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Ireland Deserves a Referendum on Abortion

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Pro-choice activists demonstrating in Dublin. Photo by William Murphy via Flickr

This post originally appeared on VICE UK

Ireland's regressive abortion laws have claimed another victim. A clinically dead pregnant woman is being kept on life support against the wishes of her parents in an attempt to preserve the life of her unborn fetus.

The woman, who's in her late 20s, cannot be named due to a court order. However, it has been reported that the fetus is between 16 to 20 weeks old, meaning the woman will need to be kept on life support for another nine to ten weeks for the fetus to be considered viable.

This weekend, the young woman's father told the Irish Independent that he wants to lay his "poor little girl to rest." Only, instead of being allowed to exercise the most basic of rights you'd expect a parent to possess, he's been forced to appeal to the high court tomorrow to allow his daughter to die with dignity.

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A pro-choice rally in Ireland

This deplorable situation is a direct result of Ireland's antiquated abortion law—specifically the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, introduced in 1983, which guarantees that the life of the mother and that of the unborn fetus are considered equal. This stipulation leaves doctors in a difficult position, as ending the woman's life would result in the termination of the fetus—something medical staff may be held responsible (and therefore prosecuted) for.

Last week, Leo Varadkar—the minister of health for Fine Gael, the lead partner in the current coalition government—defied the party line to call for a referendum on whether or not the Eighth Amendment should be repealed. Varadkar described the law as "restrictive," arguing it has a "chilling effect" on doctors.

One could suggest that this is simply political posturing, as it's not the first time Varadkar has challenged Enda Kenny, the party leader and Taoiseach (prime minister). He also described referendums as not "very democratic" in 2012, suggesting he might not actually know what a referendum is. Predictably, Kenny has distanced himself from Varadkar's comments, saying the minister was speaking in a "personal capacity."

But whatever Varadkar's motivations, it's a debate that needs to be brought to the public. For a start, Ireland is the only country left in Europe where abortion is illegal. And according to a poll in October, support is high for a referendum on liberalizing the current Irish laws around abortion, because how many more national disgraces are we, the Irish people, expected to sit back and allow?

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Savita Halappanavar

The most high profile victims of Ireland's abortion laws include: Patient X, a 14-year-old girl who was raped and became pregnant in the early 1990s, before Attorney General Harry Whelehan sought an injunction to stop her from having the fetus aborted legally in Britain; Savita Halappanavar, who died in an Irish hospital after miscarrying and contracting septicaemia because doctors wouldn't allow her to have an abortion; and, most recently, a migrant woman who, after being raped, tried to access abortion services, citing suicidal feelings. Unbelievably, proving that your unwanted pregnancy is making you want to end your own life is one of the only ways to get yourself in front of the panel of doctors who decide whether or not you can legally have an abortion.

Regardless, the woman was denied an abortion and forced to undergo a caesarean section at 26 weeks. She was given no choice over an issue that concerned only her. After already suffering a highly traumatic event, she was forced to suffer further at the hands of the state.

It's an unfathomable embarrassment that an ostensibly developed country voted "the best in the world" can actively and repeatedly put women through this kind of ordeal.

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A placard at an abortion rights rally in Dublin. Photo by William Murphy via Wikipedia

Last week, a motion was put to Dail Eireann (Irish parliament) members by independent TD (the Irish equivalent of MP) Clare Daly to repeal the Eighth Amendment. I suspect this was more of a symbolic gesture than anything else—Daly and the 12 other TDs who voted in favor of the bill must have known they were going to be overwhelmingly rejected by the house, which they were, at 110 to 13. But it's certainly a step in the right direction.

But should people's lives and a woman's right to bodily autonomy really be subject to a parliamentary vote? Is it not very basic common sense that a human being should be entitled to a choice over what happens to their own body? That women shouldn't end up dead—or kept alive against the wishes of their family—because 110 people don't like the thought of a complete stranger having an abortion?

Action needs to be taken now, and a national referendum would be vastly more representative than the situation we currently have. The Eighth Amendment has to be repealed before we end up with more innocent victims.


How Much Caffeine Will Kill You?

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The caffeine molecule. Image by Nikoloz Jorjikashvili

Caffeine is the lifeblood of a productive civilization. Behind every bridge, monument, and skyscraper in America was a workforce fueled by caffeine. If society were Popeye, coffee would be its spinach. But, like everything good in life, if you do too much of it, it will kill you. That's what the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was trying to get across last week when they issued a stern warning against powdered caffeine. The official discouragement came after two people, an 18-year-old and a 24-year-old, overdosed from the stuff earlier this year. And those weren't the first times someone has expired from caffeine, either. A 24-year-old woman in Scotland reportedly died earlier this month after taking too many caffeine-packed diet pills; a 23-year-old man in England died a few years ago after mixing two spoonfuls of caffeine powder into an energy drink at a party; and another man in the UK died from eating a tin of HERO Energy Mints last May, just to name a few.

But how much caffeine, exactly, does it take to kill you? The FDA says that you can safely consume about 400 milligrams per day, but it's extremely unlikely that you'll die even if you consume more than that (400 milligrams is roughly equal to four eight-ounce cups of joe). A study from 2005, which investigated two caffeine-related deaths, suggested that you'd have to ingest around five grams of caffeine—more than ten times the FDA's figure—to overdose. Other sources suggest it's more like ten grams, which would be like downing 50 shots of 5-Hour Energy. But in 2011 a girl died from "caffeine toxicity" after drinking just two cans of Monster—only 480 milligrams of caffeine, roughly the same amount in a Venti-sized Starbucks coffee.

So there are a lot of figures floating around out there. To get to the bottom of it, I asked Dr. Patricia Broderick who, among many other medical accolades, is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Caffeine Research. Our conversation got off to a rough start ("Can somebody overdose on caffeine? No, no, caffeine can't kill you," was, oddly, the first thing she said), but she eventually told me something interesting: We just don't really know how much caffeine it takes to put you in lethal danger. That's because caffeine tolerance is a highly individualized thing. "Women are much more susceptible to the effects of caffeine than are men," said Dr. Broderick, who added that young people also have much lower tolerances.

I found the same conclusions in a really old study on "factors affecting caffeine toxicity." The study—basically a review of preexisting research—points out that caffeine affects people differently on the basis of age, gender, body mass, tolerance to the drug, any concomitant disorders, and any other drugs the person may have consumed. Caffeine is most toxic when consumed intravenously, but can also reach lethal levels by "oral, rectal, or subcutaneous routes." The lethal dose depends on the administration of the drug, but it seems to be somewhere around 200 milligrams per kilogram—slightly more if you're consuming it through your butt, and slightly less if you're consuming it through your veins. (If you don't feel like reading the academic study from 1967, try this handy calculator instead.)

This gets to what the FDA wrote in their statement about pure caffeine powder: It's dangerous because "a single teaspoon [is] roughly equivalent to the amount in 25 cups of coffee." But as Dr. Broderick reminded me, "Coffee is to a square as caffeine is to a rectangle"—they just aren't the same thing. Drinking 25 cups of coffee is insane, but wouldn't have the same immediate effect as snorting or swallowing pure powder. Part of that has to do with the actual substance (Dr. Broderick's research suggests that coffee and tea have mitigating factors in caffeine absorption) and part of that has to do, again, with the method of administration. Think of it as the difference between swallowing an Adderall or crushing it up and huffing it. Caffeine is the same way: It will fuck you up way faster if you snort it in the powdered form, and you're a lot more likely to overdose that way.

Given the relatively high dose of caffeine necessary to bring on death, you'd think reports of possible overdose would be pretty uncommon. Surprisingly, that's not so. The American Association of Poison Control Centers receive thousands of calls each year from people concerned that their hearts are going to explode from caffeine. Last year, they received 3,033 of these types of calls calls about energy drinks alone, 1,835 of which were from people 18 and younger. Of course, nowhere near all of the people who called actually were overdosing on caffeine—they just thought they were. And many of these calls come from people who are also on other substances—alcohol, uppers, or other narcotics—so caffeine isn't strictly responsible for all of this, but it's still kind of crazy to think about.

The craziest thing is that getting high on caffeine isn't even a good time. (We tested it out earlier in the year, when one of our writers tried smoking coffee. This is most definitely not recommended behavior.) In low doses, caffeine increases dopamine, which makes your brain feel nice. But when you take too much of it, that "reward" disappears, leaving you feeling jittery, anxious, and even physically ill. Taking too much caffeine can also make you feel irritable, headachy, tired—basically the opposite of what you'd expect to feel from caffeine. So there's really no benefit in trying to edge toward that 200 milligram per kilogram figure, or injecting caffeine into your veins, or snorting spoonfuls of the powder. It won't get you to that "high" place—and it just might make your heart feel like it's going to explode.

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.

Punk Supergroup Slink Is Making Christmas Even Gayer Than It Already Was

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Photo courtesy of Slink. All other photos by the author

Christmastime gets a bum reputation for its religious agenda and conservative traditions, so people easily forget Christmas is a campy holiday about tacky decorations, Mariah Carey, and mass consumerism. But this year, gay supergroup Slink has taken holiday cheer to the next level with their debut track "Pink Christmas," an addictive pop banger that's the first Christmas song that won't drive you insane from playing it on repeat.

Comprised of Seth Bogart of Hunx and His Punx, SSION frontman Cody Critcheloe, and Samantha Urbani of Friends, Slink celebrates a holiday message about freeing the world from the separation of "red and white" and unleashing a new, pink Christmas reality. In the video for the song, the group parties at "Club XXX-Mas" with the likes of Peaches, DJ Santa, and LA legend Angelyne. Give the single one listen and you'll be lisping the words for the rest of the season: "I keep dreamin' of a pink Christmas / Santa, let your love snow down on me!"

Given Critcheloe and Bogart's penchant for sick band merchandise and low-brow high fashion (see Bogart's collaboration with Saint Laurent ), Slink has obviously become more than a band—it's also a brand. To accompany their video, the group has released a hot new scent that's also named "Pink Christmas," a Britney Spears Fantasy-esque blend of aromas that perfectly captures the spirit of being flaming and festive.

In celebration of the fragrance release and the overall gayness of Christmas, the group hosted a product launch at the downtown buzz boutique VFiles, where their scent was for sale along with a line of signature Slink holiday beanies and T-shirts. Inspired by Slink's passion for Christmastime's camp and commercialism, I stopped by the shop to ask Critcheloe and Bogart some hard-hitting holiday questions.

VICE: Is Christmas music your true calling?
Cody Critcheloe:
Seth and I have just been talking about making a Christmas song for a couple years, but never had the time, so we recorded "Pink Christmas" over the summer in LA.

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A pink Christmas? For Me? Thanks, Santa.

What pushed you two to collaborate together and create a gay supergroup?
Seth Bogart: It's crazy because I've known Cody since, like, when we were penpals, because we both did gay punk zines, and that's how we knew each other. But this is the first time we've ever worked together, and it's been great.

Cody: And Seth and I loved hanging out with Samantha, so we asked her to sing on the track. After recording [the song], it became really obvious that she was our missing Slink link, so she became a permanent member.

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

Tell me more about Angelyne, who introduces you in the video as her favorite band.
Cody: She's like this legendary LA cult figure—she drives a pink corvette, and she's famous for putting billboards of herself all around town.

Seth: She's amazing. She had us take her to McDonalds to sign her contract, and she made us eat strawberries and A1 sauce and also Big Mac buns dipped in ketchup.

Do you consider "Pink Christmas" part of the promotion for the perfume or the beginning of a new album?
Cody: "Pink Christmas" is its own project. We have a music video directed by Jennifer Stradtford, and then I also made a commercial for the fragrance in collaboration with Black Frame. But working as a group has been so much fun, we've been inspired to record an EP together.

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The Pink Christmas merch on display à la Nicki Minaj Pink Friday for Kmart

I love the perfume. What does a pink Christmas smell like?
Seth:
It's a scent that's perfect for both grandmas and bisexuals.

Cody: Basically, we had two scents that we really liked: One is White Moss, which is available at Whole Foods, and the other one was Frederick Malle's Outrageous. The result is really intense, a little bit sweet. When you first spray it out of the bottle, it smells like glue, but once it settles, it's like heaven.

Yeah, it smells musky but also herbal—kind of like a drunk Christmas tree. So boys, will Santa be good to you this year: Have you been naughty or nice?
Seth:
Too nice, it's boring.

Cody: I'm always nice.

What do you want for Christmas?
Cody:
This year I asked Santa for headphones, world peace, and to buy "Pink Christmas" on iTunes!

Download "Pink Christmas" and purchase items from the Pink Christmas Collection online, at VFiles in New York, or at Wacky Wacko in Hollywood.

Follow John on Twitter and Instagram.

We’re at a Turning Point in Canada for Illegal Downloading

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Photo via Flickr user Pablo Ruiz Múzquiz.

As you pore over a scrumptious listicle about the 17 best movies of 2014 and wonder which ones to torrent, be warned that when the clock strikes midnight on January 1, 2015, a letter may be in the mail with your name on it if you decide to join the peer-to-peer swarm.

Beginning on January 2, 2015, Canadians downloading and sharing copyrighted materials (TV shows, movies, songs, etc.) will be subject to new "notice and notice" provisions under Canada's 2012 Copyright Modernization Act. But what does this mean for the average internet lowlife?

Practically, the law means new powers will come online for rights holders to send threatening letters to internet subscribers whose IP addresses are alleged to have pirated copyrighted material. But it's not clear that these notices will truly have any teeth—yet.

A few internet service providers (ISPs) have already been sending the letters to customers to inform them that the 240p cam-rips they've been downloading off of sites like The Pirate Bay are illegal, and that they should cut it out. But the difference in 2015 will be that the notice and notice provision will officially come into force. Thus, more people will see more letters.

The letters have already started working. Data from Rogers reveal that only 5 percent of subscribers receive notices about piracy, 68 percent receive one notice, 89 percent of alleged pirates receive two notices, and only one customer in 800,000 gets "numerous notices." So it looks like once users get the official message in legalese, most of them stop all the downloading or perhaps switch to a less traceable method of not paying for content.

In summary, the notice and notice system seems to have a lot going for it. A great deal of Canadians politely stop infringing copyright when asked nicely, without messy court battles or people getting kicked offline. So why worry now?

Canada's copyright law doesn't oblige ISPs to divulge any information about the alleged offender to the plaintiff, so alleged pirates are currently well protected from the mass lawsuits by copyright trolls that have proved so popular in the United States. Copyright trolls are firms that will try to find all alleged pirates of certain files from their clients, and threaten the scofflaws with expensive lawsuits until they pay up.

Right now, ISPs are simply required to keep a record of the notice to the subscriber for six months, or one year if it somehow becomes a court case. Information like name, address, etc. remains private, out of the hands of trolls.

But Canada's protections against these legal goon squads could soon evaporate, thanks to a new law making its way through Parliament.

As Motherboard previously reported, the bill, called S-4 or the Digital Privacy Act, would "allow for an organization to 'disclose personal information without the knowledge or consent of the individual,' in circumstances of fraud or 'for the purposes of investigating a breach of an agreement or a contravention of the laws of Canada or a province that has been, is being or is about to be committed.'"

Now, obviously hopping onto a torrent swarm to download and share copyrighted material is illegal, so it seems pretty clear that ISPs could voluntarily, warrantlessly, and secretly hand out subscriber information if S-4 becomes law. In that case, you may not get a warning letter. Instead, you'd be on the end of a legal threat asking you to pay up anywhere from $20 to $5,000 per infringement or head to court.

VICE reporter Justin Ling queried Industry Minister James Moore's office about the Digital Privacy Act, and received a few unconvincing reassurances about the bill's effects which were called into question by statements the Alberta Privacy Commissioner.

At least some of the responsibility for maintaining Canada's sane, effective approach to copyright rests with the ISPs themselves. If copyright trolls come a-knockin', will they voluntarily hand over subscriber information?

The big ISPs appeared to be making some progress on protecting user privacy from warrantless government searches, but recent documents unearthed by Ottawa-based digital policy expert Michael Geist revealed that "Internet providers have tried to convince the government that they will voluntarily build surveillance capabilities into their networks."

As Geist wrote, Canada's large ISPs actually seem to be enthusiastic about building capabilities to hand over their subscribers private information to authorities whether it's a legal requirement or not. Frankly, this news doesn't doesn't inspire much confidence that ISPs will go to bat for their customers when copyright trolls threaten suits. Consider yourselves warned!

The future of copyright enforcement in Canada is up in the air, but for the moment, the only sure impact of the notice and notice regime is that a whole new set of IP addresses will begin to receive letters from rights-holders via their internet provider. These letters aren't backed up by much, but it's still a good idea to take them seriously, and keep an eye out for Bill S-4.

With the wealth of legal, innovative, and convenient methods of paying for content these days, it's also advisable to try your best to find ways to compensate creators for the works that you're enjoying. If you must insist on torrenting through 2015, beware: the letters you receive might just have consequences.


Follow Chris on Twitter.

Mother of Killed ISIS Fighter Brings De-Radicalization Program to Canada

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Damian Clairmont as a young boy. Photo via Damian's mother Christianne Boudreau.

Damian Clairmont was born in a small Nova Scotia town. Earlier this year, the 22-year-old died in Syria fighting for the Islamic State.

Damian's mother, Christianne Boudreau, had no clue how radical his ideas had become until she learned her son was in Syria working with ISIS, not in Egypt studying Arabic as he led her to believe.

His story is becoming increasingly common. As of September, the federal government said 30 Canadians like Damian had flown to Syria, and some of them had joined the Islamic State. As the political movement—which advocates violence in the name of extreme religious views—gains strength both abroad and at home, Boudreau is pushing for programs that would de-radicalize formerly peaceful Muslims like her son.

Damian spent his first six years in a French Acadian fishing village in Nova Scotia. He was a curious, bright child who taught himself to read by age four. In 1997, his family moved to Alberta. It wasn't until his teenage years that Boudreau told VICE, "we started to run into problems."

At 14, Damian dropped out of school. He became reclusive and depressed. His mother tried to get him counselling, but found mental health resources expensive and hard to access. "I kept beating my head basically against a brick wall trying to get him help," she said.

Then, the day before his 17th birthday, Damian left a note for his family and vanished. Boudreau later found him in hospital. He had attempted suicide. Soon after, he converted to Islam, which seemed to address his depression.

"It was relief because he was getting out of the house," Damian's mother recalled. "He was calm, he wasn't using drugs, he wasn't drinking, he was integrating with the family well again, and it looked like he was getting better."

For three years, Islam was a solution. "He was looking for that thing, that fulfillment, that purpose, and he found something that spoke to him and resonated within him."

But in early 2011, his ideas began to morph. "It was gradual, very gradual," his mother said.

Before, he didn't drink, but now he wouldn't come to dinner if wine was on the table. He began spouting 9/11 conspiracy theories and declaring that Western media was covering stuff up and lying. He decided a man should have more than one wife so that he would be "better looked after." He spoke about how Canada wasn't doing enough in Syria to help women and children who were being tortured. Boudreau believes it was the humanitarian in him that drew him overseas.

Damian's conversion to Islam in 2009 was triggered by an argument with a Muslim classmate about the role of women in Islam, according to another Canadian ISIS fighter and blogger who goes by Abu Muhajir. The two met in a Calgary Tim Hortons near their mosque, and later travelled together to Syria.

Abu Muhajir said he gave Damian a book called The Evidence for the Ruling Regarding Alliance with the Infidels, which he called "a great compilation of verses from Quran and Hadith that clearly shows the apostasy of those who ally with disbelievers against their own Muslim brethren."

Boudreau believed the shift in Damian's views were only a phase, and that he would eventually settle into a moderate mindset. "I kick myself now, but I didn't know what I know now back then."

Suddenly, in late 2012, Damian boarded a plane. He had spoken of going to Cairo to study Arabic, but his mother didn't think he would actually leave Canada. Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) later told her Damian flew to Istanbul, not Cairo, and travelled southeast through Turkey into Syria.

There he teamed up with Jabhat al-Nusra, an al Qaeda affiliate, fighting alongside other foreigners like himself. In June 2013, Damian joined the Islamic State. Boudreau said he settled in an ISIS-infiltrated town, Hraytan, outside Aleppo. She last heard from her son over Facebook in early September 2013. In January 2014 the Free Syrian Army reportedly captured and killed Damian.

A reporter at the Globe and Mail called her to ask about a tweet by Abu Muhajir. "It was a picture of Damian alongside a eulogy," his mother said. A CBC producer then confirmed Damian's death through a reliable source in Syria who had known him.

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Screencap of a tweet by @abu_muhajir1.

Since Damian's death, Boudreau has connected with a German de-radicalization group called Hayat. The organization connects families with counselling, provides risk assessments for young Muslims who are becoming radical in their views, and coaches families on how to react. Boudreau is fundraising for a new branch of the organization, Hayat Canada.

If Damian had accessed Hayat's services, or talked to a moderate imam scholar, he may have been coaxed away from his violent inclinations, his mother said.

Jamal Badawi, a former religious studies professor who gives talks rebutting what he calls the Islamic State's "twisted theology," said ISIS is successfully targeting young westerners like Damian, both online and in person. They are "quite savvy with the cyberspace," he said.

Badawi agrees with Boudreau; if a young Muslim is becoming radicalized, it's helpful if a knowledgeable imam has a "quiet conversation" with them.

"I would have loved to speak with him, whether he would have been convinced or not," he said. "But at least I think I had quite a bit to offer if he was willing to listen."

Extremism can arise out of misinterpretations of the Quran and the Hadith, Badawi explained. Muslims can also be moved by injustices against people of their faith, as in Damian's case. Young people especially have great compassion toward human suffering, and may conclude they have to act. Mental illness can play a role, but it's difficult to connect radicalization to any one particular source, Badawi said.

At the time Damian's ideas were shifting, Boudreau believes an intervention like Hayat could have saved him.

"If I had had connections to those resources back then, they could have assisted me in the dialogues to have with him based on what he was saying," she said.

So far, the federal government hasn't offered her any financial backing.

"Nobody in the government is doing anything, so somebody has to, because this can't happen to anyone else," she said.

Follow Hilary on Twitter.

RIP Joe Cocker, Dead at Age 70

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RIP Joe Cocker, Dead at Age 70

An Allegory of Canada for 2014: Rinelle Harper, Nicki Minaj, and Italian Art History

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Bernini's Allegory of Truth Unveiled by Time. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Two Harpers. In Canada, on one side of the pendulum, we have Stephen Harper, Prime Minister for the past eight years, and on the other, we have Rinelle Harper, a teenaged survivor.

In early November, 16-year-old Rinelle Harper, a First Nations high school student, was beaten, sexually assaulted, and "left for dead" on the banks of the Assiniboine River in my hometown, Winnipeg. A month later she had the strength, grace, and courage to address a crowd of hundreds, calling for a national inquiry into Canada's 1,200 murdered and missing indigenous women (#MMIW).

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/Z0yBqtU-Skc' width='560' height='315']

My friends in Europe, where I live, didn't realize how dire the situation is in Canada until I explained it: Rinelle Harper's story is far from unique. A few months before Rinelle was found, the dead body of another First Nations girl, 15-year-old Tina Fontaine, was pulled from another Winnipeg river wrapped in a bag. In retrospect, I can't believe how naïve I was as a teenager to be hanging out along the river—because Canada is ripe with racism, hatred, and misogyny, and even when it isn't, its rivers run with apathy.

Our federal government refuses to hold an inquiry, instead viewing the losses of all these women's lives as isolated incidents and not part of a larger epidemic plaguing our nation. As if responding to Rinelle's call, Stephen Harper told Peter Mansbridge this week regarding the prospect of a public inquiry, "It isn't high on our radar to be honest." In this same interview our Prime Minister admitted he had been trained by the RCMP to protect himself from national threats. Here is an image to ponder: 55-year-old Stephen Harper hiding in a darkened closet on Parliament Hill on October 22 and, a few weeks later, Rinelle Harper, 16, lying bruised and beaten and exposed to the elements on November 8. Harper has been Prime Minister for half of Rinelle's life but what has he done to protect it?

The same day Rinelle spoke, I visited the Galleria Borghese in Rome to study the sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini's Allegory of Truth Unveiled by Time. In 1646, Bernini's career was in jeopardy, contracts terminated, and he turned to the marble block "to vent his feelings," as Rudolf Wittkower put it, because "in the seventeenth century such expression always took the form of a conventional allegory." Through the use of well-established symbols, Bernini could clearly convey his message. Though this work was never fully executed, Bernini intended to include the figure of Time, an old bearded man with a scythe, pulling back cloth, exposing Truth's body—hence, Truth unveiled by Time. His viewers would have recognized the symbolism immediately because Truth was almost always represented as a nude woman who held the sun in her hands, and Time had his attributes.

Earlier in December I rolled my eyes at the announcement of Nicki Minaj's European tour but didn't think twice about it. After seeing Rinelle and hearing her quiet voice call for justice, I thought again about Minaj's concert poster. In it, the Trinidadian-American pop star is bare-breasted and clad in a giant feather headdress. Its conceit: just as Columbus did when he first landed in the Caribbean, Minaj in a cocky reversal intends to conquer the Old World in an upcoming tour.

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Photo via the Nicki Minaj Facebook page.

What Minaj and her team are relying on is an early modern allegorical type, one that was codified in Cesare Ripa's Iconologia, a book of emblems first published in 1593 in Italy. The book functioned as a manual for artists who wished to impart complicated, abstract ideas with the quick and easy language of allegorical figures, physical attributes and symbols. This is why Truth is nude and holds the sun, Ripa explains: because light illuminates what is.

When it came to the subject of America, Ripa advised artists to portray her, again, naked but with a feather headdress atop her head (just like Minaj), bow and arrows strapped to her back and, at her feet, a decapitated head to show the barbarism of her people. There is an argument to be made that representations like these and their idiotic iterations in 2014 are partly to blame for the attitude in Canada that the lives and bodies of indigenous women are for the taking.

Inspired by Minaj's extensive knowledge of arcane early modern iconography and Bernini's sculptural rants, I began to wonder: What might an Allegory of (North) America look like today?

Is she a bloodied and bruised naked First Nations body floating down a river in a bag?

Is she simply marked by her absence, a blank page in a new Iconologia, her remains secretly buried somewhere no one knows, perhaps in a Pickton pig farm?

I probably would have said yes until I saw Rinelle speak. Rinelle is not an allegory; I don't want to do her that injustice. She is a human being, a normal girl who, in her own words, wants to heal, "to continue on with my life," "be able to go back to school, to see my friends and be with my family."

With that in mind, here is my addendum to Cesare Ripa's Iconologia:

CANADA. A clothed woman with brown skin. She wears her hair in an impossibly tight braid down the back of her spine. She does not wear a headdress nor is she naked. The Ancient Greeks did not write about her because sadly they didn't know of her. But the Elders of her world spoke of her: She is the water-keeper. In her left hand, she holds a glass of clean water, unspoiled by fracking, and in the hopes that someday all her people will have access to clean water. In her other hand, she holds an eagle feather because she is cherished by her community as a leader, because she is neither murdered nor missing, because, like the eagle, she is an integral link between this world and the world above.

Blood streams from her upper arms because she is a Sun Dancer; she pierces and gives flesh offerings as she prays with her relatives in this ceremony. Half of her dress is a made with rolled tobacco can lids, a Jingle Dress, because she dreamt of healing her community through this dance and does so for their health and continuity. The other half of her dress is composed of jeans and a t-shirt because she's probably in law school. She has a dog at her feet because she is loyal, strong, and adaptable. "As a survivor," she "respectfully challenge[s] you all to call for a national inquiry into missing and murdered indigenous women" so that Truth and Hope will be Unveiled in Time.

Exposed to the elements, she is Truth.

Follow Shawon on Twitter.

The Nature of Electricity

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The Nature of Electricity

Comics: Roy in Hollywood

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You can buy Gilbert's books from Fantagraphics and Drawn and Quarterly.


Madonna Sings About Sniffing Glue on Her Great New Album 'Rebel Heart'

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Photo via Madonna.com

On paper, Madonna singing about the Illuminati sounds atrocious, but Rebel Heart is easily Madge's best album in at least 16 years. The artist initially planned to drop the album in the spring, but after a series of tracks leaked, she decided to release the first six song on iTunes, three months before the whole album comes out in March.

When the songs premiered, gay Twitter naturally exploded—some people were literally downloading the tracks on their smartphones at gay bars—but many fans expected little from Madonna's 13th album. Since her 1998 comeback Ray of Light, Madonna has released five full-lengths, but only two have been truly worthwhile: Music and Confessions on a Dance Floor. In recent years, instead of collaborating with relatively obscure producers as she did on classics like Erotica and Ray of Light, Madonna has hired major names like Timbaland and Benny Benassi. The results, 2008's Hard Candy and 2012's MDNA, sounded tepid. On "Give Me All Your Luvin'," a 2012 song featuring Nicki Minaj and MIA, she sounded downright bland when placed next to the rappers' swag, like the queen of pop was attempting to reclaim her title from female MCs who had never stolen her throne in the first place. Coupled with an awkward Super Bowl performance and a lackluster grinding session with Miley Cyrus, some fans believed Madonna had lost her creative way and become a vampire lusting after her competitors' youth.

Rebel Heart takes this critique and uses it as gasoline for empowerment anthems and vulnerable confessions perfect for the surreal, tragic year known as 2014 . The lead single "Living for Love" discusses surviving after a breakup with a guy Madonna left herself vulnerable to. (The person could easily be her haters.) "I'm gonna carry on," Madonna triumphantly sings. "Living for love / I'm not giving up."

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Against a throbbing Diplo beat on a later track called "Bitch, I'm Madonna," her angriest song since 1994's "Human Nature," the pop star sings about "jumping in the pool and swimming with our clothes on" and then imitates the ageist critics who complain about her dressing like a twentysomething. "Who do you think you are?" she angrily asks, before answering herself: "Bitch, I'm Madonna." Next, Nicki Minaj jumps on the track, embodying Madonna. "Ain't got a thing left for me to prove / It's that bottle service all night," she raps. "Bitch, I'm Madonna. These hoes know." Unlike her "Give Me All Your Luvin'" verse, Minaj's vocal swagger compliments Madonna instead of overpowering her. Madonna's anger gives her a charisma we haven't seen since she danced alone in a dance studio to "Hung Up" nearly a decade ago.

On another Diplo joint, "Unapologetic Bitch," she becomes an Anna Wintour–like boss, echoing "Human Nature": "It might sound like I'm an unapologetic bitch / but sometimes, you know I've got to call it like it is," she sings. "You know you never really knew how much you loved me 'til you lost me / Did you? / You know you never really knew how much your selfish bullshit cost me / Oh, fuck you."

As she did on her recent tour, where she flashed her nipple while singing a ballad version of "Like a Virgin," Madonna veers into the ridiculous on "Illuminati." "Rihanna don't know the new world order," she sings. "It's not Isis or the phoenix, cameras of Egypt." The song starts as a vague, confusing meditation on the media, but the song's chorus ("It's like everybody in this party shining like Illuminati") elevates the track from a piece of camp to a great dance banger. Few listeners can relate to a global superstar's analysis of a celebrity-oriented conspiracy theory, but everyone can relate to feeling like a superstar at a club for a few fleeting minutes.

Madonna's surprising relatability sounds like downright vulnerability on other tracks. "Devil Pray" opens with string sounds reminiscent of Madonna's American Life singer-songwriter phase, but avoids the awkwardness of a pop star channeling her inner Liz Phair when a beat kicks in as Madonna sings, "We can do drugs and we can smoke weed and we can drink whiskey." (She goes on to brag about how they could sniff glue and take E. Did I mention she's 56?) Like "Illuminati," the refrain seems absurd, but when Madonna admits she's "getting weaker" and asks to "sing hallelujah" and save her "soul," she sounds honest, even spiritual, and for the first time since Confessions on a Dance Floor, she finally fucking nails it.

The vulnerability crescendos on the standout track "Ghosttown," one of those great dance songs that's moving but not catchy enough to become a single. "Everything's gone to hell," Madonna sings. "All we've got is love." Capturing the mood of the country, she asks how we've got to such an odd, terrible place. During the refrain she sounds like she's painting herself as a savior, belting, "When it all falls down / I'll be your fire when the lights go out." But at the end of the chorus, she reveals she's discussing a one-on-one relationship with the listener: "We'll be two souls in a ghost town."

The trick captures what made Madonna great in the 80s and 90s: her ability to sing cliches ("I am a material girl," "we need a holiday," "you've got to make him express himself") and transform them into both personalized anthems and universal truths. And the slick, expensive production is catchy as hell this time around. What else can you ask for?

Follow Mitchell Sunderland on Twitter.

Skinema: What It Felt Like to Watch My Wife Get a Boob Job

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Dir: Brett Brando
Rating: 9

Brazzers.com

In the opening scene of this porno spoof of Martin Scorsese's ode to the excessive 80s, porn star Dani Daniels (the film's equivalent of Leonardo DiCaprio) gets head under her desk while trying to sell penny stocks on the telephone. The actual The Wolf of Wall Street opens with an equally engrossing scene—a wild party inside a brokerage firm that includes midget tossing, a shirtless marching band, and topless hookers. Somewhere in the mix is a man walking down a flight of stairs on his hands.

Just minutes before my wife had her boob job, I was surprised to learn that this character was inspired by her breast surgeon's brother, who worked for the real Jordan Belfort and had a penchant for scuttling around the office on his palms. I was also shocked—even a bit appalled—to find out that back in the 80s my wife's doctor and his brother used to be a break-dancing duo who would choreograph their own dance routines. The surgeon shared this information with my wife because in her former life she was a jazz and tap teacher, and because doctors like to chat with their patients to earn their trust and calm their nerves before cutting them open. The dance anecdotes were very effective in my wife's case and helped relax her before the invasive procedure.

His stories, on the other hand, had the exact opposite effect on me. And I'd been completely carefree on the way to the hospital. After all, I wasn't the one getting sliced. My wife's doctor was the best in New Jersey, and boob jobs are as routine a procedure as there are (to the best of my knowledge I've never heard of anyone dying from a tit job).

But once he told me the dance stories I started to sweat and panic, recalling that shitty show Nip/Tuck and how they were always playing music in surgery. All I could imagine was the rhythm hitting my wife's doctor and his hips starting to sway, his head beginning to bob, his hands catching a groove, and then suddenly he's dancing like Hannibal Lecter, slashing the scalpel across my wife's tits to the beat.

The next three hours were the longest of my life—longer than actually sitting through the last hour of The Wolf of Wall Street. When they finally called my name to go back and see her, I knew she would be dead, her boobs cut off, every inch of the room covered in blood, with Lisa Lisa playing on the stereo system. I was certain I'd find the good doctor, lost in emotion, still doing the running man over my wife's cold, titless corpse.

Instead I found my wife drooling silently under heavy sedation. The smiling, proud doctor stood over her, admiring his work and blocking my view. He asked whether I wanted to see them. I didn't. But before I could say no, he swung on his heels to give me a clear shot at his handy work. That's when I fainted and hit my head.

In my days I have seen some shit that is forever burnt into my psyche: I have see two small people walk right out of my wife's vagina. I broke my leg in four places and looked down to see my heel in the front of my foot. I have fireman friends who send me snapshots of people charred to death in home infernos. None of that prepared me for the sight of my wife's areolas cut off and sewn back on. I knew it was part of the procedure—I was warned well in advance—but I never expected to actually see Frankentits. I figured I'd wait a few months until the stitches were removed and her tits were all healed up, until they looked spectacular and not straight out of a MASH unit.

When I finally came to, my wife was crying hysterically. She took my reaction to mean she'd just made the worst mistake of her life aside from marrying me, which was a great feeling after cashing in the kids' college funds on funbags.

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

Do Mormons Care About Joseph Smith's 40 Wives?

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[body_image width='1240' height='1367' path='images/content-images/2014/12/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/27/' filename='do-mormons-care-about-joseph-smiths-40-wives-456-body-image-1419655058.jpg' id='14457']The Salt Lake Temple. Photo via Wikimedia Commons user Entheta

Throughout 2014, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—a.k.a. the Mormons—has quietly posted a dozen essays under a series called Gospel Topics that publicly acknowledges some of the more sordid bits of the church's history.

Founder Joseph Smith's 40 wives? Yeah, that happened. And yes, one of them was 14—or, as they creepily put it, "sealed to Joseph several months before her 15th birthday." And yup, the church has a history of not allowing black folks into the priesthood, because they were thought to be "less than fully valiant in the premortal battle against Lucifer." The LDS church also admitted that there are some conflicting accounts of what exactly went down during Joseph Smith's First Vision, when he received his instructions from God.

Mormons rarely talk about these controversies—the church had never officially admitted that Smith had 40 wives—which makes these essays a pretty big deal. But while they've been covered by various media outlets, the church hasn't done anything to spread the word about them, letting them sit in an obscure corner of the LDS website. When I reached out to the church to discuss the Gospel Topics, I was just referred to an uninformative press release.

Since the LDS church wouldn't discuss the significance of the Gospel Papers with me, I talked with some former members of the church. Dr. Ryan Cragun, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Tampa and a former Mormon, told me, "Historians and scholars have known about a lot of this stuff for the past 40 to 60 years. Who it's new to is members. Most [Mormons] don't know this stuff."

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"Growing up Mormon, you're surrounded by this idea that you're not supposed to go to outside sources," said Rachel Velamur, a former Mormon who blogs at A Post-Mormon Life. "There's a mentality that anything you hear about the church that's unsavory is just Satan's way of leading you astray."

Of course, information was a lot easier to filter out before the internet brought the world to everyone's fingertips. Going to the library, locating books about the history of Mormonism, and reading those books takes a whole lot more effort than simply typing " Joseph Smith 40 wives" into Google. That relatively new ease of access is most likely why the church posed these essays in the first place—if Mormons are going to read about this sort of thing, it's better that they get their information from official sources.

"We know the LDS church is losing lots of members," said Cragun. "One [estimate] suggests that there's about 50,000 members resigning every year."

The Salt Lake Tribune reported back in 2008 that "as many as 80 percent of the single Mormon women between 18 and 30 are no longer active in the LDS Church," a statistic that suggests the church is losing the next generation of its faith. Possibly in response, it recently lowered the age limit of when Mormons can go on missions from 19 to 18 for men and from 21 to 19 for women. If you're of a skeptical nature, you might think that the idea here is to ship out young Mormons before radical ideas from outside influences have a chance to lodge into their impressionable minds.

The reasons for this exodus from the LDS church are anecdotal, but fairly obvious. Some young people don't agree with the church's anti-homosexual stance. Some are realizing that the church is not particularly progressive when it comes to the equality of men and women. But there's also the fact that members were finding out that the church's true history differed from the "official" version.

"There are stories cropping up [in the ex-Mormon community] of people who are in their 30s and 40s who spent their entire lives sacrificing so much to be Mormon, and then finding these things out, and just having their beliefs breaking," said Velamur.

The Gospel Topics essays can be seen as a way for the church to avoid that by airing some of its dirty laundry and attempting controlling the narrative around sensitive topics like polygamy and race.

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Photo via Wikimedia user Ricardo630

"The essays are very biased," said Cragun. "By having them out there, they can basically try to corrupt the conversation."

"A lot of [the essays] talk about having the faith to believe even when we don't understand or don't agree," said Velamur. "I think for a lot of the members, that will be the mindset. 'I just need to believe even though I don't understand or agree with it.'"

Many Mormons have been wrestling the church's past polygamous practices for a long time.

"In my research of Joseph Smith's marital practices, I noticed that he first was marrying married women, and then he shifted to marrying singles who were often much younger," said Stephen Fleming, a Mormon with a PhD in religious studies at UC Santa Barbara, who blogs at The Juvenile Instructor. "I argue in my dissertation that Smith originally sought to practice shared marriages where men and women could have multiple spouses, but when his inner circle balked at this, he switched to only men being able to marry multiple spouses. I argue that the original pattern was part of kind of utopianism that goes back to Plato's Republic. These utopian ideologies don't bother me even if they aren't practical."

Fleming also doesn't believe many Mormons are receiving new information with these essays. "I doubt many Mormons first learned Joseph Smith was a polygamist from the essay. They probably learned a lot of new details, but not many would have learned for the first time that he had multiple wives." He sees the release of the Gospel Topics as a positive step for the LDS church. "Dealing with the information more directly will be better than not."

But for some, the arguments over whether Smith was morally correct in taking 40 wives isn't the point. The fact is, the church has been sitting on information that members probably should have known about.

"[Mormonism] is a very scary thing to leave," said Velamur, who left when she was 16 because she felt it was "wrong to have a mindset where you think everyone needs to believe what you believe." While she was struggling with possibly leaving the church, she wasn't aware that Joseph Smith practiced polygamy, or the history of the church's racism.

"I wish I would have known back then," she said. "It would have helped that really scared 16-year-old kid to be a little more confident in what she was doing."

[body_image width='640' height='480' path='images/content-images/2014/12/29/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/29/' filename='do-mormons-care-about-joseph-smiths-40-wives-456-body-image-1419869844.jpg' id='14717']Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon Church. Image via Wikimedia Commons

Looking forward, is there anything left in the archives yet to be released? Will there be any more Gospel Topics next year?

"The Book of Mormon lacks historicity," said Cragun. "When you start to study it from an archeological and anthropological perspective, it's riddled with flaws. It's clearly supposed to take place in Central America, and it claims there were horses there 2,000 years ago. But there were no horses. There were ancestors of horses about 12,000 years [ago], but they all went extinct. The new horses came with the Europeans."

That's just one example. While Cragun admits "Mormon apologists" have already tried to nip these inaccuracies in the bud by claiming it's not entirely known where the events described in the Book of Mormon take place—and, "if we don't know where it took place, you can't prove it didn't happen." Cragun thinks an essay on these kinds of issues would have way more extreme ramifications than Joseph Smith's many wives.

"That would be huge," said Cragun. "That would be religion-changing."

Follow Rick Paulas on Twitter

VICE INTL: Blood Debt

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In some parts of the Balkans, families still live by a centuries-old law called "the Canon," which recognizes the right to vengeance—if a man from one family kills another, the family of the victim must respond in kind. This "debt" is usually executed by the eldest male member of the family. It is his duty to avenge his loved one—if he refuses, he declared a coward and renounced by his family.

VICE Serbia recently traveled from East Montenegro—where some families have experienced four cycles of vengeance—to the north of Albania, where some children never leave their homes in fear of being killed. Along the way they spoke with families of murder victims who, disappointed by the corruption of the official justice system, have taken judgment and punishment into their own hands.

When a Gay Man Marries a Straight Woman

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Illustrations by Tom Scotcher

This post originally appeared on VICE UK

After 20 years of marriage, Mark couldn't take it any more. He still loved and cared for his wife, but had started to feel a strong attraction towards a close male friend. These feelings started to saturate his thoughts, and gradually an urge to escape the rut he'd found himself in as he entered his mid-40s brought everything to the fore.

After one drunken night out, the two friends had sex. This soon became a regular occurrence; Mark now recalls that he was "a bit blasé" about the whole thing, believing he'd never get caught. His nonchalance was misplaced—one day, Mark's wife caught the pair kissing in the kitchen.

While Mark's affair was a surprise, that it was with a man was not. Mark's wife had found a stash of gay porn shortly after they married in their early 20s, and he'd formally come out to her (although not to the rest of the world) at the age of 28. Despite his sexuality, Mark told his wife that he'd never sleep with another man, promising to stay faithful to her for as long as they were married.

But after catching him, his wife didn't walk away. In fact, today—after 30 years of marriage—they're still together.

A gay and a straight person trying to maintain a marriage seems like quite an ordeal to put yourself through. Yet for millions of people in mixed-orientation marriages, it's a basic fact of life.

When psychologists and counsellors talk about mixed-orientation marriages, or MOMs, they are describing unions in which one partner is openly gay, the other straight. And such marriages are far more common than you might think. There's currently no single set of figures available for MOMs in the UK but, according to stats released by the Straight Spouse Network, an organization set up to help the female partners of gay Mormon men in Utah, there are 2 million mixed-orientation marriages in America alone.

Although it's far more common for a gay partner to come out after the couple marry than before, this is by no means universal, according to Douglas Chay, a Maryland-based therapist who runs his own practice, Pride Counseling, and describes himself as an MOM specialist.

Douglas says that "in some cases, before the actual marriage people agree to have what they think of as a non-traditional marriage. They set rules on whether the homosexual partner can have sex with other people. They may have deals where they can both have sex with other people. But often it's simply the homosexual partner who wants that."

AS LONG AS THEY DON'T FLAUNT WHAT THEY'RE DOING, THEY CAN KEEP THEMSELVES SATISFIED AND MAINTAIN THEIR FRIENDSHIP WITH THEIR WIFE, ALBEIT BY MAINTAINING CELIBACY

The proliferation of support groups on the internet suggests a relatively sizable chunk of Britain's homosexual community are in mixed-sex unions. Mark himself is a long-standing member of Gay Married Men, a group that meets in Manchester and has around 50 members who range in age from their 20s to their 50s. The vast majority of members are already "out" to their wives.

"Those who have carried on [their marriage] are on a similar agreement to me," says Mark. "As long as they don't flaunt what they're doing, they can keep themselves satisfied and maintain their friendship with their wife, albeit by maintaining celibacy."

According to Mark, Gay Married Men doesn't offer counseling; it exists to provide regular group meetings where "people share experiences of how they have managed to come out, coming to terms with their sexuality, maybe the breakup of their relationship or the struggle they have had to carry it on." However, it's not all serious emotional support; members also occasionally swap tips on where to go cruising in the local neighborhood—which suggests the vow of celibacy might mean different things to different people.

Similar support is available across the UK; just type "mixed-orientation marriage" into Google and you'll find a support group in pretty much every major British city (though not all offer advice on cruising). Intriguingly, the vast majority of the groups are aimed at men, suggesting the homosexual partner in an MOM is invariably male.

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One of the oldest MOM support bodies, Courage, was founded back in 1988 by Jeremy Marks, who was himself about to embark on an MOM at the time. Jeremy, a committed Christian, says he knew he was gay from puberty but couldn't pursue his true feelings because "people thought it was beneath contempt. It was very demoralizing—you had society telling you [that you] were a monster."

After years of living a single, celibate life, in the late 80s Jeremy began a platonic relationship with a longtime female friend who shared his devotion to Christianity. "She was fully aware that I was gay, but she didn't know what that meant because I wasn't involved in homosexual relationships, and perhaps we were slightly afraid of loneliness and wanted to make our families happy," he recalls.

"We 'dated' for about 18 months before marrying. We were really getting to know each other as friends, but we never slept together. Even after getting married it was never a sexual relationship."

Although the couple decided to separate in their 50s, Jeremy is now dedicated to helping other people make their MOMs work. He's left Courage and now runs his own counseling service. He says he's in regular contact with between 20 to 30 MOM couples today, hailing from all over the world.

"Many of them have kids. It's a terribly difficult dilemma for the men—and of course it's very difficult [for the women]," says Jeremy. "Some men are closer to the middle of the Kinsey scale [the formula that uses a continuum to grade a person's sexuality] and get some enjoyment out of sex. However, there's always that tension for them, that they'd like to be with people of the same sex as well."

Yet, for all the obvious sexual barriers that can afflict an MOM, many gay men end up with children, which can make things even more complicated down the line.

§

One such man is Steve Williams, who runs Gaydadsupport.net, an organization set up to facilitate online conversations and meet-ups between homosexual fathers. Steve says he knew he was gay at the age of five and that his initial sexual experiences were all with men, but he's still ended up with four kids.

In his early 20s, Steve met a woman by chance after falling asleep on a bus, and found he enjoyed her company. Living in Basildon, life was far easier at the time if you were heterosexual; Steve recalls that his first heterosexual relationship "wasn't love at first sight, it was convenience."

The couple soon got engaged, and as they were planning their nuptials Steve's fiancée announced she was expecting. "I was lucky she got pregnant quickly," Steve recalls, "so she didn't want sex that often. Sex wasn't difficult, it just wasn't overly pleasurable. But when we had sex, she just tended to get pregnant.

"I actually never intended telling my wife that I was gay—I genuinely believed I could live that lie for the rest of my life. But soon after I married, a guy I'd had a relationship with reappeared, and it appeared my wife knew him. So I basically had to tell her. Even then, like a lot of wives, she assumed I was bi, not gay, and I didn't feel the need to correct her.

"We continued to have sex sporadically, and this kept producing kids. Yet, as time went on we started living in separate beds, then separate rooms, and reverted to a friendship rather than marriage. She allowed me to have dates and she had dates as well, on the pretext that we knew we were going to get divorced at some point. We just wanted to wait until we found someone worth getting a divorce for.

"Eventually I met a guy and got very close to him. One day, my wife asked me to choose between her and him. I chose the guy."

SOME COUPLES DO MANAGE TO GO THE DISTANCE, DESPITE THE OVERWHELMING ODDS

Steve, Mark and Jeremy have all negotiated the MOM journey by very different routes. However, the support they have provided to other people allows them to take a panoramic view of the MOM landscape.

So, is there a "typical" demographic for MOMs? All three are adamant that it's impossible to pin this down.

Marks insists that "there's no dominant occupational group, although the majority are skilled or professional—well-educated. It does seem to be people who've had a career and knuckled down and done what was expected of them."

Steve, meanwhile, says, "I would love to say there's a clear stereotype, but there isn't. I've had everyone from doctors, airline pilots... all sorts. If anything, there's probably a lack of manual professions. You don't get many factory workers; I can only assume it's the environment where they work."

The three men also agree that the vast majority of MOMs will, eventually, end in divorce. However, this is by no means a universal rule; some couples do manage to go the distance, despite the overwhelming odds.

When asked how a couple can manage this, Mark suggests that "to some extent they want to stick with it through fear of the unknown, the fear of loneliness. And also they value what they have, someone who's a very good friend. It seems a mutual thing in most cases. The wife has been given the opportunity to separate and it's not been taken.

"In my own case, first and foremost we are best, best friends—always have been—and we felt we had a lot together. I wish I could answer why my wife has stayed with me; I suppose there would be the fear of explaining it to family if she left. I don't imagine it would go down too well."

§

In a sense, the accounts provided by Steve, Mark, and Jeremy paint a negative picture. The world they describe is hemmed in by fear, embarrassment, and a desire to please everyone but oneself. Perhaps in time, people will look back on MOMs with pity, just as the children of the Enlightenment scorned the God-botherers of the Middle Ages.

Yet, we should also acknowledge the sacrifices these people have made, the struggles they have endured to make their marriages work. A straight marriage was never their dream, but they've followed it to the end of the rainbow.

Follow Gareth Platt on Twitter and see more of Tom Scotcher's work on his Tumblr.

We Turned Some Fashion Models into Creepy Moving Statues

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Freel and Gorse Studios jacket and trousers, Melissa sandals

PHOTOGRAPHY: FREEL AND GORSE
STYLING: PHOEBE HAINES

Make-up and body paint: Jess Cheetham
Stylist's assistant: Nathan
Model: Alexandra at Profile

Freel and Gorse Studios jacket, stylist's own socks, Dr. Martens shoes

Model's own jumper, American Apparel skirt, K-Way jacket, stylist's own socks, Freel and Gorse Studios shoes

All clothes O'Neill

Customised Nike jumper, Asil Polat skirt

Model's own jumper, Gourmet shoes


VICE Premiere: Twin Foxes Are a Reminder That Emo Rock Can Still Have Balls

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Pop punk is usually not a respected genre, and it's only rarely been popular, but happen upon the right song and you start to think, Hey, guitars, major chords, some righteous anger and heart-on-your-sleeve emotional outpouring—why isn't this track being played on the radio all the time?

"Year on a String" by relatively unknown Providence-based band Twin Foxes is one of those special songs. These guys play the type of emo that reminds us of Taking Back Sunday's heyday, but with some lo-fi hints of Cap'n Jazz and Lincoln mixed in. Listen to this if you need proof that the spirit of Jawbreaker and the Kinsella brothers is still alive and well.

"Year on a String" will be released on the band's upcoming seven-inch. Pre-order it here.

Listen to more Twin Foxeshere via Bandcamp.

VICE Vs Video Games: The Hangover Games: What to Play Once the Party’s Over

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Image via

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

We're smack dab in the middle of the Christmas and New Year party season, a time that brings with it inherent dangers: the headaches, the chills, the barfing, the all-day-in-bed dining rituals, and all of those holiday party-related embarrassments that have been arranged into their own kind of clichéd visual language by advertisers trying to sell you stuff.

I don't care who you are or what measures you take to "prevent" a hangover—whether it's eating a decent meal before going out or downing some sort of supplement when you get in—because one simple truth remains: if you drink ten pints of medium-strength beer on a night out, the next day is going to feel like the Fall of Saigon is happening between your temples.

But let's say you drag yourself out of bed sometime before a weekday airing of The Simpsons, but after the opportunity to achieve anything constructive has passed. And let's say you're lucky enough to have little-to-no home responsibilities; perhaps you'll make it as far as wherever your gaming device of choice is. And maybe you'll spend your four waking hours of this limbo-like day staring, mouth wide open and drooling, at a video game.

What are you gonna play? Nothing too explosive, or too loud—and certainly nothing particularly demanding. These games are great drunk, but the day after, significantly less so. Allow me, then, to recommend some digital distractions to see you through your self-inflicted suffering.

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ANYTHING KATAMARI-COLORED, BUT IDEALLY ONE OF THE FIRST TWO GAMES
These have worked for me, at least. The objective is delightfully elementary: roll stuff up into a massive ball, attaining a specified size before the time runs out. After this feat's accomplished, The King of All Cosmos will belittle you, regardless of your brilliance. Looking utterly mad but playing like a dream, enough that you'll temporarily forget your present nightmare, the initial brace of Katamari titles—2004's Damacy and its sequel, We Love Katamari—are among the most wonderful toys to have graced the PlayStation 2 generation.

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JOURNEY, OR FLOWER, OR BOTH
You can get these on the same "collector's edition" disc for the PS3, so if you don't own them but have said system: What are you doing not owning these? Journey is the wordless story of a wanderer who must travel from shimmering desert sands to the snowy, storm-battered peak of a distant mountain. To play, you merely point your little character forward, jumping where necessary and using a single chirrup to solve a few simple puzzles. It's supremely relaxing, but may leave those of a fragile emotional state in tears come its climax—which even the most beer-goggled will realize inside 90 minutes.

Flower is by the same team, thatgamecompany, and grants the player control of the wind. You guide the breeze, collecting petals across a variety of stages—some beautifully verdant, others scarred by industry—to unlock a level exit. Its makers have called it "our video game version of a poem," which is just what you need when your head feels like it's going to explode.

[body_image width='1280' height='720' path='images/content-images/2014/12/22/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/22/' filename='the-hangover-games-what-to-play-once-the-partys-over-836-body-image-1419251418.jpg' id='13364']

A LEGO GAME
Block-based puzzles that you can't be stuck on for too long, endearing humor and a whole lot of smashing stuff up—but in a cute way, rather than the manner in which Rockstar typically goes about the bombast business. The LEGO games are far from just for kids, and a couple of recent entries in the massive catalog of bricks-doing-shit releases have stood out.

The newest LEGO Batman effort, Beyond Gotham, is a bit too befuddling in its onslaught of characters-I-don't-care-about, but 2013's LEGO Marvel Super Heroesis better, with a roster of easily recognizable comic icons and an open-world New York to zoom Iron Man (or whoever) around. Equally appealing is the plot-mirroring video game of The LEGO Movie, which features many scenes from one of 2014's funniest films. As with all LEGO games, you can't actually "die" at all—so even those with the fuzziest vision will muddle through a few stages.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/cqFfEUL9Cwk' width='640' height='360']

The Classic Game Room review of Out Run 2 for Xbox

OUT RUN 2
I can play this (Xbox-ported) sequel to one of the most important arcade racers of all time for all time. The setup never changes: the same five minutes, give or take, over and over. And I love it. The bright Sega-blue skies, the crazy power slides, the cheesy pop of the background music, the slap-happy partner in the passenger seat who'll never be impressed whatever the difficulty of the route you rocket through. It's just gloriously relaxing, and it always puts me in my happy place—even with pores sweating out the night before's pale ale ingestion.

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BEYOND: TWO SOULS, OR—IF YOU CAN STOMACH IT—SOMETHING FROM TELLTALE
Binging on a box-set is a fine "waste" of any wasted day—but if you like your stories prompted by the press of a controller button, you could always see your shakes out in the company of a motion-captured Ellen Page, the star of this 2013 PlayStation 3 exclusive.

The Paris-based Quantic Dream studio has been putting out its singularly divisive brand of "interactive drama" for several years. But while many critics slammed Beyond: Two Souls, its most recent release, for its lack of Actual Gameplay, I enjoyed its garbled plot of psychic siblings and sci-fi silliness, and didn't mind that all I was asked to do was press X here, or nudge the analog sticks a certain way to take out some pesky lookout or whoever. To be honest, I was probably drunk when I played it, to have liked it as much as I remember—but it's equally suitable for hangover viewing, given that's what you'll mainly be doing here: watching, not playing.

Otherwise, those craving a narrative kick with effortless interactivity should seek out something from Telltale Games. The Walking Dead (which is a bit heavy on the heartache) and The Wolf Among Us (a murderous mix of Fables-preceding fantasy noir) might both be too much for delicate stomachs. But the new Game of Thrones episode is a great two-hour accompaniment to the hit HBO TV show (although it's still got its share of bloodshed), and Telltale's take on Back to the Future is a gently paced, relatively charming exercise in nostalgia.

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ENDLESS OCEAN, OR ITS SEQUEL, ADVENTURES OF THE DEEP
These Wii games take you into the big blue and just ask that you enjoy it. There are tasks, but nothing taxing. Unless the idea of being submerged makes you shit yourself, this is a great way to drift through the haze of a hangover. Just watch the air gauge, and the sharks, because death at such depths guarantees nobody's finding your lung-flooded corpse. (Nah, you'll be OK—there's no death, no "game over," in Endless Ocean.)

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THE SAILOR'S DREAM
If you're not susceptible to seasickness, here's another nautical option—this time for iOS devices, so you don't even have to get out of bed. Swedish studio Simogo's newest mobile production is an all-story affair, with no challenge except for the discovery of "memories" scattered around a small spread of islands.

These, alongside audio logs left by our narrator, which are aired every hour, on the hour—and seven folk songs to be found floating in bottles, one per day, for each day of the week—combine to form a complete, if spare, tale. If you "cheat" the game by adjusting your iPad's internal date and time, you'll see and hear everything inside an hour. But The Sailor's Dream is too sweet a serving to rush through, especially on a bad stomach. Take it slow and savor every moment.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/9Zx4-8fMm8A' width='640' height='360']

Kung Foot played by a bunch of people from YouTube

A SIMPLE LOCAL MULTIPLAYER GAME

Sportsfriends for PS3 and PS4 offers you and a pal both BaraBariBall and Super Pole Riders, which are hilarious when enjoyed while still under the influence. But if soccer, and FIFA, is your go-to sports game, here's a hangover alternative to all that officially licensed noise: Kung Foot.

A mini-game featured on the adorable Rayman Legends, Kung Foot is a one-on-one (or two-plays-two) beach volleyball meets Sensible Soccer romp that is just brilliant. Like, come on: look at it up there and tell me you don't want a turn, even if you're three sheets to the wind.

Set up tournaments or just keep on hammering through standalone matches—however you choose to approach Kung Foot, it eats up hours like children do all of the chocolates you bought to last until Christmas Eve. The same chocolates you should leave alone unless you want a puddle of brown all over your lap.

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SOMETHING FROM YOUR YOUTH THAT YOU KNOW INSIDE OUT BUT STILL LOVE
An evergreen: Whatever you can play time and again and enjoy despite the numerous times you've seen the same stages, the same enemies and the same credits.

For me, there's Out Run 2, as identified above, and as a Sega kid growing up I still love punching my way through the whole of Streets of Rage 2—difficulty down, lives up, depending on blood alcohol levels—and The Secret of Monkey Island is often restarted while hungover, what with its special edition being a permanent fixture on my mobile phone (and me long ago learning all of its solutions). Anything Mario-shaped is a pretty reliable option, too, barring this monstrosity.

So unless you were the Atari Jaguar-owning weirdo at school whose only games were Cybermorph and Trevor McFur—neither of which you should play while drunk (actually, just don't play them again, ever)—you'll be fine here. At least until that third wave of nausea kicks in and you remember where you "hid" the office stapler.

Follow Mike on Twitter.

The Cro-Mag's Frontman Wants You to Stop Eating Garbage and Whip Your Ass Into Shape

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The Cro-Mag's Frontman Wants You to Stop Eating Garbage and Whip Your Ass Into Shape

​Most Welfare Recipients Don’t Use Drugs, So Why Do States Keep Drug-Testing Them?

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Photo via Flickr user reerdahl

On Friday, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder signed into law suspicion-based drug-testing for welfare recipients in three of the state's counties in late 2015. It allocates half a million dollars to the Michigan Department of Human Services to carry out the pilot program, and marks the second time the Wolverine State has made moves in favor of punishing drug use by those receiving government assistance.

Michigan's 1999 law was struck down because it required drug testing for any and all assistance recipients—setting a precedent that similar laws are likely to dissolve at the federal level. Coincidentally, on the same day that Michigan legislators approved the 2015 pilot program, the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals killed a Florida law requiring drug testing for all government assistance recipients after it was challenged in a 2011 case led by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Yet in spite of these pronounced cases of federal resistance, states are increasingly putting their faith in welfare drug-testing legislation. Michigan is the 12th state to have enshrined such a law since 2011, though of those 12, only Georgia and Oklahoma pursued laws with conditions as stringent as those in Florida.

The public, it seems, is equally faithful. According to polls from 2011 and 2013, 53 percent and 51 percent of Americans favored drug tests for all government assistance recipients, respectively. The same year Florida enacted its now-defunct law, 71 percent of those surveyed in-state supported it. And a 2011 poll in Michigan revealed 79 percent of residents supported the state's new pilot program back then, before it had passed.

So most Americans believe states should drug test individuals who benefit from TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, commonly known as welfare), SNAP—aka food stamps—and other programs. But is there any evidence that this is a good idea?

While most data on this subject has only been collected within a few months to a year after the laws were signed into action, the majority of states with drug testing regimes haven't achieved significant reductions in government aid spending. Nor have they substantiated the assumption that assistance recipients are more likely to use drugs, which is often touted as the primary reason for pursuing such laws.

The federal government looked into these tests a few years ago, when their popularity began to climb. In its 2011 study, the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE), which operates beneath the US Department of Health and Human Services, reviewed drug testing policies for government assistance recipients in a number of states that had already enacted them. It weighed legislative cost estimates for each state, and also looked at the 82 welfare drug testing bills proposed in 31 different states in 2010 and the first half of 2011.

The results were remarkable because of what the study didn't find. It didn't find cost reductions, noting "none of the legislative costs estimates [identified] estimated net savings as a result of the proposed drug testing programs." It also didn't find any evidence that required drug testing will deter government assistance recipients from using drugs and thereby increase their employability, noting that a pilot edition of Florida's drug-testing program showed "there was very little difference in employment and earnings between [government assistance recipients] who tested positive [for drugs] and those who tested negative."

On the state level, statistics echo these findings. In its first month, a drug testing law in Tennessee that went into effect on July 1 this year resulted in only one positive test out of 812 assistance applicants. In Utah, results from mid-2013 showed that since the state's suspicion-based drug testing law was enacted in August 2012, only 12 out of 4,730 people tested positive.

And two days after Michigan's pilot program went up and Florida's law went down earlier this month, Mississippi released data showing that out of 3,656 people who applied for government assistance since the state's suspicion-based drug law went into effect on August 1, only two tested positive—or .06 percent.

In the larger debate over whether these laws, both mandatory and suspicion-based, are legal, Utah and Mississippi are key for a number of reasons. When Utah initially announced its findings, it trumpeted the law as a success. Only 12 people tested positive for drug use, lawmakers noted, but around 250 ended up not going through with the screening process at all, and as a result they forfeited their chance to receive government assistance. That means about 262 people were cut off, and the state saved over $350,000 within the law's first year.

None of the other states with drug-testing laws in place had previously reported a number quite like $350,000, let alone any significant net savings at all. Utah emerged as a hallmark, and gave proponents for drug-testing laws a model they could brandish when discussing whether these initiatives were worth putting money into.

That's what happened in Mississippi. Nearly a year after Utah made public its results at the end of 2013, Mississippi enacted a suspicion-based drug testing law modeled after Utah's, and one thing in particular they took from the western state was its preferred drug-screening questionnaire, the SASSI (Substance Abuse Subtle Screening Inventory). It's a written test—mostly true or false questions—that allegedly determines if someone is likely to be a substance abuser. If determined as such, this gives the authorities "suspicion," and with that suspicion, the state is constitutionally authorized to ask that someone to piss in a cup.

SASSI testing kits are a product sold by a company that operates beneath the same name. It was developed at the SASSI Institute in Springfield, Indiana in 1985, but has gone under three revisions since then—most recently in 1997. It is commonly used in hospitals and drug treatment programs, as well as prison and jail intake programs. But because government assistance drug testing laws are relatively new, SASSI's accuracy in relation to them has yet to undergo thorough study.

Regardless, SASSI's website claims that SASSI-3, its flagship exam, has an incredible rate of prediction. According to a SASSI Institute-led study on SASSI, entitled "Estimates of the Reliability and Criterion Validity of the Adult SASSI-3," the test is able to determine "substance-abusing and substance-dependent respondents from those without a substance abuse disorder" with 94 percent accuracy.

Leaving aside the scientifically dubious fact that this study was conducted in part by SASSI developer Franklin Glenn Miller, the data coming out of Utah and Mississippi raised serious questions about this claim.

From August 2012 to July 2013, Utah issued SASSI to nearly 5,000 government assistance applicants. Of those, 466 were identified by the test as having a high likelihood of being a drug user. Yet of the 466, as mentioned above, only 12 tested positive for drugs. SASSI had 2.5 percent accuracy in this case.

Four months into Mississippi's new law, there were 3,656 applications for TANF. Of those, 38 were deemed likely substance abusers by their SASSI test results. And of those, also mentioned above, only 2 tested positive. That's 5 percent accuracy in this case.

(I called SASSI to speak with a representative about these numbers. Maybe I was missing something; maybe I had to compare data in a certain, SASSI-certififed way. But as of publishing, I've yet to receive a response.)

Jason Williamson, a staff attorney for the ACLU, spoke against SASSI earlier this year during a public hearing held by Mississippi's Department of Human Services. This was before the state enacted its drug testing law, when it was considering whether or not it should nominate SASSI as its go-to screening technique.

His speech outlined three separate studies by researchers from 2002, 2009 and 2011. Each urges caution towards professional reliance on SASSI.

Because SASSI has proven ineffective, and because evidence overwhelmingly shows that hardly any welfare recipients use drugs—and because Florida's mandatory drug-testing law was just struck down at the federal level—I wondered if suspicion-based drug testing laws now more likely to get struck down, too.

"The short answer is no," Williamson told me. Due to the America's major welfare reform act signed by Bill Clinton in 1996, states have the right to drug test beneficiaries of government programs as long as the state can prove suspicion. "But the more relevant question is: Have the states figured out a reliable way to identify drug users? This issue is tantamount to the suspicion-based drug testing programs."

Williamson also sent me the text for a drug-testing bill Georgia introduced last year. Instead of relying solely on a questionnaire, the document says, case workers could suggest applicants for drug testing based on, though not exclusively, their "demeanor," or "missed appointments."

"Things that can obviously be explained by an infinite number of reasons," Williamson says. (The bill was suspended earlier this year when the US Department of Agriculture ruled that drug testing SNAP recipients—one of the law's provisions—was illegal because food stamps are a federal program, outside the jurisidiction of individual states)

This brought me back to Utah's excitement over the money saved when 250 people forfeited their assistance because they never showed up to take a screening exam. I called Utah's Department of Workforce Services, which administers both SASSI tests and government aid, to ask about this number. They said the state had not looked into why these people missed their appointments.

Were they all drug users, fearful of getting called out? Likely not, as all these statistics show. And getting a "positive" in Utah doesn't guarantee that your benefits get cut off, though it does require that you begin a drug treatment program.

"The applicants have to pay upfront for the tests themselves," Williamson said, speculating why assistance applicants might not make it to their prescreening session. "There could also be transportation issues, because tests are administered by different authorized facilities. Or maybe these people just got a job and no longer needed the assistance."

A savings of $350,000 is not insignificant, and it's understandable why states flirting with drug-testing laws would turn towards Utah while blueprinting their own. But since that amount was produced thanks to unknown, un-researched factors that led 250 individuals to not show up on testing day, suffice it to say there's no guarantee that following Utah's lead will produce comparable results.

And if states digest this fact and still fail to consider the way these laws help encourage unfounded stereotypes of people on welfare, it's fair to wonder if lawmakers are just using Americans in need as a disposable chip to satisfy the assumptions of their constituents.

Follow Johnny Magdaleno on Twitter.

The Radical Case for Cities Buying Sports Teams, Not Sports Stadiums

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The Radical Case for Cities Buying Sports Teams, Not Sports Stadiums
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