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Bad Cop Blotter: How Can We Stop Unnecessary and Dangerous SWAT Raids?

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SWAT team members in Oregon during an exercise. Photo via the Oregon Department of Transportation's Flickr

Last May, Bounkham "Bou Bou" Phonesavanh was gravely injured by a flash-bang grenade thrown by a Habersham County, Georgia, SWAT team during a no-knock raid. The target was a relative of little Bou Bou's parents, who were only staying in the home because their house had burned down. But the toddler was the one who suffered. He was hospitalized and briefly got put in a medically induced coma, and the bills for all that—which neither the city nor the police will pay—hit $1 million.

All of this was so shocking and awful that it received more media attention than most disastrous police raids. When government employees put an 18-month-old in a hospital, that's bound to make waves. And now there's a bill making its way through the Georgia legislature that aims to make sure this tragedy isn't repeated.

State Senator Vincent Fort, a Democrat from Atlanta, has introduced Senate Bill 45, known as "Bou Bou's Law," which would, as VICE News reports, "require police to show probable cause that there is imminent potential for life endangerment or destruction of evidence if they knocked and declared their presence at a suspect's door prior to arrest. A separate House Bill 56 would put a stop to unannounced arrests between 10 PM and 6 AM, unless a judge specifically grants a warrant."

Bill 56 is arguably the more important of the two measures. Bou Bou's Law is a step in the right direction, but since cops already normally use no-knock raids when there's a gun in the house—and since most drug suspects would destroy evidence if given the chance—the probable-cause requirement won't be that hard to surmount. But stopping cops from busting down doors late at night and early in the morning, when there's a lot of potential for confusion and violence on both sides, is a common-sense reform that would have saved the lives of people like David Hooks, who was killed by a Georgia SWAT team searching for narcotics last year.

More fundamental changes must be made to how SWAT teams are deployed, however. Last year an ACLU report found that only 7 percent of such deployments were "for hostage, barricade, or active shooter scenarios"—which are, of course, the scenarios SWAT teams are designed for. In most other cases, heavily armed cops with flash-bang grenades will just make it more likely that people will end up critically injured or dead. Until departments around the country accept that, there remains the chance for more cases like Bou Bou's.

Now on to this week's bad cops:

–In 2009, an internal CIA review suggested that the importance of information uncovered by torture was being overstressed. The CIA didn't see fit to share this with the rest of the class, however, and the agency continues to dispute the Senate's torture report, which was released in December and made similar claims. Guys, it's OK to admit that waterboarding was both ineffective and immoral.

–Earlier this month, Eric McDavid, who was sent to prison for eco-terrorism, was freed after serving almost half of his 20-year-old sentence thanks to the FBI's shady dealings being revealed. According to McDavid the bureau used a 19-year-old mole in a sort of honeypot operation, but what's even more damning is that the government withheld thousands of pages of evidence at the trial that would have exonerated him.

–In other federal agency news, the Department of Justice and the DEA paid the New York woman whose Facebook identity they used for drug stings a settlement of $134,000. The authorities did not, however, admit to having done anything wrong. Nor did they promise not to ever do it again.

–There is a warrant out for the arrest of a Detroit man who owes $30,000 in back child support—even though the DNA evidence says that Carnell Alexander is not the father of the kid in question. That sure seems like a mistake someone should have caught!

–Details are scarce on this one, but a 17-year-old girl was apparently shot and killed by the cops in Longview, Texas, after coming into the police station brandishing a knife. It sure seems like the police would be able to handle that threat without resorting to legal force.

–On Sunday, a 17-year-old Brooklyn teen was arrested for making threats against NYPD officers via Facebook. The weird part is that Osiris Aristy's threats were in Emoji form. He posted photos of himself with guns and drugs when he already had a rap sheet, so he's clearly not all that bright, but his arrest shows just how easy it to be arrested for saying stuff on social media. Be careful out there.

–Bayonne, New Jersey, cop Domenico Lillo was charged on January 23 with excessive force and falsification of records over his arrest of a suspect who he allegedly beat with a flashlight to the point of disfigurement. The plaintiff, Brandon Walsh, has also sued the Bayonne Police Department, and alleges that other officers did not help him during the December 2013 arrest. Walsh's mother and her grandchildren were also pepper-sprayed. Lillio was arrested by the FBI and suspended without pay once the charges were filed. He faces up to 30 years in prison.

–On Thursday, a Dearborn, Michigan, woman sued the local police department, alleging religious discrimination. Malak Kazan, a 27-year-old Muslim woman, was booked on a traffic violation and driving with a suspended license on July 9, which is ordinary enough, but at the police department she was told she had to remove her headscarf. Kazan said police ignored her pleas to be allowed to keep her scarf on, and even her request for a female officer to take the photo.

–Another Thursday lawsuit alleges that an unnamed woman was forced to show her genitals to prison guards after she tried to visit an inmate at a Tennessee prison while she was menstruating. The women, who is a frequent visitor to the privately run facility, says the presence of a sanitary pad made guards suspicious she was smuggling in contraband. She says she was not allowed to leave, or to show the pad to guards, or to take it out, but was actually forced to show her genitals in the bathroom.

–A nameless, apparently modest cop in Weymouth, Massachusetts went above and beyond the call of duty in responding to a woman's report of a stolen wallet on Thursday. Shannah Shea was shopping at Stop and Shop when she discovered that her wallet had been stolen, meaning her $300 was gone. Shea called 911, and the cop who responded purchased the $75 worth of groceries and gifts for her daughter she had in her cart. The cop didn't want the clerk to tell the tale, or even mention that he had paid for the groceries, which makes him humble as well as an extremely good cop.

Follow Lucy Steigerwald on Twitter.


Genetically Modified Mosquitoes​ Might Save Us From Dengue Fever

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Photo via Flickr user Wm Jas

According to an Associated Press story published yesterday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is currently debating a plan to control insect-born disease on the 44 inhabited islands in the Florida Keys by releasing millions of genetically modified mosquitos into the local wilds. These discussions are only the latest developments in a project that's been stalled by years of regulatory heel-dragging and protest. But we can only hope they result in the release of the Frankenbugs, which may actually be one of the few human attempts to play god that won't blow up in our faces—fingers crossed.

Officials hope to use the mosquitoes to control potential outbreaks of dengue fever. Spreading out of Southeast Asia in the 1950s, this mosquito-born disease causes flu-like symptoms as well as a rash, mild bleeding, and aches and pains so severe that it's earned the nickname "bone-break fever." Although not always a death sentence, the disease and secondary infections can prove fatal.

Dengue is not the only mosquito-born disease. Of the few hundred species that feast on man blood, several carry everything from chikungunya to malaria to lymphatic filariasis, Rift Valley and West Nile fevers, and various forms of encephalitis. The Aedes aegypti species that transmits dengue is also a vector for yellow fever. But dengue, for which there is no vaccine, is of special concern as over the past half-decade it has increased in prevalence thirty-fold, now infecting up to 100 million and killing at least 20,000 a year. The mosquitoes carrying the disease have started adapting to resist insecticides and changing their feeding habits to avoid protective nets.

As of 2009 dengue, thought all but eradicated, has returned to the Keys with a vengeance, infecting nearly 100 people by 2010 (the largest outbreak since 1934) and creating a lingering health threat that many fear will scare off the tourists upon whom the local economy depends.

Rather than try to control this problem with poison, Oxitec, a British company created by a few dozen University of Oxford Scientists in 2002, drew the attention of Keys officials with the offer to cheaply and effectively decimate dengue-carrying populations through genetic engineering.

In a lab, the scientists implant a new gene into non-biting male mosquitoes (only the females feast on our flesh) that causes the production of a protein that will kill them without constant treatment in the lab. These males then mate with females (who produce one litter of eggs in a lifetime) in the wild and pass along their self-destruct genes to the offspring. So long as the males strong enough to outbreed their competitors are constantly released into the wilderness, they can collapse local dengue-carrier populations in weeks. Then, as they die of protein buildup, their aberrant genes die with them, leaving no permanent changes to wider Aedes aegypti populations—all for far less than the cost of pesticides. They can even track the spread of their mutant progeny thanks to another spliced gene, which gives the monsters a fluorescent glow.

"In the target area we could suppress the population [of carriers] even to zero levels," Oxitec Chief Science Officer Dr. Luke Alphey told CNN last summer. "I hope that [this technique] will become a major part of control of major pest insects. If we could reduce, even in some countries, the burden of diseases like dengue... that would be fantastic. We're just at the dawn of genetic control."

Officials in the Keys, tired of spending $1 million a year (a tenth of their pest control budget) on iffy pesticides, watching residents ignore best-practice precautions, and tempted by the $200,000 to $400,000 per year price tag offered by Oxitec, started exploring the release of genetically modified mosquitoes all the way back in 2009. They first announced their desire to release the freak bugs and submitted plans for test dispersions for USFDA review and approval in 2012.

"The science of it, I think, looks fine," Michael Doyle of the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District told the Associated Press that year. "It's straight from setting up experiments and collecting data."

"This is safe, and it's been proven," he reiterated to Al Jazeera in 2013. "In terms of allergenicity and health issues, the FDA is looking into that, so I put it in their hands."

Locals are not nearly as hyped as Doyle about releasing the bugs of Dr. Moreau into their backyards, passing an ordinance requesting further testing on the technique before its use and creating a change.org petition to block moves to advance the project. Their concerns, shared by many environmental activists, involve the risks inherent in introducing a modified organism into a complex and ever-changing environment. While in the lab the mosquitos appear safe, many fear unintended consequences. Consequences that could include creating an environmental gap that welcomes in nastier mosquito species, forcing dengue to evolve to be even heartier, or finding that the genetic modification does not kill all the mosquitoes' progeny and that humans are allergic to the resistant spawns' bites.

Local and international environmentalists also argue that Oxitec has never produced any good data on or invited any high quality independent review of their technique by respected scholars. (Emails and phone calls to Oxitec have not been returned. We will update when and if they respond.)

"The reduction figures from their trials cannot be verified," Dr. Helen Wallace of Greenwatch UK told CNN last year, "and they have not proved a positive impact on disease."

Yet despite all the talk about how unprecedented and risky releasing genetically modified insects in America would be, there's actually a good amount of precedent and study on this issue in the US and abroad—including reviews of Oxitec from outsiders—spanning well over a decade.

The US, the first nation to mess with mosquito genetics in 1998 and learn to pass on modifications to their progeny in 2000, actually came pretty close to releasing pink bullworms with tweaked DNA in October 2001. We released a batch on a fenced-off patch of Arizona cotton fields that fall, but never took the tests further because we found it was easier at the time to sterilize bugs using radiation—a technique in use since WWII using logic similar to Oxitec's process, but which could never sterilize mosquitoes without also making them too weak to mate.

Since then, scientists have pursued pest control and diseases via gene splicing vigorously, breeding malaria parasite-resistant mosquitoes or variations of malaria-carrier species that produce only non-biting male offspring or progeny that cannot fly, to name a few projects. Most of the feedback from these tests suggests the process is relatively safe and highly effective.

Oxitec has been trying to prove that in the field across the world for the past few years. In 2010, they launched their first tests, releasing millions of mosquitoes into the wild in target regions in the Cayman Islands and Malaysia. As of 2014, they had released over 70 million modified mosquitoes, most recently in Panama, with reduction rates of at least 80 percent and no clear adverse effects on the environment or failure of modified bugs to die to this point.

Their operations in Brazil, which started as tests in 2011 but evolved into a commercial program (the first state-sanctioned mass dispersion of modified insects in the world) in 2014, have proven popular with locals and received praise and verification from local, independent researchers.

Much of the doubt about Oxitec's spliced skeeters in the Keys and beyond stems not so much from the lack of promise and evidence behind their technique, but from the company's track record of community engagement. Despite the success of their first test in the Caymans, the company earned widespread condemnation for failing to inform the locals of their bugs' release until after the fact. That's actually a huge no-no in the accepted code of scientific ethics for work involving genetic modifications. So a similar silence in the Keys understandably irked locals.

Many are especially upset by the fact that the path Oxitec has taken (seeking FDA approval to test their bugs) will allow them to release the insects without local consent—a really poor procedural message for a company with a bad track record to send to a population that's on edge.

A good part of the local resistance also stems from a knee-jerk resistance to the introduction of anything that's been genetically modified. That sort of intransigence is hard to overcome—even by pointing out that, because the Aedes aegypti is actually an invasive species with no real unique and irreplaceable role in the local environment, its eradication by a spliced bug whose mutation will not effect any other species and will vanish after it dies upon completing its task, might actually be an environmental good (especially when compared to annual pesticide dumps).

Resistance to the monster mosquitoes seems to be waning though. Signatures on the change.org petition fell off after 2012, and in 2013 an independent survey commissioned by Doyle's office found that over half of Keys residents supported using the lab-bred mosquitoes to fight dengue. As the science and support behind the Oxitec technique becomes clearer, especially given Brazil's endorsement and experience over the past year, it seems more and more likely that the FDA will finally approve the release of these flying freaks. True, things could go very Syfy channel at the last minute. But for now that seems like a(n infinitely small) risk worth taking.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

Here’s the Harper Government’s Game Plan for the Next Four Months

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Parliament in Ottawa. Photo via Flickr user sarah_poo

We're in the home stretch.

Members of Parliament, senators, and staffers flocked back to Parliament Hill on Monday, as Parliament resumed for what will likely be its last sitting before the 2015 election.

Canada's lawmakers fled the capital in December for their month-long Christmas break. Now, they've got just a few short months to put the finishing touches on the 41st Parliament's legacy.

In a speech to supporters on Sunday, the prime minister outlined the plan: first up is new anti-terror legislation, then new measures to stiffen penalties for violent offenders, and finally introducing a balanced budget.

Canada's leader then stepped off the stage to take selfies with supporters as the journalists present were corralled to the back of the room and summarily told to leave. No journalists were permitted to ask Harper any questions.

This, as terrorist groups make renewed called for attacks on Canada, the Supreme Court takes aim at several new pieces of Conservative tough-on-crime legislation, and plunging oil prices frustrate Ottawa's efforts to get the Canadian economy back on track.

Parliament is scheduled to sit for 15 weeks between now and the middle of June, when it is slated to rise for the summer. In other words, with the federal election slotted for October 19, the government needs to get everything done by the summer.

Fighting terror
After months of alluding to new anti-terror legislation in the works, Justice Minister Peter MacKay is expected to announce the new bill on Friday.

"These measures are designed to help authorities stop planned attacks, get threats off our streets, criminalize the promotion of terrorism, and prevent terrorists from travelling and recruiting others," Harper said in his Sunday speech, hastily adding that, "to be clear, in doing so, we shall be safeguarding our constitutional rights of speech, of association, of religion and all the rest."

Two sections of the Criminal Code have been singled out as targets, introduced by the Liberals in 2001 and beefed up by the Conservatives in 2013, allowing police to preventively detain suspected terrorists without charge, if they believe an attack is being planned. Those powers have only been used once so far, and the Conservatives have been considering loosening the judicial thresholds to make them more accessible to law enforcement.

"We're doing it in a way that is really focused on not only thresholds, but the practical application of the current sections and whether they're sufficient," MacKay said.

Speaking with journalists in October, MacKay also indicated that they would be looking at online advocates of terrorism.

"There's no question that the whole issue around radicalization and the type of material that is often used that we think is inappropriate and we think, quite frankly, can contribute to—again, this is my word—the poisoning of young minds, that this is something that needs to be examined, the type of material, the type of images," MacKay said, acknowledging that his government is looking at powers to remove online material that glorifies terrorism, and possibly even to prosecute those who disseminate it.

MacKay said they were looking at similar legislation passed in Europe.

This sort of legislation exists in France, where the government has faced backlash for curtailing freedom of speech after dozens of investigations were launched into those who were "glorifying" terrorism.

Asked by VICE, however, MacKay tried to temper down fears that the legislation would be a big change.

"I wouldn't want anyone left with the impression that these are broad, sweeping changes," MacKay said in the foyer of the House of Commons. "These are being done in a way that is very much informed by both recent experience and ongoing examination of many security measures that really need to be examined in detail. This is a deep dive. This not something that is being done in any, as I say that is simply responding to these events on Parliament Hill."

The House of Commons will also be debating C-44 in the coming weeks. That legislation was introduced last October, with the intent of allowing CSIS, Canada's spy agency, more power to operate abroad and cooperate with the NSA and its Canadian counterpart, CSEC.

MacKay said the Conservatives have been listening to criticism, "constructive or otherwise," from the courts and from watchdogs about the government's spying program.

Balancing budgets
The Harper government has spent much of the past few years bragging loudly about its prowess at fiscal management, job creation, and economic growth.

But, thanks to a pissing match between the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) cartel and American oil producers, the price of oil has plunged and left Canadian exports in the lurch.

That has led banks to scale back Canadian economic growth predictions. TD Bank now expects growth to be 2.4 percent for the 2014 fiscal year once the numbers are available, and just 2 percent for 2015. That's a downward revision of about half a percent overall.

TD also expects the Alberta economy to come to a stand-still next year, while equally oil-dependent Newfoundland is predicted to fall into a recession.

Growth in Ontario and British Columbia, buoyed by the manufacturing and exports that are made easier by a low Canadian dollar, is expected to carry much of the country.

Meanwhile, the Bank of Canada made the announcement that it would pare down interest rates to just 0.75 percent. That should put some coal into the engines of manufacturers, and could even encourage some oil companies to continue investing in the tar sands despite rock-bottom oil prices.

That puts the Harper government in a rough spot. As of the end of last year, Ottawa was predicting a big surplus with plenty of wiggle room, even with the Conservatives' intention to introduce their $2-billion income-splitting plan.

Even so, the government isn't backing down: the budget will still be balanced, albeit later than usual. Finance Minister Joe Oliver says the budget won't arrive until April, at the earliest. It's usually delivered in February.

Harper swore to supporters that the budget would be balanced this year, eliciting some raucous applause.

"You know, with the falling oil prices, the Government's fiscal flexibility has been reduced, at least for the short term," he admitted, before taking a swipe at the opposition. "To some, it's a reason not to balance the budget. But to them, there is always a reason not to balance the budget."

The prime minister went on to slag former prime minister Pierre Trudeau's economic record, casting him as the father of Canada's sizeable debt.

The NDP fired back, demanding that the government release its financial data to let citizens know just where the country's finances stand. They're calling it a "reality check."

The Liberals remained mum on Monday morning, but had accused Harper of making up economic policy on the fly. Party leader Justin Trudeau wouldn't say, however, whether or not the government should just run a deficit.

Tackling crime
Even though it feels like they've covered their bases already, Harper has promised a crown jewel in his tough-on-crime agenda.

"For the protection of Canadians, a life sentence will mean exactly that, a sentence for life!" Harper told the crowd on Sunday.

In Canada, a life sentence doesn't actually mean the rest of the person's life. Every convict is eligible for parole after 25 years. The Harper government has done a fair bit to keep supposedly dangerous criminals in jail—stiffening penalties for those not criminally responsible, imposing mandatory minimums on a slew of crimes, and imposing harsh new penalties on would-be gang members—but that automatic 25-year parole remains.

The government has sought to get around it in the past. By introducing consecutive sentences, Ottawa has made it so that anyone convicted of multiple violent crimes—among them sexual assault, abduction, murder, or aggravated assault—will have their minimum parole eligibility stacked.

That means that if someone is charged with four counts of first degree murder, their parole eligibility would be 100 years instead of 25.

But the language coming from the government this week appears to suggest that some criminals will lose the possibility for parole outright.

Also on the docket for Parliament is a private member's bill that lawyers say could criminalize anti-pipeline protests, as VICE reported in December.

Two bills that likely won't see the light of day again are two NDP-written bills: one would give trans Canadians the same human rights protections as gay and lesbian people, while the other would legalize sports betting.

The trans rights bill, as VICE has reported, is being held up by the Senate because the government is freaked out by the idea of recognizing trans people.

The sports betting bill, C-290, is also being held up by the Senate. It seeks to remedy the absurd reality that sports betting is legal in Canada only if you place bets on more than one sport. The bill seeks to legalize single-game betting.

The unelected Senate has passed scores of other legislation while leaving those two bills to sit, untouched. It's increasingly unlikely that either will be passed.

While this is going on, the Supreme Court will pass down several decisions that could blow new holes in the Harper government's previous tough-on-crime legislation. The top court will rule whether the Tories' mandatory minimum sentencing is unconstitutional, whether the government's anti-human smuggling rules go too far, and where medical marijuana users' rights begin and end.

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.

The Northeast Blizzard Is Just Another Sign of Global Warming

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We've heard for years how climate change is making the weather more extreme. If you live between New York City and Boston, you're probably seeing the evidence outside your window tonight in the form of lots and lots (and lots) of snow. Both cities are at risk of breaking their all-time single storm snowfall records (26.9 inches in 2006 and 27.5 inches in 2003, respectively).

That's quite a feat for the Northeast, which has some of the longest-running weather databases in the country (records have been kept continuously in NYC's Central Park since 1869). With up to 30 inches expected in New York City and "isolated totals of three feet" in the Boston area, this kind of snowstorm is very, very rare—"unprecedented," according to the National Weather Service.

When you look closer at the record books, a more ominous trend jumps out: Five of the ten biggest snowstorms in New York City have happened since 2003. This week's blizzard will likely make number six, bumping the 18-inch storm recorded on December 26, 1872 from the list. While climate change deniers will happily seize this as proof of a vast liberal conspiracy, the real question is more concerning: What if global warming is actually making snowstorms worse?

FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver ran the numbers on Monday, posting a comprehensive analysis of extreme snowfalls for the last 100 years in New York City. He explains that although total snowfall in New York City has held steady over the last century, the number of snowy days has declined. He then tries to calculate the odds that such a trend would happen on its own—that is, without the help of increased evaporation from warmer oceans and possible changes in the jet stream.

The results show a very slim chance—between 0.2 and 4 percent, depending on how you calculate the numbers—that the city's recent snowstorm streak is just a fluke. Rather, the numbers suggest that the Earth's warming atmosphere is simultaneously eliminating smaller snowfalls and boosting big ones. Indeed, the Northeast is already seeing a boost in big storms, with a 71 percent increase in extreme precipitation since 1958.

But New York's big blizzard days may be numbered. The "sweet spot" for snow here is between 20 and 30 degrees Fahrenheit, and right now, the temperature still dips low enough for all the evaporated moisture caused by global warming to turn into snow. As the rate of climate change accelerates, the number of cold days will likely continue to dwindle, and so will the snowstorms.

We don't have to revert to advanced statistical analysis or atmospheric physics to know that climate change is making the impact of big storms worse. In a much more direct way the National Weather Service in Boston has been warning that this week's blizzard might permanently alter Massachusetts geography, with a storm surge that could create "one or more new inlets." The link to climate change is pretty obvious: Sea levels have risen about a foot or so across the Northeast over the last 100 years, about half of which is directly attributable to melting glaciers and warming oceans worldwide.

This may not come as a shock—most of us have been living with the realities of climate change for quite a while now. But the fact that we are seeing its effects in snowstorms should give us pause about what's to come.

Follow Eric Holthaus on Twitter.

Elvis’s Honeymoon House Is on Sale for a Mere $8.5 Million

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[body_image width='1000' height='750' path='images/content-images/2015/01/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/26/' filename='elviss-palm-springs-honeymoon-house-is-for-sale-for-a-mere-85-million-body-image-1422315905.jpg' id='21360']The author and his wife outside Elvis's house. All photos courtesy of the author

Throughout my childhood I hoped and prayed that somehow Elvis was my real dad. Eventually, after I realized my dream was a mathematical impossibility, I decided I wanted to simply be Elvis. Sometime in my mid 20s I bought a 1960 Cadillac, started an absurd and unnecessary gun collection, and jumped headfirst into an unhealthy pill addiction. Like Elvis I quickly ballooned, from 140 to 215 pounds, limiting myself to two or three bowel movements a month. I was well on my way to dying on the throne, just like Elvis did, trying to push a watermelon out a grape-sized hole.

Luckily my wife came along and cleaned me up. Made an honest man out of me. We tied the knot on July 1, 2006 in an Elvis-themed wedding complete with four-foot tall Elvis bust ice sculptures and an exact replica of the cake Elvis and Priscilla ate on their wedding day. Next year for our ten-year anniversary we're planning on renewing our vows in Vegas and getting 450-pound Big Elvis to remarry us.

Last weekend Vans flew Patrick O'Dell and myself, along with all their bloggers, to Palm Springs for the weekend for a social media summit. I brought my wife along so we could begin planning our Vegas wedding. After hearing about our plans, O'Dell, a Palm Springs regular, told us, "You know, the house Elvis rented for his honeymoon is right down the road. They give tours. Maybe they'll rent it to you for your second honeymoon."

Within the first four minutes of the tour we learned that they'd do us one better! Elvis's honeymoon house is on the market for the low, low price of $8.5 million (recently reduced from $9.5 million). I'm going to be living in the same space that my imaginary father rented! I spent the majority of the two-hour tour of the magnificently futuristic (every room in the house is round) four-bedroom, five-bath, 5,000–square foot home scoping out closet space to figure out where I was going to store all my crap when we move in.

[body_image width='1000' height='750' path='images/content-images/2015/01/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/26/' filename='elviss-palm-springs-honeymoon-house-is-for-sale-for-a-mere-85-million-body-image-1422315960.jpg' id='21362']Darlene Perez, the world champion Priscillla Presley lookalike.

There's a scene at the end of Richard Pryor's Brewster's Millions where Pryor steps into a room built specially for him and says, "This is the room I want to die in." I felt the exact same way the moment I walked through the front doors of my new home. Instantly all my senses were attacked. The smell of Brut and Hai Karate permeated the entire house, the sweet, sweet sounds of Love Me Tender pumped into each room and everywhere I looked was a treasure trove of Elvis photographs and memorabilia. Standing in the foyer surrounded by all that splendor was the beautiful Darlene Perez, a world champion Priscilla Presley lookalike. My heart skipped a beat. Without realizing it, I unhooked my hand from my wife's and took a large step away from her and toward Darlene. I was smitten. The words I was typing out in my head accidentally fell out of my mouth. "Hubba, hubba," I said, and Darlene blushed.

Darlene told us the brief history of the year Elvis spent in the house and how Lisa Marie was conceived in the bed just up the stairs and born nine months later to the day. As we looked upon the bed I dreamt of a life with both my wife and Darlene. A life where I wore my Elvis eagle jumpsuit, Darlene dressed in Priscilla's garb, and my wife wore Marilyn Monroe outfits (whose house next door could be clearly seen from my new backyard) as we lived out the rest of our days in character, like Harmony Korine's Mister Lonely, in some sort of time-traveling sex triangle.


[body_image width='1000' height='750' path='images/content-images/2015/01/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/26/' filename='elviss-palm-springs-honeymoon-house-is-for-sale-for-a-mere-85-million-body-image-1422316028.jpg' id='21364']
The clear view of Marilyn Monroe's house

[body_image width='800' height='1110' path='images/content-images/2015/01/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/26/' filename='elviss-palm-springs-honeymoon-house-is-for-sale-for-a-mere-85-million-body-image-1422316125.jpg' id='21365']The author in the bed where Lisa was conceived

What makes tours of the Honeymoon House better than Graceland is that Darlene actually allowed us to take photos on the bed where Lisa Maria was conceived. "I bet Elvis was on top," I told my wife. "That's how you make girls."

The room just to the left of the entrance has a couch that runs the entire perimeter of the room where Elvis and Priscilla greeted their guests after returning from their Vegas wedding. I studied the home movies from that day as they looped in televisions around the room so I could remember all the details and have the caterers recreate them for when I welcomed guests after our Vegas wedding.

Darlene walked about pointing out important details of how the house played a key part in Elvis's life. She pointed to a large portrait of Elvis and Priscilla hanging above the couch and said, "See Elvis's tan in that photo? He got that tan at this house. And see that rock in the picture? It's this rock right here (pointing to the wall), nothing has ever changed in this room." I was starting to worry that the homeowners might realize $8.5 million is far less than what such an important piece of musical history is actually worth. I can barely afford the mortgage on my tiny, suburban New Jersey home, but suddenly I was seeing the investment possibilities of the Honeymoon House.

In the kitchen, Darlene stopped in front of the industrial-sized refrigerator and turned to us to whisper a secret. We gathered close and she said, "I don't usually do this on the tours, but I'm going to show you where Elvis's wedding cake was stored." She pulled back the heavy doors to reveal the place where "Elvis's hands surely touched when reaching for some of that leftover cake," and we all swooned. You could almost taste the kirschwasser.

[body_image width='1000' height='750' path='images/content-images/2015/01/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/26/' filename='elviss-palm-springs-honeymoon-house-is-for-sale-for-a-mere-85-million-body-image-1422316347.jpg' id='21368']

The photo of tan Elvis

[body_image width='1000' height='750' path='images/content-images/2015/01/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/26/' filename='elviss-palm-springs-honeymoon-house-is-for-sale-for-a-mere-85-million-body-image-1422316250.jpg' id='21366']Elvis's fridge

Connected to my kitchen is Elvis's rumpus room. The room is furnished with a jukebox, a mannequin wearing a leather motorcycle suit, and a replica of the exact same ceramic white monkey that can be seen in Graceland. "Anyone know the difference between this monkey and the one in Graceland?" Darlene asked. We racked our brains, guessing out loud, that perhaps this one didn't house a hidden gun or something of that nature. "Nope," she said. "The difference is you can touch ours." And touch it we did. The entire group rushed to rub their hands all over Elvis's pretend pet.

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[body_image width='1000' height='750' path='images/content-images/2015/01/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/26/' filename='elviss-palm-springs-honeymoon-house-is-for-sale-for-a-mere-85-million-body-image-1422315814.jpg' id='21356']

Perhaps the most shocking and awe-inspiring of anything in the house—even more so than the six-foot-deep standing bathtub (Elvis only took standing baths)—were the drinking straws on display in a trophy case of various Elvis belongings. Darlene explained that she and her sister had found those straws under five-inches of dirt in the backyard. The straws had been confirmed by men who worked security during the honeymoon party to be, in fact, the very same straws that Elvis drank from that day. I looked at my wife as if we'd just hit the lottery. I silently mouthed to her, "What if one of the straws has Elvis's DNA and we can sell those to a scientist who can use the DNA to grow a new Elvis on the back of a mouse??? We'll be rich! RICH. I SAY! RICH!!!"

Unfortunately my wife is a poor lip reader and had no idea what I was saying.

[body_image width='1000' height='750' path='images/content-images/2015/01/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/26/' filename='elviss-palm-springs-honeymoon-house-is-for-sale-for-a-mere-85-million-body-image-1422316451.jpg' id='21370']The straws with Elvis's possible (and glorious) DNA

If you're an Elvis fan or even just into Hai Karate, I urge you to make a pilgrimage to Palm Springs ASAP, because I'm currently in the process of starting one of those begging accounts on GoFundMe or Kickstarter to help raise the money needed to pay for my new home and I can assure you that when I get a hold of it the tours are going to stop.

Visit Elvis Honeymoon and follow @DarlingPresley

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

EDM Is Taking Over TV

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EDM Is Taking Over TV

Will You Be Able to Order Drugs in New York City During the Blizzard?

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This guy isn't carrying drugs, but these are the sorts of conditions that drug deliverymen will have to deal with. Photo via Flickr user momentcaptured1

If you don't live in New York City, the whole premise of getting drugs delivered might be foreign to you. Your experience of procuring pot probably involves texting someone you vaguely remember from high school and being forced to make small talk with him inside his mom's house, or driving to a weird apartment with more bros than usable pieces of furniture in it and pretending to dig some nameless dude's "dab art" (which is literally cloth pieces covered in black resin stains) as he tries to upsell you an edible.

But here, people form relationships with their weed delivery guys the same way they bond with their favorite Chinese joints. Once you have your guy (or girl), you can hit them up anytime and have them show up on your doorstep in—well, it usually takes a while, and pot dealers are notorious for following their own schedules, but who cares? You're getting drugs brought to your living room!

But Winter Storm Juno—which is apparently what we're calling this windstorm of snow blowing around us at the moment—is testing the professionalism of the city's courageous weed deliverymen and deliverywomen. The storm is affecting all sorts of business (the supermarkets are crowded with people stocking up on bread and water, Uber has put a cap on its surge prices); how are they going to deal with the streets and subways getting a deluge of white powder?

To find out, I called a 28-year-old woman from Boston who's been delivering for six years and working for herself for the last three. As such, she makes her own rules. That also means she takes things on a case-by-case basis during inclement weather.

VICE: So what's your normal volume of business like?
Weed Dealer: Usually everyone gets ready for the weekends a lot, depending on what you're getting them. And with blizzards, people don't prepare enough so people wanna hit you up in the middle of it. I'm sure tonight my phone's gonna start blowing up. Right now, it's fine, but that's because I started a corporate job, so I work from nine to six, sometimes seven, so I have to work and run around and see people at night—but a lot of people will come meet me at my work, too, because they have like these amazing smell-proof bags that let you carry whatever you want.

So what's it like to deliver weed during a blizzard?
It just sucks. You just have to bundle up and trek through and it's like a lot of fucking walking, which is the worst part. I don't mind the train. I don't bike—I just don't feel comfortable on a bike. It would probably make my life a lot easier, but I'm just not into it. And Uber is pretty helpful. A lot of people if they really, really want something—I mean I have a minimum for what I deliver for, but a lot of people, if they really want something, they'll pay for your Uber.

Was there a mad rush to stock up before the storm?
Not that much. I went away for the weekend, and whenever I go away for the weekend, I hit people up, and they'll come and see me before I go. So I saw a good amount of people before. My friend, though, he has a big service and he dispatches me a lot of times. If I want to make extra money, I'll work for him on the weekends. I just talked to him and he's running around like a maniac. But that depends on what you're selling. Different things are in more demand. Bud is pretty mellow, because it's like... it's weed. But if you sell hard drugs, people will call you all night. They'll wake you up at four in the morning. It's crazy. It's annoying.

What do people most often order when they're gonna be cooped up?
I would say weed or pills. Some people like rage and drink and do coke and shit, but not that much. That's more like going out, not staying in. That would be like my nightmare, in a small-ass fuckin' apartment. So I would say like weed and benzos and perks and stuff.

Do you raise prices because of the weather?
If it were a stranger, I would, but if it's my regular people, I don't wanna piss 'em off. But that's when they'll do stuff like I'll pay for your cab, like, "I'll throw you an extra $20 and you can take a cab." Which is very cool.

How much would you lose per day if you couldn't work?
Hundreds of dollars—that's for me, for bud. If you really have a delivery service where you deliver a bunch of different things, then it's thousands of dollars. They make thousands of dollars per day.

What percentage of dealers do you know are not going to pick up the phone tomorrow because of the weather?
Probably like 75 percent.

That still seems like a surprising amount of people willing to go outside.
How bad is it gonna be?

The mayor said it might be the worst snowstorm ever.
Oh, seriously. I am like fuckin' mad out of it. I was wondering why they like, let us go from our work early. And then when I got outside I was like, "Holy shit." So I got in an Uber. But now you're freaking me out. Maybe I won't go out tonight.

Fuck! I don't want to be responsible for your decision one way or the other. Maybe just look at Accuweather and figure it out for yourself.
Yeah, I'll just look out the window and see if everything's shoveled or whatever. Some people don't have another option, so they'll still be there in a few days.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Some Assholes in Honduras Blew Up a Dog and Put the Video Online

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[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/RUHB38VAM40' width='640' height='360']

The January 17 video above, which depicts people strapping explosives to a dog, edits out the part where the dog actually explodes. If for some reason you'd like a link to a full video of this horrible thing that happened, well, you're on your own there, but it exists. The video is high on the list of Worst Things in the World, and far, far crueler than your usual internet shock vid.

What you're seeing is a group of what look like about ten chuckling 17- to 20-year-olds strapping two huge explosive bundles to a dog. It'd be bad enough if they were ten-year-old kids without fully formed brains who were using rinky-dink fireworks bought from the back of someone's truck. It still wouldn't be forgivable, but at least there would be an element of experimentation.

The dog is also skinny and clearly frightened—it wouldn't be acceptable if it was rabid and needed to be put down, but the way it seems to known what's coming makes it harder to watch. Worst of all, the ten men clearly think it's a hilarious idea.

The internet pitchfork squads are, of course, out for the blood of the guys in the video. A Reddit commenter named RubyRadley wrote this morning that "The names of these two pieces of shit should be in big bold letters on the headline of every article written about them." I assume RubyRadley means the two people manhandling the dog, not the many, many bystanders who could have intervened. But for what it's worth their names are out there.

An outraged internet person named Amanda Perry grabbed their names from a Honduran newspaper and put them online. In fact, the story took off when she saw it on LiveLeak and tried to get the Honduran government to take action by starting an online petition at a site called YouSignAnimals. Last week the Honduran newspaper El Heraldo reported that the people involved ended up receiving a fine of 2,000 lempiras, or $95, and have to undergo 40 hours of community service. That might seem like a slap on the wrist, but in a country with a purchasing power below that of Botswana, that adds up to quite a bit of money.

Anyway, the police in Honduras have more on their plates than any other cops in the world. They just got finished shuttling a new Miss Honduras to the Miss Universe Pageant after the previous Miss Honduras, María José Alvarado, was mysteriously murdered. (The country has made serious progress in reducing its murder rate recently.)

In other words, all things considered, the punishment these assholes received was a decent outcome. All that's left now is for you to vent your rage into a comments section.

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But after you do that, if you feel the need to get back at these little maniacs—and I know some of you will—maybe try and steer your rage boner in a productive direction. Practical steps to reduce cruelty to animals exist. Did you know that World Spay Day is next month? Maybe you'll feel better if you volunteer.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter


London's Last Sex Cinema Is Back from the Dead, So I Paid It a Visit

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

It's a cold-as-fuck Friday night in South London. The gray doorway bears a sign saying: "487—Private Members Only—Stiff Door, Push Hard." I note at least three double entendres, comply, and step into a black box shaped like a wardrobe. There is no light, except from a small lozenge-shaped hole at eye-level. A girl's face appears. She eyes me suspiciously.

"We're shutting in half an hour."

I ask if I can have a quick look around, just for a couple of minutes.

"Ooooh, I don't know—there's a lot you can do in two minutes, darling."

She lets me in anyway, buzzing me through a door on my right. I descend a handsome wooden staircase down into darkness. I may have entered through a wardrobe, but this is not Narnia. There is the sound of amplified female cries of pleasure, and the sharp smell of fresh paint, amyl, and cum. Everything is painted black, everything looks new. I pass two "private cabins"—little cave-like rooms with low wooden benches and a flatscreen TV screwed to the wall, each with a furtive looking punter sat within—into the main arena. Here, six rows of as-yet-unstained red velvet seats face a huge HD screen. A group of men of mixed ages sit avidly glued to Fuck Dollz II. Fans of communal wanking rejoice: it's January 2015 and I'm standing in London's brand new—and only—public porn cinema.

In July 2014, I wrote an article commemorating the demise of Mr. B's in Islington, the last adult cinema in the UK capital, which had been alive in various guises for over 40 years. It was finally closed by Paul Convery of Islington Council last summer as part of his quest to gentrify the borough. At the time, the cinema's owners promised that they would find new premises and continue trading elsewhere. This seemed little more than a romantic dream—wank shack proprietors are not known to be the most driven operators, and the combined scourge of urban gentrification and readily available internet fap-matter made it seem unlikely. But against all odds, Mr. B's have done it, setting up shop south of the river.

Club 487 is situated on a typical London street in Deptford. There are pubs, the gentrified Royal Albert, and the altogether more scary Irish gaff, the Little Crown, a Peruvian hair product emporium, the Iyengar Yoga Institute, a Morley's Chicken shop, and the Lima Food and Wine store with its bright green frontage. Not necessarily the kind of place where you'd expect to find a palace of public onanism. But it was the first available premises the owner could find, according to Danny, the friendly, earnest-looking manager.

Danny sits in what is currently the office, a large bare Victorian front room, surrounded by cans of paint, stepladders, screwdrivers, hammers, and other tools. Porn plays on a small TV set. There's a half-finished quarter bottle of whiskey on the floor beside him.

"Word's getting around, mate. The old regulars are starting to come down. And we had a coachload down from Birmingham the other day. It's going well."

Festively, Club 487 opened on New Year's Day 2015.

Down in the Stygian gloom, it becomes apparent that much of the audience is made up of former Mr B's habitués. I spot Dave, a man in his 60s who always wears a baseball cap bearing his name and is prone to getting drunk and naked while watching the movies. I also see Steve, the pinstriped banker who cuts an incongruous, Patrick Bateman–style figure. But there are new customers here, too. Eyes watch as I hurry past the private viewing cabins, where a lone man sits in each, awaiting a companion. There is a strangely hypnotic atmosphere here—no conversation, just the sound of amplified, counterfeit female ecstasy and the occasional moans of the covert fappers present.

In an era where pop stars and actors are banding together to protest against the blandness that property developers have wrought in Soho, and where puritanism—largely driven by money—increasingly seeks to prohibit places like Club 487, how long it survives for must be open to question.

Whatever you may personally think of adult cinemas, the fact is that the "harm" they do to local areas is nonexistent. Club 487 has a members-only policy. It is hidden behind two very heavy gray doors. It has cameras installed to ensure that no one loiters outside (and after all, why would they?). If you didn't know it was there, you would pass it without being any the wiser.

But Deptford, which has long been tagged "the new Shoreditch," is currently being marketed ferociously to moneyed foreign investors. In a cheesy promotional video covered already by VICE, Tim Murphy, managing director of IP Global, an investment company tasked with flogging new flats by The Cathedral Group to overseas buyers, describes the area as "the apex of fashionability." "You can just see it hasn't had all that money thrown at it yet," he says. "And that's what you want. When you're investing in property, you don't want trendy stores ... and Starbucks everywhere, because that means the prices have already gone [up]... when the artists start coming, that's when you want to get in!"

Artists, yes. When hoary, rain-coated masturbatory enthusiasts start coming (pun intended)—less so. The scourge of "place-making" is being visited on Deptford as it has on so many other areas of London, and I can see pressure being exerted on venues like Club 487 that don't sit comfortably on some sanitized marketing plan. But cities are all about diversity and a tolerance for the preoccupations of others, as long as they're harmless. And why should the amenities of places like Deptford or Soho be dictated by a bunch of investors in Kuala Lumpur who will probably flip the flats they buy to turn a profit without even setting foot in them?

It is late afternoon, before the evening rush. Downstairs, in the gloom of the cinema, the orgiastic white noise persists. Dave and three other men sit on red velvet seats, transfixed in the glow of Anal Debauchery 3.

"Things are going well. We've got Debbie coming down next Thursday," Danny tells me as I leave. "She's a real star on the circuit. Brings her own entourage with her."

The mind boggles. Whatever the future holds, for the moment Club 487 is thriving.

Follow John on Twitter.

Are You an Asshole for Ordering Food in a Blizzard? We Asked an Ethicist

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Are You an Asshole for Ordering Food in a Blizzard? We Asked an Ethicist

​I Attended Bride World Expo as a Fake Bride-to-Be

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All photos by Michelle Groskopf

On a rainy Saturday in January, I registered as a bride-to-be and attended the 2015 Bride World Expo in Los Angeles. The thing is, I'm not a bride-to-be. I am a non-engaged person who has been dating a guy for two months. I have divorced parents and zero desire to get married anytime soon. I scream in agony every time I receive a wedding invite. I am very much the opposite of Bride World's target demographic, but goddammit I am a journalist, and I was going to experience Bride World the way a bride would.

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Arriving at the convention center where this World was to take place, I saw ads for at least a dozen wedding services even before I got to the registration booth. Bride World Expo is a bastion of aspiration capitalism, that alluring implication that if you just buy this one more thing, it could be your ticket out of this middle- to lower-middle-class hellhole. An event like this assumes you either have no price ceiling for your wedding, or you are willing to go into endless debt for it. Because it's an expo, the latter is more likely—the wealthy are not attending expos. They are practicing dressage and hiring someone to plan this shit for them.

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I had pre-registered as a bride, but my official "bride" sticker wasn't ready when I arrived. They said it was due to a clerical error, but I knew in my heart that my outfit was a dead giveaway that I was not really a bride. How could someone who looked as schlubby as I did, in Converse and hoodie from Target, be someone's future wife? The real brides were all dressed up and glowing from their pre-wedding facials.

Without a sticker, I briefly worried that vendors wouldn't try to sell me stuff. That worry lasted about ten seconds, before I was barraged by people asking about my bridal status and did I need a florist for the big day? They expected a lot more committal than I was prepared for—they wanted real times, real dates, the name of your fiancé. [body_image width='1200' height='800' path='images/content-images/2015/01/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/26/' filename='i-attended-bride-world-expo-as-a-fake-bride-to-be-122-body-image-1422315876.jpg' id='21358']

At the David's Bridal booth, I was told that if I gave my home address and phone number and committed to a date, time, and store location, I would receive a coupon for $50 off my wedding dress. This didn't seem like much of a discount in the grand scheme of wedding dresses, but like I said, I'm not Bride Word's target demographic. Wedding expos exist to capitalize on women who feel pressured to have a fancy wedding but can't afford a wedding planner, and are easily duped into buying things for the sake of "getting a good deal." You don't need an ice sculpture to get married, but don't try telling that to the people at the ice sculpture booth, or the enormous group of women surrounding it.

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I literally ran away from the David's Bridal booth and, unwittingly, into the arms of a timeshare salesperson. It struck me that a timeshare is another little piece of luxury advertised as a good deal, a way you can have a vacation home without having to be rich. I had never been pitched a timeshare before, and I stood there for a while wondering what she was selling me, because she never quite said it. She just invited me to a brunch. I said I'd have to ask my fake fiancé, and she said I could just come by myself. I panicked and said my fiancé wouldn't let me. Then I laughed too hard and said, "Ugh, men!" before backing into a mannequin at the booth of euphemistic bridalwear line Della Curva, "for the curvy bride."

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I had only been here for 22 minutes and I already wanted to go to bed. The expo was fluorescently lit, featured multiple DJs playing different songs at the same time, and, as far as I could tell, completely without drinking water. There was no water in the entire hall. Is this a purposeful tactic? Do people buy more when they're thirsty? The only available beverage was a free sample of Keurig coffee. It was the worst thing I have ever put in my mouth.

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There was also a distinct lack of sweets at this expo. This was a wedding expo, for God's sake—where were the cookies and petit fours and cake pops? To be fair, there was a lot of candy, but you couldn't eat any of it. It was all for display at various candy vendors' booths. It was almost comically cruel, and may I add, a laughably bad sales tactic. If they had given me one free Rolo, I would have bought ten on the spot and put down a deposit on a Rolo cart for my fake wedding.

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Candyless and alone, I wandered the aisles of the Bridal Expo, past gaggles of women wearing shirts that said "Bride Icon," a phrase I still don't understand or think is grammatically correct.

I passed a palm reader, whose booth looked invitingly calm amid the fluorescent lights and "luxury DJs" (another mystery term that was never explained) blaring pop songs. I had never had my palm read before, and I don't believe in it, but her booth looked quiet and had several places to sit, so I was on board. I was scared she would sense my skepticism and yell at me for being a nonbeliever, but she was nice to me and didn't try to sell me a timeshare. In fact, she was right about several things right off the bat: She said that I was career-driven, hesitant to get married, and even more hesitant to have kids (all correct). She also correctly guessed—or knew?—that I was in a new relationship, and was happy about it. She was very insistent that I would marry him within three years, which is probably just statistically likely for people around my age, but still made me pause for a second. Then she insisted that either his or my name started with J, which neither was wrong—I lost a little bit of faith in the process, but you can't win them all. As I stood up to leave, she told me I had a very psychic energy. I was flattered in spite of myself. She told me to use this year to "focus on love." I thanked her and left.

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Leaving the expo hall, I raced to a water fountain and just barely managed to escape death from thirst. I thought about what the palm reader said. What if, in the next three years, I really was a bride-to-be? Would I find myself back at a bridal expo, but "for real"? Maybe when you're getting married, the promise of lifelong love softens the fluorescent lights and the vendors jabbing clipboards in your face. I can't say for sure. But it's still hard for me to imagine myself going back there willingly.

At the smaller water fountain next to me, a little boy was playing with two toy triceratops from the dinosaur exhibit in the next hall over. He was making them kiss. I took a picture to show my boyfriend.

Follow Allegra Ringo on Twitter.

VICE INTL: Death in a Can

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Max Dog Brewing sells canisters of nitrogen for carbonating beer—or killing yourself, depending on who you ask.

We asked the man behind the company and euthanasia advocate Dr. Philip Nitschke, who in 1996 became the world's first physician to administer a legal, lethal injection in Northern Australia. The Australian government later quashed the North's euthanasia law, so Philip set up an organization called Exit International to help elderly people end their lives. Since then he's pioneered several suicide devices, written three books, and formed a political party, all in the pursuit of legalized euthanasia.

The Racism and Incompetence Behind the Unsolved Firebombing of an NFL Legend's Church

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The Racism and Incompetence Behind the Unsolved Firebombing of an NFL Legend's Church

Where Exactly Is the Rule That Says Governments Can't Negotiate with Terrorists?

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According to a video the Islamic State uploaded a week ago, the Japanese government had until 12:50 AM EST on Friday morning EST to pay $200 million or two Japanese citizens would die. When that deadline passed, members of the Islamic State say they executed one of them, Haruna Yukawa, and that if their demands aren't met, they'll execute the other, the journalist Kenji Goto.

But instead of their outlandish $200 million from Japan, the terrorists now want Jordan to release Sajida Mubarak Atrous al-Rishawi, a failed suicide bomber currently being held on terrorism charges. They assume, perhaps rightly, that Japan will talk to the US, which will in turn talk to Jordan, and that some kind of arrangement can be reached.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe didn't pay the ransom—in doing so, he honored a pledge the G8 countries made in 2013 not to negotiate with terrorists—but IS apparently thinks that a prisoner exchange is more palatable to Japan than a straight-up ransom payment.

They may be right about that—though there's a general stigma against governments "negotiating with terrorists," it's more of a fuzzy line than a hard and fast rule.

The logic to not giving in to terrorists, even when that could result in the deaths of hostages, was spelled out in a 2012 speech by David S. Cohen, who is now the Treasury Department's Under Secretary for Terrorism and Finance Intelligence:

Ransom payments lead to future kidnappings, and future kidnappings lead to additional ransom payments. And it all builds the capacity of terrorist organizations to conduct attacks. We must find a way to break the cycle. Refusing to pay ransoms or to make other concessions to terrorists is, clearly, the surest way to break the cycle, because if kidnappers consistently fail to get what they want, they will have a strong incentive to stop taking hostages in the first place.

This defiance in the face of threats is an old idea, and it's included in some of America's founding mythology—in 1801 Thomas Jefferson famously refused to negotiate with the Barbary Pirates. But for most of American history, negotiations with terrorists were handled on a case-by-case basis.

When the shit hit the fan, presidents like Nixon were known to dispense ransoms to the tune of $2 million to airline hijackers. Then there was Carter's unfreezing of $8 billion in Iranian assets during the Iranian Hostage Crisis. Even during this time, openly paying ransoms was shameful enough to be treated in a hush-hush manner. Fred Burton, Vice President of Intelligence at Stratfor and a former State Department employee, told me he wasn't in the room when money was exchanged, but it was obvious when a payment had been delivered.

"We would always deploy ahead of time, in anticipation of a hostage being released," he told me. "I would wonder, as we're flying over the North Atlantic on a special air mission out of Andrews Air Force Base, What the heck's going on? How would anybody know these hostages are coming out? But we would get to Germany, and the next thing you know, a hostage would be released in Lebanon."

The "we don't negotiate with terrorists" thing wasn't crystallized until 1985, when President Ronald Reagan gave a speech about the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 by members of Hezbollah and the Islamic Jihad. Just like IS did this week, the groups demanded the release of prisoners, not money. In response, Reagan said the following:

America will never make concessions to terrorists—to do so would only invite more terrorism—nor will we ask nor pressure any other government to do so. Once we head down that path there would be no end to it, no end to the suffering of innocent people, no end to the bloody ransom all civilized nations must pay.

Never mind that Reagan's administration would go on to trade arms for hostages with Iran, this speech was still more or less the genesis of America's modern policy against paying ransoms.

The following year, the vice president's report on counterterrorism made the stance official with the line, "The United States has a clear policy of no concessions to terrorists as the best way to protect the greatest number of people." In 1995, a similar statement showed up in a State Department fact sheet on terrorism. Every president since Reagan has kept up the policy, at least on paper.

But while that's a nice tough-on-terror policy, it's not exactly ironclad. "The State Department has a lot of policies, and policy is not law," Burton told me. "This is one of those Washington soundbites that really don't have a lot of teeth at the end of the day."

The Bowe Bergdahl and Peter Moore prisoner exchanges are public examples that show that the US and the UK will occasionally give the bad guys what they want if the price is right.

But the US does a better job of keeping negotiations under wraps than Austria, France, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland, to name a few countries who are freer with ransom payments than the US or the UK. They have collectively paid tens of millions in ransoms over the past few years, according to the New York Times.

Indeed, hostage-taking remains a profitable business. In his speech, Cohen said that $120 million was paid to terrorists between 2004 and 2012. That's in the same ballpark as the New York Times' estimate of $125 million in ransoms between 2008 and 2014—and more than half of that amount, the paper reported, was paid in the last year. A lot of that is going to al Qaeda, which has made taking Europeans hostages a core part of its business.

The Islamic State, on the other hand, is relatively new at this whole demanding ransom thing. This was the first time the group openly asked for money and it hasn't really worked out, though it has quietly made money from ransom payments in the past.

It's worth noting that there is a case to be made for trading money for hostages. Just look at the scene from about a week ago after two Italian aid workers were released after a multimillion dollar ransom was paid. It doesn't look like an evildoer using government money to stock up on RPGs, it's a family reunion:

When countries like Italy pay ransoms, they do it not by earmarking some government money as a ransom fund, but by pulling shenanigans. In 2003, Germany paid a ransom when a group of Europeans were being held in Mali, but the government dressed it up as aid money for the starving country. Officially, no ransom was ever paid. Similarly, when the Islamic State freed 49 Turkish hostages last year, officials stated that no ransom was paid. IS must have just had a change of heart.

Even the US practices this brand of under-the-table ransom payments according to Burton. He points to the example of Robert Levinson, the former FBI agent who disappeared in Iran in 2007 and is presumably still being held captive by the government. Levinson is a bargaining chip Iran hasn't cashed in yet. "Whenever we're sitting down with Iran over nuclear negotiations, somebody is going to bring up Levinson," Burton told me. "It would not be as blunt as you and I are talking. It would be, 'We would really appreciate the Islamic Republic of Iran doing everything in their power to help us resolve the unfortunate circumstance surrounding the hostage-taking of Robert Levinson.'"

Then there's the State Department's Rewards for Justice Program, which can't be documented as having generated ransom payments, and that's the point. The program hands out rewards for what is called the "favorable resolution" of a situation involving terrorism. According to Burton, however, things can get pretty murky when it comes to who gets what money.

"At it's face value [the reward is] for the arrest for prosecution of a terrorist that's engaged in terrorist activity to include hostage-taking," he told me. "But 'favorable resolution' is pretty much whatever the spies sitting around the table decide it is on that day. So if you can pay an informant to help you get a hostage out, that's a favorable resolution. Now, did you directly pay Hezbollah to get the hostage out? Well, nobody's down in the weeds trying to determine where the money went."

Whatever tactics governments employ, it seems that nothing is going to dissuade criminals and terrorists from holding hostages for ransoms. "In the 35 years I've been in this business, hostage-taking hasn't stopped," Burton said.

Even though it's hard to point to hard data, it's likely that more widespread refusal to pay ransoms really would strengthen the policy and reduce the number of hostage situations, just like Cohen and others claim. Still, it's obviously tough to demand that people put their loved ones on the line like that. The US and UK governments make speeches urging allies to stop paying ransoms from time to time and try to keep insurers from providing kidnap and ransom insurance, and even threaten the families of hostages with charges of funding terrorism if they pay up. James Foley's mother Diane told ABC News that a member of Obama's National Security Council told her that even though IS hadn't publicly demanded money, that she might face "criminal charges" if she sent money in exchange for her son's life.

The threat was likely a bluff. Burton is "not aware of anybody ever being prosecuted for this," and points out that to convict anyone of supporting terrorism, the Department of Justice would have to put the family of a hostage on trial, which is obviously not a very appealing prospect.

Instead of paying for Foley's release, the US reportedly sent in Special Operations forces to take out his kidnappers, but the rescue mission failed, and the hostage was beheaded in August. Last month, a South African named Pierre Korkie—who was supposed to be in the process of being freed after his family reportedly negotiated a ransom deal—got killed when the American military botched an extraction attempt. These fiascos aren't a good way to advertise the no-negotiating policy.

Nonetheless, the Japanese government seems to be following it, at least for now. Possibly as a result, Haruna Yukawa is dead. As for Kenji Goto, the latest IS video statement gave no timeline for his execution, but according to CNN analysts, Islamic State hostage-takers only keep someone alive if they feel like they're going to get something out of it.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Comics: Dingball: 'Farting the Babysitter's Moustache Off'

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Follow Patrick Kyle on Twitter, look at his blog and get his books from Koyama Press.


Pollution Is Damaging Polar Bears’ Dicks

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Photo by Alan D Wilson via Wikipedia

This post first appeared on VICE UK.

Humans have done a fair bit to fuck over polar bears, haven't we? We've slung them in enclosures and filmed them, belly-laughing, as they dance the wretched waltz of insanity. We've melted their natural habitat down to the landscape equivalent of honeycomb. We allow people (in Canada) to shoot them dead because it's a bit of a laugh and they get a nice rug out of it.

Despite all that, it could always be assumed that their furry erections would forever remain untroubled by the interminable folly of man.

That is—as you've probably gathered from this set-up—until now. New research by Denmark's Aarhus University shows that high levels of PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls (carcinogenic compounds used in myriad industrial applications until finally being banned in 2001), are having an adverse effect on the density of polar bears' bacula. The baculum is a bone found within the penis of many species, including bats, hedgehogs, cats, dogs, and sea lions.

The study found a high likelihood that endocrine-disrupting chemicals like PCBs are detrimentally affecting bone mineral density and that, terrifyingly, "reductions in penile BMD [bone density] could lead to increased risk of species extinction because of mating and subsequent fertilization failure as a result of weak penile bones and risk of fractures."

Though the baculum's non-uniformity in mammals means its exact function is unclear, the utter, agonizing pain of fracturing it should be easily imaginable to anyone with the ability to wince.

To collect data, Sonne's team took X-rays of 279 polar bear bacula to ascertain their calcium densities alongside known EDC (endocrine disrupting chemical) levels across a number of Arctic regions.

Though your average polar bear wouldn't exactly appreciate a curious scientist fondling its junk—even a scientist with the very purest of intentions—data collection was sadly much easier than it should have been. The bacula of polar bears are taken as trophies by the hunters who've killed them either for "sport" or subsistence, so testable samples were depressingly simple to locate, and, with them, proof of another clear and more immediate threat to the bears' numbers.

"The study suggests that the baculum may shrink and that it may become more fragile the higher the concentrations of these industrial chemicals," the study's leader, Dr. Christian Sonne, told me. These pollutants naturally gravitate to the higher latitudes and cooler air of the Arctic from the more equatorial regions in which they were produced. The effects of their lingering concentration there, coupled with their slow rate of decay, is further exacerbated by the ongoing damage of climate change, such as habitat reduction.

"We rarely see bacula with sign of fractures, but it could easily occur," said Sonne, "especially when the bears also suffer from energetic stress [food shortage] due to the shrinking in sea ice extension."

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A walrus baculum. Probably not as big as a polar bear's, but you get the idea. Photo by Didier Descouens via Wikipedia

It's this combination of factors that poses the most pressing threat to the bears. "Bears are drawing down further into their fat stores for energy late in the fasting periods," Dr. Andrew Derocher, scientific advisor to Polar Bears International and a University of Edmonton professor of biology, told me. As thinner bears draw down their fat stores due to above-average fasting, "the remaining pollution is released and circulates at higher levels. This means cubs getting milk from their mothers are getting higher doses of pollution and, for those bears that aren't lactating, it means they have to deal with higher pollution levels."

Sonne posits that there could also be another factor at play. "No one knows why bears and other mammals, like seals, have a baculum, but what we know is that it increases in size with latitude," he said.

In 2006, Sonne and his colleagues published a study of East Greenland bears that saw a causal link between these pollutants and smaller than average testes and penises. "Size may matter in polar bears," Sonne said, "as the bears are on a high latitude, the baculum size may have a mating function that's counteracted by PCBs. Therefore, high levels of pollutants may affect reproductive success, as may fractures and deformations of the bacula and, thereby, penis."

It all makes for more depressing reading on polar bears. Last week, the University of Leeds published findings showing how a remote arctic ice cap in Svalbard had thinned by a huge 50 meters since 2012, and in November a study by the Ecological Applications journal showed polar bear numbers in the Beaufort Sea region had plummeted by 40 percent since the year 2000.

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Photo by Alan D Wilson via Wikipedia

"The elephant in the room for polar bears and many other species remains the threat of climate change," Polar Bears International's senior director of conservation, Geoff York, told me. "That primary driver is expected to trigger a host of cascading effects, from habitat alteration and habitat loss, to range shifts and, ultimately, declining population numbers. Toxins like endocrine-disrupting PCBs, along with disease, are two potentially significant wildcards in the climate puzzle. Historically, neither has been a significant threat to polar bears, but that could all change abruptly."

"I don't think the effects of pollution on bone density is a direct threat to the persistence of polar bears as a species at this time—climate change remains the main threat to the species," agreed Derocher. "But there is a high likelihood of synergy between climate change and pollution. Add in potential changes to disease and parasite distribution with warming, like new vectors and hosts—these are concerns going forward."

Sonne succinctly lays out the implications of his study alongside existing conservation concerns: "You starve. Meanwhile, your sexual organs and reproductive health, as well as the immune system, are fucked up."

So, after everything we've already done to the polar bear—disease, habitat loss, parasites, food shortages, and straight-up murder—now, as if solely to kick them while they're down, we're giving them dinky, snap-happy bear dicks and ineffectual little bear balls. Polar bears: Humans definitely owe you one hell of an apology.

Follow Luke Holland on Twitter.

Instagram Art Is a Joke, and It's on You

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Image via amaliaulman on Instagram

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

The Instagram account for "amaliaulman" catalogues the life of a beautiful but unremarkable young twentysomething. Her main interests appear to be yoga and shopping. She's on an Instaquest for self-improvement and her account is full of fitspo-­type gym wear selfies and hashtags like "#training," "#thankful," "#healthy." She describes the decoration of a cafe, the backdrop for one selfie, as "#ethnic #eclectic." Her Instagram is banal as fuck and cruising it is reassuringly dull—comfortably sterile.

Only her four most recent posts break the mould of the artfully-composed mirror pic or the vacuous aspirational mantra ("Start each day with a grateful heart!"). One of them is a black-and-white picture of a rose; the caption reads, "THE END- Excellences and Perfections."

With that, the illusion is shattered. Amalia Ulman has revealed her performance. Excellences and Perfections is an artwork that explores the strained relationship between authenticity, identity, and social media—similar, in a way, to Ryder Ripps' recent exhibition, Ho. Ulman has reproduced our obsession with self­-branding to show that we don't present ourselves through Instagram, we create selves through Instagram, using a series of cultural and material markers of identity.

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I asked what drew her to Instagram to create her work, as opposed to other forms of social media. She told me that she was intrigued by the medium's "lack of textual information."

"Although there is a possibility for writing, Instagram is an image-­based platform, much more than Facebook is," says Ulman. "Very little information is given, and people follow a story only through the images they've seen so far. There are a few personalities on Instagram that I follow and I don't know anything about them except what I've imagined through their images. Instagram is a stage, where there's a public that gazes at you; on Facebook everyone becomes an agent in the story being told."

The irony, of course, is that Ulman now has over 70,000 followers; people were taken in by the performance—whether they understood it or not—and obsessively followed her character through the performance of selfies in luxury hotels (which she claims to have snuck into on occasion).

One user, "Helengo," was keen to inform other unwitting followers of the "truth," commenting on one of Ulman's photos that, "her Instagram account its all about art, everything's a performance, a character she've [ sic] created." Amalia shows that there is no "truth" underpinning our digital existence. Even Helengo's own account is a performance—what Ulman proves is that Instagram accounts can only show us constructed characters.

When I ask about the anger directed at her for duping her followers, she says that, actually, "There were many adverse reactions, but most of them took place before the revelation. I was highly accused for playing roles that, from a feminist perspective, should be challenged. But those characters were precisely chosen for that reason, those clichés from current mainstream narratives were used in an attempt to make it more plausible. The idea was to use the most popular trends adopted by young women in their twenties on Instagram, Tumblr, and Facebook for self-representation." Perhaps, for some of her followers, what was ostensibly a high-concept parody account hit too close to the bone.

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Image via mcginnessworks instagram

Amalia's one of a growing number of artists turning to Instagram to make work aiming to unsettle our comfortable relationship with technology. The bio for the Instagram account of artist Ryan McGinness reads, "Grams, instantly! Delivered to you for free via Instagram." The Instagram images themselves feature stark white text over a black circle; "Digital Socialism," "Eat Your Feed," "Here's an update of my terms." All of McGinness' Instagram works are delivered in this meme-like format. With almost 1,000 of these slogans, they each read as ironic and self-reflexive comments on social media culture itself.

While there's no unified aesthetic, artists who exploit the internet in the way Ulman and McGinness do are often called "post-internet"—a term that some think is already passé. Karen Archey is a critic who's worked extensively on the evolving art movement. What does she think it means? "'Post-internet' refers not to a time after the internet, but to an internet state of mind."

The idea is that the digital is so ubiquitous it's become unremarkable: our lives are so governed by digital technology that our online existences can't be separated from our IRL ones. However, while the digital realm that most of us frequent—the one driven by Google's big­-data capitalism—is all about homogeneous progress, post-internet art searches for glitches and irregularities, and explores the strange, performative potential of cyberspace.

What can Instagram tell us about our "internet state of mind"? "Instagram has become the home for visual storytelling for everyone from celebrities, newsrooms and brands," says Instagram's "About Us" page. It shows how Instagram transforms us all into a brand, into a painstakingly presented image or "visual story" whose construction has to look effortless. Instagram art, in various ways, makes the process of self-­branding visible. You're supposed to laugh at Instagram art. And by laughing at Instagram art, you're laughing at yourself.

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Another artist creatively exploiting Instagram is Doug Abraham. His account, "bessnyc4," aims to mock the clinical, sterile nature of digital technologies; his work splices together porn with high­ fashion ad campaigns, gore and BDSM with the familiar tropes of advertising. A series of Apple logos are reworked with a bloodied mouth, or the image of a man gagged and tied. A porn star's body with Cara Delevingne's face superimposed on it spreads her legs to reveal an owl between them.

If Ulman shows us how Instagram reduces the user to a brand defined by a set of commodities and platitudes, Abraham makes a grotesque joke by collating a brand with images from the darkest corners of the internet. Abraham provides us with the inverse of Ulman's work. If she makes us aware of our fixation with constructing our excellences and perfections on social media, Abraham uses Instagram to reveal what our social media persona has repressed. Abraham takes the piss out of the earnest practice of self branding.

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Amalia went one step further in her performance of self-branding, though. She had cosmetic surgery to physically become her character, sacrificing herself (specifically, her breasts) in the name of art. For her, surgery physically embodies the ability to recreate ourselves on social media. Social media and surgery are both forms of body modification. "The body gets flattened and transformed into an image in an environment that resembles, mostly, the linearity of a book. More than ever, our bodies and our lives are fictionalized and curated to be shared with others. I'm interested in the constant malleability of bodies."

Amalia's interest in the way social media turns us all into a kind of brand is part of a wider interest in the way massive corporations like Amazon and Google have colonized the internet. "What was supposed to be a platform freed from capitalism became a space that capitalism readily adapted itself to," she says. "The market's domination of social life subjugated 'being' into 'having.' Now, the image economy has transformed 'having' into 'appearing': having must be instantly documented for it to be of any value."

Instagram for Amalia embodies a kind of commodity fetishism for the Catfish generation. She tells me that, "Everyone becomes the celebrity of one's own life and the documentation of one's day to day becomes an asset." The hyper-aware world of post-internet art uses social media to make ironic and self-reflexive comments on social media culture itself. But while these kinds of works might be introspective and witty, the question remains: Are they actually art?

Yes. It's art as a meme that can be endlessly reproduced in the non-physical space of the internet, art that sniggers at the earnestness of our social media usage. The question is, as these artists continue to blur the line between performance and reality, how can we distinguish the two? Look out for the next big release from the post-digital canon of art in 2015: "The Existential Crisis of Neoliberalism," an original work performed on Tinder, where we're all in on the joke, without even knowing it.

Follow Naimh McIntyre on Twitter.

VICE Vs Video Games: Tim Schafer Discusses the Classic Video Games ‘Grim Fandango’ and ‘Monkey Island’

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Tim Schafer (All screen shots via)

Tim Schafer talks while he types—and does both loudly, as if to make sure I understand he is a Very Busy Man. Like I didn't already know: his studio, Double Fine Productions, has the high-def remaster of 1998 adventure classic Grim Fandango ready to roll, and then comes the small matter of the second "act" of Broken Age, the point-and-clicker that broke Kickstarter records at the time of its crowd-funding drive in 2012.

And there's plenty more going on at Double Fine. The San Francisco-based studio has another Kickstarter-backed project in the works with Massive Chalice, which moved to Steam Early Access in late 2014. They've also confirmed that a special edition of Day of the Tentacle will appear sometime this year. Schafer worked as co-designer on the 1993 original, one of LucasArts' most rapturously received adventure titles.

While at LucasArts, Schafer was also heavily involved in a design capacity on 1990's The Secret of Monkey Island and its 1991 sequel, LeChuck's Revenge, before stepping up to project leader for 1995's Full Throttle and Grim Fandango. After that, LucasArts canned its adventure titles—so he left to found Double Fine and focus on making games that weren't Star Wars cash-ins.

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Schafer playing Grim Fandango

Today, we're toasting two achievements: the first being the imminent Grim Fandango release for PlayStation, Mac, and Windows platforms; the other the uncommon longevity of the original Monkey Island, a game that the passing of 25 years can't dent the appeal of. Personally, the latter remains one of my favorite games of all time, and one that I can't bring myself to delete from my iPhone (in its special edition form), just in case the urge (re)takes me on a commute. And it frequently does.

Our connection drops once, but rather than leave me hanging when I call back, as some might, Tim's quick to pick up, albeit without breaking the inexorable drumming of fingertips on keyboard. Sometimes the pounding threatens to overpower his answers, but for 40 minutes he's an amiable interviewee, always with a half-chuckle in his responses, expressing warmth that, despite a crackly line and the small matter of 5,385 miles between us, comes over palpably. He's an old pro, obviously, but still speaks with terrific excitement—that he's doing what he absolutely loves is unquestionable.

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Grim Fandango retrospective—the HD remaster is available from the 27th of January

VICE: Looking back at the elements that make up Grim Fandango—the film noir stuff colliding with the Aztec influences, for example—it's a smorgasbord of things that perhaps shouldn't stick together. But they did. What do you put that down to?
Tim Schafer: I'd like to act as if it were a brilliant plan, like I knew deep down that these elements of film noir would gel perfectly with themes of Mexican folklore and the afterlife, and that I had this grand vision of it all coming together. But really it was just what we were into at the time. We loved the art and folklore of the Day of the Dead, and I'd studied some anthropology at college, and I was also reading a lot of Raymond Chandler and watching old Humphrey Bogart movies. Doing that, some connections emerged. And also, the four-year journey of the soul really screamed "adventure game" to me—how you must go on this treacherous journey through the afterlife. It sounded like a big, epic quest.

The crime and corruption of film noir aren't inherently part of the Day of the Dead, but I liked the stories about how people in the afterlife had to worry about money, so relatives would hide some in the lining of their coffins so it wouldn't get stolen. So it's not like Heaven—it's this other world, where you still have troubles and corruption and crime, and that was interesting to me. Also, I just wanted to do something that simply hadn't been done before, and one of the best ways to do that is to look into cultures that are not usually represented in games, and to juxtapose these two things that maybe shouldn't go together. In this case, it touched off this explosion of creativity—every day we were coming up with crazy ideas.

I remember Grim getting several "Game of the Year" style accolades, but while you've said it sold "enough" copies, the genre had lost a lot of commercial appeal. What do you think went "wrong" in gaming at the time that damaged Grim's sales?
If you're a publisher, you have to look at the size of that audience versus the one for a Star Wars game, or something that was just a shooter—these games that you know would represent money in the bank. It's not like adventure games wouldn't sell, and I'm really excited to release Grim now, but the money they'd make wouldn't have represented the maximum take possible for a project at that time. They're just looking for a return on their investment.

It's great that we have tools like Kickstarter now, as fans of adventure games don't care about returns on the investments—they just want the games they love. So when Broken Age happened, that was great. We also have these communities on forums who spread the word about hidden gems.

Community's been a strong factor in keeping Grim Fandango alive, hasn't it?
Yeah, there's a community of adventure games players who've kept all of those old LucasArts adventures playable, using ScummVM and ResidualVM, as otherwise you'd have to pirate these games, or find them on eBay. We really rely on the fans to keep that stuff alive. The new versions give you the point-and-click interface that the original didn't have, but that the fans made, and that will make it more accessible because the original tank controls weren't so easy for everybody. It'll also have direct-drive control, the kind you'd expect in a modern 3D game.

We often like to think of gamers as being quite monolithic, maybe only liking one type of game—but, really, everyone has these completely different profiles when it comes to what games matter to them. Adventure games appeal strongly to people who care about story, originality, and who actually don't mind being stumped for a while because they love that feeling of finally figuring it out. I don't think everyone likes being stuck, so that's the challenge adventure games have. You have to make that "stuckedness" entertaining.

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Tim Schafer plays Grim Fandango, part one

With Grim, how did the remastering process even begin?
We've been doing a lot of digital archaeology. LucasArts provided us with all the assets they had, and we dug and scrounged and turned up these original, uncompressed frames for cut-scenes—and we found a bunch of those. We found the original Pro Tools file for the audio, which enabled us to remaster the score with an actual concert orchestra, which was amazing. And we could also go back in and repaint all the characters, all the textures, and make them look so smooth and pretty—and now we've got dynamic light, so when someone lights a cigarette, it casts a shadow on their face.

The original Grim cost in the region of $3 million to make. If you were to build it from scratch, right now, presumably that figure would be so far below what you'd need?
Probably—but it depends how we did it. As you may have heard from the internet, I'm not very good at guessing budgets.

Did you have to remain restrained with the remastering process? Do you think going too far—making Grim too contemporary—might actually spoil the spirit of the game?
I feel like we trusted ourselves to stay true to the original. Since we made this game in the first place, and have a lot of the same people working on this remaster, we were thinking of the new version as being like the Criterion edition. We wanted to improve the fidelity of everything, without changing the story, or the presentation—by which I mean the order of the puzzles, the actual way in which the characters perform. I think if a fan heard a voice they didn't recognize in the remaster, that'd be really unsatisfying. And we've put a button in there anyway, so you can turn off all the improvements, if you want to.

If this Grim takes off and finds a new audience that demands more, where does that leave you in terms of a sequel?
I've had ideas for sequels of every game I've done, and what I've said before is that I'd love to do Grim as a proper 3D game, with dynamic backgrounds, so that the city of El Marrow would actually be simulated and you could punch out that clown and walk through his tent to visit that festival behind him. That's something I've always dreamed of doing, but no sequel is planned, at the moment. It'd be a challenge, as I think we gave the characters satisfying endings, and it might seem weird to revisit the world with new characters, but... maybe.

In terms of Monkey Island, I know you weren't The Guy on that game—that being Ron Gilbert—but that you were heavily involved. So with it reaching its 25th anniversary, I wanted to ask you about its amazing longevity.
I'd like to think its longevity is simply down to us having so much fun making it. I mean, imagine coming straight out of college and going to work at Skywalker Ranch. It was great! It was crazy, and exactly as much fun as you'd think it'd be. Star Wars was everywhere, and here we were making this new game. The internet wasn't a thing in 1990, so we were pretty isolated up there, and we were really trying to entertain each other when writing the dialogue for Monkey Island.

I'd write stuff, and then Dave [Grossman, co-writer] would try it out, and then Ron would too, and we'd see if he laughed or not. We'd be inspired by each other, and then go away and write something else. Everyone up there was funny, and that's why the game turned out funny.

I guess it's no different to, say, a show like The Simpsons, where writing sessions are collaborative and read-throughs used to gauge how funny an episode is.
It's funny you mention The Simpsons, as that started while we were making Monkey Island. We were like: "Have you seen this?" We'd spend half of our meetings just talking about The Simpsons. I know that show was a big influence on me while we were writing Monkey Island.

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In terms of your input in Monkey Island, what part of it can you look at and say: "That's mine. I did that."
It got split up quite a lot. Ron did the ghost ship, and Dave did Herman Toothrot and the Men of Low Moral Fiber. I did a lot of work on Stan, the used-ship salesman, and the villagers [the cannibals]. I was really stuck on the villagers for a long time, and then Ron says: "Why don't you make them really health conscious?" And it was just like, bing!

You mentioned the need for these adventure games to be entertaining even when the player's stuck, and I think that really came through for the first time with Monkey Island. Were you confident that the game's humor would carry the players through, even while they were gnawing their fingers off?
Oh, we knew we were tormenting them—like, "Wink wink, you know the solution's here!" Part of the puzzle design was to give you a really obvious solution, but to make sure that wouldn't work. Like, you have to hammer a nail. Sure, here's a hammer, and here's a nail. Wrong! That's a rubber hammer. You have to make a metal mold, and kill a cat, and do all these things. OK, we probably wouldn't kill a cat.

Did you follow the Monkey Island series after you left LucasArts?
Y'know, I think they did a good job on Monkey Island 3 [The Curse of Monkey Island], and I was halfway through that when the crunch time came on Grim Fandango, so I lost track of it. Then I started Monkey 4 [Escape from Monkey Island], and didn't finish that, but I did play all of the Tales games that Telltale made. They were funny.

Cheers, Tim.

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The Lost Souls of Thailand's Full Moon Parties

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This post originally appeared on VICE Germany

Haad Rin is an idyllic beach on the island of Koh Phangan in Thailand. But if its white sand and clear waters could speak, they would tell you stories of booze, drugs, and bodily fluids.

The parties held here every full moon can attract up to 30,000 people from all over the world. For years, day-glow backpackers have flocked here to get smashed on mushrooms and drink vodka Red Bull from a bucket while listening to David Guetta and psychedelic trance.

Photographer Ender Suenni has been documenting these parties for the last couple of years. Growing up in Berlin, another place famous for its untamed lifestyle, Ender was interested in these parallel worlds but was confused by some of the behavior – in particular the notion that wearing neon colors has anything to do with having "an authentic rave experience."

When morning comes, the beach is littered with lost souls bearing all sorts of wounds from the night before, stumbling on under the watchful eyes of confused locals. Check out Suenni's photos below.

I Spent the 2015 Blizzard with New York's Homeless

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I met Alberto Lora at our last stop Monday night, outside the public plaza at the Sony building, on 55th Street and Madison Avenue, as he waited in line for whatever was left of the food being handed out by the Coalition for the Homeless workers. As the streets emptied, and the blizzard settled in, Lora described how New York City's homelessness crisis is only getting worse. "The cops don't know what to do with us anymore," he told me. "The subways are packed at night with people sleeping like me. It's a major resource for us, so without it, I don't know what to do."

"Why is it like this here? In this country?" he asked. "This storm is going to be bad for some people. Real bad."

Lora had learned about the storm the night before, from a video billboard in Times Square. "This will most likely be one of the largest blizzards in the history of New York City," Mayor Bill de Blasio had announced from above. To Lora, a 42-year-old homeless man, it meant one thing: "I've gotta find somewhere to sleep."

Thousands of other New Yorkers were in the same spot: Stuck in what was supposed to be a historic blizzard, with nowhere to go. The number of homeless people in New York City has ballooned in the last decade, with roughly 60,000 people sleeping in shelters on a given night, and thousands more living on the streets. Incidentally, the city's annual homeless census was supposed to take place Monday, but had to be postponed because of the storm.

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Still, like clockwork, the Coalition for the Homeless soup vans met on the side of St. Bartholomew's Church at 7 PM Monday night, preparing to hit the emptying streets, now occupied only by the occasional delivery guy and inoperable bus. The service, which delivers some 1,000 nightly meals, couldn't miss a night—especially not last night. The vans made their rounds even during Hurricane Sandy, and the 2015 blizzard was no different.

"Most of the people we serve have been with us for a while," said Juan De La Cruz, the Coalition's food director. "Clients know we're gonna be there every night, no matter what. Many of them are invisible to everyone else."

Inside the church, the Coalition distributes upwards of 220 meals, before departing along its three delivery routes. While De La Cruz's van made its way to the Bronx, Paul Fitzgerald, a full-time staff member with the Coalition, takes our van around Manhattan, driving up the West Side to Harlem, and then back down east, past Central Park. The path originated in 1985, the year of the program's inception, and once followed the city's now-extinct homeless encampments. But although the encampments have cleared out, the homeless still know when and where to be to get a meal—which, for many of them, will be their first of the day.

At the the first stop, near Times Square, Fitzgerald jumps out to help a volunteer open the stockpiled trunk. The menu consists of meatball soup, bread, milk, and an orange, along with blankets, sleeping bags, socks, and gloves for those braving the storm outside. Men waiting nearby immediately formed a line, eager to grab their provisions. But the situation left at least one man, a homeless veteran who goes by Bishop, frustrated. "How do we live in the richest city in the country, if not the world, and people are still dying outside in cardboard boxes?" he asked.

Fitzgerald told us he has seen Bishop at this stop numerous times before. This tends to happen, he said: seeing the same old faces. "There's never been a night that I've driven when there wasn't a single person out, looking for food," he said.

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Fitzgerald's job puts him at the frontline of the swell in New York's homeless population. Since 2013, when de Blasio took office, the number of people living in homeless shelters has grown 13 percent, while the so-called "unsheltered" population has spiked by 6 percent. The numbers have been startling, Fitzgerald said, particularly among women and children, who were once rarely seen waiting for the Coalition's vans. As of November, there were reportedly 24,760 children living in New York City shelters.

Each year, the Coalition has to order more soup and oranges to meet skyrocketing demands. The annual coat drive, hosted by New York Cares, was recently moved to a larger space. "I have cops coming up to me and asking, 'What do we do?'" Fitzgerald said while driving. "There's just too many homeless people, they say, and they're asking me about alternative venues to place them in."

He explained that the individuals he encounters fall into three categories: poor but food insecure, sheltered, or living on the streets. That pattern was visible Monday night: Some people, like Warren, were not homeless, but still had nothing to eat in the project housing nearby. Others, like Jacob, lived in the city's much-despised shelter system, calling the NYC Department of Homeless Services "worse than Republicans, because they're supposed to be on your side but still don't help you." And then, there were people like Alberto Lora, who spends his nights in subway cars, but with the blizzard travel ban in place, was worried about finding a Plan B.

When temperatures drop, as they did Monday night, the city issues what is known as a "Code Blue," which means that shelters must take in anyone who comes through the door, setting aside eligibility rules to ease the process. James Winans, a spokesperson for the Bowery Mission, told me on Monday afternoon that the retreat would likely see large numbers that night, but "expected to fill every nook and cranny," using the dining area, chapel, and second floor to accommodate what has already been a rising tide in occupants. The city's Department of Homeless Services also announced Monday that it was doubling the number of outreach units in all five boroughs to transport people to nearby shelters.

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Back in the van, the numbers who show up in Harlem were a bit higher than the first few stops; a trend Fitzgerald said is due to the lack of food services uptown. But the crowds along the route were thinner than usual—on a normal winter night, the Coalition crew hands out 200 meals; closer to 300 during the summer. As inclement weather barreled into the tristate area, more individuals appeared to have already sought shelter.

Arriving at a Central Park inlet—one of the last stops on the van's path southwards—we found the park abandoned, swept barren by high velocity winds; the benches where homeless men usually sit, waiting for the van, were empty. "If they're not here, that means they went to find food elsewhere," Fitzgerald said, parked outside of the park around 9 PM. "But at this point, we're just hoping they've found somewhere to stay."

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