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​A Woman Won $1.5 Million in Damages After a Brain Injury Supposedly Made Her Become a Dominatrix

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[body_image width='800' height='685' path='images/content-images/2015/01/31/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/31/' filename='a-woman-won-15-million-in-damages-for-becoming-a-dominatrix-after-a-brain-injury-130-body-image-1422664382.jpg' id='23045']Photo via WikiMedia Commons

On August 9, 2008, Canadian Alissa Afonina was in a car with her brother Alexei, her mother Alla, and Alla's ex-boyfriend Peter Jansson when the Toyota Tacoma hit a wet patch at a curve and ran off the road. No other vehicle was involved, but the SUV, which witnesses said had been speeding, wound up on its side. The two women suffered various injuries.

Court documents say that "it is not disputed that Alissa has suffered a brain injury as a result of the accident," for which she was awarded a judgment of over $1.5 million (an additional $943,000 was awarded to her mother). What is disputed is whether the accident, and the brain damages she suffered, caused her to undergo a personality change that led to her becoming a sex worker.

Beginning in the 2008–09 school year, just after the car accident, Afonina started acting differently. One teacher testified to her lack of impulse control, outbursts in class, a scattered memory, and general social isolation. Prior to the accident, those who knew her she had been a bright student, a high-achieving "goth girl" with "artiste presentation.'"

A school psychiatrist presented a different version of pre-accident Afonina, diagnosing her with borderline personality disorder, but the judge dismissed this, believing that she faked it as an attention-getting technique. Either way, Afonina wasn't the same student after the accident. She dropped out of school to finish her 12th grade coursework at home, and attended college only briefly. Further psychiatric evaluation concluded that her health all but ruled out stable long-term employment.

And then, at some point before late 2013, Alissa Afornina became a dominatrix. It was a career choice her attorneys argued showed "unnecessary risk assumption" and proved that she had cognitive impairment from the brain injury. The judge, while noting that her profession "shows an ability to organize one's self to meet a deadline, to keep an appointment, [and] to apparently collect remuneration," found that she had "no residual earning capacity and no ability to work as a result of the brain injury."

I asked San Francisco dominatrix Eve Minax what she made of the case, and she lamented the fact that the sex workers who receive the most attention from the legal system are often people who dabble in the profession for one reason or another and aren't really thinking about it seriously. "There's a handful of us taking it seriously, who really value the meaning of our work," she said.

Minax expressed sympathy for Afornina, but added, "However her case goes, I hope that deciding to work professionally in the realm of sado-masochism does not have to be an argument on someone's lack of judgment."

When I spoke to her, Afornina agreed with Minax's underlying point and seemed somewhat aggravated about the attention her story was getting. "I think my former occupation was used to sensationalize this story," she said. "There are many people who win brain injury cases each year, but they don't end up on the cover of a paper."

Follow Peter Lawrence Kane on Twitter.


America's Infrastructure Is Slowly Falling Apart

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America is literally falling apart around us. Roads, built decades ago, are littered with potholes from carrying ten times the number of cars they were designed to carry. Crumbling Cold War–era gas pipes are exploding. One in nine of the country's bridges is structurally deficient. And some dam or levee is always just one rainstorm away from wiping out a neighborhood.

After decades of decline, public spending on infrastructure is at its lowest since 1947. State and local governments, which account for about three-quarters of the nation's infrastructure spending, have been slashing their budgets and putting off repairs. And the Highway Trust Fund, which relies on the federal gas tax for cash, is starved for resources. In its last assessment of the country's infrastructure, the American Society for Civil Engineers (ASCE) gave the US a D+, estimating it would take $3.6 trillion to upgrade the country's infrastructure by 2020.

In his State of the Union address this year, President Obama called on Congress to do something about the problem, jabbing Republicans for their myopic focus on the Keystone XL pipeline. "So let's set our sights higher than a single oil pipeline," he said. "Let's pass a bipartisan infrastructure plan that could create more than 30 times as many jobs per year, and make this country stronger for decades to come."

But while both parties agree that infrastructure needs fixing, there are no signs of agreement on any kind of long-term spending bill. So far, Republicans have resisted any attempts to raise the gas tax, which has been at 18 cents per gallon since 1993, relying instead on short-term fixes to keep the fund solvent. "We don't want to build 2014 bridges with 1993 dollars," Brian Pallasch, ASCE's managing director of government relations, told VICE.

The White House has proposed a plan to seek private capital for infrastructure projects, but that's not seen as a long-term solution. Other lawmakers have floated their own ideas—on Thursday, Senators Rand Paul (a Republican from Kentucky) and Barbara Boxer (a Democrat from California) announced they would be introducing legislation that would pay for infrastructure repairs by giving foreign companies an incentive to repatriate foreign earnings—but so far, nothing has moved forward.

In the meantime, it's just getting worse. Here are seven big infrastructure projects that are on the verge of collapse.

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Workers examine damage on the Frederick Douglass Bridge, which connects Maryland to Washington, DC. Photo by the Washington Post

Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge, Washington, DC
One of America's many structurally deficient bridges, the Frederick Douglass Memorial is trafficked by over 70,000 cars traveling to and from the nation's capital. Like most infrastructure projects, repairs would come with sticker shock: It will cost a projected $900 million to get the bridge back up to standards. "Look, it's not just that the paint is peeling off," the ASCE's Pallasch said. "Even the layperson can see that this bridge needs some work."

[body_image width='1000' height='654' path='images/content-images/2015/01/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/30/' filename='america-is-collapsing-brief-look-at-us-infrastructure-meltdown-130-body-image-1422651975.jpg' id='22999']Construction to replace Seattle's Alaskan Way Viaduct has stalled because the tunneling machine, Bertha, is stuck underground. Photo courtesy of Washington DOT

Alaskan Way Viaduct, Seattle
The elevated highway hugging Seattle's waterfront was badly damaged in a 2001 earthquake, leading to a protracted municipal debate over how to make repairs. Engineers eventually opted to dredge a massive tunnel, which they started digging in July 2013. It was supposed to be finished by December 2015, but was pushed back to August 2017 because Bertha, the tunneling machine, is stuck underground. Two state senators have proposed a bill to stop the project, which has already burned through about $2 billion of its $3 billion budget.

[body_image width='1000' height='667' path='images/content-images/2015/01/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/30/' filename='america-is-collapsing-brief-look-at-us-infrastructure-meltdown-130-body-image-1422654384.jpg' id='23008']An Amtrak train crosses the 105-year-old Portal Bridge in New Jersey. Photo by Bloomberg

Portal Bridge, New Jersey
Designed in the 1840s and completed in 1910, this bridge is, as the New York Times put it last year, a "$900 million problem." Everyday it withstands a beating from nearly 500 trains, more than any other bridge in the Western Hemisphere. It's also a swing bridge, which means it has to be opened regularly so barges can pass through the river, causing delays along Amtrak's Northeast Corridor when it fails to lock back properly.

[body_image width='1000' height='689' path='images/content-images/2015/01/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/30/' filename='america-is-collapsing-brief-look-at-us-infrastructure-meltdown-130-body-image-1422652542.jpg' id='23000']Flooding in downtown Baltimore following a water main break on Lombard Street. Photo courtesy of the City of Baltimore

Baltimore City Sewer System
Baltimore's sewer system is over a century old. Spanning more than 3,000 miles of pipelines, the city's sewers were the target of a 2002 EPA and Maryland Department of the Environment lawsuit that ended in the city signing a consent decreeto fix the deteriorating pipes.

Fast forward to 2015: While the city has made some headway on the over $1 billion in rehabilitations the sewers needed, Baltimore Department of Public Works spokesperson Jeff Raymond was cagey when I asked whether the city would meet the 2016 deadline. "We are working literally every day to make sure that we're solving our problems," he said. "The federal government has not come down and provided money to match its mandates."

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Construction on Chicago's Circle Interchange, the worst freeway intersection in America. Photo by UIC News via Flickr

Circle Interchange, Chicago
Chicago's major freeway junction is the second worst bottleneck in the country, according to rankings from the American Transportation Research Institute and the Federal Highway Administration. In 2013, then–Illinois Governor Pat Quinn launched a four-year, $475 million project to revamp the interchange. But the Illinois Department of Transportation told VICE that construction won't be finished until 2018, "pending funding between now and fiscal-year 2017."

In the meantime, the city's radio traffic reporters still call it "the mixing bowl." And as anyone who has lived in Chicago can tell you, it's still an unmitigated mess.

[body_image width='1000' height='597' path='images/content-images/2015/01/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/30/' filename='america-is-collapsing-brief-look-at-us-infrastructure-meltdown-130-body-image-1422652977.jpg' id='23001']The Addicks and Barker Dams, designed to protect Houston from floods, are at "extremely high risk of catastrophic failure." Photo courtesy of the US Army Corps of Engineers

Addicks and Barker Dams, Houston
According to the ASCE, it will cost $50 billion to fix all of America's deficient dams. In Texas alone, there are 1,086 high-hazard dams, two of which—Addicks and Barker, in the metro Houston area—were found in "extremely high risk of catastrophic failure" by the US Army Corps of Engineers in 2009. Interim risk reduction measures were put in place between 2009 and 2014, to the tune of $6.8 million, but the dams are still considered extremely high risk.

"These dams are almost 70 years old, and the average lifespan of a structure of this type is 50 years," said Sandra Arnold, chief of public affairs for the US Army Corps of Engineers Galveston District. The dams will be at high risk for catastrophe until long-term repairs, expected to cost roughly $100 million, are put in place.

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The Brent Spence Bridge, spanning the Ohio River between Kentucky and Cincinnati, was deemed "functionally obsolete" in 1998. Photo via Flickr user PunkToad

Brent Spence Bridge
Each year, 1.6 million gallons of fuel and 3.6 million hours are wasted on the Brent Spence Bridge, which connects northern Kentucky with the greater Cincinnati area. The bridge, originally opened in 1963, is overwhelmed with traffic from two interstates, resulting in nasty traffic jams. Not to mention, the structure was deemed "functionally obsolete"— in 1998.

The problem is that it's hard enough to convince one state legislature to pass a $2.6 billion upgrade. Lawmakers in Kentucky and Ohio have been locked in a lengthy battle over how to pay for the Brent Spence repairs, while 3 percent of the entire country's GDP is stuck in traffic over the Ohio River. To make matters worse, Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear has said that every month the project is delayed will tack on an additional $7 million.

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The Man Who Resurrects Thousands of Rolls of Undeveloped Film

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The Rescued Film Project is like one of those earnest, artistic ambitions you make at 2 AM in the kitchen at a house party only to wake up the next morning with no recollection of it. But 28-year-old Levi Bettwieser from Boise, Idaho, actually stuck with the idea and has spent the last few years hunting for forgotten, undeveloped rolls of film in Treasure Valley thrift stores and garage sales, developing them, and, eventually, posting them online.

Bettwieser—a photographer himself—has developed 5,500 images (only a fraction of which have made it to the online archive so far), with a backlog of 1,000 undeveloped film rolls in the vault. The Rescued Film Project started to get real traction after Bettwieser shot a video developing a batch of films he'd got hold of from an Ohio dealer—it turned out they were a collection of negatives from World War II.

As affecting as those images are, with the weight of their historical value, the real glory is in the poetic mundanity of the rest of the archive: a turkey defrosting in a kitchen sink, a smashed windscreen, family hangouts, a day at the beach, an anonymous funeral. The people who took the snapshots may have died or, if they're still alive, forgotten them entirely—we have no idea—but, in being developed this way, they come alive again.

Although there is a voyeuristic aspect to the project—the films contain people's personal moments, after all—Bettwieser maintains that its sociological and anthropological merits overrides the whole snooping-around-in-a-stranger's-past thing. He treats the films like fragile little babies, carefully welcoming them into the present world. We had a chat with him to find out just how much dusty old film rolls have taken over his life.

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VICE: Hi Levi. How did this all start?
Levi Bettwieser: I like to thrift shop and, once in a while, I'd find a crappy old camera and see that there was a film inside. I decided out of pure curiosity that, since I can develop film myself pretty cheap, I'd start collecting them. And, if I got enough to justify the chemicals, I'd maybe develop a batch. I finally got about 30 or 40 rolls that way in my local area, but now it's steamrolled into this mission where we're trying to get as many rolls as we can before they're all gone. They'll disappear eventually.

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What has the reaction been like?
When I started out it was all film from the 80s and 90s, so people were like, "Are you a voyeur? Are you being creepy?" I get it—family photos from the 90s aren't that far away from how we look now. But the further back in time you go, especially with the old black-and-white images, the more people feel removed from them. It begins feels like "history."

The magic of "found" photographs is that they have absolutely zero context on their own.
Right. If you look at one picture from one roll, you have no context for what's happening. If you look at the entire roll, you might get a little more. 95 percent of the collection is amateur—most professional photographers get their film developed, so everything else is all these moments that weren't ever meant to be anything. They weren't shot for commercial or artistic purposes, they were just personal moments from a time before people took selfies. They took photos for posterity, to share in a photo album with friends and family. I'm not in this to find the Kennedy assassination. Inevitably we've found some quite controversial stuff, but that's really not the point.

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What's the success rate with developing these films? How many even have anything on them?
Around one in four rolls. This would probably discourage a lot of people, but when you get one that's amazing, you forget about all the ones that you didn't get anything from. I develop a day at a time—usually a 15 to 18 hour stretch of just developing. I have a spot where I hang up all the film with nothing on that I call "the squid" because, by the end of the day, it's just this massive, curled-up gnarl of empty negatives.

Has anything horrible ever turned up?
We've found some nudity and drug use, but not a huge amount. We have to be careful—we don't want to turn people off from the project. When I initially tell people about what we're doing, that's instantly where their mind goes—they want to know if we've found any weird or fucked up stuff. It's never anything really messed up, though. It's all just honest human experience. If we felt totally comfortable from a legal standpoint, I'd include everything in the public archive. These images are such a tiny part of the of the results, though, that leaving them out doesn't have much impact.

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The photograph of the dead lady in her coffin had quite an impact on me.
Yes, that's a very personal moment. In that roll we could see that there were so few people at that funeral, the staff had to help carry the casket. That so few people were there made me think that it was important to include the image of the lady, because so many people out there will have an emotional reaction to it. Rescue Film is very much a historical project, but it's also art. We want to look at it from that perspective and not censor ourselves too much.

Has anyone recognized themselves and got in touch?
Once. We reconnected one woman with a roll of film she was on via our Instagram. Someone was like, "Hey that's my dad," so we emailed her all the images from the roll and she was actually in most of the pictures. She was elated because they were pictures of when her dad surprised her with a Chihuahua puppy, but also totally baffled because she had no idea who'd taken them.

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How are you paying for everything?
We've received some small donations that have gone a long way, but it's mostly come out of my own pocket. It's not that expensive to do the developing—the most expensive part is buying the film. People are looking to profit off the films they find. To do a whole batch of black-and-white film, which might consist of 25 to 30 rolls, comes in at about $25 worth of chemicals, so around a buck a roll.

So the more films people send you from around the world, the cheaper the whole thing is for you?
Yes. And honestly, there's only so many rolls of film out there.

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What are you tackling next?
Some old cigar boxes full of films from the 50s. I have about 40 of them from the same photographer. Each box contains 20 to 40 rolls of film and they're all meticulously hand labelled and packaged in pristine condition. I'd like to start doing videos bi-weekly, and this will be the next big one.

Follow Russell Dean Stone on Twitter. @rdeanstone

Michael Moore Talks to VICE About ‘American Sniper,’ the End of Sarah Palin, and PTSD

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Michael Moore at the Oscar Celebrates Docs reception in 2013. Photo by Tommaso Boddi via Getty.

On January 18, two days after the release of Clint Eastwood's American Sniper, Michael Moore tweeted: "My uncle killed by sniper in WW2. We were taught snipers were cowards. Will shoot u in the back. Snipers aren't heroes. And invaders r worse," followed by: "But if you're on the roof of your home defending it from invaders who've come 7K miles, you are not a sniper, u are brave, u are a neighbor." The backlash from the right was swift and loud. Breitbart called the tweets "pathetic trolling," John McCain said they were "idiotic" and "outrageous," and Kid Rock wrote on his website, "Fuck you Michael Moore, you're a piece of shit and your uncle would be ashamed of you." But the most dramatic reaction to the tweets came from Sarah Palin, who posed alongside Medal of Honor recipient Sergeant Dakota Meyer with a sign reading "Fuc_ You, Michael Moore." The two 0s in Moore's name had been replaced with crosshairs.

After drawing criticism from both the right and the left, Palin stood behind the photo during her bizarre, rambling speech at the Iowa Freedom Summit on Saturday, saying "what the poster said is what the rest of us are thinking." Moore, for his part, has not made any TV appearances or reacted to the controversy outside of a few tweets and Facebook posts, but he was willing to speak to VICE's Eddy Moretti at length about his thoughts on American Sniper , snipers in general, Sarah Palin, PTSD, that time Clint Eastwood threatened to kill him, and a whole host of other issues swirling around the media circus at the moment.

VICE: Hi, Michael. Let's start with your tweets, before we get into the reaction to them, and give you an opportunity to clarify what you meant, what inspired you to write them, and how you felt emotionally when you wrote them.
Michael Moore: Well the first thing I would say is that I feel really no need to clarify or defend what I wrote. I'm proud of what I wrote. I take nothing back, and in fact I've only added more to it. I am not bullied by these people who bullied a whole nation into a senseless, illegal war. So really, in terms of impact, this has none on me. I say what I say. Of course if I were wrong, or made an error, I would certainly correct it, but that's not the case here. And it really kind of grinds me when I see on TV or hear from other people, you know, Michael Moore, he walked that back, and it's just like, well, that hasn't happened. I have no apologies for my very strong beliefs in how I want the war mongering in this country to stop.

And I think that the reason we're having this conversation too—and I've shared this with nobody else, I've turned down all requests for TV shows—is that the problem with Twitter and why you do need to, we'll use the word clarify, is because 140 characters can't really convey things that have enormous depth to them. So Facebook and talking to you gives me a really good chance to add on further to what I had said on Twitter.

One thing that struck me is that there are two things you're talking about in different media. On Twitter you were talking about the issue of snipers, which is a fascinating topic that deserves some more discussion, and then there's the film called American Sniper—and it seems like you're talking about two different things. Am I right?
That's correct. I purposely didn't say anything about American Sniper in my original tweets. I certainly wrote what I wrote because that weekend there was a lot of talk about snipers because of the movie, but also because it was Martin Luther King weekend and I just found it uncomfortable that something called American Sniper, a film about a sniper, would be released on the weekend where we're honoring a great American who was killed by a sniper. And if anybody doesn't see anything wrong with that, how would you feel then if it were announced tomorrow that American Sniper 2 would be released on November 22?

Yeah, you wouldn't do some kind of disaster type attack movie and release it on September 11, for instance.
Exactly. The appliance store doesn't take out a Holocaust Day ad for you know, today, ovens on sale. I mean that would be the most extreme and bizarro example, but it just shows a bit of a tin ear. Or does it? Maybe the plan was, well, you know, Selma has just been released, are white people going to go see that movie? Let's give white people something to watch on Martin Luther King weekend . I don't know, but it felt really uncomfortable. It got me thinking about snipers, and you had to have grown up in my family to understand the intense sort of raw nerve that the idea of a sniper created.

My uncle's name was Lawrence Moore, but they called him Lornie. Uncle Lornie was someone I never met because I was born nine years after the war, but it was very clear to me at a young age that his death had impacted the family greatly. It impacted my grandmother quite intensely. When they finally shipped his body back and they buried him at the Catholic cemetery in Flint, she convinced her husband to leave their home. They moved from their home to a house two doors down from the cemetery. And she would go over there every day and visit his grave.

And to add insult to injury, the military marker sent to the grave by the War Department—its name before it was called the Pentagon—did not have Lornie's name, not Lawrence Moore's name, but Herbert Moore, who was her husband, my grandfather, was Herbert (and they also had a son, another one of my uncles, who was named Herbert). So it's not even his name on the grave.

It was a two- or three-time a year ritual for all of us kids to go there and put flags on the grave. He was a beloved sibling. To all the aunts and uncles, he was the loved one, the kind one, the one they all turned to, and it really impacted the family.

You see the battle was over in the Philippines, and they had essentially won. They were in the Luzon Province and they were marching down this road back to the base. Japanese soldiers were known for not giving up, and a sniper up in the tree shot him in the back of his head and killed him instantly. They just couldn't fathom that if it was over, why would—what a cowardly, cowardly act.

I also sent a second tweet out right away because I wanted to clarify what I meant by "sniper." A sniper, to me, is the person in the invading force. That's the soldier and the people who are doing wrong, who climb to the tops of buildings or trees and hide themselves and take out people without them knowing, without them having a chance to fight back. If troops from another country were marching down Broadway and someone were to climb to the top of a building to try and stop them, by any means, that's not a sniper. That's a defender of his or her home. Just as the person who was the sniper—the Arab sniper in American Sniper—what was he doing? He was trying to stop the invading force.

Snipers were first called sharpshooters or marksmen, they weren't called snipers until World War I, and it was really the Germans in World War I that perfected the concept of the sniper, not the Allies. And then that really carried over. In WWII, I think you can look this up, but two thirds of all kills from snipers occurred from German and Japanese soldiers. And as the war went on the Russians figured it out and how to do it. What Eisenhower did in 1956, 1957—we had the US sniper school in Fort Perry in Ohio—and he closed it down.

People should practice saying it. We will be better off in the future when we say we lost Vietnam, we lost Iraq, we lost Afghanistan.

Why?
I don't know. I mean I've been doing some research this week. It remained closed for 30 years until Reagan reopened it in 1987 at Fort Benning. There was a lot of talk after Korea, a vet told me this story, saying that it just didn't feel like the American way. Snipers are really needed by the invading force. As defenders, you know, there's all kind of preying that goes on—like if we were actually attacked we would all, as such, become snipers, if you wanted to use that word. But when the liberators come, it's the snipers that's taking out the liberators. And that's the confusion of course when you watch FOX news. I mean, talking about American Sniper —they're talking about American soldiers as the liberators of Iraq! We didn't liberate anything. In fact, we made it worse and we lost the war! Write that in the loss column. And people should practice saying it. We will be better off in the future when we say we lost Vietnam, we lost Iraq, we lost Afghanistan. Why do we invent this fairy tale about ourselves? It does no good and it is only going to get us into more trouble in the future.

The right wing in this country is championing this film, and the film is doing really well. If you assume a film does well because people love the main character, you could say that Americans are loving this sniper, right? Why do you think that is? You're right that generally snipers have always been menacing. It's always the poor guy caught in the square who gets picked off and the sniper is always hiding, and it's a sneaky move. But what is this sniper doing for popular American consciousness that is satisfying people so much and driving them into the theaters? There's some incredible psycho-drama happening around this film at a national psychic level.
Yes, and it has to do with the fact that psychically, we know we were wrong. We know that there were no weapons of mass destruction. We know that 4400 American kids lost their lives and countless tens of thousands of Iraqis. We know all this and really, underneath it is a deep-seated guilt.

Plus a lot of the Cold War republican types that go to the movies too, you know they don't live in a bubble. They have family members or they have neighbors, they have people who have come back from this war messed up. We have a huge PTSD problem. We have a huge mental issue here with the soldiers that have come back from this war. And I have to tell you the two times that I've seen it, it's very quiet at the end. Nobody is cheering. Even when Bradley Cooper takes out Mustafa, the Arab sniper, no whoop went out, and believe me, I saw this in an audience of people who are not on my side of the political fence. And they were very affected; they felt very sad. Every main character in the movie ends up either messed up by the war or dead. And it's not a celebration of this. People may go into the movie thinking ra ra!, but they don't walk out ra ra.

The final thing I'll say is that a lot of people want to see it now because of the controversy and also because it got nominated for Best Picture, and people want to see the best picture. Also it's Clint Eastwood, he's made some of the greatest films. So there are lots of reasons people are going, but I'll tell you, I saw it on the second night in Union Square, and there wasn't a single person who lives in the village in that movie theater. It was all people who took the train in from New Jersey or Long Island. And the research has been done—the studio wants to know who's going to the movie—and this movie's audience is made up of people who go to see one movie a year or people who never go to the movies. It is the Passion of the Christ crowd that is in these movie theaters.

Let's go back to snipers for a minute, and the distinction you're making between comments on snipers verses the film American Sniper. You have a real personal connection to snipers and their effects, and there aren't very many modern sniper stories that resonate in the American consciousness, except maybe if you go back to World War I or II, like you were saying.
Except even then, just off the top of your head you can't name a sniper that society has agreed over time is an American hero. It's just not in our culture. There's the famous story of Jesse James and the coward who shot him in the back. He was hanging a picture on the wall in his home when a guy comes up to the window and shoots him and kills him. Jesse James is not remembered as the scoundrel. He was a robber and a killer, but the guy who killed him is a scoundrel in the story that was told.

We grew up with stories like that. Our dads told us—at least the boys—that to cold clock somebody was a chicken shit thing to do. To hit somebody without them seeing you, to come up from behind, is just considered wrong. The word sniper itself, have you ever heard the word sniping used in a good way?

No, I haven't
It has a negative context to it. I didn't invent this the other day on Twitter. It is a commonly held belief and it's why we were never known for our so-called snipers. In the wars we've been in, it's been the other side that's had the snipers. And it's not that we haven't always had sharpshooters or marksmen. For crying out loud, I won the NRA marksmen award when I was a kid. But I think that the sniper is usually associated with the evil side, the one that's doing the harm, whether it was the Germans in either war or the Japanese in my uncle's case.

There's another film out right now called Fury. Have you seen that?
Yep, I saw it.

There's a sniper in that film too, and at the end he takes out the American hero. So it seems like the value of the sniper is in the eye of the beholder. It's the bad sniper camouflaged and taking out Brad Pitt, who was destroying a battalion of SS soldiers.
I liked that movie. It was a well-done war movie and really had me on the edge of my seat. And earlier in the movie when they come into the one town there's another German sniper, which was the problem for all Americans who went into these towns. The invading force, the Germans, were occupying the town and trying to stop the liberators. They can't win in a fair fight, and you can say that Americans had more troops, more money, and more firepower, but I also look at it in a more Zen way: That the oppressor, the invader, the occupier, pretty much—not always, but pretty much—throughout history is defeated. In other words, good does triumph over evil. With a few exceptions, Native Americans being of course an obvious one.

I get all these emails from people going Chris Kyle, he protected our troops and he saved lives. Well what does that mean he saved lives? The lives of our soldiers shouldn't have been there in jeopardy in the first place. We were the ones in the wrong, we were the invading force and eventually we lost. We were there under false pretenses and we left the place much worse off than when we got there.

Taking your personal history and emotions around the concept of a sniper into account, can you describe how you felt when you walked into the film, and also when you walked out?
Well I went there on the second night of the opening. It was only in four theaters in the country. I like Clint Eastwood, and I wanted to see this movie. Frankly it had the best trailer and best TV ads of any movie of the year. But when I got there, from the popcorn line to inside the theater, I said, "Oh my god. Look around, we're in the Village and no one from the Village is here." Then some people saw me and one person said, "Hey, it's great you're here," and thanked me for my stuff.

I was so happy sitting with this audience because they were very affected by it. There were tears.

It was clear we were in a theater with 800 vets, or active duty, or family members or friends, and we were with people who never go to the movies. In fact, the person I was with was laughing because I was sort of like a de-facto usher. Going to a movie in New York is different from elsewhere, and people would come in and look around, they couldn't find seats together and get how the whole system worked. They were so out of their element. I can't tell you, a dozen times I probably said "hey, look, there's a balcony." And they looked stunned because they hadn't caught it on their own. And I asked people, "Could you move those coats? Could you let this couple sit down?" They looked so flustered and had this look on their faces that I probably would have if I were seating myself at the Oxford Debating Society.

Anyway, I was so happy sitting with this audience because they were very affected by it. There were tears. People were having a reaction to it. The closing credits have no music, very somber. Every main character in the film either ends up messed up by the war, turns against the war and becomes anti-war, or dies. There's not some American victory to cheer at the end and there's no instance of go look what we did , or like at the end of Saving Private Ryan , where you see Tom Hanks die but in the back of your head you're going, well, he didn't die for no reason. There is none of that in this film. There is no catharsis.

I talked to Deb, who runs my film festival back in Traverse City, and she said the same thing. She went to see it at the mall. She said it was just sad from beginning to end. She said there was a lot of talking during the movie, mostly people asking each other questions because they didn't understand the politics, they didn't understand the Shia-Sunni thing and they would ask whose side is he on? There was a lot of ignorance in the audience.

But it's interesting; I just saw today that it's going to break the all-time box office R-rated movie record, which was held by The Passion of The Christ. And I think they're finding the demographics for this are very similar. These are not people that usually go to the movies, and if they do they don't go very often. Fifty percent of the American public never goes to a movie theater. And then the next 25 percent who do go, go once a year. The movie-going public is that last 25 percent. It just felt like a real Passion of the Christ crowd. People who would normally wait for it to go on video or see it on TV but wanted that collective feeling of sitting there with others.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/99k3u9ay1gs' width='640' height='360']

Trailer for 'American Sniper'

Putting your issues with snipers and the politics of war aside, would it be fair to say that you have no issues with the filmmaking itself?
The film itself. I don't usually comment if you follow my Twitter. I, like most filmmakers and directors—there's sort of an unwritten, unspoken code that we don't criticize each other's films. If we don't like a film by another director we just say nothing. If we do like something then we talk loudly about it and encourage people to go see it. That's why it's rare to find a filmmaker attacking another filmmaker for the film they've made. Because we all know how hard it is to make a good movie. The only time I've done it in the past is when I felt really bad that so many people, especially working people, were going to shell out money to see something they've been told is one thing and then it's not, and then they're going to be miserable. They work hard all week and it's a lot of money now to go to the movies and buy candy and stuff for the kids. That's just how I feel. So as a movie, I didn't say anything about the movie in those first two tweets. And then when I finally went more than 140 characters, when I went onto Facebook saying, well, I'm not going to say anything about American Sniper but I'll say this, Bradley Cooper—one of the best performances of the year. Hands down. How he transforms himself... you don't even think it's Bradley Cooper.

Steve Carell just did the same thing in Fox Catcher. After just a moment that guy "Steve Carell" is just gone and this monster is there in his place.
Exactly right. That's the sign of a good actor, so that's my first positive comment about the movie. The second thing is that technically, it's a well-made movie. I think there were some good choices made in terms of—it was very bold to not have a closing song, no music whatsoever, just credits rolling in the dark. Black and quiet. As a story, I think that this is where the film gets a little messy for me because Clint basically just wants to make an old-style western; you know, keep things really simple and don't complicate matters. For instance the Twin Towers were hit, they get called up, and suddenly they're in Iraq.

If you haven't paid attention to anything, basically the film says we were attacked, so then we attacked back in Iraq . Of course we know Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, but the film implies that it does, and that that's the mission he's on to defend our country. But we weren't being defended by his being in Iraq. You can make the case that by going into Afghanistan to stop them, and to try and get Bin Laden and all that, that it had some legitimacy to it. But before it was being run by an incompetent commander-in-chief, and it took the new commander-in-chief 13 months—if that—to do Bush's job that Bush had eight years to do, to get the mass murderer. So there are storyline problems in the film and I think that's why people in the audience were talking, because they were confused. American Sniper covers what looks like about five or six years or three or four tours of Iraq, and it was like, how does he keep ending up in the same town with that one same guy ? It was just dumb in the old-school western way. It was like a B-movie in that way. And then of course there's all the historical things that are wrong, but we don't really want to get into that. It's a movie; I'm not watching it as a documentary.

But I think people are really affected by what we did, and we're going to continue to be affected by it. Where I live in Traverse City I've set up these PTSD programs for veterans. I have these conferences for finding jobs, I started the first affirmative action program to specifically hire Iraq and Afghanistan vets, and any active-duty military and their families can go to my movie theaters for free any day of the year—they don't pay a dime. Not many businesses offer their things for free every day of the year to active-duty military. And I have these three theaters that I've restored; they're all non-profit. I set them up to be owned by the communities they're in.

You're showing the film in your own theater, right?
Yeah, I'm showing the film in one of the three theaters. And that's because I think that it's part of the American discussion and people should see it. You can't talk about it if you haven't seen it. I saw John McCain criticizing me yesterday for what I said about snipers in general and a reporter asked him if he's seen the movie and he says No, I haven't seen it yet. And it took me right back to when he went on Letterman and criticized 9/11, and Letterman goes, Did you see the movie? And he says No, I haven't seen it yet. And Letterman says Senator, do you think it's right to criticize things you haven't seen? And he goes No, you're probably right. I should see it.

I wouldn't show Transformers 5 , because that's just a crap movie. But this isn't a crap movie and in fact Clint Eastwood has even said there's a very strong anti-war sentiment in this film. You tell me, Eddy, when you came out of that film did you think to yourself, this is a great recruiting film to get young boys to join the military?

I think I kind of prepared myself for a piece of right wing propaganda when I went into the film. When I saw it I was frightened because I felt like I was in a first-person shooter video game, and I thought that was potentially a very dangerous thing, if people were finding that titillating, that they'd think, Wow, Iraq is this real-life version of this video game that I'm playing. Cool . So that was a scary moment. I was totally glued to every second of the film, though. I didn't take my eyes off the screen once. So yeah, I went in worried, and I thought the film did warrant the worry, but after talking to you now there is potentially a real anti-war message in there.
OK first of all he runs into his brother on the tarmac. He's so excited to see his brother, who is getting on a plane to get out of there. You can see the poor boy is completely shell-shocked. The American sniper dude, Chris Kyle, is all excited to see him and then his brother finally says the truth to him: "fuck this place." How often have I heard that from guys returning from there? Fuck this place. And then his best friend is killed and he goes to the funeral with his wife and his friend's widow reads his last letter home, an anti-war letter. You know, war is wrong.

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Clint Eastwood at the 2007 Academy Awards. Photo via Wikicommons

Clint Eastwood is not a right wing ideologue; he's a mixed bag of nuts, politically. And really if anything he's a libertarian. If you wanted to put a label on him, that's probably what he believes politically. I don't think he believes the United States should be the policeman of the world. It took a lot to show that the brother is against the war, his best friend is against the war, and Chris seems like he's the only one to be like Woo hoo! Everyone else is looking at him like, Are you crazy? Let's keep our heads down and get the fuck out of here as soon as we can .

Everybody knows the lie that Chris keeps telling himself, that this is worth it, he has to keep saying because he probably knows deep down in his heart that it's not worth anything—it has nothing to do with defending the United States of America, which is their only job. That's what we pay our taxes for. So if we are attacked or something is threatening us, we are protected. This was not threatening us. Iraq was not attacking us and they weren't planning to attack us.

I put out a book of letters from soldiers actually, because I got so many from people who had signed up after 9/11, just wanting to do their part, and two years later they got sent to Iraq and they're like What the fuck am I doing here? I didn't sign up for this .

It sounds like you're saying that the film is less one-dimensional than the discourse around the movie and the backlash against you, which is almost more myopic than the film itself.
Yeah, exactly. Then the question has to be asked, why? How did I become—why the hot button on this one? I mean I've read what Noam Chomsky has written about this. I've read Matt Taibbi, I've read Chris Hedges... I've read what the thinkers on the far left have said, and I mean they are brutal and vicious about the movie. And I agree on a lot of what they're saying, but they don't go after them, they go after me. I figured this out a long time ago—the reason they go after me and the reason they went after Seth Rogen, is because we reach deep into the mainstream of Middle America. My base, and obviously the church of the left, loves my work and buys my books and goes to my movies, but if it were just them, I'd be doomed. My movies play in shopping malls and cineplexes, and that's a very unusual thing for someone on the left—to have our work, our art, reach that deep into the mainstream of America. So that then makes me dangerous to them, because they know that I have this audience. I love that sometimes I get these comments like, "how did he get two million followers on Twitter? Somebody explain that to me? What kind of world are we living in?"

I don't have a nightly show like Rachel [Maddow], I don't have a weekly show like Bill [Maher]. My last movie was five years ago and my last book was a couple. I'm not out there on a daily basis. I don't go on TV. And yet I have this enormous fan base that extends way beyond the church of the left, and obviously Seth Rogen does too, to an even greater extent because he's not a political person. He's really, really in the mainstream, especially with the younger generation. And that makes him dangerous and they have to stop him immediately. He didn't think anything really political by it, I thought it was a very astute, funny observation that he made. But now there's a restaurant in Michigan and Seth Rogen and I can't eat there. I started a hashtag #tableforsethandmike for any restaurant that will feed us to please send us your name. [ Laughs]

[tweet text="Here's a tribute to you @MMFlint Michael Moore. Share it and make it trending #michaelmoore pic.twitter.com/1UN9KJfPPJ" byline="— Dakota Meyer (@Dakota_Meyer)" user_id="Dakota_Meyer" tweet_id="558544679570911232" tweet_visual_time="January 23, 2015"]

Obviously you saw the poster that Sarah Palin held up—Michael Moore with the crosshairs in the two Os.
The one that ended her political career on Saturday?

Yeah.
Yeah, I tweeted those two Tweets on Sunday, and on Monday I figured I better do a Facebook post because I live in a nation where a lot of people can't comprehend, and plus 140 characters isn't a lot. So I did the Facebook [post] and then I decided I'm going to be silent now until Friday. And I didn't tweet anything about this, didn't talk about it, didn't do anything, just decided to play rope-a-dope with these crazies and let them scream all week and they won't see me fighting back, which will elevate their screaming and nuttiness and essentially let them punch themselves in the face. This is what I hoped would happen. Think about this—the vast majority of her base is made up of born-again Christians. Good Christian people. They were stunned to see her holding a sign that said fuck you.

She got so mad at me that she let her guard down to reveal who she is, and the Christian right saw that and were all kind of horrified.

This is someone who portrays herself as a real proper American mother.
Yeah, family values and apple pie, and she says things like golly gee wiz. She got so mad at me that she let her guard down to reveal who she is, and the Christian right saw that and were all kind of horrified. She got a lot of immediate blowback on social media, and then again on Saturday before she stood up to give her speech. My theory is she thought her own people turned against her in that time and it rattled her, and then I guess the prompter went out, right? She wasn't able to recover and she was right in the middle. I should go back and have a look at this, I can't remember. I saw it on C-Span. But at the start she was on me, she's just come off this posting, she's getting a lot of blowback from her people so she starts off on me again, and then the prompter blows, so whatever. I'd like to think that a good union man or woman...

Pulled the plug?
[Laughs] Pulled the plug. But be that as it may, she got discombobulated, and if you follow any of the news on her now, in the last four days, it's all saying that she's over. They're attacking her on Fox—Bill Kristol, who was her big supporter... all these people have abandoned her because of those two things that she said, holding a sign that used the word fuck and her discombobulatedness when she was going off on me and then lost the plot and couldn't speak.

On the crosshairs and the Os, didn't she get into some trouble—didn't her website a few years ago have districts with crosshairs over them across America?
Yes, and she had to pull that off. And in the "fuck you" sign, she put crosshairs in the two Os of my name. And that also was part of the blowback, thanks for reminding me about that. So using the f-word and she went back to the crosshairs on a human being.

For what it's worth, I'm looking at the picture now and she's making this real kind of white trashy hand sign—you know when you put your pinky out and your thumb is out... I don't even know what they call that. There's a word for it.
Yeah, I know what you mean.

It's like a party time kind of hand symbol. It's pretty funny.
[Laughs] This is more like, let's kill this motherfucker and PARTY!

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/M7Is43K6lrg' width='640' height='480']

Michael Moore's Oscar acceptance speech for 'Bowling for Columbine.'

There's something really trashy and crude about what she's doing with her hands. I've got to ask you one last question, because I can't end an interview talking about Sarah Palin. You allow people suffering from PTSD to use your theaters as meeting places. How do you think the film handled the issue of PTSD, since that topic is so close to you?
Well I identify with it through the veterans I have helped, but I also identify with it personally. I didn't have to go through what they went through in Iraq, but I had to have the kind of threat level that I was under after my Oscar speech, and after Fahrenheit there were half a dozen assaults on me. I had to hire a security team, which was essentially six ex-Navy SEALs and Green Berets, and they caught this guy who had made a fertilizer bomb to blow up my house. So I've had my own issues with this.

I was glad it [PTSD] was part of the film. You know, Clint didn't try to portray either the soldiers or the veterans as a monolithic, He-Man operation. They were all kinds. And I think that they are... I know that this has actually triggered some good stuff with people wanting to deal with PTSD issues, and I think that the movie will engender wanting to help the returning veterans. I hope it does good things on emotional levels. But on the cognitive brain level, Americans who watch this film have to really commit to never again. Never will we allow a situation like this to happen again.

And there's very little attention paid... the big funeral they have at the end with the caravan, it looks like something you'd give to somebody who had died in the war. The war he died in was the war at home—the war of the returning veteran who wasn't getting help. But it's also the war of an American culture, specifically a Texan culture that says, Sure, give anybody a gun. Let's go to the range. Oh, he has PTSD? No problem, have a gun . The American gun, the American culture and attitude toward guns, killed Chris Kyle. And it's dealt with very briefly in the film. We're only told of how he died. Clint doesn't show us the scene where he picks the guy up and they go to the gun range, and show the scene at the gun range, and show that after all he goes through in Iraq, he dies this way from a fellow Army guy. Not from some liberal, some protester, but from one of his own. The whole thing is wrong, the whole war was wrong. It was immoral; it was illegal. The Pope said this was not a just war, and it is completely—look at the statistics of the guys who have come back in terms of spousal abuse.

Prescription drug abuse...
Oh my god. It's just... And I get this feeling from people, Out of sight out of mind. I don't want to think about it. But if the film gets them to think about it, it will have done a good thing, but if they go away from the film thinking Can't wait for that next war so we can get more of those bad guys , well I'm sorry folks but we're not going to learn our lesson until we're willing to say We were the bad guys , we were the guys who did the wrong thing here . People were defending their homes and that's why they were killing us. As we would kill them! If a group of Iranians or Iraqis or Canadians were coming down your Main Street in the town you're in, tell me you'd act any different.

It's even more complicated than that, because not only were they killing the American soldiers, they were killing each other. And frankly, in a way, maybe it's kind of perfect that this film comes out now, at a time when ISIS has brought the Iraq war back into people's consciousness, and exposed the complexity there that nobody really knew existed when we went into Iraq because they didn't pay attention or learn about it. It's interesting the film is coming out now, when everything is kicking up again, because we pulled this thing apart. The mess is now, and yet to come.
We did pull it apart, and I'm not saying Saddam Hussein was a good a guy, but clearly he understood that the only way for Iraq to not fall apart was for it to be a secular country, not a religious country. If religion was going to be introduced, there would be a civil war. And he was right. That's what's happening right now.

Would we be showing a film that constantly refers to Native Americans as savages?

I have to say before we close that the portrayal of Iraqis, Arab, and Muslim people in this film is really offensive. We're talking about this in our home in Michigan, there are a lot of native people here, and would we be showing a film that constantly refers to Native Americans as savages? I mean the word is said one too many times in that film. The first time I heard it I was like OK, I get it, soldiers talk this way , but when it kept getting repeated, then I heard Clint Eastwood talking, not the soldiers. He really needed to drive that point home. He needed to drive it home, story-wise, that the other sides were savages, that they would put a drill into a boy's head. That he really needed.

The first thing I wrote about his conflation of Vietnam with Iraq is that this whole thing about sending children out with grenades or the women or whatever, that was part of the Vietnam mythology. And it did happen in Vietnam a few times, but it scared everybody, made everybody think that the Vietnamese were animals. Well that didn't really happen in the Iraq war. The kids were not booby-trapped; the kids were not doing grenades and all that. In Palestine there were women who were suicide bombers, there was the woman who tried to be a suicide bomber in Jordan, but they're trying to negotiate the release right now. But that wasn't the Iraq war; it wasn't that kind of thing.

We lost so many guys and so many limbs because of cell phones and IEDs they could put on the road and explode. And then Rumsfeld refused to upgrade the Humvees from General Motors, so they were just tinfoil on the bottom for the first couple of years. Guys there started retrofitting the Humvees, they would just get scrap metal and bolt it all over the fucker so they could live because the Pentagon wasn't giving them vehicles they were going to survive in. So it was offensive to hear that word spoken throughout by—not by bad people, but by good people, which made it seem that it's OK to say these words about these Iraqi "savages."

It's also maintained a feeling about Arabs and Muslims that makes me feel uncomfortable. But you know, I'm not saying we try to whitewash this thing, there are some serious problems. Even with the guy with the fertilizer bomb, I can cite you one example of that in ten years against me. If I lived in other countries it would be a little bit more often. So I don't want to compare this to that, but I just posted a thing on Facebook tonight because I've been asked for this in the last couple of days with Clint Eastwood—did he threaten to kill me. So Snopes finally did a thing on it yesterday, and said yes, this is true, it happened in 2005 at Tavern on the Green. I think everybody took it as a joke or half joke, but it was one of those weird things where he wasn't expecting a laugh, and then when people did laugh, he didn't like it, so he was like Hey, I mean it. I'll shoot you. Then it got really quiet, like, what the fuck is wrong with him? There are certain things you don't make a joke about. You don't say to a woman, Hey, I'm gonna rape you, and then nervous laughter, No, I mean it! I'm gonna rape you! Don't say that please. That's not cool.

Let's just close here, with one last thing. Not every film can tell every story. Surely there are many Iraqi stories that are not being told in this film, but that last shot of the film where Chris walks out the door and we know what's going to happen next, what about the untold story of that killer? Should we know about these guys? Is anyone telling that story of the psychologically shattered Iraqi vet coming home?
No, it's not being told. Nobody thinks about it in their day-to-day lives. People don't want to think about how serious this problem can be. We're going to pay the price for it if we don't address it. We're already paying the price for it. It's a great problem and should be a top, top priority.

Where do people go to learn more? Do you want to send them somewhere?
The veterans hotlines that have been set up by veterans groups. There's a documentary short that's nominated for the Oscars this year called Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1. It's so powerful. It's based in a veterans hotline just up the river from here. So I think that anything you can do to support on a local basis and encourage psychologists, psychiatrists to donate whatever time they have. Don't depend on the VA for it. Then there are really good groups like the Iraq and Afghanistan veterans of America and others who are really trying to be good advocates for veterans, and I think that people should join that group. They should support it, and I think also we should make our representatives make this a priority. There's a problem with our healthcare system in that we don't treat mental health as an equal partner in this. We should be equally concerned with fighting mental health as well as physical health.

How many veterans commit suicide per day?
It's 22 a day.

That's staggering.
The percentage of homeless who are veterans is staggering. If young boys in high school could be shown here's how your country thanks you for your service ... I wrote a blog last year saying I want everyone to stop saying to soldiers and vets "thank you for your service to our country." They don't want to hear that, they want you to shut the fuck up and do something. Make sure there's mental health available. Put in politicians who won't send them to war for no reason. You know, if you want to thank them then that's how you can thank them.

More information on PTSD and veteran support groups can be found at the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Follow Eddy Moretti on Twitter @eddymoretti.

Why We Should Build Cloud Cities on Venus

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Why We Should Build Cloud Cities on Venus

​Tinnitus Is Hell’s Soundtrack, but Will the Ringing Ever Stop?

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Illustrations by James Burgess

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Around ten years ago I went to see now-defunct Aussie beer-rockers Jet at the UK's also now-defunct Oxford Zodiac. The gig still resonates with me today. Not because the band or any of their music is particularly memorable, but because, since that show, I've been permanently tormented by what sounds like a jet engine being fired directly into my ears.

I played drums as a teenager and went to college during the mini-movement dubbed the "New Rock Revolution" by NME—a time so musically exciting that going to less than three gigs a week wasn't really an option. I was used to my ears ringing for a few days after seeing the Libertines, or Interpol, or Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but after that Jet show, it just stayed.

Ears roaring, Google (it was probably Yahoo back then, actually) told me that I had tinnitus: the internal perception, often permanent, of sound when no external sound is present. I was livid that I'd been changed like this by doing nothing more than what I assumed were common activities: playing a musical instrument and going to shows.

It is thought that around ten percent of the UK population has tinnitus—so that's about 6.5 million members of the Screaming Ears Club being recognized over the next seven days for Tinnitus Awareness Week. Each of these sufferer's afflictions is different: sometimes it's a high-pitched ringing; sometimes it's another sound, such as irregular clicking; sometimes it's just in one ear; sometimes it's in both. People can get it after activities such as scuba diving or following an ear infection, but for young people the most frequent cause is noise exposure.

Unsurprisingly, the condition is widespread among musicians. Hearing damage can occur when sound volume exceeds 80 decibels, and with a loud gig clocking in at around 115 decibels, a whole tour's worth of loud gigs is a pretty surefire way to do your ears in.

"Without doubt I have tinnitus," Liam Gallagher has said. "You're not a proper rock 'n' roll star if you don't." Will.i.am left himself exposed to an association with chronically annoying noises when he revealed that he had it badly, and Chris Martin's affliction has made headlines. There are countless more examples.

Despite these high-profile sufferers talking about tinnitus—and despite an annual Tinnitus Awareness Week—public awareness of the risks of getting the condition is pitifully low. Speak to any gig-goer who has it and they'll almost always say they hadn't heard the T-word until they'd already been sentenced to a lifetime of "BEEEEEEEEEEP."

Dominic Ganderton, singer in Britpoppy Birmingham four-piece Superfood, says that age is a big factor for this lack of awareness. "I used to go to rock clubs when I was 13, go up to speakers, and put my ear by them when good songs came on," he says. "Now I think, What the fuck was I doing? It's a communication problem. No one told me."

Dominic continues: "I'm 23 now, and I must have been about 19 when I was first going to bed and listening, going, Shit, I can really hear something here. I've been playing in bands since I was 11. I've been to so many practice rooms, but I never saw a poster explaining it, or was told that loud music can damage your ears, even though that sounds like such an obvious statement."

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Another person angry about the lack of awareness of tinnitus risk is Eddy Temple-Morris, MTV presenter in the 1990s and current host of XFM's The Remix show. His ears first got mutilated by a Van Halen gig in the 70s and he's since become an ambassador for the British Tinnitus Association, campaigning to make more people aware of the condition. He's become a sort of kindly uncle figure for kids with fucked ears, spending plenty of time chatting to new tinnitus sufferers on email and Twitter.

"I find it offensive that the UK government has spent millions letting us know that we might burn our finger on a fucking firework on the 5th of November," he says. "How many public health ads have you seen for that? One in ten people have tinnitus, yet the government spends nothing on telling people that they might be getting what is essentially brain damage."

As people like Dominic, Eddy, and myself realized too late—and as is the case for any preventable ailment—prevention is better than cure. That's particularly true for tinnitus, of course, because there isn't actually any cure.

Currently the most effective treatments for hearing loss and tinnitus are largely limited to hearing aids and surgery to have implants related to the cochlea—a tiny part of the inner ear. It is thought that when hair cells in the cochlea get damaged by loud noise, tinnitus can be caused.

These treatments are either highly invasive or not exactly fashionable, unless you happen to be Morrissey in the late 80s. According to Dr. Ralph Holme, head of biomedical research at UK research-funding charity Action on Hearing Loss, "They are great treatments, but they are just a sticky plaster on the problem. We need to understand the causes to be able to develop treatments."

Everyone with tinnitus yearns for the magic pill they can take to banish the screeching, in the same way painkillers end a headache. I'd cut off at least three of my fingers for one, no question. But while such a pill is unlikely to be a reality any time soon, Holme is still excited by drug research in the area.

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There is good recent evidence suggesting that as well as damage to hair cells in the cochlea causing tinnitus, connections between those cells and the brain could also become damaged by noise exposure. Based on this, research at the University of Western Australia has suggested that the medicine Furosemide could be effective in repairing this damage.

"The research suggests there may be a narrow window [where treatment could work] after the noise exposure," says Holme. "For animals, it might be around eight weeks, then the tinnitus enters a second phase and becomes established in the brain."

Various clinical trials involving drugs containing Furosemide are taking place, and it may not be too long before they hit the market. But don't get too excited—it might sound like a sort of morning after pill for the ears is on its way, but Holme has warned against anyone getting their hopes up quite yet. "We don't know how effective the drugs will be yet," he says. "Tinnitus isn't one condition, it's a symptom of lots of different things. We might need a whole battery of drugs to treat different types of it."

§



After ten years of having tinnitus, I've learned to accept it simply because there is no other option. The ringing in my ears went from "pretty annoying" to "power drill annoying" in 2010, after watching Guns 'N' Roses' Leeds Festival set—a medical indignity even worse than the Jet incident.

It was a hellish time. I'd get up at 2 AM and walk for hours around London alone to tire myself out so I could sleep; it affected relationships and made me constantly scared of noise (not ideal, considering I was features editor of NME at the time). I mention this not for comment box sympathy, but to prove that you do return from the lowest depths. I still sleep very little and find my tinnitus highly annoying, but I got used to it. The brain adjusts, you notice it less and you accept you've just got to get on with living with tinnitus rather than being mentally dominated by it.

Current research into treatments is exciting. But with researchers mainly relying on money from under-funded charities such as Action on Hearing Loss and the American Tinnitus Association in the US, that one magic pill is unlikely to hit stores in our lifetimes.

As such, it can all seem a bit hopeless. But now, if you've got tinnitus already, understand that however bad it seems it will get easier if you look after yourself and follow tips like the ones listed below. And if you haven't got tinnitus, then do everything you can from now on to ensure you stay that way. (If you need any more inspiration, lie down next to a speaker playing "Are You Gonna Be My Girl?" at top volume and see how long it takes you to get to sleep.)

ANTI-TINNITUS TIPS

Get Professional-Level Earplugs, Now
To stop yourself from getting tinnitus in the first place—or to stop it getting worse—buy some professional-style molded earplugs. Advanced Communications Solutions make brilliant plugs that you can barely feel or see, and that retain sound quality. They cost around $200 to $300, but you can get decent off-the-rack plugs for about $30 that are better than nothing. Dr. Ralph Holme added: "Always take breaks from music, too—the damage is caused by length of time listening as well as volume."

Talk to Others in the Tinnitus Club
Having tinnitus can make you feel like you're alone. You're not—millions of people have it. Superfood singer Dominic Ganderton: "I have a friend who has it just like I do. It's a real comfort, and when we're at parties we talk about the 'tinnitus club.'"

Lay Off the Cocaine
Caffeine and alcohol are thought to aggravate tinnitus. Eddy Temple-Morris: "Any uppers are bad. Cocaine: terrible. Speed... anything like that makes it rage."

Don't Go into Denial
A huge part of living with tinnitus is learning to be OK with it. Dominic: "Pretending to block it out can be a bad tactic, and it can make you manic, feeling like you always have to be talking or moving. Accept that you have it and there's more chance your brain will accept the pattern."

Cook in Your Head
Masking tinnitus with music or a white noise app works well, and so does keeping your brain occupied with active thoughts. Eddy: "I had terrible insomnia, so now I watch a cooking show before I go to bed, then do the recipe in my head in real time—chopping the onions and everything. I'm asleep before I finish the meal."

Masturbate
Eddy: "Anything that takes your mind off tinnitus is good. Have sex. Masturbate. I said this on TV and got a lot of messages about it."

If you suffer from tinnitus—or if you just want to find out more about the condition—visit the American Tinnitus Association.

Follow Jamie on Twitter or at his website.

The Improbable Chinese Resurrection of an NBA Draft Bust

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The Improbable Chinese Resurrection of an NBA Draft Bust

What a Pair

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Diesel jackets, vintage T-shirts

PHOTOGRAPHY: LOUIE BANKS
STYLING: KYLIE GRIFFITHS

Make-up: Lucy Wearing, using MAC Cosmetics
Make-up assistant: Claudia Savage
Hair: Sami Knight, using Unite
Hair assistant: Dan Stanley
Stylist's assistants: Thomas Ramshaw and Beth Whitehead
Photographer's assistant: Rui
Models: Kat, Louis, Hayley, Fabian, Naddy, George, Victoria, Illy and Aidan at Body London; Jake and Bertie at Elite

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Ellesse jacket, Evisu jeans; Ellesse jacket; Volcom shorts

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Le Coq Sportif sweater vest, Fred Perry polo shirt

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Both T-shirts from Rokit

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Both jackets by Puffa

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Evisu jeans

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All clothes by Evisu


A Clitoris Was Successfully Reconstructed for the First Time in Sweden

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Photos via Justin William and public-domain-image.com

This article originally appeared on VICE Sweden.

The other week, Karolinska Hospital Reconstructive Surgery resident Hannes Sigurjónsson successfully reconstructed a clitoris for the first time in Sweden's medical history. Sigurjónsson learned his particular method in France, where 5,000 women have had their private parts restored.

It's obviously illegal to perform genital mutilation in Sweden. It's also illegal to travel abroad and do it in a country where it might be considered commonplace. Still, a report published by the Swedish Board of Health and Welfare on January 15 estimated that more than 38,000 women living in Sweden have been subject to genital mutilation—7,000 of whom are under 18 years old.

Slightly shocked, I called up Sigurjónsson to find out more about his revolutionary method.

VICE: Hi, Hannes. What does reconstructing a clitoris entail?
Hannes Sigurjónsson: The clitoris isn't completely removed during a genital mutilation operation—only the part that is visible. So the point of my method is to carefully remove scar tissue and reveal the part of the clitoris that's still there, move it forward, and put it in its place. In some cases, the perpetrators [of mutilation] infibulate the female, which means we have to perform defibulation—open up the vaginal orifice.

But the most important thing when treating women and girls who have been victims of female genital mutilation is for plastic surgeons, gynecologists, sexologists, and psychotherapists to work together. It is only with a multidisciplinary approach that these women can see improvement in their quality of life and experience less pain.

Tell me about the psychological help you offer your patients—is that standard practice?
Yes, it's a part of the treatment. The surgery is only one step on the female's road to recovery—both functionally and mentally. The psychological part is vital. What needs to be said is that this is a new method and a new field we are entering. We need a lot more research on the subject.

What are the risks of genital reconstructive surgery?
According to available research, bleeding and infections are the most common complications affecting about 3 to 5 percent of the operated women. Most of the women who are operated on experience less pain and more sensation in their reconstructed clitoris. Fewer than 5 percent feel less in their genitals than before the surgery. There are always risks of complications when it comes to surgery—and obviously we inform the patients about this.

Is it possible to recover entirely after having your genitals mutilated?
I wouldn't say so. It's very hard to recreate something someone has cut off and thrown away. But you can recreate plenty of parts in the genital area. We can open the vagina up again and we can recreate the clitoris and the clitoris hood. We can also in some cases recreate the labia minora.

Do you think it will be possible for these girls to completely recover in the future?
The method is being developed and is getting better with time, research and experience. But it will always be hard to restore someone's mutilated genitals 100 percent.

How big is the demand for this surgery in Sweden?
There are 38,000 females in Sweden suffering from genital mutilation—7,000 of them are children. The National Board of Health and Welfare estimates that 19,000 are in the risk zone of getting mutilated.

Worldwide, reliable sources such as the United Nations and UNICEF report that over 133 million women have been subjects to female genital mutilation. Three million young girls are mutilated every year. So the demand for this kind of surgery is huge.

Those 38,000 females in Sweden: How do you think they were exposed to this?
In their native countries, most often. There's no evidence that it's happening in Sweden, but we definitely can't rule it out. Just look at Germany, Britain, and France, where parents have been convicted for forcing their girls to go through genital mutilation. But we can't confirm that it's happening in Sweden—no one has ever reported any such cases to the police.

Follow Rasmus on Twitter.

Greased Quiffs and Switchblades: Growing Up Teddy Boy in 1970s England

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(From left to right) Steve Sampson, Jimmy Fletcher and Nidge in the Viaduct Pub, Lower Briggate, Leeds, in the early 1970s

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Edwardian suits and switchblades; greased quiff hairdos and murder on the dance floor. The original Teddy Boys not only represented a threat to the establishment in bleak postwar Britain, they also stake a serious claim as Britain's first codified youth tribe, emerging at the same time the "teenager" became a fully fledged Thing.

The subculture is often thought of as a spin-off of the rock 'n' roll revolution that hit the UK in the mid-1950s—but that isn't the case; Teddy Boy style predates all that by a good five years. As idiosyncratic and British a subculture as one is likely to find, it has changed over time—but it's never gone away.

"It's a pretty diehard culture—you tend to get people who have been involved for a fair percentage of their lives," Nidge explains to me. A long-term Teddy Boy, and founder of the encyclopedic Edwardian Teddy Boy website, Nidge—real name John Van Rheede Toas—has been involved in the movement since the early 1970s and remains a passionate advocate for the scene.

"I can still remember the first time I saw a group of Teds: Blackpool Promenade, 1961. I saw these guys who were in drape jackets—the few that remained at that point—and also leather jackets, because the rockers had started up by then. God knows why, but that image stayed with me," Nidge laughs. "I went to high school in 1968, and there were mods and rockers there. Some of the rockers wore the drainpipe jeans with colored stripes down the side, and quiffs. It just stood out. 1972 was when I got fully into it."

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A group of original Teddy Boys in Portsmouth, 1956. Copyright Hugh Finnegan—not to be reproduced without permission.

Youths had started to appear on British streets in 1951 in a style of dress partly inspired by the Edwardian dandy. A rejection of post-war greyscale drabness—demob suits and the like—it was a proudly eccentric style, and one that didn't tip its cap to the established order.

The intricacies of the original dress code is a complex area, but—broadly speaking—the drape jacket (which bore some resemblance to the American zoot suits popular in the 1940s African-American jazz scene), tapered trousers and Eaton chukka boots, Eaton Clubman shoes, or a pair of brogues were staple items in the early-50s. Hair-wise, a heavily greased quiff often formed the front, while a duck's ass made up a seam at the back. This was a serious look: fastidious, sharp, and seductive. The clothes were often cut by specialist tailors and paid for in installments over the course of a year.

While the clothes alone were enough to merit more than a worried glance from the establishment, a number of events conspired to quickly galvanize criticism of the movement. On July 2, 1953, a 17-year-old named John Beckley was stabbed to death on Clapham Common by the "Plough Gang," a mob of teenagers who were, reportedly, dressed in "eccentric Edwardian suits."

The Daily Mirror headline read: "Flick knives [switchblades], dance music, and Edwardian suits." That, unsurprisingly, was enough to arouse conservative public opinion; before long, signs appeared in local dance halls reading: "No Edwardian clothes or rubber soled footwear."

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A group of original Teds in Portsmouth, 1956. Copyright Hugh Finnegan—not to be reproduced without permission.

In 1956, the movie Blackboard Jungle began screening around the UK. A tale of American juvenile delinquency, it featured Bill Hayley's "Rock Around the Clock" in the opening and closing credits, and often triggered riotous behavior among teenage audiences lapping up the alien soundtrack.

In Elephant and Castle—as well as elsewhere around London, and further afield—gang fights broke out and seats were slashed with razors when ushers told kids to stop dancing down the aisles.

While the 60s introduced plenty of other subcultural activity that the media and political order could get red-faced and frothy-mouthed about, the Teddy Boy culture remained, albeit in a slimmed-down form.

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(From left to right) Nidge, Jimmy Fletcher, and the late Paul Exley, a.k.a. Wolf, at the White Swan (known locally as the Mucky Duck), Leeds, 1970s

"You had the rockers and the bikers and the Hells Angels, but we got on with them, for the most part," says Nidge. "A lot of us would meet in the same bars. There was a bit of a mixture between the leather-jacketed rockers and the Teddy Boys. As the [Teddy Boy] revival came [in the 1970s], you'd have Teddy Boys who'd wear leather jackets during the day and put the drape on at night. The two cultures fused somewhat. The leather jacket was the fighting gear and the drape was the smarter gear to take your missus out in. The Angels would like heavy rock, but also the rock 'n' roll we were into; same with the rockers."

Original rock 'n' roll—Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran—had long been part of the Ted DNA, but the 70s brought different records and sounds to the fore. Largely based around rare rockabilly vinyl from the 1950s that hadn't seen a British release at the time, parallels can be drawn with the Northern Soul scene: This was a movement driven by the passion and knowledge of DJs and collectors scouring the crates—and often going abroad—to search out all the hidden gems. In London, the Black Raven pub in Bishopsgate became an epicenter for the revivalist scene, with Teds flocking in from all over to dance to music they couldn't hear anywhere else.

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A report on Teds partying at the Black Raven pub

Just as the soul scene created rabid new ears for impossibly obscure US imports, rockabilly artists like Don Woody, Sonny Burgess, Ray Campi, and Mac Curtis (who were completely unknown over here while recording in the 1950s) suddenly found eager new listeners.

However, while soul heads were relatively well catered for on the radio, the BBC was not supporting the growing interest in underground rockabilly and rock 'n' roll. It was a situation that led to one of the most energizing moments in Ted history—a full scale march on the BBC on May 15, 1976 to protest the lack of rock 'n' roll radio.

"I was in Rhodesia at the time, else I would have been there. But 6,000 people marched that day," says Nidge. "The BBC were playing a lot of 60s stuff, but not any rock 'n' roll. A 50,000-strong petition and pilot show were handed in. Out of that march came 'It's Only Rock n Roll,' the radio show, and that was an intrinsic part of the culture.

"If you were a Ted or a rocker, you'd listen on a Saturday when you were getting ready to go out. It was an underground culture in the 70s, thriving in the pubs and clubs. We'd always support the underground—the underdog—rather than mainstream artists."

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Teddy Girls in Portsmouth, 1955. Copyright Hugh Finnegan—not to be reproduced without permission.

Although the Teds generally got on with rockers, attitudes changed when it came to the new breed of 1970s rockabilly kids and—later in the decade—the punks. Also around at that time were the hepcats, a younger crowd who were into American doo-wop. The "golden age" of youth cults had ushered in an often severe tribalism, one that affected most areas of cultural life. This was an era when you could get your head kicked in for having the wrong haircut, and—as Nidge recalls—people frequently did.

"There was a lot of animosity between the various youth cults in the 70s, for sure," explains Nidge. "In Leeds, where I grew up, we really got going as Teddy Boys in the early 70s. The main opposition we had were the remnants of the skinheads and the suedeheads, who evolved in the late-60s, early-70s. There was a lot of that "boot boy" culture, a spin off from the mods.

"The rockabilly culture was a spinoff from the Teds, and we didn't get on so well. Rockabilly clobber was different—jeans, hobnail boots, and a checked shirt. More of a country style. After that came the hepcats, which was an American style. They liked the faster doo-wop type of rock 'n' roll, and used to mix in the same pub as us," Nidge recalls. "Towards the end of the 70s, the hepcats probably outnumbered the Teds. I used to DJ in the early-80s in Leeds, and I'd play to both audiences. I'm not saying that there wasn't violence between the two, though—I've been nose over the bar with hepcats."

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Teds on a bar crawl in Soho, 2010. Nidge is in the center in the red tie. Photo by Rose Van T

While animosity was mostly kept to a minimum among the Teds and other youth tribes, a special breed of aggression was reserved for the punk movement.

"The punks—that was different," says Nidge. "We would fight regularly with them. We saw it as an affront. They were appropriating Ted gear and then messing it up. It was basically down to Vivienne Westwood, who had the shop Let It Rock and sold drapes that she'd then customize. It could get pretty bloody serious, actually—switchblades and knuckle dusters... all sorts. These days, it's completely different. I was at a weekender recently and there was some punk guy there and nobody batted an eyelid."

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Teddy Boys in a London club, 1977

Since the late 70s, the movement has experienced its peaks and valleys (as with many subcultures, the 80s were not a kind decade). However, in the 1990s, two sisters formed the Edwardian Drape Society in North London to bring Teds together. The club itself doesn't meet too regularly these days, but they do hold regular events under the "Tennessee Club" banner, and throw "The Wildest Cats in Town" weekender, two days of music, dancing and vintage car appreciation attended by Teds, rockabillys, rockers, and a fair percentage of what Nidge describes as "weekenders—jive bunnies; they wear the Ted gear to dance in, but don't take it further."

But what, I wondered, would become of the movement? Will it survive the next 50 years? Nidge points to tensions between the more purist element of the Edwardian scene and the 70s revivalists, but maintains that there will probably always be an underground keeping the faith.

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A new generation of Teddy Boys—Daire Kimmage, Connor Brennan, and Lee Cummins from Dublin at the Tramway Hotel, Lowestoft in 2014

"A lot of original Teds are popping their clogs these days," he says. "It gets depressing as you get older—you start going to more funerals than weddings. Weekenders have been the lifeblood of the scene, though. Obviously Wildest Cats in Town, then you have the Skegness Stomp, which is pretty much 100-percent Teds; the Ted Do in Blackpool and also the Rockers Reunion.

"There was a bit of a wane at the end of the 70s. A lot of people left it, got married, moved on... but they're coming back now that the kids have left home. The fear is that it could become watered down. We want to get the youngsters on board and get them in the right mindset to carry it on into the future, and I'm sure they will. There are a fair few of them around now, and it's my hope that these folk will continue it properly."

Follow Harry on Twitter.

London Housing Activists Gave Cops the Run-Around Last Saturday

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Photos by Chris Bethell.

On Saturday, thousands of people marched through London, converging on Boris Johnson's City Hall to demand an end to the capital's housing crisis. While this crisis—and campaigns to fix it—have been intensifying for over a year, the March For Homes was the first mass protest attempting to unite the call for affordable housing. If anything, it's surprising that it took so long. It culminated in the short-lived occupation of some luxury flats—the kind of small-scale direct action that has characterized the housing campaign so far.

This was not a march motivated by empathy or altruism—people were personally affected. From families evicted from sheltered housing to professionals paying two-thirds of their wages on rent, the march was packed full of housing horror stories to make you wince. The march itself took a route that was kind of like a guided tour of London's housing crisis.

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People were angry, and they knew what they wanted: officially, the organizers of the march were calling for rent controls, more social housing, and an end to the Bedroom Tax—in short, "secure and affordable homes for all." Unofficially, people were shouting that they wanted to "burn the estate agents!" and "all landlords are bastards—ALAB!"—a twist on ACAB, or "all cops are bastards." You know London's housing situation is screwed up when people hate landlords as much as the cops. The chants echoed through the Square Mile as about 1,000 people marched from Shoreditch Church down to meet another 1,000, coming up from South London. Some estimates for the day's overall attendance went as high as 5,000.

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Michael James

Michael James, a private tenant in Tower Hamlets, told me he'd twice resisted eviction from his flat, after his landlord decided to turf him out for reporting dangerous housing conditions to the council. His flat, which he has lived in for 26 years, is damp and has no central heating. "People are moving into homes owned by my landlord that cost £1,400 a week [$2,100], with a washing machine that doesn't work. When they ring up and say, 'the washing machine doesn't work,' the landlord responds: 'find somewhere else to live if you don't like it.'"

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The Ismail family

The Ismail family have their own housing nightmare. They are part of the Focus E15 housing campaign, which hit the front pages last summer when their occupation of the Carpenter's Estate forced Newham Mayor Robin Wales to begin repopulating homes that had been left empty for eight years. The Ismails have been helping to run a stall with the E15 Mothers outside Stratford shopping center every Saturday since they got evicted from their home and offered housing outside of London. They've been staying at a relatives house for a month. "It's everybody's problem," said Mr. Ismail, "I can see many people homeless while rich foreign investors buy homes to leave empty: something's got to change."

For many others, the rent is quite simply too damn high. If food prices had risen at the same rate as housing since the mid-1970s, the average weekly shop for a family of four would cost £453.23 [$681.72].

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The first stop along the route was One Commercial Street. This luxury redevelopment gained notoriety last summer when anarchist group Class War began protesting against a new architectural-detail-cum-class-divider: one door for the rich, and another for the poor. It is a towering monument to London's spectacular inequality, developed and owned by Redrow, a housing giant who recently withdrew a sociopathic ad depicting a thoroughly miserable banker who tramples his way to the top, only to be rewarded by an over-priced glass box overlooking London—"at his feet."

Lovers of an angry gesture, Class War were not about to pass up the opportunity to stop by and do some more shouting and banner holding.

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Cold, wet, and loomed over at all times by London's icons of super-wealth, the march itself seemed like some sort of allegory for the housing situation for the poor in London. Once the freezing march had reached its destination and some speeches had been made in the shadow of City Hall, everyone was just about ready to go back to their overpriced shoe-box apartments.

But then, someone shouted, "If you don't want the protest to end, follow us!"

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Around 50 people broke off from the speeches, rushing around the corner to another luxury development, One Tower Bridge. In these luxury blocks—half-finished on "one of London's last great riverside sites"—they won't need to build in any poor doors. That's because there won't be any poor people at all. Apart from maybe an army of cleaners, concierges, porters, and whatever other clichéd Victorian characters are required to provide a "5-star luxury living experience in the most exciting city in the world." The cheapest one bedroom property on offer costs £1,475,000 [$2,218,000]. Coming in at a cool £15,000,000 [$23,000,000] is apartment number 501, complete with four bedrooms, "a 24-hour Harrods concierge," "an iconic riverside location," "luxury spa and gym facilities," and two living rooms (one "formal," one "informal").

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Protestors piled through the entrance to the building site, passing security guards and attempting to barricade the way behind them. The police chased some of the activists and slogans were sprayed in the walls.

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One guy even surfed on a trash bin to get try and get away from the cops. Some people managed to reach balconies and hang banners off them, while most people got blocked at the foot of the staircase.

Later on another occupation took place on the Aylesbury Estate—an old council estate fallen victim to the regeneration-cum-gentrification of Elephant and Castle.

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All in all, the March For Homes was like trying to cram all the ups and downs of London's monumental housing saga into one short, drizzly walk. Protestors knew what they wanted—secure, affordable homes for everyone—but did they know how to get it?

This is where the differences between the myriad groups that organized, supported, and mobilized for the march began to show. It's not hard to imagine how the Mayor of Tower Hamlets, trade unionists from Lambeth, and anarchists from Lewisham, or people who just turned up to vent, might offer very different solutions to the housing crisis. Who exactly is the demand for affordable housing being leveled at? Boris Johnson? The Labour Party? Or perhaps the Green Party? Property developers? Crooked landlords?

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One thing is for certain—despite housing being billed a "key" electoral battle ground, nobody I talked to was feeling particularly inspired by the upcoming General Election. Perhaps that's not surprising when there are more landlords than women in Parliament. Labor councillors have become the bad guys in many boroughs, pushing through regeneration schemes from Waltham Forest, to Southwark, to Newham. Sonia, an angry resident from Fred John Towers—an estate in Leytonstone earmarked for redevelopment—made herself crystal clear: "do not vote Labor." Then there are the Tories, funded by their luxury property bedfellows. Are they gonna pursue any policies that solve the housing crisis if it costs their mates money? It's hard not to be cynical.

When it comes to housing, the choice at the election seems to be between two parties who are more likely to be seen at the opening reception of a property developer's conference than picketing the poor-doors outside some luxury flats. That said, housing protests have been some of the most successful of the last few years, so all's not lost. The housing crisis may determine the outcome of the election, but it seems unlikely that the election will determine the outcome of the housing crisis.

Follow Gabriel and Chris on Twitter.


We Spoke to the Activist Behind #BlackLivesMatter About Racism in Britain and America

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Patrisse Cullors speaking in Tottenham, London, as part of the Ferguson solidarity tour. Photo by Steve Eason

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

With political slogans becoming the property of absolutely everybody with a Twitter account within a matter of minutes, it's easy to assume that some of the most Zeitgeist-y parts of our political discourse come out of thin air, but of course that's not the case. Patrisse Cullors is co-founder of Black Lives Matter—the movement and oft-trending hashtag. Based in LA, she's been on the front line at uprisings across the US in response to a wave of high profile deaths of black people in police custody.

She's currently on a speaking tour of the UK and Ireland, heading to communities, universities, and holding meetings in Parliament. I caught up with Patirsse on the train from Brighton to London in the midst of a hectic schedule. We chatted about how she's spreading the Black Lives Matter movement across the globe, what's happening in the States at the moment, and why that's relevant to the UK.

VICE: Tell me about the origins of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Patrisse Cullors: After George Zimmerman was acquitted of the murder of Trayvon Martin, back in July 2013, myself and two friends came up with the hashtag. My friend Alicia had written a love-letter to folks, saying, "Our Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter."

I put a hashtag in front—within days people were using it across the world. We're talking about all black lives, we weren't just talking about black men dying in the hands of the police, we're talking about black women, black trans people, black queer people. We want to show that under the current system of white supremacy, anti-blackness has major consequences. Inside the US, and around the world, anti-black racism has global consequences. Black Lives Matter is a call to action—it's a mantra, a testimony.

My brother was incarcerated in LA county jails at 19, and he was almost killed by the sheriffs. They beat him. They tortured him and brutalized him.

How did you end up at the heart of it?
I've been organizing since I was 16. I came out as queer, and was kicked out of home. Along with a bunch of other young queer women of color, we raised each other. We also dealt with poverty, being black and brown in the USA, and trying to figure out how to live our daily lives. My brother was incarcerated in LA county jails at 19, and he was almost killed by the sheriffs. They beat him. They tortured him and brutalized him. This was my awakening, seeing how far the state will go, and how they treat our families.

Most disturbing was the lack of support and absolute neglect that my brother and my family faced after he was brutalized. Part of my upbringing was a feeling of rage, but I also knew I could do something about it. With my mentors, and a civil rights organization, I learned my craft over 11 years. I focused on the school to prison pipeline [where young people go straight from school into the juvenile criminal justice system], environmental justice, and police violence.

Did this movement grow out of the death of Mike Brown? That's really when we started to hear about stuff in the UK.
Actually, I think the first set of uprisings came with the murder of Oscar Grant. That was our politicization.

You don't hear as much about Oscar Grant over here. Who is he?
Oscar Grant was a young black man murdered by Bart police on January 1, 2010. He was coming home from a New Year's Eve party with his girlfriend and some friends. An altercation happened on the train, by Fruitvale Station. This film came out of it—it's powerful. He's handcuffed; the cops take three of his friends off the train as it's stopped. The cop is shouting "relax, relax!" and he's saying he is relaxed. Next thing he is shot in the back. It was all on camera, all recorded. It goes viral. That was our generation's "oh fuck."

Uprisings happened in Oakland, in LA, there were a lot of protests. And then we had Trayvon Martin's murder, and while we don't take to the streets, we follow the trial of George Zimmerman. When he's acquitted, we take to the streets. This went global. And then we saw a visibilizing of the murders, of young black boys in particular. The media picks it up. Renisha McBride, shot on a doorstep when looking for help. It wasn't just Mike Brown's. It was multiple murders; Mike Brown was the last straw. The momentum picked up. People had always been dying, but now the world seemed to care.

What's the situation on the ground at the moment?
There is still a lot going on, people showing up to council meetings, in the halls of power, and we are shutting shit down. Just in the last week there was an altercation between the cops and the community at a council meeting in St Louis, Ferguson. Folks are very angry. We don't think the changes we need have been made. There has been no justice for Mike Brown, no justice for Eric Garner—people are still dying at the hands of the state. It's important for us to continue to push these conversations, even if the mainstream media has taken a step back. We've proclaimed that 2015 will be the year of resistance, the year of resilience, and its only January.

Do you think the mood has changed outside black communities in the US?
There's been a significant amount of consciousness-raising throughout the entire country, and specifically in more middle class communities. What has been interesting is that middle class black folk, who before hadn't identified with poor black communities, have had their own revelations. They're realising that they're still black, and it's still America.

There was this husband and wife I met, both Harvard grads, raising their children to believe we live in a post-racial society. They sent their kids to private school, where their son gets called the N-word. Suddenly they realised these things still exist. Even with all these resources, they're still subject to these discriminations. The country is waking up. Five or six years ago if you went up to some random white folk in a middle class neighbourhood, they'd think the cops work for them. If you ask now, there's harsh criticism. I think that's got a lot to do with social media, and how we've shaped the narrative.

Many queer black women are prominent the movement. How does the work with the church, which plays such a big part in many black communities?
Historically there's been a massive discontent between black queer and trans people and the church. We know that in the civil rights movement a lot of black queer folk were asked to step out, including a predominant member, Bayard Rustin, who was actually the mastermind of the march on Washington, but because he was gay he was asked not to participate. None of us want to be him this time. We've pushed the black church in particular to look at the crisis for all black people, not just cis-black-heterosexual men. This has split the church a bit, but there's a hell of a lot of pastors turning out to support the queer and trans community.

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Patrisse Cullors speaking in Tottenham, London, as part of the Ferguson solidarity tour. Photo by Steve Eason

You've been in the UK for a week, how has it been, and how does the situation here relate to the USA?
In theory the UK has a significant amount of structures to allow for accountability, of law enforcement in particular. That's the theory. But in the US we don't really have these structures to allow for accountability. There aren't really independent investigators, its just very rare for prosecutions for law enforcement. And so, being here, I've realized, there are some systems in place that might actually be good for the US. It just seems those systems don't work.

Britain has done a great job as painting itself as the humanitarian, with the US being the torturer. But that shit ain't true.

Then there are the similarities, the ways in which black people are treated—it's outright racism. From Christopher Alder being brutalized on tape, hearing the officers calling him racist slurs, to the G4S guards who killed Jimmy Mubenga with racist texts on their phones. You have that same hatred, these white supremacist ideologies coming out of both of our countries. And here too, justice is not being served. We have Mike Brown, no justice. We have Eric Garner, no justice. Here we see the same: Mark Duggan, Sean Rigg. The list is vast.

Is this stuff talked about in the States, like how in the UK we're aware over here about what's going on in Ferguson?
Here's the thing, black people in the US don't know what's happening here in the UK. I'm well read, well educated, and coming here and learning these stories I'm like, "Why don't I know about this, why haven't we heard?" The US is very insular. The UK has an image of being better, a humane society, that there isn't the same level of racism here. But now I have a very different perspective that I'm going to take home and talk about. Britain has done a great job as painting itself as the humanitarian, with the US being the torturer. But that shit ain't true.

Here in the UK there've been solidarity actions. People shut down the streets in London and Westfield shopping center too. What's the impact of these things for people on the ground? Do you notice?
Yes, it was noticed. We've seen all the work folks are doing on the ground. From here, where you guys shut down Westfield, to Spain and Brazil. In Israel, African refugees are using the Black Lives Matter mantra to talk about law enforcement violence by the Israeli police. We see it, and we're in awe. We wanted and needed it to go global.

Where is this going? What happens next?
There are 23 Black Lives Matter chapters right now, in the US, Canada, and Ghana. We need to uplift the local struggles across the country, as well as pushing for greater accountability for law enforcement.

We want legislation that will see divestment from law enforcement and investing in poor communities. We want to build a national project linking families who have been impacted by state violence, with a national database that looks at individual law enforcement officers and agencies. We also want to look at how to develop a system of independent investigation. We want to figure out a victims' bill of rights, to counter the police bill of rights. Until then, we're gonna shut shit down.

Follow Mike on Twitter.

Bad Cop Blotter: Should We Be Surprised That the DEA Is Tracking America's Drivers?

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Thanks to some sleuthing and Freedom of Information Act requests by the American Civil Liberties Union, last week the public learned that the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has a license plate tracking system that contains hundreds of millions of records. Though the documents that the federal agency provided to the ACLU were "heavily redacted and incomplete," the nonprofit reported that it's clear that "this program is a major DEA initiative that has the potential to track our movements around the country. With its jurisdiction and its finances, the federal government is uniquely positioned to create a centralized repository of all drivers' movements across the country—and the DEA seems to be moving toward doing just that."

Among other revelations is that one of the "primary" goals of this piece of the American surveillance state, which was launched in 2008, was to help various law enforcement agencies with their asset forfeiture programs, a particularly loathsome aspect of the war on drugs that involves cops seizing cash and property from suspects and then forcing them to prove their innocence to get their stuff back.

Some might argue that License Plate Recognition (LPR) scanners are far from Orwellian—all they can do is roughly track the movements of drivers, and those movements are made in public anyway. But this bulk collection of data is comparable to the NSA's casual vacuuming up of metadata—the bits and pieces of information are individually inconsequential, but when put together they can reveal intimate details about our lives.

Clearly the DEA would prefer to not answer pesky questions about exactly how many cameras are part of this system (more than 100, according to the ACLU report), how long information is stored, and just who has access to it. We do know that the program is heavily focused on border states, including California, Arizona, and New Mexico, though it seems to be expanding rapidly. A 2009 email revealed that agency officials even considered indiscriminately tracking license plates at gun shows. Even if the excuse for that kind of tracking—which was said to be only a suggestion—is that it will lead to dangerous drug- and gun-trafficking cartels, the DEA has a long history of stepping on the gun rights of, say, people who dare to use medical marijuana.

The bottom line is that we don't have any reason to trust federal agencies that collect massive amounts of data on us. After all, just two years ago the New York Times uncovered evidence that the DEA secretly had access to a gigantic database of phone records. (The Department of Justice recently claimed that this program was discontinued in the fall of 2013.) The agency also uses what's known parallel construction to convict some drug suspects—which generally means starting an investigation off of a tip from another agency, like the NSA, then later reconstructing the narrative of the investigation to mask the fact of the original tip. And last year Edward Snowden and the Intercept revealed ICREACH, an easily searchable database of hundreds of billions of records in an easily searchable database that can be accessed by operatives from the DEA, the FBI, and the NSA, and other agencies.

If revelations about the DEA's license plate scanning seems almost exhaustingly minute compared to all the terrifying things we already know, it's still another major piece of evidence showing that the upper echelons of law enforcement have little to no interest in our constitutional rights.

Now for the rest of this week's bad cops:

-Seattle Police officer Cynthia Whitlatch was put on desk dusty seven months after she arrested a 69-year-old man who was using a golf club as a cane to lean on. Last summer, Whitlatch arrested William Wingate for refusing to drop the golf club and for allegedly swinging it at her—but even though video of the incident did not back up Whitlatch's story, Wingate was charged with unlawful use of a weapon. Once prosecutors took a better look, the charges were dropped, however, and he got his golf club back along with an apology. Whitlatch initially got what sounded like a talking to and some retraining. However, after she made some post-Ferguson Facebook posts about "black paranoia," she was relegated to desk duty.

-Speaking of Seattle: A teacher there is suing the police department after he was pepper sprayed in the face during a Martin Luther King, Jr. Day march. Jesse Hagopian can be seen in a video uploaded to YouTube crossing the street while chatting on his cellphone, and then abruptly being sprayed in the face by the officer. She appears to be acting unprovoked, while her fellow bike cops stand around looking underwhelmed. The NAACP is backing Hagopian's lawsuit.

-John B. Greer was fatally shot by Fairfax County, Virginia, police in August of 2013 while standing on his own stoop. Since then there has been a disturbing pattern of stonewalling from police over the details of the incident. Finally, on Saturday, the Washington Post reported that four police officers say Greer had his hands up when he was shot. Adam D. Torres was 17 feet away from Greer when he says the man began to move his hands down, resulting the barrage of bullets. But the four other officers say that Greer did nothing of the sort. The "blue wall of silence" is legendary, so if four other cops say a domestic dispute suspect wasn't lowering his hands, it seems likely he wasn't lowering his hands. Torres, for his part, continues to defend the shooting as legitimate.

-Former California Highway Patrolman Sean Harrington won't go to jail for stealing nude pictures off of the phones of drunk driving suspects, but he will receive a 180-day suspended sentence, as well as three years of probation. Harrington also has to give a community speech about how he was a dick. If nothing else, lets hope he won't ever be a law enforcement officer again.

-On Thursday, a bill was introduced in the Minnesota state legislature that would keep police dash-cam footage private, and therefore inaccessable to anyone except the cops and the subjects of the videos. There are unquestionably privacy concerns at work when the police are always on film, but making potential footage of police misconduct out of the reach of the press and public is not the answer to that legitimate concern.

-It's official: Detroit Police Officer Joseph Weekley will not face any charges for killing seven-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones during a 2010 police raid. Juries failed to render a verdict against Weekely twice before. In the fall, a judge dismissed manslaughter charges against Weekley and on Friday, the same judge dismissed charges of reckless use of a firearm. Stanley-Jones died during the search for a murder suspect, but even in those circumstances the deployment of a SWAT team (with a camera crew in tow) was still dangerous. Whether anyone will learn from Stanley-Jones's death, and whether policies on SWAT deployment will be changed, remains doubtful. But we now know nobody will be punished.

-St. Louis is on track to start a civilian oversight board, an idea that has a lot of support from the community. However, police union official Jeff Roorda is fighting against the plan, claiming that if it passed, police officers would be upset, and "incredibly reluctant to do their jobs... St. Louis would be a much more dangerous place than it is now." The subtle blackmail contained in that remark is disturbing. Good cops should accept that civilians have a stake in their jobs, and that they are allowed to keep an eye on them when they work.

-Speaking of good cops, our Good Cop of the Week is retired, but is still doing good works. Former Apex, North Carolina, officer Mike Wilson was driving with his wife on January 24 when they encountered a woman who had driven her car into the middle of a cold, deep creek and stranded herself on a sandbar. Wilson rescued the woman and even swam back to the car to confirm that there was nobody else in distress. If Wilson was this courageous during his tenure as a cop, he was a good cop indeed.

Follow Lucy Steigerwald on Twitter.

VICE on HBO: Watch Our HBO Report on the Worst Drought in Texas's History

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(We're putting the second season of our Emmy-winning HBO show online. Watch all the episodes that have gone up so far here.)

In the eighth episode of our second season of VICE on HBO, we head to Papua New Guinea, where America's Exxon Mobil has staked a claim to a $19 billion liquid natural gas project. Then, we go to Texas in the midst of the state's worst drought in recorded history. While many feel that humans are to blame for the climate change, a lot of Texans do not—and they have taken few, if any, initiatives to limit the state's CO2 emissions.

The Premier of Ontario May Have Tried to Buy Off One of Her Candidates

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Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne. Photo via Flickr user Joseph Morris

The Premier of Ontario is mired in a House of Cards-esque plot, chock full of deception, secret recordings, and, to hear her new adversary tell it, bribery.

Former Liberal candidate Andrew Olivier says a party organizer, the chief of staff to the premier, and Kathleen Wynne herself all offered him government jobs if he stepped aside and let their preferred candidate run.

Now, police are investigating and Wynne herself could be at the heart of that probe.

The whole scandal has cast a spotlight on the underworld of Ontario patronage and nepotism. And it all stems from a hotly contested provincial by-election in the riding of Sudbury.

It began when would-be Liberal candidate Andrew Olivier got a call from local party organizer Gerry Lougheed.

Olivier had narrowly lost a race for the seat in the general election, less than a year earlier, to NDP candidate Joe Cimino. So when Cimino abruptly resigned his seat for health reasons a few months after the election, Olivier decided to take another crack at it.

A few days after Olivier made it public that he would be running again, he got a visit from Lougheed.

"This is a significant conversation, my friend," Lougheed told Olivier.

Lougheed is a mainstay of federal and provincial politics in Sudbury. Olivier calls him a "kingmaker."

The entire conversation is on tape because Olivier, who is quadriplegic, records his conversations rather than taking notes.

What follows is a bombshell.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/Cm8bp9ZKUQU#t:883' width='420' height='315']

Call between Gerry Lougheed and Andrew Olivier

"Glenn Thibeault, as of this morning, has decided that he's going to run," Lougheed says.

Thibeault was the federal Member of Parliament for the riding, and a New Democrat.

His decision to switch allegiances came as shock to some, though not to others. In defending his decision to jump ship, Thibeault went after Mulcair—the man he endorsed for leadership of the party in 2012—for his "top-down" approach to running the NDP.

Two party sources who spoke with VICE, however, said that Thibeault was negotiating with the federal Liberal Party as far back as 2009, when Jack Layton was still leader. He reportedly backed off after the poll numbers for then-Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff cratered.

"I think the nomination is very important to Glenn," Lougheed tells Olivier. "But obviously, he'd like to have an acclamation, with everybody behind him, because the NDP are gonna shit all over him."

"I'm sure," says Olivier.

What comes next is what, according to Olivier and the NDP, amounts to bribery.

If you consider stepping down and getting behind Thibeault, says Lougheed, "the premier wants to talk to you. They would like to present to you options in terms of appointments, jobs, whatever."

Lougheed gives Olivier tips on how to get a good deal.

"You need to say: so, why would Andrew Olivier be motivated to do this?" Lougheed tells him. "What's in it for me? Politically, what's in it for me? In my long term, short term, is there an appointment, are you gonna let me head up a commission? What are you giving me, for me to step down, that is worthwhile?"

The conversation lasts 20 minutes. Lougheed leaves. Olivier maintains that he wants to run.

Later that day, Wynne called Olivier. That's the one tape that Olivier hasn't made public, because an investigation by the provincial police and Elections Ontario is ongoing. There's been no indication of what Wynne said to the would-be candidate.

The next day, Olivier received another call. This time, it wasn't a political fixer like Lougheed calling—it was Pat Sorbara, Wynne's deputy chief of staff and campaign director for the Ontario Liberals.

Olivier tells Sorbara that, sorry, but he'll be continuing his candidacy. Sorbara says: too bad, we'll be appointing Thibeault.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/5nhSDau0tuw#t:968' width='420' height='315']

Call between Pat Sorbara and Andrew Olivier

But the conversation continues. Sorbara tells Olivier how extraordinary the situation is, and how badly everyone in the Premier's office wants to resolve this amicably.

"Let's just think about the other ways that you could," Sorbara stammers a bit. "I was hesitant to go here because I don't want to look like I'm trying to suggest there's a consolation prize."

Nevertheless, she goes on.

"But I heard you say: 'I wanna be a boss, I wanna be at the table,' and that's what [Wynne] was trying to say to you," Sorbara says, offering him an advisory role on disability advocacy and policy, as an executive of the party, or a job in Thibeault's office, if he wins.

All of the jobs bandied about by Sorbara and Lougheed, at this point, would normally come with a stipend or salary paid for through the government.

The two end the conversation. Olivier says he'll think about it. In the end, he rejected the government.

Four days later, Olivier held a press conference to allege that the party offered him a job in exchange for stepping aside.

"I will not be bullied or bought," Olivier swore.

The investigation
After levying the accusations at the two Liberal organizers, Olivier got a call from the Ontario Provincial Police. They wanted the tapes.

On the advice of his counsel, Olivier asked that they issue a summons for the material. They refused and closed the investigation.

That's pretty exceptional, as the charges they're investigating are not small affairs. The Criminal Code makes it illegal for public office holders to horse trade an office under their purview in exchange for some political benefit. Penalties include jail time.

After the OPP walked away, Olivier told VICE, he was frustrated.

"It's hard to go outside when people think you lied," he said. "When people think you cried wolf."

Olivier eventually got the summons he was asking for, not from the OPP but from Elections Ontario. The Elections Act states clearly that it's illegal to "give, procure or promise or agree to procure an office or employment to induce a person to become a candidate, refrain from becoming a candidate or withdraw his or her candidacy."

Olivier coughed up all three tapes. Then he posted two of them to YouTube.

In the maelstrom of scrutiny, the OPP re-opened its investigation. Wynne will also be meeting with Elections Ontario this week.

Wynne's office has been categorical in arguing that "any suggestion that anything was offered in exchange for any action is false". Olivier was already told he would not be the candidate, her office contends, and therefore there couldn't possibly be bought off. The office also rightly pointed out that Lougheed has no formal job with the party.

Yet the tapes prove that Lougheed made a very clear request: that Olivier withdraw and allow the process to look like Thibeault was running unopposed, instead of forcing Wynne to appoint him and make everything look undemocratic.

Both Wynne's office and Lougheed said he was in no position to offer a job to Olivier.

Lougheed's prominence in the party is not insignificant, however. He's one of only seven individuals who donated the maximum amount—$9,975—to the Liberals in 2014. He's also seen as a crucial organizer and fundraiser in the riding in question. A local organizer called him the neighbourhood " muckety-muck."

He also organizes extensively for the federal Liberal Party. That might explain why Marianne Matichuk, who also wanted to run, is now seeking the federal nomination. With Thibeault gone, it's much more likely that she'll actually win.

Olivier ended up running just the same. He announced his intention to run as an independent in early January.

[body_image width='785' height='960' path='images/content-images/2015/02/02/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/02/' filename='the-premier-of-ontario-may-have-tried-to-buy-off-one-of-her-candidates-823-body-image-1422893764.jpg' id='23389']Andrew Olivier. Photo via campaign literature

Polling firm Mainstreet Technologies found 14 percent of the riding would vote "other" come election day. By the middle of January another firm, Forum Research, had Olivier at 22 percent. Another firm has confirmed that about one in five voters were siding with Olivier around that time

Thibeault also lost some support from the party's top brass. Liberal riding president Bill Nurmi resigned, along with a good chunk of the riding association executives, after Olivier went forward with the tapes.

Thibeault just appointed his own people to the board—the new president is his former staffer and the new secretary is his sister.

The Mainstreet poll found that 46 percent of voters disapprove of Thibeault's decision to run for the Liberals.

VICE asked what drove Olivier's decision to run as an independent which, normally, would be an adventure doomed to absolute failure.

"I wanted to be in a position to best represent Sudbury," Olivier said. "To best represent the people that supported me."

He says his rejection of the deal has sparked something with voters—a rejection of the backroom deals that all three parties make.

"We've got some momentum here," he says.

A culture of patronage?
The Ontario Liberal Party is certainly not the first provincial government to employ patronage as a means to an end.

Indeed, a VICE analysis of information from the Ontario Public Appointments Secretariat reveals that there is more than one patronage job on the provinces' various commissions and boards.

Both Gerry Lougheed and his partner, Louise Paquette, have received jobs from the province.

Lougheed sits on the Sudbury Police Services Board, thanks to an appointment from the Premier, while Paquette is the Executive Director of a regional health board with the provincially-appointed board members hiring Paquette.

Several other Liberal-involved Ontarians also have jobs thanks to Wynne.

Gurjit Sidhu, a federal Liberal riding president and nomination candidate, sits on the Citizens' Council. Sandra Pupatello, who also ran for the Liberal leadership, got a job on the board of Hydro One. Vito Sgro, a riding president and organizer of Wynne's leadership bid, is on the board of Infrastructure Ontario. Christopher Hoffman, whose $7,500 donation makes him the third-largest individual donor to Wynne's leadership campaign, was appointed by Wynne to Toronto's health board.

Each of those jobs comes with considerable financial incentive: per diems ranging from $200 to $500.

There are dozens of other Liberal donors who show up on the various boards and commissions that fall under Wynne's purview.

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.


Pierre Kwenders Sings in Five Languages, but Don't Call it World Music

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Pierre Kwenders Sings in Five Languages, but Don't Call it World Music

We Asked a Criminologist if Vigilantes Are Carrying Out Justice in Edmonton

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[body_image width='1500' height='1155' path='images/content-images/2015/02/02/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/02/' filename='we-asked-a-criminologist-if-vigilantes-are-carrying-out-justice-in-edmonton-712-body-image-1422903423.jpg' id='23457']

Photo via Flickr user Secretive Ireland

On the evening of January 22, Richard Suter was picked up from his Edmonton home by three men pretending to be Edmonton police officers. In an interview with the Edmonton Journal's Andrea Ross, the 64-year-old said the men, dressed in what looked like SWAT uniforms, showed up at his door told him to come with them.

When Suter asked them what they were there about they told him, "You know what this is about. We've been told to bring you in." The men led the 64-year-old to a pickup truck, handcuffed him, and put a bag over his head. Several hours later he was left near a farmer's field, wearing just his boots and bathrobe, alive, but badly beaten and now missing a thumb.

Suter was eventually found by a passing motorist. His thumb was not.

But this wasn't the first time that Richard Suter's name has graced the front page of an Edmonton newspaper.

Suter is awaiting trial for a May 19, 2013 incident when his SUV slammed into the patio of a Ric's Grill restaurant on the south side of Edmonton, resulting in the death of 2-year-old Geo Mounsef. It's alleged that he was drunk behind the wheel, and it's speculated that Suter put his vehicle into drive instead of reverse when he slammed into the eatery's patio.

He's charged with impaired operation causing death, refusing to provide a breath sample, and two counts of impaired operation causing bodily harm.

In a post pinned to the Facebook group Justice for Geo's wall, Geo's mother Sage Morin recounts what happened.

"A blue SUV which had originally appeared to be slowly parking suddenly floored his acceleration driving through my entire family, pinning my 2 year old son against a concrete wall," the post reads. "The driver stumbled out of his vehicle, too drunk to even stand, too much of an animal to even say sorry."

The case struck a chord with Edmontonians and a large group rallied behind the deceased boy. Emotions came to a boiling point in May 2013, when Suter was granted bail. Mounsef's mother stormed out of the courthouse and the deceased boy's father screamed at Suter while their supporters crowded the courthouse.

For a while all seemed quiet on the Suter front, but that changed on a cold Thursday evening in late January when he was abducted and assaulted by the three men.

Suter told the Journal he believes the act was not random and that the men were "professional criminals." That said, Suter does not understand the rationale behind the action, if it was indeed planned.

"It's got to be some kind of vengeance or something, if it had something to do with the accident," Suter said in an interview with Edmonton's Global News. "There's no intimidation purpose. I'm the one that's standing trial so who would intimidate me? I don't know; that doesn't make sense.... I have no reason to believe that I've done anything else."

VICE interviewed Temitope Oriola, a criminologist and recipient of the Governor General of Canada Academic Gold Medal, and had him analyze the public facts of the case.

After doing so, Oriola told VICE that the incident appears to be "a case of vigilante justice that is, in the absence of any contradictory evidence, likely connected to Geo Mounsef's death."

According to Oriola, there are several determinants that may spark vigilante justice, but in the end it boils down to a lack of trust with the justice system. "Essentially this is about the cosigned relationship of trust, between people and agents of law enforcement."

If the Suter case was indeed vigilante justice, there are several factors that may have driven the culprits to take action: the fact that the justice system was taking its sweet time with the case; Suter being granted bail in 2013; and that the outcome of the trial will likely be, in the eyes of the assailants, too lenient.

Sage Morin has since posted on the same Facebook group condemning the violence Suter experienced.

"Justice For Geo will not come in the form of violence. Our family remains hopeful and entrusting of the legal system to bring Justice For Geo," Morin wrote. "It is utterly heartbreaking to have our Baby Geo's memory associated with this horrible act of violence."

Oriola notes that while Morin has expressed outrage at and condemned these actions, the crime does not necessarily have to have a direct tie to the family to be a case of vigilante justice.

"It is not unusual that vigilante justice is executed by persons who have no direct stakes in the matter at hand," said Oriola. "They need only be subjectively connected with the victim—at least in their heads—for such actions to take place.

"They rarely seek the consent of victims or their families before action," he explained.

Edmonton police have denounced vigilante justice before. When a story broke in 2013 about the online hacktivist collective Anonymous posting the information of people allegedly luring underage girls online, ALERT's Integrated Child Exploitation Unit head Bob Andrews said, "Allegations alone are not enough to lay a charge."

Orilia further explained that since vigilante justice is far more common in countries where citizens hold no respect for and have no trust in the legal system, these cases are exceedingly rare in a developed country like Canada.

"People may want swift action, or what they perceive as justice, without considering the implications for law and order," Oriola said. "Vigilantism is no guarantee of justice; it is not justice. The notion that an accused person is innocent until proven guilty must be upheld."

It is unclear, as of now, what will come from Suter's abduction. The three men involved are still at large. When contacted for a statement, Scott Pattison of the Edmonton Police Service's media relations unit said that due to the ongoing investigation he was unable to discuss the matter.

Suter is set to stand trial for Mousef's death in October.

Follow Mack on Twitter or visit his website.

An Actor Who Played the Red Power Ranger Allegedly Murdered His Roommate with a Sword

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[body_image width='1500' height='1294' path='images/content-images/2015/02/02/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/02/' filename='a-red-power-ranger-is-accused-of-murdering-his-roommate-with-a-sword-202-body-image-1422901868.jpg' id='23454']

Photo via Flickr user Nathan Rupert

Cops are saying that Ricardo Medina Jr., who used to play the Red Power Ranger on TV, murdered his roommate over the weekend.

According to a press release from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, the altercation took place around 4 PM on Saturday in Palmdale. Medina, who is 36, apparently got into an argument with the victim, Joshua Sutter, before retreating into his bedroom. When Sutter tried to force his way into the room, Medina allegedly delivered a fatal blow with a nearby sword to the man's abdomen. Then the actor called 9-1-1 and submitted himself to an interview. Medina is being charged with murder is being held on a $1 million bond, according to the press release.

Those familiar with the the original iteration of the showMighty Morphin' Power Rangers, which ran from 1993 to 1995—probably associate the Red Power Ranger with Austin St. John, but since then, there's been a whole mess of reboots and sequels. The version of the show that Medina Jr. was on—Power Rangers: Wild Forceaired in 2002 and featured a cast of nature-loving rangers squaring off against an evil force caused by pollution. (Their main opponent was Master Org, a dude who kind of looks like Daniel Day Lewis in Last of the Mohicans with a horn on his head.)

This isn't the first time a former actor from the Power Rangers scene has been wrapped up in a murder investigation. In 2008 Skylar Deleon, who once appeared as an uncredited extra on Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, was convicted of murdering three people—a man he met in jail and a couple—in order to steal some money and a yacht.

Medina's IMDB page indicates that he had stints on two other Power Ranger shows as well as appearances on CSI: Miami and ER, though it seems like his career has come to an abrupt end.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

An Open Letter to One of Katy Perry's Ridiculously Handsome Super Bowl Sharks

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An Open Letter to One of Katy Perry's Ridiculously Handsome Super Bowl Sharks

The Real Reason the US Military Is Suddenly So Secretive About Afghanistan

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The Real Reason the US Military Is Suddenly So Secretive About Afghanistan
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