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No God? No Problem

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Sanderson Jones, the atheist preacher who hopes to see hundreds of his Sunday Assemblies all over the world in the next two years, is at the forefront of the godless-congregation movement. All photos By Devin Yalkin

We know you're busy. You probably didn't have time to read every article we published on VICE.com this year. So we've compiled a list of some of our favourites and will be re-featuring them on the homepage through the end of 2014. This one was originally published on January 9.

On November 7, Nashville, Tennessee, got its first-ever atheist church. The rhinestone-studded "buckle of the Bible Belt" is home to hundreds of Christian congregations, but a Sunday Assembly, as the gathering of nonbelievers calls itself, was novel enough to attract news teams from a couple of local TV stations. Getting atheists on camera was rare, one of the reporters told me—it was common for Nashvillians to hide their lack of belief to avoid getting harangued and persecuted by the region's ruthless and plentiful evangelicals.

The service began like an ordinary church service, with a hymn, a rousing and easily sung selection. But instead of "Abide with Me," or "Michael Row the Boat Ashore," it kicked off with the Youngbloods' "Get Together," played by a band specially assembled for the occasion. They followed it up with "Folsom Prison Blues."

The congregation clapped along, a little hesitantly, a bit off beat. (Atheists aren't particularly known for their sense of rhythm.) Then the preacher bounded onto the stage—tall, bearded, and long-haired, he's Jesus Christ's second coming reimagined as a camp counselor.

His name is Sanderson Jones, and he was extremely excited to be there.

"I hope you're ready for an hour and a bit of just celebrating that we're alive!" He grinned at the 100 or so cheering souls assembled before him. "We should probably explain what the Sunday Assembly is, how we got here, and what's going to happen afterward."

Sanderson told them they were all a part of a "godless congregation," the goal of which was an attempt to "help everyone live this one life as fully as possible." Then he gave the floor to a local organizer who read a poem, which was followed by some words from a sexologist that seemed to make some people slightly uncomfortable, then a spirited sing-along rendition of "Hey Jude," then the passing around of a collection plate, and finally, a brief, contemplative silence that resembled prayer. At the end, many congregants marched in near unison to a bar down the road, where they talked about their lives to strangers who had the potential to become friends. In this hostile environment, the amassed atheists and agnostics shared their stories of being nonbelievers and made plans for the following month's Assembly. For a new church to prosper, it must function as a community, as a family—as a microcosm of the entirety of world.

Scenes like this are what Sanderson and his partner, Pippa Evans, are trying to create all over the world. They birthed the Sunday Assembly only a year ago, but already they're planning to turn it into a planet-spanning secular religion.

Sanderson and Pippa have told their story in so many interviews, crowd-funding videos, sermons, and conversations that it's become worn smooth with use. In 2011, the two English standup comedians were driving to Bath when they got to talking about an idea that had been independently bouncing around inside both their heads: What if there were a church for people who didn't believe in God? Over the course of the car ride, they became convinced that the world needed such an institution, and that they should be the ones to found it.

They kept thinking and discussing, and last January they held their first Assembly in a former church in London. The idea, they told reporters later, was "part atheist church, part foot-stomping show, and 100 percent celebration of life," and "all the best bits of church but with no religion." To their surprise, 200 people showed up to hear the word of nothing in particular. At their second service one month later, 300 people were in attendance, and they knew they had a foothold. Before long, Sunday Assemblies were established in the UK, New York, and Melbourne, Australia, guided by an all-inclusive mission statement: "Live better, help often, wonder more."

In October, nine months after the church's inaugural service, the Sunday Assembly launched an ambitious expansion project: a crowd-funding page with a goal of raising £500,000 (over $800,000) to build a website to establish new Assemblies. "In the same way that Airbnb makes it easy to rent out your room, we're going to make it easy to start your own congregation," Sanderson told me at the time. He and Pippa made plans to travel across Europe, Australia, and the United States, hosting Assemblies across 35 cities in 40 days.

Around this time, journalists began wondering if the Sunday Assembly could be the fastest-growing church in the world. Dozens of media outlets, from the Guardian to the Economist to the Sydney Morning Herald, ran stories about an odd but seemingly successful godless faith founded by a pair of standup comedians—a quirky enterprise that practically begged to be blogged about. It didn't hurt that Sanderson is a superb evangelist who gives away ready-made two-line quotes like candy. He's tall and lanky and full of a boundless, golden retriever–esque energy, one of those rare souls who can deliver statements about the overwhelming awesomeness of life with a straight face and make you believe them. Being pleasantly surprised seems to be his default state of being.

A headline writer for the New Republic referred to him as "Hipster Jesus," but that implies an edginess that isn't part of his character. He's relentlessly positive, and never directs snark or scorn toward religious fundamentalists, natural targets for a comedian in a roomful of atheists. He doesn't even swear onstage—Sanderson once told a congregation in Washington, DC, "The only F-word we like to use is fun!"

I met Sanderson for the first time last summer, when he visited New York to establish the first American Assembly. The initial service was held on a sweltering June afternoon in a cramped midtown bar. It was a boozy, standing-room-only affair, with maybe 100 curious congregants rubbing shoulders in a small back room. The bartenders wore bikini tops. We sang together and listened to Sanderson preach, not against religion or God, but toward an appreciation of the wonders of existence. "Atheism is the diving board," he shouted at one point. "Life is the swimming pool!"

The whole thing struck me as an entertaining lark, a piece of comedic performance art that pointed the way toward a tolerant, positive form of nonbelief. But this fall, when Sanderson emailed me to announce he and Pippa were hitting the road to launch dozens of new Assemblies and raise a half a million pounds, I decided to drop what I was doing and hop onboard the tour.

"We're going to help thousands of towns, cities, and villages, and millions of people to have community without the need for religion," he told me. Yes, millions. Sanderson and Pippa believe the time has come for atheists to stand and be counted, and that their mission is to help nonbelievers organize into congregations and support each other as religious groups do. And they think the best way to do that is by being really, really nice.

Pippa Evans, the co-founder of the Sunday Assembly, pauses for a moment during a service held in the main concert hall at the New York Society for Ethical Culture.

On the Sunday Assembly's trek across America, one of Sanderson's recurring set pieces was to ask the assembled atheists how many of them had ever considered something like a church without God. Inevitably, a forest of hands shot up.

The idea behind godless congregations, as groups like the Sunday Assembly are known, is pretty simple: churches are about building communities based on shared values as much as they're about worship. Studies conducted in the past few years have shown that churchgoers are happier, more optimistic, and healthier than the general heathen population. Being a part of a congregation means having more opportunities to talk to people, meet new friends and romantic partners, and make professional connections.

Perhaps the first thinker to seriously consider congregational atheism was the eccentric French sociologist Auguste Comte. In the mid-19th century, he created a church sans deity called the Religion of Humanity. He imagined it would mimic the Catholic Church, and fantasized about the establishment of a massive priesthood, services aimed at making people more altruistic, and the canonization of saint-like figures such as Aristotle, Shakespeare, and Saint Paul. Comte died before any of his ideas were taken seriously, let alone came to fruition, but today there are chapels devoted to his religion in France and Brazil. Far from being wrong or crazy, it seems he was just ahead of our time as well as his own.

In the 20th century, progressive branches of Christianity and Judaism grew to embrace nonbelievers. For example, Unitarian Universalists, the most liberal denomination of Protestantism, often hold nontheistic services and welcome atheists and agnostics; Humanistic Judaism, founded by Rabbi Sherwin Wine in the 1960s, is a similar fusion of religious traditions with an embrace of godlessness.

The Ethical Culture movement has also had success building secular congregations. Established in New York 1876 by Felix Adler, who had been a rabbi in training before renouncing his faith, it held services, provided education for the children of its congregants, and did a great deal of charity work while spreading the humanist gospel of reason, social justice, and a morality not tied to any divine authority. This fall, the New York Sunday Assembly moved its monthly gatherings from the bar in Midtown to a fourth-floor room of the Society's stately Manhattan headquarters. (A Christian church rents the building's larger main concert hall downstairs.)

Though some long-running godless congregations have hundreds of members, no institution has succeeded on the type of scale congregational-minded atheists have dreamed of for decades, and the popularity of evangelical Christianity compared to godless gatherings can, to say the least, cause frustration for nonbelievers.

James Croft, a humanist speaker training to become an Ethical Culture Leader (that organization's equivalent to a priest), gets especially annoyed when he visits secular meetings held near Christian congregations. "[Those churches are] offering a message that is so much less compelling, so much less truthful, so much less ethically grounded, than the humanist message," he said. "Yet they have hundreds of people, and I'm speaking to a group of 15."

A widely cited survey conducted in 2012 by the University of California, Berkeley, found that 20 percent of American adults say they don't identify with any religion, up from only 8 percent in 1990. In recent years, a number of godless congregations have sprouted up to turn these statistics into communities. There's the Houston Oasis, established in 2012, and Louisiana's Community Mission Chapel, founded last year, both the work of former Christian clergymen who lost their faith in God but still wished to foster human connections. Harvard, the first university in the world to host a humanist chaplain, is a fertile breeding ground for godless congregations—last month, the Humanist Community at Harvard opened a brand-new community center called the Humanist Hub that welcomes atheists, agnostics, and anyone else who walks in the door.

"Finding a Humanist congregation is not some oddball curiosity of an idea," writes the organization's founder, Greg Epstein, in his 2010 book Good Without God. "It's not even a luxury, to be addressed after we succeed in getting 'In God We Trust' off the dollar bill. If [atheists and humanists] ever want to be anything more than a downtrodden minority, it is a necessary response to one of our most aching and eternal human needs."

The problem faced by people like Greg and James is basically one of marketing. "Humanism has just the best ethical message out there," said James. "I'm always amazed, then, to find that we have no idea how to sell it."

The congregation in New York participates in an icebreaker game called Dutch Clapping.

Sanderson has a résumé that makes him uniquely qualified to be an atheist evangelist. Before his comedy career allowed him to quit his day job, he sold advertising at the Economist, and before the Sunday Assembly his most well-known venture was a live performance called the "Comedy Sale." For the production, Sanderson would hawk tickets to the show on the street, quickly memorize the names of ticket buyers, research them online, and poke fun at them onstage. Most comedians go through a phase of their careers where they have to hand out flyers to get people in the doors before they can perform their acts—but, according to Pippa, Sanderson may be the only comic who ever liked the flyering part.

Maybe the most important marketing tactic the Sunday Assembly has adopted is that they are careful not to say anything that could offend potential converts. Pippa was a practicing Christian until she was 17, and she steers the group away from adopting language that's overly churchy. They also tend to eschew words like atheism, ethical, rational, humanist, or secular, in order to avoid associations with organizations that have used those labels. "We need more normal people," Sanderson said. "People think people who are already involved in secular organizations are weird."

Unlike some hardcore atheists, who are ready to argue whenever anyone says, "God bless you," Sanderson and Pippa are disarmingly kindhearted and accepting. Strolling through Midtown Manhattan, I saw them stop at a candy store on the way to an Assembly to buy sweets they later gave out to anyone and everyone who crossed their path. They're so bubbly that, after my photographer met them, he asked me whether they were straight edge. No, I told him, they're just very wholesome.

After spending several days with Pippa and Sanderson, I believe that their earnestness is genuine, but it's also a useful proselytizing technique. If members of a church come off as contented, well adjusted, and stress free, it makes it all the easier to draw new converts in.

"At the moment," Sanderson put it, "I'm the ultimate advertisement for the product." Fittingly, he's also the product's spokesman. Pippa's duties include arranging and leading the services' musical segments and laying the foundation for the burgeoning international organization, but Sanderson is the face of the Sunday Assembly and the one who gives most of its interviews to the media. Pippa's perfectly happy with this division of labor, and I could see why—as I trailed them through the media-saturated towns of New York, Boston, and DC, a great deal of Sanderson's days were devoted to retelling curious reporters the same canned anecdotes over and over again.

He'd repeat, for instance, a line about the Sunday Assembly being all the best, nougat-y parts of church without the icky God thing at the center. He had one ready-made bit about how he and Pippa are the grit, the local organizers are the oysters, and the resulting Assemblies are the pearls. He also talked a lot about the time he was on a British radio show with a Christian clergyman. Sanderson mentioned that for atheists, going to churches that emphasize God is like putting on a shoe with a stone in it: "You don't chuck the shoe out," he told the minister. "You just get rid of the stone!"

"Well done, Sanderson!" the minister replied. "You've just told your first parable!"

Sanderson in front of the New York Sunday Assembly. His sermons usually touch on positive themes like thankfulness, wonder, and how amazing it is to be alive.

Not so long ago, publicly expressing disbelief in God was dangerous. Even in 20th-century America, atheists faced discrimination and hatred, especially from the right. In the 50s, anti-Communist crusaders like Joseph McCarthy essentially accused atheists of being traitors to America.

It's only natural to respond to vitriol with vitriol, and for decades, most prominent American atheists were antitheists—militant nonbelievers who spent their lives denouncing the faithful, brainwashed masses. In the 1920s, Charles Lee Smith, the founder of the now defunct American Association for the Advancement of Atheism, made headlines after he was arrested for blasphemy in Arkansas for distributing pro-evolution, anti-Christian literature. More recently, "New Atheist" authors like Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins have publicly debated the existence of God and published best-selling books raging against the perceived evils of religion.

On occasion, antitheism has lead to hateful positions and stigmas that have damaged the reputation of atheism on the whole. Last year, Dawkins compared Islam to Nazism and the Qur'an to Mein Kampf on Twitter, prompting a heated debate among bloggers about whether these so-called rational New Atheists had crossed the line into bigoted Islamophobia.
Prejudice against atheists won't be going away anytime soon—a 2012 poll found that only 54 percent of Americans would support a well-qualified atheist running for public office—but many young nonbelievers today don't think religion needs to be wiped out, its humanitarian and moral aspects simply need to be separated from God.

"We could learn a huge amount from [evangelical churches] and replicate it and replace our values with theirs," James Croft told me. "Instead of promoting antigay hatred and bullshit about women's place in the world and nonsense about reproductive rights, we'd be promoting dignity for all human beings, a living wage, health care for everybody, and all these amazing things."

Congregational atheists despise megachurch pastor Rick Warren's homophobic, anti-atheist sentiments, but many profess an admiration for what he has built—his Saddleback Church, founded in 1980 in Lake Forest, California, is a congregation of tens of thousands that ranks as the seventh-largest church in the country. Its popularity is largely due to its modern services that include music and multimedia presentations, and today it has a dozen satellite congregations, streams Warren's sermons online, manages all sorts of charity programs, and trains and nurtures its future leaders from within.

Humanism has the potential to speak to just as many young people as Christianity, Islam, or Judaism, Harvard's Humanist chaplain, Greg Epstein, told me. He said the advantage those religions have is that "they don't have to take the time to build their buildings, to train their leaders, to come up what they're going to say every week, to come up with a recognizable brand... Right now, what we need to do is to have people invest in the institutions that are coming up."

The realization of Greg's goal will take a type of expertise that's mostly foreign to the philosophers and writers who have so far been the public face of atheism, but those working to create godless congregations believe that they're at the forefront of a big, big boom—all they need to do is build it, and the godless will come.

Sanderson encourages the crowd in New York to sing along during a secular hymn. Normally the band plays well-known examples of what he calls "power cheese," like "Eye of the Tiger" or "Hey Jude."

The challenge for groups like the Sunday Assembly isn't dealing with criticism from religious fundamentalists, it's convincing atheists that being part of a congregation is worthwhile. Some bloggers, like PolicyMic's Michael Luciano, have denounced the idea that something like a religious service could offer anyone anything of value. He wrote, "For atheists, every religious service is predicated on a falsehood, regardless of whatever feel-good niceties may accompany its production."

Following suit, many prominent atheist groups are leery of building church-like institutions. One of the organizers who helped the Center for Inquiry host the first DC Assembly told me that CFI is mostly "secular humanists," who are distinct from the "religious humanists" who form congregations, while in the process enlightening me on why Sanderson and Pippa try to avoid labels.

Others feel that the Sunday Assembly isn't sufficiently antitheist. Around the time of the November service in New York, some members of that Assembly broke away from the group and created The Godless Revival, a competing "no-holds-barred atheist variety show" held at a Manhattan bar.

"What started out as a comedic Atheist church wants to turn itself into some sort of centralized humanist religion, with Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans at the helm," Lee Moore, one of the Assembly's apostates, wrote in a blog post that also accused the pair of "trying to get rich from their new-age religion." He went on to compare the duo to L. Ron Hubbard and called their family-friendly services "milquetoast."

Sanderson is fond of casually dismissing most of that kind of criticism with a practiced joke about the people who say "the way I don't believe in God is not the right way to not believe in God." But maybe his detractors have a point: Once you take the religion out of church and the antitheism out of atheism, what do you have left?

The theology preached at Sunday Assemblies is a kind of mish-mash of the feel-good parts of humanism coupled with an enthusiastic emphasis on how wonderful life is. Sanderson's speeches often touch on themes of thankfulness, the amazing fact of existence itself, and his mother, who died when he was ten years old—he was sad at first, he told the DC congregation, but gradually, as time went on he began to realize that he had been lucky to have her for as long as he did. "I started becoming happy that she had loved me for ten whole years," he said.

These sermons appeal to as broad an audience as possible, but they're a little too unserious for some people, including a few of the Sunday Assembly's allies. When I asked James Croft about the Sunday Assembly he praised the organization for being more open to displays of emotion and fun than most humanist gatherings, but added there needed to be something beyond the good times. "One of the things congregational communities should do is challenge people to be better, to challenge people to reconsider the way they live their lives," he said. "It requires you to make them uncomfortable, to make them leave with sort of a splinter in their eye, thinking, I have to work that out." Superlative religious services and Ethical Culture meetings balance fun and deep existential questioning; Sanderson and Pippa have yet to achieve this.

The philosopher Alain de Botton, author of a book titled Religion for Atheists, is a harsher critic. He claims that the Sunday Assembly is a blatant rip-off of his School of Life organization, which combines therapy and adult education with secular sermons. "They are, in our eyes, quite clearly just unacknowledged exploiters of the creativity of others," he wrote to me in an email. "We believe our sermons are simply richer experiences than theirs: they combine a dignity, an intellectual depth, and a genuine community spirit in a way that theirs can only dimly ape. We are worried that their manner of execution is in grave danger of ruining a very good idea for everyone. After all, people are unlikely to try a secular sermon twice."

This sort of battered pessimism, which assumes atheist churches must be perfect or risk alienating potential converts, is uncommon among advocates for congregational atheism. It would stand to reason that if one humanist, atheist, or agnostic gathering is good, two are better, and 2,000 are better still. The only question is how you get those numbers.

Sanderson and Pippa may dream of thousands of affiliated congregations, but so far their main achievement has been in attracting publicity, not in building infrastructure or putting asses in seats. The first Assembly in LA drew over 400 people, and the original London congregation is still going strong—it attracts hundreds to its bimonthly services, organizes charity drives, and even hosts Sunday school-like classes for kids and a philosophy discussion club. That's in post-religion England, though. The burgeoning US Assemblies are smaller—at the December service in New York, without Sanderson and Pippa leading the festitivies, attendance was down to 50 or 75, and that's the most established of the American congregations. The tour brought media attention to the group and emails from hundreds of people who wanted an Assembly in their town, but the crowd-funding campaign raised less than $60,000.

In a blog post published on December 4, Sanderson and Pippa admitted they hadn't come close to hitting their fundraising target, but shrugged it off—they said that some programmers had offered to build their dreamed-of congregation-creating website, and the donations they'd gotten would help support the organization's founders. Sanderson has stopped doing stand-up so that he can work on the Sunday Assembly full-time, while Pippa will continue her comedy career while contributing to the project in her free time.

Sanderson and Pippa told me that their next steps will be to secure funding from big-ticket donors, provide more training for Assembly leaders, file the appropriate paperwork to make donations tax-deductible, and essentially construct an international secular organization from scratch. In May, there will be an international Sunday Assembly conference in London, and in August they plan to host an assembly at the World Humanist Congress in Oxford. "We're just gonna do that as the biggest and best smoke machine, light-and-laser show the world's ever fucking seen," Sanderson said. "There's gonna be these guys who are used to lectures going, 'Huh?' " In September, the idea is to open the next wave of Assemblies—and not just a handful; they plan to push out 100 chapters more or less simultaneously.

While being interviewed in November by Greg Epstein and James Croft for a podcast in Boston, Sanderson and Pippa were asked what the Sunday Assembly might look like in five years. The comedians burst out laughing before Greg finished the question. They started a single secular service a year ago to see if they could pull it off. Now they're seeding dozens of churches around the world. A nontheistic religion was once a philosophical thought experiment. Today there are competing godless faiths. In a life so full of wonderful surprises, how could they possibly look that far down the road?


Vigilante in 'Now I'm Just a Regular Man'

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Check out more of Patrick Kyle's work here.

VICE INTL: Subtropical Solitude

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78-year-­old Masafumi Nagasaki is the sole resident of a tropical island located at the southern tip of Okinawa, Japan. He would rather obey the demands of nature than of another person, which is what led him to escape civilization and live on Sotobanari Island. We decided to go and find out exactly what kind of lifestyle he's leading, and why he chooses not to wear clothes.


A Look Back at the Australian Aboriginal Rights Movements of 2014

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2014 saw a rise in the formation of prominent Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander movements. And although these movements have seemingly different agendas—from calling a halt to another stolen generation, to reclaiming the first land handed back to indigenous Australians, to forming an Aboriginal-controlled body to represent all indigenous nations—they're all connected by the common cause of indigenous self-determination.

At a time when minister for Aboriginal affairs, Tony Abbott, is championing the cause of constitutional recognition, which many indigenous rights activists label as mere tokenism, movements such as these are calling instead for greater Aboriginal sovereignty.

These movements come as the gap between indigenous Australians and the rest of the population is widening. The 2014 Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage report revealed that suicide rates, cases of self-harm, and levels of incarceration are soaring. On the recommendation of Andrew Forrest's Creating Parity report, the government is now planning to implement changes to its welfare system that will see indigenous recipients in remote areas working double the amount of work-for-the-dole hours than those in urban areas.

VICE Australia spoke with representatives from several newly established indigenous movements to gauge their success so far and vision for the future.

Grandmothers Against Removals (GMAR)

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On National Apology Day, February 13, a group of women from the Gamilaraay nation of northern New South Wales (NSW) who called themselves GMAR gathered outside state parliament to protest the forced removals of Aboriginal children from their homes by the NSW Department of Family and Community Services (FACS). They declared a new stolen generation is happening nationally, as current figures show more Aboriginal children are being removed from their homes than at any other time in Australian history. In NSW, the nationwide crisis is at its peak, with 10 percent of the state's indigenous children in out-of-home care.

"Basically the group is saying, if a family is in crisis, work with the families and keep the children within their Aboriginal families and communities. Children are being removed from their Aboriginal families in entirety, not just their parents," said Suellyn Tighe, a member of GMAR.

Tighe explained that the movement has been campaigning for a proposed Aboriginal Community Expert Committee, which would work in conjunction with FACS, to oversee cases of possible child removal. The grassroots movement garnered the support of major institutions, such as the NSW Ombudsman and the Aboriginal Child, Family and Community Care State Secretariat. And this led to the first meeting of the GMAR working group, also attended by representatives of FACS, with the aim of developing the structure for an initial northern NSW and future statewide committee.

However at the first meeting the FACS attendees named themselves chair of the committee. "We actually said, 'This completely smacks of paternalism. This is our proposal, therefore we should be leading this,'" Tighe said. FACS conceded this at a second meeting in December and a GMAR representative now chairs the group.

Redfern Aboriginal Tent Embassy

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On National Sorry Day, May 26, a group of Aboriginal activists established the Redfern Aboriginal tent embassy on an area of land known as "the Block," in inner-city Sydney. The embassy is protesting the $7 million Pemulwuy project, a development initiated by the Aboriginal Housing Company (AHC) and developer Deicorp.

The Block—the heartland of Sydney's indigenous community since it was handed back in the 1970s—was previously used by the AHC to provide low-income houses for local Aboriginal residents.

The new development has the financial backing to establish a commercial sector and student housing. But there is no funding for a proposed 62 affordable houses for Aboriginal residents.

On December 22, Jenny Munro, tent embassy organizer and a founding member of the AHC, was arrested over an incident and one of her bail conditions is that she cannot return to the embassy. Munro told VICE that on the same day, Redfern police informed her that they were going to evict the embassy protesters. This led to an alert being sent out over the embassy's Facebook page, resulting in 150 protesters assembling and maintaining a vigil.

These incidents came just weeks after it was revealed that Deicorp employed a company that allegedly used racist marketing to advertise another Redfern development. "The attitude of the development company is very anti-Aboriginal," Munro said. "I think something needs to be done to stop the developer moving in, while this question mark hangs over their head."

But these events have done nothing to deter Munro and her group. "We're as strong and determined as ever to maintain our protest at the site that is one of the most iconic pieces of land for our people, having been one of the first that we gained back under the white system of law in this country," Munro said.

The Freedom Summit

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Ask Tauto Sansbury, organizer of the 2014 Freedom Summit in Alice springs, why the event was necessary and he'll give you a specific and direct answer. "Because of all the issues faced within Australia, because of the federal government's cuts to Aboriginal programs, because of the Andrew Forrest report Creating Parity, the National Indigenous Advisory Body chaired by Warren Mundine is ineffective, and the information that's been provided by Marcia Langton and Noel Pearson to the federal government on Aboriginal affairs is pretty ineffective," Tauto told VICE over the phone.

"The Abbott government are removing Aboriginal rights on a daily basis. We want to be able to attack the government on all of these issues," he added.

The summit was headed by 20 delegates, who it is proposed will form a national Aboriginal-controlled representative body. This body will be able to address both federal and state governments on indigenous issues, such as sovereignty, treaty rights, and self-determination. As Sansbury explained, it will work to get "everybody united from around Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australia and to have one united voice going forward into 2015."

The next move is for the delegates, along with an estimated 1000 plus supporters, to converge on Canberra on January 26, to begin a sit-in outside of Parliament.

The Brisbane Sovereign Aboriginal Embassy

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The Brisbane Sovereign Aboriginal embassy was established in Musgrave Park in March of 2012. The embassy runs a food program, which services 235 families throughout the greater city on a weekly basis. According to Boe Spearim, a representative of the embassy, the program lowers the rate of Aboriginal child removals by the Department of Community, Child Safety and Disability Services, as the first thing an officer does when inspecting a residence is to check the amount of food in the cupboards.

GMAR and other grandparents groups from around the nation held a two day meeting in Musgrave Park in July, in response to the national child removals crisis. At that time the groups formed the National Aboriginal Strategic Alliance (NASA). The park was also the site where the "Decolonization Before Profits" G20 protest march was organized in November.

"One of the things that came out of the week-long protests in Brisbane, was that we decided next year, February 13, the grannies group (NASA) is going to head down to Canberra for a national protest," Spearim said. "Also through G20, us young fellas, started a new group called Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance. We're looking to have a national meeting at the start of February in Victoria."

Follow Paul Gregorie on Twitter.

Russia Sentenced an Opposition Leader's Brother to a Labor Camp and It's Already Backfiring

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Alexei Navalny campaigning for mayor of Moscow in 2013. Photo via Flickr user Aleksey Ruban

The conclusion of a controversial trial in Moscow has proven that there is one thing more heinous in Vladimir Putin's eyes than being a high-profile opposition figure, and that is to be his brother. In a sentencing moved up to Tuesday in hopes of wrong-footing protesters, anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny received a three-and-a-half year suspended sentence on questionable fraud and money-laundering charges, but his brother Oleg was sentenced to serve in a labor camp for the same period.

This is likely to prove counter-productive—vindictive enough to anger Navalny, yet not enough to silence him.

Navalny, who came to prominence with the unexpected explosion of a middle-class anti-Putin protest movement during the 2011-12 presidential election campaign, is perhaps the most persistent and painful thorn in Putin's side. He has focused squarely on corruption, and thanks to a series of leaks, whistleblowers and inspired investigations, he has been able to publicize the cronyism and lavish lifestyles of the Russian elite and even make some noise before the global PR bonanza that was the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics.

As a result, the government has repeatedly sought to silence him. Navalny had been arrested and given minor sentences on numerous occasions, such that Amnesty International designated him a prisoner of conscience. The powerful Investigative Committee—a body broadly similar to the office of the US attorney general—made him a particular target, especially at the urging of its head, Alexander Bastrykin, who has a personal rivalry with Navalny. An investigation into alleged embezzlement in a logging company was closed for lack of evidence and then re-opened on Bastrykin's orders. Even though the alleged victim of the fraud, a regional governor, asserted that no money had been stolen, in 2013, Navalny was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. Unexpectedly, the sentence was later suspended.

If the Kremlin hoped this would chasten Navalny, they were disappointed. He joined Moscow's mayoral elections that summer, coming in second despite being excluded from the mainstream—government-controlled/influenced—media. He continued to criticize elites and expose abuses by senior business and political figures.

Meanwhile, a second fraud case was being prepared against him by the Investigative Committee. Navalny and his brother Oleg were accused of overcharging a Russian subsidiary of the French cosmetics company Yves Rocher, even though it subsequently withdrew a complaint against the two men. This led to Navalny being placed under house arrest in February, although he maintained his ongoing political campaign—not for any office so much as broad reform—both directly and through his supporters.

There was little doubt as to the outcome of the trial given the extent to which the Russian judiciary is not exactly independent of the government. Still, it's highly unusual to see a trial expedited at the last minute, in this case just before the extended Russian New Year holiday.

Navalny's suspended sentence means that he will be barred from potentially standing in 2016's elections to the Duma, Russia's parliament. However, his future campaigning is likely to be more meaningfully overshadowed by the fate of his brother, Oleg. Even though the prosecutor had requested a lighter punishment for him, the decision to imprison Oleg means that the authorities will have the opportunity to make his life either easier or harder, with options ranging from early release all the way to transfer to a tougher regime labor colony. Navalny made no bones that he felt his brother was now a hostage for his behavior. Indeed, Oleg himself had predicted this in an earlier interview: "We absolutely knew that sooner or later this all would touch us... It is easy to influence a person through his family."

But early indications are that Navalny is unlikely to moderate his activism. If anything, he seems incensed by the treatment of his brother and called "on everyone to go to the streets until the authorities, who are grabbing and torturing innocent people, are ousted." While the logic behind moving up the sentencing seems to have been to preempt protests scheduled for the original date, hundreds and perhaps thousands of people braved a massive police operation in response to Navalny's appeal to attend an unofficial demonstration Tuesday night at the Manezh Square, close to the Kremlin. Navalny himself tried to attend, but was arrested along with dozens of other activists; it is unclear whether he will be charged, but the usual police tactic is to detain and then release him once the protest is concluded. (Indeed, the latest report from Interfax suggests Navalny is merely being "escorted home" by cops.)

The Kremlin has so far neither been able to intimidate Navalny nor buy him off. All the same, it is a mark of the general mood of uncertainty that Russian elites have managed to adopt a counter-productive compromise between those in the halls of power who want a tough crackdown on the opposition movement and those worried about the implications, especially in the current climate of economic crisis and international condemnation. Hawks such as Mikhail Markelov, a parliamentarian from the ruling United Russia bloc, think this doesn't go far enough. He has called for the sentence to be increased on appeal. Nor are the more liberal elements of the government or the business community happy with the outcome. Indeed, the latter are now especially worried, given the extent to which the legal system is often used as a weapon of commercial rivalries in today's Russia. Until now, it has been tacitly accepted that family members were off limits, but Oleg Navalny's fate could mean everyone is fair game. At a time when the ruble is under pressure, capital flight is soaring, and general confidence is dropping, this is not just a story about the fate of one charismatic anti-corruption campaigner, but one about the credibility of the regime as a whole.

Follow Mark Galeotti on Twitter.

Adopting Potential Werewolves Is Routine Business for Argentine Presidents

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Photo via Flickr user Cristina Kirchner

Last week, President Cristina Kirchner adopted a Jewish teenager named Yair Tawil and posted pictures of the event on her Twitter feed. Outlets around the world ran with the story, explaining the move by citing lingering local superstition about werewolves. In Western folklore, only a werewolf can create another werewolf with its bite, but in Argentina, the story's a little different: the creature is born when a couple gives birth to their seventh son in a row. According to said folklore, seventh sons turn into el lobizon on their 13th birthday if nothing is done about the hereditary curse. Thus, the need for presidential action is pretty clear.

"The notion of animal shifting came from different Native American traditions," Oscar Chamosa, a folklorist at the University of Georgia, told me. "The idea of el lobison comes from uturunco—or the were-jaguar—which mixed with the European notion of the werewolf." Chamosa says he's not sure how the idea was first associated with teenaged boys.

But even if someone who's devoted his entire life to studying Argentine folklore can't explain it, the teen werewolf thing had become pervasive by the early 20th century, and Catholics in Argentina were producing enough seventh children, that the myth became a public policy problem. After all, terrified parents were (according to legend, at least) regularly committing infanticide.

"In order to counteract the myth, Argentine presidents have traditionally godfathered any child born into the same family," Chamosa explains, adding that the governor of a province or mayor of a village would sometimes officiate for practical reasons. "The rationale is that the godson of a president would be respected throughout his life despite the suspicion his seventh-male birth position would bring with it."

This idea apparently prevented people from murdering their own babies, so it was a smart move on part of the Argentine government. But if it's surprising people believed in such a curse a century ago, it's downright bizarre that they're still entertaining the notion of it today.

As per a decree that came out in 1973, adoptees receive a gold medal and a college scholarship. And Argentina is apparently still making new rules about werewolf children, because in 1999 the adoption ceremony was extended to non-Catholics. As the Independent noted, Tawil is the first Jewish boy to receive the honor. So while a werewolf Bar Mitzvah might be a joke on 30 Rock, it's also apparently a real thing that just happened in South America.

The boy's parents first applied for the medal and scholarship in 1993, but were denied. They applied again after the rules changed to include Jews in 2009. A tweet from President Kirchner's account shows her lighting a menorah with the Tawils, quite the gesture given that the Jewish population of Argentina is less than half of one percent.

Jewishpublications are making a big deal out of the historic event, and angry commenters are freaking out about a Jew being adopted—even symbolically—by a non-Jew and the blasphemous concept of a Jewish family taking part in something involving werewolves. (In Jewish folklore, people don't turn into werewolves, and whatever they were before beasthood is never really discussed.)

But most observers have been glossing over the absolutely fucking strange juxtaposition between a groundbreaking event and an ancient superstition. Like, for instance, that's it's kind of a weird move to progressively bequeath a privilege to a religious minority while tacitly legitimizing the belief that human beings have the ability to transform into mythical creatures that feast on unbaptized babies.

Stories about the adoption would also have us believe the president of an industrialized nation believes in werewolves, which is clearly not the case. Although presidents in our own country's recent memory believed they were chosen by God, Chamosa describes Argentina's Kirchner as a nominal Catholic who's a "progressive left-wing president—more like a Marxist and a secular person in general." Much as our Dear Leader pardons a turkey every year, this is an Argentine ritual that's basically a national inside joke.

Chamosa says that the werewolf thing has stuck around out of quaint tradition and that the average family in the country today has only two children. For that reason, anyone who achieves an unbroken chain of seven same-sex children is rewarded with the prize.

Of course, that doesn't mean there aren't some people in Latin America who still believe in el lobizon.

"Belief in the healing powers of folk saints and withcraft are pretty much shared across the territory, especially—but not only—in rural areas," Chamosa says. "I would say that only old people still believe [in el lobison]. But you really don't know."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

How Oasis's First Album Voiced the Hopes and Dreams of the 90s in the UK

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This post originally appeared on VICE UK

33⅓ is a series of books dedicated to the most incredible musical albums ever made—one book per album, one author per book. Over the coming months, we'll be running excerpts from their in-depth essays. This week, writer Alex Niven looks at how Oasis's Definitely Maybe voiced the collective hopes and dreams of post-Thatcher Britain. Here's Chapter One:

Nowadays, Oasis are one of those bands who are mostly popularly loved, mostly critically scorned. But in a wayward world, when there is consensus among journalists, critics, and cultural commentators that something is worthy of scorn, this is a sure sign that there is almost certainly something profoundly valuable about it. Cynicism is the patois of the status quo. Positive change doesn't emerge from the critical stereotypes of the present, but from the ruins of the past, from a tiny, neglected detail in something so familiar we have lost sight of its worth: a stray seed fallen by the wayside, an overlooked feature of an everyday routine, a speck of dust in a football stadium. As the philosopher Walter Benjamin once argued, in the utopian future everything will be the same as it is now—just a little bit different. All we have to do is identify the little bit and try to make it grow.

Where are the forgotten details in our recent history that might help us escape from a cynical present in which populism has disappeared from pop music and in which we don't seem to have made any real artistic or social progress since the 1990s? The argument of the following book is that one way of answering this question is to look at the most apparently banal, ordinary, hackneyed phenomenon of the last 20 years. In order to move forward positively again, it seems reasonable to suggest, we should look at the most central, the most visible, the most obvious presences in our popular culture and try to work out how they went so badly wrong. We should look at the events that filled people with belief and made them feel part of a team, at the melodies that buried themselves in our collective consciousness but became so clichéd and commonplace that we began to resent them, at the people who were co-opted and stereotyped in a world of money and selfishness until they became a crass parody of their former selves. One way we should do this, the following book argues, is by looking seriously and at length at the rock band Oasis.

In particular, this book argues, we should look at early Oasis. Over a two-year period, from the release of their debut single "Supersonic" in the spring of 1994 to their gargantuan Knebworth gigs in the summer of 1996, Oasis became more culturally central than any other band in post-war Britain, with the obvious exception of their role models, the Beatles. During this period, pubs, nightclubs, school discos, playgrounds, shopping centers, weddings, offices, high streets, council estates and—perhaps most remarkable of all—football grounds all resounded with the music of a band who, for a brief moment, fostered an unprecedented atmosphere of pop-cultural unity. Oasis were a front-page newspaper story. They made the BBC Six O'Clock News, dominated the airwaves and symbolically sealed the British public's social contract with New Labour when Noel Gallagher was photographed shaking Tony Blair's hand at Downing Street in the summer of 1997. Oasis's populism was of a rare and profound order. Even if most of what they did from 1997 onwards was a travesty of popular art, we ignore the scope and significance of the initial Oasis narrative at our peril.

But how did it all happen, and where did it all go wrong? What stray details about Oasis should we try to recover at all costs?

The answer, of course, must lie mainly with the songs themselves. In fact, pretty much everything we need to know about Oasis is contained on their debut album Definitely Maybe, the songs of which were all composed before the band became famous at all. Writing in Manchester in the years 1991–3, in an environment where socio-economic depression gave rise to a culture of radical hedonism and anti-establishment belligerence, Noel Gallagher composed a series of songs that distilled the spirit of the age far better than, for instance, the more usually celebrated Kurt Cobain, a nihilist capable of writing surpassingly awful lyrics about licking open sores and eating cancer, lyrics that rhymed "mosquito" with "libido" just for the hell of it.

In deliberate contrast to such gothic cod-intellect­ualism, Noel Gallagher's songs on Definitely Maybe offered a message of affirmation and hope that was couched in a language of remarkable clarity. While the long post-punk era that climaxed with grunge in the early 1990s had celebrated negation and made a virtue out of motifs of death and defeat, Oasis lyrics talked about a wholehearted desire to live and hinted at the possibility that some sort of spectacular victory might be won in the teeth of the 1980s nightmare. Significantly, for Gallagher, the difference between Oasis and a grunge band like Nirvana was explicitly a question of class. There were more similarities between Kurt Cobain's self-proclaimed 'white trash' background and the Manchester working-class upbringing than Gallagher realized. But the opposition was nevertheless deeply felt. As Gallagher would later put it, Cobain 'had everything, and was miserable about it. And we had fuck-all, and I still thought that getting up in the morning was the greatest fucking thing ever, because you didn't know where you'd end up at night.'

This, then, was the first and perhaps the most important message Oasis were trying to communicate. In an era in which deconstructive cynicism was threatening the very existence of a counterculture and the mainstream left, Oasis offered an anomalous vision of radical positivity. And the fact that this was indisputably a working-class vision—one founded in the solidarity and fraternity of working-class lived experience—was crucial. As the band's biographer once put it, Oasis were the sound of "a council estate singing its heart out." In a Britain that had just undergone the most damaging period of social upheaval in a century under the Thatcher government, Noel Gallagher ventriloquized slogans of burning communitarian optimism through the mouth of his brother Liam and the playing of the other Oasis "everymen": Paul McGuigan, Paul Arthurs, and Tony McCarroll. The sheer elemental energy of Gallagher's idealism on record could be breathtaking. In the chorus of the quintessential Oasis anthem "Acquiesce" (1995), for instance, the lyrics promised that a miraculous collective recovery was just around the corner, that anything was possible if only we believed unequivocally in each other. Where else in pre-millennium culture can you find such an unabashed, affirmative use of the word we? Perhaps only Bill Clinton came close to refuting the eighties myth that there was no such thing as society. (See, for example, Clinton's great epigram of 90s liberal unity: "There is no them; there's only us.")

But Oasis were not, or not only, optimists. If they had been, there really would be little to distinguish their project from the hollow euphoria of mid-nineties politics. The second important detail to recover about Oasis is their remarkable ability to communicate an oceanic melancholy even in their most hubristic moments.

"Supersonic," the first single from Definitely Maybe , is often regarded as an epitome of lumpen nonsense poetry, with its doctor/helicopter, Elsa/Alka-Seltzer doggerel rhymes. But listen more closely. As "Supersonic"'s chorus approaches, the swaggering lyrical graffiti makes way for a much more ambiguous voice, a man who lives in the shadows and struggles to get the right words out of his mouth. There are echoes in these lyrics (and in its mournful melody) of the Smiths's "How Soon Is Now?" and this is characteristic of a side of Noel Gallagher's songwriting that is not often talked about. Oasis were among the foremost adaptors of the Manchester–Irish outsider voice last heard in the elegiac eighties compositions of Morrissey and Marr. From the Smiths, Noel Gallagher inherited an obsession with separation, abandonment, and dislocation of the individual. In counterpoint with their message of communal hope, Oasis sang plangently and with Morrissey-esque gloom about loneliness and the desire to escape from a humdrum town where prospects were bleak and the old structures of social unity—job, club, estate, union—were being decimated by a neoliberal project of class annihilation.

Oasis songs proliferate with calls for breakout and departure, but with an accompanying sense that doing so will result in betrayal and the loss of some precious aspect of a core identity. Repeatedly, there are cries that things are sliding away, slipping away, fading away, that something is being thrown away, that time is running out and sadness is about to engulf us even at moments of euphoria and triumph. "Fade Away," one of the band's famously over-brilliant, early B-sides, condenses this theme in a beautiful motto, the gist of which is that our dreams are in a state of decay almost from the moment we are born. Oasis songs are awash with a sense of imminent collapse and disaster. Flood imagery abounds: rain pours down, sinks fill up, the sound of the sea bellows in the background, and individuals are buried under great tides of water and landslides of champagne. Oasis wrote about the overwhelming sadness of late-capitalist experience, of a drowned world in which definition and identity were being washed away by excess and human beings were tumbling headlong into a submarine solitude.

The irony was that Oasis themselves became the disaster. Their second album (What's the Story) Morning Glory? contained many of their greatest hits and some of their most powerful statements (most obviously, the end-of-the-line apotheosis that was "Champagne Supernova"). But almost instantly on coming to power and acclaim, Oasis's whole raison d'être of soulfulness and oppositional team spirit seemed to evaporate.

Many of the songs on Definitely Maybe were written by Gallagher in a British Gas storehouse while he was recovering from a building site injury. Many of the songs on Morning Glory, and almost all of the songs on the dire third album Be Here Now , were written in lavish hotel rooms or on bacchanalian tour buses by a man who quickly embraced the Thatcherite ethos of wealth-worship, even as he made occasional gestures at his socialist roots. Truly, us had become them, and this is pretty much where we remain today. Gallagher is now one of the privileged rock aristocrats he once defined himself against, a soon-to-be-knighted celebrity in the same cultural bracket as Simon Cowell and Andrew Lloyd Webber.

But it is precisely because of this drastic inversion of principles that we need to treat Oasis with profound seriousness. What did Gallagher take with him when he defected to the dark side of the millionaire power brokers? When we dismiss Oasis in favor of cooler, less-compromised 90s bands, what forms of empowerment do we dismiss along with them?

My argument is that the fragments of an answer are dotted all over Definitely Maybe and its singles and B-sides, in the music Oasis created when they were part of an 'us' that dreamed that a better future might emerge from the rubble of a vanishing working-class past. The music of Definitely Maybe is loaded with a pathos that is by turns life-affirming and tragic because it took place at the exact moment the working-class counterculture stepped into a moment of sunshine, right in the instant before it withered in the heat of the late-capitalist noon.

We all know what happened next. We all know what became of a culture-wide desperation to become a rock 'n' roll star and leave behind our workmates and community to chase a dream of libertarian excess in a fantasy realm of sky and sun and stars that shine. But we have forgotten that when Oasis dreamed these dreams, they were living on the ground, in a context where idealism found expression in a fierce need to assert the belief that life is not, ultimately, about self and escapism, but about discovering paradise in the minds of other people. This is the hidden hope in the football stadium, and this peculiar kind of collective yearning is what we have to redeem and recover as we listen to the haunting popular songs on Definitely Maybe .

Follow Alex Niven on Twitter.

Pick up the book here

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Kanye West: Portrait of the Monster as a Young Masterpiece


James Schamus Wants to Tell You How the Economy Really Works

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You've probably seen one of James Schamus' movies. The former CEO of Focus Features was the screenwriter for The Ice Storm and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and producer for Brokeback Mountain and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. But his two newest films are perhaps even more important than anything he's done in the past. Schamus recently took part in the new series We the Economy, part of an anthology of films called "20 Short Films You Can't Afford to Miss." The series, which is produced by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, is designed to raise awareness and understanding of the mechanics of the US economy, with each film produced by a different acclaimed filmmaker.

In his two contributions, That Film About Money (parts I and II), Schamus, a self-described "economic theory junkie," sets out to address the question: "What is the real value of a dollar?" The answer, as Schamus puts it, is going to "freak you out."

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/pfXlA_zTfxY' width='640' height='360'] That Film About Money, Part I

VICE: One of the main contentions of the films is that money is created through debt, correct?
James Schamus: Well, money is a way of accounting for debt. I'm not arguing against the idea of this kind of accounting. As it occurs in human history, it unlocks a lot of energy. If you go back to Mesopotamia, back to these large, centralized bureaucracies, you notice that the birth of writing occurs pretty much alongside the birth of money and accounting. They kind of go hand in hand, but that's a whole other video. Symbolic representation, you might say, is a kind of accounting. It's representing something that isn't there, that you think is behind it somehow. Money and language are kind of weirdly functions of the same technology, of representation, of promising. My word is my vow, my bond, my promise, that's the only reason words mean anything, because they're kind of like money—they represent. So when you watch the way in which large-scale centralized bureaucracies like Mesopotamia, for example, function, you see how these two technologies go hand in hand. And a lot of energy gets moved around, because you can move things around without having to move the things. You can just move the symbols around.

So what part about it do you object to?
Let me put it to you this way: Part I [of the film] lets you know that this is all a fiction. We're all agreeing to agree, we're all buying into each other's promises. And that's not necessarily the worst thing in the world. It just means when the bank says We're awesome. We have over $200 billion in deposits . And they go in front of Congress and say this shit, you want to go, Dude, what you just said is, technically, you are $200 billion in debt. Because when you put money in the bank you are lending the bank your money. We just need to remind people there is something weird about this, so when people like the folks from Goldman Sachs get up and say this crap, you can call them on their bullshit. Part I is saying, Just remember, this is really weird.Part II is like, Let's watch how weird works, when really powerful people get together and screw the rest of us. Let's see how it actually works in practice. And let's just see what happens over the course of the last 40 years and watch precisely how the system makes it look normal that basically the top .01% can take a gigantic Hoover vacuum and shove it up the rear end of 99% of the world's population and drain every last penny out of their asses, and pretend that's like the normal course of business.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/cGJTE4V6e_k' width='640' height='360']

I always found it interesting that we always refer to these financial upturns and downturns as a cycle .
Yeah, it's the business cycle. It's kind of like, yeah, that's the mass murder cycle. [laughs]

What have people said to you about the videos? Are people surprised at the information?
Yes, even sophisticated people. My set is fairly well-educated, to put it mildly, and many of them are quite successful, to put it mildly, and many of them think of themselves as politically very sophisticated and aware of things and having opinions about economics and the economy and who to vote for. And I thought, you know, if in a couple of brief minutes I can A) tee up the absurdity of those assumptions and B) in Part II, just knock them over politically with how what we think of as a natural order of things is actually a machine for creating massive injustice and inequality, and entertain people at the same time, that's a pretty good challenge.

Is that what you were trying to accomplish with the films?
I'm not trying to convey much information, my main goal is simply to freak you out. If I can freak you out, in a fun way, then you're going to be motivated to stay freaked out and be suspicious from now on every time you look at a business page of the Times or whatever you read. So the goal was, for the rest of your life, every time you see a dollar bill, there'll be this weird middle-aged guy in a hat [referring to himself in the films] in your peripheral vision going, "Are you kidding?" And every time you walk by a bank for the rest of your life you're going to go, "Oh, that looks like a weird temple but I know it's not, or it looks like a weird airport lounge, and now I know why: because there's nothing there." If I freak you out enough, if you have the opportunity to learn something, you will. And clearly this thing, my little contributions, now that I've seen most of the others, are a definite kick in the ass to these kind of Neoliberal assumptions to how natural the economy is.

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You talk about credit cards and advertising in the films, how do they play into all of this?
Well, the banks run the whole credit card business, essentially. That's their business. Trust me on this one—they are, as Rick Wolff says, the masters of all debt, and it is they who have managed to pump up and inflate threefold, the last four years, the debt of the average household. And again, they make money every which way on the mushrooming cloud of debt that they have handed over to different people. And again, you can see even now with mortgages, the return on these kinds of mortgages where the banks make them, and they immediately spin them into tranches of mortgage-backed securities that they sell off.

And they're not responsible for collecting on them.
Absolutely. And with advertising, you know from your neoliberal friends and economics professors that the magic hand of the market is the result of the fact that we are all rational economic agents, and this entire system is founded on this bizarre belief that we are rational economic agents. There's this deep-seated rationality attached somehow to our innate greed that creates this wonderful system. This is the entire ideological edifice on which this whole thing is supported, right? If that were the case, why would we then spend a trillion dollars a year, a massive portion of our gross domestic product, making irrational appeals to ourselves to buy shit we don't need? Like, how did that happen? So if the whole system is based on irrational appeals to go out and buy crap you don't need, like a bag with a label on it that jacks the price up by some multiple that has nothing to do the actual use-value, for example, how does that jive with your rational economic agent theory that supports the entire structure of the system?

Well, in that vein, you say in the film that it's not just that corporations are becoming people, but that people are becoming corporations. What does that mean, exactly?
As Mitt Romney explained, corporations are people too! Corporate personality is an evolving legal theory, it's a legal fiction. Again, you see money and fiction aligning themselves here. It has a really interesting history. Back in the 1800s, if you wanted to incorporate a company, you actually had to have a special bill passed by a state legislature. It was that difficult to do, because people were rightfully concerned that what happens when you create corporations is you create cover for people to do all sorts of nasty criminal stuff, and the only person who could ever go to jail is this thing called the corporation, which can't go to jail, so you've actually created a monster.

And remember the structure of corporations: there are shareholders, who nominally own the corporation—although now that's been rigged by management because different classes of stock and options and all that—you have the management, and then you have the board of directors, who are supposed to give a sort of oversight of the management on behalf of the shareholders. So you have basically the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. And corporations are really interesting people; think about it this way: if you were to hold an annual meeting of the shareholders in which the board of directors and the top management were all attending, and God forbid a bomb went off or a comet landed on the meeting, and everybody died, the corporation would still live. Its shares would be handed to their heirs, and you'd rehire. So they're unkillable. At the same time, they're also not responsible for anything. Their liability is just this vague abstraction.

[body_image width='1000' height='550' path='images/content-images/2014/12/29/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/29/' filename='james-schamus-405-body-image-1419876032.jpg' id='14728']

Getting back to what you said earlier, as a filmmaker and screenwriter you deal with narrative, is that something that fuels your interest in economics?
Yeah, I think so. Take the whole idea of the economy, for example, which people think of as this thing, as a noun. The economy is a word, it's a noun. How long has the economy been a thing, do you think?

You mean how long has it been a thing in the way we describe it today?
Yeah. Give me your best guess.

A hundred years?
You're way off. It's 50 years. Like, it's bizarre; it wasn't a thing before. The economy shows up as a noun in the 1950s, essentially. The first government reports that start using the word, "the economy," in that way, was in the 1950s. Isn't that crazy? So Tim Mitchell, who's a professor at Columbia, wrote a really interesting article recently on this drawing on a lot of really cool research. And for Tim, as he explains, the way you get a thing like the economy and create it as this object—I mean the series is called We the Economy—is the technology by which governments really fold in the idea of the future as part of their purview, that they really have to manage and control. And so you create a thing that you manage, and deal with, especially in conjunction with the financial classes that help you run the government back and forth, like Federal Reserve banks—is it government, or is it private? Does it matter? No, because it turns out the government is kind of a private enterprise. So yeah, narratives are about, "What's going to happen next?" Well, the economy is a technology by which power really tries to manage what's next, but also people's understanding of what's going to be next, people's understanding of what they have to invest, even personally, into their society, their culture, their government, their politics, in order to be part of this.

So it's a management thing, and again it adds that aura of inevitability. The one thing you know about economics is that when somebody says, "Well you know, that's just the business cycle," economically we can or can't do this, it gives it the aura of the inevitable, when in fact—and this is what my movie is trying to say—there's nothing inevitable about this. This is politics. It used to be called "political economy." That's what they used to call it.

Pre-1950?
Yeah, not like, "the economy," you'd just say, "in political economy." It's a political thing, but now people think of it as a technical thing, even a governmental thing. But of course you just want to say, and this is what Part Two says, "Guys, excuse me, this is just politics by other names." People say, "Oh, economics is a science." Well in many ways there are scientific apparatuses, I'm not knocking these people in the Econ Department. There's a lot you can learn studying these systems and there's a lot of mathematical modeling you can do, and especially if you really want to use it to play markets by doing flash trading, there's a science to that but it's not science. It's scientific-ey, it's scientistic.

[body_image width='1000' height='550' path='images/content-images/2014/12/29/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/29/' filename='james-schamus-405-body-image-1419875552.jpg' id='14727']

Do you think what you talk about in the films is stuff that the Federal Reserve and the banks would want us to know? Why don't we learn this in school?
No. There's no way that the guys who control the banking system want you to know this stuff. And it's amazing because I went online to look at all the movies that are supposed to educate you about the economy, and some of them have a lot of hits, but they're all patently insane. It's mind-boggling. And there's a reason nobody actually understands this stuff, because every time somebody tries to explain it, they're kind of lying to you, because they really don't want you to know that the whole system really is run by a bunch of bankers who have this thing rigged. [ laughs]

Giancarlo T. Roma is a Brooklyn-based writer, musician, and former competitive chess player. Follow him on Twitter.


Unmet Expectations: Rebecca Storm's Year in Pictures

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To mark the end of another year during which I accomplished little of what I had hoped (no surprises there), here is a collection of photos I took. Some feature unremarkable moments from my life, some feature eczema, some feature me lying in a dirty bath. Here's to the new year and to more unmet expectations!

See more of Rebecca's work here.

BREAKING: The New Play-Doh Toy Looks Kinda Like a Dildo

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Photo by Flickr user Dennis Brekke

The hot toy for tots this year was the Play-Doh Sweet Shoppe Cake Mountain Playset, which is basically a plastic layer cake that kids can frost with Play-Doh. This sounds like a dull, Rod-and-Todd-Flanders-esque playtime activity, but the Cake Mountain Playset quickly became one of the holiday season's more controversial toys, because the thingy used for frosting the cakes, the "extruder tool," looks like a dick.

[tweet text="I salute the designers who somehow managed to get this Play-Doh icing maker past their bosses. http://t.co/cRCnsEMmmo pic.twitter.com/0aQMtJS9Wi" byline="— Saladin Ahmed (@saladinahmed)" user_id="saladinahmed" tweet_id="549737430803562497" tweet_visual_time="December 30, 2014"]

There have been hundreds of comments on the company's Facebook page from uptight parents who are pissed that they unwittingly bought their kids a plastic penis. Some also allege that Play-Doh had deleted their previous comments, which included pictures of the offending toy, so that they wouldn't appear on the company's page.

Of course, it's not like toy stores have never stocked a penis lookalike before. There was the Dora the Explorer Aquapet that looked distinctly like a dick and balls, the Muppets Beaker Hot Wheel car that also looked like a dick and balls, the E.T. Finger Light that resembled a big wrinkly penis, and this thing, which is essentially an action figure with a giant boner. These have all generated their own controversies and waves of parental complaints, because it's apparently unforgivable to give children anything that even remotely resembles one of their own body parts.

Play-Doh released a statement on Facebook acknowledging the "consumer feedback about the extruder tool" and offering to replace the toy for any perturbed parents, though they haven't stated what the replacement "extruder" will look like. Nicole Agnello, a PR representative for Play-Doh, told me that the company is "in the process of updating all future Play-Doh products with a different tool."

But honestly, even if having a penis-shaped toy was somehow dangerous and not just flat-out funny, what kid is going to look at this thing and see anything other than an icing tool for making beautiful fake cakes? Get your head out of the gutter, mom! Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.

VICE Premiere: Rubberize Your Sole with Neu Balance's 'Get Up'

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Some people are really into sneakers, or "kicks" or whatever they call them. I have a few friends who always seem to be either looking down at their eBay app to snipe a new pair of limited somethings or looking down because they just bought a fly new pair of I don't know. Neu Balance, an intriguing Canadian electronic duo composed of Sam Beatch and Sebastian Davidson, seem to be really into sneakers. Or maybe their name is an inside joke. Or maybe they got their moniker because their music is good for running and walking. Or maybe they're in on this whole vaporwave meta-commercial accelerationist thing that I find so confusing. I don't know, and it really doesn't matter—their music is excellent.

This track, "Get Up," is off Rubber Sole, set to be released on January 6 via the venerable 1080p Records. It's a downtempo track with some bizarre sound textures mixed in and it has a beat you could make love to, but only if you wear your shiny new 574s.

How Major Video Games Subverted Cultural Taboos Without Anyone Noticing

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How Major Video Games Subverted Cultural Taboos Without Anyone Noticing

Bret Easton Ellis Says We're All a Bunch of Cry-Babies

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Bret Easton Ellis photographed at his home in LA by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete

We know you're busy. You probably didn't have time to read every article we published on VICE.com this year. So we've compiled a list of some of our favourites and will be re-featuring them on the homepage through the end of 2014. This one was originally published on February 17.

Bret Easton Ellis has only got to open his mouth for the cry-babies of the world to crawl out and start berating him for being a morally depraved chancer. Back in the 80s and 90s, you could sympathise with people getting offended by his books if they hadn't spent much time around hedge-fund managers or fashion world dickheads. If they had, they'd realize that American Psycho and Glamorama are in essence works of journalism – dressed up in Valentino and splattered with blood, yes, but documentaries of a certain moment in history all the same. "The six or seven books add up as a sort of autobiography," he says. "When I look at them I think, 'Oh, that's where I was in '91. That's where I was in '88. Okay, I got it.'"

Now he has moved into film, as well as writing screenplays for TV and delivering his own weekly podcast. Which, among other highlights, has featured Kanye West and Marilyn Manson. Yet still he has repeatedly faced accusations of "douchery" from bloggers and a general outcry every time he criticizes anything on Twitter.

When I called his house in LA last week, Bret talked passionately about his frustration with what he's dubbed "Generation Wuss" – you, me, everyone else who's young, hyper-sensitive and grown up with the internet, basically. Over the course of a few hours, I was genuinely impressed by the amount of interest he takes in the lives of people who've grown up reading his books, the technology they use and the way they consume culture. His annoyance seems to come from a place of concern rather than misanthropy.

So, why all the pant-wetting?

VICE: Why have you termed me and my contemporaries "Generation Wuss"?
Bret Easton Ellis: You have to understand that I'm coming to these things as a member of the most pessimistic and ironic generation that has ever roamed the earth. When I hear millennials getting hurt by "cyber bullying", or it being a gateway to suicide, it's difficult for me to process. A little less so for my boyfriend, who happens to be a millennial of that age, but even he somewhat agrees with the sensitivity of Generation Wuss. It's very difficult for them to take criticism, and because of that a lot of the content produced is kind of shitty. And when someone is criticized for their content, they seem to collapse, or the person criticizing them is called a hater, a contrarian, a troll.

In a way it's down to the generation that raised them, who cocooned them in praise – four stars for showing up, you know? But eventually everyone has to hit the dark side of life; someone doesn't like you, someone doesn't like your work, someone doesn't love you back... people die. What we have is a generation who are super-confident and super-positive about things, but when the least bit of darkness enters their lives, they're paralyzed.

I realized the other day that I'm around the same age as Patrick Bateman. His existence was fairly typical of a 27-year-old living in New York at the time you wrote American Psycho, but it couldn't be further away from my reality.
Not to reference the 27-year-old [Bret's boyfriend] too often, but he would completely agree with you. American Psycho is about a world that is as alien to him as Saturn.

I think it was a world we were promised, though.
There was a certain point where we realized the promises were lies and that we were going to be economically adrift. It's the fault of the baby boomer generation for raising their kids at the highest peak of the empire, in a complete fantasy world. My generation, Gen X, realized that, like most fantasies, it was somewhat dissatisfying, and we rebelled with irony, negativity and attitude because we had the luxury to do that. Our reality wasn't an economic hardship.

Right – which is what The Wolf of Wall Street is all about. Is that why you like it so much?
I never like a movie because of its subject matter. I liked it because it wasn't an op-ed piece and it wasn't concerned with another thing that so many movies are concerned with today, which is decency: decent people under stress or hardship.

To me, it's a classic young man story, like Barry Lyndon. Nine times out of ten they blow it, they fuck up, they spend all the money, they let their id run wild, don't check themselves, don't look towards the future and... it crashes. Also, I just thought it was hilarious, and Leonardo delivered a transfixing performance. And the fact that he's not going to win an Academy Award this year is a real bummer.

Seeing him in that film, do you wish he'd played Patrick Bateman?
I was really not involved in the making of that movie. All I know was that it was an offer made to Leo after Christian Bale. It would have been the start of erasing something that was probably quite embarrassing for him, being known for the rest of his life as Jack from Titanic. I don't know exactly what happened. I also didn't know how far along Christian was in preparing American Psycho, so my endorsing Leo might have looked insensitive. But yes – in answer to your question, I would have liked to see him in the role. But it was probably a lot better at that time and less distracting to have a relatively unknown actor.

You said Terrence Malick was a big inspiration.
One of the key moments in my young movie-going life was watching Days of Heaven and realizing that film was an art form. I'd been leading up to that epiphany, growing up in LA and being very aware of the film industry. But in 1978, that's when I got it. That's why I have such a tie to that film and why I watch it every two years. It takes me back.

Is it a style you'd like to recreate in your own films?
I don't know about that. Part of the problem I had with The Canyons was that I would have directed it faster. I don't have the Asian mindset that Paul Schrader does, which is steeped in [Yasujiro] Ozu and the great Japanese directors from the 50s and 60s. That's his way of pacing a movie.

That sounds like a pretty massive disparity in your vision for the film.
It seems more massive than it really was. The Canyons was guerrilla film making. We were going to make it for no money and put it on iTunes. We didn't think it was going to turn into this notorious, cultural event in the US.

Surely you knew that casting Lindsay Lohan would have that kind of effect?
No, but it was a $150,000 movie. We were sitting in friends' bedrooms; we weren't trying to create The Godfather. I wrote the script – I think it was one of only two scripts in Schrader's career that he didn't touch, the other being a script written by Harold Pinter for a film called The Comfort of Strangers, which is a movie that influenced The Canyons – and Schrader wanted it shot the way he shoots. And I thought, 'You know, this will be faster after we've edited it.' And it did [get faster], to a degree.

Look, 20 percent of people I know like the movie; 80 percent don't like the movie. But the sketchiness of it – the sleazy, cold aspect of it – what can I say? It speaks to me.

The sinister portrait of LA that you paint in Less Than Zero – with howling coyotes and dead bodies littering alleyways – is that a realistic depiction of the place? Or has your view of it changed as you've grown older?
I think it's a bit of both. I do think my southern California childhood was very idyllic. Yes, there was a bad marriage going down in the house and I suffered from a little bit of depression, but there was the beach, there were the malls, a lot of my friends drove around in convertibles. I mean, how bad is it?

I wasn't an unpopular kid. I had a lot of friends, I threw parties, I had a... girlfriend. But writing all the time alienated me from the crowd slightly, and because of that I did tend to look at the world with a more jaundiced eye.

Okay. Is it true that you're writing a TV series about the Manson murders?
Yes, although I wouldn't say it's about the Manson murders. It's about the two years surrounding the Manson murders in LA. The show starts about a year before the Manson murders. I'm just beginning to plan it. It's in the beginning stages.

And are you writing a new book?
Yes, but I wish it wasn't important to people that I am. I had a bit of a breakdown in January of 2013. I did more writing in 2012 than I'd ever done in my life – a series of movies, two of which got made, and countless television pilots. By January of 2013 I was exhausted. I found myself hungry to write prose, so I started working on this book. Every now and then it comes alive and I work on it until I get distracted by something else. It's on my desk, along with a play that I'm writing.

What made you want to do the podcast?
I published a very long, 4,000 word piece for Out Magazine. It got a lot of attention here in the US, and reading articles written in response to it, I realized people had stopped reading halfway through.

That's the internet.
Well, there's a positive myth that the internet is great for writing long-form pieces and you can publish 11,000 words, but it doesn't mean people will necessarily read the whole thing. So I thought, if I had a podcast, I could have my say over it. I wasn't into the idea of a talk radio show at first, but it's been really interesting. I don't understand this idea of the novelist being locked in the top of a tower. I've seen people respond negatively to the fact I'm on Twitter and have opinions about pop culture. I like it. It fucks with people's idea of what I'm really like.

Is this one of the problems you had with David Foster Wallace – that he played up to the almighty author thing?
I think David Foster Wallace is a complete fraud. I'm really shocked that people take him seriously. People say the same thing about me of course, and I've been criticized for saying these things about Wallace due to the very sentimental narrative attached to him since he killed himself.

But it all ties into Generation Wuss and its wussy influence on social media to a degree; if you have a snarky opinion about anything, you're a douche. To me, that's problematic. It limits discourse. If you just like everything, what are we going to talk about? How great everything is? How often I've pushed the Like button on my Facebook page?

Is it BuzzFeed who said they're not going to run any negative reviews any more? Really, guys? What's going to happen to culture then? What's going to happen to conversation? It's going to die.

Yeah. But I suppose now, in place of money, we have a currency of popularity, and the main pay-off is thousands of people liking your shit on Facebook. In that climate, how do you create vital work?
I agree with you, and it's kind of touching to me that there isn't an economic way of elevating yourself, and the only way to do that is through your brand, your profile and your social media presence. I think I might be too old to consciously use Instagram or Tumblr to my advantage. I don't even use Twitter correctly. But living with someone who's 27, I think the way you described it is perfectly accurate: online presence is the currency.

While my boyfriend and his friends can be really quite biting and mean at times, overall they really do want to put out a more gentle, amiable persona.

But I wouldn't say your work in the 80s and 90s was particularly amoral. American Psycho did carry a kind of moral message. It might not have been stated explicitly, but it was there.
You need to feel that, though. I got shit for American Psycho, with people saying it was calculated to offend people. If that was true, I wouldn't have spent three to four years on it, and I would have just filled every page with horrible descriptions. I was writing about my life. I was writing about being Patrick Bateman – a young man in New York during that era – and being lost in that yuppie culture, which is really just consumerist culture. Feeling that I had to have all of the things that a young man had at that time and hating myself for not having them and hating society and not wanting to grow up. That's really what American Psycho was. It was a very personal novel.

Also, like a lot of men, I had a pretty tawdry fantasy world, and if any man really wants to admit that, they're going to be attacked for it.

When people accuse you of misogyny, I'm always like, 'Oh right, because the men come off so well in those books.'
Well, look. [Laughs] This is exactly the kind of thing a misogynist would say, but I've never felt like a misogynist. Yet, it has been interesting to look back at myself when I've been accused of that and to understand why someone would say it. For example, I don't think American Psycho is a misogynist text at all; I think misogyny is part of the picture. But, like I said in the Wolf of Wall Street podcast, a depiction is not endorsement.

I was criticized for speaking about Kathryn Bigelow on Twitter [Ellis said that her being "a hot woman" had led to her being "overrated" as a director]. First of all, I thought that was an aesthetic thing and a comment about Hollywood and reverse sexism, but it came out in a way that annoyed people who are very sensitive about those things. I got it when I said Alice Munro was overrated, too, without people acknowledging that I've criticized a lot of male authors I don't like, and I've celebrated a lot about female writers I love. My friend Donna Tartt, for instance – her new novel, The Goldfinch, is really good and I'm in awe of someone who can do that.

And you've made no secret of how much you love Joan Didion.
Well, every now and then someone comes along who changes your perception. Before Didion, it was Hemingway – that was when I was 12 or 13. Didion was later, in high school, and it was more personal because she was writing about southern California and referencing streets I had driven on. She was describing a sensibility about women that jibed with what I was noticing in my mum's friends. I tried writing Less Than Zero maybe two times before what was ultimately published, and Joan Didion played a big part in shaping it.

Do you ever feel as though feminism is slipping into a blame culture?
Years ago, I found Jezebel.com very ominous and worrying. I mean, not that I care that much, but now it really has come full circle. I think the Lena Dunham bullying thing – and I don't want to toe the party line and say, "Oh, it was so shitty of Jezebel to do that" – but it was indicative of where a kind of feminism is right now.

I keep thinking that feminism is getting to a place that's cool, mostly because women that I know just want to be real and they want to be sexual and they want to be pretty. Meeting James Deen, being immersed in his world, meeting a lot of women who worked in porn and seeing how cool they were with it gave me a different view.

You don't think it's fucked them up?
No, they're not fucked up by it. James Deen's girlfriend [VICE columnist Stoya] is a huge performer and, like James, doesn't look like a traditional porn star. She also has a blog where she writes about feminist porn and how she's in control.

Can you tell me about the Kanye film collaboration?
You know what, I can't. It's in Kanye-land and that's subject to a whole other timeframe. He came and asked me to write the film. I didn't want to at first. Then I listened to Yeezus. It was early summer last year and I was driving in my car. He'd given me an advance copy and I thought, regardless of whether I'm right for this project, I want to work with whoever made this. So fuck it, I said yes. And that's how it happened. That was seven or eight months ago. We'll see what happens.

I really like him as a person. I know he comes off in this performance art way in the press, but if you're just alone with him in a room talking for three hours, it's kind of mind-blowing.

I think he just broke the golden rule of admitting to being a narcissist, and that's what people can't handle.
Why is that rule there, though?

Right, because if you're working in the media or entertainment industry, chances are, you're a narcissist.
Yeah, you're right. We all are. We're all here. And he's one of the few people who will admit it, and I like him for that and I wish more people would follow suit. I think that's what makes Jennifer Lawrence so appealing. She's the future of Hollywood personas. I don't know where the "old rules" of the empire – about showing your best self on the red carpet – gets anyone. It suggests an unfree society.

Can you explain this empire and post-empire distinction? Because you refer to it a lot.
Empire is the US from roughly WWII to a little after 9/11. It was at the height of its power, its prestige and its economic worth. Then it lost a lot of those things. In the face of technology and social media, the mask of pride has been slowly eradicated. That empirical attitude of believing you're better than everyone – that you're above everything – and trying to give the impression that you have no problems. Post-empire is just about being yourself. It's showing the reality rather than obscuring things in reams and reams of meaning.

But can you ever present a "real" version of yourself online?
Well, turning yourself into an avatar, at least, is post-empire. That's a new kind of mask. It's more playful than hiding your feelings, presenting your best self and lying if you have to. Unless, of course, you argue that that's just a whole new form of empire in itself.

Download the Bret Easton Ellis podcast featuring Marilyn Manson, Kanye West and Judd Apatow here.

Bret is launching his own YouTube channel in the coming months.

Follow Nathalie (@NROLAH) and Bret (@BretEastonEllis) on Twitter.

Girl Writer: My Neverending Struggle to Accept My Weight

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Portrait of the author as a child

I was around nine years old, lying in bed with my eyes closed shut. I remembered counting to 30, chanting to myself, "Please God, when I open my eyes make me skinny." At the end of those 30 seconds, I opened my eyes and looked down at my naked body. God had left it alone.

I tried again, thinking maybe he just needed a little more time. My eyes shut, and in this second attempt, I counted by Mississippi seconds. When that shockingly didn't work, I went for it one last time. In this third and final attempt, not only did I use Mississippi seconds, but I also spelled out the word. "One Mississippi, M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I. Two Mississippi, M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I..." Again, nothing.

God was given three very generous chances to magically transform my body to my liking, yet didn't do shit. What's up dude? You can part a Red Sea, and make a boat big enough to fit two of every animal, yet can't remove a few measly pounds from a nine-year-old girl's body? I was starting to understand atheism.

When I was this age, I was obsessed with my weight. I wasn't even fat, but I was consumed with the fear of being fat. Like a lot of people with eating disorders, I got good at hiding it. After eating a slice of bread, I would take to my jumprope and burn off the calories from that indulgence. Instead of eating lunch at school, I would suck on a lollipop, because what's healthier than hard sugar?

One day, I complained about stomach pain to my doctor and found out I was severely constipated. He showed me an X-ray of my stomach and drew large circles with his finger. "You see all that? That's your poop." I couldn't see what he was talking about, but I guess my dad did. From that point on, he and my mom got stricter about observing my diet. After a few weeks, I grew to care less about my body and finally felt good again.

Well, as good as any growing girl can feel about herself. Unfortunately, hating your body is a sort of rite of passage for women. It goes hand-in-hand with getting your period and discovering shower-head masturbation. I went through the initial stage, which is usually the most drastic, at an early age. By the time I got to high school, my fear had come true. Now I was actually overweight, but this time around, I didn't really care.

I was never quite sure what caused my weight gain, but I assumed it had something to do with my period no longer making its monthly visit. Later, I would find out that I have polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), a hormonal disorder that millions of women have. The cause is not quite known, but it is most likely a genetic disorder.

Women with this condition have a lot of internal issues going on, such as cysts on the ovaries and lack of a regular menstrual cycle. It can also lead to infertility, which, considering my age and annual income, is the only bonus. The most visible effect PCOS has on women, however, is that it makes it easy to gain weight and difficult to lose it. Once my period stopped coming naturally, I ballooned.

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My middle period

In high school, I was sort of delusional. Being a teenage girl who was sure of her heterosexuality, the number one thing on my mind was boys. A boyfriend was the only thing I wanted, yet I somehow convinced myself that the way for me to get one was by working on my personality. I didn't care all that much for my appearance and focused on making myself known for the things I looked for in a suitor: a strong sense of humor and a deep knowledge of the sort of things I deemed highly intellectual (Wes Anderson films and Devendra Banhart).

Now, this might come as a surprise to you, but I was wrong. The boys were not flocking to the chubby girl on the school's improv team smugly quoting Rushmore. Maybe I am a complete narcissist, but instead of feeling like I was not good enough, I took the route of feeling that everyone else was not good enough for me, which later resulted in me being extremely picky when it came to dating. (This is known in some circles as a "defense mechanism," but I just like to think of it as good old-fashioned knowing what I want.)

As I got older, by some cruel twist of fate, I ended up being more confident in myself and my appearance. Sadly, for overweight women, this is like winning the lottery. I definitely had (and still have) moments of hating everything about my dumb, fat face and my ugly, gross stomach. What I eventually came to realize though, is that nearly every woman goes through these same feelings, regardless of her relative thinness or fatness.

The heaviest I got was during college. I weighed 175 pounds and stood five feet tall, which is officially obese. At the time, it didn't bother me all that much. I knew that it should have (according to my mom and society or whatever), but it didn't. When I looked in the mirror, I still didn't see an ugly person. I eventually lost some of that weight, thanks to no longer being able to take advantage of my university's all-you-can eat freshman cafeteria. However, I still stayed kind of fat.

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The author today

After many years of being forced to try and lose weight by outside forces and not really being able to do so, I came to the conclusion that life is better lived not constantly counting calories and feeling like a failure because I ate a piece of free bread at a restaurant. I still hear the voices shouting at me to just lose 40 pounds already. They follow me wherever I go, A Beautiful Mind–style. Like schizophrenic math prodigy John Nash, I taught myself to not let those voices control my life even though they're still there.

You think I don't know that those 40 pounds could catapult me from sassy best friend in a rom-com to potential lead? You think I don't know that 40 pounds could get me sexually harassed by twice the amount of strangers at bars? You think it has escaped my mind that 40 pounds would make it much easier for me to do a perfect cartwheel? I know all this, yet I still can't find myself to give a damn. Currently, I feel good being moderately healthy and making walking my main form of exercise. As much as I like to tweet about being sexually aroused by pizza, I have kept to a pretty healthy diet most of my adult life. Not strict, but healthier than the average American. I know that is not saying much, but let's just say there's microwavable quinoa in the freezer, and I know what chia seeds are. Kind of.

I'm not going to lie and say that I would hate being thin. That's bullshit. I'm really just saying that I don't hate being overweight. A middle-aged man who frequently touches my vagina with metal objects (also known as my gynecologist) tells me that losing weight is the only thing that could possibly cure my PCOS. That's my only motivation to try and drop the pounds, but I'm not in a rush. It's strange feeling like there's something wrong with you because you don't despise yourself.

Some of you are going to think I shouldn't promote body positivity because you happen to think it's ugly. You also might try to disguise your distaste of fat women by bringing up the health bullshit, as if we are not all going to die one day. That's fine. For every ten of you who think I'm horrific, there's another ten who are down to fuck, regardless of the stretch marks on my boobs and the cottage cheese on my thighs (literal and figurative). And if I can remember that fact, I feel pretty OK.

Follow Alison Stevenson on Twitter.

Texas Is the Next Big Test for Legal Weed

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Just before Christmas, Democratic Texas State Representative Joe Moody introduced a bill that would reduce penalties for possession of small amounts of marijuana from an arrestable offense carrying up to six months in jail and a $2,000 fine to a civil infraction with a much smaller fee of $100. The bill has enjoyed bipartisan support from both liberal and far-right organizations, and advocates behind HB 507 expect the bill to receive partisan support from Texas Democrats and a "liberty-minded" faction of Republicans. But to become law in the hyper-conservative state, reform must appeal to more conservative Republicans and, in particular, to their concerns with fiscal responsibility.

"What we've got to do with our legislation is pretty much tie it to two things," said Randal Kuykendall, a veteran lobbyist hired by Marijuana Policy Project to advocate for new legislation in Texas. The first, he said, is to "make sure legislators know that it's safe—that even if our measures go horribly wrong, chaos is not going to occur." The second is to reiterate "that there's an economic impact positive to state," said Kuykendall. "With the civil penalties bill, we're saving resources, time and effort for prosecutors, and allowing people that are non-violent with minor offenses back in the workplace."

Ninety-seven percent of marijuana arrests in Texas are for low-level possession, and in 2010, more than 78,000 people were arrested for marijuana in the state, with each lock-up costing taxpayers an estimated $10,000. "Republicans care about fiscal responsibility in Texas, and if we can save the taxpayers over 700 million in tax dollars per year, it makes them look good," said Max Davidson, director of operations for the Dallas/Fort Worth chapter of NORML.

While marijuana policy reform has not historically enjoyed Republican support, Davidson said that Republicans are coming around to the idea of change, at least in private. He said he has spoken to 20 state Republicans who have said they will support some level of marijuana policy reform, several of them so conservative Davidson claimed that mentioning their names made a liberal Texas Democrat's jaw "hit the ground."

Ultimately, the umbrella group behind HB 507, Texans for Responsible Marijuana Policy, and Marijuana Policy Project, which has positioned itself as the local leader on the issue, aim to pass full marijuana legalization in Texas, and while HB 507 seeks to reduce penalties for marijuana, full legalization and medical marijuana proposals are also in the works.

Historically, though, far more Texas Republicans than Democrats have openly opposed marijuana policy reform, including access to medical marijuana and decriminalization. While Texas Democrats passed a resolution in 2012 endorsing the decriminalization and regulation of marijuana possession and sale, while the state GOP struck medical marijuana support from their party platform this year. Incoming Republican Governor Greg Abbott and several Republican state representatives are staunch defenders of the status quo, and are expected to maintain hard-lined positions against marijuana policy reform when the legislature meets again in January.

At the same time, though, there are Tea Party-style conservatives who have started using libertarian rhetoric to express support for marijuana policy reform.Legalization advocates have pinned their hopes to these right wingers, and other like-minded Republicans, like state representative Tan Parker, who chairs the typically conservative, House Corrections Committee and who has publicly come out in favor of reducing penalties for marijuana possession.

"Texas voters are there, and the reason has lot to do with how prohibition has so clearly failed," said Heather Fazio, the Texas political director for Marijuana Policy Project, the group behind HB 507, "It is also due to the emergence of the Liberty Movement in Texas and throughout the country—more liberty-minded Republicans getting to the roots of limited government."

Some Texas Republicans who openly support a change to marijuana laws seem to be vying for the political expedience popular support for marijuana policy reform may offer elected officials. Before the November midterms, for example, Harris County District Attorney Devin Anderson and her challenger, Democrat Kim Ogg, faced off over ownership of the idea to decriminalize marijuana. "This is not a new plan," Ogg told the Houston Chronicle of Anderson's proposal, "It's a 'me too' program by a candidate who has shifted her position with the winds of political change."

And despite some resistance to change among the state GOP, at least one Representative-elect, ultra-conservative Republican Tony Tinderholt (who "might be Texas' most far-right candidate, according to the Texas Observer) is considering support for marijuana policy reform. In a phone interview, Tinderholt said he was not prepared to formally state his position on HB 507 and other reforms, but expressed openness to new laws, under the strict condition that he can prove his constituents support the changes.

"I spent 10 years of a 21-year military career doing counternarcotics mission all over South and Central America, and I'll tell ya, I'm not convinced that the current policies at the national level are effective enough," Tinderholt told me. " I'm not quite sure at this point what I'd change, but I don't think that our current policies at the national level are truly effective—when you compare dollars spent versus the return on investment or change and impact."

"We've got 22 veterans a day that are killing themselves across the nation," he added, saying that "if [marijuana] has really true effects that are helpful and really make a difference in people's lives, we'd be crazy not to support something like that."

Like others, Tinderholt emphasized the importance of couching any attempts at reform in the language of fiscal conservatism. "Part of the decision making process, part of it, is gonna be is it fiscally responsible?" he said, "I think that will play a part in the decision making, and I think it'll play a part in how the people in my district view different pieces of legislation, particularly the decriminalization issue."

Follow Kristen on Twitter


A Look Back at the Pedophilia Scandals That Swallowed Britain Whole in 2014

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In 2014, a series of often seemingly intertwining child sex abuse stories have engulfed the UK in what has become the biggest scandal of modern times. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that the whole country feels duped, dirtied, and, worse, connected in some way. Culprits and alleged culprits have included celebrities, the social services and police (whose systemic failures resulted in an estimated 1,400 children being sexually exploited in the town of Rotherham between 1997 and 2013), politicians (the evidence of a pedophile ring operating within the corridors of Westminster during the 1980s is now incontrovertible after London´s Metropolitan Police described allegations from an anonymous survivor as "credible and true" this month), and even employees of the Royal Family (British tabloid the Sunday People recently revealed that the House of Windsor was also implicated in abuses centered around accusations from a 16-year-old boy).

The town of Rochdale lies at the center of two of these recent child sex scandals. In 2012, nine Pakistani men were convicted of running a "grooming" operation that targeted young girls there, and it was also home of the late Liberal Member of Parliament (MP) Cyril Smith, a 400-pound giant of a man who reportedly terrorized the local Knowl View Residential School.

Though Smith's penchant for the abuse and rape of young boys had been gossiped about for decades (at least two regional newspaper editors had D notices slapped on them, meaning that no story could be published about Smith's behavior), the politician wasn't publicly accused of child abuse until 2012, when the police admitted that they should have pursued charges against him. Simon Danczuk, the current Labour MP for Rochdale, is responsible for exposing Smith in Parliament, and has since co-written a book detailing his predecessor's alleged misdeeds.

"I do wonder whether the fact that people in the community in Rochdale were well aware of the rumor and gossip about Smith, the abuse that he meted out to his victims—did that provide some sort of acceptance that this type of abuse?" asks Danczuk today. "Did it normalize it, did it make it more acceptable, did it make it more likely to be ignored?"

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Cyril Smith. Photo via Wikipedia

The exposure of the town's pedophiliac Pakistani gang was perhaps an even bigger scandal, but for different reasons. In 2012, the nationalist English Defence League (EDL) rallied in Rochdale; for those right-wingers, the affair was more proof that the multiculturalist experiment had failed. Unfortunately it's an attractive theory in Britain at the moment: that immigration has brought with it misogynistic Muslim gangs who rape children with impunity.

This line of thought conveniently ignores the fact that child rapists have found niches in all levels of society: at the BBC's various broadcasting premises, in hospitals, in care homes, on government property, in Westminster, even within the Royal palaces. It seems to happen wherever there is an imbalance of power.

William Vahey, an American teacher employed at Southbank International School in central London, serves as a useful example. He decidedly took advantage of the power he had over his pupils—but as often seems to be the case, the real scandal is how the system seems to have accommodated an abuser, or at least ignored crimes that should have been made visible. After receiving complaints about Vahey, who has been since found to have drugged and abused 60 teenage boys at the school from 2009 to 2013, headmaster Terry Hedger did little more than reassure the teacher that he would protect his "fine reputation and standing" and that he believed Vahey was the victim of pressure "from vindictive parents." Vahey killed himself in March after his computer was found to contain hundreds of images of child rape.

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FBI photo of William Vahey

Vahey's crimes seem to be mirrored on a society-wide scale. In 2012, allegations against the late TV host and bizarre British icon Jimmy Savile surfaced; the list of potential victims stretches into the hundreds, and other well-known BBC names have since been convicted of similar crimes. Last month John Allen, a care home proprietor who has been convicted of 33 sex offenses against children in his charge, was accused of providing boys to sex parties frequented by political figures, and the late former MI6 deputy Sir Peter Hayman has been accused of attending such parties. Just last week John Mann, a Labour MP, handed a dossier to Scotland Yard with 22 names of individuals, including former MPs from the country's two major parties, who he thinks should be questioned over alleged child abuse in the 1970s and 80s. Mann even suggested that two would-be whistleblowers may have been murdered.

The Westminster story became headline news the way a dam breaks—first through almost unnoticeable cracks in the façade, then with a sudden flood. One of the first cracks was when a whistleblower from the social work world passed a tip off to Labour MP Tom Watson, who in 2012 asked Prime Minister David Cameron if an evidence file linked to the conviction of pedophile Peter Righton—who advised the government on child care policy in the 1970s—could be looked at again. That file, which was initially sent to home secretary Leon Brittan by campaigning Tory MP Geoffrey Dickens in 1983, supposedly linked senior cabinet members in the Thatcher administration, as well as Smith, to a pedophile ring. In July it was revealed that the dossier was among 114 files relating to child sex abuse that had disappeared from 1979 to 1999. Brittan himself was questioned by police that same month over allegations of rape—the victim was over the age of 18, but the event just added to public suspicion, stoked by the suggestion of Lord Norman Tebbit that there "may well have been" an establishment cover-up under Brittan´s watch.

After that, both the press and the police began investigating these claims more carefully. The publications most involved in pushing the Westminster pedophile scandal out to the public have been the Sunday People and the investigative website Exaro.

"I think we have come across the biggest political scandal in Britain's postwar history." –Exaro editor Mark Watts

The further the media and the cops went down the rabbit hole, the more they found. "A key turning point was we ran a story on two abuse survivors who talked about being sexually abused as boys by MPs and other VIPs at Dolphin Square [a luxury apartment complex] and other locations," says Mark Watts, the editor of Exaro. "That led the police again to contact us and ask to speak to these two survivors and again we passed on the request."

The police in turn created Operation Midland, which investigated an alleged pedophile ring that operated at Dolphin Square between 1974 and 1984. It is in one of the apartments there that an anonymous source known in the media as "Nick" alleges he saw a boy get strangled to death by a Conservative MP during a dark sex game.

In July, before the Westminster story gained momentum, Home Secretary Theresa May announced an inquiry into organized child sex abuse dating back to the 1970s. But the two people she appointed to chair the inquiry were both found to have conflicts of interest, and panel members have reportedly sent abusive emails to alleged survivors. The (still chair-less) inquiry is now on the verge of collapse, though many see even that flawed effort as a step in the right direction.

"I think the home secretary is very much in favor of getting to the bottom of what's gone wrong—that's why she's helped initiate the overarching enquiry," says Danczuck. "But I do also think there is a division in cabinet in terms of people wanting to get to the bottom of this. Theresa May is on the side that does. My interpretation is that the Prime Minister is less enthusiastic." The Labour MP suspects there are many in the Conservative Party keen on keeping a lid on any possible revelations. In any case, this story has gone far, far beyond "a few bad apples" territory.

"I think we have come across the biggest political scandal in Britain's postwar history," says Watts. "It goes way beyond Jimmy Savile. We're talking about people in positions of real power in Britain and the ensuing cover-up. Because of the sheer gravity of what went on, it does rather explain why so much effort has gone into covering it up."

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Jimmy Savile. Photo via Wikipedia

There's no one explanation for why so many cases of sex abuse have been ignored for so long. Blame can be laid on a lack of funding for welfare programs which might have helped victims; you can also point to an odd form of liberal guilt—the media may have resisted running with the Rochdale story, for example, because they didn't want to get lumped in with the racists in the EDL. More simply, it was easier to be ignorant. But following the Met Police's confirmation of its investigation into the murder of three boys in conjunction with activities at Dolphin Square and other locations, it is now impossible for anyone paying attention to describe pedophilia as exclusively the domain of immigrant gangs and perverted celebrities.

All this publicity surrounding pedophilia has had mixed effects, says the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children's Jon Brown. "There is a huge amount of anger out there," he says, but adds that the high-profile cases shouldn't obscure the fact that around 80 percent of child abuse happens in the care of loved ones. For example, it is often the abusive father who introduces his child to a sex ring that will put them at risk of abuses from others.

"While people are talking about abuse that happened many years ago that doesn't mean its not happening now," says Brown. "Day in day out there is an awful grind of inter-family abuse, and so much of that never gets disclosed as it's difficult for children to talk about."

It's difficult for anyone to talk about, and that's why so many of the people involved in this scandal were able to hide in plain sight. A few years ago I visited Keith Harding's World of Mechanical Music with my wife and her family. The Gloucestershire museum was filled with automata, a charming collection obsessively amassed by Harding, who greeted us at the desk and seemed a sweet, if eccentric, bloke. In November Harding, now dead, was connected to Jimmy Savile—he appeared on his popular show Jim'll Fix It—and exposed as a vocal member of the Paedophile Information Exchange, a fringe group that existed between 1974 and '84. "A child is able to recognize a pleasurable experience," PIE claimed in its campaign for the recognition of the "responsible, caring pedophile."

Connections that have long been deemed the ludicrous preserve of conspiracy theorists are now ordained as possibilities, some even plausibilities.

It's an all-too-common phenomenon that has long been a cliché: the odd, flamboyant outsider who, on closer examination, contains a monstrous amount of skeletons in his closet. Looking at much of the detail of the Savile case it seems like looking back on some kind of strange group hallucination. How could he have been given the keys to Broadmoor Hospital? How could he have worked as a porter at Leeds hospital without the proper checks? If Savile embodies the whole recent series of scandals in the UK it is because he shimmied between classes so effectively, because he infiltrated the upper echelons without anyone wondering at his "eccentricities."

The self image of the United Kingdom is one of tolerance and discretion—it is a trait that its citizens are often commended for, but it also makes it easy for the powerful to hide behind the veil of sensibility and deference. The curiously claustrophobic nature of British society—neatly represented by the seemingly impenetrable gray 1930s apartment block of Dolphin Square—does lead one to wonder exactly how entwined these separate cases of depravity were. Savile did spend 11 consecutive New Years Eves celebrating with Margaret Thatcher, after all. Connections that have long been deemed the ludicrous preserve of conspiracy theorists are now ordained as possibilities, some even plausibilities. The unthinkable is now eminently thinkable.

The secrets and cover-ups don't make for pretty reading, but now that there have been efforts to get them out in the open, the healing process is happening in earnest, not least in Rochdale. "I helped reveal what Cyril Smith did because I thought it would benefit the community," says Danczuk. "They've carried this burden, this knowledge, for decades. I think it is better to get it out in the open than to keep it a dirty secret."

This culmination of child abuse revelations might not be what people in the UK want to hear as they look forward to toasting the end of another year. But its shocking prevalence in headlines and conversations offers an opportunity for hope for justice in 2015, not least for the survivors.

"I think in many respects this subject's time had come," adds Danczuk. "Finally people can talk about it. Thousands of individuals have been carrying this burden—and still do, and still don't reveal it. But the more who do, I think it is better for them. I've had people who were abused by Smith, who hadn't told a soul before they came to me. A man who hadn't told his wife who he'd been married to for 30-odd, 40 years, explaining to me that I was the first person he had told that he had been abused by someone. You see a 60-odd-year-old man breaking down and crying because of what happened to him, I think it is positive that he can finally come to terms with it."

PETA Sued to Stop a North Carolina Man from Dropping a Live Possum to Celebrate New Year's Eve

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Annual possum drops are a thing. Photo via Flickr user andrew pratt

Clay Logan claims to have been born when Moby Dick was still a minnow, and says he's never hurt a possum in his life. For almost two decades, the North Carolina convenience store owner had been running his own version of Times Square's ball drop that used a live critter rather than a glass ball. But two years ago, animal rights activists started slapping the Brasstown resident with lawsuits. This year, thanks to legal action from PETA, he plans on using "some roadkill or a pot of stewed possum" instead.

"PETA jumped on me when I got an article in the New York Times," Logan told me. "They never bothered me before I was known."

The idea for the possum drops emerged when Logan came across a novelty can of possum in a Mississippi truck stop. He thought, Yeah, that's got potential, and went home to make his own label for the can. Logan says he proceeded to drop the object from the roof of his convenience store in a plexiglass box as hundreds of people cheered him on. Just like that, a tradition was born.

Brasstown has a population of 240 people, and has been stagnant for years. As Logan puts it, "Some lady gets pregnant and some guy leaves, so we haven't grown in a long time." He's never lived anywhere else, though. And he says he's just trying to find a way to bring cash into the small town.

"Our economy is real low," he says. "Every little bit helps." According to Logan, thousands now come to watch the possum drop, and there are other events on New Year's Eve at the convenience store, like a pageant in which local men dress in drag to compete for the title of "Miss Possum."

There's a different possum used each time around, Logan says, because their lifespan is only three or four years. Besides taking a trip in a box, Old Possum—as the locals call him—is paraded around local schools, where he goes by OP, the drug-free possum, and is used as an instructional tool to keep kids from smoking weed.

But even though Logan is quick to defend the event as a boon for the community, PETA is more than a little miffed by the whole ordeal. The animal rights group says that possums, which are notoriously shy animals, are being subjected to hypothermia in the box, and can literally be frightened to death by fireworks. Martina Bernstein, director of litigation for PETA, likens the event to putting a person in front of a firing squad.

PETA first filed suit in 2011, and stopped the event from using a live possum the following year. But the governor signed the Possum Right-to-Work Act in 2013 in order to ensure the show could go on. The activists sued a second time, and Clay County responding by making a new rule indicating that no law relating to the capture of animals would apply during the week of New Year's, Bernstein told me. She added that the amount of effort local officials are willing to exert to preserve the Possum Drop is "breathtaking."

PETA's latest lawsuit is still pending, and Clay plans on beating them so he can have a live star at next year's event. But if he doesn't prevail, the tradition he started will be sorely missed. Clay's website about the Drop features a guestbook, and people who travel to see OP get lowered from the sky offer up rave reviews.

"Was sure glad to hear that the '05 possum was LIVE. As anyone who has ever kicked a dead cow on a late night coon hunt and seen three possums roll out of it knows, possums are just naturally curious," wrote Steve White, from Killduff, Iowa. "I am sure the ride in a limo and then the trip up and down for the drop made this possum's day!"

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Lower Your Expectations with These Stories of New Year's Eves Gone Horribly Wrong

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This post originally appeared on VICE Australia

If you've made it to the stage in your life where you can read and use the computer without your parents' permission, you should have worked out that New Year's Eve is total shit. Everyone wants to have their best night of the year, which always ends with all of you in a overcrowded room surrounded by drunk strangers—and that's a best-case scenario. At worst, well, at worst something like the below stories from anonymous VICE Australia contributors will happen to you. Enjoy!

GETTING A HEAD START TO THE NEW YEAR

My worst New Year's was in year 11 [junior year of high school, to Americans]. I was still pretty new to parties and was really focusing on keeping down my Woodstock [a cheap canned drink favored by Australian teenagers] while remaining upright (physically if not morally). I'd gone to the obligatory party with my best friend, who since childhood was always far better at social situations than me. At 16 she was now a fully developed, charming, and a very desirable teen babe. This was best illustrated by her equally cool boyfriend who had come with us. He was a super nice dude and together they were what the movies made you think teen couples are like. I, on the other hand, was still letting my mom buy me jeans from Kmart. The party itself was obviously terrible but I was a kid so thought it was a Ne-Yo video come to life. I didn't mind that I didn't know anyone, or that all the boys were dirtbag skate rats because as I mentioned, I was 16. I had two more Woodstocks in my backpack. Life was good.

It was a few minutes from midnight when I realized I hadn't seen my BFF for a while. I wanted to ring in the new year with her, but also didn't want to be accosted by a stranger without her protection. I was in a small group of nice but still very cool and intimidating older kids and trying to act casual and not seem nervous about not having my wingwoman around. So I casually leaned against a wall as the countdown started, except it wasn't a wall, it was a window, that broke, because I fell through it.

At this stage it was embarrassing, but not the worst moment of my life. Then I looked up: I'd fallen through a bedroom window where my best friend was busy blowing her boyfriend. A lot of people leaned through after me to see if I was OK, and witnessed the surreal combination of my pal screaming, her boyfriend jizzing, and everyone screaming HAPPY NEW YEAR! all at the same time.

NEW YEAR'S DEVASTATION

A few years ago my then boyfriend and I booked a beach house on the Gold Coast with three other couples. It was going to be the best trip ever, until my boyfriend dumped me on December 29. I was heartbroken and didn't want to go on the trip, but the other couples assured me it would still be fun and not awkward. Eventually I let myself be convinced that I wouldn't be a seventh wheel.

I arrived at the beach house a little later than the others, and was surprised at the cool reception I received. It later came out that they'd been chatting about the breakup over the previous couple of days and decided it was my fault. Also they probably, understandably, had been having second thoughts about inviting a single—and miserable—pal to a couples' retreat.

They spent the next three nights, including New Year's Eve, in their rooms having very loud sex. The only time I saw anyone during the whole trip was when they emerging occasionally for meals, to watch fireworks, or find more condoms before going back to sex each other again.

As a final bit of awkwardness I was bunking with one of the couples, so I spent the whole weekend on the couch watching TV, crying over the breakup, feeling alienated by the other couples, and unable to go to my room because someone was having sex on or near my bed.

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NEW YEAR'S SEARCH PARTY

When I was 15 some buds and I lied about spending New Year's on a yacht with a friend's family. Instead, we somehow convinced an adult to drop us off down the coast without asking too many questions. Looking back the weirdest part of this story is that at 15, my parents believed I knew someone with a yacht. Anyway, we didn't have any plans or anywhere to stay, but we were like, pfft who cares, because we had about 20 pineapple Cruisers [another beloved Aussie teen beverage].

After a bit of roaming we headed to the beach where, being New Year's Eve, we found a massive bonfire with heaps of people hanging out on couches getting wasted. By then we were pretty drunk and I immediately made out with several dudes who didn't know they were kissing someone in year nine. After a while I started chatting to a 19-year-old, who was super ripped and like a gymnast or something. To my teenage self, he was pretty much all my hormones in a tank top.

We chatted, did cartwheels, and he picked me up and pretended to run into the ocean. It was amazing. Eventually we walked about 100 meters away from the group and spent the next hour or so making out.

Obviously, being a drunk teenager I didn't think to tell my friends where I was, but by this point they'd noticed I was missing and started asking around. From the outside the story was I'd been talking to some older dude who was last seen throwing me in the ocean. Everyone went ballistic.

I couldn't hear much down the beach because I was pretty distracted, and it was New Year's so a bit of screaming seemed normal. The whole party, now frantic, started wading out into the ocean to find me. Finally someone spotted a rock a little way out that was shaped like a body and called the cops. If you've never been cockblocked by the police and a bunch of crying friends who thought you were dead, you haven't lived.

SHITTY PARTY

One New Year's a few years back we went to a house party at a friend's place. It started out pretty tame, but being a New Year's party it escalated quickly. By midnight it was super crowded and there was hardly room to move, we were all jammed into the backyard, and there was a fair amount of pushing and shoving. As more people piled in for the countdown I was pushed further and further back until I was almost at the rear fence.

As the countdown started, there was a surge of bodies as everyone threw up their hands to scream "Happy New Year!" Somewhere in the middle of this I got a sizable bump from someone and stepped back to steady myself. As my foot touched the ground I felt the unfamiliar, but also strangely and instantly recognizable sensation of stepping in shit barefoot.

Obviously I was immediately grossed out, but worse was the realization that I haven't seen a dog or cat all night. Rather, what I'd noticed was the long line for the toilet as the small house became host to a larger and larger party as midnight crept around.

It seems that at some point people, riding high on poo-inducing party pills, figured that if pissing in the yard was an option, why not just commit and start shitting in the yard? Looking down as my soiled foot, I realized that the first moments of the new year would be spent washing another human's feces from between my toes.

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AULD LANG HEAD INJURY

The New Year's Eve following my 18th birthday I was working in the factory of a huge New Zealand milk company. It was just a gig I picked up and left between semester breaks, but the shifts were 12 hours long so it wasn't exactly an easy student job. I worked two mornings, two nights, and then had four days off. It was usually OK, except when New Year's Eve fell on my last night shift before the extended weekend. I tried to get out of it so I could enjoy the evening with my friends, but that was obviously impossible.

Being a factory there was absolutely no drinking allowed, so I treated myself to a ginger beer as compensation. It probably wasn't worth the effort anyway, as moments before midnight I hit my forehead on the bottom of a hopper, giving myself a nice head wound and in hindsight maybe a concussion.

Seeing I was halfway through my shift, and there was nobody they could call in who would be sober, I was deemed fit enough to continue working. A little after midnight, as my first notable act of the new year, I crashed a forklift into an air duct. I don't remember the details too well on account of the head injury, but I do remember it was a very big deal. The next few hours were spent desperately trying to fix the damage and find a maintenance person two hours into the new year.

It was 4.30 AM before things had settled down enough for me to finally be able to go home. When I made it back my housemates were sitting on the couch soberly watching music videos. So at least there was comfort in the fact New Year's is always shit, whether you've sustained head trauma or not.

Illustrations by Carla Uriarte.

UN Security Council Rejects Palestinian Resolution to End Israel's Occupation

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UN Security Council Rejects Palestinian Resolution to End Israel's Occupation

Jameis Winston Conduct Hearing Transcript Reveals Mass Confusion and Bizarre Decision-Making

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Jameis Winston Conduct Hearing Transcript Reveals Mass Confusion and Bizarre Decision-Making
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