[body_image width='700' height='468' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='cancer-can-be-heartbreakingly-funny-178-body-image-1423054766.jpg' id='24144']

Image via Beatrice Murch

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

My mom was diagnosed with lymphoma a couple of years ago. She's now in remission, and it was a horrendous time that my family would never want to repeat in a million years. But, much like how I imagine the experience of eating a piece of hardened dog shit embedded with nuggets of milk chocolate might be, there were pockets of joy.

The first laugh-out-loud moment came when Mom was hospitalized for having an extremely low blood count and was given an immediate transfusion before her consultant was able to diagnose her. A problem with excess fluid in her ears had left her partially deaf so the doctor had to shout— really loudly—to her during ward rounds. "I'M AFRAID YOU HAVE CANCER," he bellowed, like Brian Blessed. "BUT IT'S THE GOOD KIND! THE BEST TYPE TO HAVE." It was ridiculous.

Then came the chemo. After a series of treatments, Mom's hair began to fall out in clumps until she was left with a single section at the very back that was as long as a ruler. She looked like Tong-Po in Kickboxer. Mom co-opted my sisters and I into transforming her remaining hair into a makeshift fringe, though, by pulling it over the rest of her (very bald) head and "setting" it over her eyebrow-less forehead. It was spiky and peeped out from under her headscarf, like a curious tarantula, but none of us had the heart to tell her. I'll never forget her face when she asked us if she looked OK. We lied. And we laughed. It didn't matter—she felt better.

Later, my younger sister convinced Mom to let her cut the remaining strands of hair off with a pair of kitchen scissors. It was a disturbing moment and one that my sister is still haunted by. By this point, Mom's eyes had become like those of a small child; shiny, nervous, searching for security and validation. My sister became her parent, soothing her with kind words and preparing anything she wanted to eat at the drop of a hat, cleansing her face for her while she laid in bed and listening to her talk about God, the meaning of life, and the clarity that cancer forces upon its unwilling hosts. Then Mom would ask her if her arms looked fat, demand buttered teacakes, and end up nodding off mid-sentence, releasing a steady stream of trapped, ill wind as she snoozed.

My old dad refused to believe that my mom could possibly have cancer and lived in a perpetual fog of denial. He stopped wearing dress shirts (his uniform, basically), opting for comfier T-shirts with slogans across the chest. My mom was too tired to help him shop so, one day, he showed up to Friday prayers at the mosque wearing a T-shirt he'd bought of his own volition that said, "Una cerveza por favor." He had absolutely no idea what it meant, much like the other top he'd bought that featured an illustration of Holland's scenic countryside and the words "wind factory." He pretty much turned into a toddler who'd been given the freedom to choose his outfit for pre-school for the first time and speedily put on a sparkly bikini, a pair of frog wellies, and a Rasta hat.

It was funny. Really, really funny. But desperately sad, too. We knew that, deep down, the poor sod had stopped caring about clothing after realizing that the woman he had spent the last 40 years trying to impress might not be around to be impressed any more.

As the first winter approached, Mom had to wear a beanie hat under her hooded coat to keep her hairless head warm. She walked the streets of Bradford like an exhausted thug in a shalwar kameez. Dad would take her out in the car for cancer-friendly dates where he'd roll up outside an Asian bakery and buy her a hot naan that had just come out of the tandoor. It was the only thing she wanted to eat, so he would sit with her as they munched on hot flatbreads talking about anything but cancer. All the while, my pensioner father would be wearing a flat cap, spectacles, and an XL T-shirt with an image of Al Pacino and a gun printed on the front. They didn't have the foggiest about how utterly, unfathomably absurd they looked, and that's what made it so beautiful.

Then there was Edna, the woman my mom shared a room with at the hospital, who kept putting her oxygen tube up her ass. She was clearly delirious and never had any visitors. The nurse would return every few hours to retrieve the tube, saying, "Oh Edna! Where's that tube? Is it up your bum again?" I'll always remember Edna for making my mom laugh, albeit inadvertently, and the tenderness of the nurses who never seemed to run out of kindness, care, and humor.

Cancer is a savage disease that, once it's left the starting blocks, doesn't want to give up. At every turn, it's trying to give you the finger, saying, "Up yours! Not done with you yet, you bastard," but the way that sufferers and survivors handle their treatment is a testament to the fortitude of the human spirit. Cancer will stop winning one day, it will. But you have to match its stubbornness with humor and silliness wherever you can, with whoever you can. Even if hope is thin and even if you feel guilty doing it. Because if you're not laughing, you'll be bawling. Trust me, it's one of the only ways to cope.

Follow Javaria on Twitter.

In 1998, Exhumed recorded Gore Metal, one of the most influential death metal records ever made. Like most metal albums recorded with a small budget in the 90s, the sound quality was absolute shit. Cheap recording gear of that era was built for Rod Stewart, not Napalm Death—it was hard to capture the dynamic brutality Exhumed was going for when recording on the equivalent of a YakBak. That's thankfully not the case now, so Exhumed decided to tackle the songs from Gore Metal once again.

They re-recorded the 1998 album in its entirety, start to finish, and are releasing it on Relapse later this month. The new recording has the same face-smashing ferocity of the original but with some much-needed sonic depth. It sounds amazing. We're streaming the whole thing exclusively on VICE. Give it a listen.

Preorder Gore Metal: A Necrospective here.

[body_image width='632' height='468' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='im-addicted-to-being-financially-dominated-379-body-image-1423055279.jpg' id='24151']

Cleo, a financial dominatrix, who the author has previously spoken to

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

A couple of years ago I wrote a piece about financial domination. In case you're not up to date with the latest in illogical, emasculating fetishes, it basically involves men getting turned on by the act of giving dominatrixes large sums of money online. And that's it; they don't even meet face-to-face, let alone do anything actually sexual. It's difficult to see the appeal, but, you know, different strokes, I guess.

After the article was published, I began to receive emails from men claiming that their addictions to being financially dominated had ruined them—that some "pay pigs" (to use the industry term) were donating thousands of dollars a year, often maxing out their credit cards and overdrafts to sustain their fixations. Turns out there are even support groups for addicts, and a number of blogs written by recovering addicts.

I contacted a financial dominatrix by the name of Goddess Minoa to ask her whether she thinks addiction is a serious problem among her clients. "I would say the majority of money slaves have their head on their shoulders," she told me. "I also indulge in other fetishes. There are those who have a limit and there are those who simply do not. The same applies in financial domination."

[body_image width='893' height='610' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='im-addicted-to-being-financially-dominated-379-body-image-1423055782.jpg' id='24153']

Goddess Minoa

She made a compelling argument, but I was still curious to know the extent of the impact this addiction can have upon people's lives, so—via his mistress, Gisy Scerman—I got in touch with an Italian "money slave" who runs a blog about his attempts to get clean. Let's call him "Max." Here's what he had to say.

VICE: How did you get into financial domination in the first place?
Max: I've always visited cam sites a lot. One of the girls there spoke on her profile about financial domination, and I decided to google it. I remember reading blogs, visiting goddesses' sites and looking at them for days. Then, one time, I decided to try it.

What's the appeal of it for you?
It most probably comes from the act of being made to feel a fool by a beautiful woman who uses your weakness to make you do what she wants.

How much do you spend a year on it?
Some years ago, I started taking note of my expenses, hoping it would help me to stop. It didn't help, but now I have an exact number. Last year, I spent £16,000 [$24,000].

Wow. When did you first realize this was a genuine addiction?
A couple of months after I first tried it. I was spending a lot, so I tried to stop. After a few days, I was back at it again, unable to stay away.

Have you taken any steps since then to curb your spending?
I tried, but failed. Now, my "solution" is to work harder. I have two jobs, and one of them pays for my addiction.

Do you think most people who spend money on financial domination have a problem, or do you think that the majority only spend within their limits?
I think everyone who starts this faces a big problem at the beginning. It's almost impossible to predict how much you will end up spending, so, at first, it can be tough—but human beings always find ways to survive in any situation, so everyone finds his balance after a while. For some, the balance can be to give almost everything to their doms. For others, it is to give them their savings. It all depends on the person.

Do any financial dominatrixes take steps to avoid dealing with slaves they believe have an addiction?
I don't think I have an addiction that causes me huge problems, so none of the goddesses I've served have had to stop me.

You've spoken on your blog about maxing out your credit card. Can you say a bit about that?
It has happened a couple of times. It wasn't a nice experience, but, deep down, it was exciting.

What's your life like outside of being financially dominated?
I work as a programmer and have a marketing job. I have a wife and a daughter, and, believe it or not, my family always comes first. I try to work harder and harder to feed my addiction, but I don't let this take anything away from my family.

Do you find it difficult to keep your addiction hidden from your wife, given the extent of your spending?
Well, it sure isn't easy, but I only ever spend money on it very late at night or when I'm not at home, so it's not that difficult, either.

Do you think an element of shame prevents financial domination addicts from getting help?
It's not just financial domination addiction that this applies to; it's the same for any kind of sexual addiction.

Are you a big spender outside of the financial domination?
I live a normal life. I can't say I spend a lot, but can't say I don't spend anything. I have two cheap cars, a PS4, a smartphone, a tablet, and pay the mortgage on my house.

What advice would you give to other financial domination addicts who are trying to quit?
Don't try to quit; try to adjust financial domination to your financial situation. Decide upon a budget and stick to it. Try to let some time pass between one session and another, and take things slowly, but don't try to quit, because it's a part of you—and, sooner or later, it will come out again, or, even worse, you'll feel bad for not living it. It's way better to look at your financial situation and decide how you can fit financial domination into it.

So you wouldn't want to quit ever?
I don't think it's possible to quit and live happily ever after. Would you ever quit listening to the music that you like?

I suppose not. Have you ever come close to quitting?
A couple of times I actually thought, OK, this is it; it's over! But I always got back into it.

[body_image width='1200' height='1200' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='working-in-londons-newest-porn-cinema-876-body-image-1423055208.jpg' id='24149']

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

"He's a porn connoisseur—he knows every film we've ever shown here and at the old cinema. But he hates playing them more than once; he doesn't want to let the customers down. He also knows the names of all the regulars, and their membership numbers," says Deborah of her husband Roger, owner of London's only porn cinema.

From what she says, Roger's brain seems to be constructed like a giant porn computer. Instead of bits and bytes however, obscure flicks like American Fur Pie and Charlie's Anus III are neatly ordered within his cranium, ensuring that his customers experience only the freshest jerk-matter on the market.

It's Monday night, and Deborah has welcomed me in the large, windowless, converted front room of Club 487 in Deptford. The Victorian property is still piled high with aging and disconcertingly grubby velvet cinema seats, as well as tools, paint buckets, and more evidence of the on-going renovation work to the building.

Roger isn't around but Deborah, who works here part-time, seems happy to let me in and show me what a typical day in Club 487 is like. She is an attractive, intelligent woman who looks a little like a schoolteacher.

"This is an unusual job, right?" I comment.

"Everyone has their own thing," she replies. "I never go downstairs when it's open—only before to make sure the place is clean. But they're a nice bunch, the guys that come here."

Has there ever been any trouble?

"Never from the regulars—they're good as gold. There was talk of people loitering outside the old place [Mr B's in Islington] but it wasn't true. We have CCTV, and you can see for yourself that there's no one outside. We had a couple of dodgy-looking locals down here the other night, so I had to knock them back, but apart from that it's been fine."

Deborah introduces me to a genial man in a blue polo shirt and white beard, who she calls Bill. Bill—it turns out—is her dad. He's here helping out with the renovations.

"We just stick on the films and change them when they finish," he says. "We don't watch."

"Don't write that we sit here watching porn together all day, because we don't!" says Deborah.

It's true—they don't. A small black and white TV with the sound turned down shows what is playing in the bowels of the cinema. Meanwhile, Bill and Deborah kick back and relax, playing games on their iPhones, or watching Netflix.

It still must be a bit weird working here, no? Deborah shrugs: "It's a job, isn't it? I'd rather be at home, but what can you do?"

"She can handle the customers right enough. Doesn't take any crap," says Bill looking over at his daughter fondly.

There's a pleasant, familial atmosphere here. Bill and Deborah are friendly people. I like talking to them. It's all strangely at odds with the melodramatic music coming from the German fuck-fest playing downstairs.

The cinema has been open for a little over a month and so far the neighborhood seems either oblivious or perfectly OK with it. "The girls in the African hair shop next door have been great. Everyone just keeps themselves to themselves. What people get up to in their own time is their business, isn't it?"

It's a hard sentiment to refute. With Boris Johnson coming out in support of the "Save Soho" campaign recently, perhaps the tide is turning on the puritanism wrought by gentrification. Maybe it's with more venues like Club 487 that London can finally rediscover its libertine spirit.

[body_image width='1200' height='1200' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='working-in-londons-newest-porn-cinema-876-body-image-1423055253.jpg' id='24150']

I walk down the staircase into the subterranean gloom of the cinema. Danny, the other manager, has put up a sign saying "CUSTOMERS are re-minded That Cleanliness is Next To Godliness." Deborah isn't sure about the sign. I tell her it adds character to the place.

As usual, the corridor—lit only by the dim glow of the main screen and two auxiliary ones in the "private" cabins—is populated with lurkers. There is a sharp smell of sweat pulsing like a heartbeat: it's hard to locate its provenance but it appears to be triggered by movement.

One man is dressed in worn jeans and a shapeless Adidas hoodie. Another, wearing a three-piece suit, has the greying temples, chummy superiority, and oddly distended chin of a mutant Piers Morgan. A third, a guy in his late 30s—tall, wiry and jittery, bouncing from one foot to the other—rocks a pair of skinny jeans and a checked shirt. They scan anyone passing through the corridor with the severe attention of the addict. They are all looking for something.

An Asian guy in an elegant but short red evening dress teamed with a prominent pearl choker stands at the bottom of the stairs. He has a prim look, as though acknowledging that the scene around him is distasteful, but that he is drawn to it anyway. He wears glasses and has careful, conscientious eyes, as though somewhere far away from here, in the real world, he heads up accounts for a data management company. He is talking to a Scouser in a checked shirt.

"It all used to go off at the Sunset [a defunct adult cinema in Soho] before it closed," the Scouser says. "You'd get all sorts in there. Politicians, the lot. This rich guy used to go—loaded, he was. One time he came in with a beautiful girl. They went to the front, she stripped naked, and he put trash bags on the floor. She laid down, and he got all the guys in the auditorium to cum on her."

"Ah," says the guy in the dress.

They pause to process the mental image.

"Some girls like acting out a fantasy," the Scouser elucidates. "After all, in a place like this, no one's going to call you a slut the next day."

"No."

"Someone died in the Sunset once. Just keeled over. Natural causes," the Scouser continues.

The guy in the dress looks shocked. "Isn't it awful to think you might die in a porn cinema?" he says.

There is a pause.

"I dunno. It could be worse. At least you'd die having fun," says the Scouser.

It's an existential moment, but it passes quickly. A few moments later, the Scouser moves to the main room, his laser eyes boring into the other punters. On screen, My Best Friend's Wetting is playing, punctuated by the grunts and groans of an audience entertaining themselves to it in the only way they know best.

It's 8 PM at Club 487, London's last remaining porn cinema, and there's still another two hours of fun left to go tonight.

[body_image width='1000' height='663' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='walter-pearce-photo-diary-vol-4-notes-from-the-road-405-body-image-1423071400.jpg' id='24323']Brennan in Houston, 2014. All photos by Walter Pearce

From late December to early January I visited Houston, LA, and San Francisco. I also spent some time in New York, where I usually am. Here are some pictures that I took in these places of people I met and things I saw.

[body_image width='1000' height='663' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='walter-pearce-photo-diary-vol-4-notes-from-the-road-405-body-image-1423071476.jpg' id='24324']

[body_image width='1000' height='1334' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='walter-pearce-photo-diary-vol-4-notes-from-the-road-405-body-image-1423071503.jpg' id='24326']

[body_image width='1000' height='663' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='walter-pearce-photo-diary-vol-4-notes-from-the-road-405-body-image-1423071645.jpg' id='24332']

[body_image width='1000' height='663' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='walter-pearce-photo-diary-vol-4-notes-from-the-road-405-body-image-1423071661.jpg' id='24333']

[body_image width='1000' height='663' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='walter-pearce-photo-diary-vol-4-notes-from-the-road-405-body-image-1423071675.jpg' id='24334']

[body_image width='1000' height='663' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='walter-pearce-photo-diary-vol-4-notes-from-the-road-405-body-image-1423071693.jpg' id='24335']

[body_image width='1000' height='663' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='walter-pearce-photo-diary-vol-4-notes-from-the-road-405-body-image-1423071900.jpg' id='24342']

[body_image width='1000' height='663' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='walter-pearce-photo-diary-vol-4-notes-from-the-road-405-body-image-1423071926.jpg' id='24344']

[body_image width='1000' height='663' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='walter-pearce-photo-diary-vol-4-notes-from-the-road-405-body-image-1423072071.jpg' id='24350']

[body_image width='1000' height='663' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='walter-pearce-photo-diary-vol-4-notes-from-the-road-405-body-image-1423072089.jpg' id='24352']

[body_image width='1000' height='663' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='walter-pearce-photo-diary-vol-4-notes-from-the-road-405-body-image-1423071978.jpg' id='24346']

[body_image width='1000' height='1508' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='walter-pearce-photo-diary-vol-4-notes-from-the-road-405-body-image-1423072009.jpg' id='24348']

[body_image width='1000' height='1508' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='walter-pearce-photo-diary-vol-4-notes-from-the-road-405-body-image-1423071994.jpg' id='24347']

[body_image width='1000' height='663' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='walter-pearce-photo-diary-vol-4-notes-from-the-road-405-body-image-1423072115.jpg' id='24355']

[body_image width='1000' height='663' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='walter-pearce-photo-diary-vol-4-notes-from-the-road-405-body-image-1423072129.jpg' id='24357']

[body_image width='1000' height='663' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='walter-pearce-photo-diary-vol-4-notes-from-the-road-405-body-image-1423072142.jpg' id='24359']

[body_image width='1000' height='663' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='walter-pearce-photo-diary-vol-4-notes-from-the-road-405-body-image-1423072152.jpg' id='24360']

[body_image width='1000' height='663' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='walter-pearce-photo-diary-vol-4-notes-from-the-road-405-body-image-1423072165.jpg' id='24362']

[body_image width='1000' height='663' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='walter-pearce-photo-diary-vol-4-notes-from-the-road-405-body-image-1423072186.jpg' id='24363']

[body_image width='1000' height='1334' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='walter-pearce-photo-diary-vol-4-notes-from-the-road-405-body-image-1423072201.jpg' id='24364']

[body_image width='1000' height='1508' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='walter-pearce-photo-diary-vol-4-notes-from-the-road-405-body-image-1423072231.jpg' id='24365']

Walter Pearce is an NYC-based photographer. Follow him on Instagram for more dry moments from exciting places and plenty of selfies.

[body_image width='1191' height='710' path='images/content-images/2015/02/03/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/03/' filename='stereotypical-paedophile-look-189-body-image-1422977576.png' id='23787']

Jimmy Savile. Screen shot via.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Imagine it's Christmas and you're playing Pictionary. Now imagine someone—probably not your grandma—has asked you to draw a pedophile.

What would you sketch? Presumably some combination of cliches that add up to your standard Dirty Old Man: a trench coat with some weird stains on it, oversized glasses, lank, thinning hair, and an unsettling leer. A very unpleasant cocktail of Worzel Gummidge and Limmy's dark comic creation, "Beast."

But where has that mental image come from? Why, when we see a photo of a sex offender in the paper or on TV, do we turn to a friend and say, "Yep, he looks the type"?

[body_image width='800' height='621' path='images/content-images/2015/02/03/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/03/' filename='stereotypical-paedophile-look-189-body-image-1422978046.jpg' id='23789']

Graffiti about the sexual abuse of children in the Catholic church. Photo by Milliped via Wikimedia Commons

Operation Yewtree's horrendous revelations have begun to indicate the true scale of sexual abuse of children in the UK. Best estimates for the number of pedophiles in Britain today place it at a staggering 250,000, with some studies suggesting that 1 percent of all men could experience sexual feelings toward minors. I asked sociologist Dr. Sarah Goode, author of Paedophiles in Society, if this could have anything to do with the way we assume child sex abusers look.

"I think we half-realize that sexual attraction to kids is potentially there in people who look just like us," said Dr. Goode. "The problem is, that knowledge makes us so uncomfortable [that] we prefer to pretend it's 'those weird monsters over there.'

"We make them distant figures—the weird-looking guy at the end of the street. And it hasn't helped us understand risks or keep children safe. I think some of those sort of fairy tale representations of monstrous pedophiles—and all those Stranger Danger public information films—they were there to make adults feel better."

Before dismissing the stereotype entirely, I wondered about the technique of facial profiling. Is there anything useful to be learned about the quick, near-instant judgements we make about potentially threatening strangers? Anything that might help us understand real risks to children?

Humans have a long history of seeing criminal deviancy in a person's face. The pseudo-science of physiognomy dates back to Ancient Greece and was revived prior to the Enlightenment. Italian scholar Giambattista Della Porta believed a person's inner temperament actually had an effect on the way their face looked.

His book, De humana physiognomia (1586), features woodcuts of animals to help illustrate the personality characteristics written all over each human face, like the "bullish" aggression of the poor ugly sod in the image below.

[body_image width='1200' height='708' path='images/content-images/2015/02/03/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/03/' filename='stereotypical-paedophile-look-189-body-image-1422976677.jpg' id='23768']

A page from Giambattista Della Porta's 'De humana physiognomia.' Image via.

Although such ideas were laughed away in the 19th century, when people still believed the world was a massive table, a new kind of physiognomy is now emerging. Recent studies have suggested that the instinctive moral verdicts we make based on facial appearances might not be completely fallacious and moronic. When researchers at Cornell University in New York presented people with a series of expressionless photos of Caucasian men in their 20s, they found participants could distinguish convicted criminals from non-criminals with above-chance accuracy.

It seems what the observer is instinctively looking for is a high facial width-to-height ratio (WHR), an indicator of high levels of testosterone. So, according to the study, a heightened capacity for aggressiveness—and a predilection for breaking rules—might actually show up in the wideness of your face.

[body_image width='829' height='530' path='images/content-images/2015/02/03/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/03/' filename='stereotypical-paedophile-look-189-body-image-1422976849.png' id='23776']

An image from Professor Cheryl McCormick's study

I asked Cheryl McCormick, a Canadian neuroscience professor who has also carried out studies showing WHR as a key biomarker for aggressiveness, about what these kinds of findings mean.

"We were a little worried about the comparison to the early physiognomists," she admitted. "But we found that the snap judgements were so consistent from person to person that there does seem to be a good correlation between the relative width of the face and how people form impressions of them.

"We're prone to stereotype and over-generalize about who might be aggressive, but it still begs the question, 'Where does the stereotype come from?' I try to be skeptical, but I don't think we would have found such consistency in results without some kernel of truth to our snap judgements.

"It's probably only important when confronted by a stranger, because in our evolutionary history you had to make a snap decision whether to fight or to flee... it would have been worth your while to err on the side of caution."

Still, even if we accept that WHR tells us something about a person's inclination to act recklessly on their desires, it doesn't tell us anything about pedophiles specifically. However, there is one scientist who's studied the brains of pedophiles, and his research has led him to believe that they really are hard-wired a little differently from the rest of us.

[body_image width='640' height='437' path='images/content-images/2015/02/03/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/03/' filename='stereotypical-paedophile-look-189-body-image-1422978604.jpg' id='23792']

Roy Whiting, the sex offender who was imprisoned for the murder of schoolgirl Sarah Payne

Dr. James Cantor is a clinical psychologist specializing in sexology. Using neuro-imaging techniques he found that male pedophiles have significantly less white matter, the connective tissue responsible for communication between different regions in the brain. Their attraction to children could be the result of "cross-wiring" between the sexual response system and the parental, nurturing part of the brain.

Oddly, he also found that pedophiles tend to be shorter than average in height, and are three times more likely to be left-handed or ambidextrous.

"The left-handedness is not directly causal," Dr. Cantor explained. "Because left-handedness is entirely a phenomenon of patterns causing one hemisphere of the brain to be dominant. The fact it shows up here is simply an echo and indication that some things are going differently [in pedophiles] before birth."

So it would be completely the wrong conclusion to draw any sinister link between pedophilia and left-handedness?

"Yes, that would be utter nonsense—the number of left-handers who will be [pedophiles] would be a tiny fraction of a percent," said Dr. Cantor.

And so it's certainly not useful in any criminal profiling sense?

"No. It's several orders of magnitude away from telling us anything meaningful about a particular person, so there's nothing in any of this that could allow us to do any meaningful profiling."

[body_image width='600' height='600' path='images/content-images/2015/02/03/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/03/' filename='stereotypical-paedophile-look-189-body-image-1422978234.jpg' id='23790']

Ian Watkins, sex offender and former Lostprophets frontman

Finally, I asked a child protection specialist, John Brown of the NSPCC, if he thought there were any common factors which could lead us to make useful generalizations. He mentioned "a history of no long-term consenting adult relationships" in sex offenders. Doesn't that suggest there might just be something to the stereotype of the lonely loser at the end of the street?

"Well, they may look like the lonely loser at the end of the street, but they may not," said Brown, head of the charity's sexual abuse program. "They may have a series of short-term relationships, and that's how they gain access to children. How people look or dress is just no indication of propensity."

Despite stumbling upon some vaguely relevant actual science, I discovered there really isn't anything in this pedophile-spotting business. Dr. Goode's point remains true: this terrible compulsion could be there in people who look just like us. And if we also accept the idea that there's little anyone can do about their desires—that people don't actively choose to be pedophiles—we might have to think a bit differently about dealing with the threat.

Dr. Goode, Dr Cantor, and John Brown all believe we should look toward the Prevention Project Dunkelfeld in Germany, a treatment centre aimed at people struggling with their sexual interests in children. By offering talk therapies and libido-reducing medication, the chances of acting on urges are subdued.

Sounds to me like progress. It's certainly a more mature approach than pretending pedophilia is the sole preserve of goggle-eyed freaks offering sweeties at the school gates. It's time to leave all that behind and move forward with something constructive.

Follow Adam on Twitter.

[body_image width='1200' height='800' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='more-photos-of-joe-biden-hanging-out-at-our-office-169-body-image-1423072091.jpg' id='24353']

Earlier this morning Vice President Joe Biden stopped by our offices in Williamsburg to speak with VICE founder Shane Smith, VICE News editor-in-chief Jason Mojica, and others about the environment, youth issues in America, and a variety of other topics. He also took a tour of the offices and gave a brief speech to a group of assembled employees, during which he said VICE is "on the cutting edge of what's happening." For a more comprehensive recap head over to VICE News. In the meantime, here are some photos of Biden and Smith from today's visit.

[body_image width='700' height='394' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='game-streaming-feels-like-a-security-disaster-waiting-to-happen-229-body-image-1423057751.jpg' id='24165']

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

It happened by accident. I'd been playing Alien: Isolation and Xenomorph had once again seen fit to rip my face off. Game over, man. Game over. I rage quit and returned to the PS4 home screen. My console presented me with links to other people's live streams of the game, and I decided to see if anyone had a better approach.

That was my initiation into social gaming. Before then, when it came to video games, I'd always been a loner—preferring to work my way through a well-crafted single-player story at my own pace, rather than play online and endure insults from shrieking prepubescent boys. I scoffed when Sony announced that they were adding a "share" button to their PS4 controller, enabling users to upload screenshots or live stream their gaming sessions. Really, dude? What sort of audience is there for watching other people play games?

A big one, it seems. In August last year, Twitch, one of the biggest game streaming sites, was acquired by Amazon for $970 million. YouTuber Felix Kjellberg, better known as PewDiePie, has been uploading videos of him playing games since 2010 and now has more subscribers than any other channel. The Wall Street Journal reported that, in 2013, Kjellberg earned more than $4 million. Shows what I know.

While their online security might need some work, Sony aren't stupid. They have incorporated social gaming into the heart of the PS4 experience.

Having looked at a few Alien: Isolation streams and discerned that the game is more difficult than attempting a self-appendectomy, I started browsing the other broadcasts out there. Only some of the things I ended up watching didn't look like video games at all. Instead, they featured ordinary human faces peeking out from very normal-looking living rooms, like Gogglebox with even lower production values. The users weren't filming the games at all—they were filming themselves.

I clicked on one, and that's where my obsession began.

The PS4 comes bundled with a game called The Playroom. If you have a PlayStation Camera, you can use the game to interact with little Augmented Reality robots that dick about in your front room. Clever use of tech, but it quickly runs out of novelty value. What it also does, though, is to allow players to broadcast what's going on in their living rooms to an audience of perfect strangers.

[body_image width='700' height='394' path='images/content-images/2015/02/02/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/02/' filename='game-streaming-feels-like-a-security-disaster-waiting-to-happen-229-body-image-1422890849.jpg' id='23345']

It seems an odd thing to do, on the face of it. David Cameron recently hinted that he would like to ban encrypted messaging services such as iMessage and WhatsApp, leaving more of our communications open to government surveillance. Edward Snowden frequently provides new revelations about the NSA's internet monitoring program, each more depressing than the last. And this slow erosion of our privacy hasn't been an easy sell for politicians. The NHS Care Data scheme, which would've seen our medical data being sold off to private companies, was postponed following public opposition, while I'm sure your Facebook news feed was recently clogged with people reposting a status declaring their opposition to changes to Facebook's privacy policy. (If that was you, it's a pointless hoax, by the way.)

This is what intrigues me. In an age where we are becoming fiercely protective of our right to privacy, why would we choose to invite anonymous strangers into our living rooms? It felt different from posting something on Facebook, Instagram, or even uploading a vlog on YouTube. This is unedited, stream of consciousness stuff. You can see and respond to comments in real time. Often, they're not very nice.

[body_image width='700' height='394' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='game-streaming-feels-like-a-security-disaster-waiting-to-happen-229-body-image-1423057780.jpg' id='24166']

Unless the broadcasters have explicitly agreed for me to use their faces and Gamertags, I've blurred them out. I usually didn't interact with them, I just watched—it was addictive. I felt like James Stewart in Hitchcock's Rear Window, or Bart Simpson when he breaks his leg and spies on Ned Flanders. While most of the streams consisted of people sitting in their living rooms and reacting to trolls, some of them were interesting.

There was the guy who decided to broadcast himself rolling up a joint.

[body_image width='700' height='394' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='game-streaming-feels-like-a-security-disaster-waiting-to-happen-229-body-image-1423057829.jpg' id='24168']

Some of the streams were more concerning, like the couple with the eye-wateringly large dildo.

[body_image width='700' height='394' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='game-streaming-feels-like-a-security-disaster-waiting-to-happen-229-body-image-1423057850.jpg' id='24169']

What people should and shouldn't do in their own homes in front of a consenting audience is up to them. But the possibility of it being screenshotted and reposted would give me pause for thought. (My hairy glutes might not break the internet like Kim Kardashian's oiled globes did, but they might cause literally tens of people to reassess their life choices.)

Reposting happens, too. It probably won't surprise you to learn that there is a NSFW subreddit dedicated to this very quest—and they don't blur the faces. Redditors will spend hours scouring the streams, thumbs poised over the Share button, ready for the slightest hint of action. It's not surprising that Twitch has banned streams of The Playroom altogether, while the other service, USTREAM, is constantly shutting down users for breaking their content guidelines.

The Playroom's reputation is likely why a lot of the viewing community treat these broadcasts like they're Babestation. If there's a hint of estrogen in the broadcast, you can expect its viewing figures to be several times greater:

[body_image width='700' height='394' path='images/content-images/2015/02/02/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/02/' filename='game-streaming-feels-like-a-security-disaster-waiting-to-happen-229-body-image-1422891138.jpg' id='23351']

But what do you reckon are the most common questions posed by their anonymous audience members?

"What's it like in your country?" Nope.

[body_image width='700' height='394' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='game-streaming-feels-like-a-security-disaster-waiting-to-happen-229-body-image-1423057948.jpg' id='24173']

"What do you think about that anti-austerity party being elected in Greece?" Nah.

[body_image width='700' height='394' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='game-streaming-feels-like-a-security-disaster-waiting-to-happen-229-body-image-1423057969.jpg' id='24174']

I was eager to hear a female broadcaster's thoughts on the misogynist catcalling, but most I approached didn't get back to me, probably quite rightly thinking that, "I'm writing an article," was some lame pick-up schtick. I did manage to speak to Katie, though, who was pretty nonchalant about it all. When I saw her live stream, she was playing an acoustic guitar. The guitar wasn't the focal point of the comments section, however.

[body_image width='700' height='394' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='game-streaming-feels-like-a-security-disaster-waiting-to-happen-229-body-image-1423058038.jpg' id='24176']

Katie has been broadcasting for a week and considers it to be a giggle. She dismisses the trolling and pervy comments, and, in her own words, "loves the banter."

Another user, though (who wished to remain anonymous), was ambivalent. She's been broadcasting for two days and it's been quite a mixed experience. "There are a few viewers I've actually become friends with. There's just a lot of negative encounters like one I encountered yesterday... he first requested me to remove my clothing, then kept threatening to commit suicide if I refused to listen to his demands," she told me. "And of course I have a handful of men who claim to own me or ask me to marry them." All this, in two days.

Most of the broadcasters I contacted didn't respond, regardless of gender. Except for Travis, a self-taught portrait artist who was thrilled at the prospect of getting his paintings out to a wider audience—most others were reluctant. I suppose that putting yourself in front of an anonymous group of people is one thing, but to then have someone say they'd like to ask you questions and feature you in an article? That makes your audience far less abstract. The joint roller asked for my whole career history before he stopped replying.

[body_image width='700' height='394' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='game-streaming-feels-like-a-security-disaster-waiting-to-happen-229-body-image-1423058011.jpg' id='24175']

With facial recognition technology becoming increasingly effective, audiences could soon become a lot more real for broadcasters. Last year, the FBI were able to use facial recognition software to capture a fugitive that had been on the run for 14 years. Facebook have been working on a set of algorithms called "DeepFace," capable of matching faces with a hit rate of 97.25 percent. (Humans, by comparison, get this right 97.53 percent of the time.)

Before Google canned its Glass initiative, one of the more interesting (read: fucking terrifying) developer projects was NameTag—a tool that would enable strangers to find out more about you just by taking a photo. The tech is almost there, and it doesn't take a conspiracist to realize that we are probably not that far off someone being able to screenshot a live stream, use facial recognition to discover the identity of the broadcaster, and then use online directory inquiries to discover their address.

Maybe I am being paranoid. But think about it—if you give the wrong anonymous person that kind of power, the possibilities are endless. Several game streamers have already been SWATted, a practice where an anonymous tip-off leads to armed police raiding the victim's house. The more that broadcasters open themselves up, the more exposed they are. "This person likes to do nasty things on camera, why not visit them at their address...?" or, "Check out the 50-inch TV and PS4 in this person's living room! Want to go see it in person?"

It's becoming increasingly difficult to compartmentalize our numerous online personas, let alone keep our online lives distinct from our private ones. What seems like a good idea at 2 AM one morning might not seem so clever a week later, but by then it could be too late. Hiding behind a Gamertag won't always be enough to protect a broadcaster's anonymity, and I wonder if they will welcome the attention. As for me, I'm going back to isolation.

Follow Liam on Twitter.

[body_image width='1200' height='800' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='down-the-river-photographs-seine-riverboats-876-body-image-1423066009.jpg' id='24249']

This article originally appeared on VICE France.

Tourists in Paris go crazy over the riverboats on the Seine. According to Haropaports (the official website for Parisian ports), the Promenade-en-Île de France cruise attracted more than 7.5 million passengers in 2013—by comparison, the Eiffel Tower hosted 6.7 million visitors that year.

The idea for this series, which I titled Down the River, came simply enough. I was walking on a bridge by the Seine one day, and as a riverboat passed below my feet, I took a photograph. Once I got home, I thought it would be interesting to shoot more tourists huddled on boats in the same way.

I tried to approach this series in the same way I work on street photography: to find an extraordinary moment within the ordinary. When that moment is harder to find, I try to create it with my use of color, or by focusing on the people's behavior: the position of their bodies, the distance they keep from each other, or just the overall emotion generated by the scene.

[body_image width='1200' height='800' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='down-the-river-photographs-seine-riverboats-876-body-image-1423065525.jpg' id='24233']

I have been working on Down the River for two years. I shoot in all seasons and always from the same bridge—it's the only one that has no edge, which allows me to keep a clean frame if I lean the right way.

I won't lie, it's a pretty tedious job—it takes patience. Boats float by at 20-minute intervals on average but it often happens that I get no worthwhile photographs, even after standing on that bridge for several hours. It took me about 50 visits to figure out the exact times when the light is in the right position, when no one can see the shadow of the bridge or that of the surrounding buildings.

During those visits, I also found that there are different types of boats: The bigger boats pack in hundreds of tourists, most of them Asian, for whatever reason. Then there are the medium-sized boats which carry tourists but also deal with corporate parties and weddings. Finally, every now and again a yacht carrying people drinking champagne will also make an appearance. There is something for everyone on the Seine.

The only thing that never seizes to amaze me is the people who prefer to stay glued to their phones rather than looking at the monuments.

[body_image width='1200' height='800' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='down-the-river-photographs-seine-riverboats-876-body-image-1423065223.jpg' id='24231']

The tourists on Seine's riverboats are a weird species—for starters, they can't help but wave every time they notice someone looking at them. I wanted to avoid taking staged photographs so I often had to resort to tricks, like pretending to look at the sky while pointing my lens on them and clicking at the last minute.

I'm quite shocked by the way tourism works in Paris: Masses of people experience the city from a bus window or by follow tourist guides around like cattle, never discovering anything on their own. I met a woman in the Philippines who told me she had toured Paris for a couple of days—the Eiffel Tower, Versailles, and the department stores was all she could recall. I found that to be very sad.

I've now become one of the bridge's regulars. Besides me, that bridge is host to a country singer, a Roma beggar, and a couple of girls who rip off tourists by posing as deaf. I think I'll meet more interesting characters as time goes by. I intend to continue this series and turn it into a book.

[body_image width='1200' height='800' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='down-the-river-photographs-seine-riverboats-876-body-image-1423065657.jpg' id='24237']

[body_image width='1200' height='800' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='down-the-river-photographs-seine-riverboats-876-body-image-1423065685.jpg' id='24238']

[body_image width='1200' height='801' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='down-the-river-photographs-seine-riverboats-876-body-image-1423065707.jpg' id='24239']

[body_image width='1200' height='800' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='down-the-river-photographs-seine-riverboats-876-body-image-1423065729.jpg' id='24240']

[body_image width='1200' height='800' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='down-the-river-photographs-seine-riverboats-876-body-image-1423065790.jpg' id='24241']

[body_image width='1200' height='800' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='down-the-river-photographs-seine-riverboats-876-body-image-1423065804.jpg' id='24242']

[body_image width='1200' height='800' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='down-the-river-photographs-seine-riverboats-876-body-image-1423065963.jpg' id='24248']

[body_image width='1740' height='1155' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='an-oral-history-of-the-best-kids-show-ever-on-canadian-tv-852-body-image-1423083513.jpeg' id='24476']

Cast and crew of Street Cents circa 1993. Photo courtesy Louise Moon

Teenagers are the demographic most susceptible to misleading advertising. It's not that all teenagers are dumb (although a lot of them are), but when you combine adolescent insecurity, peer pressure, and a lack of experience with regretful purchases of trendy, overpriced crap, you've got yourself an easy target for profit-hungry corporations selling everything from "Smurfs to acne products." At least, that's how it was in 1989, when John Nowlan, an executive producer of children and youth programming at CBC Halifax, created Street Cents: a show about consumer awareness for the people who needed it most.

Not long after creating the show, Nowlan dedicated himself to finding corporate sponsors to keep it free from advertising. Meanwhile, a group of young, talented writers, actors, and comedians took over. The show become a strange hybrid of journalism, sitcom and sketch comedy. There isn't much evidence of its existence on the internet, save for a short Wikipedia article and a few short clips that the CBC hasn't removed from YouTube yet, but for Canadians who grew up with the CBC in the early 90s, Street Cents is like a memory that may or may not be real. "Did that show really exist? Was that J-Roc from Trailer Park Boys? Were there pigs?"

But it's real, and not only did it launch the career of J-Roc (aka Jonathan Torrens, who also hosted Jonovision for the CBC), but also Mike Clattenburg, who started as a field producer on Street Cents before creating Trailer Park Boys and co-creating Black Jesus for Adult Swim. Street Cents was not only the proving ground for Halifax's most famous television export, but more importantly it was also a playground for a group of Halifax-based creatives to experiment, fool around, and make people laugh, all under the auspices of "youth programming."

The show lasted until 2006, adopting a less chaotic newsmagazine format by the end of its run, but most people remember it from its mid-90s episodes, where shitty consumer products were dubbed "Fit for the Pit" and thrown into a fiery manhole, and the three young hosts busted out parodies, impersonations, and sketches that were much funnier and more creative than anyone expected them to be. So we corralled a number of the people involved in that run of the show to give you an oral history of Street Cents.

[body_image width='1024' height='682' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='an-oral-history-of-the-best-kids-show-ever-on-canadian-tv-852-body-image-1423083990.jpg' id='24489']

Screencap of a Street Cents episode on VHS

John Nowlan (creator of Street Cents): I got the money to produce a pilot, then called Money Penny, named after the James Bond character. I thought that would be a cool name. As it turned out, we did some testing of names with kids after the pilot was hugely successful and kids didn't like it, they preferred the name Street Cents, the play on words. So we switched the title.

John Finklestein (Senior Producer): John's always had all the angles on getting a lot done for very cheaply. It took that man to get Street Cents going, actually. CBC said no to his idea, and then he went out, spent time looking for people [sponsors] who would commit and basically told the CBC, "I can give you a half a million dollar cheque," so that was enough for them to say, 'Yes' to the show... We were able to raise almost a million dollars to produce a full season of Street Cents out of Halifax for the full network without commercials, which thrilled me.

Benita Ha (Host): I was surprised I was cast, you know, this Chinese kid with braces. Money Penny was great, I thought it was a great concept, and I was really happy to be on a show and of course my whole family was perched on chairs waiting for the first episode.

John Nowlan: Jonathan [Torrens] came on in one of our early shows in one of our early shows. We liked him, in a test he did for us, and we decided to bring him in not as a host, but as a tester, and we fed him nothing but fast food, hamburgers and french fries and milkshakes for a week or two and then got reports from him.

Jonathan Torrens (Host): I was 16. I auditioned three times and didn't get the job originally. The job went to a kid named Chris Lydon, who was kind of more the type they were looking for: kind of a skateboarder cool kid. I ate nothing but fast food for five days, which in retrospect, wasn't that much of a stretch. Like, that wasn't hard hitting journalism, that was just how I rolled, 'cause I was actually working at McDonald's at the time, and you could get a free lunch every shift you worked, so I would usually leave high school and go down and work an 11-2 lunchtime shift just to get a lunch anyway.

John Nowlan: You know, every kid's dream, or many kids' dream, is to eat nothing but fast food at our expense, so we bought him that, and so he gave us reports on how he felt day after day of a diet of nothing but fast foods—McDonald's, Burger King.

Jonathan Torrens: It was kind of a challenge because I worked at McDonald's, as I mentioned, and didn't want to sell my co-workers down the river.

John Nowlan: And he was fabulous, and he gave us really funny, witty reports about how he felt, and he got lethargic and lost brain power and muscle power and everything else over the weeks that he did it.

[body_image width='1024' height='682' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='an-oral-history-of-the-best-kids-show-ever-on-canadian-tv-852-body-image-1423085286.jpg' id='24512']

Jonathan Torrens, who went on to host CBC's Jonovision and act in Trailer Park Boys. Screencap via VHS

Jonathan Torrens: Long story short though, Chris didn't work out. He wasn't a good fit, or he didn't like the gig or something, so after my fast food week I became a regular host. I think the third or fourth episode in that season.

Mike Clattenburg (Field Producer and Studio Director): I admired [Jonathan's] talent early on. Long before I worked on the show, I was a real fan of Street Cents. We'd see each other around town. Then I get this gig working with him. It didn't take long for us to become pals, we made each other laugh constantly. But no matter what room you are in, Jono is still the funniest guy in the room.

Henry Sawyer-Foner (Studio Director): It was like a cast of four actors and a large pig. It was kind of strange. None of us really knew what we were doing and we all had to figure it out together. The show had a pretty broad palette, and we got to play around with a bunch of different realities and tones, and in a way I guess you could say it developed into a subgenre of its own. Like it wasn't high stakes, because it was a kids show, so we could take risks.

Many of us were from away, and so we'd hang out. We shared a sense of the absurd, I guess. We all enjoyed absurd comedy, and were big fans of SNL and maybe even Monty Python and shows like that, that influenced us.

Louise Moon (Writer): Whatever the popular show was, whether it was Beverly Hills 90210 or Party of Five or Dawson's Creek or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. We would take one of those shows and then we would use it to answer one of the viewer's segments. So if it was "What's Your Beef," and it was about skateboards or something, we would have some sort of crisis in the world of Dawson's Creek.

Jonathan Torrens: Like if Party of Five was on and we were doing a thing about a five-man tent, then it would be "Party of Five-Man Tents" or whatever.

[body_image width='1024' height='682' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='an-oral-history-of-the-best-kids-show-ever-on-canadian-tv-852-body-image-1423084358.jpg' id='24490']

Jonathan Torrens as Paul Stanley of KISS. Screencap via VHS

Louise Moon: Even comedy people, they would say, "Oh yeah, I love the parodies on that show." For me, that was the big thing. There was nobody in Canada doing the exact same thing that we were doing, the sort of SNL-style, In Living Color-style parodies of pop culture.

[body_image width='1024' height='682' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='an-oral-history-of-the-best-kids-show-ever-on-canadian-tv-852-body-image-1423084445.jpg' id='24491']

The Street Cents crew tosses an inferior product into the pit. Screencap via VHS

Fit for the pit
John Nowlan: The writers were fabulous. We had villainous characters and plots and at the same time we had a lot of product tests, and we weren't afraid to throw brand-name products into the pit. We had an expression: "fit for the pit." And every week there was a product that did not live up to its advertised hype, usually a brand-name product. And we were thrilled to be able to throw it into our make-believe pit with a loud explosion and a lot of fake smoke, so we had great fun with that.

Jonathan Torrens: I remember that the pit was just a 650-watt light with a red gel on it and a smoke machine. In the early going we probably only had one version of the prop that we were throwing in the pit, so if it landed on the light and got singed, that was it.

Mike Clattenburg: When you threw something in the Street Cents pit, the line was always, "[This product] is fit for the pit!" They'd throw the product in the pit: BOOM! It would explode in a huge flash of fire and smoke. We examined this product called Miracle Thaw, it was some ridiculous way to thaw meat on a piece of metal. Anyway, Jono and I changed the line to, "Go on wit ya, Miracle Thaw!" Then threw it in the pit. BOOM! It was so funny to us, but everyone else thought we were fucked. I only shot one take because the pyro was a big reset. I think I caught some shit for that. It went to air.

[body_image width='1024' height='682' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='an-oral-history-of-the-best-kids-show-ever-on-canadian-tv-852-body-image-1423084485.jpg' id='24492']

Warning for early 90s teens. Screencap via VHS

The audience
Jonathan Torrens: This was a show on the public broadcaster for kids on Saturday morning, so it was almost uncool. It's only with the benefit of hindsight that I can now be really proud of what we did.... But at the time, I guess because the audience was teenagers, they were like, "You're that guy on that show, that show sucks, dude," or, "Hey buddy, how's the Street Cents?" "Hey look, there's buddy off of Street Cents, that show is stupid!"

Benita Ha: We noticed our audience growing, and that was pretty cool. People would start to recognize us more. I think I remember we had a mall signing. We had to sign autographs at a mall in Ottawa. We thought, okay, maybe they'll be 50 people per mall or something like that and it turned out it was 500 hundred per mall. So that was a shocker.

I remember one girl, I saw her necklace. I was like, "That's a really nice necklace," and then she ended up giving it to me, and I was like "No!" She was like, "You said you like it!" And I'm like, "Yeah, but on you!" She's like, "No! Take it!" This is like a 10-year-old giving me her necklace.

Henry Sawyer-Foner: We went from nobody knew about the show to people starting to... the ratings started to pick up and we started to get nominated and winning awards and stuff like that, a little bit here and there.

On Clattenburg
Jonathan Torrens: It was also, for me, a really formative period in my life because Mike Clattenburg, who went on to create Trailer Park Boys, came on to Street Cents first as a field producer, where we became fast friends, and then as a studio director.

Mike had a cable show in Halifax called That Damn Cable Show and I was a fan of that show because he did sketches like "Truckers in Love" and if you watched it now, there were early indications of, tonally, what Trailer Park Boys would be. Like, two truckers standing in the produce section of a grocery store and one of them saying, "Aw, I found these flowers, you might as well have 'em." You could tell they were in love and trying to deny it.

[body_image width='895' height='918' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='an-oral-history-of-the-best-kids-show-ever-on-canadian-tv-852-body-image-1423085134.jpeg' id='24508']

Show writer Louise Moon at her desk. Photo courtesy Louise Moon

Louise Moon: He had done his own cable show in Halifax and so he had a real sort of rock 'n' roll kind of vibe. So, at that time, it was like the transition between the 80s and the 90s. So the show went from sort of that kind of poppy fun kind of 80s big hair, shoulder pads era to the plaid shirt, Sloan, Thrush Hermit kind of vibe.

Mike Clattenburg: I remember Jono [Torrens] and I did a Beck/Sloan-ish grunge parody about organic produce.

Johnathan Finklestein: We changed the over time, but Mike was in charge of that, which basically meant that he packaged the show. He oversaw, directed the packaging of the show. The overall look, the transitions, the bumpers, everything else like that.

Jonathan Torrens: So when Clattenburg started at Street Cents, he just turned that whole building, CBC Halifax on its ear, and suddenly he and I and Brian Heighton were making fake ads and shooting little music videos about people who weren't there. That was the, "Oh my God, I've found my people!" moment.

Mike Clattenburg: I was really into indie rock and rap videos then. I brought a music video sensibility to parts of the show, and as much new music as I could.

John Finklestein: We had talks, Mike and I, and they were about how he wanted to stylistically change the studio parts of the show. There's always a little bit of creative tension when something's going well and then a new director comes in and wants to change stuff around. It takes a while to find that trust and balance to say, "Okay, you can do this, but let's not lose what everybody knows to be Street Cents."

Jonathan Torrens: He went to high school with the guys who play Ricky and Julian on Trailer Park Boys, and we were out drinking in Halifax one night with the guy who would play Julian years later, and Julian said, "Hey can you pass the ketchup, J-Roc." We always talked like J-Roc, Clattenburg and me, in the halls of Street Cents, because we both went to high school with those dudes, and that was just our dialect, man. Years later when he was doing Trailer Park, he said, "You should play J-Roc on the show," and I was happy to.

[body_image width='1024' height='682' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='an-oral-history-of-the-best-kids-show-ever-on-canadian-tv-852-body-image-1423084547.jpg' id='24493']

Benita Ha holds a condom. Screencap via VHS

On edginess
Johnathan Finklestein: CBC execs were very supportive of us doing topics that really mattered to teens, because when you're doing a show for teenagers, 12 to 17, who like to watch adult programming, grown-up programming, you're only going to get them if you actually talk about the things you care about. So the show was quite edgy.

A kid didn't think [their school was] going far enough in their sex education, and thought condom machines should be in schools—and they are, in some schools—but they weren't in some schools, so we would look at that, and that was considered a consumer issue. So Street Cents talked about everything from underwear street tests, to acne cream, to sex.

[body_image width='1024' height='682' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='an-oral-history-of-the-best-kids-show-ever-on-canadian-tv-852-body-image-1423084854.jpg' id='24498']

The special effects of an early-90s CBC show led to horrifying fake acne. Screencap via VHS

John Nowlan: We weren't a drama. We were a consumer show. So anything with a consumer bent—and certainly shoplifting and condoms and other things have a consumer bent of interest to teenagers—so yeah, edginess is good, I think. As long as you're accurate and it reflects the interests of the key audience, which are young people.

Louise Moon: We tried to give a voice to our viewers and took their complaints seriously. A frequent beef we heard was that mall security guards treated teens unfairly. So a field producer came up with the "Mall Cops" sketch, a spoof of the reality show Cops, in which two overly-aggressive security guards hassled some teens trying to eat lunch in a food court. It had its own version of the Bad Boys theme song. "Mall cops, mall cops, doing what they please.... They got a walkie-talkie and a bunch of keys."

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/c3s_xsWGgus?list=PLMu6tgB50mN3U5tyDTjWU089UiFYk8Tan' width='560' height='315']

A hangover show
Henry Sawyer-Foner: It was pretty irreverent, especially for a Saturday morning kids show on CBC. As I said, for some reason, maybe it was because of Benita Ha, I don't know, but we got a lot of younger, teenaged, and 20-something males writing in all the time. I remember we were kind of chuffed by that.

Benita Ha: I think our biggest demographic were men between the ages of 17 and 25 or something like that, and our target age range is like 12 to 17 or something. I'm thinking it's probably because they came home from their hangovers and turned on the TV to what's on, and it's Street Cents.

Peter Moss (Creative Head of Children's and Family Programs at CBC): A hangover show only in that all of the home-based sections—the part that was actually shot in studio in Halifax as opposed to the fieldwork that was done right across the country—was very funny. Weirdly, ironically, haphazardly, chaotically funny.

[body_image width='1024' height='682' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='an-oral-history-of-the-best-kids-show-ever-on-canadian-tv-852-body-image-1423085081.jpg' id='24505']

Street Cents definitely got weird. Screencap via VHS

Henry Sawyer-Foner: It was interesting, because our demographic was supposed to be tweens, but [because] the show was on a Saturday morning, a huge part of our demographic were 20-somethings as well who were too hungover to watch cartoons. A lot of people remember it pretty fondly just because, I guess, we were goofing around a lot.

Peter Moss: After CBC, I was for a time at YTV and Treehouse TV, and we ran Teletubbies. There were a lot of people stoned watching Teletubbies. It had a very weird demo, as well as a target audience. So who knows who was watching Street Cents. They're either doing drinking games—you know, every time he says this, let's down a pint—or you just sort of mellow out, smoke a joint, and watch. When I grew up I remember being stoned watching early episodes of Sesame Street. I used to love it when somebody would come to the camera and go "Near! This is near!" Later on I ended up working at Sesame Street, and it wasn't so funny.

Benita Ha: I remember a health [episode].... We're all doing our exercises and counting them off. Like, I'd be doing push ups, and I'm like, "23, 24..." and then Jamie's doing pull-ups and it's like, "one, two..." and then Jonathan was doing bicep curls and he's like, "68, 69." And then he paused for a second, smiled just a little bit of a smile, and then he goes, "70, 71..." You know what I mean—he said 69 with a pause. But it's so subtle that if you're a kid, you don't know, you're just like, "Oh, they're doing more exercises." But if you're a 22-year-old guy, you're like, "Did he just... No!" And you can't believe it because it's a kids' show.

[body_image width='1024' height='682' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='an-oral-history-of-the-best-kids-show-ever-on-canadian-tv-852-body-image-1423085039.jpg' id='24503']

Benita Ha in the show's opening credits. Screencap via VHS

Henry Sawyer-Foner: There weren't a lot of people breathing down our neck. We didn't get a lot of network notes, because we were out on the east coast, which was always an advantage. It was a big advantage for [This Hour Has] 22 Minutes, too. You're kind of out there in this netherworld.

John Finklestein: Nobody paid attention to us, we were in the corner of the country.

Phyllis Platt (Network Program Director at the CBC): I don't think [their location] really had a huge impact, because they still needed to be in touch with the children's department in Toronto. There were always ongoing conversations and stuff about the shows.

John Finklestein: I would say that the executives gave us a lot of editorial range. I think they trusted us to know what kids wanted to know, and didn't get in our way as far as telling us we had to sandpaper the edges off the show. And the ratings for the show were pretty good. That doesn't hurt.

[body_image width='1731' height='1155' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='an-oral-history-of-the-best-kids-show-ever-on-canadian-tv-852-body-image-1423084682.jpeg' id='24495']

Street Cents at a mall. Photo courtesy Louise Moon

On sponsorship
John Nowlan: We needed money, and in those days shows aimed at young people, unlike pre-school, could have commercials, but I said I don't want Street Cents to have commercials. I felt it really important that it have the credibility of Consumer Reports magazine, which thrives because it doesn't have any advertising. I was actually able to get the Canadian Banker's Association to throw in several hundred thousand dollars in the initial season. Because one of their objectives was to teach everybody financial literacy, but particularly young people. To encourage them, obviously, to open bank accounts and know what compound interest means and things like that. So they came aboard for several hundred thousand dollars and I got the Bronfman Foundation and other groups like that—foundations that are interested in young people—to put in money.

John Finklestein: He would bring me out so we could negotiate on what the limits were on how far we can go to promote their industries, and mostly we needed the independence, because it was CBC, and even though we were sort of an entertainment show, we felt like we had to be bound by their journalistic policies. So there wasn't really a conflict of interest, but it was just to say that, obviously, if the Royal Canadian Mint hadn't sponsored the show, we probably wouldn't be doing coin segments every week on loose change.

Peter Moss: Mostly what I did was try to make sure there was enough money so that he didn't need them. Because it was very different when sponsors had to be brought on. I think the more sponsors we brought on the less happy everybody was.

John Nowlan: I think [Peter is] wrong. We wanted the show to be about personal financial responsibility. I didn't want an individual bank because that would be a bit bias. But the Canadian Bankers Association has kind of the same goals. When I presented the show to them, they loved the idea of teaching young people financial literacy: how to open bank accounts and how to buy responsibly and how to use your money responsibly.

Jonathan Torrens: A show for kids brought to you by the Royal Canadian Mint? That's bananas!

Henry Sawyer-Foner: I remember we had to do a thing about the mint, the Canadian mint, on a regular basis, but those were field pieces, so it would be about coins, fairly benign, but it was sponsored by the mint. The banking stuff, yeah, I guess it probably was some sort of propaganda about that.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/_HIJCu32yn8?list=PLMu6tgB50mN3U5tyDTjWU089UiFYk8Tan' width='560' height='315']

Louise Moon: It's funny, because we had this fictional company called Buy-Co, and Buy-Co acquired Street Cents to try raise its prestige in the corporate community. So, in a way, we were kind of making fun of ourselves, in that we have these corporate sponsors, but I don't think it ever compromised the integrity of the series. They were only sponsors who... they weren't, like, Mattel or anything that would have an impact on the kids.

Peter Moss: it's a hard thing to work out exactly how much cash was brought in versus what the true cost of it was. But my memory was that those things... It's usually the case that those last little bits that were brought in in sponsorship were the crucial dollars that were needed because the rent was already paid.

[body_image width='1024' height='682' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='an-oral-history-of-the-best-kids-show-ever-on-canadian-tv-852-body-image-1423084720.jpg' id='24496']

One of the beloved Street Cents pigs. Screencap via VHS

The pig
John Nowlan: We had a pig named Penny, and as the pig evolved, the pig became Nickel the Pig and then Moui, which I think is Vietnamese for dime, and so we went up the money scale with the name of the pig as the show evolved over the years. We thought it would be fun to have a pig on set to show the piggishness and the pork that a lot of corporations take from young people.

Henry Sawyer-Foner: We had to shoot quickly because it would squeal and shit as soon as it came on set. I remember once it got tangled up in some camera cables and it went berserk, squealing and kicking like a pig possessed. One of our veteran cameramen appeared on the monitor wielding this giant hunting knife, and I was just completely horrified as he moved towards it because I thought he was going to put it out of its misery, until he just kind of sliced the cables to let it free. So that was really incredible, it was like, "Oh my god! We're going to butcher a pig on TV on a kids' show!"

John Finklestein: There was a lot of poop.

Benita Ha: The pig would start going to the washroom every single time we started rolling. It was like "In three, two, oh wait stop, it's happening!" It's like it knew. It knew when we were about to shoot. It would be fine for the rehearsals and then... boom.

Jonathan Torrens: Most of the fun in the early days I remember coming from where the pig would use the bathroom. In the second year there was a Vietnamese potbelly pig and we had a thing called the "cesspool" where people would guess how many times it used the bathroom during the day. Fortunately, in the third season they got a little tiny hedgehog so its logs were much easier to clean.

[body_image width='1024' height='682' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='an-oral-history-of-the-best-kids-show-ever-on-canadian-tv-852-body-image-1423084760.jpg' id='24497']

The smaller, less poop-filled Street Cents hedgehog. Screencap via VHS

Mike Clattenburg: That pig was not a bad dude in my books, but he did shit himself a few times. That hedgehog was cute. I remember he rocked some unexpected pisses. We also had a silly robotic hedgehog for stunts and special effects. I loved it.

John Finklestein: It was probably the best job I ever had. It's more than a feeling, it's also because of what we achieved. For a while it was nominated every year for an award. It didn't always win, but often won. I think it was the year I left it won an International Emmy, so I just missed that one.

Benita Ha: I remember there was one episode, we were so happy we got the Gemini that we put it in every single shot, but we never talked about it. It was just sitting there. Like, Jonathan would open the fridge and there's the Gemini. We totally ignored it, but it's just there for people who know. They were all walking through the set, and there was a Gemini sitting there again, just in the middle of the scene.

[body_image width='1450' height='1155' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='an-oral-history-of-the-best-kids-show-ever-on-canadian-tv-852-body-image-1423084938.jpeg' id='24500']

Jonathan Torrens, show host Brian Heighton, and Henry Sawyer-Foner at the 1999 Gemini Awards. Photo courtesy Louise Moon

Jonathan Torrens: It's been a long time since I've thought about it, and I'm touched by the affection people seem to still have for it. It also, I guess, the one thing I would say is, it set the tone for everything I would go on to work on. Like, I lived in the United States, and they wanted to know if you're Ryan Seacrest or David Schwimmer. Like, are you a sitcom guy or are you a host, because you can't be both. Street Cents was proof that you can, and everything that I've gone on to do since then has been kind of a hybrid.

Benita Ha: I think it's great, too, as an Asian as well, just being one of those first Asian women—I should say girl—at the time, like, teenager, on national television. Now it's like you see them all the time, it's not a big deal. But I think back, 25 years ago, on CBC it was like, "Hey, that's pretty cool."

Jonathan Torrens: I knew it was time to leave when I did the "Why is there so much air in chip bags?" episode for the third time.

John Nowlan: It lasted 17 years, which is a pretty good run for a CBC show. A very good run. But there was really no reason to dump it other than CBC didn't have the money anymore and didn't want to bother doing as I did: to go out and raise the funds from foundations and corporations. As long as the pension plan is in good shape, I will tend to keep my mouth shut... for the most part.

John Finklestein: I'd like to revive it. I don't know who would take it anymore in this country.

Follow Alan Jones on Twitter.

[body_image width='1280' height='1024' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='we-asked-an-expert-what-would-happen-if-we-stopped-vaccinating-everyone-204-body-image-1423078024.jpg' id='24423']

Photo via WikiMedia Commons

On January 23, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a health advisory to address the recent multi-state measles outbreak associated with travel to Disneyland in California.The agency said 52 measles cases were associated with the outbreak, and 28 occurred in unvaccinated persons. This a big deal because measles was supposed to have been eliminated in the United States in 2000 thanks to vaccinations, yet here we are.

There have been split reactions to the disease outbreak. President Obama stressed that the science behind vaccines is "indisputable" and instructed parents to vaccinate their children. But New Jersey Governor (and likely 2016 presidential candidate) Chris Christie made a call for "balance" to allow parents "some measure of choice" to not vaccinate. On the somewhat more bizarre end of the spectrum, CNN gave airtime to Arizona cardiologist Dr. Jack Wolfson, who proudly stated his refusal to vaccinate his two children and claimed that another child's leukemia was "very likely from vaccinations in the first place."

To be very clear, there's no science to support what Dr. Wolfson is claiming. But what would happen if we all stopped vaccinating ourselves and our kids? One of the most vocal vaccine advocates is Dr. Paul Offit. He's the Director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, where he's also a professor and an attending physician for the Division of Infectious Diseases. He's written several books documenting the rhetoric of the anti-vaccination movement, and was kind enough to take some time from his busy schedule and talk to me about the what might happen if more Americans stopped vaccinating. Spoiler alert: It's not pretty.

VICE: In the US, what are the current rates of vaccination for things like measles?
Dr. Paul Offit: The rates are in the high 80 percent, low 90 percent range. They're actually very good. The problem is that there are certain districts or regions that are woefully undervaccinated.

The ideal rate would be 100 percent, right?
Well, remember, there are hundreds of thousands of people who can't be vaccinated because they're getting chemotherapy for cancer, or other therapies for chronic diseases. Those people really depend on those around them to be vaccinated.

For highly contagious diseases, you really need vaccines in the 92 to 94 percent rate to prevent outbreaks. Measles, in many ways, is the canary in the coal mine. It's the best indicator of the health of immunization right now, because it's a very effective vaccine and a very contagious virus. So when that herd immunity starts to fray, that's the disease that's going to come back first. You have to have immunization rates drop further to see diseases like polio come back, which are less contagious.

So, once the number of vaccinated people drops below a certain percentage, is there a point at which even the herd immunity won't protect people that are vaccinated?
Sure, sure. Firstly, vaccines aren't 100 percent effective. If you've gotten a dose of the measles vaccine, and let's say it's 95 percent effective, that means that of 100 people, five in an outbreak who have gotten the vaccine will get infected.

There was an outbreak of the measles in the Netherlands between 1999 and 2000. Several thousand people got sick. Obviously, you were in the best position if you were vaccinated and living in a highly vaccinated community; you were in the worst position if you were not vaccinated living in a relatively unvaccinated community. But you were actually better off being unvaccinated living in a highly vaccinated community than being vaccinated and living in a highly unvaccinated community. That's surprising, right? So yeah, the herd is the most important thing.

At what point, with diseases like measles, would we see outbreaks like California's happen more often?
There was a great article written by Gary Baum in the The Hollywood Reporter, where he went to elementary schools in places like Beverly Hills or Santa Monica or Marina Del Rey, and found that the immunization rates in some schools were less than 50 percent. Those places are just waiting for this to happen. But remember, they are part of a much larger herd: The area around them is better vaccinated. But once [an outbreak has] started, it takes off. It would've been much worse if the California State Department of Health didn't react as quickly and effectively as they did. Once kids were infected or known to be exposed, they'd be quarantined for three weeks, which led to fewer secondary or tertiary cases. I give them credit. But that's a lot of money and time that's wasted taking care of this.

Broadly speaking, under current law, could these kind of dangerously low rates conceivably happen elsewhere or are there safeguards in place like what you just described in California?
No, I think there's pop off valves that make it perfectly possible. Obviously, every state has medical exemptions to vaccinations, but 20 states have philosophical exemptions—one of them is California—and you can simply say that "it's not my philosophy" to get vaccinated, which is ridiculous. Forty-eight states have religious exemptions, so in states where there's not a philosophical exemption, people can just say "it's my religion," and nobody really challenges that.

So what would America start to look like if everyone took advantage of these philosophical or religious exemptions and stopped getting vaccinated?
It would look like what it used to look like—which is to say, every year, 48,000 people would be hospitalized with measles and 500 would die. There would be people who would have subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, which is a chronic measles infection of the brain and is essentially a death sentence. Mumps would be a common cause of deafness and sterility. Rubella or German measles would cause as many as 20,000 children to be born with severe permanent birth defects every year, and 5,000 spontaneous abortions. Bacterial meningitis caused by streptococcus pneumoniae caused by haemophilus influenza B or meningococcus, and it would cause tens of thousands of children to die or be left with permanent neurological damage. The rotavirus would cause 70,000 children to be hospitalized with dehydration and 60 to die. The chicken pox would cause 10,000 children to be hospitalized, and 70 to 100 would die. Hepatitis A would cause tens of thousands of cases and about 100 deaths. Hepatitis B would again re-emerge as a silent epidemic; millions of people would be chronically infected, and about 5,000 would die of acute hepatitis B. Tens of thousands would go on to have chronic hepatitis. This would mean infections of the liver, which can cause things like cirrhosis and liver cancer.

This would be every year?
Yes.

Wow. What would you say are the key forces that are leading us down that road?
Our misguided respect for individual choice. I mean, I just don't get it. You have Governor Christie, who says that it should be a parent's choice whether or not their kids get vaccinated. In that state, there is a state law to require car seats for children. Why is that not a parent's choice? Because obviously, car seats prevent your children from dying if you're in an accident. I don't see how this is any different. The only difference that I can see is that if you choose not to get a vaccine, it affects not only your child, but those with whom they come in contact. How is vaccination a personal choice? How is that a matter of conscience? I think these exemptions are misnamed, and I think we shouldn't have them.

I think that people who choose to put themselves and their children at risk should, in some ways, have to pay for it. If we're going to be spending more money—I mean, think of all the money that was spent by the Department of Health in California to quarantine these cases to prevent secondary and tertiary cases—then those who make the choice for that to happen should pay for it. How about that? Almost like a smoking tax.

So what should we do to promote higher rates of vaccination?
Making it much harder to get the exemptions is step one, and then ultimately eliminating those exemptions is step two. The answer to the question "What most likely educates people away from these false beliefs?" is "the disease." We can talk vaccination education, but we can also say that if we let our guard down, this is going to happen. So, we failed. We failed to be compelling. Nothing is as compelling as the virus or the disease itself. Reasonable people are scared of measles. The anti-vaccine people think that measles is no big deal, which shows that they're perfectly capable of denying history.

Follow Simon Davis on Twitter.

In the lead-up to the inevitable announcement that he is running for president, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush has followed in the footsteps of our last three presidents and admitted that he used to smoke pot as a kid. In a Boston Globeprofile of Bush's teenage years at the prestigious Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., the second son of the Bush dynasty was painted as a nihilistic bully, a long-haired jock who cared nothing for politics, the Vietnam war, or getting good grades. According to recollections from his classmates, Jeb Bush just wanted to hit the hash pipe and rock out to Steppenwolf.

Bush's father, George Senior, was a freshman congressman on the fast track to a storied life in Washington when Jeb enrolled in the Massachusetts prep school in 1967. The summer of love had just turned to fall, Bush was 14 and apparently had yet to be infected with the ambition of his father. He had completed the ninth grade in Houston, but was asked to repeat it at Andover, where he says his grades remained just high enough to avoid expulsion.

"I drank alcohol and I smoked marijuana when I was at Andover," the 61-year-old Bush recalled in his interview with the Globe, adding that "It was pretty common."

The Globe spoke with Bush's former classmate, Peter Tibbetts, who recalls smoking marijuana with Bush in the woods near the school—where Bush suggested Tibbetts take up cigarettes so he could better handle his smoke—and then later smoking hash with him back on campus. "The first time I really got stoned was in Jeb's room," Tibbetts said. "He had a portable stereo with removable speakers. He put on Steppenwolf for me." Tibbetts added that he once bought hash from Bush.

In hindsight, Bush told the Globe, he considers his dope-smoking to be "stupid" and "wrong." But his critics—including potential 2016 rival Rand Paul—have pointed out that in his years as Florida Governor, Bush supported harsh policies that incarcerated people for behaving exactly as he did as a student.

"If you're white and you're rich in our country, if you're busted for drugs, you get a good attorney and in all likelihood you serve no time, but if you're poor black or Hispanic or poor and white, you get put in jail," Paul said in an interview with Fox News Monday. "I think it is hypocritical for very wealthy white people who have all the resources to evade the drug laws," he added "Particularly in Jeb Bush's case, he's against even allowing medical marijuana for people that are confined to wheelchairs from multiple sclerosis,""

Paul—who, like Jeb, is almost certainly running for president—said he is not in favor of full marijuana legalization, though he supports the right of states like Colorado, Washington, and Alaska, to make their own choice on the issue. He added that he thinks Congress should look at reducing sentences for nonviolent drug offenders.

Paul also admitted to smoking pot as a young man, and said that it was "a mistake." Admissions of toking up as youth have become so common during presidential campaigns, it's almost a requisite milestone in the pageantry of running for the Oval Office. Following Bush's confession on Monday, an aide to presumptive GOP candidate Ted Cruz told The Daily Mailthat his boss "foolishly experimented with marijuana," as a teenager, but added, "it was a mistake, and he's never tried it since."

During an interview with ABC and Yahoo News last May, Senator Marco Rubio responded to inquiries about whether he partook in his youth with "Here's the problem with that question in American politics, if you say you did, suddenly there are all these people saying 'Well, it's not a big deal, look at all these successful people who did it.' On the other side of it, if you tell people that you didn't, they won't believe you."

And in an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel last year, Texas Governor Rick Perry denied ever smoking himself, but suggested that marijuana decriminalization may be around the corner in his state. "We already kind of did that," he said. "You don't want to ruin a kids life for having a joint. And, historically, that's what we saw." Perry went on to boast about the success of his criminal justice reform efforts, including the implementation of drug courts.

As governor of Florida, Jeb Bush took the opposite tack, opposing programs that would have placed drug offenders in rehabilitation programs instead of prisons, despite his daughter having done a stint in rehab after being caught trying to purchase Xanax with a phony prescription. While in rehab, she was busted twice with drugs, once with prescription pills, and another time with a rock of cocaine.

Eight years after Bush left office, Florida remains one of the worst places to get caught with marijuana in the country. According to data compiled by MuckRock, Florida leads several states—including Texas and California—in number of marijuana citations per capita, issuing more than five times the number of citations between 2011 and October 2014. In November, a constitutional amendment that would have legalized marijuana for medical purposes failed to get the 60 percent of votes needed to pass, despite earning support from a majority of voters.

Follow Josiah on Twitter.

Contraband smartphones are readily available inside America's vast prison system. Price and availability vary widely, but they've been making their way inside the belly of the beast in major numbers for a while now. Recently, reports have emerged about prisoners in the US (and abroad) making rap videos, posting on social media sites like Facebook and Instagram, and even running their criminal enterprises by phone from their cells.

For some context on the smartphone scene in America's prison system, we called a lifer in California for an interview—which he participated in via contraband smartphone, of course. He broke down how much the devices cost in the state system, their availability, how they are getting in, what they are being used for, and the consequences for those prisoners who get caught with one.

"It all depends on what prison you in, as far as how much you will pay," says Big Smoke, a 34-year-old Crip member doing life in the California Department of Corrections. "The first prison that I bought me a cell phone from, it cost me $1,000 for a Verizon flip phone." That might seem outrageous for an outdated piece of plastic, but when you're doing life in a netherworld of corruption and violence, shelling out a grand for a beacon to the outside world isn't beyond reason.

"It depends on what environment you're in, because the prices will fluctuate," Big Smoke goes on. "Right now in that prison I was in, Salinas Valley, the flip phones is going for $2,500 and the smartphones for $3,500 because it is so scarce."

So the laws of supply and demand apply inside the prison-industrial complex, too. But how do the smartphones get into prisons in the first place?

"The staff is bringing them in because it's a lucrative market, big time," Big Smoke says. "As fast as they come, the inmates is buying them off the staff. We just had a female guard who got busted with ten cell phones and a whole bunch of weed in her purse, bringing it in. So it's a black market and it's always gonna be some cop or other staff that's tempted to bring it in."

Prisoners have too much idle time and anything that can divert them—be it drugs or a cell phone—is going to be highly coveted. But cell phones aren't always that hard to come by.

"In some prisons, it's so plentiful that the prices drop, like this smartphone I'm on, I paid $350 for it. It's a 4G Galaxy," Big Smoke says. "That's unheard of because in other prisons, this same phone goes for ten times the amount. But in LA County prisons, the gangs got a monopolization. We right here, we in our backyard. We flood this muthafucka, everybody flooding it. When you go up north in California, it's a little different, but right here in LA County everything is cheap, everything is in bulk."

And while prisoners may not have massive social media followings, they're on the same sites as the rest of us.

"Everybody on Facebook," Big Smoke says. "All my homies that got phones, all of us are friends on Facebook. Niggas be making rap videos, they be filming riots and filming shit that's going on and putting them on YouTube." Of course, they are all on Facebook under fake names, because if the prison officials find out, they will shut the perpetrator down. Still, despite some states—like California— increasing penalties for smartphone use, the consequences effectively remain so minor that most prisoners like Big Smoke don't sweat it.

"I got caught with like seven cell phones. It's nothing major," he told us. "I don't have no fear of getting caught with a cell phone. It's real low here. We ain't tripping no way. I'm a lifer, so until my appeal gets reversed, I'm not tripping, because what can they do to me, give me another year?" As long as they can come up with the money to buy one, prisoners looking ahead to long bids see no reason to pass up the pleasures of modern technology.

"They don't put us in the hole or nothing here; they just slap us on the wrist," Big Smoke says. "The lowest division here is like an F and a cell phone is a division D. The highest division is an A. If you get that, it's bad. An A is like stabbing someone with a knife."

With all the gang and racial violence in California's prison system, correctional officials have more important things to worry about than smartphone proliferation.

"The gangs over here is always prevalent," Big Smoke says. "They had three race riots since I been here. The Bloods and Crips and Mexicans. They be tripping on the gang activity more than anything."

That means that not much time is spent keeping tabs on what has become a pretty big underground economy in prisons.

"The cell phones is rampant up and down the coast of California," Big Smoke says. "Some inmates is even smuggling them in now because it's so profitable. They smuggling in memory cards, chargers, cords, anything that has to do with a cell phone. All that stuff goes for $50 a pop. Every part that has to do with a cell phone is profitable. The black market is big."

Enforcement may be relatively lax, but the occasional search is still a cause for concern.

"They don't trip that hard, they look for them, but they be looking for knives and shit we be using when we get ready to go to war with each other," Big Smoke says. "There are so many damn gangsters on the line. We have so many racial riots, it's crazy. Drama among the blacks and Mexicans and the Bloods verse the Crips. The white boys against whoever and them fuckers are violent as fuck. They don't play."

When the guards do conduct searches, inmates are ready and warn each other—with smartphones, among other things.

"If the police is searching in one block we gonna know in the next block and vice versa because we communicate," Big Smoke says. "If they heading our way we gonna know, we text each other. We give the guys in the other buildings a heads up if they hit us first. 'Yo, put your shit up. It's a security breach.' We got a communication system. We can find out what we're on lockdown for."

This isn't just about making life easy on the inside, though. Prisoners can also run a network of illegal activity from their cells.

"We monopolize, do deals on the streets," Big Smoke says. "I got a gang of homeboys, I fuck with a lot of Crips all over the country. My shit blow up all day. You don't even know. The phones give us an edge. This muthafucka right now help me to monopolize a lot of shit from right here."

Follow Seth Ferranti on Twitter.

[body_image width='2000' height='3000' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='fashion-designer-rad-hourani-is-dismantling-the-gender-binary-456-body-image-1423082908.jpg' id='24469']
All images courtesy of Rad Hourani

For the past seven years Rad Hourani's vampy, futuristic clothing line, Unisex, has been pushing the boundaries of the gender binary that is been deeply rooted in the fashion industry. While many designers flirt with the idea of androgyny, Rad goes beyond blurring the line between males and female to completely disregarding it with his avant-garde asexual collections. His shadowy geometric pieces even earned him a spot at the Paris Couture Fashion Week, making him the first and only unisex designer to ever show at the coveted event.

Originally born in Jordan, the striking 32-year-old Canadian-native didn't design his first garments until the age of 25, when he set out to create a neutral of clothing he wasn't able to find on his copious shopping trips. The women's clothes were too tight, the men's clothes were too loose, and the fabrics were always wrong. So he took on the challenge of learning the entire design process himself.

When it came to clothing, he wanted to develop an aesthetic that was simple and complex, but neither male nor female. He tailored his pieces to both sex's anatomies. Only five years after moving from Montreal to Paris to pursue a career in styling, he was showing his collections at the Chambre Syndicale de La Haute Couture.

Taking his inspiration from art and architecture, this season Rad presented his latest collection as weeklong exhibition in Paris in collaboration with L'Arsenal Contemporary Art Center. The atypical setup allowed viewers an interactive experience that is not provided by the usual six-minute runway show. The exhibition, which allowed viewers to see the garments as sculptures, made complete sense for a designer like Rad, who approaches each of his pieces as a definitive statement, with no interest in the fast-changing trends of the fashion industry.

I called up Rad in Paris on the closing day of his exhibition to discuss fast fashion, the importance of couture, and the future of unisex clothing.

VICE: When did you decide to start a clothing line?
Rad Hourani: I started as a model scout at 19 and after that I became a full-time stylist. When I first moved to Paris I was trying to find clothes that resonated with my way of dressing and the way I wanted to express myself. I realized the clothes that I was looking for did not exist, so I taught myself how to design clothes. My desire for unisex came from something that I was looking for, but I couldn't find.

What were the first pieces you designed?
It was actually a full collection for myself. I was shopping a lot at that time and the women's clothes were too tight and too short. The men's clothes were too loose or the fabrics were not my kind of fabrics. I learned about the fabrics that I liked and what I was attracted to in terms of comfort and in terms of my own look. For the first collection I wanted to make pieces for my wardrobe that were architectural. It was not planned to be what it is today, it was just something that was a necessity for me.

[body_image width='2000' height='3000' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='fashion-designer-rad-hourani-is-dismantling-the-gender-binary-456-body-image-1423083313.jpeg' id='24475']

How did growing up in Montreal influence your style?
I think the newness of Montreal made me free to do what I wanted. I think Paris inspired me to not just do things to do things because there is such a history and a profound uniqueness. It forced me to make my own style. Canada gave me the freedom to just start and do something because there isn't that history.

Why was it important for you to make a line that is unisex?
I made an observation before starting Unisex to understand who I am as a person and how to express myself. For me, clothing is a reflection of who we are and it is the first way to express yourself when you see someone. I didn't understand who decided that a man should be dressed differently than a woman and all of these other limitations that we have in life like our age, gender, religion, nation, or any other boundaries that divide people from each other. I am someone who likes to live with no limitations or boundaries. So I thought, Why are there no unisex clothes? Each garment is a neutral garment that can be worn by a man or women or any kind of gender.

How unisex is different from androgyny?
Androgyny is a style, feminine is a style, and masculine is a style. What I am trying to do are not androgynous clothes. What I am doing is creating a neutral canvas that people can use and adapt to their wardrobe with any they want. Unisex is not a style, it is a neutral garment and lifestyle.

[body_image width='2000' height='3000' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='fashion-designer-rad-hourani-is-dismantling-the-gender-binary-456-body-image-1423083111.jpg' id='24472']

What is your creative process like?
I always work with paper and a pen. I never start with a mood board or any direction. It is always an evolution from point zero to four. I always evolve in myself and in an architectural complex way that looks simple. Working with graphics and architectural shapes gives me my own direction and without needing to start from zero each time. That is also why I call my collections number 1, 2, 3, because I want it to be an evolution and I want it to be timeless. I don't want it to be for certain periods of time or certain trends.

How do you design each garment to fit the different sexes?
I work with a very architectural and rectangular canvas so it can fit any type of body. I did one year of study on anatomy to know how a men's and women's bodies work. I assembled that all together to make one canvas. If you look at the website and see how the clothes are presented, you can see how you can make it masculine or feminine.

Do you hope all fashion will move towards being unisex?
I have been receiving many articles lately that have been referring to people going more into unisex, gender-less, or androgynous. Maybe there is an influence or maybe people are just starting to see that there should be no boundary between dressing.

[body_image width='2000' height='3001' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='fashion-designer-rad-hourani-is-dismantling-the-gender-binary-456-body-image-1423083233.jpeg' id='24473']

What inspired you to use different materials and colors in your recent collection?
At the Center of Contemporary Art, where I shot my collection, there were many different art works that gave me the idea of including unusual fabrics. I wanted to present the collection as an exhibit rather than a presentation or a show. I wanted it to be open to the public for the whole week of couture and I wanted it to be expressed in photography, film, and installations. For the installations, I wanted the clothes to look like sculptures. I thought if I did it in all black or drabber colors, it might be less fitting with the artwork and the whole concept of the exhibit. So that's why I used color and fabrics like plastic and nylon that people don't usually use in couture.

Why is it important to you to present your pieces as art?
I think couture is a form of art. Ready-to-wear is something I need to produce to sell in stores around the world. If I work for six months on a couture collection and then show it in six minutes and rush everyone, they don't have the time to feel the clothes and get close to them and have time to see them. For some people they didn't understand the exhibit, but to me it makes perfect sense.

[body_image width='2000' height='3000' path='images/content-images/2015/02/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/04/' filename='fashion-designer-rad-hourani-is-dismantling-the-gender-binary-456-body-image-1423083256.jpeg' id='24474']

You've mentioned before that you aren't really interested in fashion.
I am not attracted to a machine that is just about producing and following trends. I think art is what makes us dream and continue in what we love to do. For me the word fashion is not what I am attracted to anymore. I want to build my work as a form of art as much as possible and at all times.

What other projects are you working on?
I am constantly working on photography and more film. I have different projects coming up. I might be collaborating with Larry Clary for an exhibit at my gallery in Paris. I also want to concentrate more on my website. We live in an online world and I want people to have access to this unisex world just by coming to RadHourani.com.

Follow Erica on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE Alps.

In an interview with VICE yesterday, former PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West) Vienna spokesman Georg Nagel claimed that he could not even imagine spotting right-wing extremists at Monday's demo in the Austrian capital. But VICE attended that same demonstration, and we're pretty sure we spotted quite a few people you wouldn't invite to your mixed-race wedding.

We combined what we saw during the rally with a couple of tidbits we found online, and the picture that came together was far from the harmless protest of concerned citizens that the Islamophobic organization tries to promote. To us, the PEGIDA rally was the perfect excuse for assorted Austrian hooligans, neo-Nazis, conspiracy theorists, members of the Identitarian movement, and members of the (in comparison not-even-so-far-right) Freedom Party to get together. Here's what we saw at that demo.

RIGHT-WING BRANDS

[body_image width='800' height='534' path='images/content-images/2015/02/03/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/03/' filename='so-rechts-war-die-pegida-demo-760-body-image-1422969142.jpg' id='23667']
Photo by Kurt Prinz

Ansgar Aryan is a German apparel brand, known for being favorited by German neo-Nazis and right wingers. The brand, whose iconography relies on symbolism, tends to advertise on right-wing internet portals, which, as you can see, has proven to be a successful marketing technique—Ansgar Aryan products are finally embraced by an international crowd.

THE RIGHT-WING POLICE UNION

Der AUF-Gewerkschafter, diesmal ohne eisernem Kreuz als Ohrring. #nopegida pic.twitter.com/sZsfo6Q5qW
— Nathan (@nathanspasic) 3. Februar 2015

The caption reads: The AUF guy—this time he is not wearing an iron cross as an earring.

The man in this picture is a police officer. He's also a member of the far-right Freedom Party's police union group, the AUF. Last time he appeared in the news was during the police evacuation of Pizzeria Anarchia—Vienna's last squat. Back then, he went to the protest while off-duty and brought his gun along.

This time, again, he was off duty and in action. And so was AUF, who use cars that resemble police vehicles and provides policemen with sandwiches at such demos.

MARTIN GRAF

Das Volk.Wer ist das schon?Martin Graf ist jedenfalls auch da. #Pegida #wien pic.twitter.com/LnCU2WnhCk
— Julia Herrnböck (@HappySlocum) 2. Februar 2015

The caption reads: "Where are 'the people'? ["the people" is what PEGIDA call themselves] Martin Graf is here for sure."

The Freedom Party's Martin Graf was also in attendance. For those whose knowledge of central European bigotry needs brushing up, the FPO is Austria's right-wing populist party. Graf is also a member of the Olympia fraternity, which, according to the Documentation Center of Austrian Resistance (which officially keeps track of past and present right-wing activities), is considered a far-right organization.

When it comes to the present-day borders of Germany, Graf maintains that these "were drawn arbitrarily; German nationals should be able to express their nationalism freely in Europe."

NAZI SALUTES

[body_image width='900' height='600' path='images/content-images/2015/02/03/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/03/' filename='so-rechts-war-die-pegida-demo-760-body-image-1422969205.jpg' id='23670']Photo by Kurt Prinz

Austria is the only country in the world that has a law against what we call Nazi Reactivation. This means that explicit salutes, motifs, and sayings that have anything to do with Nazi symbolism are banned. Because of this, you'll rarely ever spot somebody doing a Nazi salute in public.

But where there's a will, there's a way, so Austrian neo-Nazis invented a new move, called "Kühnengruß," which is basically the Nazi salute but with only three fingers. Not that it really mattered—at the PEGIDA rally in Vienna, far-right sympathizers were throwing Nazi salutes all over the place. The police are currently investigating.

[body_image width='1200' height='675' path='images/content-images/2015/02/03/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/03/' filename='so-rechts-war-die-pegida-demo-760-body-image-1422970696.jpg' id='23692']

Photo by David Prokop

Hitlergruß neben der Polizei. Wien 2015. pic.twitter.com/FvJvYg2QKS
— Michel Reimon (@michelreimon) 2. Februar 2015

The caption reads: "Hitler salute by the police line."

THE IDENTITARIAN MOVEMENT

[tweet text="Wir kommen wieder! #pegida #wien pic.twitter.com/aZXhb8KGb5" byline="— Martin Sellner (@Martin_Sellner)" user_id="Martin_Sellner" tweet_id="562337373628145666" tweet_visual_time="2. Februar 2015"]

The caption reads: "We'll be back!"

In May of 2014, the Identitarian movement, which holds itself as the "European New Right," marched through the streets of Vienna for the first time ever. Some of its members started out in far-right fraternities and/or the Freedom Party, and some were even on the FPO's ballot in past elections.

On Monday, about 50 of its members marched along with their friends—the PEGIDA guys.

[tweet text="#Pegida #Wien Heimat, Freiheit, Tradition - Multikulti Endstation! pic.twitter.com/E6gbxqiveQ" byline="— Alina von Rauheneck (@Alina_Rauheneck)" user_id="Alina_Rauheneck" tweet_id="562304835949985792" tweet_visual_time="February 2, 2015"]

The caption reads: "Homeland, Freedom, Tradition—Multiculturalism ends here!"