated with what are essentially sugar pills soaked in water.

[body_image width='800' height='600' path='images/content-images/2014/11/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/26/' filename='treating-ebola-with-homeopathy-393-body-image-1417005020.jpg' id='6904']

Non-homeopath Ebola response volunteers in Nigeria (Photo by CDC Global ​via)

Homeopathy was developed in 1796 by the German scientist Samuel Hahnemann, based on the idea that "like cures like." It works like this: hay fever makes your eyes water, right? Guess what else makes your eyes water? Onions! Just soak a minuscule piece of onion in distilled water, then dilute that water a few hundred times, give it a shake and you're all done—hay fever will trouble you no more.

The Ebola virus kills you by essentially dissolving the walls of your veins, making you bleed to death from the inside in a massive internal hemorrhage. It's absolutely fucking horrific. Dr. Hiltner says his team went to Liberia carrying 110 potential homeopathic Ebola remedies. Based on the "like cures like" principle they needed other substances that kill you by hemorrhage. Among their brightest hopes were arsenic and rattlesnake venom. So exactly the kind of thing you want to put in your body when you're  already laid out in the ETU.

Aside from the whole deliberately feeding sick people arsenic thing, the real controversy of homeopathic practice is that the remedies are so heavily diluted that no molecular trace of the supposed active ingredient—be it onion, venom, or any other—actually remains. In chemical terms, it's basically just water dropped onto sugar pills. The theory is that the homeopathic agent "re-programs" the "energy" of the water, in the same way one saves information on a hard drive—and it's the "water memory" that supposedly cures you.

[body_image width='800' height='600' path='images/content-images/2014/11/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/26/' filename='treating-ebola-with-homeopathy-393-body-image-1417004833.jpg' id='6901']

An ETU in Liberia (Photo by CDC Global ​via)

Despite the claims of practitioners there is absolutely no peer-reviewed scientific literature indicating that homeopathy works any better than placebos.

So, it is perhaps understandable that, with the eyes of the world upon them, the Liberian authorities were unwilling to let this stuff anywhere near Ebola patients.

The thought of four experienced medical doctors stretching the resources of a poverty-stricken country in the grip of an epidemic, when they could be really helping, is kind of galling. This is certainly the view of Mike Noyes, head of ActionAid,  who is quoted on the MailOnline: "With this crisis, you can't be offering false hope. There is no scientific evidence that homeopathy has any impact on dealing with viral disease like Ebola. Coming in from the outside with these unproven approaches is damaging to the response and bringing the disease under control."

The team did eventually get to treat non-Ebola patients in Ganta with homeopathy, and reported good results. Of course, every one of those patients was also receiving all the prescribed conventional treatments, so those results are totally meaningless from any scientific or therapeutic perspective.

[body_image width='640' height='427' path='images/content-images/2014/11/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/26/' filename='treating-ebola-with-homeopathy-393-body-image-1417005121.jpg' id='6907']

Actual real doctors and nurses practicing their medical skills at the army's Ebola training center near York (Photo by Simon Davis/DFID ​via)

All in all, the whole trip just sounds like a massive disaster—four doctors running around Liberia, banned from peddling their quackery by bemused local medics. Even the obvious question of whether they underwent quarantine on their return—or were just planning on curing themselves with snake venom—is irrelevant, as they never actually came into contact with an Ebola patient.

While the expedition itself may come off as merely chaotic, there's also a slightly sketchier side to the story.

The mission was organized through two organizations: the Liga Medicorum Homeopathica Internationalis, a key institution for homeopathy advocacy, and the German group Freundes Liberias, an organization dedicated to promoting co-operation between Germany and Liberia.

Freundes Liberias raised donations for the trip with  this campaign. The page talks about a "team of 20 international doctors," but makes no mention of the fact that they will be operating only as homeopaths. This squares with the fact that the Liberian medical authorities backed the trip when they thought it was a "team of doctors," and were then shocked to learn about the homeopathy.

[body_image width='640' height='427' path='images/content-images/2014/11/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/26/' filename='treating-ebola-with-homeopathy-393-body-image-1417005345.jpg' id='6911']

An actual real doctor removing his PPE as he exits an ETU. Photo by Athalia Christie via ​Flickr.

So, did the organizsers of the expedition raise money and obtain visas and support in Liberia by telling people they were sending doctors, before actually sending homeopaths? If so, that would be pretty shoddy business.

When asked for comment, Thomas Köppig, head of Freundes Liberias, was emphatic:

"When LMHI first contacted Freunde Liberias asking if the association would be willing to support a trip [...] I received the four CVs [...] confirmation that all members of the group were physicians and obviously experienced in working in disaster areas [...] Furthermore, LMHI confirmed that the doctors would work as regular doctors and only secondarily as homeopaths."

The response from LMHI is rather less clear, claiming that the doctors "were not able to treat Ebola patients do [sic] [to] some diplomatic problems [...] We are not asking for donations for the Ebola relief action any more because the situation changed."

Among the doctors on the expedition, however, there was absolutely no confusion that they were going to Liberia specifically to practice homeopathy, not conventional medicine—and also to use the opportunity to promote homeopathy. 

[body_image width='923' height='692' path='images/content-images/2014/11/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/26/' filename='treating-ebola-with-homeopathy-393-body-image-1417005481.jpg' id='6913']

(Photo by CDC Global ​Flickr)

When this story broke, Karen Allen of Homeopaths Without Borders deleted  this message from Dr. Ortrud Lindemann, one of the homeopaths in Liberia, from her Facebook page. Homeopath Dr. Edouard Broussalian also deleted ​a p​ost from his own site that claimed the mission would ensure "the makers of experimental vaccines will have to pack their bags." In fact, there was a real flurry of deleted pages regarding the mission from people connected to LMHI, which is never a particularly good sign.

Dr. Hiltner himself is very open: "This was a golden opportunity to treat something that conventional medicine couldn't," he says. "Not only to help the people, but to show homeopathy works... there's got to be that day that conventional medicine will respect homeopathy—both have their strengths, both have their weaknesses; they need to stop calling each other names."

Speaking to Dr. Hiltner, it's difficult to hold all this against him. He took the time to volunteer to go to Liberia and paid for his flight from California to Brussels, where the international team of homeopaths assembled and was flown to Monrovia (he does say he may be compensated for the ticket at some point).

For a guy who's been a practicing medical doctor for 44 years, Dr. Hiltner is into some fairly whacky shit, not least Iridology and Medical Astrology, practices that make homeopathy seem positively vanilla. However, he's also clear that he knows these are controversial techniques and would never use them to interfere with conventional medicine—including on the trip to Liberia. Essentially, his heart is in the right place, even if it's making him do some very silly stuff.

Which makes it all the more of a shame that he's been drawn into this fiasco. A couple of doctors pin-balling around West Africa carrying cases of highly diluted snake venom has a certain shambolic gallows-humor; sneaking a PR stunt for homeopathy into an epidemic under the cover of sending medical help is really pretty tawdry.

We Chatted with Giller Prize-Winning Author Sean Michaels

0
0

[body_image width='800' height='532' path='images/content-images/2014/11/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/26/' filename='we-chatted-with-giller-prize-winning-author-sean-michaels-775-body-image-1417019753.jpg' id='7031']

Sean Michaels accepts the Giller Prize. Photo via Giller website

A couple of weeks ago, Montreal-based writer Sean Michaels walked away with the 21st Giller Prize, Canada's prestigious annual award for fiction. Full disclosure: I know Sean Michaels. I've hung out with the guy at parties and danced at his wedding, and I consider him a friend. Still, the night that I heard that he had won the Giller, I was shocked. Not because I doubted his talents: he's a superb writer and his prose is imbued with humour and energy. Rather, I was shocked because his book ​Us Conductors was about something kind of weird—a fictionalized account of the life of Russian-born inventor Lev Sergeyevich Termen, aka Leon Theremin, creator of the ghostly electronic music instrument the theremin—and I thought to myself: He won't win. Nothing good and weird ever gets recognized in Canada.

I'm happy to say I was wrong.

Sean deservedly walked away with the prize, and now that it's one of the ​top-selling books in Canada​, people are beginning to understand exactly why he won. His book breathes new life into the already-strange tale of Termen's travels as an inventor, a lover, and a Soviet spy from East to West. Michaels manages to flip effortlessly from the speakeasies of Prohibition-era New York to the gulags of Stalinist Russia with writing that injects a freshness, a vibrancy into each place and moment. I recently called Sean up to chat about his win, his troubles finding an English-speaking fixer in Russia, and how even in the tiny world of the theremin there are haters.

VICE: First off, were you surprised that you won?
Sean Michaels: I was shocked. I was really discombobulated by the turn of events.

Your win surprised a lot of people. The Toronto Star called it an "upset victory." What do you think Us Conductors winning the Giller says about the state of writing in Canada?
I think it speaks to the curiosity of the jury that selected it. But I also think that it's a reminder that Canadian literature is not the same kind of hoary tales of sadness and wheat fields that we think of as "Can Lit." Certainly Us Conductors isn't, but even having read most of the rest of the nominees—and I read a lot of Canadian literature—there's such a wide variety of voices. But it still feels like a little bit of an outlier on the list of Giller winners.

Let's talk 
about your research for the book. Why was it important for you to go to Russia?
A lot of the research was to fill out the details of the book. I was not that interested in the detective work: the facts, places, and times. You know, facades of buildings, every little detail... But at a certain point, as I was editing the book, I really felt strongly that I wanted to be true to the ambiance, to the big picture. Particularly of the Russian scenes. And, ironically, that was one of those areas where the big picture was harder to be truthful about than the little picture.

You know, you can read books and get street addresses, and things. But I had never been to Russia; I didn't have a sense of really what it felt like to be walking along the river in Moscow, or over a bridge in St. Petersburg—there's quite a lot of scenes that take place in the gulag and I just had no picture in my head. I mean, I had pictures from books, but I had no real, vivid picture in my head of what it felt like. What does it look like when the sun is going down, you know? What's the feeling? And so I felt strongly that I wanted to go.

Was it tough to find a fixer?
I started searching, struggling to find English speakers in Magadan, and someone suggested that I try couchsurfing.com. Not because I needed a couch to surf on, but because I could find English-language profiles. So I found this couple, and we corresponded, and they offered to put me up. And when I arrived, it turned out they didn't speak English and they had just been using Google Translate for the whole correspondence. But still, they showed me all around the city in their little hatchback, playing A Tribe Called Quest out of the stereo, and it was fun.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/w5qf9O6c20o' width='480' height='360']

Tell me a little bit about how this all started. Do you remember the first time you heard a theremin, and was that the spark for the book?
Somebody turned me on to the story of Lev and Clara about six or seven years ago. Just kind of, "Oh, have you ever heard the story of this guy? He had this crazy life." The greatest theremin player, he fell in love, and then he left. And that was rattling around in my head for a long time. And it definitely started to rattle in kind of harmony with this experience I had a few years before that. I was in the car one night, my parents' car, home for the summer or something, driving, and I turned on the radio, and this beautiful aria was playing. It was a soprano singer, a beautiful piece of music. I didn't recognize it or anything, it was just one of those beautiful music moments. And then at the end of the segment the presenter said that I'd been listening to Quebec thereminist P​eter Pringle playing on the theremin. That hadn't been a singer at all. And that was my first experience. And still, most people haven't even had that experience, the beautiful theremin. I realized the story of Lev and Clara doesn't need to be the story of a goofy, mad scientist with his crazy contraption. Actually the contraption itself can contribute aesthetically to a story of love and distance.

I've played a theremin before, and if you're not good with them, it's a fucking nightmare. Most people who just approach them create this horrible noise. But they're really sort of magic. What do you see as the relationship between science and the magic?The theremin happened at this really odd moment, where it was invented in the 20s, just after the dawn of this electric age. And it was really this moment where scientists were making some huge breakthroughs. Really, like, civilization-changing, civilizational breakthroughs, but at the same time people were dreaming. Ideology was also making these breakthroughs. People were breaking further into democracy, and all this stuff was going down. And you know, the theremin came after the electric lightbulb, so there was kind of evidence of electricity's capacity to change things substantially. So much like the radio, it was really happening at the intersection of this dreaming future and this scientific, pragmatic, industrialization present. And so for me, Termen was a scientist, experimenter, into gases, and whatever else, yet he decided to make a musical instrument. I just had to see him as someone who embodied that kind of moment where scientists and people's curiosity about science was crossing a line with their ability to reimagine their own lives.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/50Rtg5Vmlrc' width='642' height='315']

Do you think a guy like Termen could exist today?
Yes. The best recollection I have is this guy Dean Kamen, the guy who invented the Segway like 10 years ago. I remember before he announced his invention, just that kind of rhetoric about how it would transform everything. And he had this pedigree—people thought he actually was a genius. And I think that in the same way, people were kind of imagining, like—I remember articles like, "What could the invention be? How could our world be transformed?" So I think there is capacity for a really charismatic and brilliant inventor to kind of force people to imagine things. Maybe even that guy from Tesla. People just want to imagine that technology, an invention, could transform everything.

I suppose the other similarity between Kamen and Termen is that both of their creations were failures.
Well, yeah. So I mean, could there be someone like Termen? Yeah, because he was ultimately a disappointment.

There's tons of disappointing scientists in the world!
We also forget, I think, now that technology is everywhere, the kind of disorienting experience of the truly new. So the theremin was, for tens of thousands of people, their first time not just seeing music played in the air, but their first time hearing synthetic music, that weird, electric noise... I tried an Oculus Rift a month or two ago. And I was also, like, "Holy crap! This is actually something I've never experienced before."

In a way, this innocent yearning for discovery sort of explains steampunk—these people with a boner for an older, authentic, wondrous, yet simple time...
...With wooden cabinetry.

Exactly. I know you from living in Montreal, I kept noticing the names of familiar Montreal places like "Green Room," and "Nouveau Palais." And then there was one name that popped up: Andre Markov, who was both a Russian mathematician around the time of Termen but also a defenseman for the Montreal Canadiens...
No, that guy was definitely named after the hockey player.

[Laughs] That's great. How much did Montreal influence the writing of the book?
When I was kind of conceiving the book, I really didn't like the idea of writing this dry, stuffy, historical novel—because up until now I've only ever written contemporary stuff, never historical fiction. And I remember reflecting quite strongly, on the trailer of Sophia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, where she used New Order's "Age of Consent" as part of the soundtrack. And I really love that idea, the reminder that these past times have the same kind of thrilling energy as our contemporary times. I decided at some point that I wanted to use new wave, post-punk music, and cold wave, as a secret soundtrack for the book. So the chapter titles are all nods to music from that era. I was trying to give it this up-to-date feeling from this musical side, but also at the same time, I think I was also very deliberately imbuing it with my Montreal experiences of the past 16 years. That feeling of going out partying on those endless nights, I wanted to kind of capture some of my own experience of that, filtered through the electric 1980s, and then filtered through the Prohibition-era New York.

In terms of the idea of taking someone else's story and fictionalizing it, was there any internal struggle in terms of doing these people's story justice, or changing it?
Yeah. Well, I feel very strongly about the ethical dimension of being a fiction writer, or being a writer in general. I did spend a lot of time thinking about it. I eventually came to the decision, "It's fine. Do whatever you want." So long as I'm being very, very explicit and clear that this is a work of fiction. But I did think about it a lot. But I'm not now struggling with it.

Are there surviving relatives? Have they read the book?
There are. I don't know if anyone's read the book, though. When I was going to Russia I reached out to Termen's grandson, who was furious to hear about my book. He was instantly cranky. And then he asked me what my source material was for the book, and I mentioned that I was using this Glinsky biography, and he was like, "Oh, that's a terrible [book]!" He hates that book. I feel like the family really has kind of turned those ancestors into saints, as these perfect people, when the evidence is clear to me that—not only is nobody perfect, but in Termen's case in particular, I think he was a bit of a jerk. But I do know a thereminist who liked my book a lot was going to meet them this fall, to see the Termen family. So I don't know if he'll help the discussion. I met Steve​ Martin, not the actor, but the filmmaker who made the Theremin docu​mentary, and we had a very nice chat in Los Angeles. And then he went home and blasted me online. It was one of the cruelest moments I've experienced.

Really! What do you mean he blasted you?
Well, I remember that he called me a "slob." He was like, "And that smug, asshole slob." He just doesn't like that I was "lying." He thought my book was full of inaccuracies. The theremin really is this world where there's this small amount of turf, and there are a lot of people who really try to have that be their turf.

Theremin beef. Well, hopefully this Giller will shut those people up.
Yeah. "Let's see your prize cabinet."

​​@katigburgers

VICE Vs Video Games: The Best Video Games to Avoid Your Family with This Thanksgiving

0
0

Here's a little rundown of the video games that VICE's video game writers have been playing and enjoying since September of this year. If you're looking for an escape from familial bonding over the next couple of days, these are the worlds you should immerse yourself in.

[body_image width='1280' height='720' path='images/content-images/2014/11/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/26/' filename='these-are-the-best-video-games-of-the-past-few-months-499-body-image-1417007210.jpg' id='6934']

BAYONETTA 2
(Developed by Platinum Games, published by Nintendo)

Leggy witch with daddy issues punches heavenly opponents into chucks of bloody flesh and shattered metal, scattering halos all over the place—halos later used as currency to buy new combat techniques and lollipop power-ups from a bar somewhere between this realm of ours and hell itself.  Between a beginning in the big city and an end atop some mythical mountain, she'll transform into a big cat and a sea serpent, as well as riding on the back of a fighter jet twice—first, fending off centaur-like assailants while dodging skyscrapers, and much later in a flashback to Sega's classic After Burner

Nothing in Bayonetta 2 makes a whole lot of sense when you isolate its constituents, but when everything's squashed together in a style wholly identifiable as the manic work of Platinum Games, this Wii U exclusive sings a symphony of compulsive mayhem. It's the best action game of 2014. 

Mike Diver

[body_image width='1100' height='619' path='images/content-images/2014/11/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/26/' filename='these-are-the-best-video-games-of-the-past-few-months-499-body-image-1417007002.jpg' id='6928']

DESTINY
(Developed by Bungie, published by Activision)

Destiny is a great online shooter struggling to free itself from a pile of guns with marginally differentiated stats and cute names. Its dependence on grind as a means of providing longevity undermines the architecture of what might otherwise be dizzying, Halo-esque firefights. Its plot, in which Tyrion Lannister voices an invisible loading bar, is a sad little skeleton of hints about a vivid wider fiction. In short, it's a game that's very much in love with its own bullshit.

And yet, I'm itching to go back to it. The gunplay is briskly executed, even allowing for level differences between player and enemy; the planets are gloriously unlikely sweeps of postcard views; and the mix of spontaneous occurring and planned co-op leads to plenty of memorable moments. Plus, when you zap a guy with a pulse rifle he evaporates. 

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

[body_image width='1920' height='1080' path='images/content-images/2014/11/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/26/' filename='these-are-the-best-video-games-of-the-past-few-months-499-body-image-1417007094.jpg' id='6932']

THE EVIL WITHIN 
(Developed by Tango Gameworks, published by Bethesda Softworks)

Or: Shinji Mikami Plays the Hits. The Evil Within is a grab-bag of elements from its director's back catalogue: ostensibly it's Resident Evil 4 with a torture-porn aesthetic, but supplies are sparse like the original Resi, encouraging you to dispatch enemies with a knife to the carotid artery rather than waste valuable rounds. Still, with the help of the brilliantly named Agony Crossbow and the most satisfying video game shotgun in years, you're soon blowing them into fleshy chunks. Gory, nasty and full of devious tricks and traps, it doesn't do much new, but it's relentlessly thrilling all the same. 

Chris Schilling

[body_image width='1920' height='1080' path='images/content-images/2014/11/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/26/' filename='these-are-the-best-video-games-of-the-past-few-months-499-body-image-1417009795.jpg' id='6977']

SHERLOCK HOLMES: CRIMES & PUNISHMENTS
(Developed by Frogwares, published by Focus Home Interactive)

You know, I bet if Bandersnatch Cummerbund played the titular character in Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments the game would get the recognition it deserves. How this series continues to fly under the radar is beyond me—and come every iteration it just gets better. With several possible solutions for each case (the majority of which being wrong), there's a real skill to your deductions. This, along with making a moral decision about your culprit at the end, means you can almost feel the deerstalker upon your head. Even though Holmes never wore one. That's how good it is. 

Matt Porter

[body_image width='1920' height='1080' path='images/content-images/2014/11/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/26/' filename='these-are-the-best-video-games-of-the-past-few-months-499-body-image-1417009863.jpg' id='6978']

THE BINDING OF ISAAC: REBIRTH
(Developed and published by Nicalis with Edmund McMillen)

Indecision blights me every day. A game like The Walking Dead—though I love it—is a nightmare. Making quick decisions with people's lives, leaving them for dead? NOPE. The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, though—a wonderful remake of the 2011 original, now ported to PS4 and Vita—does almost everything for me. 

A randomly generated, 2D Zelda-like shooter, progress is mostly based on chance. Upgrades (or downgrades) can be left behind, but there'll be more. You might become godlike, storming into hell all tears blazing. Or you could suffer being dealt terrible hands. But that's out of my own, so I scroll through each unique room hoping for easier enemies and better treasures, knowing the rest is all down to my (obviously vast) skill. Distilled gaming. 

Brad Barrett

[body_image width='1280' height='720' path='images/content-images/2014/11/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/26/' filename='these-are-the-best-video-games-of-the-past-few-months-499-body-image-1417009998.jpg' id='6979']

THE SAILOR'S DREAM
(Developed by Simogo)

Simogo's latest is a gentle, contemplative work that sees you sailing around a peaceful archipelago, pulling ashore to explore abandoned buildings: a lighthouse, a radio shack, a house on a cliff. Poking around their dark, mysterious rooms, you discover sound toys and mementoes, each of which adds color and texture to a touching narrative. 

With no real puzzles to solve beyond piecing together the strands of the story, the pleasure comes from simply lingering inside this gorgeously rendered little dream world, enjoying Jonathan Eng's wonderfully wistful soundtrack. 

Chris Schilling

[body_image width='1000' height='750' path='images/content-images/2014/11/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/26/' filename='these-are-the-best-video-games-of-the-past-few-months-499-body-image-1417010085.jpg' id='6980']

MONUMENT VALLEY: FORGOTTEN SHORES
(Developed and published by ustwo)

An eight-level add-on—costing a little over $2 per month, much to the disgust of some mobile gamers expecting developers to give away their content after several months of hard work—to ustwo's beautiful original, Monument Valley's Forgotten Shores, places finger-prompted protagonist Ida in some wonderfully creative environments, still taking aesthetic cues from the work of artist MC Escher. 

This time pathways can be twisted, so as to move from one surface to another, and there's a fiddly end stage, "Nocturne," where each of (Ida's companion) Totem's quarters comes into essential play. There's plenty of the wet stuff this time around, including a gorgeous level set against a mammoth waterfall, and a rather more compact one, "The Oubliette," which is comparable to the original's "The Box" puzzle. 

You'll likely cruise through these challenges in under 40 minutes, but just being in these places is enough—the sound and visuals are completely otherworldly, and a great escape during any commute. 

Mike Diver

[body_image width='2371' height='1421' path='images/content-images/2014/11/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/26/' filename='these-are-the-best-video-games-of-the-past-few-months-499-body-image-1417010192.jpg' id='6981']

ALIEN: ISOLATION
(Developed by The Creative Assembly, published by Sega)

While game developers have traditionally looked to James Cameron's action-packed sequel for inspiration, The Creative Assembly used Ridley Scott's original 1979 Alien film as the foundation for this superb horror game. You aren't blasting waves of xenomorphs with a pulse rifle in Isolation. Instead, as the name suggests, you're alone, being stalked by a single, fearsome alien. 

Giger's creature is devilishly intelligent, with dynamic artificial intelligence that reacts, and adapts, to your play style. The retro-future setting, with its chunky 1970s technology, is dark, claustrophobic and oppressive, which only adds to the game's feeling of constant, gnawing tension. This is the atmospheric, slow-burning horror game the Alien series has always been crying out for. 

Andy Kelly

[body_image width='1920' height='1080' path='images/content-images/2014/11/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/26/' filename='these-are-the-best-video-games-of-the-past-few-months-499-body-image-1417010288.jpg' id='6982']

DRAGON AGE: INQUISITION
(Developed by BioWare, published by Electronic Arts)

Dragon Age! Where being the leader of a fearsome shadow-empire doesn't stop people from asking me to fetch herbs or help them track down the plagiarist behind a tedious fantasy novel! Dragon Age! Where I get to reinvent myself as Helga, goat-lady and closet elf lover! Dragon Age! Where I can whisk up icicle caltrops to hold off acid-puking spiders while my rogue hurls sleeping powder at a legionnaire who's corner-trapping my warrior! Dragon Age!

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

[body_image width='2048' height='1152' path='images/content-images/2014/11/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/26/' filename='these-are-the-best-video-games-of-the-past-few-months-499-body-image-1417010832.jpg' id='6983']

MIDDLE EARTH: SHADOW OF MORDOR
(Developed by Monolith Productions, published by Warner Bros.)

This had no right being good. It's a thoroughly dumb use of Tolkien's world, and is derivative of a dozen other games. But, man, it's brilliant. Every idea it steals it makes its own, like a really good cover version that you can control with your thumbs.

But then you dig deeper and discover the nemesis system, in which orcs who kill you grow stronger. Rivalries form, and you genuinely grow to hate, and sometimes respect, your adversaries—a rarity in games, where enemies are usually no more than faceless drones. This is a confident, fun, and challenging open world brawler that shamelessly pilfers from the likes of Assassin's Creed and the Arkham series, but throws in that inspired nemesis system to mix things up. 

I will beat you, Tûgog Man-Breaker. One day.

Andy Kelly

[body_image width='1280' height='720' path='images/content-images/2014/11/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/26/' filename='these-are-the-best-video-games-of-the-past-few-months-499-body-image-1417010941.jpg' id='6984']

SUPER SMASH BROS
(Developed by Sora Ltd/Bandai Namco Games, published by Nintendo)

Nintendo's biggest-hitter of 2014 delivers on both its home version—shinier visuals, compatible with the company's funny little Amiibo toys—and its equally slick portable counterpart. On the move, it's easy to jump into a four-character free-for-all between tube stops, and while newcomers to the series will likely find their first few hours a mix of entertainingly random victories mixed with colorfully excruciating failures, once you lock down a character that suits you (unlocking more as you progress), the precisely engineered gameplay of this simple-concept experience emerges. 

There's a shitload of different game modes, solo and shared, but many will simply focus on the multiplayer fracases (up to eight, on Wii U), which have never played better. 

Mike Diver

'Las Vegas' Is a Short Film About New Zealand’s Oldest Strip Club

0
0

Most people remember their first time inside a strip club. For New York–based filmmaker, Tom Gould, that rite of passage was so memorable ​he made a movie about it 14 years later. Last year while back at home in New Zealand, the director visited Auckland's infamous Karangahape Road, where he retraced his steps to a velvet-lined bar named Las Vegas, which has been open since 1962, making it the oldest strip club in the country. This is where he rediscovered Adrian "Adriatix" Churn, the character who has been the voice of Las Vegas for the last four decades. 

The resulting short film is a mix of glamour and grime, starring not only the cast of the club but also the drag queens and fa'afafi​ne that coexist with the drunks, punks, and vagrants out on the street. We talked to Tom about making the film, and why he's keen to share the shadier side of New Zealand with the world at large.

[vimeo src='//player.vimeo.com/video/111665843?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0&color=ffffff' width='500' height='281']

VICE: So Tom, what's your first memory of Las Vegas?
Tom Gould: Well the first time I actually went in there I was 14 years old and we were just kids hanging out on K Road. I was really small when I was younger and I could never get in places. All my friends looked older but I was short, so there was no way I was going to get in there. We walked up the stairs, which is this creepy long stairway that is really steep, and you get to the top and there was the booth where the bouncers and owners would be. And back then there was a curtain on the right-hand side which went through to where the catwalk and strippers were. I remember going up there with my friends and everyone else had fake IDs and looked a little bit older but I had to sneak under the curtain to get in. I remember being down on my hands and knees while everyone was distracting the owners. I snuck through the curtain and popped up and was like, "Wow, this is what this place looks like." 

[body_image width='1920' height='1080' path='images/content-images/2014/11/25/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/25/' filename='new-zealands-oldest-strip-club-body-image-1416873716.jpg' id='6384']

Was Adrian there that night?
He was there in the DJ booth. I remember hearing his crazy voice. He would put on voices and accents. His voice is what I remembered from that first night.

Why did you want to make a film about it?
To me it's one of those historical Auckland places that I really wanted to document. And the fact that Adrian is still there and doing what he wants to do, that makes it all the more special. Coming back to Auckland all the time, I see things changing and a lot of the history gets lost. Every time I come back I see little bits of the city gone. But Las Vegas is always there, and before anything happened to it, I wanted to immortalize and preserve it because it's just such an icon.

[body_image width='1200' height='675' path='images/content-images/2014/11/25/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/25/' filename='new-zealands-oldest-strip-club-body-image-1416873859.jpg' id='6385']

When you approached Adrian about making the film how did he react?
I wasn't sure how he was going to react because he's quite a crazy kind of character, but I went up there one night and spoke to everyone and he was keen right away. We filmed over the course of three weeks. It was a lot of long nights hanging out on K Road and speaking to people and listening Adrian about his stories. He has so much history in that area. You'd see him every day from Wednesday to Saturday out the front of Las Vegas chain smoking, just observing the evolution of K Road. For the past 40 years he's watched it from street level, standing in a doorway in the same position. If anyone's going to speak about the history of K Road and what's gone on there, it's got to be him.

In the film he talks about K Road in broad strokes.
Yeah, that was important. I wanted to get the surroundings of Las Vegas, not just the club's interior, because it is just a strip club. But what makes the whole thing special is the environment and the history on Karangahape Road. I really wanted to get a lot of people that made the place special—the street workers and the drag queens, the people out on the street. K Road is one of those places where people are still individuals. Characters like them can still exist and they're all in a beautiful harmony. I wanted to paint a picture of the people that Adrian has been watching all these years.

[body_image width='1200' height='675' path='images/content-images/2014/11/25/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/25/' filename='new-zealands-oldest-strip-club-body-image-1416873915.jpg' id='6386']

Let's talk about Dirty Dave, who features in the film alongside Adrian. What's his role at the club?
He's like a manager, but he has since left the club. He'd been there for a long time. Not as long as Adrian, but he was there for over a decade.

He's a strange character because he's silent, but you can't help notice him there smoking, and the hat. Yeah, it's crazy. It's hard to pick up in the film, but on the front of the hat it obviously says "Dirty Dave" and on the back it says "World's Greatest Dad." His daughter gave it to him. She worked at the club as well.

[body_image width='1200' height='675' path='images/content-images/2014/11/25/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/25/' filename='new-zealands-oldest-strip-club-body-image-1416873951.jpg' id='6387']

I heard that Adrian still plays eight-tracks up at the studio?
He used to play vinyl back in the day, he actually sent me all these old photos because he documented all the different setups he's had. And I'm sure he would have played eight-tracks but it's gone all digital now. I spoke to him a lot about the music, which is obviously dictated by the girls and the songs they want to dance to. So he's not playing as many of the old classics that he would have back in the mid 60s and early 70s. The technology he uses has to keep up with what the girls want to dance to.

The cover of "Lola" by the Kinks was a nice touch then.
For the film I wanted Adrian to get in the booth and play one of the songs from the golden era of Las Vegas, so I asked him to put on his favorite song and he put on the original Kinks version. It was crazy and fitting because of what the song is about. I wanted to get a local band to cover it so we could use it in the film so I reached out to the Raw N​erves

[body_image width='1200' height='675' path='images/content-images/2014/11/25/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/25/' filename='new-zealands-oldest-strip-club-body-image-1416873983.jpg' id='6388']

Before making this documentary, you also released an emotiona​lly striking short film about Martyka from the Mongrel Mob. How did that come about?
That came about when I first came back to New Zealand. I saw an article in the local Hawke's Bay newspaper about the Mongrel Mob and how it was getting a bad rap for domestic violence. Martyka was in the article saying he was trying to help fellow Mob members change their ways. It mentioned in the article that he'd raised all these kids, four of his own and another six through foster and welfare care, and I thought it was really striking. 

The Mongrel Mob and other gangs are a big topic in New Zealand. It affects so many people in different ways, and a lot of it is negative. I wanted to show a deeper story, not something that is just on the surface. I wanted to show something more real and personal that had a positive side.

These films are both under ten minutes long. What is it about the short format that you enjoy?
I think you can tell a story in a really short amount of time and there is something great about that. I also think it helps get it out there, it's more accessible for people to watch and it caters more to people's attention spans. And it's nice for people to see a little snapshot of something and be able to appreciate it.

Follow Danielle Street on ​Twitter.

All Is Not Well in England's Learning-Disabled Village

0
0

[body_image width='640' height='428' path='images/content-images/2014/11/25/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/25/' filename='botton-village-coworker-evictions-292-body-image-1416945326.jpg' id='6777']

The walled garden at Botton Hall in Botton village. Photo by Mick Garratt

This post originally appeared in VICE UK

Sarah is making pizza. She rolls out the dough, covers it with topping, and puts it in the oven. Outside, life in the village seems normal. People are at work—some in workshops making glass or candles, some on the farm. 

Sarah (not her real name) is one of 130 people with a learning disability who live in Botton, a village in North Yorkshire, England, that's also home to a large number of non-disabled "co-workers."  Working in the bakery is part of a routine that keeps life structured and orderly for the "villagers."

Today, however, something isn't quite right. Sarah takes the pizza out of the oven and puts it down, realizing a moment later she's put it on a wooden tray instead of a metal one. Usually this wouldn't be a big deal; today, Sarah is worried.

Later, she writes a letter to one of her co-workers.

"I am feeling very nerves [ sic] about things at work aspecally [sic] when I work in the bakery and the thing is if I accidentally make a mistake I am terrified that some one like Huw John or someone from CVT [Camphill Village Trust, the charity that runs Botton] will come up and say they want to talk to me [...] I find it hard to say that I have made a mistake and I feel nerves [sic] that I will get in trouble."

[body_image width='1653' height='2338' path='images/content-images/2014/11/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/26/' filename='botton-village-coworker-evictions-292-body-image-1417009688.jpg' id='6975']

A letter written by Sarah

Sarah won't be in trouble for the pizza incident, but it's unsurprising she feels on edge. Over the course of the year, Botton has been embroiled in an increasingly nasty battle with the charity that runs it, the Camphill Village Trust (CVT), whose CEO, Huw John, Sarah mentions in her letter. This week, the situation has escalated, with the police being called about the alleged harassment and bullying of disabled residents by the charity's management.

The anger and accusations—which fly in both directions—are a far cry from the vision for Botton laid out by its founder, an Austrian refugee who created the community's prototype in Scotland in 1939, based on the be-nice-to-each-other-we're-all-equal principles of philosopher Rudolf Steiner. There are now 119 Camphill communities across the world, and Botton is seen as their flagship, with a total population of 280 people who live, work, eat, and sleep as families.

Having fled the Nazis, the founders of the original Camphill communities were clear that there should be no central authority—co-workers would live and work alongside those with disabilities on an equal footing. Co-workers have shared accommodation with residents since 1955, providing unpaid care in return for having their living costs covered. Now, co-workers have been told they must live separately and work on a paid-shift basis. Those who resist have been threatened with eviction.

The upheavals began in 2011, when the Charity Commission and Care Quality Commission raised concerns over the administration of finances and suggested that residents weren't being given enough independence. For the last three years, however, reports have been glowing, and Botton now has approval from both boards. Despite this, CVT is forging ahead with the changes. Some co-workers have been served with eviction orders, and several residents have already been removed by their families over concerns for their well-being.

[body_image width='960' height='640' path='images/content-images/2014/11/25/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/25/' filename='botton-village-coworker-evictions-292-body-image-1416947289.jpg' id='6795']

A candlelight vigil in Botton. Photo via the ​Action for Botton Facebook group

Residents have accused CVT of making them feel "thick and stupid" and of "spying" on them. The feeling that the charity is treating the learning disabled as pawns is strong within the community. In August, CVT attempted to stop residents from attending a candlelight vigil, claiming individual assessments were needed first. The charity has also enforced restrictions on allowing residents to talk to the press.

Anna Moore at Bindmans LLP, the lawyers acting for Botton residents, believes this is a breach of the Mental Capacity Act, which states that a person must be assumed to have capacity unless it's established otherwise.

"Sadly, my clients believe that this is a crude attempt to prevent them from speaking out about their concerns regarding the changes proposed by CVT," Moore said at the time of the vigil.

[body_image width='640' height='318' path='images/content-images/2014/11/25/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/25/' filename='botton-village-coworker-evictions-292-body-image-1416947174.jpeg' id='6794']

Botton residents

Since then, the situation has deteriorated even more. The report delivered to the police this week includes allegations that residents were followed, threatened, and photographed against their will by CVT employees. Sarah says that, at one point, she was so frightened by the perceived threat of CVT that she contacted "the North Yorkshire police, the North Yorkshire air ambulance, the AA, the Royal Lifeboat, and Buckingham Palace!"

North Yorkshire police confirmed that they've received complaints but not found evidence of criminal conduct by the charity's management. However, a spokesperson for Botton expressed concern that no statements had been taken from the residents making accusations.

"We've been made to feel like second-class citizens," I'm told. "Victims of the harassment—including the learning disabled and their co-workers, as well as the wider community—are saddened that their statements and accounts will not be taken and have requested an explanation from the police. The learning-disabled residents who tried to make statements all have capacity to do so, as defined by the Mental Capacity Act."

For its part, CVT claims that the allegations are unfounded.

"The charity and its management has faced a public barrage of allegations and accusation in recent months, which we believe are part of an orchestrated wider campaign by some Botton coworkers and others to resist the changes needed," says CEO Huw John. "We are confident that there has been no bullying, harassment, or mismanagement at Botton, and that there will be no police case to answer. All of the changes we have recently introduced have been part of reasonable and appropriate management of the charity."

Some co-workers wouldn't agree with this. Mark Barber, who lives in Botton with his children and two learning-disabled residents, claims he was told to leave his house with no notice. On the advice of lawyers, he's standing his ground, and CVT's claim that he was costing $102,000 a year seem to have been disproven by the charity's own recently published accounts, which put the figure nearer $24,000.

[body_image width='1280' height='853' path='images/content-images/2014/11/25/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/25/' filename='botton-village-coworker-evictions-292-body-image-1416945545.jpg' id='6778']

From left to right: Allan Hodson, Fionn Reid, and Dan Francis

Dan Francis, a long-term resident with Down syndrome, is chatty and upbeat when I speak to him, excited that his birthday is coming up. He likes bird group, choir, and Status Quo. He loves living with his Botton family in a house with younger children. Dan's mom is deeply concerned by what's happening to her son's home.

"If the proposed changes take place, Dan will become a dependent, learning-disabled person living in a care home. He will not have the [same kind of] support and the continuity of care," she tells me. "He keeps telling his house parents that he doesn't want them to leave and asks for reassurance that they will stay. This is an impossible situation, immensely cruel for both house parents and villagers."

Dan's mom fears that replacing his Botton house parents with a rotation of care workers will leave her son lonely and disoriented. This is echoed by other family members I speak to. Botton is a special place, they say; the changes will destroy it, and people's lives will be shattered.

[body_image width='640' height='426' path='images/content-images/2014/11/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/26/' filename='botton-village-coworker-evictions-292-body-image-1417004249.jpeg' id='6899']

Botton residents taking part in a tug-of-war

"There's a sense of unease, nervousness, a smatter of fear now," says co-worker Fionn Reid. "But on top of the worry and anxiety, you have to get on and make sure that the people you're there to support and have chosen to share a life with are OK. It's inspirational in a way, because it really nails down why you're here and why you chose to do it.

"I can say with confidence that, for everyone facing eviction, the one thing that will be worse than losing their house and having to find a new job is the ending of what Botton was created for. The destruction of an ethos."

Botton has long been held up as an example of a community that is, by all accounts, more generous and caring than any recognizable part of Cameron's Big Society. So it's hard not to see this as a battle between myopic public-sector management mentality and real but workable idealism. Is there really no space left for ways of living that fall outside the ever-tightening net of regulation?

Allan Hodson has lived at Botton since suffering a brain injury 27 years ago. "When it's running smooth it's very nice," he says. "Now there's lots of stress in the house. It's been hard. It would be nice to see things back to normal. This is a happy family, not a sad family."

Follow Frankie Mullin on ​Twitter.


A Shopping Mall Has Become a Weird 24-Hour Haven for London's Skate Subculture

0
0

[body_image width='700' height='466' path='images/content-images/2014/11/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/26/' filename='the-stratford-centre-is-thriving-in-westfields-giant-shadow-098-body-image-1417004915.jpg' id='6902']

Photos by Haley Hatton

​This post originally appeared in VICE UK

If you live in London for any other reason than to make money, the last ten years have seen the city redesigned around you, for people who aren't you. Of course by now we know the culprits well: London 2012, offshore property developers, a Mayor who posits the consumer industry as the solution to all the city's ills. Indicative of this New London are its two Westfield poles. The one at Shepherd's Bush in the west, and the bigger, even more popular Stratford City in the east.

The sleek interiors, mood lighting, ease of access and hundreds of boutique shopping experiences on offer attracts thousands every day. Three years after it opened, the scale of the place is still daunting. To drive round it is to be within an archetype of dystopia so overblown you almost cringe at the barefaced nature of it. Indicatively, though there are signs directing you to places further afield—central London, Leytonstone, Leyton, Stansted airport—there are none pointing you towards the older end of Stratford, towards the old town hall or the 1970s-built Stratford Centre. It is as if turbo-charged, 21st-century London would rather not know about the old Stratford. Because it has invented an entirely new one.

Walk into the Stratford Centre and the old shopping precinct is a world apart from Westfield. People predicted that it would close as soon as the giant opened, but it has survived, and has become a 24-hour hub of the community since. 

[body_image width='700' height='465' path='images/content-images/2014/11/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/26/' filename='the-stratford-centre-is-thriving-in-westfields-giant-shadow-098-body-image-1417005024.jpg' id='6905']

Through the evening and into the night, the Stratford Centre houses a community of skaters, dancers and body-poppers who move liberated from stereo to stereo. It's like being in an 80s version of the future.

After the kids clear out, the center becomes an unofficial home for Stratford's homeless. It feels like a reclaimed space next to the over-managed Olympic Queen Elizabeth Park and the consumer security zone, Westfield. It tells a story of London that might not be told through the official channels, who have hyped up the new developments.

The central hub where everybody skates and dances is a folded-in microcosm of the classic British high street, complete with JD Sports, H. Samuel, Claire's Accessories, Dorothy Perkins, Thomas Cook, Carphone Warehouse, an independent jewelers, a pharmacy, and a linen shop. Looking around at the livewire scene, it feels like The Warriors as imagined by JD Sports' marketing team. Whether you view it as bleak or not is a half-full/half-empty concern.

[body_image width='700' height='465' path='images/content-images/2014/11/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/26/' filename='the-stratford-centre-is-thriving-in-westfields-giant-shadow-098-body-image-1417005102.jpg' id='6906']

At night, the space opens up. Westfield might have its 24-hour casinos, but the two sets of late-night visitors are very different. Skaters like Isaiah have been coming to the center for over five years. By mutual agreement they're allowed to come and go as they please, the center being a public thoroughfare. "I heard you could skate until one in the morning," he says. "Practice new stuff, just skate. It's 24 hours. Some skaters leave at 4 AM."

Isaiah and other skaters I talk to say that it's necessity that has brought them here, night after night. "Most skate parks are more designed for BMX people. It's so smooth here and you are actually allowed to skate—it's open, there's space, so it is so much easier for skaters in general to enjoy themselves."

Isaiah comes from Catford in South East London. His tall, slinky mate in a sweater with the dog from Family Guy on it and matching grey joggers comes all the way from West Wickham in Bromley, Kent. "All the skaters just come here to hang out and chill—it's the only place like it," he says. "This is nothing," he says, gesturing to the scene around him on a Monday evening. "On a Friday, there's about 60 people. Skaters, dancers, people taking pictures..."

[body_image width='700' height='465' path='images/content-images/2014/11/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/26/' filename='the-stratford-centre-is-thriving-in-westfields-giant-shadow-098-body-image-1417005215.jpg' id='6909']

The Stratford Centre is like no shopping center I've ever seen, in that security generally leave you alone. I spy some skaters hanging in one of the ventricles that comes off the center—lads called CJ, Alex and Norman, all from Russia. CJ has been coming for three years. They come for the "good atmosphere," he says. "The first time I came here I thought they were gonna kick us out straight away. But they didn't. I think security just can't because so many people [like us] come here."

They regularly stay at the center all night. "One day, a load of skaters just came in here. Security told them to leave and they pretty much just refused," adds Alex. "They kept coming back every week and the security were like, 'Yeah, screw it.'" What's the relationship between these men and and security, though? One of quiet tolerance? 

"They hate us," says CJ. 

"Oh no, it differs," tempers Alex. "Some of them are cool."

When I visit, the center is closed from around midnight until about 6 AM for renovations and to put up the Christmas lights. There is a tangible fear among those that use it during the night that they may not always be able to do so. "I worry that they'll try [and close it]," says Alex. "But there are so many people who come here that I don't think they'd be able to stop them."

Such is the unexpected life of the place, the skaters regularly get people coming up to them, congratulating them, taking photos, shaking their hands. "It happens all the time," says Alex, from Romford. "The majority of them are usually drunk. People come up to us and ask us about the place, ask why we skate here. They really appreciate it; some people stand there and will watch you for a good 20 minutes."

[body_image width='700' height='465' path='images/content-images/2014/11/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/26/' filename='the-stratford-centre-is-thriving-in-westfields-giant-shadow-098-body-image-1417005301.jpg' id='6910']

"I've been coming for about three or four years and I hope it will still be here in five," says CJ. "It's been going for a good five years already," adds Alex. One individual, Norman, who lives with his family near Maryland station, hasn't been in the UK very long and came after a friend's recommendation, but hopes somewhere better might be built nearby. "I hope there are going to build a better place!" he says. "With mini-ramps everywhere!"

And that's just the thing. If there were a better place for these people to go and hang out, they would. This is making do, but they're still grateful. "Skating is a passion for a lot of people," says CJ, who, until recently, worked as a laborer but is now unemployed. "Here, it's covered. There's no rain. I come every day, I leave just before midnight. It's my a passion."

Their presence doesn't come without police attention, though. "During the week, Monday to Thursday, they just bowl about," says Alex. "But on Fridays there are about 20 walking up and down. There was one guy who got arrested a few weeks ago for mouthing off to them. The police kicked him to the floor because they said he had a knife. He didn't have anything on him in the end." Presumably this isn't a great thing for those that come and use the center peacefully. "No. Because when people see that they are gonna stop us coming."

[body_image width='700' height='465' path='images/content-images/2014/11/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/26/' filename='the-stratford-centre-is-thriving-in-westfields-giant-shadow-098-body-image-1417005399.jpg' id='6912']

I try to speak to a policeman about what it's like to patrol the center at night, but he shoos me away with a smile; he's got bigger fish to fry, in the form of the five-foot teenager in a puffa jacket and his mates that they're following. With his fellow officer, he stops the kid to talk. For a moment things seem tense, then PC and kids go their separate ways. I call management and email and call the PR team to ask them about their thoughts on the skaters but am met with a cold reception each time I ring. I have my own suspicions that the skaters are allowed such free reign over the place in order to keep them away from Westfield but no one, it seems, wants to comment on the way the center is being used. 

By the side of the entrance is a notice for the dispersal of groups and people under 16, reminding you that the center is still being fought over. Anna Minton is the author of Ground Control, the 2009 book that did much to push the crisis of public space into the forefront of the discussion about London. "I went to the Stratford Centre in 2012 and you could already see stark contrasts between glossy Westfield, on a totally different level, two stories up and looking down on the center and separated by the barrier of a massive road interchange," she says. 

For Minton, Westfield represents the securitization of land that has fast become the norm in cities over the world. "What has really characterized a city like London over the last ten years or so is that every single pocket is now up for development. It's got a very high property value. The empty spaces in the city, which are always the creative spaces, are less and less."

[body_image width='700' height='525' path='images/content-images/2014/11/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/26/' filename='the-stratford-centre-is-thriving-in-westfields-giant-shadow-098-body-image-1417005492.jpg' id='6914']

Image  ​via Wikimedia Commons

The existence of places like the Stratford Centre, then, is quite precarious. As Minton says, "There is so little of the city left where people can express themselves and reclaim the space."

People often lament the lack of subcultures in this country, but they never really look in depth as to why that might be. We mourn the passing of legitimate street culture and music scenes. People say: "It's gone—those days are never coming back." But what is obvious after you spend a time looking at it, is that the lack of public space or affordable property for music venues, youth clubs and the like, has been decisive—places in which young people felt safe from authority, in which community could foster, in which art is made, that encourage an organic creativity. 

These days, a "creative" is ES Magazine—shorthand for a "trendy" person with a job in PR or fashion or design, not an adjective for a looser but perhaps more intellectually stimulating pursuit than is offered to us now by the dominance of retail. The ingenuity of the Stratford Centre skaters to stake a claim to this slice of identikit shopping mall is the more truly creative act—an impulse that more mourners of subculture and wallowers in nostalgia could do well to tap into.

Follow Tim Burrows on ​Twitter

'Inherent Vice' and the Complicated Protagonists of Paul Thomas Anderson

0
0
[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/wZfs22E7JmI' width='640' height='360']

"I never remember plots in movies. I remember how they make me feel, and I remember emotions, and I remember visual things that I've seen—but my brain can never connect the dots of how things go together." —Paul Thomas Anderson

**

You won't really know what happens in Inherent Vice after seeing it just once.

I don't say this to condescend, or to imply that the stoner-comedy-mystery is an impenetrable mindfuck in the vein of David Lynch's strangest works. But that being said, this is a new release from one of our brightest, boldest, and ballsiest directors—a filmmaker who recently concluded his epic exegesis of the founding of Scientology by having Philip Seymour Hoffman croon an unnervingly icy rendition of "On a Slow Boat to China" as a form of pseudo-seduction.

Paul Thomas Anderson is not afraid to get weird. His latest effort happens to get weird in the sense that it seems to deliver a contact high as you're watching it. An all-encompassing conspiracy is developing on screen that you can't make heads or tails of, but the paranoia still lingers. The film is almost impossible to follow from a plot perspective on first viewing, in the same way that The Maltese Falcon is impossible to follow when you're watching it high at 2 AM on TCM. But plot doesn't matter in Paul Thomas Anderson movies, and Inherent Vice, based on the Thomas Pynchon novel, is the most Paul Thomas Anderson-y movie that Paul Thomas Anderson has made yet, and the culmination of a four-movie journey that started with Adam Sandler.

After wowing the film world with the Scorsese-esque manic ensemble bravado of Boogie Nights and Magnolia, Anderson started making genre films on his own terms. The first of these art-house experimentations, Punch-Drunk Love, is a woozily romantic fever dream that doubles as an Adam Sandler comedy, in that it feels like it was made by aliens fascinated by the enduring appeal of Sandler's rage-addled man-child persona. Punch-Drunk Love is brilliant in that it has Sandler playing a character similar to those that he's known for in his Happy Madison productions, even though the film views his trademark sophomoric outbursts and suppressed self-loathing with a probing sobriety. Could it be that the poor guy hammering the glass door at a family party is what's really been lurking inside Mr. Deeds this whole time? As ​Roger Ebert noted in his review, "[Sandler's] outbursts here help to explain the curiously violent passages... It's as if Sandler is Hannibal Lecter in a Jerry Lewis body."

Anderson followed up that film with a self-described take on Count Dracula—the epic pseudo-Western There Will Be Blood, which finds a modern heir to Bram Stoker's ghoul in the form of a psychotically motivated oilman named Daniel Plainview. In dissecting his intent, Anderson told American Cinematographer magazine, "I just had it in my head, underneath it all, that we were making a horror film." By the time we see Plainview, bloodied bowling pin in hand, lurched over the limp body of his fiercest competition during the film's darkly hilarious finale, Anderson's explanation becomes increasingly understandable.

And then there's The Master: Anderson's war film, both literally, in keeping with its protagonist's history in World War II, and ideologically. For all of the intensity of The Master, this is a movie that begins its most fiery sequence (where Lancaster Dodd "processes" Freddie Quell) with a terrific fart joke. This sense of controlled tonal whiplash—the freewheeling ability to switch between genres in a single scene, or even a single shot—is the defining alchemy of all of Anderson's movies, even predating his recent run of art films. Think back to the scene in Boogie Nights when Scotty J. shoves his tongue down Dirk Diggler's throat, then slides back into his ridiculous new sports car a blubbery mess, wailing, "I'm a fuckin' idiot" over and over again. It even goes back to the raining frogs at the end of Magnolia, a sequence that ping-pongs the film between Biblical solemnity, ecological terror, and surrealist comedy for a few ecstatic minutes.

Inherent Vice is a whole movie that operates on this wavelength. It's as much of a deconstruction of Raymond Chandler as it is an old-fashioned gags-and-stunts picture, in the vein of the madcap spoof movies of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker (the architects of Police Squad, Airplane, and Top Secret). It's a whacked-out farce that features Martin Short as a coke-addled corrupt dentist, while also doubling as a stripped-down look at the loneliness that motivates the entire genre of film noir, that sense of a culture gasping its dying breaths.

Just look at Anderson's hero. As Doc Sportello, a perma-blazed detective embarking on an aimless odyssey across the beaches and deserts of Southern California, Joaquin Phoenix ambles along like Homer Simpson, contorts his face like Donald Duck, and in one exquisite tumble (inside a poorly concealed massage parlor turned brothel), pratfalls like John Belushi. If nothing else, Inherent Vice proves that Joaquin Phoenix is not merely an astonishingly gifted dramatic performer but also a physical comedian on par with Jim Carrey and Chris Farley. It's a marvel of a performance, and one that is so fundamentally reactive that it's destined to be overlooked during the year-end awards cycle.

But Phoenix's performance is especially marvelous because he is that bridge between Anderson's dual muses here. He can nail the comedy, the Leslie Nielsen attitude, the coolness that comes from not caring how cool you look when you're tumbling over yourself. Yet he can also hint at the deep, abiding sense of heartbreak and pain that comes with noir heroism, and do so with just a simple facial expression that pivots the film from comedy to tragedy. He's got the shimmy of Bluto and the soul of Philip Marlowe.

Under the surface of Punch-Drunk Love's Barry Egan, Anderson found the anguished heart of a lonesome romantic, as the film's initial sobriety slipped into a sort of hallucinatory glee in its final half, thanks in no small part to the film's lush anamorphic cinematography and swooning Jon Brion score. Similarly, in Sportello, Anderson finds a different kind of compromised romantic—one with a love for both his flighty on-and-off lady friend (a revelatory Katherine Waterston) and his city, despite the knowledge that neither relationship is built to last.

It's the core of any good film noir story—the fatalistic crusader who perseveres with the good fight despite his better judgment. Like how you might remember Dracula, if you looked past the narrative particulars, as the story of an unstoppable megalomaniac who can't help himself from sucking the life force of everything around him. Or how Billy Madison plays back in your head, when you think about it a few days later, as the story of a violent victim of arrested development who just wants to be loved. For Paul Thomas Anderson, the plot is just window dressing—the conduit for whatever emotional clashes he finds lurking inside his given genre obsession. And in the case of Inherent Vice, he'll make you feel so high that you have no choice but to give yourself over.

America Protested the Ferguson Grand Jury Decision Again Last Night

0
0

[body_image width='640' height='480' path='images/content-images/2014/11/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/26/' filename='heres-how-america-protested-the-ferguson-grand-jury-decision-last-night-1126-body-image-1417019958.jpg' id='7033']

Protesters in New York. Photos by the author

Thousands of protesters once again took to the streets in New York and other cities across the country Tuesday night, showing their solidarity with the people of Ferguson, Missouri. This was the second round of protests following a grand jury's decision on Monday not to indict Darren Wilson for killing Michael Brown.

In  ​Oakland, protesters blocked the freeway, taking over Interstate 580 in both directions, and in ​Dallas, they shut down Interstate 35E. In Los Angeles, Seattle, Washington, DC, and Boston, cries for justice for Brown rose above the streets. It was about the events in Ferguson, but it was also a response to a criminal justice system that many see as deeply racist, corrupt, and unresponsive to the needs of the people.

In New York City, thousands of demonstrators marching from Union Square swelled FDR Drive as they boarded the ramp on Houston Street and marched miles up to the United Nations building at 42nd Street and First Avenue. There, an impassioned young black man in a suit led a nearly five-minute-long moment of silence for Brown, holding his hands above his head even as his arms shook. The march continued to Times Square, where police  ​made ten arrests, and then up the West Side Highway farther north to Harlem, where the rally continued late into the night.

[body_image width='640' height='480' path='images/content-images/2014/11/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/26/' filename='heres-how-america-protested-the-ferguson-grand-jury-decision-last-night-1126-body-image-1417020152.jpg' id='7034']

Some of the most emotionally charged moments of the evening came as the protesters took FDR Drive, climbing over guardrails near the on-ramp to stop southbound traffic and completely occupy the north side. As the wall dividing a sidewalk from FDR grew higher, some youths who had opted to walk next to the street climbed over the barrier, hoisted up by other demonstrators.

Chants—some of them familiar from old Occupy Wall Street rallies—rang out as protesters covered more than 40 city blocks:

"Whose streets? Our streets!"

"Hands up, don't shoot!"

"Black lives matter!"

"Turn it up, don't turn it down—we do this for Mike Brown!"

The crowd was full of students and teenagers of all races who remained peaceful throughout the night. At one point, a white man with gray hair dressed in a suit angrily threw debris at demonstrators, who did not respond in kind. "Back to business," a young woman said, and so they went.

While many New Yorkers turned up to display their anger with the system that failed to indict Wilson, they stressed the national importance of their message.

"It's an American problem," said 19-year-old Nigel Scott, a black student of African studies at New York University. "I'm only 19 years old, and I already feel like I don't belong in the country that I've been born in," he told me, holding a sign that read "My Life Matters." "I'm tired of having to wear my NYU sweatshirt around the city so people aren't scared of me. I'm tired of people being scared of me just for who I am."

Most demonstrators agreed they were just plain tired of waiting for change.

"I was out here for Trayvon Martin, I was also out here for MIke Brown back last August. It's just infuriating and saddening more than anything that we have to keep doing this," said Christiana Harry, a 22-year-old senior in sociology at Howard University. "The poster I made has so many names on it it's crazy. You know, going back to '99," when NYPD officers  ​killed an unarmed Amadou Diallo in a hailstorm of 41 bullets and got off scot-free.

Just days before the Ferguson decision came down, NYPD rookie Peter Liang  ​fatally shot 28-year-old Akai Gurley in a residential stairwell. In a rare admission of wrongdoing, NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton sa​id that "no dialogue was exchanged" between the two men, and "the deceased is totally innocent." The medical examiner ruled Gurley's death a homicide.

[body_image width='640' height='480' path='images/content-images/2014/11/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/26/' filename='america-protested-the-ferguson-grand-jury-decision-again-last-night-1126-body-image-1417020265.jpg' id='7035']

The recent police-involved shooting, combined with a racial disparity in City Council representation (of 51 members, 26 are people of color, though whites are a minority in the city), also prompted a dozen Council members to walk out of a meeting Tuesday and join the protests overrunning the streets of Manhattan.

"We stand here today as members of the New York City Council, representatives of our majority minority city to proclaim in solidarity that black lives matter," City Council members said together. "Black lives matter in Ferguson, Missouri. Black lives matter in the stairwells of our NYCHA [New York City Housing Housing Authority] communities."

Demonstrators hoped the march would rally support for criminal justice reform and spread the word about police violence in black communities.

"I believe that, if we come together, we show solidarity, that's what really makes a difference," said Harry. "Everybody comes together and says this is wrong, and we're going to show you why it's wrong."

A young man who wanted only to go by "George" was less optimistic. "The system isn't broken. It's working exactly as it should," he told me.

Follow Kristen Gwynne on ​Twitter.

Star Trek: The Illogical Fighting Style of James T. Kirk

The First US Official to Resign Over Afghanistan Is Fighting to Help Whistleblowers

0
0

​ [body_image width='640' height='427' path='images/content-images/2014/11/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/26/' filename='whistleblower-matthew-hoh-interview-198-body-image-1417018828.jpg' id='7024']

Matthew Hoh. Photos by Adam Barnett

It's five years since Matthew Hoh became the first US official to resign in protest over the government's handling of the Afghanistan war, resulting in a PR disaster for the US government.

"After I resigned, I was in a bar and it just so happened that I was sitting next to an editor from the Washington Post. We got talking and he told me to call the foreign affairs desk the next day." He did and a few hours later, Post journalist Karen DeYoung was on the phone. They spoke for six hours and within days, his resignation letter was on the front page.

In the letter, Hoh explained he had lost confidence in the tactics being used in the conflict, and that he had no idea why it was going on. He wrote, "My resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end."

Today, sitting in his hotel room in central London, wearing a War Resisters International badge and with leather elbow patches sown onto his jacket, he admits he is surprised by his journey from Marine Corps captain to peace activist. "I never planned any of this," he says. "In a year I went from thinking I would have 35 years in the government before getting a PhD and teaching at a small college somewhere to saying, 'Fuck you, I am not doing this anymore. It's wrong.'"

The years since he resigned have been marked by the current administration embarking on what Glenn Greenwald has called "the mo​st aggressive and vindictive assault on whistleblowers of any president in American history." Of the 11 times the Espionage Act has been used to prosecute whistleblowers who have leaked information to journalists, seven have been under Obama. Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist James Risen is to this day ​facing possible prosecution for refusing to reveal the identity of his one of sources to the authorities.

Hoh now fears that if he had blown the whistle today as he had done in 2009, he would be facing prosecution. This explains his motivation for becoming an advisory board member at ExposeFacts, a new website led by veteran journalist and activist Norman Solomon. The project is designed as a place for people to leak information safely, while also offering better protection to whistleblowers and campaigning to shield reporters from state surveillance. It already has the backing of a host of Pulitzer Prize winners and Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times.

The day before I meet him, Hoh was part of panel of former intelligence workers at the launch of ExposeFacts that told the world's media that they were fighting back against the Obama administrations "war on journalism and whistleblowing."

They aim to provide technology for secure, anonymous whistleblowing, and to push the actions of whistleblowers "to the forefront of the public consciousness."

[body_image width='640' height='427' path='images/content-images/2014/11/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/26/' filename='whistleblower-matthew-hoh-interview-198-body-image-1417018880.jpg' id='7025']

Having enlisted for the Marines in the heady days before 9/11, initially Hoh's military career was "just like the brochure said it would be." He was stationed in Okinawa, Japan, with his days spent training, traveling the world, and hanging out at the base's private beach.

Hardworking and intelligent, with supreme self-confidence and an inherent curiosity about the world, Hoh enjoyed what he describes as a "Forrest Gump-like" rise through the ranks.

By the time US forces invaded Iraq, he was working for the Secretary of the Navy. By 2004, he was leading reconstruction projects in Iraq, handing out money to political leaders and making arrangements, ostensibly so the country's devastated athletics facilities could be rebuilt. He would travel with his own security team, with a pistol tucked into his suit pocket and $25 million in cash.

"It was part Scarface, part Lawrence of Arabia," he recalls. "But it was very instructive to me about the folly of war."

Throughout the conflict, Hoh was skeptical about the reasons for going to war and the mission itself. "I certainly doubted why we were there and could see it wasn't adding up. I was doing all I could to do it right," he says. "But it doesn't matter how much honor you possess if a war is morally fraught."

He worked with a group of women in Baghdad and the memory of them haunts him still. They were modern and educated. They wore hijabs that matched their mascara and believed in the US mission.

"We gave them this hope and this promise and then we gave them a hell that you and I can't even imagine," he says. "I know one of them is still alive, but that is something that has haunted me ever since. I don't know if they were blown up in a car bomb, or if they were raped, or if their families were killed. That's where a lot of my moral injury comes from."

After a period spent moving from one prestigious desk job to the next, Hoh was back in Iraq in 2007. He was with a small group of men when the helicopter they were traveling in crashed over the Persian Gulf. "It was kind of ironic because you go to the desert and almost die in the water," he says. "Four guys died, including one who was a friend of mine and I could not save any of them. It crushed me. I had survivor's guilt."

On returning home he could barely function. While spending a day at the beach in Delaware, he had a flashback. "It came over me as soon as I went in the water. All the stereotypical PTSD symptoms you hear about not liking fireworks, or not being in crowds, they're all a joke, compared to this moral injury. It's just blackness," he says.

"The alcohol became key. I was always a big drinker, but this was different. It was the only way I could get through the day. My days in this period consisted of getting up, going to work, leaving work as soon as possible, getting home, working out, drinking, blacking out by 10 PM and then doing it all again."

Two years later, figuring that if he was going to die, it may as well be in Afghanistan, he went back to fight. He was the State Department's senior representative in Zabul province, an area which had seen some of the fiercest fighting of the war. But five months into his year-long contract, he was done with the military.

"I didn't believe any of what was being said. That we were there to protect ourselves from another 9/11 and all that stuff. It just wasn't true," he remembers.

That's when he resigned and before long he was being chased by journalists who wanted to hear of his disaffection. "It was a huge deal," recalls Hoh. "I had three TV news trucks outside my house and 75 media requests, the day after it broke."

Despite US Envoy Richard Holbrooke telling him that he understood his misgivings about the war and that his letter was being "taken seriously," after news of his resignation went public Hoh found himself cut off from the Washington establishment. A Wikipedia page about him that downplayed his role in the State Department and featured a clip of him being used in an al Qaeda propaganda video surfaced online. For more than two years, he couldn't find work and had no money coming in. He found himself selling cars for a few months just to get by.

Being frozen out took its toll. By 2011, suicide had become a daily obsession. He would plan it meticulously, figuring out when and how he would do it, how he would tell his family. "The only thing I didn't do was buy a gun," he says.

[body_image width='427' height='640' path='images/content-images/2014/11/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/26/' filename='whistleblower-matthew-hoh-interview-198-body-image-1417019545.jpg' id='7030']

Ultimately, it was through the support of family and an ex-girlfriend who forced him into therapy that he was able to dig himself out of that feeling. A sense of having a greater purpose helped too. Every time he saw a politician lie on TV, or when he read a newspaper article he knew to be untrue, he kept wanting to speak out. "I was out in public and doing media, so I felt like I couldn't kill myself," he says. "People would say, 'You're gonna listen to what that guy thinks about the war?! He shot himself in the head!' I had this cause, this purpose and I could not discredit that by killing myself."

Hoh is now 41. Having left Washington vowing never to return, he lives in Raleigh, North Carolina and earns $48,000 a year through his job the Center for International Policy. If he had stayed in the military, he says, he would be earning more than double that.

He's turned his back on a career, a high salary, an institution, and a way of life—now he's determined to help others who want to do the same. For all he's lost by speaking out, he's also gained a tremendous amount. "I'm very happy," Hoh tells me later. "With the moral injury, the PTSD, the depression, the suicidality, I have my bad periods, but I'm getting through. I don't own a gun, I don't keep alcohol in my house, I see my psychologist every week, I take medication. I manage it like you would manage high blood pressure. I'm just happy that I can express my own thoughts and think my own way. That's worth more than any amount of money."

Follow Joe Sandler Clarke on ​Twitter.

This Migrant Spent Over Two Years Behind Bars and Begging to Leave the UK

0
0

​ [body_image width='640' height='427' path='images/content-images/2014/11/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/26/' filename='years-in-detention-centre-demanding-to-go-home-108-body-image-1417012320.jpg' id='6986']

Paul Addo

This post originally appeared in VICE UK

The UK locked up over 30,000 people last year—not for committing a crime, but for wanting to stay in the country. Immigration Removal Centers are used to house people who people who have been rejected for asylum. Desperate not to be forcibly returned to where they came from, be that a war zone or place of persecution over politics, sexuality or whatever else, they languish in one of these prisons by all but name until they can be removed from the country against their will. In the case of Paul Addo, things were a little different. He was locked up for incredible two years and eight months, being moved from one private detention center to another—all the while trying to leave the country.

"I was convinced I'd be gone in one week," said Paul when I met him at Heathrow, near the Colnbrook and Harmonsworth detention centers where he had spent much of his time behind bards.  "One week became two, then three. It was a bad dream. I was locked up for longer than killers and rapists. And at least they have an end in sight." During this time, he didn't know when he would eventually be let out. "Being locked up with no time limit is worse than prison. It is totally degrading," he told me.

Paul says he travelled the world for years with what he thought was a UK passport, believing he had dual UK and Ghanaian citizenship. But on his return from a trip to Amsterdam in April, he was stopped by UK Border Agency officers, who found his passport to be false. After serving six months in jail he wanted to go back to Ghana. On a routine visit to the Home Office to help process the move, he was put in a removal centre.

"They held me all that time yet here was no attempt to deport me," he said Paul. "They never gave me a ticket. I just wanted to go to Ghana, I had a good life there. But the Ghanaian High Commission said that I didn't have a Ghanaian passport. My brother even flew to Ghana to help get documents for me. I was doing this with my own money. I was desperate to leave the country at all costs."

Many of Paul's fellow detainees were not able to access legal representation, but Paul was fortunate enough to be able to hire unlawful detention specialist Janet Farrell. She said, "Paul complied fully with the documentation process and with regular reporting prior to being detained. But the UK can't control the integrity of other countries' systems. There is a huge amount of variance in what's required to prove citizenship in other countries. A lot of people like Paul have been out of their country a long time and may find it hard to prove they are citizens."

In other words, Paul was being punished by a UK bureaucracy for the failures of a foreign one. He's not the only one. "Many long-term detainees are being held on the basis that the Home Office, for a variety of reasons, cannot document them," said Farrell. "Paul was willing to go home, but because the Ghanaian authorities did not issue a travel document for his return, he was detained for close to three years."

[body_image width='640' height='426' path='images/content-images/2014/11/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/26/' filename='years-in-detention-centre-demanding-to-go-home-108-body-image-1417012844.jpg' id='6987']

Morton Hall detention center

Once he was in the centers, Paul had a miserable time. "There were a lot of human rights violations in detention," me told me. "People I knew got hurt by officers, and anybody who saw anything would be let out or transferred in the middle of the night. I saw disabled people, people with crutches and wheelchairs, sick people detained, elderly people and blind people too. There were a lot of self-harmers, many people with mental difficulties—being locked up with no end in sight, and not for committing any crime takes its toll. And healthcare in most detention centers is minimal."

"I had a cell mate who had sickle cell anaemia and suffered badly. I was taking care of him, helping him find charities and a solicitor to help. They moved me to another detention center. Every time I made friends or helped people I was moved to another detention center. I was moved back and forth almost 20 times," he said.

Finally in December 2010, on his ninth attempt, Paul got bail. He sued the Home Office for unlawful detention, and they settled for about £50,000. That's just one way in which the UK tax payer is losing out. Processing asylum seekers in the community works out around 80 percent cheaper than in detention. The Home Office recently admitted that in 2013 to 2014 the total cost of running immigration detention was £164.4 million. This is largely outsourced to multinationals such as Serco and G4S—two companies which had to pay the Home Office tens of millions of pounds back after they massively  ​overcharged them to put electronic tags on offenders.

Now back in Ghana, Paul intends to make up for lost time by working on regeneration projects.  Others Paul met in detention won't fare as well when they eventually get out. Around half of ex-detainees do not leave the UK, but are kept in limbo, surviving on tokens worth £35 a week as their asylum claims are processed. If they do not qualify for that, they're in destitute because they're not allowed to work. "A lot of people I know ended up homeless," Paul said. "One man I help with money was sleeping rough in bus shelters at the age of 69. In other European countries you are allowed to work and contribute to the economy while you wait for your case to be resolved."

Janet Farrell added, "The UK is the only EU country that hasn't signed up to the EU Returns Directive which places a maximum time limit on immigration detention and requires automatic judicial oversight of prolonged detentions, save for Ireland, which has its own time limit which is shorter than the Directive in any event. The lack of these two safeguards in my view encourages a culture of poor decision making by the Home Office and the use of detention by default."

At this month's Parliamentary Inquiry into the Use of Immigration Detention, MPs heard that countries like Sweden that have a system of processing immigrants in the community actually end up having more voluntary returns.

Paul believes that in his case, detention was definitely a hindrance, not a help to persuading the Ghanaian authorities to allow him to eventually return. "The detention regime is run as a business with detainees as the commodity," Paul said.

Melanie Griffiths, research fellow at Bristol University, who specialises in  detention, deportation and asylum agrees. "Detention is big business, outsourced to big international corporations, which reduces accountability," she said. "Interestingly, some of the companies involved have ties to Guantanamo Bay."

"As there's no time limit to detaining people in this country, there's no pressure to decide cases quickly. People are warehoused and forgotten about. Everybody I have talked to in detention is stressed, on sleeping pills. Many self-harm. This all seems only designed to appease UKIP supporters."

Over the last 12 months, UK immigration detention center capacity has increased by 25 percent, and the government has just announced a plan to double the size of Campsfield House Immigration Removal Centre in Oxfordshire. Maybe Paul's story will give them pause for thought about how helpful that will really be.

Follow Ben Gelblum on ​Twitter

Jian Ghomeshi Posted $100,000 in Bail, and Now Lives with His Mom

0
0

[body_image width='1874' height='1406' path='images/content-images/2014/11/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/26/' filename='jian-ghomeshi-is-about-to-appear-in-court-444-body-image-1417029420.jpg' id='7091']

​Photo by Allison Elkin.

Jian Ghomeshi has been released on $100,000 bail following his arrest this morning. According to a  ​Toronto Police Se​rvices release, Ghomeshi faces four charges of sexual assault and one charge of overcoming resistance, which, according to Canada's criminal code, means that he's alleged to have attempted to "render another person insensible, unconscious or incapable of resistance."

According to TPS, the investigation has been ongoing since October 31st 2014, after three women filed complaints alleging that he was physically violent without their consent. This was just days after Canadian actress Lucy DeCoutere went public with allegations of sexual assault that occurred over a decade ago. So far nine women have come forward to the media with allegations of violence, sexual abuse or harassment at the hands of Ghomeshi.

In what Star reporter Kevin Donovan ​described to th​e CBC as "a friendly arrest," police had been negotiating the terms of Ghomeshi's arrest through his legal counsel. At 8 AM today Ghomeshi turned himself in to Toronto's 11 Division in northwest Toronto. He arrived at a downtown courthouse in the ​back of a police cruiser shortly after noon, and due to the conditions of his release, he must now live with his mother (who sat in the front row of the public gallery today) and surrender his passport as he awaits his next court date.

This morning's arrest comes on the heels of recent news that Ghomeshi dropped his $55-million dollar lawsuit against the CBC and deleted all of his social media accounts, suggesting he may have known this was coming and was preparing for the ensuing legal battle. In his interview with CBC, Kevin Donovan speculated this recent activity had something to do with police charges, stating: "If Jian Ghomeshi had been told that he was going to be arrested... it was probably a wise move to drop that [lawsuit]."

When reached for comment by VICE, Jesse Brown, who delivered the Jian Ghomeshi story to the Star, told us: "My focus with this story remains on the CBC executives. None have taken the slightest bit of responsibility yet. Ghomeshi alleges CBC offered to let him walk & tell the public he quit *after* he showed them videos proving he'd battered a woman. They haven't denied it. If they offered to collude with Ghomeshi and conceal his crimes, how can they continue to run our public news service?"

CBC commented just after 1:30 PM, stating: "We understand that none of the charges involve employees or former employees of CBC and we won't be commenting about charges that are now before the courts."

VICE was at the bail hearing this afternoon. The Crown announced a publication ban on all victims' names with the exception of Lucy DeCoutere. As he signed a paper indicating that he understands the terms of his bail, Ghomeshi broke his cool composure with a slight smirk. Accompanied by his lawyer, he exited the College Park courtroom and entered the elevator to be met on the ground floor by a crowd, the flash bulbs of cameras going off, and the sound of voices hurling insults and questions.

Despite the extra strong-armed police in yellow jackets guarding him, the large crowd of media was hard to control. One cameraman accidentally hit a cop over the head with his equipment and police were screaming to back up as Ghomeshi and his lawyer descended the stairs to the eastern exit on Yonge Street, fearing that people would start falling down the stairs. Despite being asked over and over by reporters how he was feeling, Ghomeshi kept a straight face showing no emotion as he took his walk of shame and stayed completely silent. As the sea of people, cameras, and smartphones moved outside, Ghomeshi and his lawyer were put into a van that was stopped next to the curb outside of the Yonge Street entrance of College Park. 

Before taking off, Ghomeshi's lawyer gave the following statement: "Mr. Ghomeshi will be pleading not guilty. We will defend and respond to these allegations fully and directly in a court of law. It is not our practice to litigate matters in the media. This case is will be no exception. What we have to say will be said in court. We have no further comment and Mr. Ghomeshi will not be making any statements."

We will update this story as it develops.

With additional reporting from Allison Elkin and Patrick McGuire.


Watch Episode One of 'Refugee Chefs' on Munchies

25 Things You're Too Old for Now That You're 25

0
0

[body_image width='922' height='615' path='images/content-images/2014/11/25/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/25/' filename='joel-golby-things-youre-too-old-at-25-609-body-image-1416937152.jpg' id='6715']Happy birthday. The candles represent your dreams. Photo via Flickr user Ana C.

I don't know how old you are. I don't care, is the thing, because once you hit 25 you absolutely stop caring about the age or personal details like the names of people around you—they're all just sort of sacks of meat bouncing through a beige landscape and occasionally having sex or buying things. In August, I hit that milestone. Even though I still have a childlike face and body that will allow me to order off the kid's menu forever, I started to feel a change inside. Someone said "on fleek" to me and I didn't even bother to find out what it meant. I went to McDonald's at the end of a night out and thought, Actually, no, and then went home and instead had a single carrot. I started a savings account. Young me—rebellious me, with no responsibility outside of a job transcribing phone calls—young me is absolutely gutted at this development. Old me—that is to say, the new me—could not give less of a shit.

Sometimes, when twilight is descending, I go and find a bench by the sea and watch the young people peacock up and down the promenade. It's then that I think back fondly to the things that 20-year-old me used to do—sorting Skittles by color then dropping them into six bottles of vodka and later dropping a perfect rainbow of vomit into and around the toilet at my mom's house; really enjoying Christopher Nolan's Batman movies and telling people how much I enjoyed them; reading a book and thinking it was important. And then I think: What an awful, awful garbage person I was. No one wants to hear my thoughts on Slaughterhouse Five, and they never did in the first place. Fuck!

In-depth analysis from our SEO guy tells me most VICE readers are either 25 or approaching 25 and, as such, in dire need of guidance. Consider me your wise old sage. Because I've been there: Hitting 25 is the first true reminder that life is finite and you are dying by the second (fun!!!). And because of this, it's a good age to open your eyes, clear your head, and stop doing things you are too fucking old for any more. Here they are:

[body_image width='969' height='672' path='images/content-images/2014/11/25/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/25/' filename='joel-golby-things-youre-too-old-at-25-609-body-image-1416937243.jpg' id='6716']Some young people enjoy a Jägerbomb (Photo via Kris Fricke)

1) Doing Drugs to Impress People
Any time I've ever done cocaine, I just want to call my parents. Once, while smoking weed, I watched as one of my friends very slowly pissed herself. Is that what drugs are supposed to do? Either way, it's not for me. Not anymore.

If your thing is getting fingered in a cab by a dude with coke on his hands, then please, by all means, go and do that right now. I'll even hail one for you. But when you hit 25 I think you know whether you actually like doing drugs—with all the requisite waiting around for a drug dealer and the furtive toilet visits and all the times you are expected to rip your shirt open to the naval like that famous soccer lady and shout "I LOVE DOING DRUGS"—or whether you are just doing them because the cool kids do them. We were shown boring videos about peer pressure in high school, and for fuck's sake, they ended up being right. There's no point doing drugs after 25 unless you're in it to win it, so unless you're a full-blown addict, it might do you good to stop now. (It might also be a good idea if you are a full-blown addict.)

2) Being ID'd
​It's really fun being ID'd when you are young and actually have ID because there is something glorious about the face people pull when they are counting backward and trying to figure out your age from your year of birth. But then when you are ID'd twice in the same night by the same fucking bartender and you are 25 years old, it becomes more tedious. Also, I'm way too good at ordering from a bar to actually be the age I look, which is 14. Also also, if I was 14 and trying to get ~drunk~ I wouldn't be asking you the etiology of Fernet, or ordering a $20 Old Fashioned. Especially not by myself. :(

3) Eating Bread with Wild Abandon
​The days of me eating an entire baguette with some brie and then fitting into my jeans the next day are over.

4) Trying to Understand Young People with Their Young People Music
​I will give $100 to the first person who can sit me down and convincingly explain how Nick Jonas is considered talented and likable or how can decipher anything Ariana Grande is saying ever.

5) Drinking Four Loko or a Jägergrenade
​A Jägergrenade is a special kind of Jägerbomb that somehow incorporates a shot of tequila into the mix. A sidewalk slammer is when you drink a bottle of OE down to the label, fill the rest with Four Loko, and wake up on a stranger's lawn covered in mysterious contusions without your wallet or phone. When you're 25 and not a crust punk, you can get away that kind of shit maybe, maybe once a year—at most. Ration wisely.

6) Panicking at an ATM
​When you are poor, the cash machine is kind of like the Wizard of Oz, as in you treat it like there's a tiny person inside who decides to either gift you with money or make you look like a fucking idiot. The worst one is when you put your details in and ask him for $10 and the little dude whirrs and clicks and your stomach rises and your heart beats in your throat and the he goes, "Sorry, this machine can only dispense: $20 bills." And then you have to walk away in shame because you only have 15 bucks in your account. When you get to 25 you are so over this guessing game that it's not even funny. Fuck ATMs and fuck banks. Fuck that tiny cash machine troll who loves to deny you the ability to go see a movie or eat a decent meal. But also, crucially: Fuck having to pay for a pack of Ramen noodles with a mug full of dimes. Basically, by the time you're 25, you should just take a few minutes to figure out how to manage your dough.

[body_image width='1040' height='696' path='images/content-images/2014/11/25/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/25/' filename='joel-golby-things-youre-too-old-at-25-609-body-image-1416937328.jpg' id='6718']Yeah it's out of order. Forever. As in, you have no money. Photo via Flickr user ​Johnny Wilson)

7) Experimenting with a Haircut
​If you've got to 25 and you haven't got every fringe or dye job or shaved patch hair mistake out of your system yet then you've been doing hair wrong for a solid quarter-century. Stop trying to stay current. Anything that requires more than two products or curling implements is an needless complication at your age. When you go to the hairdressers, ask for a short back and sides for boys or "a bit off the ends, but not too much off the ends" for girls. That's it. That's your haircut forever now. Enjoy it.

8) Talking to Anyone Under the Age of 22
​I know there's that thing about the youngest people you can viably have sex with being half your age plus seven, but I don't know what I would say to a 19.5-year-old girl beyond, like, "Hey, has anyone ever tried to explain floppy disks to you?" Most of my conversations are basically just loudly referencing shit that happened when I was around that age, which means the girl in question would have practically been a zygote. Consider this my resignation from talking to anyone born after 1994.

9) Engaging in Small Talk
​Sometimes I get introduced to people and I say, "Oh, nice to meet you," and they say, "Uhhh, we've met before." That's when you decide to never speak to that person again, if you can help it. Think about it: If they were that good at small talk, you would have remembered them. You only drink sidewalk slammers once a year these days, after all, so that shit isn't on you. At this point, the unmemorable person will start yammering on about some boring-as-fuck PR job. Slowly back away while suggesting that they become interesting in the future.

[body_image width='960' height='720' path='images/content-images/2014/11/25/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/25/' filename='joel-golby-things-youre-too-old-at-25-609-body-image-1416937391.jpg' id='6719']Earth humans enjoying their small talk. Photo via Flickr user ​Taulu

10) Taking Convoluted Subway Riders
​I never actually watched Sex and the City, but I'm pretty sure that lady took cabs like, all the time. And how?! Her job was to literally write once a week about the people's whose dicks had been inside her. I have a real job (sorta), and I write several articles per day. Suck on that, Bradshaw. But anyway, if Hopstop is telling me I have to travel to basically Midwood in order to catch a train that'll ultimately take me less than a mile west of my starting point, I'm just getting in a car. If fictional sex lady can to afford it, so can I.

11) Shopping at the Mall
I don't think my body is physically strong enough, in my increasing old age, to permeate the cologne barrier surrounding a store like Hollister anyway. Everything in Forever 21 is basically made of tissue paper meant to disintegrate immediately after purchase. Their blouses are like the ghosts in Field of Dreams—unable to physically exist after crossing a certain physical boundary, which in this case, means the entrance to the mall. Stop buying shitty clothes.

12) Having Terrible Friends
​If we go for a drink and I have to basically interview you to make conversation, I'm not having fun. When you invite me to a Facebook event that doesn't even occur for six more weeks, I think you're an idiot. If you say, "We should hang out more" but don't suggest a time or a place for us to hang out, you're not even trying. (We also probably hate each other.) I have difficulty enough managing the three friends I already have, and I don't have time to add more anyway.

[body_image width='1024' height='768' path='images/content-images/2014/11/25/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/25/' filename='joel-golby-things-youre-too-old-at-25-609-body-image-1416937447.jpg' id='6720']Go home, dude. Photo via Flickr user ​DEM

13) Bad One-Night StandsPretending to care about people's jobs in PR is the absolute definition of hell. Pretending to care long enough to seduce them, accompany them on a 15-minute cab ride, navigate their tiny, dark apartment, knock a lamp over and awkwardly fuck them? That's a Herculean task. And, oh by the way, for all that effort, there's a 99.9 percent chance it's going to be terrible. If you find someone who doesn't work in PR and who you don't hate fucking, hang on for dear life and never let go. (But don't get married or anything. Ew.)

14) Spring Break
If you're 25 or older and this idea seems appealing, I can't help you.

15) The Bitter, Bitter End of a Night Out
​Next time it hits 3 AM and you run out of ideas and someone asks, "Where next?" experiment with saying, "Let's go to our separate homes and sleep." Nothing good has ever come out of trekking through the snow to the only bar anyone can think of that might possibly be open. What do you expect's gonna happen when you get inside—that your shitty, drug-thirsty friends are suddenly going to get more pleasant rather than desperate and sad? Stop deluding yourself.

16) Hangovers
When you get to be 25 and realize the solution is literally just "drink a glass of water" and maybe "eat a banana," you feel really, really dumb.

17) Waiting in Line
​Call your parents right now and thank them for taking you to Disney World as a kid. Once you're aware of your own mortality, waiting in line to ride some spinning tea cups is basically impossible. Your mom loves the shit out of you.

18) Kissing Bartenders' Asses
​I am sick of acting like the person handing me a drink is doing me some huge favor. I'm not your friend: This is a business transaction, and I'm not some 21-year-old who's not gonna tip you. Also, your job is to pour liquid into dirty cups, occasionally pick those cups up when I am done with them and sometimes drop the cups in a stack on the floor. You're not Jesus, alright? You're a dude who wears a bottle opener attachment on his belt. PLEASE TAKE MY MONEY.

19) Not Having the Heating On
​Wearing every sweater you own at once is not the adult option.

[body_image width='819' height='569' path='images/content-images/2014/11/25/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/25/' filename='joel-golby-things-youre-too-old-at-25-609-body-image-1416937504.jpg' id='6721'] Photo via Flickr ​Nathan Rupert

20) Festivals
​I went to Bonnaroo once when I was 20 and didn't have fun. That said, there's no way I would have fun now. The best thing that happened to me was taking acid when Phish started playing, falling asleep, and waking up to the same song being played 12 hours later. That band sucks, but like, I didn't know time had passed andI thought I was lost in a guitar solo! After that? The second best thing was like, using the portable toilets on the first day, before the area surrounding them became an impenetrable moat of human shit. That was literally the second-best thing that happened during the entire festival.

21) Utilizing Presents From Cheap Relatives
​Everyone has the one family member who, every year, gifts a box set of sickly sweet smelling items -- usually like a lotion, a "bath gel" (idk what that really is), and some sort of body wash. In your early 20s, the trick was to save them up and, once you ran out of normal products, coast off the gifts for a good month stretch. Your grandma/aunt/whatever was cheap for giving you such a shitty present, but you're even cheaper if you're willing to be covered in glitter and smell like a goddamn pineapple for a month to save $4. 

22) Reading Blogs
​Except this one? 

23) Pregnancy Scares
If I have to listen to another friend cry about how they might be pregnant, I'm going to kill myself. I don't know, maybe you should stop being mad at your dad and therefore fucking random ecstasy dealers you meet at bars, so we don't have to go through this for yet another month in a row? Condoms are free absolutely everywhere in this city, so I don't get what's happening with this. Get your shit together, though, we're 25

24) Any Text Message Longer Than 200 Characters
​tl;dr

25) Fingering
This obviously doesn't count for lesbians, but for straight people it's like come on. You guys can do p in v stuff! Fingering your girlfriend when you have a dick is basically really rude. It's the equivalent of loudly complaining about how boooring it is to play basketball when you're standing right next to a kid in a wheelchair. I hate you.

Inside the Burnaby Mountain Protest Camp

0
0

[body_image width='764' height='508' path='images/content-images/2014/11/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/26/' filename='inside-the-burnaby-mountain-protest-camp-952-body-image-1417024943.jpg' id='7063']

Photo by Emma Campbell and Mitch Stookey.

Erin Flegg is an activist and journalist who has helped organize the Burnaby Mountain protests. This is a first-person account of some of her recent experiences. It's an exclusive to VICE Canada.

On September 3, local contractors cut down 13 trees on unceded Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh) territory, more commonly known as the Burnaby Mountain Conservation Area, triggering a months-long blockade that has garnered attention nationwide.

Texas-based oil company Kinder Morgan has been attempting to survey the Burnaby Mountain for the purpose of drilling several 250-metre boreholes into the ground to collect data to determine if the mountain is stable enough to drive a pipeline through it. This proposed pipeline would be a twinning of the existing Trans Mountain pipeline, which currently transports 300,000 barrels of crude oil per day from Edmonton to the BC coast. The second pipeline would nearly triple capacity to 890,000 barrels per day.

When I arrived at the parking lot at the top of Burnaby Mountain last week, Marija Brzev was on the phone with her boss, attempting to negotiate her schedule. It was about 7 PM and her employer, the Vancouver-based housing advocacy organization Portland Hotel Society, was trying to convince her to cover the night shift. She spent the previous night alternately sleeping in the back of a pickup parked on the side of the road and sitting by the nearby fire to make sure it burned through the night. After a long day on the mountain, she was in no state to keep awake much longer, much less the whole night, and the shift in question started in three hours.

This is how it began: a handful of people clinging tenuously to things like employment, relationships and housing in order keep watch over two small patches of the mountain. After spending 13 hours locked down to Kinder Morgan's Westridge terminal with and activists Adam Gold, Mia Nissen, Dan Wallace, and Liam Mongeon, Brzev and a few others began spending night and day at the top of Centennial Way in the park, or down at the clearing where the oil and gas giant cleared the first trees.

They were soon joined by friends from out of town, people who quit their jobs to be there more often, and local mothers dropping by every morning and evening with food and clothes and candles. The bike ride up there is wretched, but the view is breathtaking, and after a summer spent doing ​research​ in blockade camps and resistance communities all over BC with my partner, it seemed only right that we should go, too.

Over the course of the past two months, the camp grew from a pile of tarps in the parking lot into a vibrant community space, complete with covered kitchen, sitting areas, and information boards.

After caretakers kicked surveyors off the mountain and surrounding area several times, Kinder Morgan applied for an injunction on the two main borehole sites, and the courts announced on November 14 that it would grant the injunction effective Monday November 17 at 4 PM.

A mass rally brought hundreds of people to the camp on Monday, but RCMP didn't move in. The mood was quiet, if a bit tense, as everyone waited to see when they'd decide to enforce the court order. Until Thursday, November 20, when Burnaby RCMP—backed by forces from surrounding communities of Delta and Surrey—stormed in and tore the whole thing down.

Now it's national news, with the number of arrests topping 70 and rising every day. And while it seems unlikely anyone will be able to stop work long enough to prevent Kinder Morgan from collecting the data it needs to continue with the project, the impact the camp and the subsequent events are having on both public opinion and investor security is undeniable.

After largely ignoring the people who built the camp on the mountain, the ​Globe and Mail​ this week published a flurry of stories about contr​oversy surrounding the project and the billions of dollars in develo​pment money tied up in court thanks mainly to First Nations-led opposition. Talking heads, aware of the province's strong history of resistance to major development, are conceding that this is big, even for BC.

​[body_image width='775' height='524' path='images/content-images/2014/11/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/26/' filename='inside-the-burnaby-mountain-protest-camp-952-body-image-1417025114.jpg' id='7067']

Photo by Emma Campbell and Mitch Stookey.

By all appearances a sweet and quiet young women, Brzev has almost single-handedly dealt with the media, from small independents all the way to national television news. After spending about an hour locked by the neck to a concrete block inside the injunction zone on Thursday, she removed the u-lock herself, shuffled to the outside of the police tape surrounded by an enormous huddle of supporters, and immediately told a group of salivating reporters:

"They're on unceded Coast Salish territory. They have no consent to be here from the Coast Salish people, so there's no reason why this pipeline should be built. The community has come out consistently to say no, and RCMP are here trying to say they're here for public safety, whereas the whole community is out here protecting each other. There's no reason for the line to be drawn."

Though no one mentions it, except to make jokes about how many babies they know were the result of cold nights spent camped out during Occupy, one of the first things to emerge from the camp was a shy romance between 22-year-old Brzev and her 25-year-old compatriot Skinteh. A wild-eyed mountain man who is impossible to pin down, Skinteh is in his element in the woods. If you want to talk to him for longer than 45 seconds, you better be prepared to follow him into the forest, help him haul out a twelve-foot log and hold it steady while he nails it to the barricades.

Watching him the last few weeks has been a lesson in knowing the difference between paranoia and preparedness. The camp itself, surrounded by fallen trees and shored up with rusted out car parts and broken statuary, looks insane, and there was talk of blocking off more and more trails to keep out cops.

RCMP officer Mike Kalanj, the mental health coordinator for the Burnaby detachment, served as spokesperson for the police force, and checked in almost every day since the injunction was granted, mostly to play nice and tell everyone that police had no orders to enforce that day. He said the same thing to camp police liaisons around 8 AM last Thursday, roughly ten minutes before two vanloads of police arrived on the scene.

​[body_image width='782' height='520' path='images/content-images/2014/11/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/26/' filename='inside-the-burnaby-mountain-protest-camp-952-body-image-1417024969.jpg' id='7064']
Photo by Emma Campbell and Mitch Stookey.​

Police told the caretakers the injunction lines would be clearly marked according to the GPS coordinates listed in the court document, and instead they taped off the public access road that leads up to the top of the mountain and Horizons restaurant, and then proceeded to push that line further and further out, choking peaceful protesters and throwing an elderly women to the ground. Police said protesters would be given the opportunity to stand in the safe zone without being arrested, and instead grabbed multiple people, dragged them across the police line and arrested them.

In spite of most of the media coverage focusing on the midd​le-class white ​person angle, some of the most powerful forces behind the blockade have been indigenous women.

When the weather turned cold, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh elder Sut-lut arrived and made a sacred fire—lit with ceremony and kept burning and free of anything but wood until the person who lit it chooses to put it out—and she and her sister Clarissa came almost every day to tend it. Sut-lut said that after hearing about 18-year-old Jakub Markiewicz chaining himself under a Kinder Morgan Jeep on October 29, she was compelled to come up to the mountain and start talking to the caretakers. As grandmother and mother, she said, she feels a special connection to the mountain and to the people defending it. She was on Burnaby Mountain, up the hill from the camp, on May 31, 1997 when she got the news that her only daughter had been murdered.

​[body_image width='783' height='511' path='images/content-images/2014/11/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/26/' filename='inside-the-burnaby-mountain-protest-camp-952-body-image-1417025085.jpg' id='7065']

Photo by Emma Campbell and Mitch Stookey.

"Then I understood why I needed to come up here and defend this place. It's a very special place for me." Most days she arrives wearing a t-shirt over her warm clothes with a picture of her daughter on the front.

"My daughter's gone so I'll do it for Christy Clark's son, Hamish Clark."

Arrested on Thursday after lying down on the cedar log her younger brother is carving into a totem pole, next to the spot where Kinder Morgan has been drilling 24 hours day, she has returned almost every day to tend the fire, along with indigenous women from these territories and others. They have kept the fire burning through the night, inviting elders and young people to come sit with them. RCMP moved the fire from its original spot inside the camp to an area out of the way of Kinder Morgan's equipment, but it's still inside police lines, which means anyone hoping to get near it needs police permission and escort.

As drilling continues round the clock and Kinder Morgan gets closer to finishing this round of work, people continue flood the mountain. A group of women acting in solidarity with the Klabona Keepers, the Tahltan elders fighting an injunction to protect the Sacred Headwaters of northern BC, spoke out yesterday and crossed police lines. A bus full of organizers and activists from Victoria got on the ferry to spend some time on the mountain. Burnaby residents continue to supply food and firewood in spite of the road closure and heavy police presence.

Kinder Morgan will likely finish its drilling and leave with the information it came for, but the caretakers have ensured the company will at least think twice before coming back again.

@eflegg

Somebody Invented a Pill to Make Your Farts Smell Like Roses

0
0

​The French have made many important contributions to this world: f oie gras, existential philosophy, the tuberculosis vaccine. And the great ideas just keep coming. We just caught a whiff of a French invention that will surely revolutionize the world as we know it: a pill that allegedly makes your farts smell like ​roses.

The man who invented these perfumed farts,  Christian Poincheval, is a 65-year-old entrepreneur who looks like​ a psychedelic Santa Claus. In the past, he's created things like a garden rake that functions like a Swiss Army knife and a line of toilet paper inscribed with trivia and thoughts about current affairs. This latest batch of genius was inspired by a bout of particularly fetid farts after dinner one night six years ago:

"We had just come back from Switzerland and we were eating a lot with our friends, and the smell from the flatulence was really terrible. We couldn't breathe, so me and a friend decided something had to be done," he told The Local.

And thus, the perfumed-fart pills were born.  They're made from a mixture of charcoal, fennel, seaweed, and blueberries, which are intended to mitigate whatever foul and sulfurous odor is brewing inside of you.

​60-capsule pack sells for 9.99 euros, or just over $12. Flavor options include roses and violets, plus a special edition of ​chocolate-flavored farts. Poincheval believes they'll make great stocking stuffers, for all of that fart-inducing holiday food. "There will be a real need for these pills over Christmas," he said.

Oh, I believe it. These will definitely be on my Christmas list, along with those ​pills that make you poop 24-karat gold.

Follow Arielle Pardes on ​Twitter.

Photos from Last Night in Ferguson

0
0

[body_image width='1499' height='1000' path='images/content-images/2014/11/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/26/' filename='photos-from-last-night-in-ferguson-body-image-1417030080.jpg' id='7097']

Last night we witnessed ​another wave of demonstrations ​around the country inspired by the Ferguson grand jury's decision not to indict officer Darren Wilson for shooting Michael Brown. Rallies shut down highways from New York to Oakland, and ​in Ferguson the police fired tear gas into the crowds and arrested more than 40 protesters. Due to an aggressive response from the local authorities and the National Guard there was reportedly less looting and violence, but it was still a tense night that saw smashed windows and a police cruiser set on fire. Photographer Barrett Emke was there, and this is what he saw.

Viewing all 38002 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images