VICE travels to Mississippi, where the Klu Klux Klan is experiencing a rise in members, fueled by a new strategy that targets veterans just returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Host Rocco Castoro chats with Klan member and former Marine Steve, and explores how the KKK's numbers are tied to world wars.

​Nowadays, our online dealings take place in the world of web 2.0, or 2.5, or wherever we are now. Sleek design, usability, mobile-ready pages that don't give our phones aneurysms. But that doesn't mean the old world is gone. ​HamsterDance.com is being squatted upon by an entrepreneurial usurper, but the original ​ear-throttling anthem is still out there. GeoCities and AngelFire pages live on, you just have to scroll to the sixth or seventh pages of Google searches to find them. Like the ruins of the Coliseum or shuttered drive-in theaters, the ghosts of web 1.0 linger. And scattered throughout that hidden world are the early internet churches.

At least, the sites where churches used to be. Many of these lost congregations are full of broken links, graphical hiccups, odd fonts, and color schemes that ravage the retinas. The chat rooms have long had their Java scripts revoked, and contact forms send back only automated responses from the old mailer-daemons. So, just what happened to the promises of early internet churches?

GodWeb.org in 1999. Screen capture provided by ​WayBackMachine

In 1984, Reverend Charles Henderson began typing sermons on his personal computer to be spoken to his congregation at Central Presbyterian Church in Montclair, New Jersey. As he ​once said during a talk at MIT, "it was a convenience, but not life changing." But throughout the years, Henderson watched interconnectivity spread across this thing called the World Wide Web. In 1994, he had an idea.

"Why not create a chat room that was modeled after a church?" he told me.

Thus began the First Church of Cyberspace, located at ​GodWeb.org. It was a webpage with inspirational music, sermons, even a "visual sanctuary" where people meditated to a pixelated image of a flickering candle. Also in the space was the chat room where, every Sunday evening at eight, 30 or so congregants gathered to have real-time conversations, starting with Bible study and delving into current events and politics.

By most accounts, this chat room was the world's first internet congregation.

For Henderson, the internet was a chance to fix some of the issues he'd seen developing in the traditional structure of worship, as well as a way to slow down the thinning of the flock. "Most Christian denominations have these legacy churches that were built decades ago, but the populations located near them are declining," Henderson said. "Even megachurches that have the advantage of being located on highways have topped out." The internet solved this problem of proximity.

If you head over to the website now, it's mostly gone. GodWeb.org still exists as a clearinghouse for general Christian information, sermons, essays, commentary on current events, and even a humor section. But the flickeri​ng candles have been replaced by the question marks of corrupt image files. The chat room has given way to a message board, because Henderson wanted to remove the time-based limitation that real-time chats required.

"People have more complicated schedules," he said. "Even churches are having difficulty getting people to come in at 11 o'clock Sunday morning."

The hit count proves that Henderson's correct in that regards. His 30 chatters on Sunday nights long ago doesn't compare to the 40,000 unique visitors GodWeb gets a week. (Comparatively, as Henderson points out, "the typical Presbyterian church might have 150 people in the typical congregation.") But has something been lost with the shuttering of congregations that meet in real time?

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​NorthlandChurch.net in 2002. Capture provided by WayBackMachine

"During web 1.0, there was a real you and an online you," said Nathan Clark, director of digital innovation for Northland​ Church. "The online you, who knew other online people, in an online way. Now, being online is an extension of your own life."

That philosophy extends to how Northland created their virtual environment. The church was at the forefront of using the internet to extend its message in the early 00s, when radio technicians ran fiber-optic cables from an old building to a new one. The two congregations were physically separated, yet still together.

"People [sang] duets in two different buildings in real time," said Clark. "We realized that part of what was exciting about it was not being confined by the space of the building."

This idea gradually spiderwebbed. In addition to three primary sites in Longwood, Florida, the church—which officially calls itself "Northland, a Church Distributed"—opened "house churches" around the country, "global partners" around the world, a prison outreach program, and invited people everywhere to pop into their " online worship environmen​t" during live services, which are still broadcast today. Through the live services, congregants can watch a video feed of the service while chatting others. They can even participate in communion by tearing bread and chugging wine in the comfort of their living room.

Although a lot of church services have translated well to the web, there are some theological concerns when it comes to, for instance, administering virtual sacraments or last rites. One somewhat creepy church or allowed sinners to email in​ a confession. Henderson of GodWeb.org hosted memorial services, but that was it. And while Clark said he draws the line at performing weddings, he remembered a time when he virtually performed a reading at a funeral, suggesting that perhaps his terms are malleable.

That's not to say other churches are quick to delve into virtual worship. "Most of the skepticism around online church is motivated by fear," said Clark. "'If they can worship online, will they give offerings?' 'Is online church destroying the community?' It's worth considering, but the fear that drives many of them is not a legitimate reason not to pursue it."

As Clark points out, Northland has never been scared of the web because they don't see it as a replacement to meatspace worship, merely an addition. "A lot of people worship online because they've been wounded by the church," said Clark. "What we don't want to do is just collect wounded and not help them heal." In addition to holding online services, they try to find comparable churches near online congregants in order for them to experience the more personal side of church services. "If all you ever do is dial online, you're probably missing out on the richer experience."

Of course, if there's nothing down the street, where do you go?

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​Church of Fools' virtual service.

Ship of Fools began in the 1970s as a UK-based print magazine as a place for, as the magazine put it, "Christian unrest." "We are Christians, but we believe in self-criticism," said founder Simon Jenkins. "Poking fun at ridiculous religious stuff as a means of good housekeeping."

In 1983, the print version folded, only to be resurrected as a website on April Fools' Day in 1998. Almost immediately, the website's bulletin board began fostering a community of like-minded individuals. The power of such a community wasn't evident to Jenkins until the death of one of its members, who went by the name Miss Molly.

"She got cancer and spent the last three months of her life on a [message board] thread," said Jenkins. "She said, 'I'm dying, and I'd like to talk to you about my life'. And she had quite an interesting life, and people wanted to be with her in her last months." After 1,000 posts, she died. But the extreme outpouring of emotions led Jenkins and his co-founder Stephen Goddard to see that this online community may be something more than just randoms on a message board. " Well, are we actually a church?"

The concept was back-burnered until 2003, when the site created an online reality game called The A​rk, which featured 12 characters walking and talking (read: typing) around a virtual 3D environment. Every so often, they'd get voted off until there was one left, Survivor-style. Every Sunday, the remaining characters performed a small church service in The Ark's living room. After the game ended, Jenkins and Goddard thought about creating a real online church.

The following year, the group raised enough funding to create the ​Church of Fools, a 3D environment where congregants—30 at a time, due to bandwidth issues—strolled, sat in pews, and participated in regular services given by a real-life clergymen. (Well, the avatars of real-life clergymen.) When service wasn't going on, the church was open for congregants to just hang out. "Downstairs was an old-fashioned crypt, and there was a holy water dispensing machine," said Jenkins. "We had quite a lot of visual jokes in there."

If you didn't make the cut of 30 congregants, you could watch the service as a "ghost," which meant others couldn't see you, but you could lurk. "We often had up to 3,000 ghosts in the church," said Jenkins. "We would pray for the ghosts, and the people who couldn't be there, and also previous generations who passed on."

Jenkins was struck by the world congregation this "experiment" made possible. "We would say, 'Let's say the Lord's Prayer in whatever language you prayed it in,'" said Jenkins. "Spanish would come up, Welsh would come up, Latin, English, German. It was a spine-tingling moment." Other times, he was taken aback by the intense emotional charge of the conversations inside the virtual sanctuary. "You'd be sitting in one of the pews and someone would sit next to you, and they might start talking about how they lost their brother in a car crash and came here because they wanted to talk to someone."

But the environment, as any virtual environment does, had its fair share of trolls. "We had no security," said Jenkins. "[Trolls] would post the times of our services on their websites and try to occupy all the spaces. And they'd go into the crypt and worship the vending machines. They would do a wave or all bow at the same time. It was brilliant."

After four months, the experiment ended after the funding dried up. The Ship of Fools website and message board continued, but it was different. Soon, a more pious group of congregants moved on to form ​St. Pixels. They tried their hand at a form of 2D worship, before delving back into the 3D environment, and then ultimately settling for weekly services on a Facebook app. As of this writing, they have 550 "likes."
​

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​Church of Fools' virtual service.

So, where does the future of online worshipping go? Since the First Church of Cyberspace, Rev. Henderson has dabbled in other virtual churches, in one instance building a church in the New England Village region of Second Life. Henderson believes this kind of virtual church service will be the next wave in how believers commune with God, not least because web 2.0 is about dissolving the border between real and virtual.

"People who have met in a virtual world can develop relationships in the real world and end up getting married," Henderson said. "One world kind of blends with the each other. They go hand in hand."

But no one mans the structure in faux New England, and no one's there to lead services. So, it just kind of sits, waiting to be discovered by players, who look around, maybe hold some kind of brief service or party, and move on. This isn't a congregation, it's a digital ruin.

"Building a church building isn't enough," said Jenkins. "It just becomes a museum piece. It's kind of meaningless, it's just architecture. You're just talking about pixels, really."

To Jenkins, the Church of Fools was more than pixels. The online community wasn't something that lived in this nebulous "elsewhere." It was a real space. "My mom, who was 80 at the time, used to come to the church on Sundays," said Jenkins. "During the week, on the phone to me she'd say, 'Oh, I'll see you in church.' Even she got into this idea we were in the same space."

If you want to get all theological, churches aren't about the physical places themselves, despite the breathtaking amounts of money traditional spent on lavish cathedrals, mosques, and temples. They're about the community and the people. As Jesus put it, "Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them." He doesn't say anything about those places being in real life. 

"Would it be appropriate for a dragon in Second Life to lead prayer?" asks Jenkins. "It's an amazing and wonderful question to ask."

Follow Rick Paulus on ​Twitter

Today, December 17, is the International Day to End Violence Against SexWorkers, and groups all over the world are gathering to memorialize victims. The occasion was launched by Annie Sprinkle after the "Green River Killer," Gary Ridgway, confessed to killing dozens of women, and explained that he chose sex workers as targets because he thought they would rarely or never be reported missing. In fact, many reports had been made to the police, but they didn't seem to care—Seattle sex workers knew who Gary Ridgway was for years before he was arrested.

I grew up in the shadow of another serial killer, Robert Hansen, who flew kidnapped sex workers to remote locations in his airplane and hunted them, literally. The older glamorous burlesque queen I lived with as a teenager had escaped from Hansen after being kidnapped and tortured. Like Cindy Paulsen, the main character of the documentary about Hansen's killing spree, my friend had gone to the police and been made fun of and threatened with arrest herself. People on the street knew who Hansen was for years before the police arrested him.

The police practice of not taking reports from—or investigating the deaths of—prostitutes continues to this day. In 2010, a sex worker on Long Island named Shannan Gilbert called 9-1-1, frantically reporting that she was going to be killed. The police wouldn't respond without an address, so she ran and banged frantically on a stranger's door before resuming her flight. When cops arrived, instead of investigating, they wrote her off as a hooker who was probably on drugs. A year later, Shannan's body was found less than a mile from where she'd dialed 9-1-1, along with the bodies of several other sex workers thought to be victims of a serial killer. The police maintain that Shannan likely drowned, accidentally, after leaving her clothes and purse and wading, naked, for a quarter-mile through waist-deep water, though a recent autopsy found no drugs in her system. As one author put it, "Against all common sense and with willful ignorance of Shannan's own words that night, the police seemed to be saying that Shannan Gilbert had died because her soul had been rent asunder by a life in the streets."

On Wednesday, there will be candlelight vigils in remembrance of these murdered sex workers. Many of us will also be thinking of the sex workers we've known who've died in less dramatic, but tragically preventable, ways because their lives did not seem to matter to people in power. Sex workers' lives often don't seem to matter to police, hospitals, shelters, doctors, disability eligibility officers, or cab drivers.

In September 2013, I attended a sex trafficking seminar where Alaska's then attorney general explained that his primary goal was to boost trust between victims within the sex industry and law enforcement by increasing arrests. He seemed unable to understand why victims wouldn't come forward to police. Apparently the problem was the tragic state of their souls rather than their previous experiences with police.

I decided to devote my master's research and thesis to investigating Alaskan sex workers' lived experiences with the institutions that are supposed to help them. In the beginning, I expected to find that police didn't take reports, and that was true: Of those who'd tried to report being the victim or witness to a crime, police had taken reports from only 44 percent. A third of those who'd tried to report a crime were threatened with arrest. Much more chilling, though, was the amount of violence from police. Over a quarter of those surveyed reported being sexually assaulted by police officers, and the assaults by police were concentrated among those who had also experienced abusive working conditions in the sex industry and therefore might be most in need of protection.

Just 50 years ago, it was not uncommon practice for police and criminals to target gay men, lesbians, and gender non-conforming folks with violence. Today GLBT people are not only able to report crimes, but there's legislation protecting them from discrimination. It's time to do the same for sex workers.

Tara Burns is the author of Whore Diaries: My First Two Weeks as an Escort and Whore Diaries II: Adventures in Independent Escorting. Follow her on Twitter.

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Protesters at 2011's "Muff March" on Harley Street. Photos by Alan Denney ​via Wikicommons

This post originally appeared in VICE UK​

A few months ago, 21-year-old Megan* had a labiaplasty. She borrowed the money from her mom and, after a consultation at a clinic in London, went ahead with the operation, which, in her case, involved the trimming down of her inner lips (labia minora). The results are great, Megan tells me, and her life has improved. So she was shocked to hear of comments made by Theresa May last week suggesting that some types of labiaplasty could be illegal.

"People are entitled to do whatever they want with their bodies," Megan says. "Until I had the surgery I thought it was normal to be uncomfortable in everyday life. I hated the appearance of my labia, and a lot of things—including sex—were difficult."

However, "designer vagina" operations, the Home Secretary said last week, could technically fall into the same category of crime as female genital mutilation (FGM). May suggested that doctors could be prosecuted for carrying out cosmetic labiaplasty, even if the women they perform the procedures on are over 18 and have given their consent.

Vaginas are considered fair game by the beauty industry; tangled tons of pubes are stripped from them each year, they are vajazzled, dyed, scented, and bleached. Since 2001, the number of labiaplasties performed by the NHS has risen five-fold, with more than 2,000 operations carried out in 2010 alone. However, many women have the surgery in private clinics, which aren't required to keep records, so the number is really far higher.

It's heartbreaking that so many women are unhappy. With the boom in labiaplasty it's safe to say there is no longer a single part of our bodies not held up to scrutiny, pathologized, turned to profit. But still, May's comments are likely to jar. The freedom, as an adult, to do as you wish with your body is a key tenet of feminism (think abortion, the right to say no to sex) so making labiaplasty illegal goes against the grain. Likewise, her comparison of labiaplasty to FGM—a major form of child abuse—doesn't, on the surface, seem fair.

Not so, says FGM campaigner and spokesperson for the Foundation for Women's Health Research and Development (FORWARD), Saria Khalifa. "We welcome Theresa May's comments," Khalifa tells me. "There's been very little conversation around the complexities and similarities between female genital cosmetic surgery (FGCS) and FGM. There are parallels."

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Protesters at 2011's "Muff March" on Harley Street

FGM is classified into four major types. It may include the removal of the clitoris or the fold of skin which surrounds it (type 1), the partial or total removal of the clitoris, labia minora and labia majora (type 2), or the narrowing of the vaginal opening by cutting and repositioning the inner, or outer, labia (infibulation, type 3). Type 4 involves "all other harmful procedures to the female genitalia for non-medical purposes," covering procedures such as piercing, incising, scraping and cauterising.

There are similarities between type 1 and type 2 FGM and some forms of labiaplasty. In the UK, reduction of the labia is the most common operation, but women can also get a vaginal "rejuvenation" (to tighten it up a bit) or get their hymen repaired so they tear and bleed the next time they have sex.

In the US, a growing number of women are asking for the "Barbie", a form of labiaplasty that involves chopping off the entire inside lips and possibly reducing the outer, leaving a flat, doll-like area with little resemblance to most adult women's genitals. Bearing in mind that FGM does not always involve removal of the clitoris, it's hard to see this procedure as vastly different to FGM.

But however grim Barbie vaginas may seem, grown women are choosing them of their own free will. FGM, by comparison, is nearly always carried out on minors. In the UK, 23,000 girls under 15 are thought to be at risk and FGM is, quite rightly, illegal. The UK has been criticized for lagging behind on prosecutions for the procedure and the situation has been called a national scandal.

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Protesters at 2011's "Muff March" on Harley Street

Age and consent, then, are at the heart of arguments in favour of FGCS. "The difference between this and FGM is that FGM isn't always consensual," Megan says. "With labiaplasty, women have it because they want to and it's often going to make their life better."

However, Khalifa says that consent may not be such a clear dividing line. "There are women over the age of 18 in lots of communities who want FGM done because they feel it's beneficial or think it's more beautiful—that's how they've been raised to view their bodies," she says. "Because it isn't our cultural norm in the UK, it's an idea we can't wrap our heads around. But it's similar to breast implants or a variety of other cosmetic procedures. There is also that pressure in the UK for women to look a certain way.

"There are gray areas around FGM because, how the law currently stands, if a woman over the age of 18 wanted to go through a form of FGM she would legally not be allowed, or the person who did that to her would be prosecuted. There's a slight double standard."

The thinking behind UK law—the Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003 and the Prohibition of Female Genital Mutilation (Scotland) Act 2005—which makes FGM illegal at any age is that it is impossible to separate genuine personal consent from societal pressure. Indeed. With women between 18 and 25—those who have grown up most steeped in media images of the perfect vag—the age group most commonly requesting labiaplasty, societal pressure to look a certain way is a real and insidious thing.

Megan is aware of this. "As people, we're shaped by society. It's a no brainer that society plays a big part in what's considered normal," she says.

The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) is concerned about the murky area where societal norms and personal choice become impossible to disentangle. At present, FGCS is deemed acceptable when women are distressed by a "perception of abnormality", in which case they'll be classed as needing the surgery for a psychological reason. But perceptions are slippery things.

"The phrase 'distress caused by a perception of abnormality' is open to interpretation, giving rise to some ambiguity around the legal status of some FGCS procedures," says the RCOG.

May's suggestion, that FGCS only be permissible when there is a physical or psychological justification, becomes redundant when definitions are this subjective. Surgery is painful and expensive. People don't go into it lightly.

"No one has plastic surgery for shits and giggles," Megan says. "There is always going to be either a mental or physical reason. You do it because you have either an emotional or physical issue and, more than anything else, that's what you're going to be sorting out."

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Protesters at 2011's "Muff March" on Harley Street

Khalifa believes that what's needed is a better system in place to offer women requesting FGCS pre-surgery counseling. Studies have shown that many women seeking labiaplasty have labia that fall within normal limits. Take a look at some before and after pictures on any surgery website; the "befores" often look pretty damn ordinary.

David Mills, managing director of the cosmetic surgery firm Moorgate Aesthetics, disagrees. "In most cases of labiaplasty, there's clearly a protrusion of the labia," he says. "Women are often uncomfortable and not able to enjoy normal activities. They're often embarrassed about wearing swimwear and it may affect their personal relationships. If patients have a history of depression or another medical condition that causes concern, we will contact their GP, but I don't recall anyone being turned away for this procedure."

Mills calls Theresa May's comments "draconian" and questions what the difference is between elective surgery on the labia and elective surgery on any other part of the body. Women choose to have their breasts enlarged or their sagging stomach tissue removed, so why not allow them to choose what happens to their labia?

Of course, there is no moral difference between getting breast implants and electing to have your labia reduced with FGCS. The ultimate aim should be that no one feels the pressure to add bits or chop bits from their body, but, in the meantime, women like Megan argue they should be free to do what they want.

The high level of coercion and severe long-term health consequences separate FGM from other elective surgeries, but the similarities should shine a light—again—on how just how steeped we are in dictatorial social norms.

Khalifa believes education is the way forward. "We don't have a system set up for girls to feel comfortable with the way they look," she says. "With FGM, there are very clear parallels not only with female genital cosmetic surgery, but other forms of cosmetic surgery that society dictates to us as women. We need to have more discussion about this."

Follow Frankie Mullin on ​Twitter

[body_image width='1024' height='1024' path='images/content-images/2014/12/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/16/' filename='brydie-lee-kennedy-five-things-sexism-ruined-in-2014-768-body-image-1418751091.jpg' id='11786']...in video games journalism. Photo by Joseph Gilbert via Flickr

This post originally appeared in VICE UK

This year should have been a great one for women. I mean, for starters, it's 2014. That is the future, basically. Most years should be great years for women by now, at least until gender is made irrelevant by our robot rulers (or made super relevant again, if the future follows The Jetsons model).

But, as the days rolled on, women around the world found themselves waking up like this, if "this" is a state of baffled horror at the reactionary weirdness of lady-hating dude-bros. A fog of misogyny descended and then drifted into loads of different areas that had previously seemed fun and safe.

Here are just a few things that sexism straight up ruined for me in 2014.

Ethics
My favorite lecturer at uni was a philosophy PhD candidate called John who was, to date, the only guy I've ever met whose sexiness was enhanced by a ponytail. He taught Practical Ethics, a class in which I primarily argued with fundamentalist Christians about abortions and lied about being a vegetarian in an attempt to impress Professor Ponytail. So my associations with ethics have always been basically great. Also because, if you're talking about ethics, it's generally because you're trying to ensure that people are being treated fairly, which is, you know, good.

Enter Gamergate​, the online crap tornado that occurred when women involved in the video game industry suggested that maybe a culture which had been entirely male-dominated since its inception and often treated women as sex objects could think about modernizing a bit. In response, male gamers did totally rational things like spread rumors about game designer Zoe Quinn's sex life and threaten her so much that she had to leave her home. Oh, and then in October they made terrorist threats against Utah State University because they were hosting a lecture by Anita Sarkeesian, who'd become infamous in gaming circles for her Tropes vs Women in Video Games series. All very chill, appropriate responses.

And all of this was done under the guise of concern for "Ethics in Video Game Journalism," because I guess just saying, "NO GIRLS ALLOWED IN THE GUNS 'N' WANKING CLUBHOUSE" didn't quite fit on their banners. I am now distrustful of any call for ethics in any arena. Thanks, men.

[body_image width='1274' height='712' path='images/content-images/2014/12/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/16/' filename='brydie-lee-kennedy-five-things-sexism-ruined-in-2014-768-body-image-1418751140.png' id='11787']The name "Dapper Laughs" doesn't even make sense; that's the worst thing

Black Turtlenecks
Who among us hasn't tried to Euro-up a look with a high, dark neckline, ideally paired with red wine and a touch of disdain? And for those of us prone to hormonal spot breakouts on our chest (Not me. Not me. Just a "random example"), a turtleneck can be the perfect accessory to your complexion's crime.

And then Dapper bloody Laughs—or "character comedian Daniel O'Reilly", as his mum calls him—comes along, does that Newsnight interview and ruins the garment forever. It's bad enough that he built his career on rape threats and the general degradation of women, now he has to make the otherwise innocent turtleneck synonymous with bullshit televised apologies?

For shame, Daniel. I mean, on the list of Sexist Cunts of 2014, you're way behind, say, Julien Blanc, but at least he had the good sense to do his choke slams while wearing deep Vs, which have literally always been awful.

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Touching Sporting Narratives
Everyone loves a good "triumph over adversity in order to become a highly paid professional athlete" story, don't they? It's like how everyone likes Kanye West because he broke his jaw once. But can we be touched by these stories after it turns out that, actually, difficult background or not, top-tier athletes will continue to be righteous, violent assholes when it comes to women, and that the institutions around them will continue to protect them?

I mean, Pistorius had both his legs amputated before he turned one; Ray Rice's dad was killed when he was young; Ched Evans is called "Ched"—all were starting from positions of pretty serious disadvantage. But every time I feel like being inspired by their stories, my buzz gets harshed out by all the murdering/assaulting/raping they did. I'm canceling my Sky Sports subscription and it's sexism's fault.

[body_image width='683' height='1000' path='images/content-images/2014/12/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/16/' filename='brydie-lee-kennedy-five-things-sexism-ruined-in-2014-768-body-image-1418751255.jpg' id='11790']Spoiler: the doughnut he is eating has dog jizz in it

American College Comedies
Say you're the kind of idiot who laughs at the jizz scene in Scary Movie—that's all been ruined this year, along with my enjoyment of all the other terrible popcorn comedies set in American colleges throughout history. The cause? The horribly depressing amount of stories to emerge this year that detailed how prevalent rape is on American college campuses.

It's kind of hard to get into a hilarious party scene when you realize you're scanning the background extras to see if any of the dudes are dropping things in the girls' drinks, or if a Rolling Stone journalist is walking around the party with a skateboard saying, "How do you do, fellow kids?"

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Last year called, it wants its cronuts back. Photo via Flickr user ccho

Portmanteaus
Did you know that when a donkey and a zebra have a kid it's called a zedonk? Seriously. Type that into Word and marvel at the lack of squiggly red line. Such an adorable name for this heartwarming example of interspecies love, and yet I can't enjoy it any more. Nor can I dig the retro charm of cassingle, the coronary-disaster that is the cronut or the modern marvel that is the vlog... LOL, jk, vlog was always a terrible word for a terrible thing.

But when hundreds of naked photos of female celebrities were released without their permission in September, this hilarious sex-crime was initially dubbed Celebgate. Which was pretty bad, in terms of whacking a jaunty label on a crime. But that wasn't enough for our merry band of pervs, so this label was soon overtaken by The Fappening.

You know. Because fapping is an onomatopoeic word for wanking and these dudes wanted you to know they were getting off on gross violations of privacy. RIP, portmanteaus—never forget (nevget).

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Clay Hunt died from survivor's guilt. When the handsome Houstonian with a sparse auburn beard and tattooed arms shipped out to Iraq, he was what his best friend described as "the all-American kid." But after two tours that included helplessly watching the tragic deaths of two of his fellow Marines, Hunt sunk into a downward spiral of PTSD, depression, and eventually suicide in March 2011, at the age of 28.

"He knew in his head there was nothing else he could have done, and he knew no one could have done anything more," his mom, Stacy Hunt, told 60 Minutes last year. "But in his heart it tore him apart."

In July, Minnesota Congressman Timothy Walz sponsored a bill in Hunt's honor. The Clay Hunt SAV Act would have required independent reviews of the Veterans Affairs Department's suicide prevention program, incentivized civilian psychiatrists to work with veterans, and created a program to help returning service members adjust to life after war. It would have cost just $22 million—a little more than 0.0001 percent of the total US budget. It seemed like a no-brainer and passed easily in the House of Representatives earlier this year.

But the bill didn't get past Tom Coburn, an outgoing Republican senator and infamous obstructionist who goes by the nickname Dr. No, because that's how he always votes. The 65-year-old Oklahoma physician is retiring due to health problems, but in one last act of defiance, he prevented the Clay Hunt bill from even getting a vote in the Senate.

"It's a shame that after two decades of service in Washington, Sen. Coburn will always be remembered for this final, misguided attack on veterans nationwide," Paul Rieckhoff, founder of the advocacy group Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, said in a statement. "While we recognize Senator Coburn's reputation as a budget hawk, clearly the minor cost of this bill would have a tremendous payoff to help save lives in our community."

Coburn's main beef with the bill was that it was redundant, and wouldn't be offset by any cuts in spending. That may be true, but it also conveniently overlooks the fact that military suicide continues to be a huge problem. In 2012, the VA estimated that 22 veterans take their lives every day. And as the recent scandal over waiting times at veterans' hospitals revealed, the agency has done a terrible job caring for soldiers seeking mental health treatment (and any other kind of medical treatment, for that matter).

There are signs that the military's suicide epidemic might even be getting worse, as more soldiers return home from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Department of Defense's quarterly suicide report, released last week, found that there were 70 suicides 1among service members in the second quarter of 2014. That puts the total number of military suicides at 144 for the first six months of this year, and means were well on our way to outpacing last year's totals.

Notably Coburn, a doctor-turned-politician supports the Iraq War, which has cost $2 trillion to date. As Wonkette points out, the $22 million price tag for the suicide prevention bill is equal to the cost of about 210 minutes of fighting the Iraq war at its height.

"I'm going to be rejecting this bill because it just throws money and doesn't solve the real problem," Coburn said in a speech on the Senate floor Monday. " "Events, catastrophic events, depression, and situations lead people to suicide, not any one individual. They are searching for an answer we have failed to give."

As disheartening as Coburn's swan song was, though, Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) said lawmakers plan to reintroduce the Clay Hunt SAV bill when Congress returns next year. And with Coburn out of the way, supporters are hopeful it will pass.

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[body_image width='500' height='281' path='images/content-images/2014/12/17/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/17/' filename='hackers-have-scared-movie-theaters-into-not-showing-the-interview-body-image-1418852700.jpg' id='12166']

Image via Sony Pictures

The Interview was—spoiler—supposed to be a comedy about a pair of bumbling journalists (Seth Rogen and VICE contributor James Franco) who get instructed by the CIA to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un. Now, thanks to the Sony hackers, it's taken a turn for the meta, and will ultimately be remembered as a film that resulted a terrorist threat against the United States.

Since November 14, an unknown person or persons have been leaking Sony's films, private emails, and executive salaries. There are rumors that the North Korean government itself is behind the threat, although officials there have denied them. But the story kicked up a notch yesterday, when the hackers threatened moviegoers who might want to go see the film. Calling themselves "Guardians of Peace," they issued this warning on the anonymous messageboard Pastebin:

We will clearly show it to you at the very time and places "The Interview" be shown, including the premiere, how bitter fate those who seek fun in terror should be doomed to.
Soon all the world will see what an awful movie Sony Pictures Entertainment has made.
The world will be full of fear.
Remember the 11th of September 2001.
We recommend you to keep yourself distant from the places at that time.
(If your house is nearby, you'd better leave.)
Whatever comes in the coming days is called by the greed of Sony Pictures Entertainment.
All the world will denounce the SONY.

As a result of this over-the-top threat, the world premiere of the film, in LA, was scaled back to the point where reporters weren't even allowed interviews (kind of ironic, right?). New York's premiere was cancelled entirely. Now, rather than risk the unspecified consequences, both Regal and AMC have opted not to show the film. Several smaller cinema chains have followed suit. One, Bow Tie Cinemas, released a statement about the decision today.

"Given that the source and credibility of these threats is unknown at the time of this announcement, we have decided after careful consideration not to open The Interview on December 25, 2014 as originally planned," it read. "We hope that those responsible for this act are swiftly identified and brought to justice.

Of course, making a film prohibitively difficult to see is just going to make people want see it more—it's why people still remember Piss Christ. (This phenomenon is basically the plot of Infinite Jest.) Who knows? Maybe this is a huge publicity stunt by the production company. Sony could probably release this movie on DVD tomorrow and make a trillion dollars.

Maybe that's why not all theaters are cowed by the threats. "If they play it, we'll show it," Tom Stephenson, the CEO of Look Cinemas, told Variety. "Sony has a right to make the movie, we have a right to play it and censorship in general is a bad thing."

UPDATE: According to CNN, Sony just decided to cancel the movie's planned release altogether:

[tweet text="With movie theaters canceling showings of The Interview, @Sony pulls the Dec 25 release of the film, @PamelaBrownCNN reports" byline="— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper)" user_id="jaketapper" tweet_id="545336315613810688" tweet_visual_time="December 17, 2014"]

...and the AP is saying the same thing. Look for The Interview on DVD or Netflix, I guess.

[tweet text="BREAKING: Sony Pictures cancels Dec. 25 release of 'The Interview'" byline="— The Associated Press (@AP)" user_id="AP" tweet_id="545338539505119232" tweet_visual_time="December 17, 2014"]

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Englishmen love a cricket analogy, so here's one. From the beginning of the 19th century until 1962, a game of cricket was played almost every year, almost always at Lord's in London, between a team of amateurs known as the Gentlemen and a team of professionals known as the Players. The Gentlemen, it was presumed, were above doing something quite as vulgar as making money playing a sport. They were privately educated members of the British elite. Their opponents were ordinary wage-earning members of the masses.

When the game—and the concept of amateurism in Cricket—was abolished in 1963, the Players had won 125 games to the Gentlemen's 68. The City of London, which has for centuries been the home of Britain's trading and financial services industries, was the venue for another game played by men who thought of themselves as gentlemen. Before the arrival of the big American banks in the 1980s, when a number of British institutions were taken over by their Wall Street counterparts and the hardworking, hard-gambling culture of global finance as we know it began to take shape, the city was a closed shop dominated by chaps who'd been to expensive schools and didn't want to be seen to be trying too hard.

This was an era in which banks were not the incomprehensible monolithic institutions beset by conflicts of interest that they are today. It was an era in which tying yourself to a corporation and pursuing a policy of get-the-money-whichever-way-you-can was not acceptable. One bank wouldn't poach another's clients, and a degree of loyalty was shown to customers. It was also an era in which insider trading was seen, in the words of the now elderly British businessman Sir Martin Jacomb, as a "victimless crime" and in which the Accepting Houses committee fronted as a trade association while acting as a cartel, its policy coordinated between a collection of established banks, the Bank of England, and the government.

Then, on October 27, 1986, for good and ill, everything changed. This was the day known as the "Big Bang," on which a sudden wave of deregulation swept through London's financial markets. Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government thought that too much regulation and a banking system presided over by a dozy old elite had seen London slip far behind New York as a financial center of the world. The Yanks were running around doing deals on massive mobile phones while the Brits were putting a bottle of wine away at lunch and napping till dinner. For Thatcher, a disciple of free-market prophets like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, the key to London regaining its place as a dominant financial hub was in unrestricted competition.

So fixed commission charges were dropped, the distinction between stockjobbers (guys who made a market in the shares) and stockbrokers (guys who traded on behalf of investors) was abolished, trading moved from the floor of the stock exchange to a screen-based system, and the way was paved for smaller banks to merge with investment banks and for big American institutions to come in and gobble up the old British firms that were in danger of being engulfed by the rising tide of the free market. London, because of its history, language, time zone, and relative political stability, became the bridge between Wall Street and Europe, the second base for the American banks' global conquest. Wall Street was coming to the City of London, and it was bringing longer working hours, shorter lunches, conflicts of interest, fiercer competition, and a "greed-is-good" attitude with it.

This change was not completely unprecedented, though. Over lunch at a restaurant owned, suitably, by the Hambro family of Hambros Bank fame, Tom Chandos, who was for many years an executive at Kleinwort Benson, a long-established banking institution in London, told me that in the old days the investment bank S. G. Warburg & Co. was the outlier. Warburg's founder, Siegmund Warburg, was an outsider, a German Jew who'd fled the Nazis in the 1930s. Just as the Americans would in the 1980s, Warburg brought a more aggressive, rigorous culture to banking—a culture that set his institution apart from the old British banks and was best exemplified by the fact that it carried out the first hostile takeover in the UK. Warburg disrupted London in the same way the American banks did in the 1980s. They provided the early warning signs.

Chandos told me a story about his father, who was a partner in an established stockbroking firm after the Second World War. In the late 1950s, Siegmund Warburg tried to persuade him to come work at his bank. Chandos Sr. liked Warburg, and he knew that the working culture was different there and that you had to try harder. He lived in Hampshire, about an hour outside London, and in those days, if you were a refined man like Chandos Sr., you didn't just roll out of your office and into the nearest pub. You went home and you dressed for dinner. The problem with working at S. G. Warburg, Chandos Sr. confided to his son years later, was that "you sometimes had to be at your desk beyond six o'clock, which meant you couldn't get home in time to change for dinner." He had other reasons for turning the job down, of course, and while he approved of the bank's culture, it wasn't quite for him.

London's relaxed approach to work was for a long time a source of scorn and amusement on Wall Street. Tom Bernard, who worked on Wall Street for 30 years and who was immortalized as the "Human Piranha" in Liar's Poker, Michael Lewis's memoir of his time at the now dead investment bank Salomon Brothers, told me that "there was a view among many at Salomon's HQ that employees outside New York City did not work as hard as they did. Tokyo and San Francisco (salesmen were at their desks at 5 AM) were notable exceptions."

In Liar's Poker, this view is more strongly expressed, with one Salomon employee referring to a group of his company's Englishmen as "Eurofaggots" who left their desks at 5 PM and deserved their losses. In turn, Lewis refers to the "older Europeans who staffed the offices of Salomon" as "freedom fighters." Bernard was more diplomatic: "In general, I enjoyed working with my British counterparts. Their wry humor provided a refreshing balance to our American, in-your-face gallows humor. On my part, the trans-Atlantic jibes were all in good fun. If you were a productive team player, you were respected regardless of nationality or locale."

Lunch was the symbolic battleground on which the war of working practices was fought. It wasn't until 1987 that Gordon Gekko declared that "lunch is for wimps," but the nails had been hammered into the coffin of the Wall Street lunch a decade earlier.  "When I started at Salomon in 1979," Tom Bernard said, "the old Wall Street custom of drinking at lunch was dying fast for trading-desk professionals. We usually ate at our desks, but when we did lunch with clients, the markets had become way too demanding to return to our desks any less than 100 percent sober."

The tradition of the big lunch, with wine, took longer to die in Europe. In fact, it's still not dead in London. One young corporate finance executive told me that Wall Street would "never take our lunches away from us." Friday is usually the day for this. "I'll leave the office at midday, and I won't come back. I take clients to lunch, we get the drinks in, and we go from there." In London, there's a formula for how lunch is done: If it's a traditional London lunch, you have a bottle of wine. If it's a Wall Street lunch, you don't have any wine. You can compromise with a glass.

This view of American bankers as boy scouts is confined to lunch, though. In the 80s, an English banker told me, there was a rumor that the trading desk at First Boston once brought in more cocaine in a day than profit. In many ways, the people—still mostly men—who populate Wall Street and London have far more in common with one another than they do with their fellow citizens. Tony Volpon, a strategist at Nomura on Wall Street, told me that "your nationality may be important, but it's just too competitive for it to have that much of an impact."

There are very few areas in life where you can have this much money this young. There are also very few areas in life where you have to work as hard, where you may even be expected to spend 72 straight hours in the office, as Moritz Erhardt did. The 21-year-old intern at Bank of America Merrill Lynch died in his shower from an epileptic seizure after putting in a shift of that length.

Cocaine, espresso, Red Bull, testosterone: These are the fuels that run through Wall Street and London. 

Stamina is the name of the game. In many institutions, if you can pull a series of all-nighters for a few years in your early 20s, if you can take your clients out to restaurants and strip clubs, fill them with booze and drugs and get them laid, then you can begin dreaming about becoming a senior banker and clocking off at 6 or 7 PM. Cocaine, espresso, Red Bull, testosterone: These are the fuels that run through Wall Street and London. And these fuels are all powering you on in the pursuit of one thing: money. As Chandos, who was already in his 30s in the 1980s, said to me, "I was excited to enjoy the innovation and change the American banks brought to London while it was still possible to have an acceptable lifestyle. Now, in order to succeed, you have no life. It's a Faustian pact."

Did this Faustian pact begin to take shape in the 1980s? Following the arrival of their trans-Atlantic counterparts in London, many British bankers wanted to be more American than the Americans. Up until the 1980s, middle- and upper-class British society turned its nose up at those working in American banks. Even if you made more money at a firm like Goldman Sachs, it was socially far more advantageous to be part of an old British institution. Chandos told me about a high-flying English banker who left Kleinwort Benson for JPMorgan and then came back. Apparently, one of the reasons for his return was that it meant more to his wife to say, in their social circles, that he was a director at a British bank than that he had better prospects at an American one.

Private schoolboys leaving Oxford or Cambridge and entering finance in the 1960s and 70s thought that if you went to an American bank you were a dimwit who couldn't cut it. It was a variation on a long-held Old World assumption about Americans: that they are burger-guzzling simpletons who like to wander around ancient sites of European culture in shorts and socks and sandals, breathing exclusively through their mouths. By the 1990s, that attitude had disappeared from London completely.

The Americans turned the game into something much more competitive, brought in their own culture, and sucked in a whole new load of British bankers, who often took the aggressive, hardworking instincts of Wall Street and ran even further with them. Matthew Greenburgh, a British banker who was formerly vice chairman of Merrill Lynch, told me that "it was normally the European bankers (and other non-Americans) who were more innovative, aggressive, entrepreneurial, and risk-taking—characteristics that are no longer in vogue in banking, of course. Americans were considered to be more rule-bound and herd-following. Perhaps all the brightest or most daring Americans went into hedge funds or Silicon Valley."

In the era of globalization, London also reached out to the rest of the world faster than Wall Street. Volpon pointed out that for financial workers in New York, the domestic market is important. This means that they need to get up to Boston and across to Los Angeles from time to time. Wall Street may think of the flyover states as being populated by a bunch of suburban moms, regional salesmen, and trailer trash good only for a subprime mortgage, but they at least have to acknowledge that this world exists and that it provides them with money. In London, the rest of the country is basically irrelevant. London's financial areas—the old City, Mayfair, and Canary Wharf—are connected to Britain by geography alone. The market is global. It's about EMEA: Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. A banker based in the UK's capital is more likely to go to Hong Kong than he is to go to Manchester.

This is now also reflected in the international staffs that fill the offices in London, as well as the people they do business with. Volpon said that "over the last ten years, London has become a place where people from the Middle East and Russia do business. They might be worried that in the US their money would be frozen. London has a more international flavor to it... When I worked there, my day-to-day life had a much more cosmopolitan feeling."

But this high-financial cosmopolitanism, which has its roots in the arrival of American banks, has left many ordinary Londoners feeling alienated. They are removed from this world and its money, and they are paying for it in the form of steep housing prices. In some areas, they can't even set foot on the land these banks occupy. The City of London Corporation, the municipal governing body of the city, has been around for almost a thousand years. It has its own police force, as does Canary Wharf, which is a private estate patrolled by a private security force. There is a closed, ancient form of justice and protection in these modern places. The anonymous towers of Canary Wharf could be anywhere in the world while those of Wall Street feel organic to New York, one of the birthplaces of modernist architecture.

But Canary Wharf is in East London's Docklands, once the cutthroat, bustling center of the British Empire's trade, bringing in cargo from all four corners of the globe. Between 1960 and 1980 all the docks were closed down, leaving behind mass unemployment and a swath of derelict land. The old game was dead. In the 1980s, a new game struggled into life: global capital in the heart of the old Docklands. The Canary Wharf project responded to the coming of the American banks and to the increasingly global nature of finance. Where working men in overalls and flat caps once stood outside pubs hoping to be chosen to bring that day's cargo in, now working men in suits and ties stand inside corporate offices, hoping to force through that latest merger. Cranes always hang high in the Docklands. Something is always being built. Someone is always making money, and someone is always being ripped off.

These two cities—New York and London—and their financial centers have become intertwined in a way that means that when we think of "bankers," we think of them not as Americans or Brits but simply as bankers. Both systems have been the beneficiaries of massive government bailouts in the last few years. This conversation about Wall Street and London has, at the root of it, a still-unanswered question about risk and how it should be managed. Should these financial institutions be compensated by the state, even when they have been knowingly gambling away the money of ordinary people?

The entitled amateurism of those gentlemen cricket players was founded on a system that kept them in place at the top of the chain. The amateur gentlemen of old London may have been swept aside by the professionals of Wall Street, but the takeover merely created another elite, another set of winners ready to make the system work for them.

Photo courtesy of Gamerscore blog via Wikipedia

Everyone knows Christmas is literally just about drinking spiked eggnog and sullenly disagreeing with your parents. And that, at some point, your mom will start an argument about something in the 1985 edition of Trivial Pursuit, while your brother will find the patterns in the tablecloth really interesting, before regurgitating some turkey and cranberry sauce back up into his lap.

This is a given. It is tradition and it is dependable. But there are alternatives. This is the future; now, at 7 PM on Christmas day, when you're too drunk for polite conversation, you're no longer forced to resort to that musty old Monopoly board. Instead, you can start your arguments with a new medium of entertainment called the "video game."

And the best thing you can do to kick-start the process is in invest in Spaceteam.

The Spaceteam trailer

Spaceteam is a "cooperative shouting game for phones and tablets," as its makers put it, and it's available for iOS and Android devices. You need two of these devices at least to make it work, but ideally every member of your argument party will need a device with the game on to play.

The idea is that you're all on the bridge of a spaceship hurtling through space, and each player has a number of buttons on a panel in front of you to help fly it as far as you can. Instructions appear at the top of the screen, but you haven't got all the buttons: The instructions need to be delegated to be completed. So you have to shout them out Star Trek-style to each other: "Discharge the Clip-Jawed Fluxtrunions!" "Discharged! Decrease Chemical Quartz to 2!"

It gets ever more furious as the instructions get faster, your buttons start to shake and warp on screen, and slime (inexplicably) starts to ooze from the panel. It's just like pretending to be on the USS Enterprise, if the ship was populated by people who consistently bicker about who should have to be Scottie, and god, WHY won't you just vent the HYPERSPANNERS?

Another recent discovery of mine has been the game Friendstrap. It's the lesser-known release of developers Game Oven, who made Fingle, a game that's a bit like Twister for fingers set to porny music. Fingle is great, but I don't know if I'd want to play something with porn overtones with any member of my family. It would also lead to my dad making inexcusable jokes that might lead to my sitting with my head over the toilet for the rest of the night.

The trailer for Friendstrap

Anyway, Friendstrap is great: on both iOS and Android, it's a game that requires you and a partner of your choice to put a thumb on the screen and hold it, where it will show a conversation topic. Your job is to talk about the topic for as long as the timer goes for. When the device vibrates, time is up and you release your fingers, then touch again for another subject. The idea is to go for as long as you can, bound together by the device. It's fantastic for getting to know someone, creating strange lines of conversation, breaking the ice at parties and for liquor-induced after-dinner garbles. Plus, it's simple enough for your grandma to get the hang of it after a couple of turns.

The trailer for Sportsfriends

Sportsfriends is a bundle of four extraordinarily well-crafted, award-winning games intended for people to play together in one room on the PS3 or PS4.

These "local multiplayer" games have been tried and tested in a number of stringent ways by me, such as when I was drunk at a Wild Rumpus event, when I was on antibiotics at Gamecity, and when I beat chair of the International Game Festival Brandon Boyer at Super Pole Riders fair and square. While three out of the four games utilize renowned Old People Obstacle, the PlayStation controller, the game Johann Sebastian Joust uses PlayStation Move controllers, which are slightly easier for Olds to understand, in the same way they usually understand you can aim a TV remote control at a screen and it's supposed to make something happen.

The trailer for Johann Sebastian Joust

You can play this physical party game with up to eight people all at once, and the idea is you stand in a circle (you don't even have to look at a screen to play this game), hold your Move controller upright and try to be the last person with their controller lit up. When the game plays JS Bach's "Brandenburg Concertos" in slow-motion, the controllers are sensitive to movement, but when the music speeds up they're not so sensitive—and if you move your controller too much you're out.

House rules are great fun to institute here, too: You can have an all-seated round, or lie down, or you could introduce the rule that everyone should be holding a piece of pie in their other hand. A lot of dancing, shuffling, and elbow nudging ensues, and the younger you are the more boisterous you get. But I must remind you of the old Scottish adage: You cannae shove yer grannie, for she's yer mammy's mammy.

The other Sportsfriends games are more like straight-up video games, but Hokra is a particular favorite of mine because it's so easy to grasp: t's just a kind of video game ice hockey seen from the top down.

Singstar, Guitar Hero, and Rock Band are other failsafe favorites that might already be in your cupboard. Having loud pop tracks blaring out of the TV means your family can't possibly start a conversation about when you're going to get a boyfriend, when you're going to get a driving license, when you're going to get mortgage, when you're going to get that actually quite worrying mole removed, etc, etc, etc, when you're screaming the Cure and attempting to destroy the drum pads with the vigor of someone who only has to do this once a year. If you're less lucky, your father will claim he can sing and choose to massacre your favorite Bowie track.

I did a straw poll on Twitter of all your favorite games to play when you go home, and I got many touching stories. A person mentioned, in a warm and fuzzy fashion, that she often plays Super Mario Bros. with her mom at Christmas. Another mentioned going home to play Halo with his brothers. This year, the new Mario Kart and Smash Bros entries seem to be the things you want to take home with you to play.

The trailer for Flower

At the end of the poll, my friend Sanatana Mishra suggested that he liked playing a game like Flower on this holiday—a game it's possible to enjoy passively when people are busy. He said his mom loved watching it. I gently realized he was talking in the past tense, and I thought to myself: yes. Video games are a fire, and we sit around them. Whether we're shouting at each other, or appreciating each other, we at least have some kindling around.

Sportsfriends is available on Steam from tomorrow.

Follow Cara Ellison on Twitter.

Previously:

Video Games Rule the World, So You Should Probably Just Embrace eSports Already

'The Crew' Is the Video Game Equivalent of the Great American Road Trip

Anxiety Disorders and the Great Escape Video Gaming Can Provide

[body_image width='624' height='351' path='images/content-images/2014/12/17/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/17/' filename='woman-banned-from-every-football-ground-for-ripping-up-the-quran-955-body-image-1418838389.jpg' id='12121']

Julie Phillips, Qu'ran destroying Middlesbrough fan

This post originally appeared on VICE UK

You know how it is: You're getting ready to watch a sporting event, you've got one foot out the door, and you do a quick pocket pat. Got your wallet? Got your ticket? Got your bobble hat and scarf? Do you have one of them clacker things, or a vuvuzela? Do you have $12 for a shit hotdog? Oh, and do you have a copy of the Qu'ran to shred into pieces in the direction of Lee Clark? Well then, let's go down the football. COME ON, MIDDLESBROUGH! LET'S BOSS THEM SO HARD THAT MUHAMMAD FEELS IT!

Middlesbrough fan Julie Phillips did this. Middlesbrough fan Julie Phillips just got banned from every field in England and Wales for ripping up the Qu'ran at the Middlesbrough–Birmingham game last December. Middlesbrough fan Julie Phillips—when asked why she ripped up pages of the Qu'ran at a Middlesbrough-Birmingham game—said she didn't know it was the Qu'ran. She just thought it was a book.

Two things, Julie: Why would you rip up any book at a soccer match? That doesn't make any sense. That doesn't prove anything.

Second: If you're going to rip up a book at a soccer match, which—as we've already established—makes no fucking sense at all, please check that it is absolutely any book on earth apart from the Qu'ran. Please just make that basic check. Fifty Shades of Grey? Shred it. Harry Potter, one through seven? Shred the fucker. The Qu'ran? Definitely don't shred the Qu'ran.

But Julie doesn't give a fuck about my advice. Julie was going HAM, pulling pages of the holy text out by the handful and distributing them to some 700 traveling Boro fans to shred like confetti. Did Julie know what she was doing? It tends to say "Qu'ran" on the front. And yet, at a hearing at Birmingham Magistrates' Court in May, Julie and fellow supporter Gemma Parkin denied it was a "racially aggravated" offense.

Anyway, following the trial in May, Cleveland Police applied to the court in Teesside to have Phillips banned from every football field in England and Wales, claiming the Qu'ran incident was just the tip of the acting-like-an-utter-shitshow iceberg that had already seen her banned from Middlesbrough's Riverside Stadium. The court heard that, while traveling back from another game, she was abusive towards members of the British Transport Police, and was arrested at a home game previously for racially abusing a steward. All of which does little to support the "didn't know it was the Qu'ran" hypothesis.

James Langley, a lawyer for the Cleveland Police, said Phillips' ban should serve as a warning to other fans. For her part, Phillips thinks Middlesbrough issuing her with a lifetime ban was "very harsh", and she's since lost her job with Middlesbrough Council. (Presumably for shredding important documents without checking what they were.)

Anyway, while the idea of a female soccer hooligan might sound like the premise for a shitty and short-lived West End musical ( Hard Bitches, or something like that), what's curious about the Phillips case is how much she went out of her own way to be really racist for no reason. Like: quite a bad year for racism, all told. The police are still racist. Fashion is still racist. Wigan chairman Dave Whelan is still racist. Just seems weird that with all that going on you'd still go to a soccer game and throw bits of the Qu'ran about. Get a hobby, Julie Phillips. Sort your life out.

Follow Joel Golby on Twitter.

Even on days when it's not particularly busy, the 2,538 stars that constitute the Hollywood Walk of Fame are swarmed by street vendors, locals, tour guides, grown adults dressed as movie characters, and tourists eager to touch a small piece of the dream worlds they've spent their lives watching through screens.

Kerry Morrison of the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance sees wide-eyed visitors fix their gaze downward, toward the iconic handprints and names embedded in the concrete, every day as a part of her job. "It's almost the sense, you feel, that they think that that person is buried there or something," she said. "There's like this symbolic significance to seeing that name in the sidewalk. That's kind of a universal language in a sense."

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Hollywood Boulevard is more than just a capitalistic land shark that swallows credit cards. It's a place that stands in, however inadequately, for over 100 years of movie history, a postcard version of all the things that Los Angeles represents to the world. LA is a 469-square-mile mega-city without a center, and for the 42.2 million visitors who came to the city in 2013, all they really know of this place I call home is the nebulous idea of "Hollywood."

Tourists aren't guaranteed to see George Clooney, a member of One Direction, or the rotting corpse of Marilyn Monroe, but you can certainly catch a glimpse of a reasonable wax facsimile for a nominal fee. The shows and films that make up the iconography of our popular are ephemeral, and mostly haven't left any physical trace, leaving their worshippers in a bind—where are they supposed to go to pay tribute to the things they love? If Hollywood didn't already exist, it would have to be invented in order to serve as the world's kitschiest pilgrimage destination. And here we are.

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Former Hollywood Chamber of Commerce president E.M. Stuart devised the concept behind the Walk of Fame in 1953 in an effort to "maintain the glory of a community whose name means glamour and excitement in the four corners of the world." The project cost $1.25 million, which was paid through taxes levied on neighboring property owners—who sued in protest. Due to legal challenges and construction delays, the Walk didn't officially open to the public until 1961. It ended up being an enormous hit, however: In 1978, the Walk of Fame was declared a Los Angeles Historical-Cultural Monument, and today, an estimated 10 million visitors come to Hollywood Boulevard every year for the privilege of staring at the sidewalk. New York tourists look up at impossibly tall buildings, but LA tourists look down. I like to think of Los Angeles as the most underrated city in the world for navel-gazing.

Despite its status as a landmark, the Walk of Fame is not some kind of altruistic government operation to honor artistic achievement. This part of Hollywood is operated and maintained by a variety of different agencies: the Chamber of Commerce, the Hollywood Business Improvement District, the Hollywood Property Owners' Alliance, the Hollywood Historic Trust, and the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (which has two subway stops along the Walk) among others. Getting anything done in the area routinely becomes a nightmarish game of bureaucratic flag football.

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The process of receiving a star is even more complicated. A prospective applicant must be nominated by a third party—a fan, a friend, an agent, or a total stranger. That third party fills out a form, and assuming the star agrees to the nomination, the Chamber of Commerce votes on which nominations they'll accept. (The Walk of Fame website says that around 20 to 24 people are chosen each year.)

Those that get picked then have to pay a whopping $30,000 for the ceremony and installation of their star. That's pocket change for the Channing Tatums of the world, but every so often, someone is picked who can't afford the cost of being honored. Star Trek's James Doohan, who played Scotty, had to solicit donations in order to afford his star, which according to his son, was a bargain at $15,000 back in 2003.

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Whatever the cost for celebrities, there's a cache to having a star on the Walk of Fame. It legitimizes a career. It says to a tourist, "This person, even if you've never heard of them, is important." The Walk of Fame is a kind of conduit to the magnificent, opulent existence that outsiders imagine defines LA. Tourists must come here expecting some coked-out Beverly Hills Cop fantasy where the natives wear Speedos to dinner and Vin Diesel greets you at the airport with a bag of unmarked bills. Maybe that's why they're so disappointed when they arrive .

A Reddit thread from last month titled " World travelers of reddit, where did you go that was a total disappointment?" showed that Los Angeles is one of the most biggest letdowns in the world. What makes these travelers so unimpressed by LA's charms? In a word, Hollywood:

"I don't dislike the city by any means, I just didn't expect the contrast of homeless people sleeping next to stars on the 'Walk of Fame.'"

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"LA kind of forces you to go into the crappy parts. Hell, Hollywood was the crappiest part of LA I visited."

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This sort of response would be comical, if it wasn't completely depressing. You can't expect every tourist to adapt to the grittiness of an American metropolis, but some of these commenters seem to think it's shocking that poverty exists in the shiny confines of movieland.

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This town isn't just a backdrop for films, of course. In a trend that was mirrored in most American cities during the 1960s and 1970s, LA's urban core fell out of favor with the well-heeled, who moved to more secluded areas like Malibu, Brentwood, Pacific Palisades, and Westwood (or more conspicuously, futuristic utopian mega-developments like Century City). The industry left, too, with most of the studios (save for Paramount) abandoning Hollywood for the San Fernando Valley.

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The version of Hollywood that remained was both a rotten tooth of a neighborhood and an eerie reminder of a different time. The 1970s and 1980s were a troubled time for Hollywood Boulevard. It wasn't a hub for the film and TV industries anymore, but it had yet to begin its transformation into the cartoon wonderland it is today.

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Movie theaters closed and were turned into churches, and strip clubs and tattoo parlors popped up on street corners—not the end of the world for the adventurous sort, but a major turnoff for the kind of people who like to blow cash in tourist traps. Even with the redevelopment, many of these storefronts remain. "Mid-BID (the middle of the business improvement district) is probably where the per-capita number of stripper stores, tattoo parlors, and bong shops exceeds anywhere else in LA," Morrison told me.

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In the midst of this economic and cultural shift, Hollywood stubbornly held onto its image, like a crazed Norma Desmond screaming about how the pictures got small. Stars continued to be added to the Walk of Fame, even though the streets around them were far grittier than the illusion being sold. Those stars were commemorated by the "Mayor of Hollywood," a fake civic leader for a made-up city.

The title " Mayor of Hollywood," like the Walk of Fame, was a Chamber of Commerce initiative to drum up business in the area. Community leaders, old-timey movie stars, D-list personalities, and newscasters traded the honor every few years. The job entailed slinging handshakes, raising money for neighborhood needs, and acting as a booster for an area of the city that was in dire need of attention. Most importantly, the mayor was master of ceremonies for the installation of new Walk of Fame stars.

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A contest organized by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce would periodically be held to choose who would get to slap "mayor" onto their business cards. Band leader and TV presenter Lawrence Welk held the office twice, in 1958 and 1972. Charlton Heston was mayor in 1962. (As far as I know, he didn't run around Sunset Boulevard with a shotgun screaming about apes, but if he did, maybe he would have been reelected.)

Game show host Monty Hall was replaced by former local disc jockey Johnny Grant in 1980, and Grant would serve in the role until his death in 2008. In the new, gentrified Hollywood, the idea of an honorary mayor strikes me as a bit antiquated, and it seems like the Chamber of Commerce agrees. Leron Gubler, the current president of the Chamber, told me that the "board made a decision that they didn't see that there was any real need to rush into having another honorary mayor."

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The disinterest in continuing the mayoral tradition didn't stop various local eccentrics from lobbying for the job not long after Grant's death—a list that included model/actress/singer/writer/pink enthusiast Angelyne and TV host Gary Owens. Gubler now hosts all Walk of Fame star ceremonies and functions as a de-facto "mayor" of sorts, which seems appropriate, as he's been here for over two decades and seen all kinds of changes take place.

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"We are very lucky, I tell people, that redevelopment failed in the 60s and 70s and 80s, because they would have probably torn down a lot of the historic buildings in that era," he said. "Because it failed, most of those buildings are still remaining." The new construction that's sprouted up around the Walk of Fame in the last decade has tried to preserve the area's history while also seeking to make it more palatable to the tourists who flock to places like New York's Times Square in numbers that dwarf even the Walk of Fame's.

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Kelly Morrison's job is to move the transformation of the neighborhood around the Walk of Fame forward, which means changing it to fit the times. "I've got a 30-year-old [kid] and a 23-year-old—they do not wanna live in the suburbs! They wanna live in the action," she said. "They wanna be able to walk to the grocery store and get food for the night. It's the whole New York experience. That's what we're trying to create."

But just as LA isn't New York, Hollywood Boulevard isn't Times Square—a giant public gathering spot and transit hub that resembles a theme park more than an organic part of the city.

When I go to Times Square now, I can't help but think of the giant squid monster from the end of the Watcmen comic book. In the moment before it exploded and wiped me off the face of the planet, I wouldn't spend a nanosecond being surprised that a garish creature like that showed up in the middle of all that corporate neon and glowing screens. The Hollywood Walk of Fame is more important to the city it calls home than Times Square. It's a blinkered, daft reflection of what LA is, and what it wishes it could be.

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Hollywood is just LA in miniature, a straight shot of economic disparity, delusion, perfect weather, and unflitered desperation—but it wants you to think of it as a place where America's dreams come true, or the place that gives America its dreams in the first place.

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Tourists don't come here for potholes, parking tickets, and poverty. That's what they're trying to escape when they board their plane to California. They're here for the dream of Hollywood—the gilded excess, the glamour, and the notorious lack of a moral compass. No star map will direct you to the places you've manufactured in your head. To all those innocent souls in search of a land where fake breasts grow on trees and all the dogs have modeling agents, I apologize. All you have is LA.

Follow Dave Schilling on Twitter.

That diplomatic relations are set to resume between the United States and the Castro government wasn't the only big story to come out of Cuba on Wednesday. Starting midnight December 20, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the hemisphere's longest-standing leftist insurgency, will enter an indefinite, unilateral—albeit conditional—ceasefire, rebel commanders announced in Havana.

The FARC leadership has been gathered in Cuba for over two years now, negotiating a peace accord with the Colombian government that would bring an end to 50 years of open rebellion. Up until this point, however, both parties had continued hostilities, even in the midst of talks.

"We think we've started on a definitive path toward peace," reads a statement released by the guerrillas, who asked that various international and independent bodies monitor the ceasefire. "It's now or never."

Though the rebels were expected to announce a temporary suspension of military operations for the duration of the Christmas holiday season as they have in the past, the "indefinite" part of the ceasefire came as a surprise. Just last month, negotiations seemed to be on the verge of potential collapse. Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, who championed the peace process in his recent successful re-election campaign, withdrew government delegates following the rebel " kidnapping" of Brigadier General Ruben Dario Alzate in the northwest of the country, a decision that marked the first unscheduled break since the start of talks in November 2012. (The general was traveling in a rebel-controlled zone without protection.)

Coming in the aftermath of the FARC's humanitarian-supervised handover of General Alzate, the first general captured by the rebels in their history, and the ensuing resumption of dialogue, the ceasefire announcement is already being heralded as a turning point in the historic peace process.

But buried in FARC's statement is a caveat: "This unilateral ceasefire, which we hope will be prolonged in time, will only end if it is determined that our guerrilla structures have been the object of an attack by the military." If the Colombian military does not reverse its current position, in other words, the ceasefire could be fleeting at best.

Facing increasing domestic pressure from right-wing opponents and his military, President Santos stated as recently as Tuesday that "the power of the military offensive will continue until will be bring an end to this conflict." Santos, having repeatedly turned down FARC requests for a bilateral ceasefire, has yet to respond to the ceasefire announcement. Government peace talks spokesmen contacted for this article were unavailable for comment.

"I don't think they can call off the military completely unless they get more clarity from the FARC about what 'hostilities' mean," Adam Isacson, senior Colombia expert at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), told VICE.

During last winter's unilateral ceasefire, independent observers confirmed that, with some minor exceptions, the FARC leadership was able to rein in its various guerrilla fronts. Throughout talks, human rights groups have denounced the FARC's continued use of land mines, child recruits, terrorist attacks on infrastructure, and other controversial tactics. As Isaacson points out, "It's so hard to verify if those kind of 'hostilities' are being carried out or not."

Thus far, FARC and government negotiating teams have agreed on three of six formal agenda items, including rural development, drug production, and political participation. Still left to discuss are victims reparation, disarmament, and a broader peace agreement. Currently, the talks have centered around "de-escalating" conflict violence and hearing from victims groups.

The Colombian armed conflict has claimed over 220,000 lives and displaced almost 6 million people. The majority of human rights violations have been committed by right-wing paramilitary groups allied with the government. Neo-paramilitary successor groups formed following the paramilitary demobilization of the early 2000s are still the greatest victimizers in the conflict.

The latest victims group to travel to Havana asked both sides for "acts of peace." To that end, the rebels are calling on the government to respond in kind to their unilateral ceasefire.

"No more circus, no more exhibitions of uncontrolled force," reads the rebel statement. "No more paying debts with the sacrifice of other people's lives."

Steven Cohen is a freelance journalist based out of Colombia and former editor of Colombia Reports.

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At this point every counterculture scholar in the Western world has a bookshelf that's fat with the weight of dozens of photo books documenting punks from decades past. None of them are like Sinecure's new book Sounds of Two Eyes Opening. It's a collection of images taken by Spot, who is best known as a producer for legendary label SST back in the early 80s but should probably now be recognized as one of the best photographers of Los Angeles's bygone beach, skate, and punk cultures.

Every one of Spot's black-and-white shots is like a beautiful nightmare. He has drained 70s-era Los Angeles of any element of beach fantasy and replaced it with an ominous and frightening beach reality. His exteriors are lonely and frightening. His interiors look like haunted houses. Spot shows LA as it truly is: gray, isolating, and frightening.

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Although Spot strips away any sense of glamour or coolness from his subjects, his work never feels cruel or like he's trying to be mean or judgmental. His girls in bikinis aren't titillating, his punks aren't dangerous, his skaters aren't gods. He cuts through the artifice to the real humanity and he forgives his subjects for their flaws and pretenses.

I got to talk to Spot recently about that.

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VICE:When did you come up with the title Sounds of Two Eyes Opening? You mention in your introduction that photographers have to keep both eyes open when they shoot.
Spot: First and foremost, I'm a musician and everything else I've ever done has been based on that. I learned to play back in the days when AM radio was king (years before FM rock came along) and, even though AM was kinda "low-res" and broadcast in mono, you're still listening with both ears.

It's really the basis of all language and if you're serious about the experience of music, you learn to keep both sides of your brain open and rely upon instinct rather than premeditation. Y'know, using improvisation and gut feelings as frameworks for rhythm and composition. In photography, the viewfinder should not be a limitation—it's merely one part of a larger vision.

It can be difficult at first, but you have to train yourself to keep both eyes open—otherwise you miss all the subtlety and depth of what you're looking at and how it connects with everything that's happening around you. A baseball player at bat has to read not only the pitcher but the also the guys in the outfield. That's how you know when to swing and when to not.

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How did the subjects of your photos feel when and if they saw the images of themselves?
Folks liked the photos when they saw them. Why not?

What I mean is that your photos strip your subjects of glamour but not in a cruel way. Your bands don't seem deified, your bikini girls don't feel objectified like the way they often are in photos.
No one ever protested my images other than stupid, drunken idiots and a few policemen and drug dealers—and some "artists" who were way too full of themselves. I didn't pay attention to what other photographers were doing. I paid attention to my subjects and what they were doing.

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This is the first book collecting your work—how do you feel about it? Do you feel like this took too long to happen?
It ain't perfect but it turned out better than I expected. There was no opportunity to do any kind of book before this. Everything worth doing takes too long to happen. Oh, impatient humanity.

What would you do differently to make the book perfect?
It was a collaborative effort with the usual aesthetic head-butting. I would've eliminated some images and added others. Of course, perfection is a nebulous concept.

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How did you develop the techniques and choices that you show in this book? You portray the colorful worlds of beach people, bikini girls skaters and punks in a palette of grays.
You just do it, make mistakes and figure out what works and what doesn't for what you're trying to do. Gray is the domain of black-and-white photography. People mislead themselves in thinking that black and white are just representations of absences and oversaturations. They may represent these but they are also actual colors.

When I look at the pictures in this book I feel zero nostalgia for this world. The photos are beautiful but I think you manage to show almost nude young women in a way that's not sexy and punk bands in a way that's not romantic.
Nostalgia is a byproduct of action and memory. It doesn't have to exist but culture tends to impose a "longing for times gone by" and "the other side is always greener" mentality on perception. It's very marketable and does a great job of spinning history into easily digestible hot dogmas and popsicle politics. It's why America has such a fascination with the Wild West and a "rugged individualism" that maybe never existed. We've all pined for living in a time we were never part of. I once wished I had lived in the 1920s with the flappers, gangsters, speakeasies, and jazz joints. Sure, why not? Haunted house? I don't know about that but I have seen ghosts.

Some of your photos feel like film noir stills.
I think one of my favorite movies ever is Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? I'm a huge fan of Joan Crawford. (And yeah, Alfred Hitchcock.)

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When did you fantasize about the flapper age? What specifically appealed about it to you?
When I was about 15 or 16. It was probably the last holdout of East Coast–style rebellion against the status quo and misguided missionary zeal. By the 30s (likely due to the repeal of Prohibition) it had all cooled to a sober (and ironically so), big-shouldered, double-breasted, modest-hemline-and-hairdo, lumbering-sedan world that included the West Coast as well. It was a somber Chicago style that established a sense of "cultural mafia" that didn't effectively crumble until the rise of electrified country, R&B, and rock 'n' roll on the nation's airwaves.

Is it weird to think of people wishing that they'd been able to witness the things you witnessed, the birth of skate culture and LA's hardcore scene?
No. Wouldn't you have wanted to see firsthand the building of the Empire State Building or the Wright Brothers' first flight?

Do you hate LA? Did you hate LA? Is that an oversimplification? I get very sad when I look at these pictures. Everything looks so grimy, lonely, and hopeless.
LA has one of the most amazing and interesting histories of all US cities, and they excelled at erasing their own legacy just to prove they were not like any other place. It's really not up to me to weigh in on this anymore; I got the hell out almost 30 years ago. It's a whole different perspective but the webseries OnlyinHelLA.com sums up a part of the experience nicely. LA is the best and worst place in the world. It all depends on what you bring to it but it's ridiculous to trust those who insist: "Life is what you make it"—a lot of people's lives in LA have been made hell by those who think they've found heaven.

Why did you leave LA?
It was a breakout from an unlocked prison. Too much time spent in traffic, too much time spent dealing with other people's problems, and realizing there was no longer a warden and the guards had only become inmates with fancier cells.

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Where do you live now and are you happier there? Do you ever go back to LA to visit?
Sheboygan, Wisconsin—right on Lake Michigan. There's pros and cons about any place a person chooses to live. Ain't no residential silver bullet, but I do get better sleep.

Have you ever picked up a camera again?
Only when I've had to protect myself. An old Nikon FTN makes a great bludgeon.

Seriously, I've tried but I ain't got the motivation (or a darkroom) no more. The digital world is attractive but it doesn't have the magic. I'd rather have Jean Harlow with acne than any number of models expecting to be photoshopped.

Do you have a cellphone with a camera in it and if so do you ever use it?
Yes, and when I'm home I turn the damn thing on maybe once or twice a week.

You can get Sounds of Two Eyes Opening from Sinecure Books.

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Image via

This post originally appeared in VICE UK

I work as a nurse on an acute mental health ward. One month in every three, I'm on "nights"—12-hour shifts that run from 7:30 PM to 7:45 AM. Sometimes I'll be there later, or earlier, depending on how complicated the handover to the day staff is.

I start by doing my rounds, doing the nurse-type things you might imagine in your head: I talk to my patients and see how they're doing, check their medication and then make a start on my paperwork. There might be need for close observations, too, where patients need to be kept within eyesight or—in the most extreme circumstances—at an arm's reach at all times. It's suicide watch, essentially, though we never call it that.

Paperwork takes up my time more than anything else. These days, as we're individually audited by our managers, we have to make sure our care plans are properly managed. Each nurse is allocated a set amount of patients and they're our responsibility—so, too, is keeping our care plans updated. My patient care definitely suffers because of the intensity of this compulsory responsibility—I can't care for someone if I am too busy writing about them.

Aside from the paperwork, no two nights are the same. It's completely unpredictable and there are often emergencies. The other night, a patient held a knife to my throat. It was only an eating knife, so not all that dramatic, but you know... alarming all the same. When incidents like this happen you have to react very quickly. I took the knife from her and she was, luckily, open to taking her medication. No hard restraint was required because other people were free to assist me. It doesn't always work out that way.

The reality of working in NHS hospitals at the moment is that night shifts are always understaffed. Mental health wards are no exception. I was fortunate with the knife incident, but in the dark hours there are usually only three professionals per ward. Sometimes, as a Band 5 Staff Nurse (23 years old, a year into the job), I'm the most senior person in the whole building. There are times when people sound their alarms and there's just no one available. There was a rumor in the summer about introducing a Band 6 to work night duties—someone who would be there especially to navigate these incidents—but hasn't happened yet.

We are, of course, given training to handle the hazardous implications of our practice. Provisions are in place. Legally, we can do anything—within reason—to protect ourselves. If someone is punching the shit out of someone else, we don't have to be delicate about it. Obviously none of us want to do anything to harm the patients in our care—it's the precise opposite. But sometimes, situations require drastic actions that ultimately benefit patients' safety.

The level of threat of physical harm from patients can be, at times, frightening. A few weeks ago a senior member of my team was stuck in a locked room, unable to leave his shift hours after finishing, because a patient was threatening him with jugs of boiling water. This was a staff nurse I look to for guidance—someone who's usually so calm, so at ease. When he's worried, I know it's bad.

It's not just the fear of physical abuse, though. The verbal stuff is much more frequent and, often, has greater impact. I work in an inner-city London hospital that provides care for a very multicultural community. As a result, there is a lot of racism, and it's never not shocking—especially when it's thrown around in such a cavalier way. Even though our patients are very unwell and many, really, don't know what they're saying, the words remain brutal. They're a shock to the system.

But some of it can be quite funny. A Chinese patient said she was going to chop off a male nurse's balls and turn them into chop suey the other day. I laughed and so did he. She may have been capable of doing just that, but you have to laugh. You have to get on with it.

During my last batch of night shifts we had an emergency admission where the patient had to sleep in the lounge. It was the only option available. We become fire fighters in those incidents, making the best of it until the morning, when the cavalry arrives.

For all the training in the world, though—and we do have excellent training—we are running on all cylinders, all of the time. The mental health sector and the complex level of care required remains misunderstood, hidden away. We are making progress, and I love the NHS with every fiber of my being. When we're able to do the jobs entrusted to us, I think we give the best care in the world. We have a holistic approach in the UK, tailoring care to suit an individual's needs rather than a blanket approach for each specific illness, and it's incredibly strong. I'm also incredibly proud that, in a hospital in a poor part of the country, we care for so, so many who'd be left unchecked without the NHS.

It's undoubtable that the NHS is a precarious structure right now. The foundations are shaking. But it's worth remembering that things were more fucked up in hospitals 50 years ago. They might have had more staff, but one person I know says he trained under someone who used to just stand in a mental health ward with a bottle of liquid medicine and brazenly dish it out, with little determination for individual cases whatsoever. Things have moved on dramatically. It's not about keeping everyone quiet or sedated. We work with patients now. We build rapport and therapeutic relationships.

But things are difficult. The problems we're facing—hierarchical shake-ups, funding cuts, reorganization on an astounding level—have a huge impact on how mental health is delivered and responded to. I think, if measures aren't put in place very soon—perhaps with this new £30 million pledge from the government emergency mental health car—there's a very real danger that we'll start slipping backward. Sustainability is vital.

During my last batch of night shifts we had an emergency admission where the patient had to sleep in the lounge. It was the only option available. We become fire fighters in those incidents, making the best of it until the morning, when the cavalry arrives. These are very ill patients. Most are sectioned and need urgent, intensive care in the same way someone who's bleeding uncontrollably does. The mentally ill can spontaneously become psychotic; unmanageable for nurses and carers who have a ward full of other patients.

There is also the unavoidable issue of police cells and whether they are the best environment for someone who is mentally ill. On our ward, most of our admissions come through Accident and Emergency, but a fair few come from the police. I'm sure the police want to do the best for people, but there's just such a stigma surrounding the mentally ill still—so many perceptions aren't just wrong, they're dangerous. The police are trained in something entirely different to mental health workers—people who are unwell are not criminals. Even if they pose a risk to themselves or others.

Being kept in a holding cell is testing for anyone, but for those who are really vulnerable, it is terrifying. It can also have a negative effect on someone's possibility of recovery. And it's an unfortunate truth that, sometimes, mentally ill people are sometimes mistreated—intentionally, or otherwise. I've had to help patients file complaints on more than one occasion. Then again, how would the police know what to do? My friends still have no idea what my work involves. People are shocked when I tell them I dress "smart casual" because we want to remove any impression of authority—they imagine me walking around in a white coat.

This government cash injection into emergency mental health can't come too soon. The level of care we've built so far might find itself in danger with a lack of adequate resources on the front line—the people on the ground who deal with the raw, gritty stuff, the nurses who are now working with the police to become more equipped at dealing with uncertainty and trauma.

The more staff we have, the more time we'll have to treat our patients. I've been told that it costs around £1,000 a night to keep a mentally unstable person in the hospital, but if we can't offer adequate care when it's needed, the implications of readmission, etc., will, I imagine, end up costing a lot more than two extra nurse's wages. We're paid, on average, just over £25,000 a year.

When it comes to mental health, early intervention is key. If we can get to grips with problems earlier, logic suggests that there'll be fewer emergencies to react to in the future.

The author's name has been changed.

As told to Josh Barrie

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An image from Huxley's "Evidence as to man's place in nature" (Image via)

Humans, if you hadn't already noticed, have stopped evolving. As David Attenborough recently reminded us, our species is the first—by our free will—to remove itself from the process of natural selection, therefore stunting evolution. That, accompanied by Steven Hawking and Elon Musk's theories that robots will supersede human intelligence and become our biggest existential threat, paints a pretty bleak vision of the future.

Neuroscientist Randal Koene has the answer. Instead of allowing robots to become our cold, lifeless overlords, why don't we just become partially robotic ourselves? Koene is currently working on whole brain emulation, the process of being able to upload our minds to a computer. By mapping the brain, figuring out its mechanisms and replicating this activity in code, humans could—theoretically—live on indefinitely.

I recently gave Randal a call to try and get my head around his ideas.

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Randal Koene

VICE: Hi, Randal. When did you first think: You know what? I'm going to try to upload my brain to a computer?
Randal Koene: When I was 13, I read Arthur C. Clarke's The City and the Stars. Set in the far future, the citizens are immortal. There's a giant central computer that runs the city, which is able to construct and deconstruct people who are stored in memory banks. For me, this was a wonderful exploration of the idea that information is really what distinguishes us, our creations, and our thoughts from the gradual dissipation that is entropy in the universe.

The story was particularly relevant to me at the time because I was keenly interested in exploration and all manner of creative activity. The most frustrating thing was to run out of time. That was, of course, caused by my own limitations; the limited speed of thought and creation, and limited cognitive and physical abilities.

If we think of ourselves as processes interacting with information, this opens up the possibility to transcend those limitations. If you can improve yourself almost arbitrarily then you can push back all boundaries. It took quite a few years to work through those insights and desires enough times to lay bare the feasible approaches to achieving that goal. The thing that makes all of that possible is a "Substrate-Independent Mind."

What's that?
A SIM is not merely an artificial intelligence, but a re-instantiation of a specific human mind—a human mind downloaded to a computer. Neuroscientists are 99.9% percent convinced that the brain is a mechanism. It is something that computes, something that carries out functions. If you can figure out how it works, you can build a replacement for it. The idea that you can take a small piece of the brain and build a replica for it is very mainstream and well understood. Why not do that with the whole brain? And then why not upload that to a computer so that we can process more data and store it better, the way a computer does, organizing thoughts into folders that we can access whenever we choose?

So, in the future, if we're able to download our brains, will brainless bodies be genetically grown for us? Or will we inhabit a more computer-like environment; a robot, say, or an android?
It would be interesting to inhabit a more virtual world. Or perhaps bodies that aren't built to survive in this environment, but somewhere else, like space. Living on Earth, where we need to breath oxygen, will no longer be necessary. We might have an existence in an environment more like the Cloud.

It's not just a matter of the space we inhabit, but that the biological reasons for mortality vanish. So you could have art projects or science projects that would normally outstrip the lifespan of a normal person.

How do you map the essence of who we are? How do you translate identity to a series of codes?
All of this has something to do with the connectome; the way that neurons connect to other neurons. When you're trying to make a decision, the activity in your brain is being shunted from one place to another. The way these synaptic connections function and the fact that they're made in a specific place will give you a type of memory.

The popular conception of what a memory is differs to the engineering or scientific definition, which is "a previous action that affects a future action." That goes much further than having a memory of the face of your grandmother or what you said two minutes ago.

It goes into all the details of why a concert pianist plays in a certain way, or why an executive would make a particular business decision. The reason is because they have previous experiences alongside a basic layout that's there from their birth, due to their DNA. That does really affect everything about your personality—all the characteristics that make you, you.

Will an uploaded mind be self-aware? Will it have consciousness?
I believe that all of what we manifest—all of our brain activity, everything we experience—is due to the way the brain functions. This includes self-awareness. Being aware of what's going on around you and the way you are and what you are is an experience. An experience is a mechanism, a processing happening inside your brain. So if you make a copy of all of that processing, then I'm convinced that copy will include self-awareness.

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A Nao humanoid robot. Photo by Jiuguang Wang via

What about things like humor or empathy?
If you have an exact copy of the entire brain and you aren't leaving out the parts that are involved with emotions, then why wouldn't you have humor, why wouldn't you have empathy? You would have the same sense of humor in your substrate independent mind as you do in reality. Having a sense of humor is just a certain way of processing activity that goes through your brain, just like the concert pianist who plays Beethoven in a certain way.

If I uploaded my mind to my computer, would the real me and my computer be able to share thoughts?
It might be possible in the future. You'd need to have enough access to the brains in both instances to create a channel—something like a radio communication between individual sets of neurons—so you could get an image that someone is seeing to automatically appear as activity in the neurons of the other brain. You can do that sort of thing if you have enough access, which is what my project is all about: getting access.

What's your primary reason for wanting to upload your mind?
I think the main reason is because I believe that humans individually, as well as a species, can benefit enormously from greater adaptability. The way our information technology is developing means there are now vast amounts of data streaming through that we cannot comprehend; only, our machines can.

We'll have another life form that we compete with, be it AI or some alien life that we encounter in our explorations, or perhaps other animals that we uplift by increasing their intelligence. If there are other lifeforms that are thinking, that also have goals and that are changing their environment correspondingly, that changes our environment, too. Keeping up with that by adapting can only be positive.

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A humanoid TOSY ping pong-playing robot. Photo courtesy of Humanrobo via

How would this existence out of our organic bodies affect sex and reproduction?
I imagine that we'll still want to create offspring, to create new beings that are in some way related to or derived from ourselves, or from groups of us. Sometimes, sexual reproduction might be the way to go, but sometimes there may be other interesting ways to creatively work with others—or not—to develop a new mind, with new characteristics and new physical forms. I suppose there will be much exploration and discovery involved.

I also imagine that we'll still want to experience connections between humans; bonding or intimacy sensations; shared highs that take us out of our ordinary trajectories of thought and feeling—orgasm. Exploration will probably lead to many more ways to achieve that, and different paths that can be taken, so that biological sex is only one of many options. I think this is already happening to some degree.

I think it's highly unlikely that sex and reproduction, in the broader sense of their definitions, would disappear. It's more likely that a vibrant and adaptable species will discover many more variants of both.

How far away are we from uploading the first mind?
A worm's mind has already been uploaded, but their brains work in a very different way to mammals. But, in ten years, I think it'll be possible to upload the mind of a fruit fly. From thereon, the human brain is a little hard to predict, but I really hope it will be in my lifetime.

Thanks, Randal.

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