This post originally appeared on VICE UK

Like many forms of black self-expression, black hair is not often noticed by broader society and only enters mainstream conversation when something has gone awry.

In recent times Chris Rock's Good Hair ​documentary attempted to introduce to a wider world the issues surrounding weave, hair relaxing, and black people conforming to Eurocentric ideas of beauty, but other than this rare example—and outside of a style mag sticking Pharrell or Idris Elba in a suit—there is still little conversation or visibility around black hair in wider society.

Talk on Twitter recently turned to a new film called Get Hard, the poster for which features Kevin Hart braiding Will Ferrell's hair while both grimace at the camera. The comedy follows millionaire Ferrell as he employs street-smart Hart to toughen him up before he heads to prison. The punchline of the poster was clear: For Ferrell to avoid ending up as a jail-house bitch he needs to look like someone you don't fuck with—he needs cornrows, a stereotypically black hairstyle that will make him better suited to prison life.

This is one of many examples where black hair is bound up in a matrix of negative associations and misunderstandings. Piers Morgan may now see himself as an expert on ra​ce relations, but he once revealed his total ignorance over black hair when he told Rihanna to abandon her p​ixie crop. That's not her real hair, Piers; it's a hairpiece. The discourse surrounding black hair is so awful that two-year-old Blue Ivy Carter is already the butt of jokes for her "messy" afro.

Black hair isn't talked about but instead viewed from afar with fascination, and then persecuted up close for failing to conform.

Journalist Reni Eddo-Lod​ge cites a common quote to coming up when there are clashes with black culture in the mainstream: "Black culture is popular; black people are not." Reni says that in mainstream culture, "blackness is used like an accessory, like punk or goth."

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The author at age four

Throughout my life, my hair has been either the source of trouble for the establishment or an object of wonderment for strangers who see no issue with running their hands through it without asking permission.

Growing up in East London, I eventually found myself going to private school in the sticks of Great London before going to the virtually mono-ethnic white spaces of Essex and Somerset for my further education. Since my teenage years I've existed on the fringe, acting like some sort of black emissary to my white peers, before returning home to accusations of "choc ice" and "bounty" (a.k.a. a black person who acts white).

My hair became a battleground as I attempted to stay true to my roots while also following rules that often do not consider or have any understanding of black ethnic and minority people. 

Sometimes the desire for acceptance manifested itself in a more Eurocentric cut, as I tried to put those who had never met a black man before at ease. At other times I've said, "Sod the rules," and the simmering resentment at having to prove myself as someone worth acknowledging as a person would manifest as a mohawk or a lightening-bolt pattern in my hair. I spent the majority of second year at university growing an afro, only to shave it all off just after my 20th birthday for fear I was playing up to the sassy token black stereotype.

For 90s kids Will Smith's character in  The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was the archetypal black man in a fish-out-of-water situation. For me, he was a figure I could easily relate to.

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The author, at left

Talking about her own struggles, Reni says it wasn't until she became politically aware that she started wearing her hair in its natural state:  "I didn't have a choice—as soon as I could walk and talk, my mom, bless her, was having my hair relaxed and I was having routine scalp sessions." 

To relax afro hair, a chemical agent is used to break down the chemical bonds of the hair. Damage to the scalp and burning is a constant risk during the process, so parents often wait for a child to come of age before having it done to them.

When I asked Reni why she thought her mother made this decision, she told me she thinks of it as the result of a litany of "insidious coercions" from mainstream media for people to conform to Eurocentric ideas of beauty.

"People are bombarded with insidious messaging that is informed by racism. If you think about the Eurocentric ideas of beauty you see, you rarely see a white person with a curly hairstyle, let alone a black afro," she said. "I was made to believe that black hair is dry, dirty, or nappy. I was convinced I couldn't go natural with my hair for a long time because it was unruly and messy."

All this makes for a dreadful shame. Afro hair is more than just what grows out the top of some people's heads. It's the summation of a cultural experience, a point of black self-expression and empowerment that comes from one of the most accessible pillars of black community—the barbershop.

Afro hair is more than just what grows out the top of some people's heads. It's the summation of a cultural experience, a point of black self-expression and empowerment.

The experience of going to a black barbershops and hairdressers is one like no other, a chance to immerse yourself in a culture and be at ease for a few hours with a cross-section of society. Growing up in Leytonstone, East London, some of my best formative experiences occurred in a barbershop called Mister Tee. (I currently get my hair done at a place called "Hair Force One." Barbershop names > nightclub names.)

The film  ​Barbershop may be pretty cartoony, but it was true in articulation of how the general day in the barbershop is so much more than your time in the chair.

Firstly, unless you have an appointment (rarely possible unless you've built a rapport with a barber over the years), most of the time you spend in a barbershop isn't in the chair itself. Barbershops function as conversation halls with haircuts included as extra. Outside of the church, there are few other places around where an educated accountant has just as much sway as a 15-year-old kid who wants to be a grime artist. 

It was in a barbershop where I first learned how to play checkers,  back in 1996—waiting for my dad to get a trim while he went at it with a Nigerian man who fervently believed Frank Bruno would beat Mike Tyson. It was in a barbershop where I saw numerous FA Cup finals unfold, watching games in the mirror reflection, hoping my barber wouldn't mess up my hairline in the event of a sudden goal.

"These places exists because the mainstream, which is coded white, doesn't cater to us. I can't go to white hairdressers who supposedly 'cater to everyone,' because no one there knows how to do my hair," says Reni Eddo-Lodge.

In our rapidly gentrifying cityscapes, barbershops make for some of the few black-owned businesses that stand firm on our streets; the home of local heroes. David Cameron's hairdresser may have earned himse​lf an MBE for swapping the PM's side parting, but I doubt he's done as much for his local community as your local inner-city black barber who dishes out fresh trims, words of wisdom, and truths to dozens of people a week.

"These places exists because the mainstream, which is coded white, doesn't cater to us," says Reni. "I can't go to white hairdressers who supposedly 'cater to everyone,' because no one there knows how to do my hair. When I went to university in the north of England, I had to travel several miles to Manchester to find a place that knew what to do with my hair. I once had someone in Toni & Guy try to charge me £80 [$125] for a routine trim because I was deemed a 'special case.' These places are important because they understand the issues of being black."

Afro hair cannot be cut by just anyone, so like Reni, to get a haircut I'm always drawn back to the black barbershop. School and university may have taken me out of Leytonstone, but Leytonstone remains in me, as I'll always need my hair cut (or at least I hope I will—my dad is 50 and still just about hanging on to his hair).

The barbershop is a constant pilgrimage. No matter how far away I go, I travel back to the barbershop and I'm put back in tune with the black experience, as people talk about the issues and stories about being black in the present day. Granddads tell me how lucky I have it that I was able to go to university and in turn I tell teenagers about the perils of doing my degree.  It's almost like a big brother program, years of black experience being passed on from person to person, all while we get our hair cut.

The products of our barbershops themselves—those cornrows, crops, and fades—are so much more than something to be dismissed as a novelty, bickered about by the media, or deemed disruptive enough to be suspende​d from school over.

There needs to be a greater acceptance and understanding of black hair and its many permutations. It's a crying shame that there is so much tension surrounding black hair. It's so much more than a visual punchline.

Follow Carl Anka on ​Twitter.

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Batman hanging out on a roof in Arkham City

Back in late 2011 I was a student with way too much time on my hands. One day, to fill some of that time, I figured I'd try to complete 100 percent of Batman: Arkham City.

It became apparent that this was an awful idea when I realized there were 400 items to collect or smash. Four hundred.  Skyrimwas coming out following week; I didn't have time for this. I'd finished the main story, of course. But that just bothered me more. I'd "finished" Arkham City, but I hadn't "completed" it. 

I soon realized I'd never "completed" a game where 100 percent "completion" means doing stuff outside the bounds of the main storyline.  Did that mean I was playing them wrong? The developers had put all this stuff in there to be seen, after all. Was I not getting the full experience if I didn't see everything? Or did that mean I simply wasn't a "completionist"? 

Then you have  ​all these statist​ics saying that huge numbers of people never finish the games they buy. If a decent percentage of people can't find the time to get to the end of the main story in your game, then how many do you think are going to go after all of the little collectibles? It also doesn't help that, for the most part, collectibles in games are utterly meaningless. Remember the pigeons in GTA IV? There were 200 of them littered around Liberty City. And what did you get for killing all of them? An Annihilator helicopter spawned on a helipad near Star Junction.

Batman: Arkham City—Riddler trailer

Imagine how long that would have taken, even if you were using a guide. Imagine the poor soul who had to write that guide. 

But hey, at least you got a helicopter. The exact same helicopter you can spawn literally any time you want by taking out your phone and dialing 359-555-0100. Of course, that's cheating—and anyway, you were butchering all those flying rats to get 2.5 percent game completion, right? A 40th of the game completed by doing something completely inane. Seems like a lot, tbh. And the pigeons aren't the series' only culprit. Remember the UFO parts in GTA V? Nah, me neither.

Going back to Arkham City for a moment, at least there was a purpose to it all. At certain points along your path of finding all the Riddler trophies (as Batman and Catwoman), destroying all of the cameras and lining up all of the question marks, you gained access to new side quests, each with a mini story and unique dialogue. It added an actual incentive, other than, "Haha, dickhead, you haven't finished the game unless you've done all this other stuff." 

That said, when there are so many things to collect before the final payoff, the incentive does have limited appeal. I ended up watching the Riddler side quests play out on YouTube. 

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Assassin's Creed Unity: stab throats, or scour Paris for collectibles? 

I suppose Arkham City would be an example of a game doing collectibles "right," even though I still barely collected any of them. So when there are good examples, why do so many games still take the wrong route? 

Ubisoft's  ​Assassin's Creed Unity brings back the treasure chests that have been a mainstay of the series up until now. It's not like money is ever a problem in an AC game, yet here they are, marked on your map, glowing as you run by them, saying: "I'm important! Search me!" 

In this year's Assassin's Creed iteration (or, one of this year's iterations, at least), the chests have different colors. The blue ones are tied to the game's companion app. So not only do I have to spend a few seconds watching the same animation play out, I have to download something else for my phone before I do it?

What's more bizarre is when collectibles are done well and poorly within the same game. I'm going to pick on Ubisoft again. While there are a lot of talented developers over there who make multiple impressive open world games year in, year out, they don't half make a lot of the same mistakes every time they do it. Take Far Cry 3 as an example. Skinning animals to craft better ammo pouches, taking over outposts to get new side quests and fast travel locations. Good stuff. Not only useful, but fun to do.

Hold on, what's this? I need to go and collect relics, too? What do I get for it? A couple of weapons and a recipe for a syringe that makes me invulnerable for a while? Well, it's not like this game is very hard to begin with, so screw that, what else have you got for me? "Letters of the Lost" to go and find? I mean, I appreciate someone had to write them all, but I can't imagine the contents of these letters are going to be life-changing in any way. Anything else? Collectible memory cards? These get me money and the occasional item. Great. It's a pretty world, but not pretty enough to methodically search in the hopes of finding something.  ​Far Cry 4 is just a mountainous Far Cry 3, and has an almost identical collectible system. Don't get me wrong, both are brilliant games, but can't we revolutionize just a little bit?

I get it—you need to populate your open world with random bullshit, or else it feels empty. But is that really the case? Even if you don't go looking for stuff to collect in GTA V, it still has the most complete and "alive" world that's ever been created in a game. Especially now ​in the new con​sole releases, with the updated polygon counts and extra facial animations. You can spend an hour just walking around and taking in the sights. Having to go and find said random bullshit: That would just remind me that I'm playing a game.

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Shadow of Mordor—if you don't enjoy this sort of thing, no fear: Instead, you can run around collecting mostly meaningless artifacts.

There's just too much. Open the world map on Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and you won't be able to see the ground for icons—side quests and stuff to collect and things to examine. I was doing the legendary weapon quests for a while, but eventually just ended up finishing the game's storyline because the missions happened to be nearby at the time. I was still nowhere near completing the side quests. Why would I go back to them now that I don't really have anything to use them on? As for the artefacts and ​Ithildin? I got a few of them if I was passing by. Couldn't tell you any of the stories associated with them now, though.

Developers, I want my collectibles to mean something. Give me a cool reward or an awesome cutscene—something to make it worth my time. The best parts of your game don't have to be restricted to the main story. Give people a little credit. If you entice them, they'll go and find all the stuff you put in your world. Better yet, make finding them actually fun. Hiding 50 objects around your world and saying your game takes two more hours to complete isn't good design or giving the player "value for money," it's laziness.

I'm not a student any more; I don't have the time to do all the boring stuff it takes to 100 percent a game. I have other things to do. There are several coins hidden down the sides of my sofa. My reward for finding them is that I get to buy dinner today. Those are some good collectibles. 

Follow Matt Porter on ​Twitter

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Montreal police spent $7.3 million on overtime during each 2012 student demonstration. Photo by E.K. Hudson.

​Full disclosure: E.K. Hudson was arrested in two of demonstrations, which prompted class-action lawsuits and she's not excluding herself from the suits. Here are the stories she filed: March 2​2, 2013 and A​pril 5, 2013.

Demonstrators have launched eight class-action lawsuits against the City of Montreal, claiming police violated their Charter-enshrined right to protest during the 2012 student strike.

The eight suits were given the go-ahead this summer with public notice given this week in a Journal Métro ad. The lawsuits automatically include anyone detained or ticketed in these demonstrations. If demonstrators choose to opt out of the suit, they have 90 days starting from December 6 to inform l​awyer Sibel Ataogul and her team.

Though Montreal police frequently used kettling and mass arrests throughout the student strike of 2012—popularly known as the Maple Spring—the tactic is by no means new.

In November 2005, the UN issued a repo​rt criticizing Montreal police for mass arrest tactics that encroach on the right to "peacefully participate in social protests." The report noted the then-striking fact that between 1999 and 2005, police arrested 2,000 demonstrators in Montreal, surpassing all other Canadian cities. 

However, that number pales in comparison to the arrests that took place during the student protests of 2012. In just six and a half months, between Feb. 16 and Sept. 3,  3,509 demonstrators we​re arrested in Montreal.

"Montreal, we're the capital of mass arrests in Canada," claims Alexandre Popovic, a Montreal activist who researches mass arrests and police brutality in the city.

Popovic was arrested in what seems to have been the first mass arrest that led to a class action—a precedent-setting case that Ataogul, the lead lawyer for the eight class actions now proceeding, is looking at carefully. The demonstration was an overnight Food Not Bombs action in Emile-Gamlin where 77 people were arrested and held overnight.

Popovic was involved in two different class actions. The first was launched in 1999 and the trial began in 2011. He eventually received $1,500. Demonstrators involved in the class-action suits now are hoping for more.

If all eight lawsuits are successful, the city will be forced to pay $21 million in damages to demonstrators. The damages for a March 22, 2013 protest, for example, which commemorated the one-year anniversary of the largest demonstration during the Maple Spring, could be as high as $6,638 per demonstrator who was kettled and ticketed.

Each of the class actions is linked to a demonstration in the last three years where police kettled demonstrators, detained them for hours (sometimes in extreme weather) and often doled out tickets to the tune of $637.

Class-action lawsuits allow a group of people who have a similar complaint to join their cases together and sue another party. The suits are designed as recourse for cases where people were less likely to independently bring their complaint forward for any number of reasons—financial or otherwise. A representative from the group must be chosen for each lawsuit to advance.

Julien Villeneuve, a CEGEP professor known during throu​ghout the Maple Spring as Anarchopanda, is the representative for one of the lawsuits. His class action is linked to a kettle and subsequent arrest of more than 400 demonstrators on May Day (May 1) 2013.

"To illegalize a demonstration is problematic. We have the right to gather, assemble and express ourselves in the public space," he said. "We're talking about people walking in the streets and chanting slogans."

All eight demonstrations from which the class actions stem were declared illegal under the controversial municipal bylaw P-6, which c​ame into place May 2012 amid the Maple Spring as demonstrations were reaching a daily fever pitch that nearly grinded the city's operations to a halt.

P-6 allowed police to declare an assembly of more than 50 people illegal if no itinerary had been provided in advance for police approval. It also banned demonstrators from wearing masks.

P-6 prompted heavy ​criticism from many quarers, including the United Nations, whose High Commissioner for Human Rights spoke against Quebe​c's "new legislation" after the introduction of bylaw P-6 and the introduction of Bill 78, provincial legislation that allowed the terms of P-6 to be enforced throughout the province. (Villeneuve has launched a constitutional challenge against the bylaw separate from the class-action lawsuits.) Anyone arrested for violating P-6 received a $637 ticket.

McGill law student Kevin Paul was arrested in two of the class-action demonstrations and is happy to see the actions moving forward—the money could make a big difference in paying off his student loans, if the suits are successful.

Guillermo, a Montreal student active in the student movement who would only be identified by his first name, was at four of the eight demonstrations that led to class-action suits.

"I'm very happy it's happening and I honestly just hope that this makes a dent in the [police's] funds," he wrote in an email.

At the height of the student strike, it was revealed that each demonstration cost Montr​eal police $7.3 million in overtime pay during spring 2012 and currently the City of Montreal is pa​ying $110,000 to outsource defense against Villeneuve's challenge to P-6. The City of Montreal refused to comment on the class action lawsuits but confirmed its in-house legal team would be handling the cases.

For Villeneuve, the $637 P-6 ticket is one of the major reasons many people stopped coming to demonstrations in Montreal and the continued threat of a ticket under the bylaw as an obstacle to mobilizing.

"There's a movement agains​t austerity in Quebec that is gaining traction and one of the obstacles that we have to overcome is the fear of police, the fear of brutality, the fear of P6, the fear of getting mass kettled and given fines." But Villeneuve is cautiously optimistic.

"It works until it doesn't and until people get fed up," he referenced a recent anti-austerity demonstration that openly violated P-6 by not giving police an itinerary and was well-attended.

"I think we're slowly started to overcome the barrier of fear and slowly starting to feel comfortable protesting again and it's going to be a long fight."

@EK_Hudso​n

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Photo courtesy Hiromi Itō

Hiromi Itō's first book to be translated into English, ​Killing Kanoko, takes its title from a poem in which the author, having recently given birth to a daughter, imagines killing the child numerous times. The poem is violent and striking for its unusual take on a new mother's relationship with her child. "Congratulations on your destruction," the poem repeats regularly, amid descriptions of contemplating abortion, aching nipples, and hordes of ants. It's a chilling work, one with a complex array of emotions and taboo ideas, altogether delivered in Hiromi Itō's trademark stream-of-consciousness gone hell-bent.

Hiromi Itō is one of the most famous and best-selling poets of modern Japan. Her synthesis of common voices, natural imagery, and uncanny thinking plainly set and reset the bar for a new wave of women's writing in a country where—perhaps even more than others—women have been traditionally held up to a quiet daily decorum.  Hiromi Itō shatters that in nearly every line. Reading her work, one gets the sense that anything can happen: shifts in diction, time, location; absorption of science writing into slang; emotional honesty to the point of sublime terror; dreamscapes mashed into the everyday.

Her second translated work,  Wild Grass on the Riverbank, translated by Jeffrey Angles, was recently published by ​Action Books. The 96-page tract demonstrates the author's shift from verse to a more continuous, genre-bent experience, knitting a full narrative across its many still-fragmented parts. The work follows the travel of a family of many children, their mother, and a father who is both alive and dead, through fields of insane fauna, dystopian wasteland landscape, eerie haunted temporary homes, refrains of song fragments, skin plagues, and breakouts. 

Reminiscent of the plunging-network narratives of Alice Notley's Descent of Alette and Amos Tutuola's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, the book goes into both the multivalent psyches of the human landscape and the ground we walk on, forging between them a trek that is by turns spiritual, spasmodic, romantic, furious, contemplative, and insane.

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Here's an excerpt:

Michiyuki

By late summer, everyone on the riverbank was dead

Not just the creatures, but the summer grass, the rusted bicycles, the summer grass

Cars without doors or windows, the warped porn magazines, the summer grass

Empty cans with food stuck inside and empty bottles full of muddy water

Girl's panties and condoms, father's corpse, and so much summer grass

The riverbank only meant to control you

The summer grass touched our bodies

The seeds fell down onto our bodies

On the bank, I noticed a kind of grass that multiplied conspicuously

It was about one meter high and looks like some kind of rice

It had spikes full of seed

It was everywhere

It glimmered white in the dim evening light

Sticky liquid oozed from the spikes full of seed

The dogs got sticky

The dogs smelled terrible

The dogs agonized and rubbed their bodies onto the ground

The man from the riverbank appeared in the evening

Every evening he appeared and sat under an arbor

Completely alone

Older, grimy, shabby, pale as a corpse

When his penis rose up

A smell rose up like the one from the rice-like grass on the bank

The penis in his hand glistened and glistened

The flowers of the kudzu also rose up, I noticed the kudzu flowers rising up here and there, one day, we became tangled in the tendrils of the kudzu plants, I heard something slithering along abruptly, no sooner had I heard this than a tendril trapped my heel, it hit me, and knocked me on my back into a bush, there Sorghum halepense rattled in the wind, the unfamiliar grass from before started shaking, releasing its scent, then the tendril stretched all the further, crawling onto my body, getting into my panties, and creeping into my vagina, I inhaled and exhaled, I exhaled and the tendril slid in, I inhaled and the tendril slid out, I exhaled again and it slid further in, my body was turned this way and that like the leaves of the kudzu, my body opened and closed over and over, and Alexa watched all of this, Alexa was watching, watching and laughing, I became angry, so angry, I got up and shoved Alexa away, she fell down on her back, the tendrils clung to Alexa too, Alexa also turned this way and that, the tendril also went inside her vagina, deep inside, and she started to cry

Everyone was dead

Father

Little brother

Mother and me

Ahh... think I'll, I'll think to myself

Pack it in

And buy a pick-up

Take it down to L.A.

Find a place

To call my own

Maybe that place would be a hot spring

One that heals eczema, dermatitis, neuralgia

Menopausal disorders, diabetes, infectious diseases

A hot spring among hot springs, one that would fix you up right away

A place where you could soak yourself, open your pores, scrub your body, swell up

A place where you will want to live again and start a brand new day

Little brother cried, hey, I'm itchy, so itchy, I told him not to scratch, but he did it anyway, the place he scratched soon turned into a blister, little brother cried, I didn't scratch it that much, only a little, but even so, the place he scratched turned into a blister, there were blisters all over his body, after they ruptured, they got inflamed and full of pus

Little brother no longer seemed like himself, he was horribly swollen, he rolled all over the house, mouth open, wheezing, crying

And crying

Mother said, I want to take him to a hot spring, I've heard of a hot spring that's good for your skin, why don't we take your dead father and dead dog along too to soak in the water, so we decided to go, we just left everything as it was, we left the leftover food, dirty clothes, and wet towels just as they were, then we carefully laid my wheezing brother on the rear seat, and we stuffed some other things in the car, my little sister, spare clothes, the corpses, the dogs, plastic bags, pillows, food and drink (even some flowerpots), so much stuff, then we took off, I stared at the road from the passenger seat and asked, how do we get there? from the driver's seat, mother answered, it's over that mountain

Mother said, that hot spring

Will fix you up right away,

Soak yourself, open your pores, scrub your body, swell up,

It'll heal your eczema, your blisters,

Your skin infections, your ringworm,

Your dermatitis, your infectious diseases,

Your atopy, your allergies,

Your corpses, your impending death, your having died, and even death in general

A hot spring that will fix you up you right up right away,

A place where you will want to live again and start a brand new day,

Anyway, mother said,

Let's go over that mountain

The back seat was full, no space left for your feet

The car was old and rickety, and there hadn't been much foot room from the start

But still we stuffed it full

With things, with garbage, with food

With people, with dogs, and with corpses

Until there was no space left

It stunk of dogs

It stunk of death

Little brother was wheezing in the back seat

Little sister sometimes cried out as if she'd just remembered something

She said, I left something back at home,

She said, please go back, I forgot something

But we can't go back

Someone asked, if we just keep going

Through the fork in the road,

Won't that be Toroku?,

Won't that be Kurokami?,

Won't that be Kokai?,

The Jōgyōji crossing,

Through Uchi-tsuboi,

Up Setozaka slope,

Shouldn't we go

All the way over there?

She knew the way to the big camphor tree where that samurai-monk was buried

At the samurai-monk's big tree, we turned right at a three-way intersection

We could see the huge treetop of the samurai-monk's big camphor tree

From where we were, it looked so huge

That I bet it'd block out the whole universe if you were standing underneath

There was a path for tractors and pick-ups right there

We turned right at the three-way intersection

There was a small stone bridge, we crossed it

Then came out at another three-way intersection

We went straight

We went straight

We went up the road

We went through tangerine orchards on both sides, and when we came out

We were on mountainous roads

Where it was dark even in the middle of the day

The road meandered through a forest with shining leaves

The road meandered

The road drew close to a cliff

Then moved away

Ahh... I think to myself

Think I'll pack it in, and buy a pick-up, take it down to L.A.

Mother started to sing in a key way too high for her,

Ahh... Think I'll...

A tangle of karasuuri flowers and fruits

Ahh, Think I'll...

A thick bunch of worm-eaten leaves

A scarlet flower was blooming, probably a garden species that escaped somebody's yard

In the shade of the other plants, a large white flower was blooming

A flower pale and white

It couldn't have been a garden species, it was pale because it was in the shade

Another car came

We passed each other

We guessed the car was going home from the hot spring

All fixed up, the driver had fixed his skin trouble and was going home

I tried to get a good look

But the car sped by us in a flash

Much further and we'd be at the seashore

The seashore facing west

Mother said, doesn't look like there is a hot spring, beyond this is the Pure Land

The dog noticed the smell of the sea

It stuck its nose out the window, howling for the sea

Mother said, we should've crossed a large bridge,

I forgot the name, but it's a large bridge,

There were big floods here in the late nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries,

Lots of earth, sand, and drowned bodies got caught on the bridge,

But the floods downstream were even worse,

We screwed up when we missed the bridge,

The only water we've seen has been those small streams,

Mother said, we've definitely gone the wrong way,

Mother said, we'll never get there if we keep going this way

The dog that was howling for the sea rose up in the back seat

And walked across little brother

Alexa shouted in anger

Mother said, we'd better start all over,

I give up

Little brother cried out in a high voice,

You can't give up,

Is that all you know how to do?

Alexa shouted, shut up

Little sister wept, I told you, I told you

The dog barked

Lots of dogs barked

Alexa shouted, I can't take it anymore, I can't, I can't

She said, no one ever listens to me

She sunk her face into her thighs, curled up, and started to sob

Her voice grew louder, more childish than little brother's

More infantile than little sister's

She cried on and on, on and on

Only sobbing

On and on

On and on

Mother said, we should've turned around,

But if we did, we'd just get more lost,

Let's keep going down the hill to the sea, then go home round the cape

So that's how we got back home

Nothing fixed

Nothing found

Nothing

We failed

It was no good

It was all over

Follow Blake Butler on ​Twitter

Buy Killing Kanoko ​here.

​The Black Flock Motorcycle Gang is a German biker club made up of former neo-Nazis who swear they've rehabilitated and abandoned their hateful ways. VICE Germany went to hang out with some members of the club and learn about their bigotry-free lives of crime and debauchery.

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​ ​All images by Christopher Allman, via ​peopleofieya.com and his ​Flickr

In 1978, more than 900 people drank the "Kool-Aid" and died from cyanide poisoning in a twisted murder-suicide at ​Jonestown, the Guyana settlement of the People's Temple ​cult led by Jim Jones. In 1994, 48 members of the ​Order of the Solar Temple sect were found dead after suffocating, shooting, and burning themselves in a ritualistic slaying in a small Canadian town north of Montreal. In the early 2000s, the corpses of nearly 800 followers of the ​Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God were exhumed from the doomsday cult's headquarters in Uganda, the result of yet another mass slaughter by self-immolation.

It's pretty much a truism that by the time a cult is brought to the media's attention, something's gone terribly wrong. When you reflect on the insanity and death associated with high-profile groups like the People's Temple, it's easy to think that cults are just inherently bad. But that isn't necessarily the case, at least according to Chicago-based artist Christopher Allman, who is focusing on building his own "((((Sci-fi)))) cult," the ​People of Ieya.

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Trying to summarize his cult's creation mythology in only a few words is an act of futility, mainly because it's all futuristic nonsense Allman admittedly pulled out of his ass. It does, however, have underpinnings of humanism in its core values, which are empathy, fairness, sincerity, and rationality, according to ​the cult's website—head there if you want to learn more.

Essentially, Allman—who grew up Mormon in Utah—is trying to take the best parts of the religious communal experience and dump the ​murder-suicides, ​molestation, and ​incest. This means partaking in weed-fueled theological discussions over communally-prepared dinners (good), but not forcing participants to leave their families, wear robes, and ​kill children (bad).

I spoke to Allman about the cult, how to eschew the trappings of power, and being targeted by the FBI.

VICE: So, what's the first step in starting a cult?
​Christopher Allman: For the past two years, it was trying to create the visual culture. Trying to make the imagery and belief system, essentially creating my ideal community. In terms of the mechanics of having people involved, I mean, this kind of happened from doing shows and performances and people being interested and saying, Hey, I wanna be involved. So I started handing out flyers, saying, "Do you want to join a cult?" Everybody that's physically interacted with the group is a friend or a friend-of-a-friend.

So, how is this different from just a group of friends hanging out?
​In some ways, it's not at all, I guess. But in another way, there's a sense of purpose we have, like self-improvement, or being interested in ideas and discussion. It's more formalized than a hangout, more structured. And there's one person who gets an extra amount of say than normal if it were just friends. On one hand, I'm totally into it, I love it. But at the same time, I have a certain level of detachment. I don't genuinely believe there are space time-travelers.

If you don't believe the cult's creation story, that's a pretty big disconnect, isn't it? 
​There's a certain element of role play, an RPG suspension of disbelief. You don't believe all of it, but you like the idea of it, so you want to behave as if you believe. It's a group performance where everyone's a player.

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On your website, you also go into the details of your ideal utopian community.
​That came tangentially. I'd also been an architecture major, and have long had fantasies about utopian communities. Like a lot of people who find this car culture a bit unsavory and wish they could have some sort of intimate village life. I would often fantasize about something like that. So creating a utopian community went along with that.

From Jonestown to, well, a lot of examples, utopian communities always seem to end up not so great. What would you do different?
​A big part is that so many utopians are based on really dogmatic ideology, and I think part of what would be appealing to me is a strict rejection of any deep dogma or ideology that allows abuses and corruption. A lot of the negative examples of utopian communities tend to revolve around the show of a certain individual. Were my community built, ideally, there wouldn't be any one person who gets all the fame.

Why did you leave Mormonism?
​A lot of people outside the church are surprised to learn this, but the church is really hemorrhaging members, particularly young people. It's mostly because the internet and issues with the church's history. All this crazy stuff is now online and people are finding it and leaving in droves. Basically, the official history versus the actual history are way different, and people are finding out and leaving.

How do your folks feel about all this?
​It's hard for me to tell. I know they're not crazy about it, and don't totally get where I'm coming from, but don't ever outright say it. They try to be a little supportive, but clearly aren't crazy about it. Understandably. It's crazy, to make a cult.​

​

Apparently, crazy enough to get the FBI interested...
​Yeah, that. The FBI started following me. I think it was the first time I was doing a pubic performance of any sort. We were in this park and there was maybe ten to 15 people with us, and this guy shows up, and he's like, "Hey can I join?" He starts asking everybody a lot of weird questions, like, "Hey, who here drinks alcohol? Raise your hands." He was interviewing everybody like that. It's like, Oh, that's weird. And after that, there was this van parked outside my window for several days. Basically, for a month it was really overt surveillance of myself, my friends, my girlfriend. They weren't hiding at all, wanting us to know we were being surveyed. I tried to file a FOIA act, and only got back something that said we can neither confirm nor deny this.

What were they doing?
​One time I was at the Baha'i Temple with some friends, and they were obviously, kind of comically, following us and taking our picture. They would be like, "Oh, hello Christopher," you know, somebody I never met before. Or, I had been in Utah, they were like, "How was your trip to Utah?" Somebody I never met before. There was so much stuff. For all I know they're still following me, and doing it secretly, but at least the in-my-face surveillance has stopped.

Where does the cult go from here?
​I would love for it to expand. Every time I do an interview, I get a little more people interested. I would love to be able to establish a village as an alternative to modernity and normal capitalist structures. Whether or not that could happen, I don't know. I would love to have a building where we could be, and have art and religion be one in the same, and not necessarily have to believe it, but be fun and fictional and also fulfilling.

How about sweet, sweet tax exemption?
​I haven't done that, but I want to. But I'm hoping to get it chartered like a real religion. Everything that's happened so far has been build up, trying to get it ready, get the website ready. It's at its earliest stages right now.

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Real cult leaders are never off-duty, but it seems like you kind of go in and out of your role. If this expands as far as you want, will you be, like, a full-time cult leader?
​I don't know how I'd navigate that. To be honest, I can't be an actual cult leader. It seems stressful and too much pressure. I wouldn't want people to actually take what I say to heart, in case I'm wrong. I'm probably wrong about a lot of things.

Follow Rick Paulas on ​Twitter.

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I hit my snooze rock bottom three years ago at the Boston Howard Johnson. It was 1 PM. I had treated myself to a night of drinking Bud Lights in bed alone and was sleeping like the nearly born, floating in an amniotic sac of slumber. Swaddled in the delicious cloak of daytime unconsciousness, my breath made me heavier and heavier, breathing in and out, and...

"Housekeeping!"

Not a question. Not an apology. An order.

"Housekeeping!"

I sprung straight up and screamed before aggressively lisping through my mouth guard, "Five more minuthes!" As my eyes began to focus, the image of this interloper, this no-nonsense woman in her 60s, grew sharper. She stood with her arms sternly on her hips as she looked down on me. What was she still doing here? I needed her to leave, but I didn't have it in me to explain that every second she stood there she was ripping me away from the mother's milk of sleep that I had so gloriously been bathing in.

"Five more minuthes!" I repeated, and flung my head onto the pillow to punctuate my point. Amazingly, without further comment, she silently backed her toiletries cart into the hall, and I was left to return to the delightful twilight that I hoped to waste away in all day. The first round of snoozing is always the most satisfying because it's a victory over reality—avoiding the inevitable has always been one of my favorite things to not do. 

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Throughout my early 20s, I regularly extinguished alarms so that I could sleep through my first day at that temp job I needed, but didn't want. Calls from my student loan company came. I hit ignore and blew my money on skydiving and sundresses. Snooze. I racked up parking tickets and then threw them away. Snooze. My long-term relationship withered and I moved into a cavernous studio made of chilly cement. Snooze. I was worn raw with loneliness and came dangerously close to facing it head-on before binge watching all 200 episodes of Toddlers and Tiaras instead. Snooze. 

I ate peanut butter for dinner, and my fear of failure ate me for breakfast. I fell into a shame spiral over my own inertia that could only be kept at bay by taking a nap and waking up to discover that, somehow, it was October already. Snooze, snooze, snooze. To snooze is to remain, for just a few precious moments, suspended in the blissful state of inaction.

"Housekeeping!" she barked again, and this time, she gripped the handle of her broom to show she meant business.

My nervous system responded on behalf of my entire being: "Five more minuthes!" I hollered, and then folded my pillow over my head to indicate the degree to which this woman was ruining my life by attempting to go about hers.

"I have to go home."

"Then go! For the love of Christ! Go!" I wiped a puddle of drool away from my cheek. Couldn't she see I was busy?

"You don't want housekeeping?"

"Just go away! Pleath!"

"But..."

And then, I did the unthinkable.

Lacking the proper words with which to express how much I wanted this helpful woman to leave my life forever, I threw my pillow at her.

Seriously.

It didn't hit her, but it didn't matter. As soon as it thudded softly onto the floor, there was a silence in the room that indicated both of us knew there was no turning back from here. Finally, without speaking, she took several brave steps toward my bedside and stared at the empty six-pack that rested atop the Gideon Bible.

"Don't you want to wake up?"

Didn't I want to wake up? Had anything about my behavior indicated that I wanted to wake up? I chomped angrily on my mouth guard and wondered what was wrong with this simpleton. Of course, I wanted to want to wake up.

The calls from student loans grew more incessant, of course, and I considered paying them back before deciding on the much simpler option of never holding one job long enough for my wages to be garnished. I paid a parking ticket on time and then immediately regretted it when my car was booted anyway on account of the six others that remained outstanding. I wanted to get my shit together, just not as much as I wanted to stay the way I was.

Didn't I want to wake up? What kind of question was that?

My phone became a never-ending parade of 800 numbers. My late afternoons became a daily attempt to caffeinate myself out of the fog of sleep. I had to sell jewelry to pay for another boot. Didn't I want to wake up? Jesus fucking Christ. This was almost maddening enough to tear me from the rat's nest of inactivity that had kept me warm for so long.

I sat up in bed. She was gone, but I couldn't even enjoy her absence. I brushed my teeth furiously. Fine. I was up.

It finally happened: The discomfort of avoiding my problems grew so severe that even my beloved state of avoidance was not safe from their reach. I started blowing my paychecks on bills. I got health insurance. Worst of all, I got really into running. I stay informed these days. I eat well. I'm a total fucking nightmare. I am disappointed in how proud I am of the person I've become. I convince myself that I "still got it," and cling desperately to sweet memories of sleeping in cars and throwing up in casinos. I'm digging my heels into the sands of time and being forced against my will into the slaughterhouse of self-improvement.

I finished brushing my teeth and used the phone in my room to call housekeeping.

"Hello?" her familiar voice answered.

"I'm up now," I conceded, "You can come back."

And she did. She was short and much less intimidating now that we were both standing, and I had to cock my head down to apologize. She said it was OK, but I could tell she was still hurt as she pushed past me and begin to straighten up my affairs.

I would never tell her this, but my life is infinitely better now than it was in that delightfully hopeless moment when she first barged in on my dreams. I have traded my dungeon studio for a house with good lighting that I share with my boyfriend, and, thanks to him waking me up with coffee every morning, I am able to get out of bed. It still takes me awhile. I still shrink from each new day, powerless against the allure of the snooze button and its promise that for just five more minutes I can stay here, tucked into the false promise that if I just keep my eyes closed, I can remain in this delicious rut forever. 

Follow Tess Barker on ​Twitter.

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One of Medreleaf's legal grow rooms. Photo by Patrick McGuire.

In a few weeks, Canadian cannabis patients will find it harder than ever to get information about their medicine.

Last month, Health Canada sent a letter to 16 licensed pot producers saying they can't display photos of plants on their sites, tweet links to articles about the benefits of marijuana, or tell clients what a certain strain tastes, smells, or feels like.

Any of that information is advertising, according to our government's health regulator, and it's illegal to promote the sale of a narcotic like "marihuana."

They also warned producers against making "medical claims" about their products—but the difference between a health claim and information backed by scientific study remains hazy.

If producers don't change their ways by January 12, they could have their licences revoked.

VICE asked three of the 16 producers who received these letters what they thought about the government cracking the whip.

Mark Zekulin, executive vice-president of Tweed, whose medical marijuana factory is housed inside a converted chocolate factory, says he thought the letter from Health Canada was clear. Tweed can't say a certain strain will cure, treat, or prevent a specific ailment, but they can say studies have shown THC is good for pain.

"I hope I'm right," he said a few minutes later after a back-and-forth about the nuances. "It's not always crystal clear."

Health Canada told Medreleaf, an Ontario-based marijuana producer, that the company crossed the line with the images and language on its website and the links it tweeted, CEO Neil Closner says.

He's unsure of whether some of the information on Medreleaf's site is scientific data, or whether it's a medical claim, the latter of which is "a big no-no."

Medreleaf works closely with an Israeli producer that has been growing specific genetic strains of marijuana for 10 years and tracking patients' progress with that product. 

"That's data that we have," Closner said, "so the question is, well, if we have all this accumulated data, are we allowed or not allowed to make any kind of claims about them?"

Peace Naturals, another Ontario-based producer, was dinged in this area too. They had client feedback and anecdotal information about weed on their site. Health Canada said that had to go.

Mark Gobuty, CEO and founder of Peace Naturals, gets that.

"Imagine going to your doctor and he gives you a prescription, and you ask the doctor, well, what's it like? And if he tells you, well you know I had Sally in here last week, and she tells me that she sleeps better, that her feet don't hurt her anymore—well, you know, that never happens in a professional world. So we can't provide anecdotal client feedback, which, you know, I completely understand."

Other rules aren't so obvious.

Gobuty believes Peace Naturals is allowed to give out that information over the phone to registered clients. But he concedes Health Canada hasn't actually said whether that's OK.

Pissed off by increasingly strict government regulation, licensed user Greg Chaisson started buying his weed from an unlicensed British Columbia-based company. They're all stoners, so they tell him exactly how each product feels, tastes, and smells.

Chaisson has colitis—bowel inflammation similar to Crohn's. He buys weed with high myrcene levels because it's been shown to reduce inflammation in rats ​(it also smells really nice).

But he says licensed producers were unable or unwilling to give him information about myrcene levels, so he bought and experimented with different strains through these producers. He called it an "expensive guessing game."

When these companies comply with Health Canada's rules, he expects patients will have an even harder time figuring out what medication is best for them.

I ran the myrcene problem past Closner of Medreleaf.

He had the impression his company isn't allowed to publish myrcene levels on its website. "From what I'm seeing in the letter we received, the answer would be no, which is problematic."

Not only do these strict rules limit the information customers can glean from licensed producers, Closner says they also put Medreleaf and similar producers at a disadvantage when competing with grey-market suppliers.

"We're very heavily regulated, and we're trying to do the right thing, and we're trying to follow all the rules, and yet there are some other companies that are seemingly allowed to just do whatever they want."

Medreleaf has an anti-inflammatory product, he continues, "which is, I believe, the highest ratio of CBD to THC in the whole country, so for anti-inflammatory properties, we have the best one."

"Are you even allowed to say that?" I ask.

"Probably not," he answers. "That's the problem."​

@hilarybeaumont

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San Diego State University, which has seen 17 reported cases of sexual assault this year. Photo via Flickr user Nat​han Rupert

All of a sudden, college bros and the evils they do are at the center of a national media firestorm. Last week, Rolling Stone's viral story about campus rapes became the target of a lot of c​riticism when a central character's description of events was called into question. Although we don't yet know exactly what was misreported in the story about a gang rape at the University of Virginia, the whole mess is beginning to look like the second coming of the Duke​ lacrosse scandal, where bros were falsely accused of rape. 

Besides doing a disservice to sexual assault victims—and convincing the UVA administration to suspen​d all frats until January—the Rolling Stone story led readers to believe a certain group of college dudes psychopathically gang-raped someone with a bottle, when it turns out maybe they didn't do anything wrong at all.

Naturally, the college dudes in question got pissed—they want to clear their names for good and make sure this kind of debacle doesn't happen again. They even went so far as to hire former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott to lobby on their behalf.

"Congress needs to take a comprehensive approach to fixing these problems so that every case is handled in a manner that is fair, balanced and provides the full measure of constitutional protections to all parties," Lott said in ​a statement published by Politico. The idea he's pushing is to move sexual assault cases out of the jurisdiction of campus judicial reviews, where there is a lot of potential for inexperienced or unprepared administrators to screw things up. (Others, inclu​ding Slate's Emily Yoffe, have also criticized the way rapes are handled at colleges.)

But while the current hullabaloo centers around what a few men may or may not have done at one particular school, what shouldn't get lost is that colleges—and frats in particular—can be incubators for a particularly noxious blend of hormones and privilege.

Take, for instance, San Diego State University. There have been 17 reports of sexual assault there this year, and seven of those have o​ccurred in frat houses. An audit ​by the state that came out in June found the school was not handling reports of sexual assault adequately and concluded that some staff were not properly trained to handle reports of sexual violence and that the reporting process wasn't made clear to students.

Jordan Busse is a student activist at the school. She says that until recently, the school's task force for dealing with assault was comprised solely of two fraternity brothers. "There was a rape every week for three weeks in the beginning of the semester, and that went unacknowledged by our administration," she told me.

To raise awareness about this issue, students held a Take Back the Night rally on November 21. Some fraternities apparently did not take this all that seriously: Members of Sigma Phi Epsilon and Delta Sigma Phi allegedly waved dildos and yelled obscenities at marchers. In response, SDSU's student paper reported, school officials interviewed members of the frats in question and are trying to figure out exactly what happened.

"You're usually going to get two versions of everything, so we're just going to go through and hear both sides of the story," Director of Student Life and Leadership Randy Timm told the Daily Aztec. "I think a lot of it is listening to the stories, finding if the stories can be corroborated, and talking it through."

The school certainly to be taking the harassment claims seriously, and it's recently created a more inclusive task force for dealing with assault, Busse says. Still, it's going to be an uphill battle to abolish bad behavior like that of the SDSU frats. That was made clear yesterday, when an S​DSU student was arrested for allegedly forcing a young woman perform oral sex on him at an off-campus party earlier this month. However flawed the criminal ju​stice system's handling of rape cases may be, it's probably good that the cops, rather than school administrators or the media, is handling things. 

Follow Allie Conti on ​Twitter.

​No one ever thought the CIA's torture program for terror suspects was a pleasant evening at Medieval Times or a mild tickling from Bradley Cooper. We always knew it was pretty grim. Granted, terms like "waterboarding" and "behavioral control" don't immediately make you cringe or reach for the nearest slop bucket to expel your breakfast. These are psychological terrors more than anything else, tools to break a person's spirit so they'll divulge sensitive details of their dastardly plans to strike at the heart of America. But the  ​horrific details we learned from the ​Senate Select Committee report sound less like interrogation techniques and more like cut scenes from The Human Centipede.

One of the CIA techniques we learned about yesterday was rectal feeding. The idea of cramming food and liquid up someone's ass against his will is so crude and idiotic that it comes off as a sort of frat-boy prank gone wrong. I don't think it's much of a stretch to look at America's last adventure in the Middle East as some kind of sado-masochistic sex romp—a Revenge of the Nerds sequel in which Ogre became president of the Greek Council and forced all the students he didn't like to stick pine needles in their pee holes. We thought ​Abu Ghraib was bad, but that was just act one of the snuff film we called a war.

Rectal feeding wasn't always a device for "extracting information." A June 1913 article in the  ​British Medical Journal explained the practical benefits of consuming nutrients through the anus. It claims that rectal feeding was popular in the Middle Ages, and that experiments were done on dogs in 1872—the dogs were given injections of 500 calories of "chopped meat and pancreas." There's even an anecdote about keeping a woman alive for 70 days on rectal feeding alone in the 17th century. As a recent article on our sister site Motherboard ​points out, rectal feeding was very useful in the days before IVs for patients who had, for whatever reason, lost their ability to eat solid foods. The British Medical Journal goes into a bit more detail on what was deemed a successful experiment in rectal feeding:

Seven young women suffering from gastric ulcer were fed entirely on nutrient enemata for six or seven days. They were kept in bed and weighed before and after. All did well clinically. The enemata were given six-hourly, and consisted of two eggs or 200 c.cm. of milk and eggs, dextrose, normal saline, and in one case cod-liver oil. The whole was pancreatized for 20 minutes. Every day the bowel as washed out, and the contents analyzed.

This didn't quite catch on as a miracle diet or a replacement for the tedious process of chewing, but it did help keep President James Garfield alive for 80 days after ​he was shot by Charles J. Guiteau in 1881. According to medical historian ​Dr. Ira Rutkow, President Garfield's physicians believed that one of the bullets that struck their patient had pierced his intestines. As such, they deemed it unwise to feed him solid foods. Instead, they fed him a steady diet of beef bouillon, egg yolks, milk, whiskey, and drops of opium through his rectal cavity. Garfield died anyway, but he wouldn't have lasted nearly as long without all the egg yolks, liquor, and drugs they pumped up his ass.

As intravenous administration of nutrients became widely used by medical professionals, rectal feeding and devices like the Murphy Drip fell out of favor. Besides South Park's ​ongoing ​fascination with putting food up your butthole, the whole practice had been pretty much consigned to the garbage dump of creepy medical treatments, where it could share space with such oddities as bloodletting and drilling holes in your skull. Leave it to Americans to get nostalgic and resurrect something irrelevant for nefarious purposes. In the last couple years, we've brought back fear of Russian aggression, racial tension, ​whooping cough, police brutality, ​voter suppression, and ​Hillary Clinton. What's next, cars without seat belts? Lead-based paint? Polka music? God help us all.

Follow Dave Schilling on ​Twitter.

[body_image width='1024' height='571' path='images/content-images/2014/12/10/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/10/' filename='joel-golby-edinburgh-playhouse-sent-porn-dvds-to-kids-993-body-image-1418234652.jpg' id='10481']Yes, it is wicked, Playhouse. It is wicked what you did. Image via ​Dancewear Central

This post originally appeared on VICE UK

Listen, none of us are without sin. So can we really go in on the Edinburgh Playhouse for sending a load of porno DVDs to some kids, ​as it emerged it did this week? In a way: no, absolutely not. In another way: Yes, we should. In another way: We should really be asking what the Edinburgh Playhouse was doing with a big ol' stack of porno. In another way: Edinburgh Playhouse should not have sent the aforementioned porno stack to a bunch of local kids.

Here's what happened: Over the summer, several children aged ten and under attended an acting summer school, likely because their parents have unrealistic dreams for them and their future. The final show was recorded, edited, and sent to a DVD plant to be pressed onto DVDs. So far, so jazz hands.

Here's where things went a bit wrong. Instead of transferring a wholesome school-age children's performance onto DVD, the plant instead copied a load of hardcore—and, like, this is hardcore, man; you see it going in—porn onto the DVDs instead. And then the Edinburgh Playhouse innocently took these DVDs and sent them out to their network of tiny children, all of whom probably held world premieres in their living rooms, the family all crammed onto sofas, aunties and uncles commuting in from distant Scottish towns, microwave popcorn, grandma as a special treat let out from her home. And then: full-on, jizz-gushing porno. Appalling.

Obviously—as you'd hope—the Playhouse has been quick to issue an apology, saying today the mistake took place at the home of the production company, Edithouse, and that the Edinburgh Playhouse did not deliberately send a load of porno to some kids.

"Edithouse takes full responsibility for the mistakes made in the duplication process of DVDs for the Edinburgh Playhouse, which resulted in highly inappropriate and inaccurate material being sent out to a small number of Edinburgh Playhouse customers," a statement said.

"We would like to apologize sincerely to the Edinburgh Playhouse for the inconvenience and most importantly to the children and parents affected by this terrible error," the statement continued. "We are sorry for any distress caused." It was not a premeditated porno attack, basically. It was a whoopsie. Still, they've launched an investigation, for what it's worth.

But some parents aren't happy with the apology: The father of one ten-year-old girl told BBC News the film was "absolutely disgusting filth"—which, side note, is a really funny sentence to imagine being shouted by a spit-flecked Scottish dad—and that he definitely had not taken the DVD to the special plastic bag of porn with a load of shoes in it to disguise the porn that he had upstairs in his wardrobe. Absolutely not. He had absolutely not done that.

"We took immediate measures to recall all of the DVDs," the Playhouse said yesterday, "and sought the advice of the police and notified those affected customers as a matter of urgency." 

The police, for their part, say no crime has been committed, because if you send a load of porn to kids by accident then there's really no need to arrest anybody. Like leaving a load of porno mags under a hedge, like in the good old days. A victimless crime.

Anyway, let's learn a lesson here: next time you are mailing a DVD to a bunch of kids, please make sure the absolute worst possible outcome can't happen by watching the DVD first and making sure it doesn't have any balls, dicks, or tits in it. 

Follow Joel Golby on ​Twitter.

Columbia Law School ignited controversy this week by announcing that it would allow its students to postpone their exams if they felt traumatized by the grand jury decisions regarding  ​Michael Brown and ​Eric Garner. Similar policies have been announced at ​Harvard and Georgetown law schools.

An email from Interim Law School Dean Robert Scott described it like so:

The grand juries' determinations to return non-indictments in the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases have shaken the faith of some in the integrity of the grand jury system and in the law more generally. For some law students, particularly, though not only, students of color, this chain of events is all the more profound as it threatens to undermine a sense that the law is a fundamental pillar of society designed to protect fairness, due process, and equality.

A lot of people are saying that this is pretty fucking stupid: Lawyers need to possess " fortitude in the face of injustice"; students need to ​channel their frustration into their exams rather than avoid them; students will all claim their "​feelings have been hurt" just to get their exams rescheduled. ​Naomi Schaeffer Riley, in ​an op-ed for the New York Post, accused the law school of "coddling" its students: "No indictment? Sorry, I need to spend the day trembling with rage and sorrow in my office. Can't take any calls today. I'm meeting with my shrink."

December is a strenuous time for law students: They've spent untold hours in the library hunched over legal texts, preparing for the exams that will make or break their future as lawyers. In many classes, the exam counts for 100 percent of their grade—so the stakes are high. But this year wasn't your average study season. Protests erupted around the country in response to the grand jury non-indictments, and Columbia in particular was embroiled in a fairly heated conversation about race and law.

"After the Ferguson non-indictment, Columbia Law School hosted a forum to discuss the legal procedure behind the grand jury decision and many students criticized the fact that the panelists were three white professors," explained  Alice Wang, a first-year student at the law school. "Black professors—including renowned critical race theory scholar Kimberle Crenshaw—sat in the audience and had to raise their hands to speak." 

At that forum, Wang says she was "floored by one student's comment that while he's all for working within the system to engender gradual change, he has been a victim of police brutality and is concerned about the people who are literally scared to go out on the streets and cannot wait."

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A  Columbia law stu​dent tweets about the "Forum on Ferguson"

That forum was followed by  ​a letter from a group that calls itself the Columbia Law Coalition of Concerned Students of Color, which included a list of demands, exam postponements among them. The letter is really worth reading in its entirety, but the heart of it was a call for faculty and administration at Columbia to "recognize our trauma as legitimate and worthy of a response."

The problem, they say, isn't just that they haven't had time to study for their exams. The problem is that there is no support for students of color—within the legal system or within Columbia. The problem is that Columbia's first administrative response to the Garner non-indictment was to  ​call the cops on student protesters who staged a die-in at the tree lighting ceremony on December 4.

"It's funny to me that so much focus has been put on exam postponement, and how unfair it is to other students. Our entire existence in these spaces is unfair," said Arielle Reid, a third-year law student at Columbia and one of the organizers of The Coalition. "The way we are treated on a daily basis by our peers and professors are unfair. Being the only black person in a class about criminal law, where everyone else has the luxury to pretend that the subject has no racial implications, is unfair. The status quo is unfair."

Columbia, like all universities, has a policy in place for  ​rescheduling exams—things like a serious illness, bereavement, religious observances, or the birth of your child are considered reasonable excuses. Other circumstances are considered on a case-by-case basis. The exemption for "trauma" (a word that's caused a lot of controversy) in light of the non-indictments falls into this last category, but like all special circumstances, Columbia requires that students petitioning for an exam postponement provide documents and an explanation about why they need this exam postponed. And it's not without precedent: In 1970, Harvard Law School allowed students to delay their exams if they were ​participating in Vietnam War protests.

Some critics have pointed out that if law schools are making an exemption for this version of "trauma," then they ought to include other versions, too. "I don't want to participate in the victim Olympics," said a second-year student at Georgetown who asked to remain anonymous, "but I know what it feels like to be raped and know there's nothing I can do about it in the eyes of the law and its evidentiary standards. We are all victims of injustice at one point or another. Using our personal victimhood to shirk our responsibilities as students, as lawyers, as whatever we choose to be only shows the oppressor that they've won, in some small way."

But maybe responsibilities aren't really being shirked. According to Jeremy Berman, a first-year at Columbia, "almost no one is actually delaying their exams." A representative from Columbia Law School wouldn't tell me how many students had made requests, but a spokeswoman told the New York Times that only a "​small number" of students had been granted postponements. Wang reasoned that this was because studying for exams is painful, and "who wants to prolong that misery?"

So if the point of the policy wasn't to get everyone's exams pushed back, then the point is that the administration is making a statement of compassion: We hear you. We empathize with you. We support you.

"I was in the [law school] building studying with friends when the protesters walked through yesterday. Many, if not most or all, of the protesters were Columbia students—and I recognized at least two law students," said Berman. "If a protest movement is to have a real effect on the nation, then it has to continue in the weeks following an event, and it has to inconvenience some people, or else it would be too easy to ignore."

Follow Arielle Pardes on ​Twitter.

​Among the least surprising findings in the Senate I​ntelligence Committee's report on the CIA's rendition and interrogation program is that the agency, including its highest-ranking leaders, lied about the program. A lot. To everyone.

The CIA, in the report's bureaucratic wording, "provided inaccurate information" to Congress, the White House, the Justice Department, the press, and the agency's own inspector general. This is in addition to selectively omitting information, destroying information, and failing to correct false information. While variations of the words "lie" or "mislead" don't actually appear in the 500-page executive summary of th​e report released to the public Tuesday, "inaccurate" appears 263 times.

Here, we've pulled out all of the major ways that intelligence officials lied about its enhanced interrogation program. It's a partial list, but should give you a good idea of the lengths the CIA went to deceive the public, Congress, and even members of its own agency about the scope of the detention program. 

The CIA Said the Interrogations Stopped Terrorist Attacks: Even to this day, intelligence officials have claimed that the enhanced interrogation tactics saved "hundreds or thousands of innocent lives." This argument was used to justify the program, both legally and in the eyes of Congress and the public. The problem is, of course, that statements about the program's effectiveness weren't actually true.

In fact, Senate investigators reviewed 20 of the most cited examples of counterterrorism victories attributed to the CIA's interrogation program—including claims that information from detainees helped thwart terrorist attacks on Heathrow Airport, on the US Consulate in Karachi, and at various locations in the US—"and found them to be wrong in fundamental respects."

The CIA Lied to the Justice Department About Its Torture Tactics: The DOJ's legal justification for the program relied on the argument that the tactics were necessary to save lives. Obviously, those claims were inaccurate. On top of that, the CIA lied to the Justice Department about the conditions of confinement and interrogation methods used on detainees, leading the department to craft legal justifications that were divorced from the reality of the program.

For example, the CIA told the DOJ that it would be "unlikely" that sleep deprivation would cause hallucinations, and that medical personnel would intervene if they did, which was a lie. The agency also failed to inform the DOJ that it was using techniques like "water dousing, nudity, abdominal slaps, and dietary manipulation," on the detainees.

The CIA Claimed It Had Fewer Than 100 Detainees: In statements to the Senate Intelligence Committee and the public, the CIA claimed it had fewer than 100 detainees. But committee investigators found there were 119 detainees, at least 26 of whom were wrongfully held. One of those 26 was an "intellectually challenged" man held to leverage information from one of his family members.

The CIA Said It Only Waterboarded Three People: The CIA previously said it only waterboarded three detainees, but Senate investigators found evidence suggesting there may have been more. Investigators uncovered a photograph of a "well-worn" waterboard, surrounded by buckets of water, at a site where the CIA said it had never conducted waterboardings.

The CIA Lied to the White House: The Senate report concluded that the CIA "provided extensive amounts of inaccurate and incomplete information related to the operation and effectiveness of the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program to the White House, the National Security Council principals, and their staffs." According to the report, no CIA officer—including the directors of the agency—even briefed the president on the details of the enhanced interrogation program until April 2006, after 38 detainees had already been tortured.

Other Cabinet officials were also kept in the dark, apparently per the White House's request. A 2003 internal CIA email noted that "the "it is clear to us...that the [White House] is extremely concerned [Secretary of State Colin] Powell would blow his stack if he were to be briefed on what's been going."

The CIA Lied to Congress: This one isn't surprising. The report states that "briefings to the full Committee beginning on September 6, 2006, also contained numerous inaccuracies, including inaccurate descriptions of how interrogation techniques were applied and what information was obtained from CIA detainees." In fact, it doesn't seem like Congress knew much of anything about the program.

The CIA Lied About Congress: Despite multiple letters from senators expressing criticism and concern about the program, CIA Director Michael Hayden told a room of foreign ambassadors that the Senate Intelligence Committee was "fully briefed" on program, adding: "This is not CIA's program. This is not the President's program. This is America's program." The CIA also lied about the views of US senators to the Department of Justice, in order to get approval for the program.

The CIA Lied to Its Own Inspector General: The CIA avoided oversight of the enhanced interrogation program from all sides, including from the independent office tasked with overseeing the agency. Senate investigators found that during a 2004 special review of the program, CIA officials provided the OIG with inaccurate information about the operation and management of the program, as well as about its effectiveness. The lies were included in the final report, which was later declassified and released to the public. According to Senate investigators, the report "remains uncorrected," which means, officially, the CIA is still lying to the public.

The CIA Lied to the Media: According to the report, the CIA public affairs office selectively leaked classified information to suggest to reporters that the program was working with, often to positively shape coverage. This is nothing new or extraordinary in Washington, but the report found that, like everything else the CIA said about the program, the leaks to reporters were inaccurate.

Since the report's release, defenders of the program have pushed back against the Senate Intelligence Committee's findings. Hayden, the former CIA chief who is singled out numerous times for making inaccurate statements made to Congress, denied lying about the program.

"My response is that I didn't lie and I didn't mislead Congress,'' Hayden s​aid in an interview with Today Wednesday morning, when asked about congressional testimony he made in 2007. "My purpose going down there was to put my arms around the other political branch and try to decide a way forward. I was straightforward and honest and gave information as I knew it to be and as the agency knew it to be."

Other former CIA officials have denounced the Senate report as a partisan hit job, and even launched a website, CIA Sav​ed Lives, to push back against its findings. They say the report's argument that the CIA torture program didn't disrupt terrorist plots is—wait for it—inaccurate.

"We found out this week that weed is still kinda illegal here," Seth Rogen tells me, while pouring a straight-from-the-bottle shot of tequila into my mouth. Rogen is feeding booze to a small crowd of fans—who stand before him like baby birds waiting for their mama's puked-up worm entrails—in the balcony of a Denver theater, essentially apologizing that he didn't come through on his promise to get high with the crowd during an advance screening of his new film, The Interview, which is opening this Christmas.

Back in November, Rogen tweeted, "We are going to do a screening of #TheInterviewMovie in Colorado where I get baked with everyone first, and we can smoke weed in the theater." Originally, this event was to be hosted by the Sie Film Center, but they refused to allow marijuana to be smoked in their theater. A new theater—the ​Oriential—was found at the last minute.

The venue had played host to many comedy shows this year during which marijuana has been copiously consumed, but once word got out about where Rogen was poised to hold his cinematic smoke-fest, Denver's Department of Excise and Licensing told the owners that their liquor license was going to be in jeopardy if they allowed cannabis to be consumed at the show. Extra security was hired to police the event, and anyone who so much as hit a vape pen was tossed out. Two sources confirmed that several undercover police officers were roaming the theater. Smartphones were confiscated from all who attended, and only given back once their owners left the place.

Public consumption of marijuana has actually been one of the  signature issues facing Colorado this year. State law ​prohibits marijuana from being displayed or ingested in any "public" setting—but the meaning of that word has been debated endlessly. This has proved to be a minor disaster for the tourism industry that has taken off in the wake of legalization, as well as the number of "pot-friendly" comedy, music, food, and art events that keep popping up.

Police and officials in Denver have made life miserable for anyone trying to host a show or party that is advertised as allowing pot smoke. But this is an industry that was birthed by civil disobedience, and the demand for cannabis clubs and weed-friendly venues is putting the massive gray areas of Colorado's marijuana laws to the test.

According to Colorado Public Radio, Denver police have handed out 6​68 citations for public consumption of marijuana in the first three quarters of this year, a 471 percent increase from 2013. "A lot of [the citations] are complaint-driven," says Christine Downs, a spokesperson for the Denver Police Department. "People call in and say, 'Someone's smoking outside' and we'll go issue a citation, if needed."

Colorado Springs has found a temporary solution to this issue in the form of cannabis clubs like Speakeasy Vape Lounge. Since they serve no booze, the Vape Lounge doesn't have a liquor license the city can threaten to revoke, and the venue is technically considered "private," since anyone inside its doors must pay for a daily or yearly membership. But whether these types of clubs are actually legal remains unclear, and pot-party entrepreneurs are spending a lot of money and undergoing a lot of stress as they try to stay on the right side of the law.

"A lot like gun laws, [public smoking laws] only affect those who are trying to obey the rules," Jamen Johnson, owner of Speakeasy Vape Lounge, tells me. "The people who bother to go through the red tape are the ones they harass... With alcohol you have production, distribution, and consumption licenses. With cannabis we have two of those, production and distribution licenses, but we don't have consumption licenses. If you make a license to apply for, I'll apply for it. Give me a fee, and I'll pay it. "

Last month, Johnson was hoping to steer clear of the cops while hosting Chr​omic Con, a marijuana-friendly comic book convention in Denver. Outside the venue was a sign proclaiming that this is "a private event," and anyone inside ostensibly purchased a ticket through a website that required a password. (In fact, the password was advertised on the event Facebook page, which was open to the public.)

Responding to the legality of Speakeasy Vape Lounge, Colorado Springs City's Planning and Development Director, Peter Wysocki, tells me that the City Council has "directed staff to draft an ordinance addressing cannabis consumption clubs. We are currently working with City Attorney's Office on the ordinance. Cannabis consumption clubs are currently considered as 'private membership clubs' and are permitted in any zoning district that allows 'private membership clubs.'"

Event organizers are deploying a variety of tactics to make their events "private," and the law's lack of clarity on the issue allow some to evade prosecution. This comes with a constant of police arriving unexpectedly to shut down your party and potentially arrest you. But law-breaking on a mass scale was essentially what brought on marijuana legalization in the first place, and creating a legal space for cannabis consumption outside the home will most likely only be achieved by similar illegal activity.

"There's an argument to be made that systems only change when forces from the outside challenge them directly through civil disobedience, instead of working from the inside," says James Walsh, a University of Colorado-Denver history professor who specializes in social movements and civil disobedience in the US. "We've seen that with marijuana, in the 420 rallies with mass amounts of people engaging in civil disobedience, and police never know how to react to that other than not reacting. I don't think we'd be seeing so many other states following in Colorado's path if it weren't for civil disobedience."

Colorado has enjoyed a smoother ride when it comes to legalization than Washington state, and has set a constantly-cited precedent for states like Alaska and Oregon in their efforts to legalize. But blazing that trail hasn't been pain-free, and Denver City Attorney Marley Bordovsky is presented a new case involving some "private" marijuana event that the city deemed public on a daily basis.

"If you want to have friends over and smoke marijuana in your own home, that's fine," says Bordovsky, who is the point person at the Denver City Attorney's office for all marijuana issues. "But if any stranger could come to your house and you're charging five dollars to get in, and are letting in just anyone, then you're verging on a [public] event."

Bordovsky says that when these pot-friendly event cases go to court in Colorado, many prosecutors are pointing to the 1989 Supreme Court ruling in U​S v. Lansdowne Swim Club for clarification of what constitutes a private event space. In that case, a Pennsylvania swim club was facing prosecution for discriminating against potential black members in violation of the Civil Rights Act—but the defense argued that they were not subject to the 1964 law since they were not a public establishment.

The case ran into the same problem that Colorado courts have encountered in that the Civil Rights Act did not provide a clear definition of what constitutes a private club, and there had been very few court rulings in the past that lawyers on either side could reference. In the end, the justices ruled that the swim club was a public space, not a private one, and had been hiding behind things like membership fees in order to discriminate against black patrons.

Perhaps ironically, discrimination is actually an essential component in determining the legal definition of a private club. Deciding who comes to your house for dinner (friends, family, colleagues, etc.) is different from deciding who comes to your concert (anyone who can pay the cover charge and doesn't start a fight). This does help narrow things down a bit, but these parameters are still not fundamental enough to stop many in Denver from widening their "social circle" to include any stranger with money.

"People are attending cannabis-friendly events all over the state every weekend," says Jane West, founder of Edible Events, a company that hosts pot-friendly gourmet dinners around the state. "It's important to me that I'm in a safe zone legally, but unfortunately there is no such safe zone." Following legalization, West put on a number of highly successful parties in private art galleries, going so far as to get an officer from Excise and Licensing to walk through the space—and she says he gave her enthusiastic approval to go ahead. Believing she was in compliance with state law, she planned a small brunch event on April 20.

As the event was winding down, West says that "eight SWAT team members and three undercover police officers descended upon our little corner bakery. There were more of them than there were people at the event. I was given a ticket for distributing alcohol without a permit." West adds that if she had applied for a temporary alcohol permit, her event would be considered "public" according to the law.

Many 4/20 events were getting similar treatment on that day. Alcohol was tied to most of these citations, whether it was not having a permit or being threatened with the revocation of a liquor license for allowing marijuana to be consumed. In the last year, West has been in court six times and has incurred thousands of dollars in court costs, lawyer fees, and losses from events that have been shut down. She pleaded guilty with a deferred judgement for the 4/20 brunch, which means if she gets in trouble again she could potentially face a prison sentence.

Hardcore marijuana activists enjoy citing Henry David Thoreau's wisdom on civil disobedience: "Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison." But West is a mother with two young children and considers herself more of a businesswoman than an activist.

She continues to host her Edible Events parties, albeit with absolutely no public promotion and a limited guest list that includes only people she knows personally. There is no cover charge, the event is financed entirely through sponsorship, and cannabis consumption only occurs within party busses parked outside the venue (since they fall under the same laws with marijuana that limos do with alcohol). " I still don't know if I'm completely safe," she says.

No one really does, apparently not even the Colorado government or police. That will only happen if policymakers are compelled by civil disobedience to provide some clarity.

In that sense, Seth Rogen's failed attempt at creating a public pot party was a step backward in this fight, even if it was a good time. The audience learned that Rogen smokes "five to seven" joints a day, and that he was so blitzed on a pot cookie at the time he had "no idea what's going on right now." The movie itself was funny as hell. But it would've been a lot better accompanied by a joint instead of several pints of beer. 

Follow Josiah M. Hesse on ​Twitter.

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A young woman in São Paulo gets the HPV vaccine. Photo via Flickr user ​Pan American Health Organization—WHO.

​In a new study, researchers have found that receiving the HPV vaccine does not—repeat, DOES NOT—make young women more promiscuous.

The study, published Monday in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, tracks the medical data of 260,000 Ontario girls. Half of the girls were eligible for the HPV vaccine when it was introduced by the province in 2007 and 2008. They were in grade eight at the time.

Researchers obtained their (anonymized) data and determined the vaccine does not cause "risky" sexual behaviour. They found that pregnancy rates, and rates of non-HPV-related STIs, did not increase in the group that received the vaccine as compared to the group that didn't.

Presumably, that's because women know that the vaccine protects them from one type of STI that can cause cervical cancer, and not all STIs.

The question should be, however, why are researchers measuring the "promiscuity" levels of young women in the first place? Increasingly, society at large is beginning to recognize that labeling women as promiscuous feeds directly into slut-shaming and a wider rape culture. Sexualization of little girls through policing their clothing and bodily autonomy is problematic. Thirteen-year-olds themselves are aware of this.

But though HPV (or the human papilloma virus) causes about 70 percent of cervical cancers and genital warts, parents, apparently, are fearful that their girls will engage in more sex if they receive the vaccine.

I was left with lots of other questions, too: Is it not creepy, at the very least, to so closely track the sexual behaviours of women at any age? Are conversations on rape culture lost on the medical community?

With these questions in mind, I called up the study's lead author, Dr. Leah Smith, and senior researcher, Dr. Linda Levesque. Smith conducted her work on the project as part of her PhD at McGill, but the study's base was Levesque's department at Queen's. The women had heard parents' concerns, and they wanted to put some science behind the speculations, one way or another.

"The reason this question came up in particular was really because of some of the public controversy that's been going on about this, some of the media attention [suggesting] that the vaccination would make for an increase in sexual behaviour," Smith says. "Parents are citing this as a reason why they're reluctant to have their daughters vaccinated."

She reminds me that Catholic school boards in Alberta and Ontario have been against the vaccine in the past for this reason. In fact, Mike Del Grande, the new chair of the Toronto District Catholic School Board, said just last week that HPV vaccines are a moral issue.

The researchers decided it was time to figure out whether these parents were operating based on a misconception.

"We really wanted to take some kind of an objective, scientific approach to investigating whether or not" the vaccine has this effect on sexual behaviours, Smith says.

Though their intent is good, the language in the study is troubling. It treats promiscuity as a danger in itself. Further, no one ever seems to measure boys' promiscuity. From the study:

"A major topic of public debate has been the possibility that HPV vaccination might lead to sexual disinhibition, that is, that receipt of the vaccine might give women and girls a false sense of protection against all sexually transmitted infections and that this false sense of protection might lead them to engage in more risky sexual behaviours than they would otherwise (e.g., be more promiscuous or neglect to use condoms). Increases in these risky behaviours could have important clinical consequences, including increased risk of pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections.

"...Moreover, parental fears of increased promiscuity following HPV vaccination have been reported as a major determinant of vaccine refusal, which may help to explain suboptimal HPV vaccine coverage in some jurisdictions. Evidently, both actual and perceived sexual disinhibition can have a negative effect on the potential health benefits of HPV vaccination."

I told Smith and Levesque that if girls are labeled as promiscuous and then something sexually violent happens to them, they often are blamed. I asked if they worried about the potential for harm in their word choice.

"I think we were really focused on the HPV vaccination issue; that was really the driving force behind the question for us," Levesque says. She says it's an important question, and that she identifies as a feminist, but that "we weren't really thinking about the broader social context that you bring up."

As for the word "promiscuity," they say it was used because that's the predominant wording found in the HPV literature. And the reason only girls were tested, Smith says, is that they were the only ones vaccinated at the time.

The wording of the study leaves me a bit confused as to whether they were testing for only pregnancy and STIs, or were using those tests to determine sexual behaviour in general.

Smith and Levesque say they didn't look directly at all sexual behaviours, like condom use and number of sexual partners, because that information would need to be self-reported and could easily be skewed due to societal pressure. Young women, for example, may be less likely to admit to having had several partners, lest they be branded a slut.

It's interesting to me that they're aware of these nuances, but their study contained harmful language anyway. Parental hysteria over teen sexuality should not be creeping into medical journals.

Again, while the intentions here are good, where does it leave us if the medical community is applying potentially harmful words to such young women? Levesque may have said they hadn't considered the wider societal context of their words, but it's time for our institutions to start doing just that.

​@sarratch

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​A 9/11 Truther. ​Photo via Flickr user mass​_copblock.​

With the help of Elizabeth May, Canada's Green Party leader and a sitting member of Parliament, a group of 9/11 Truthers have made Canada the latest target for their eccentric lobbying campaign.

Trotting out a stable of theories, new and old, four representatives of the Truther movement appeared in a press conference on the first floor of the Parliament of Canada.

After May introduced the petition to the House of Commons calling for an independent investigation into the events of September 11, the Truthers were officially welcomed to the steps of Canadian power.

May introduced the petition last week, contending it was her obligat​ion as a Parliamentarian to introduce the petitions to the government.

While the Green leader said she doesn't support the Truther movement in any way, she did help them wedge a foot into the door of Parliament.

Her petition, which calls on Ottawa to "hear our policy recommendations to protect Canadians against future acts of state sponsored terrorism," requires a response from the government within 45 days.

The petition lists several "new forensic evidence" developments as reason to consider the Truther allegations.

Among them the "several tons of molten iron/steel" (even though the official report explains that the molten m​etal was aluminum, from the plane); "nano-thermite composite incendiaries discovered throughout the WTC dust," (even though you'd need thousands of pounds of thermite to ​make that happen); and "DVD Material entitled: '9/11: Blueprint for Truth."

Armed with 1,400 signatures and that new "forensic evidence," the Truthers presented their case before two members of the Parliamentary Press Gallery (VICE included) on Wednesday morning.

ReThink911, an Ottawa-based group, was one of three groups that came to parliament. The other two, Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth and the 9/11 Consensus Panel, a group claiming to run a quasi-peer review of the evidence presented by the movement—are US based organizations.

"We applaud Elizabeth for her courage in submitting this historic petition which has been signed by Canadians all across the country," said Isabelle Beenen, from Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth.

All three groups say May didn't work in any capacity with them on this file.

"We've had no conversations with Elizabeth May," said Canadian organizer David Long, admitting May only introduced the petition because she felt she had to.

There are no fewer than two dozen peer-reviewed ​studies confirming contending both towers' collapse were from the two planes flying into them. Oppositely, only one peer-reviewed paper, published without the editor of t​he paper's knowledge, supports the theory the 9/11 attacks were an orchestrated conspiracy.

VICE asked the groups why the Canadian Government should launch an investigation into their allegations, given the lack of evidence.

"To believe that simple office fires could cause the collapse of a 47-story office building. It's impossible," said Bill Brinnier, a New York City architect and noted Truther. "Now, there are peer-reviewed studies of alternate explanations of what happened. And they're not being accepted by the mainstream media."

Brinnier's point is true, if you accept a wider definition of "peer-reviewed," a term used in academia meaning scientific or academic papers are thoroughly vetted by professor and equal peers.

One of the chief academic reference points for Truthers is The Jo​urnal of 9/11 Studies, an online-only journal that includes such classics as "The Moral Decoding of 9-11: Beyond the U.S. Criminal State," "The Top Ten Connections Between [National Institute of Standards and Technology] and Nano-Thermites," and "Why Did the World's Most Advanced Electronics Warfare Plane Circle Over The White House on 9/11?"

Beyond some of the more outlandish claims typical of the Truther movement, Brinnier did, however, have some pretty solid circumstantial evidence to back his claims.

"There was, in fact, a major elevator renovation to all three buildings, for the proceeding nine months so there was ample opportunity for someone to get in there," he said. "And there have been reports of trucks arriving at the World Trade Centre between 3 AM and 4 AM every morning for the previous two months before 9/11. That was ample opportunity to get things in there. The security was completely controlled by members of the government."

But, no matter how many jokes get cracked at their expense or how many peer reviewed studies debunk their claims, Truthers like Brinnier vow to fight on.

"We're going to continue, as long as it takes," he said. "As long as I have breath in my lungs."

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