The violent and gruesome world of Columbine blogs surfaced last week following the death of 19-year-old Nova Scotian James Gamble, who police allege helped plan a foiled Valentine's Day shooting at a Halifax mall.

Gamble's Tumblr was dedicated to the two shooters who killed 13 people at the Colorado high school in 1999. When a tipster told police about the plan to shoot up the Halifax Shopping Centre on Valentine's Day, Gamble reportedly committed suicide, and police charged Randall Steven Shepherd of Halifax and Lindsay Kantha Souvannarath of Illinois with conspiracy to commit murder and arson.

Police say the alleged plotters met online. Gamble and Souvannarath posted on Tumblr about their upcoming Valentine's Day plans under the Columbine tag, which is used by a dedicated community of Columbine bloggers posting from all over the world. However, federal justice minister Peter MacKay said the Valentine's Day plot "does not appear to have been culturally motivated."

At VICE Canada, we were curious about this Tumblr community, so I Skyped a few of the so-called Columbiners who followed Gamble's blog. Despite the creepy content they posted, they were pretty nice.

Unlike Gamble, none of the three bloggers VICE spoke with advocate murder. Like him, though, all of them have struggled with suicidal thoughts.

Based on the west coast of the US, 26-year-old Natasha runs a true crime blog with 11,000 followers. Her Tumblr, True Crime Hot House, is a place for her to obsess about murderers, and post letters and art that incarcerated serial killers send her through the mail.

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Pictures of various school shooters. (From top left to right: Michael Carneal, Brandon McInerney, John Jason McLaughlin, Kipland Kinkel, and Eric Hainstock. Bottom left to right: Charles Andy Williams, Bobby Gladden prison yard photo)

Though Natasha (not her real name) posts about Columbine, she wouldn't call herself a Columbiner. The school shooting is more of a sub-interest to her.

Natasha and Gamble followed each other on Tumblr. When she heard about his death, Natasha posted a eulogy for the 19-year-old: "James, you ran a cool blog and will be missed."

She wrote that Tumblr users posting "rude and thoughtless" comments should think of his friends and family. She also encouraged people with suicidal thoughts to reach out to someone. "I promise I am always here to talk to anyone who feels like they've hit their rock bottom," she wrote.

Younger Columbiners often message her about suicidal thoughts. Like Gamble, a lot of them post about self harm and suicide, but she says it's hard to know when it's just internet talk and when it's serious.

Gamble's death and the alleged shooting plot took the community by surprise, Natasha says. They didn't see any warning signs. There are more extreme blogs than his, she explains.

The true crime Tumblr community is a varied group. Many bloggers are in their teens. Some are interested in the criminology surrounding serial killers and mass murderers. Others relate to the two Columbine shooters—known in the community by their first names Eric and Dylan—and want to copy them.

On February 8, four days before Gamble's death, a commenter on his blog asked, "Do you have combat boots like Dylan?" He replied, "Indeed I do," and posted a photo of himself wearing the boots and holding a long gun and hunting knife.

His blog is also full of glorified Nazi imagery. That's because the Columbine shooters were interested in the Nazis and Hitler, Natasha explains.

She doesn't post that stuff. "I see so many people doing it—not that I condone it. It's this weird trend," she says. "Strangely it's become hip."

She thinks the posters have "displaced hate."

Not everyone in the community advocates murder or posts Nazi imagery. "James didn't represent the whole true crime community, [and] I don't represent the whole true crime community," Natasha says.

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Art by school shooter Bobby Gladden, who as heavily interested in Columbine.

Dana is a 16-year-old Aussie who runs a Columbine blog, with 500 followers, dedicated to the victims of the massacre. Not many Australians are interested in Columbine, she says, so most of her followers are in the US.

Dana first learned about Columbine when she was cast as a mass shooter in a school play, and started researching the role. The story grabbed her "because it was unlike any other shooting."

"It's human nature to want to know more about death," she says.

Dana says people who are depressed or suicidal can get pulled into the subculture. The two murderers were young, so people her age can relate to them.

"You've got Eric who was the more homicidal of the pair, and Dylan who was the more suicidal of the pair," she says. "Putting those together sort of represents the way a lot of young people are feeling."

There are people in the community who want to present the facts about Columbine, and others who want to place the shooters on a pedestal, she says. A small number of people have "malicious intentions."

"The public needs to understand the majority of us are people who would never consider doing anything malicious," Dana emphasizes.

Lydia is the same age as Dana. The 16-year-old runs a Columbine blogout of Latvia with 540 followers. She didn't want us to use her real name because she worried her school would find out about her blog.

Lydia learned about the 1999 massacre about a year ago when school shootings came up in her class. She searched for more information and found one of the shooters' diaries online.

"When I first read some pages of Dylan Klebold's journal, I realized he was going through a lot of things that I was going through," she said. "Feeling lost, sad, having suicidal thoughts and other things like that really applied to me. It almost made me forget that this was written by a future mass murderer."

[body_image width='1200' height='1600' path='images/content-images/2015/02/24/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/24/' filename='speaking-to-columbiners-about-depression-suicide-and-the-halifax-shooting-plot-232-body-image-1424803875.jpg' id='30475']Columbine yearbooks, 1994 to 1997, owned by blogger Natasha.

In the Columbine Tumblr community, she found other people like her.

She says the perception that Columbiners are violent is wrong. Many of them have helped her deal with the dark thoughts. If she's feeling down, she posts about it and her followers send her messages that make her feel better. Lydia said she is also talking to a counsellor.

Some Columbiners advocate violence, Lydia says, "but there aren't that many of them."

Dana, the Australian blogger, says people don't need to be worried about the Columbiner subculture on Tumblr, but the threats within the community shouldn't be taken lightly.

"Every threat and every suicidal claim should be taken seriously, because you never know if they're going to do it or not," she says. "And you always need to assume that they are."

If you have suicidal thoughts, you can find a list of Canadian help lines here, and crisis centres here. If you're in the US, click here for a help line that will connect you with a trained counsellor.

Follow Hilary Beaumont on Twitter.

[body_image width='954' height='634' path='images/content-images/2015/02/19/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/19/' filename='heres-what-happens-to-you-immediately-after-you-graduate-university-303-body-image-1424348490.jpg' id='28947']Hulk just checked the starting salary for sports-science students. Photo by Jake Lewis

Post-college life isn't working out for you, is it? I don't mean this as an insult, but look at you: You're sitting at work and reading this on the down-low, alt-tabbing to a spreadsheet your boss asked you to do four days ago whenever he walks by. It doesn't take four days to do a spreadsheet. You know this. Your boss knows this. Nobody even wants the spreadsheet you are pretending to make. You will go home and your roommate will ask you what you did today and you won't be able to remember.

It wasn't supposed to go like this. You imagined walking out straight from the graduation ceremony into a good job—OK, maybe you didn't have this pictured so clearly in your head, but you imagined an interview at some hip office, a boss lauding your 3.5 GPA, your film studies degree, your semester spent DJing a bluegrass show on college radio. Health insurance! A bank account that's never empty! Parents who don't lie to their friends about what you do!

Thing is, that's usually not the case, is it? Here are the three things that happen to you post-college:

1) Great success—you're a fresh-out-of-Stanford startup entrepreneur or a hotshot graphic-design prodigy or you get scooped up by an intelligence agency thanks to your preternatural language and crypto skills. If this was going to happen to you, you'd know already.

2) A return home—those four parent-subsidized years in the gleaming metropolis of Boston were fun, but now it's back to Dayton, where you will work a service-industry job and probably have a kid extremely quickly.

3) Pure aimlessness—you want to go to grad school (or even law school, maybe?), but your lack of salable skills and the great expanse of life stretching before you is terrifying, so for now you drink too much and fritter your nights away on a series of fleeting relationships until you feel hollowed-out and blurry and you start to hear the sound of your own desperation keening away inside of you like a earsplitting siren audible only to you.

Anyway, that last one is how I assume you're currently living, or what you can expect in a couple of months, once you've picked up your degree. Here's everything else you can look forward to.

[body_image width='683' height='1024' path='images/content-images/2015/02/19/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/19/' filename='heres-what-happens-to-you-immediately-after-you-graduate-university-303-body-image-1424348734.jpg' id='28949']These are Cambridge students, so that dead guy with the odd socks is probably running HSBC by now. Photo by Nicholas Pomeroy

YOU WILL GO LIVE BACK AT HOME AGAIN

Your high-school vow to move away forever at 18 will be forgotten pretty quickly once you realize you can't pay rent. But when you slink back to the zip code of your upbringing, you'll find a few differences.

For example: Your bedroom is now called the "spare room" and you have to wedge your stuff around an elliptical machine from that one week your dad tried to fend off a heart attack with exercise. When you wake up with a hangover your mom doesn't preach to you anymore, she just makes breakfast by dropping every single pan she owns really loudly on the floor.

Your parents are more tired of you than you are of them; they're supposed to be semi-retired and on a cruise, fucking like a pair of tanned, slightly wrinkled bunny rabbits. Your moping around on their sofa and complaining about the food in the fridge is wrecking that. Just by existing, you are destroying someone else's dream.

SOMEONE IN YOUR FAMILY WILL TELL YOU WHAT A BIG WASTE OF TIME COLLEGE WAS

"You did what?" your uncle is saying. "Theater design? What's that?" His favorite film is "any Bond movie." His life revolves around smoking, being upset about property taxes, and getting into a car so clumsily the whole vehicle shakes.

"That stuff's a waste of fucking time," he's saying. "Your cousin's a plumber." Your cousin is his son, the one who started those fires when you were six. "He just bought a van." You do not have a van. "Can't pay for a van with a philosophy degree, can you?" He has a point. "CAN YOU? HUH?" He's holding your chin now. Six people are holding him back. "CAN'T THINK YOURSELF OUT OF A HEADLOCK, CAN YOU?"

For some reason, there is something about the concept of spending four years on a degree that really rubs some people the wrong way, and they will kick you with boots made of hindsight for having the temerity—the nerve—for trying to better yourself with knowledge. For some men (and it's mostly men here), the only honorable jobs involve working with your hands, and getting any sort of liberal arts degree amounts to an admission that you can't live in the real world any more than you can change a tire.

There's not any real way you can deal with this, by the way. Everyone has his journey, and yours just happens to include a four-year detour where you got really into at least one daytime TV program and drank away all your spending money. If you are wondering why certain branches of your family don't respect you, just think back to how you spent the last four years.

ONE OF YOUR MOM'S FRIEND'S KIDS WILL BE DOING BETTER THAN YOU

"You know Linda," your mom is saying on the phone. "You do know Linda. She used to come over and cut your hair when you were a kid. She fell off that chair at mine and your stepfather's wedding, and you started crying because she wasn't wearing underwear and you were staring right into the eye of the storm."

"Oh yeah," you say. "Linda."

"Well, anyway, that daughter of hers who was always too young for you to really have anything in common with, but who I made you hang out with all the time anyway, just got into Harvard Medical School. She's going to be a doctor, she says—although she could probably be anything she wants. We're going to a party for her, later. Your dad's got his suit on."

"HE'S NOT MY DAD!" you scream, slamming the phone down.

On the plus side, you can probably use that as a scene for the screenplay you're writing, right?

[body_image width='954' height='634' path='images/content-images/2015/02/19/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/19/' filename='heres-what-happens-to-you-immediately-after-you-graduate-university-303-body-image-1424348898.jpg' id='28951']These two quietly unfriended on Facebook today. Photo by Jake Lewis

YOU WILL READ A NEWS REPORT ABOUT AVERAGE GRADUATE SALARIES AND THE AVERAGE WILL BE $10,000 MORE THAN YOU CURRENTLY GET PAID

"And bad news for graduates," says an important person on CNN. "A new study today found the average graduate starting salary is a mere $37,000, which—reminder—is about $10,000 more than you are currently earning."

Seems a little niche, this news, a little targeted. But you can't really stay to argue because you have to catch the bus to that desolate out-of-town shopping complex, where you have to clean out all the puppy shit at a Pets-R-Us. The kind of job that makes you hate puppies. That's your job.

SOMEONE WILL ASK YOU A TRIVIA QUESTION UNRELATED TO YOUR DEGREE AND CLAIM SOME SORT OF VICTORY WHEN YOU CAN'T ANSWER IT

"English literature, huh? All right then, smartass: What's a cantilever? You don't know, do you? Hey, Dave. Dave! Come here and hear this—he doesn't know what a cantilever is! Four years and all that money later!"

Your dad can be a real prick sometimes.

SOMEONE YOU HATED WILL BE DOING BETTER THAN YOU

You know the one. Always used to turn up in comedy T-shirts. "KEEP CALM AND MAKE ME A SANDWICH"—that sort of thing. A Breaking Bad/Sonic the Hedgehog crossover T-shirt where Jesse calls Knuckles a "bitch." He sat in front of you that time and just scrolled through doge memes, snickering so hard saliva got all over his iPad. Now he's taking a year off from engineering to write a book that he already got a deal for. He has 70,000 Twitter followers. How's that screenplay coming?

[body_image width='954' height='634' path='images/content-images/2015/02/19/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/19/' filename='heres-what-happens-to-you-immediately-after-you-graduate-university-303-body-image-1424349015.jpg' id='28952']I guarantee you that Tim Burton's idea of a schoolgirl doesn't talk to Thor any more. Photo by Jake Lewis

YOU WILL LOSE TOUCH WITH YOUR COLLEGE BUDDIES

"Friends forever!" you say, posing for one last selfie with the guys when you went out one last time for graduation. Then someone moves home, someone else goes on a long road trip to nowhere, and someone else is moving in with his girlfriend and is doing pretty well for himself at a bank.

And then, like the torn pieces of the terrible dissertation you should have shredded and scattered instead of submitting, they fade away. And then you remember: Actually, they were terrible anyway. John kept using your house's one good plate as an ashtray. Tim threw up on your couch. Steve hit on your ex a week after she dumped you. Fuck them.

BUT YOU'LL FIND PEOPLE YOU DIDN'T KNOW THAT WELL REALLY WANT TO "CATCH UP" WITH YOU

He's in town for a conference, he says. Want to go out for a couple beers? The old bar we always went to? And you're thinking: Where do I know this guy from, again? Is he the one who kept getting into fights at house parties? And wrote those emotional Facebook statuses? Yes, it is, and in ten years he will be your best man at your wedding, because he will stay in touch with you when no one else will.

YOU FINALLY OUTGROW THE IDEA OF TRYING TO KEEP UP WITH CLIQUES

Whatever way you spin it, university was a constant chase after the vapors of coolness in whatever way you could manage it—it's all about grasping onto anyone who vaguely shares a common interest with you and building your fort around them. Remember how you told that guy you DJ'd "a bit" and he actually booked you to play a Thursday night slot and it was so bad security escorted you home? Same.

Every skipped seminar, every band T-shirt, every time you read a meaty-looking philosophy book in public, every Tumblr you started and then abandoned—they were all your attempts at being in.

And then you're sent out into the world and you realize: Hold on, cliques don't really exist out here in the wastelands of real life. Nobody really cares how good you are at roller derby. Take off your festival wristbands and your team hoodies and start being normal.

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SOME DUDE YOU HATED WILL HAVE A FEATURE WRITTEN ABOUT HIS NEW FOOD VAN

"Cory Davison, 22, graduated from the same university you did, but is doing way better. 'I sort of realized around my second year,' Corey mused. 'Like, people were partying loads, living it up, and I was like: I just want to stay home and make chicken enchiladas as good as I can possibly make them.'"

It was there, at the university you went to—at a graduate investment fair you didn't even know was happening, even though it was held in the quad of your own dorm—that Davison secured a $60,000 on-the-spot investment for his food van.

You read about this the day after you get rejected for the busboy job you used to do in high school because you are "overqualified."

YOU'RE GOING TO REALIZE HOW BAD YOU LOOKED

Wore Converse with your blazer? Curled your hair? Pierced your lip and your eyebrow? Wore sweatpants and flip-flops and socks while roaming around campus? It didn't work. It never worked.

This shouldn't be news: If you can look back at your Facebook photos and say, "Yes, I looked good and cool," then you are still a child and an idiot. As soon as you can't remember your college self without flinching, you have officially grown and improved as a person. You are on the journey toward being an Adult. An Adult who doesn't think eyebrow piercings with strange gray-green residue on them are an acceptable look.

YOU'LL THINK ABOUT GETTING A MASTER'S

Don't do it.

[body_image width='954' height='634' path='images/content-images/2015/02/19/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/19/' filename='heres-what-happens-to-you-immediately-after-you-graduate-university-303-body-image-1424350935.jpg' id='28965']Cool guys having a good time. Photo by Jake Lewis

YOU'LL SEE SOMEONE ON A LONG TRAIN JOURNEY WEARING A UNIVERSITY HOODIE WITH THEIR NICKNAME ON THE BACK AND YOU WILL BECOME REPULSED TO THE POINT OF NAUSEA

Nobody calls you "Shebs," Melanie. I don't know why you paid $15.99 extra to have it printed on your hoodie.

YOU WILL NOT READ A BOOK FOR FIVE YEARS

Unless you're paying $40,000 over the course of four years for the privilege of being told to read, you will not read.

[body_image width='954' height='634' path='images/content-images/2015/02/19/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/19/' filename='heres-what-happens-to-you-immediately-after-you-graduate-university-303-body-image-1424351057.jpg' id='28966']More cool guys. Photo by Jake Lewis

YOU WILL START YOUR FIRST JOB AND YOUR BOSS WILL BE YOUNGER THAN YOU

It doesn't matter what your job is—you could be making coffee or you could be 3-D-printing parts for F1 engines; you could be doing data entry or you could be an actual astronaut going to the moon—at some point on your first day you will have to shake the hand of someone two rungs up the career ladder ahead of you who is, inexplicably, about ten years old.

Don't worry about this. It will only get worse.

YOU WILL TRY TO TRADE A TEXTBOOK YOU ONCE PAID $100 FOR SO YOU CAN ATTEMPT TO BUY SOME DINNER

Apparently that Norton Anthology of English Literature you've been using as a doorstop is worth about $5 now because there's a new edition with exactly one new poem in it.

University textbooks are kind of like new cars in that drive-them-off-the-lot-and-they-immediately-lose-value way. Only, imagine you drove the car off the lot and straight into a tree, at speed, and both the tree and the car then caught fire, and then the entire car lot caught fire, and the guy who just sold you your car is like, "There is so much damage happening right now! There is so much money on fire right now!" and you're slightly closer to an analogy that aptly explains the market economy of used textbooks.

YOU'LL REALIZE THAT ALL THE FREE TIME YOU WILL EVER HAVE TO TRULY ACHIEVE A CREATIVE ENDEAVOR IS FOREVER BEHIND YOU

How's your screenplay coming?

YOU'LL LEARN THAT being HUNGOVER AT WORK Is worse than being HUNGOVER IN A LECTURE

Being hungover in a lecture is fine: You drift in and out of the conversation while being huddled in a massive hoodie and occasionally sneaking yourself some salt-and-vinegar chips, and then you fuck off home and lie on the sofa watching Big Bang Theory reruns until you are fully recuperated. You're such a Sheldon!

Working on a hangover is different: an eight-hour slog, with a commute each way and a burrito in between. And people expect you to do stuff. And they don't have any sympathy for you. And the phone keeps ringing really loudly. There is no greater agony on earth.

[body_image width='954' height='634' path='images/content-images/2015/02/19/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/19/' filename='heres-what-happens-to-you-immediately-after-you-graduate-university-303-body-image-1424351240.jpg' id='28968']"Hello, Mom? No, I fucking hate it. Get Dad to come pick me up." Photo by Jake Lewis

YOU REALIZE HOW POINTLESS YOUR DEGREE WAS

Unless you're a doctor (and if you are a doctor, what are you doing reading this? Shouldn't you be massaging someone's heart or something?) then your degree was pointless. It was pointless. This is the first thing you realize as soon as you graduate: Your degree is a meaningless waste of time.

Want to work in a creative industry? Roll up your art degree and burn it for fuel, because you're going to have to do at least six months of interning anyway. Want to work doing something STEM-y? Enjoy on-the-job graduate training, science nerd. Speak Spanish? Half the country speaks it better than you.

YOU'RE GOING TO LOSE A GOOD YEAR TO A SHITTY JOB THAT YOU HATE

You're almost certainly going to lose a year of your life to a terrible dead-end job. You will be that voice on the phone asking someone to sign up for cables. You will be that guy who asks whether the customer wants it grande or venti. You will have moments when you fantasize about being a bus driver with a pension plan.

If you are me, you will lose both your youth and your enthusiasm to a two-hole paper punch/three-prong-binder filing system that you have to work with for two and a half years. The final gasps of your salad days will be spent learning how to send a fax.

This is the reality of entry-level administration, a career into which you, a perky young graduate, are doomed. The danger, of course, is falling deeper into the endless admin sea: One half-promotion is like a manacle around your foot, tying you to a lifetime of anodyne paper sorting when you really wanted to be an illustrator. And there's no quick fix, either, beyond applying for those actual jobs you want and trying not to get stare-into-a-canal-by-yourself sad about it.

You will lose a year to a shitty job. Think of it as a sort of national service for people who know the names of more than one Roman emperor.

THINGS WILL GET BETTER, EVENTUALLY

Bulletproof theory: Everyone had a nemesis at college. If you didn't, that means you were someone else's. A crying girl in the dorms, that guy from your class who ran for student office, the girl who had loud, shrieking orgasms in the room next to yours.

Eventually something good will come for you, and when it does the absolute best thing you can do is go on Facebook or LinkedIn and see how shitty your nemesis's life is compared with yours, then do a victory dance. TAKE THAT, JOHN. PAY THE DEBT OFF ON THAT.

Follow Joel on Twitter.

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If you google around for articles about Ashley Madison, the online dating site for married people, you'll usually end up reading variations on one of two pieces. The first is an article by a male journalist who signs up to the site "purely for research purposes," meets some women as part of his research, doesn't have the decency to actually sleep with them, and then uses this research to draw shoddy conclusions about the kind of women who use the site. The second is written by a woman whose marriage has gone stale, ends up using the site, maybe has sex, and learns some valuable life lessons by doing so. This article is neither of these things.

Background: I'm 40ish, a college professor in the UK, an upstanding member of the local community, married with kids. I'm also a sex addict. Or, I'd admit to being a sex addict if I actually accepted that sex addiction was a real disease, as opposed to just a term used to pathologize people who like sex a lot, particularly the weird stuff. Call me overly subjective, but I assume that everyone is addicted to sex at heart—it's just that some people are too uptight to admit it. If I were trying to justify that last statement, I'd say that my wife belongs to the latter category, but that would be a lie. She's as addicted to sex as anyone, except that for some weird reason, she only wants to have sex with me.

I'd messed around on Tinder in the past with some success, but while I'm clearly a scumbag, I'm a scumbag who doesn't want to get caught. I've found that meeting someone on Tinder involves double the amount of lying—lying to my wife about what I'm up to, but also lying to my matches about my situation. As good a liar as I am, keeping up this level of deceit can be tiring. Ashley Madison seemed like a way of addressing both problems. Anyone on the site who recognized me was likely to be as morally compromised as I am and therefore unlikely to blow my cover. And if I managed to meet someone, I wouldn't have to make up some cock-and-bull story about having to be discreet because I'd recently separated from my wife, yada yada yada.

So I set up a profile on Ashley Madison, posted a discreet photo, and bought some credits in the hope that I might eventually meet some other married sex addicts. And this is what I learned...

The Site Is Full of Scammers

What a surprise, eh? A website populated by men who want sex, but don't want to get found out, is the perfect place to rip someone off. However, most of these con artists have the sophistication of a Nigerian 419 scammer and are fairly easy to spot. One of their biggest flaws is that they use photos of porn stars for their profile pics, without realizing that most AM users probably spend more time watching porn than they do playing with their kids. Some of these profiles cut right to the promise of whatever sick shit turns you on. Others play the long game, spinning out a story over days, weeks even. The first kind are pretty easy to spot, the second, less so—a lot of effort goes into some scams, and I'm not too proud to say that I ended up getting strung along the first few times, stopping just before getting seriously burnt.

Whichever approach they take, it usually ends up in the same place: They either ask you to sign up to a "ticket site" or ask if you want to webcam. Ticket sites are, supposedly, a place where they can anonymously verify your identity, to protect themselves—the only problem being that you verify your identity by giving your credit card details to an Eastern European fraudster who installs spyware on your computer. And webcamming? Well, for some weird reason, they never want to use Skype, but happen to know of this great site where you can set up a profile. "Of course it isn't a scam, baby. Trust me." The first rule of Ashley Madison: If it seems too good to be true, it almost certainly is.

If She's Not a Scammer, She's Probably a Sugar Baby

If you find a profile of an attractive woman under 25 and she doesn't turn out to be a scammer, then she probably is out to get paid. It's pretty reasonable, I suppose—why would she want to sleep with paunchy married men for free, when she could sleep with a muscular, tanned twentysomething who probably shaves his balls (see below)? Why would she pick you over him unless there were some other incentive? Some men think that if they offer to pick up the tab and book an Uber rather than make their lady friend take the bus home, these impressionable young things will fall into their arms. That's not the way it works. Sugar babies want an allowance, they want to go shopping, and after you book the Uber home, they want to take it alone.

If She's Under 25, Attractive, and Not a Sugar Baby, Things Will Get Weird

Even though you know that the attractive under-25s are going to tap you up for money, you're probably still going to approach them. I mean, they're as close as you're going to get to the porno fantasy that made you sign up to the site in the first place. Every now and then you ignore your better judgment and send them a key to access your photos along with a message that tries to come across as sexually interested but not too weird. Most will ignore you, especially if you tell them that you're not interested in being a Sugar Daddy. But the ones who do respond will inevitably turn out to be weird.

These women will send you messages that are so tasteless you'll think the production crew of To Catch a Predator is targeting you. I've had one girl brag about her "young-looking" body before sending me photos of herself with a former lover—a former lover who made her dress in his daughter's swimsuit before fucking in said daughter's bed. Another wasn't interested in meeting for a traditional dinner-and-drink sort of date, but she did send me her address and leave a window open so that I could climb in at a prearranged time and play-rape her. Roleplaying incest isn't really my idea of fun, nor is explaining to the cops that I was fulfilling a woman's play-rape fantasy, should it come to that. I politely declined both overtures.

Even when things aren't that extreme, my impression is that sex has become a lot more... experimental in the decade since I got married. Now, this is far from being a scientific study, and it may just be that AM users are more likely to go for some kink, but it seems like spanking, hair pulling, bondage, and even choking are now prevalent, if not ubiquitous. And anal. When I was starting to have sex, back in the 1990s, anal was an urban myth. Blame internet porn if you like, but ass-fucking is almost always on the table now, whether that's to your taste or not.

On that note...

If She's Under 25 and American, She'll Probably Want You to Shave Your Pubes

A secondary consequence of the ubiquity of porn is shaved balls. Again, my view of sex might be getting distorted by the type of person who uses AM, but I'm going to throw another less-than-scientific generalization in here: In the UK, it seems to be the norm for men to have some hair around their junk. You might have to trim it a little so you don't look like a tramp, but you're not expected to look like a toddler. In the US, shaving seems pretty much compulsory; I once spent weeks—literally, weeks of late-night texting, emails, phone calls—setting up a date with a woman who was way out of my league. She was the right side of freaky, didn't want to tap me up for cash, and sent me a barrage of explicit selfies. I was visiting LA, and she was going to join me for the weekend but then gave me an ultimatum. Either I turned up as hairless as a snake, or the deal was off.

Her argument was that I'd expect her to be waxed to perfection, so why should things be different for me? She was blind to the fact that if I came home from California with a bald sack my wife would probably cut it off with scissors. Shaved balls were a deal breaker, and we had to call the whole thing off. My tip: Ask about this up front, as it'll save you a lot of hassle.

Things Sometimes Get Weird, Regardless of Age

After a few months, you start to gather humorous "worst AM experience" anecdotes, which make a useful icebreaker when you eventually meet someone semi-normal. They're usually fairly predictable—people who look different from their photos, people who ask for weird sex stuff right off the bat, and so on. Mine trumps the lot of them. I had been in contact with a young attractive American girl who was visiting the UK. We emailed, then we swapped messenger details. Texting took a sexual turn fairly quickly—we traded nudes and pretty swiftly moved on to phone sex. I arranged to meet her and spent the entire train journey into town exchanging a series of increasingly filthy texts. As I changed trains, my phone rang and her number came up.

Her: "Hi, Daddy. What are you doing?"

Me: "Just changing trains. How about you?"

Her: "Playing with my big cock"

Me: "Sorry?"

Her (voice dropping from soprano to bass): "You heard me, daddy. Playing with my big cock."

Personally, I'm willing to accept the argument that gender is a social rather than biological construction, and a pretty fluid one at that. Having a cock doesn't automatically make you "a man." But it soon became clear that this guy didn't see himself as existing on any kind of gender continuum. He was a dude who liked to catfish married men. In all fairness, even after the big reveal, he still offered to come to my hotel and suck me off. Again, I found myself having to politely decline.

There Are Real WomEn on Ashley Madison, if You Look Hard Enough

Let's not turn this into an infomercial: I spent hours, days even, sending out messages to dozens of women. And it wasn't cheap. You have to buy credits that allow you to initiate contact, and having quickly done the sums on the back of an envelope, I found it costs about $2.50 for each woman you say hi to. So while I was sacrificing hours of quality family time to type out charming opening lines on my phone without my wife noticing, I was also paying through the nose for it. I'd guess more than 80 percent of messages get ignored, and most of the other 20 percent fall into one of the categories above. But if you're determined, capable of writing in full sentences, relatively attractive, and not a psychopath, you can meet real women through AM.

My first few meetings were more like job interviews than dates. We'd arrange to have coffee, choosing somewhere discreet enough for us not to get spotted together, but public enough that someone would notice if one of us tried to strangle the other. On one of those first few dates, I arrived early, she came in, and we both knew within seconds that it wasn't going further. She complained about her inattentive husband, I made something up about my wife being frigid, and we swapped stories about our depressing marriages for long enough for it to be polite. Then I left, got on the train, and tried to make sure that I sent the inevitable "thanks but no thanks" email before she did. "No spark" or "no chemistry" is the polite AM-ism for: "We're never going to fuck."

After a couple of these, I started to think that AM functions more as a therapy session than a way of getting laid. Some of the women I met begged me to go back home and take out my sexual frustration on my wife. "She'll love it," they would say, even after I had explained that my wife is as vanilla as they come, and what she wants and what I want are very different. Others ran a mile when faced with adultery in flesh-and-blood form, rather than just words on a screen. But if you persevere, it eventually may well work out.

Articles about AM inevitably end with a moral lesson. Usually, they're something along the lines of "cheating women are just craving attention from their overworked husbands," or some such patriarchal bullshit. My lessons are much simpler: Avoid the sugar babies, don't give out your real identity, and be ready to play the long game. It might cost more money and take more time than it used to when you were single, but stick with it and AM can help you ruin what's left of your marriage, eventually.

Check back tomorrow for this article's companion piece, an essay on the Ashley Madison experience from the perspective of an anonymous female user.

Marijuana will be legal in Washington, DC as soon as Thursday, but thanks to Republicans in Congress, the estimated $130 million local marijuana market will be stuck in legal limbo, with all sales remaining on the black market and not a penny of tax revenue going into the city's coffers.

City officials, police, and activists have been preparing for an orderly transition to legal pot since voters overwhelmingly approved Initiative 71 in November, legalizing the possession of up to two ounces of marijuana. But because of a provision slipped into an end-of-year spending bill by Maryland GOP Rep. Andy Harris, the city is barred from spending any money to implement the ballot measure, and thus from establishing any rules to govern legal marijuana sales.

"First we had taxation without representation, and now we've got legalization without commercialization," Adam Eidinger, the chairman of the DC Cannabis Campaign, said in an interview with VICE.

The situation leaves DC in a strange position. While city officials are forbidden from doing anything about the legalization law—on advice from the DC Attorney General, the DC Council couldn't even hold an official hearing on taxing and regulating weed for fear that the city could face a lawsuit for violating Congress's ban, instead slyly downgrading a recent meeting to a "roundtable discussion"—they also moved ahead with submitting Initiative 71 for a 30-day congressional review required of all new DC laws , essentially daring Republicans to strike down the measure outright.

Based on the current congressional calendar, that review period is up on Thursday. At that point legalization will go into effect, although law could still be challenged in court by a DC resident or by the US Justice Department. According to theWashington Post, the city attorney general has issued guidance to the Metropolitan Police Department telling cops not to arrest or issue fines for marijuana possession, or use it as a pretext for other criminal investigations.

"The District government has been assessing the law," an MPD spokesperson said in a statement to VICE, noting that "while there are still some novel scenarios to be resolved," the provisions of the initiative are "very clear."

In the meantime, the marijuana marketplace will remain underground, without the regulatory structure or industry business models that have characterized full weed legalization in Colorado and Washington. An expo for would-be weed entrepreneurs in the District is scheduled for this weekend, and the National Cannabis Industry Association plans to descend on Capitol Hill for a national symposium and lobbying push in April.

Eidinger, of the DC Cannabis Campaign, said there are also plans in the works for a massive marijuana seed giveaway sometime in March, although he declined to give details, on the advice of lawyers. With the legal weed just days from becoming a reality, activists are just trying not to slip up. "This is like the end of the Super Bowl," he said. "You're this close to winning, but you better not throw the ball.

Republicans in Congress aren't likely to disappear so easily though. Several prominent drug war hardliners—including Utah Congressman Jason Chaffetz, chairman of the powerful House Oversight Committee—are still threatening legal action. "Looking at the Constitution, Washington, DC is different. They are not a state and we have a role to play and the Congress passed this," Chaffetz told CNN earlier this month. "I respect the people who live here and most everything passes through without a problem. But the idea that this is going to be a haven for pot smoking, I can't support that."

"We may very well head to the courts," he continued. "Some legal folks in the city of Washington, DC may beg to differ, but I think we've been crystal clear. You haven't heard the end of it. It will come back again."

City officials and activists have all been pushing back against the idea that the nation's capital will become a marijuana free-for-all. In an interview with VICE, a city official said that upcoming legalization is only an "incremental change" from last year's decriminalization law, which downgraded possession to a $25 fine. Smoking weed in public will still be illegal, as will possessing weed on federal property, which makes up about 21 percent of land in DC.

Malik Burnett, the policy manager of the Drug Policy Alliance, said in an interview that the situation in DC will be similar to the periods in Colorado, Washington and Alaska after voters had passed marijuana legalization laws, but before state governments had put regulations in place.

"The only thing that District residents will see in their day-to-day life is police will stop arresting people for possession," Burnett said. "Other than that life will go on as normal." If there is a legal challenge from Congress, Burnett said it's unclear what the charges leveled against the District would be.

"This is a real fundamental question we don't have an answer to, and I don't think they do either," Burnett said. "I think they're interested, but I don't know how they can accomplish that."

[body_image width='1024' height='768' path='images/content-images/2015/02/24/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/24/' filename='how-to-explain-war-to-a-six-year-old-body-image-1424809606.jpg' id='30493']

Illustrated by Jenna Frome

A while back, Zachary Gallant's then-six-year-old cousin asked his grandfather one of those accidentally existential questions kids often stumble upon: Pop-Pop, why is there war? The question was passed along to Gallant, who has worked in post-conflict regions for eight years. At the time of this conversation he was doing a Fulbright on redevelopment in the former Yugoslavia. So he spends a ton of time thinking about conflicts, why they happen, and how to prevent and move past them. But he suddenly realized both how often kids, even outside of wars, are exposed to images of violence —and how rare and difficult it is for adults to explain violence and its complex root causes to them.

"Why is there war is a question that doesn't get answered easily or at all," Gallant told VICE. "It is impossible to answer in the paragraph a parent tries to give a kid after a question like that. And [it] certainly doesn't get answered in school. Or it didn't in my experience."

That conversation gave Gallant an idea: He decided to use his years of experience to create a new tool to help kids learn about war, to facilitate parental conversations about the complexities of conflicts, and to get kids to think about how to deescalate rather than perpetuate violence. And he decided that the best way to do that would be through a rhyming, illustrated book, a la Doctor Seuss, but with more ethnic violence and Kalashnikovs, entitled War: A Children's Book.

"One of the big places I was working in [at the time] was a multiethnic community in northern Serbia," explains Gallant of his decision to use singsong prose to engage in one of the toughest conversations you can have with a kid.

"The way that ethnic hatred is communicated [there] is simply through stories like you would tell a child. Whether or not there's truth in it, the easiest way to transmit hate is through simplicity. And I figured there might be something to transmitting the opposite—I wouldn't say love, but a non-conflict-oriented mode of interaction—through the same kind of simple, rhyming schemes."

Gallant cracked out a draft of the book within a single night. But he's spent months fleshing it out, editing and revising the draft, with the help of an ever-growing body of dozens of collaborators—from an illustrator who worked with him in the Balkans to children's book authors and teachers and panels of friends' kids. He says he's worked hard to make sure the book takes no sides, neither condemning soldiers nor promoting conflict nor advancing pacifism, all while keeping a rhymed meter comprehensible to kids 6-8 or up.

Now Gallant and his team are raising money via Kickstarter, and eventually plan to distribute the book freely to libraries, schools, and peace-building organizations. As of today, the campaign has only raised $6,283 of the $20,000 needed for a first run, with a deadline of March 3. But Gallant remains wholly confident and optimistic. He's hoping to hit a ton of flex goals: A few thousand dollars to make the book 50 percent longer so that it's not so dense and can feature more artwork. A few thousand more would translate it into Arabic, French, Russian, and Spanish. And a few thousand further to make a 10-15 minute short animated version of the book, accessible for free online, ideally in many languages and accompanied by an interactive app-cum-guide that will help mediate children's journey through his violent parable.

If all goes according to plan, Gallant wants to publish by August 2015. But he decided to release the current draft of the book's text for free last month, to help families trying to explain the Charlie Hebdo attack to their children. The manuscript is a trip to read, with lines that mash together one's childhood and modern existence in somewhat rough but very direct rhymes like:

"You see lots of things that are bound to confuse. / You hear of all these strange places, with all these strange names, / and you see all those faces, and they all look the same: / some are crying, some yelling, most covered in grime / some creaming, some frowning, and you think all the time: / That they all look the same. It's worthy saying again: / The same as your parents, the same as your friends."

"A family's home, where they've lived all their life, / Can disappear in the course of one single night. / And it's easier to fear and to blame the ones fighting, / But it's often not their fault; they're equally frightened."

And: "This isn't to say one should never step in. / There are certainly times when quarreling isn't a sin."

Reading through Gallant's manuscript, it can be a little hard to figure out how it will fly with kids. Some believe analogies are the best way to help kids comprehend the realities of conflict without understanding, say, 75 years of Israeli-Palestinian historical minutiae. Gallant does that pretty well. But there's also a good body of literature on how difficult it can be for kids at various ages to grasp abstract concepts like the ones Gallant talks about. It's also fairly important to answer kids' questions, rather than dump too much information and imagery on them so as not to overload or traumatize them. That's a much harder tightrope to walk when you've got a book instead of a conversation.

Gallant believes War walks these lines fairly well. He says educators have told him the manuscript is simple, but comprehensive and not fluffy. He believes kids see enough of war via media already, so it's hard to traumatize them with something like this. And ideally, he wants the book to be read by parents and children together so questions can be fielded and context added as needed, although he's not quite sure how to make that interaction happen once the book leaves his control and hits the shelves of libraries and book stores.

"The perfect balance between educating and frightening may just not exist," admits Gallant. "At the same time, I still view [it] as better than not having the resource. If the kid is still seeing war, then I feel that even if it's not a perfect exposure because it's not being done with the adult who's willing to talk to them about it—I still think it's better than not having an explanation."

"The text is always in need of ironing," continues Gallant. "And it's one of the things I'm loving about having it released for free ... People have read it and said, 'I love what you're doing, here's what I would do.' We have almost a crowd-sourcing willingness to edit the text."

Still a little torn about how the text will actually play with kids, VICE decided to send the manuscript to a few experts outside of Gallant's development team. We asked Stephen Mooser, the author of more than 60 children's books and the president of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, whether he thought the style and format of Gallant's text would resonate with kids. We also consulted James Garbarino, a professor of child psychology at Loyola University Chicago and author of Let's Talk About Living in a World with Violence , a book on understanding and coping with global conflict geared toward kids, to see whether or not he thought children would be able to digest Gallant's message without emotional heartburn.

"The rhyming is hard," says Mooser. "Not all of the lines scan and that can throw the reader off. Kids [aged 6-10] might not notice the occasional problems with the meter, but I do think you will be taxing their attention span, especially at the younger end, because of the length and the repetition... This is much too long for a traditional picture book... I think it can easily be cut in half because it is very repetitive—goes over the same history of misunderstandings and prejudices."

For his part, Garbarino told us, "I appreciate the intention, but I think as a 'book for children,' it is rather weak. The language is stilted and awkward in many places.... [But kids aged 6 to 8] are too young for this form of expression. That's my view.

"Bottom line: To me it reads like something an adult who does not have a lot of experience with children—their language, the way they experience feeling, and their thinking process."

So the external consensus is that Gallant has the right heart here, just not enough experience writing for kids. That seems like something the violence expert turned kid's writer would be willing to accept and internalize. He's shown his willingness to take criticism onboard and to edit. Even he's willing to admit that the book is definitely longer than he'd like it to be.

Yet he's hesitant to cut it down to fit a kid's attention span for fear of losing nuance. And therein lies the problem. Gallant is a man with a complex understanding of war trying to communicate that understanding to kids who can barely sit through a Vine, and in language that might be a bit over some of their heads. He's counting on an intermediated reading experience not every kid is going to get. He's on the right track, but he's not yet hammered out the kinks that develop when you try to take a graduate student's mind and vocabulary and meld it with Goodnight Moon .

That doesn't mean Gallant's quest is impossible. You can communicate some pretty complex geopolitical concepts to kids without them even realizing it. Think The Butter Battle Book and the Cold War arms race and mutually assured destruction (or really anything in Dr. Seuss's political oeuvre). It just takes a great deal of mastery and critique to develop something of that caliber for kids. So what Gallant probably needs right now is another round of constructive criticism—for as many writers and psychologists and kids and parents as possible to read his text and give him their thoughts. Then he might stand a chance of editing it down into the useful and revolutionary peace-building and experience-mediating kids' tool that he's envisioned.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

Video by Melissa Matos of TRUSST

Brooklyn-based producer Obey City never stops working. He's constantly provided us with sultry, sexy tunes since the release of his first EP almost two years ago. His new video for "Waterbed" is as torrid as ever, interjecting verses from vocalist Anthony Flammia with mood-lit vignettes of a hot model showered in colorful waves. I've never met a prude R&B fan, but this video could convert even the up-tightest of abstainers.

Buy Obey City's new EP, Merlot Sounds, on iTunes and check out more from the producer here.

Click to enlarge

As the attack on the staff of Charlie Hebdo made clear, journalists everywhere face targeted threats intended to silence them. Religious extremists certainly play a role, but more often than not government and anti-government forces are the perpetrators of violence against the men and women who report the truth as they see it. Since 2000, many journalists have been killed while working in dangerous situations. Here we focus on those who were intentionally targeted and murdered for doing their job.

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Patrick Swayze a year after 'Road House' was released. Photo via Flickr user Alan Light

"If somebody gets in your face and calls you a cocksucker, I want you to be nice. Ask him to walk. Be nice. If he won't walk, walk him. But be nice. If you can't walk him, one of the others will help you, and you'll both be nice.

"I want you to remember that it's a job. It's nothing personal."

This is the advice Patrick Swayze's character Dalton gives to his fellow bouncers in the 1989 cult classic Road House. In the movie, Double Deuce is a smoky bar where brawls and black eyes are common, and Swayze's underlings are sick and tired of getting their asses handed to them by what Swayze calls "40-year-old adolescents, felons, power drinkers, and trustees of modern chemistry."

Swayze's tired too. So he riddles off the "three simple rules" of bar management: Never underestimate your drunken customer, always take it outside, and, most importantly, "Be nice."

According to the New York Post, cops in New York City are being told to do the same thing. [youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/l0aPIXy6PHM' width='640' height='360']

The tabloid reported Tuesday that this scene from Road House is being shown to all 22,000 cops who are participating in the New York Police Department's mandatory retraining program.

During the three-day course at a new academy in Queens, cops must attend lectures that encourage deescalation rather than aggression and learn how to evade violence—presumably so another chokehold doesn't end up on YouTube. The program is one of Mayor Bill de Blasio's initiatives to reform the NYPD in a post-Eric-Garner world.

(The NYPD has been reached for comment regarding the use of Patrick Swayze as a viable training tactic, and we are anxiously waiting to hear back.)

So New York City is apparently just a bigger, slightly more diverse version of this fictional dive bar. And, just like the bouncers in the movie, cops hate being told to play nice.

Over the past few days, at least one source has been steadily leaking out details of the new training regimen to the Post. So far, we've heard that officers are being told to take a deep breath and close their eyes when dealing with an unruly citizen, and that 80 percent of the cops believe the lessons in integrity are a "waste of time." Some are even reportedly using the retraining as a good time to catch up on sleep.

"The NYPD is trying to get people's attention," Eugene O'Donnell, a retired Brooklyn cop and professor at the CUNY John Jay School of Criminal Justice, told me. "Good training is hard to come by. In a perfect world, they'd have high-tech modules and videos, but they're making do with what they have.

"But a heroic cop, who read about cops being taught to close their eyes and breathe, told me earlier today, 'Of course that makes sense.' It's a little of, 'Everything I need to know, I learned in kindergarten,'" O'Donnell added. "Basic human empathy is the most used skill."

Still, if the Post is to believed, the heavy dose of Swayze is not playing well at all.

"It's crazy," one source told the Post. "They're showing us something from a movie and they want us to act like that in real life. It's not realistic—it's Hollywood."

At a press conference on Tuesday, NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton disputed the Post reports, referencing an internal poll that says 84 percent of officers who have gone through the program think the training efforts are "relevant to their job." He argued that the tabloid was spreading "incredible misinformation" from a pissed-off cop. "Let's face it: the Post doesn't like the mayor," Bratton added. (There's plenty of evidence that the cops don't like the mayor either.)

Also on Tuesday, and on a decidedly more serious note, Bratton told a crowd at an event for Black History Month that yes, as FBI Director James Comey recently conceded, cops have an inherent racial bias.

"Many of the worst parts of black history would have been impossible without police, too," he said.

Follow John Surico on Twitter.

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Bill C-51 proposes sweeping new powers for law enforcement. Photo via Jonathan McIntosh

The Conservatives' anti-terror bill may have passed its first test, but NDP tactics have already managed to delay the wide-ranging legislation.

Bill C-51 passed by a huge margin in the House of Commons on Monday evening, with 176 Liberals, Bloc Quebecois, and Conservative members standing to support the massive omnibus surveillance bill.

The NDP, Greens, and a lone independent conservative, Brent Rathgeber, all opposed the legislation.

Monday's vote took place after just four days of debate. The Harper government put strict limits on how much debate the bill was allowed to receive, for the sake of getting the legislation passed as fast as humanly possible.

But on Tuesday morning, New Democrats moved to throw a wrench in the machine, filibustering a committee tasked with scheduling hearings on the anti-terror legislation.

The Public Safety committee was supposed to decide how many meetings would be dedicated to the bill and how many witnesses it would hear from. The opposition parties were pushing to have as many hearings as possible (the NDP want 25) that could include a witness list of near 100 experts and specialists. The Conservatives had other ideas, in keeping with their breakneck plan to get the bill adopted into law as soon as possible.

In protest, the NDP began dilatory tactics in order to try and pressure the Conservatives into compromising. Tuesday afternoon, a closed-door meeting of the committee dragged on into its fourth hour before it was finally adjourned without any resolution about the number of days of study or the witness list. It will meet again on Thursday to try and iron out the disputes. The meetings will likely be closed to the public and to media, despite objections from the opposition.

"The full debate about how many witnesses and their scheduling should be taking place in public," NDP public safety critic Randall Garrison told VICE after the committee adjourned. "It should not take place behind closed doors."

The Parliamentary guerrilla warfare being employed by the NDP is some of the most forceful opposition the party has used in years. It's in keeping with the vow from party leader Thomas Mulcair to do everything in his power to stop, or at least fix, the legislation.

"I don't think this is an exercise in futility," says Rathgeber of the NDP's tactics to defeat the bill. He abruptly quit the Conservative caucus in 2013 due to what he cited as a lack of transparency and openness in the government. He's the most outspoken libertarian-minded MP in Parliament.

Rathgeber says there are often sharp disagreements in the Conservative caucus, especially amongst those with civil libertarian sympathies. But while critics might be vocal over beers or in private, internal opposition never materializes in public.

"When The Centre makes up its mind to do something, opposition crumbles in the face of that," he says.

"The Centre" is the Conservatives' codeword for the Prime Minister's Office. Rathgeber says that once the boss makes up his mind, "it comes down like a ton of bricks," especially on those who consider revolting. When it comes to controversial legislation such as C-51, Conservative MPs tend to self-police and withdraw opposition, either in order to look like good team players, or to avoid blowback from the party leadership.

Rathgeber has his slew of concerns with the bill: the rushed timeframe to consider it, the apparent refusal to accept changes, the hostility towards independent oversight of Canada's spy agencies, and, of course, the infringement on civil liberties.

He's trying to get on the Public Safety committee, of which he is not usually a member. The decision about whether to let him, and Green Party leader Elizabeth May, join the study will happen this week.

Rathgeber says he's heard vocal concerns from his constituents on the bill, and there's little chance that he's the only one.

"Incumbent candidates should be forced to stand up and defend how they voted on this bill," he says.

Indeed, not a single Conservative MP voted against the far-reaching bill on Monday night.

More interesting, however, is who voted in favour of the omnibus legislation.

The NDP, Green Party, and Rathgeber all voted against the legislation. The Conservatives, Liberals, and Bloc Quebecois all opted in favour of the legislation.

Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney on Monday told the NDP to stop "fear-mongering" on the legislation.

"On the third page of the bill, protests are not even included. What is included is tools to ensure that those who are there to protect us will be able to protect us," he said during Question Period.

Blaney was referring to a section of the act that clarifies: "for greater certainty, [an activity that undermines the security of Canada] does not include lawful advocacy, protest, dissent and artistic expression," the bill reads.

Green Party leader Elizabeth May didn't buy Blaney's explanation.

"Well, the use of the word 'lawful' at the beginning of that phrase has been interpreted by other legal analysts, not just me, but by numerous scholars who have been looking at this proposed law since it was brought forward, to apply to all aspects. If people violated a municipal bylaw, they would no longer be engaged in a lawful activity," she said.

But the Liberal MPs who sit next to her in the House were less perturbed by the bill. While they say it needs to be fixed, they voted for the legislation in its current form.

The back-and-forth over the legislation is ratcheting up a ground war in Quebec, where the parties see an opportunity to win seats away from the NDP. Thanks, perhaps, to the attacks in Paris in January, polls have shown that Quebecers are the most forcefully in favour of new anti-terror laws.

That may explain why the Liberals, led by Justin Trudeau, stood to vote in favour of a bill that has sparked oppositions from his party's traditional supporters.

The NDP's Murray Rankin offered some of the more forceful opposition to the bill on Monday.

Rankin has some expertise on the subject, as he formerly legal counsel at the Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC) which is tasked with reviewing CSIS' activities. He says the way in which the committee has been managed in recent years has left it completely unprepared to deal with the new powers CSIS is about to accumulate.

The review committee—which is really only empowered to look at the spy agency's agencies well after the fact, and has no real power to obtain documents or hold CSIS to account—lost two committee chairs in the last few years. First was Arthur Porter, who was arrested on corruption charges in Panama. His replacement, Chuck Strahl, resigned after it was revealed that he was lobbying for pipeline giant Enbridge.

"It's broken," Murray says of SIRC. He told VICE that, between the membership issues and budgetary constraints, the review committee is also lacking its Inspector General—a position responsible for forcing CSIS to give up documents when requested. The position was axed by the Conservatives in 2012.

He adds that the legislation, which allows CSIS to "disrupt" perceived threats, even if that means ignoring Canadians' civil liberties, is far out in left field.

"I'm a constitutional lawyer and I've never seen language like this," he says.

For one, the bill puts the onus on CSIS to decide if it needs to obtain a warrant. Many of CSIS' operations may never become public, go before a judge or, possibly, even be reviewed in secret by SIRC.

Rankin, who had previously been chosen by the Harper government to work for the government on terrorism and national security cases, says he's "gobsmacked" by many of the changes.

"It's appalling. It's very disturbing."

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.

If you're like me, you saw the trailer for the new con-artist movie Focus and thought nothing more strident than, "Oh, I hope that's good. I haven't seen a hit from Will Smith in a while." And your reaction to the romance in the movie—if you had one at all—might have been, "Margot Robbie seems kinda young for Will Smith, but whatever." The fact that it's an interracial relationship might have slipped past you.

So it might surprise you to learn that the comments under the video are some of the most vile, old-fashioned racism you'll encounter this week. For instance, YouTube user Kurt Rustle offers:

Wake up White people. You see it, don't you? Everywhere they push this. They have gotten bold, and the anti-white propaganda is everywhere in the media before your eyes. Are you going to stand for it? Are you going to just watch as your European race is annihilated in a very slow and cruel manner?

Anzu Futaba asks:

When are people going to have enough of this garbage and kick the Jews out of the US for trying to genocide whites via forced assimilation? Enough is enough, push them into the ocean!

And Denise Celt offers a refutation of Michael Mingroni's principle of heterosis:

Race mixing is literally sick. Gene incompatibility creates a host of physical and mental problems. Jews love to promote sickness and evil.

The comments, along with the groundswell of supportive upvotes they've received in the past few days, might stem from a recent post on the white-supremacist website DailySlave (yep, really) called "New Jew Hollywood Film 'Focus' Promotes Race Mixing Between Negro Male and Blonde Haired White Female," which contains a link to the trailer.

At first glance, this all might sound like either trolling or Jim Crow–era racists somehow blogging through a time portal. But according to a two-year-old Gallup poll, more than one in ten Americans still don't support interracial marriage. As you might expect, the greatest volume of opposition in their survey came from people 65 and older. If Gallup's line graph is to be believed, opposition to interracial marriage will probably be close to vanishing in the next decade or so, which is nice.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Trayvon Martin's parents and supporters rally in NYC after his death in 2012. Photo via Flickr user David Shankbone

It's been just shy of three years since George Zimmerman fatally shot a 17-year-old black teenager in Sanford, Florida. The killing of Trayvon Martin, who was famously in possession of only Skittles and an Arizona fruit drink, set off a series of protests across the country and a national debate on racial profiling. Tragically, that case of vigilantism-gone-wrong foreshadowed a series of cases in which unarmed black men were killed by the police.

Zimmerman was acquitted of second-degree murder charges in July 2013, but the question of whether or not he racially profiled Martin was left to the feds. Now, two days before the third anniversary of Martin's death, the Department of Justice has finally announced that it won't file charges against Zimmerman.

"Though a comprehensive investigation found that the high standard for a federal hate crime prosecution cannot be met under the circumstances here, this young man's premature death necessitates that we continue the dialogue and be unafraid of confronting the issues and tensions his passing brought to the surface," Attorney General Eric Holder said. "We, as a nation, must take concrete steps to ensure that such incidents do not occur in the future."

Basically, this means the government doesn't consider Martin's death a civil rights issue, even as it continues weighing whether to press charges for more recent killings of unarmed black men, like that of Michael Brown in Ferguson.

Since becoming a household name, Zimmerman has whittled away his time in Lake Mary, Florida, not far from Sanford. Just last month, he was charged for violent outbursts against his girlfriend, and he's been accused of threatening a man's life in a fit of road rage. Despite these incidents, Zimmerman has also become a bit of an icon for those who think he was unfairly vilified by the media for "standing his ground" and defending his neighborhood. Banking on his questionable celebrity, Zimmerman has sold a cheesy patriotic painting for more than $100,000 on Ebay. For the most part, though, his fellow Lake Mary residents seem to consider him something of a liability. The police chief there even agreed with a resident who called him a "ticking time bomb."

Although Zimmerman's newfound "fame" is pretty gut-wrenching to contemplate, at least one good thing has come from his notoriety. Since Martin's death, Eric Garner, Akai Gurley, Tamir Rice and Michael Brown have also become household names, and the recent emergence of the #BlackLivesMatter movement has elevated what could have just been a homicide in a town with a history of racism into something worthy of international scrutiny.

However, in the cases of all of those men (with the exception of Gurley), the officer who killed them hasn't been indicted. That's been true even in the face of video to corroborate the claims that their deaths were unjustified. The last chance for enraged activists and grieving family members, then, is for the Department of Justice to put together a civil rights case against those who perpetrated the violence. Apparently, the burden of proving Zimmerman killed Martin because of his race was a bridge too far.

The announcement comes as the public awaits two similar decisions about the death of Brown, who was killed by Officer Darren Wilson in August. In that case, the DOJ will rule on whether or not Wilson racially profiled him, and, separately, whether the police department there regularly discriminated against black people. As ABC news reports, it's expected that Wilson will be off the hook, though the department itself might face some kind of penalty.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

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Length of the 33-foot tunnel. Photos via Toronto Police Services

The tunnel that cops found under Toronto's Black Creek Parkland is no ordinary hole in the ground. Reinforced with plywood walls, soundproofing foam and left behind with a generator and digging tools, it's begging us to ask: what's your deal, hole? We have no idea, but its very existence is baffling. Its discovery is one of those things—like the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight 370, or the pit of fire in Turkmenistan that hasn't burnt out after four decades—that feels less like real life than a plot point in some apocalyptic Christian movie.

Not being experts with mysterious holes, we left it to the professionals and listened to Toronto Police Deputy Chief Mark Saunders' press conference Tuesday to see if we could parse out the story.

On January 14th of this year, a conservation officer's attention was drawn to a large mound of dirt located in a heavily wooded area of Black Creek Parkland.... Upon further examination, the officer located a large piece of wood acting as a lid of some sort. This lid was covered in dirt in an effort to conceal its appearance.

What Saunders refers to as a "lid of some sort" is obviously a trap door, because no story about a mysterious hole is complete without reference to a trap door. However, the fact that it's not vacuum sealed means we're probably not dealing with a bunker from the Dharma Initiative.

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Once the lid was removed, the officer observed a large ten foot hole with a ladder leading down to a chamber. He immediately called the police. Officers from 31 Division arrived and commenced an investigation. Here is what we've learned to date: At the time of the discovery, no one was located inside the chamber. The measurements of the chamber are 6 foot 4 in height, 2 feet 10 inches in width, and 33 feet and 3 inches in length.

So the hole isn't quite big enough to be a secret passageway for York students, but it is tall enough for most non-basketball players to stand upright.

The individuals responsible for building it clearly had some levels of expertise in ensuring its structural integrity. By looking at the design, you can see that they used plywood walls and ceiling reinforcement with 2 by 8 wood framing... Other items located around the immediate area were: moisture resistant lightbulbs, a sump-pump for removing ground water, a pulley system most-likely to remove dirt, a red portable gas container, work gloves, a wheelbarrow, and food and beverage containers.

Honestly, this sounds like a prank by some York University engineering students. Engineers do this kind of thing, right? Build a hole for no reason? Why not! Only We're just not sure who was supposed to be pranked by a tunnel in the middle of Black Creek Parkland.

Located inside the chamber, hanging from a nail, was a rosary with a Remembrance Day poppy affixed to it.

WHAT? I give up on my theory about eager engineering students. This is some weird shit. Maybe this tunnel was meant to be the site of some underground chapel, like the catacombs in Paris, or that Christian iconography-filled underground congregation in Fritz Lang's Metropolis. This feels like a clue Tom Hanks would find about some Vatican-sponsored crime syndicate in The Da Vinci Code. The presence of Christian and war-related objects could be innocent, but what if it's not?

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Entrance to the tunnel

As part of our investigation, the chamber was excavated, photographed and forensically examined, and the investigation is still ongoing. At the moment, we are unable to determine who constructed this chamber, nor are we able to determine what the motive was for building it.

Chief Saunders then went on to request that anyone with information about the tunnel, or who had seen anything suspicious on Black Creek Parkland, to get in touch with the police.

Considering the wealth of materials left behind on site, it's a little strange that the police don't seem to have a clue who did this. Did they check with York University to see if they're missing a generator? Did they check any local hardware stores to see if someone purchased a sump-pump lately? Did they visit any local churches to see if any nuns were missing a rosary? Saunders did mention that forensics testing has not been completed (presumably on the DNA covered food and beverage containers), but then why hold a press conference now?

When one reporter asked Saunders why more surveillance wasn't done on the tunnel, to see if any of it builders showed up to continue the job, Saunders replied that "We knew that media was aware of this and that at some point in time it was going to be released. I wanted to get in front of it." But the tunnel was discovered on January 14 and the press only reported it last night. That window would have given the police five weeks to surveil the hole before the public knew. When another reporter asked why it took so long for the police to tell the press about the hole, Chief Saunders replied that it wasn't necessary because there was no public safety issue. And then he added: "There's nothing right now that suggests this is criminal. We're trying to establish who built it, what built it, and what were their intentions."

Clearly, Saunders either knows jack shit about the hole or there's something going on that he's not telling us. Various media have speculated about the possibility that the tunnel may have something to do with terrorism because of its proximity to York's Rexall Centre, which will be used for tennis events during this year's Pan Am Games. Furthermore, the CBC reported Monday that national security officials were notified about the existence of the hole and the press conference comes on the same week that the Canadian parliament votes on Bill C-51, a controversial piece of "anti-terror" legislation. Hmmmm.

However, as the police executive in charge of security at the Pan Am Games, Saunders also said that the tunnel would have been an "eyesore" to security groups at the games, which seems like a specious claim to make about an underground hole. But he's probably referring to the security procedures that would have located something like a rosary-filled hole before it could become a threat.

But if, as Saunders said, "there's no criminal offense for digging a hole," if there's no issue of public safety, if no crime was committed, and if the tunnel didn't pose a threat to the Pan Am Games, then why did the cops need to hold a press conference with a deputy chief? As Saunders told one reporter, "I don't have a working theory. We're open. We go with the evidence and right now the evidence says that we do not understand why it was built or who built it."

This was the Seinfeld of press conferences: it was about nothing. No crime was committed and no one knows anything about who didn't commit it. Not only do we, as Canadians, have to wrap our mind around a mysterious man-made hole, but we also have to wrap our minds around why the cops are making a big deal out of it.

Follow Alan Jones on Twitter.

This story was co-published with The Marshall Project.

On Friday, the Marshall Project posted two prison-orientation videos—one for incoming female inmates, one for incoming male inmates—that feature veteran inmates advising newcomers on how to avoid being raped. The videos are to be shown to new inmates in all prisons in the State of New York.

The videos, initially available on The Marshall Project's website but reproduced below, are startling. The tone is that of a welcome video, offering matter-of-fact, practical tips, while the subject is sexual violence.

But much of the reaction to the videos has focused on how unusual it is for New York to take this step—to openly acknowledge that sexual violence in prisons is an ongoing reality despite years of professed "zero tolerance" by the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS).

The videos also take an extraordinary approach to the material, by involving actual inmates in every step of the process. A former prisoner, T. J. Parsell, is the director. Current inmates workshopped all of the content before filming. These inmates are referred to as "the experts," and interviews with them take up most of the running time.

Where there is criticism, it has focused not on what is in the videos but on what is missing. Some prisoner advocates have pointed out that the videos disregard sensitive topics that could reflect badly on DOCCS. While the women's version acknowledges that guards can be predators, for example, the men's version makes no mention of staff-on-inmate sexual violence, even though male inmates are more likely to be sexually molested by staff than by fellow inmates. And both the male and female versions, said Brenda Smith, a former PREA [Prison Rape Elimination Act] commissioner and an expert on prison rape, should have explicitly emphasized that there is no such thing as consensual sex between inmates and staff; that female staff can be as sexually abusive as male staff; and that sex between inmates can start out as consensual but turn into something more coercive.

The videos, these critics say, are an attempt to change the culture of the inmates, by helping them identify predators and by attempting to convince them that reporting sexual assault "is not snitching." But such an approach may not make a dent in prison rape unless it is coupled with a more concrete effort, on the part of DOCCS, to hold itself accountable—by installing more cameras in facilities and by consistently punishing staff who take advantage of inmates.

Below, a further selection of the responses, both laudatory and skeptical, to these unusual videos.

Lara Stemple, director, Health and Human Rights Law Project, UCLA School of Law, and the former executive director of Stop Prisoner Rape
The interviews with the inmates themselves, as opposed to a more artificial approach or one that simply recites policy, is a brilliant strategy. Hearing from "one of our own" makes it more likely inmates will take heed. Second, the work that the videos do to dismantle the so-called "code of silence" is vital. Reluctance to report has long been a major obstacle, and inmates urging others to speak out is powerfully important.

I'll just note that I was concerned to hear one of the women inmates say, "It's rare you see healthy relationships" inside. I'm concerned about homophobia and overzealousness that might unnecessarily patrol consensual relationships, which do take place in prisons. We have to be careful not to police all intimate relationships among inmates.

Finally, the Bureau of Justice Statistics data has consistently shown that male inmates are more likely to be sexually victimized by staff than by other inmates. Because the data is quite robust and runs counter to assumptions, this phenomenon needs to be brought forward and addressed. I'd like to see an additional video about this form of abuse.

Dori Lewis and Veronica Vela, attorneys with the Prisoners' Rights Project of the Legal Aid Society
While we appreciate DOCCS's effort, the [women's] video does not make much of an effort to convince women that DOCCS understands what women are up against when they've been abused by staff: the power differential, the fear of retaliation, and the reality that women prisoners are not believed when they actually do report staff abuse.

The video tells women to refuse an officer's advances, with vague assurances that DOCCS will protect them from retaliation. But the video ignores prison reality: A prisoner is not allowed to disobey an officer's order. A promise of protection from retaliation is virtually meaningless: If she reports misconduct she will have to live with the day-to-day fear that he, or his friends and colleagues, will make her life a living hell, including being the target of false disciplinary charges. The video acknowledges that some relationships between staff and women prisoners are obvious and glaring to anyone who pays attention, but ignores the Department's responsibility to pay attention to what its staff is doing, and to supervise them to prevent such abuse from taking place. The video claims that complaints of staff sexual abuse will be taken seriously, but that claim is undermined by how DOCCS actually responds to these allegations: In reality, New York State substantiates only about 2 percent of the complaints of staff sexual abuse that they receive.

So long as DOCCS fails adequately to investigate and discipline staff, all the videos in the world won't convince women in custody that there is any reason to report: They know they won't be believed and that no action will be taken.

A. T. Wall, director, Rhode Island Department of Corrections (in the past, Rhode Island and Michigan have also shown inmates an orientation video about prison rape, but that video featured dramatizations rather than first-person advice from actual inmates)
Relying on inmate peers to provide this advice—it provides a level of authenticity that we in the corrections business simply can't convey. I'm also pleased that there is mention of sexual violence on the part of staff against inmates. I believe we as a profession have evolved tremendously, to the point where it's now acceptable to educate inmates about their rights.

Jennifer Coombs, a former inmate at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women (while in prison, she and a male corrections officer had a sexual relationship; he ultimately pleaded guilty to statutory rape)
I was a little surprised that some of the inmates would even talk about this. [When I was an incoming inmate,] we didn't talk about it at all. So when guards started flirting with me, I thought, Oh my gosh, this really happens? When I went there, I didn't think any of that stuff would have happened to me. I think the video is a good idea because it prepares people about some of the behaviors that can happen. I think it would have prepared me better for what to expect.

I like the part about who you can contact if something happens to you, because it's so scary and a lot of girls won't say anything because the guards have all the control in there. If you say something to the wrong person, you put your safety in jeopardy.

Michael Powers, president, New York State Correctional Officers and Police Benevolent Association, Inc.
It's unfortunate that the video documentary, which obviously is intended as an educational piece for incoming female inmates, chooses to single out staff in conversations related to sexual assaults. The overwhelming majority of [correctional officers] perform their duties with professionalism and integrity while providing an environment that is conducive to the inmate's rehabilitation. This is being accomplished as prison violence and the number of assaults on staff continue to rise to record levels.

Cindy Struckman-Johnson, former commissioner, National Prison Rape Elimination Commission
I liked the close-ups of the speakers' faces—you feel as if you are in the room with them. They had just the right tone—frank and realistic in their advice to stay safe yet respectful of the listener.

Samuel Hamilton, a former inmate at Fishkill Correctional Facility, who participated in the filming of the videos
My first word after watching the final product: powerful.

I was in prison for over 30 years, and very, very rarely did DOCCS ask us—the inmates—for help with solving a problem. Instead, they always asked somebody with a degree in criminology to design programs for us.

That's what was so unusual about this whole experience. They sat us in a circle, then asked us to have what they called a "dialogue" about what new inmates should know about sexual assault—and they allowed us to actually have that dialogue... It really was us that came up with the content of this thing. And why not ask the people with hundreds of years of combined experience to come up with the solutions?

Because this was made by actual inmates, the new inmates are going to listen, I have no doubt of it. You know, even the loud, tough guys, the ones who might say this video is a joke, are coming in with fear. And whether they think they're paying attention or not, the information in this video will be stored away in their brains, until one day they will need it, and it will be there. They'll remember.

As for the part about snitching, changing the culture is not going to happen from just one video... That being said, what I see this video trying to do is separate between different TYPES of snitching. Inmates' brains have many different sections, like anyone else's. And we can put snitching-about-rape in a separate section from other types of snitching... The main point is that we can't be rehabilitated if we don't feel safe. Feeling fear makes your brain too hard for learning. And after watching this video, I'm certain it can help individuals feel less fear.

This article was co-published with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization focused on the US criminal-justice system. You can sign up for their newsletter or follow The Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter.

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Photo by Brad Kuehnemuth

John de Ruiter was sitting on an elevated stage in a large armchair in front of a packed auditorium. The entire room was intently focused on him and the intense gaze emanating from his steely blue eyes. He's handsome, like a top-tier Porsche salesman. On each side of the stage were mammoth video screens, both projecting an extreme closeup of John's face. For the next hour, we all silently stared at John.

I was told that John can look straight into your soul; other followers said they can see an aura around John during his three-hour staring sessions, or "meetings" as they're called. His followers, who number in the thousands, consider John the "living embodiment of truth." He is the L. Ron Hubbard of staring.

John de Ruiter (simply "John" to his followers) was a humble Christian preacher and orthopedic shoemaker in rural Alberta before he founded the College of Integrated Philosophy in Edmonton, Canada. He's now worshipped as a new messiah by his worldwide followers.

The College of Integrated Philosophy holds regular "meetings" at the Oasis Centre, a $7 million facility near the West Edmonton Mall, hidden within an office park and manned by an army of enthusiastic volunteers. Before that, John held his meetings in a small bookstore off of Whyte Ave. His followers, largely middle-aged women, are completely "John Gone."

When I heard about John, I was intrigued. Was this the emperor's new spiritual clothes or was there something more to this staring guru? I traveled to Edmonton to find out.

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It's $10 a head to attend John's three-hour staring meetings that consists of "dialogue and silent connection." Forty-five minutes before commencement, the Oasis Centre was already packed to capacity. Before settling in, I went to have lunch at John's café inside the facility.

"I moved here because of John," said a middle-aged woman standing next to me in the food line. This was the umteenth time I'd heard someone say this. "Before I met John I was living on a beach near Byron Bay and didn't even know where Edmonton was," the woman added. Now, she had moved to Canada from Europe in search of something she felt only John could offer.

"Have you ever taken acid?" she asked me. "That's what it's like when you hear John. You listen and then suddenly something snaps and you get it."

I hoped that I, too, would have an acid-snapping spiritual moment today. If it didn't happen during the first meeting, there were plenty more to choose from: "Friday night we have a meeting. Sunday we have two meetings. Then Monday we have another one," relayed a gray-haired woman while I grabbed a sandwich wrap. She was smiling broadly. "I go to all of them. I work here, so Monday I go to work and just continue to stay here for the meeting as well as Fridays."

John's upcoming world staring tour includes seminars in Israel, Germany, India, Holland, and England—and while tickets to meetings are a measly $10, seminar tickets go for hundreds of dollars. Despite the hefty price tag, many of his devotees are willing to follow him around the globe.

"John goes to all these place. I go sometimes," said a kindly woman from New York. She had been a John-follower for 15 years before she decided to make the move to Edmonton. "I've been to Israel four times with John."

I sat down at her table, along with some women from Israel, Germany, and the UK, all of whom stared intensely at me.

"It's very international," she continued. "You'll find that there are less Edmontonians than people from elsewhere, but they live in Edmonton now because of John."

"Are you going to sign up to talk to John?" asked the Israeli woman, who also moved to Canada because of John. "You put your name down if you want to talk to John and you wait and see if your name comes up on the board."

"Maybe I shouldn't dive right into the deep end," I replied.

"No two meetings are the same—it all depends on who asks the questions," added an older Austrian woman who moved to Edmonton five years ago. When she first attended John's seminar in Europe, she couldn't speak a word of English. And yet: "I could understand everything he said; I just knew he was speaking very important truths." She told me that no matter where John moved, she would follow him.

"It might seem really confusing at first at what's going on," she said to me, before advising me to "listen with your heart."

"Have you ever taken acid?" she asked me. "That's what it's like when you hear John. You listen and then suddenly something snaps and you get it."

Before I had come to see the College of Integrated Philosophy for myself, I had spoken with Professor Stephen Kent of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, a cult expert who has been researching de Ruiter's activities for years.

"It's a community of striving, if not naïve, followers," he told me, describing the majority of members as older Aquarian-aged people who've grown up expecting the world to be filled with peace and happiness but have been left disappointed. "De Ruiter is maybe seen as the last hope of their generation to provide the kind of world they wanted," he said. "People who want the world to be a good place and think it's attributing to its betterment. But in fact are spending hours and hours of time listening to not a whole lot of insight."

Kent said that John's following stems from the psychological process called "misattribution," based on the idea that humans are meaning-seeking creatures. Followers, he said, misattribute John's relative silence and his scarcity of words as indications of profound depth. "They expect a guru up there pontificating—but he doesn't say much. If you look at the message, there's not a lot of substance to it," he explained. "Many of the people are widely read in spirituality issues. They fill in the absence of the thoughts with their own knowledge and hopes and aspirations. So they give John meaning that he himself may not even realize."

Members have expressed disillusionment with John's group in the past—but few have publicly come forward about it. "They look around and perceive to see a large happy community—and then say, 'Oh the problem must be with me; everybody else sees the wisdom—so it's my problem.' Then they feel that it's their shortcomings," said Kent. "I'd say a lot of people have caught on but they haven't spoken publicly about what they come to realize."

Kent told me the story of one woman who had left the group after she saw John at a gas station filling up his off-roading truck. She asked the attendant if he knew John, and he told her that John came in all the time to repair his truck from off-roading trips over the weekends. The woman realized that the money she was giving the group had been partly funding John's off-road hobby.

"Over a period of time people have spent countless hours and a fair amount of money seeking out a product that is nonexistent. And when people finally realize what they've been doing for so long it hits a lot of them really hard," said Professor Kent. "People are assigning wisdom to John based on what they have picked up themselves over the years. That sense of wisdom gets reinforced with members."

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Kent has also been told stories of arranged marriages to help foreign members to move to Edmonton where they become Oasis Centre volunteers. "I've heard that John will point at two people and say they should be married," he said. Kent gets frequent calls from concerned family members and friends. "The devotion to John takes over people's lives. It inhibits the ability to make rational decisions for themselves and for their loved ones."

John's most public controversy involved two sisters he was having a relationship with while he was married: Benita and Katrina von Sass. Not only did their father, businessman Peter von Sass, provide John financial support, but he also introduced John to his young nubile daughters. (The story made headlines because Katrina is a former Canadian Olympic volleyball player.)

The staring guru originally denied the affair, stating he was answering questions on a "personal level." He later told his congregation that "truth" had told him to sleep with the von Sass sisters. John's wife divorced him when she refused to join the sister harem; the von Sass girls eventually sued John, stating they were owed certain entitlements and payments from a decade spent as his common-law wives.

In an affidavit, Benita von Sass described John as "an opportunist and a huckster." She said that he had told her to "sexually submit to him" as it was "God's will," and that he claimed to be "Christ on Earth." At the time, she said, he was still having regular sex with two of them in addition to his wife and herself.

"There have been constant rumors about affairs and members either don't take the seriously or don't care," said Kent. "They believe he is operating on a different level of wisdom that puts him in a different realm from the rest of us and give him permissions that normal people don't have."

Then he began staring, his eyes glistening like pooled Visine.

I knew this before I arrived at the staring meeting. Still, I tried keep my heart and mind open as instructed, since I wanted to understand how John could wield so much power with merely a look.

"What John emphasizes is it's not about anything he is saying—it's really about opening your heart and seeing what you see and what opens for you," said a volunteer from Holland, who recently moved to Edmonton after coming to John's summer seminar (within a week she was engaged to another volunteer). "Sometimes it could be far out there, based on so much knowledge and foundation and common understanding," she said, acknowledging that at some of the three-hour meetings, John doesn't speak at all.

I paid for my $10 ticket and drew an assigned seat. The gold circle is up front, where you get the most impact of John's direct stare.

"I'm in the boonies," lamented a woman who had been coming to meetings since 1996.

"You've been here for so long, you don't need any more closeups," her friend replied.

The Oasis Centre's lavish auditorium was designed solely for John and his staring proclivities. Adorned with ornate chandeliers, proscenium stage, and marble pillars, it's a venue worthy of a king—or a spiritual guru with followers who move from all corners of the world to be closer to his gaze. The College of Integrated Philosophy sometimes rents out the luxurious facility for wedding receptions, which can cost up to $13,000 during peak season.

I took my seat off to the side as roughly 350 people filtered in, filling almost the entire auditorium.

"I've been to about 4,000 meetings," said the young woman sitting next to me. "I started coming when I was seven." She was originally from Vancouver, she told me, "but my parents moved here because of John."

Once seated, a British woman came onstage to tell us about the scholarship fund for those who can't afford John's seminars. She was providing a training workshop for budgeting: "Those requesting a scholarship may be asked to look at their lifestyle and find new ways to contribute to these seminars financially," she said. "This could include simple suggestions like setting up a toonie jar, comprehensive budget planning, managing resources, considering downsizing, or renting a room or a garage out."

I tried to keep my heart open as John's devotees instructed, despite the fact that this woman had just encouraged his followers to rent out rooms in their homes to help pay for these expensive seminars.

Suddenly, the energy of the room shifted dramatically. There was no music—just silence and a few coughs. We were acutely aware of John's presence as he stood at the side of the stage for what seemed an incredible amount of time. Then he slowly walked towards his large comfy chair, his footsteps loudly reverberating throughout the hushed auditorium. The atmosphere was mausoleum-esque. John sat and slowly put on his headset with dramatic effect. Then he began staring, his eyes glistening like pooled Visine.

What followed was the world's largest staring contest with John's face on the large video screen. It was hard not to break into a smug Richard Dawkins laugh, but this meeting was a no-nonsense affair, so I clamped down on my giggling. Occasionally the video monitors cut to shots of us staring at John. It was like being in church, if the pastor had a stroke and all he could do was stare at you. This went on for about an hour.

Then, John went one by one and stared directly at each person in attendance. When he looked at me, my heart fluttered and I realized how uncomfortable it is to be stared at by non-blinking eyes.

I tried melting into his stare, to feel what his followers must feel—his handsome face, his pouty lips, his steely blue eyes. Staring at John was like staring at a glassy-eyed Dutch painting. It started to feel like he was staring solely at me, and it felt incredibly intimate because of the utter silence. The room was crowded, yet it was just me and John.

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Then, abruptly, the spell was broken. John's large staring head on the video screen started to remind me of David Cronenberg's Scanners and I was afraid it might explode. Was I beginning to read too much into this?

Then it got weird.

A teary-eyed woman appeared on the large video screens. She had signed up to ask questions of John, and took the chair directly in front of him. The woman was a fragile mess and spoke very slowly: "It's important for me to speak to you. I have a really hard time articulating. I don't have a question, I just love what I'm responding to."

John stared at her.

"I just so love responding. It's not even a choice; it's just happening. I have no direct experience what is now—but I love our bond." More staring. There was a long pause. Strained coughs. "I don't know what this is, but somehow we are in this together in some sweet way."

John and the woman were now staring at each other. We stared at them. Who would blink first?

Professor Kent had told me that in the old days, anyone could ask John a question. Now, there's a preliminary screening; if they don't like what the person is going to say, they don't get called on.

"How to see the speck of gold that has no weight—it is weightless?" a Dutch woman now asked from John's hot seat. There's a long, long pause.

John spoke, at last. His words were slow, soft, and deliberate: "You enjoy knowing the gold directly."

We waited for hours for John to speak, and now he was speaking; so I guessed his words must be very important: "It is real to you. The gold," John said slowly. "You respond to what you know is golden." Pause. "You see that which is most deeply real in you."

Slow and torturous, John threw out more fortune cookie Haiku statements: "The plow breaks the ground in yourself." Long pause. "When you are in flow, do what is golden; that which is not golden breaks."

John's followers stared intently, hanging onto every word, creating meaning out of it all. The Dutch woman kept questioning with equally slow delivery; it was like watching two people on mescaline hold a conversation.

"I feel small," she said.

"You feel that because yourself is too small for you," John replied.

The woman's chest heaved with each question as John continued his dreamy, hypnotic dialogue. Sometimes she said things and John didn't respond—he just kept uncomfortably staring at her.

Then, John pulled what I assume is his most popular parlor trick: He shed one tear that slowly trickled down his cheek. I could feel the entire auditorium gasp.

"Tell me to stop because I could go on forever," said the Dutch woman. John remained quiet. The two ended up staring each other down for another ten minutes until John slowly took off his headset and walked offstage.

I felt confused—had I missed something? John seemed to give people a sense of happiness, but all I saw was underlying confusion and sadness.

"It's a lot to take in for the first time," I said to the kindly New York woman as we left for our dinner break in John's café.

"John opens the door for you and gives you the direction," she explained. "Once the door is open, you're there." I asked her what she meant. "It's not a practice like Buddhism," she said. "It's more direct. This is direct knowledge—a direct transmission, and John's a portal to it. He awakens the answers within you."

"Sometimes you can say a lot more without words," I replied.

A man from London overheard us and offered his own interpretation of the profound depth: "Life is uneventful; it's meant to be uneventful."

"Is that how it usually is, where he channels the answers within the person?" I asked the Austrian woman, trying to connect the spiritual dots.

"It's not channeling, it's so much more. It's what the person can see," she clarified, adding: "You came to a very special meeting. You're lucky!"

Since I made the trek to Edmonton, I decided to stay for the second session, which meant I was moving into my fifth hour of staring—and this one was maybe not as special, though it started similarly. Another attractive, teary-eyed woman stepped into John's hot seat. Her question had to do with hysterically sobbing on the drive home from a meeting.

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"Your deeper womanist is more than yourself," John said slowly, and then stared for a long period of time before adding: "It has no past. It flows without a path."

"Can you say more about that?" she asked with frustration. "I really want to know more."

"Use the pathways into yourself. But it still has not path—as your deeper womanist moves through the pathways of yourself." Pause. "As it moves through yourself, it will change yourself." Pause. Your deeper womanist."

"Is my deeper womanist an aspect of my being?"

John sat unmoved, unblinking. Was he channeling the answer or did he not have an answer? After several minutes: "Without a self it has no purpose."

The woman seemed frustrated by the painfully long silences between responses. "I am not affected by how you are not responding," she said.

John gave the woman his silent, steely stare. Was John helping the emotionally fragile, who are willing to believe everything he says (no matter how slowly) with blind devolution? Or was he a charlatan conducting an elaborate parlor trick for the vulnerable and weak? The man sitting next to looked like he was dragged here by his wife, and began dozing off. Then silence. Then nothingness.

Follow Harmon Leon on Twitter.

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Jacket by Ethologie

PHOTOGRAPHY: CARL WILSON
STYLING: THOMAS RAMSHAW

Model: Frankie the Frankfurter

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Lulu Liu collar and jacket

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Frankie at the Christian Cowan-Sanluis show (human models styled separately)

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Frankie at the Swatch Pooch Parlour; watches by Swatch

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G.F Hawthorne jumper

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Vielma jumper (with designer Gabriel Vielma)