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Bring on the Class War: Bernie Sanders Dreams of a Revolution in 2016

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After a few frenetic weeks of campaigning, the UK elections are being held today—which should serve as a reminder of just how bloated and drawn-out America's presidential races have become. Even the most ardent political junkies might blanche at the numbing loop of focus groups, fundraisers, and cable news spin that will be stretched out over the next 18 months. Compounded with the apparent inevitability of Hillary Clinton's coronation as the Democratic nominee—and the prospect of another Clinton vs. Bush—it's hardly surprising that most Americans have been bored out of any interest in the national electoral process.

Bernie Sanders wants you to know that it doesn't have to be this way. The Vermont senator's nascent presidential campaign, announced last week, is based around the idea that electoral politics can work when it is driven by voters—in fact, he thinks that this "political revolution," as Sanders calls it, is the only antidote to the overwhelming influence of money and corporate interests on politics.

"I get very frightened about the future of American democracy when this becomes a battle between billionaires," Sanders said in an interview Sunday with ABC's This Week, one of his first after announcing his White House bid. "We need a political revolution of millions of people in this country who are prepared to stand up and say, 'Enough is enough,'" Sanders argued. "I want to help lead that effort."

Sanders has been talking about this revolution for months. In the lead up to his announcement, the Vermont Independent was on a grassroots tour of various lefty watering holes—community arts centers, student unions, garden parties, SEIU halls, Progressive Democrats of America conventions—warning voters about the myriad threats facing the working class and the need to mobilize a grassroots movement that will somehow be strong enough to take on what he calls "the billionaire class."

At these events, as in most things he does, Sanders is outraged, and usually didactic, spouting his wisdom about the working class. He warns about corporate interests, the Koch brothers, and myriad other forces working to game the economy and gum up the democratic system. He demands audiences answer questions about college tuition, Social Security, the cost of childcare in Denmark.

"How many countries are there—major countries, wealthy countries—that do not guarantee health care? Give me an answer," he demanded of an audience in Keene, New Hampshire, last fall, one of dozens like it that Sanders addressed as he explored the idea of running for president. "Young lady, in the pink sweatshirt, you. How many countries? No? How about you, Keene State red sweatshirt. You don't know?

"If there is one thing that bothers me—I'm going to be very hard on you here—it is that many young people do not know very much about what goes on in the world."

If any of the college students are upset by this interrogation, Sanders doesn't seem to notice or care. Badgering college sophomores is just part of waking people up. This idea—that Americans are ignorant or disinterested in the political system, feudal vassals of a crony capitalist government—is the driving force behind Sanders's political project. He points out that just under 54 percent of Americans voted in the 2012 presidential election, a number that is consistent with most recent presidential years, but that trails turnout rates in other developed countries.

Despite widespread contempt for the political system—Congress' approval rating is just 22 percent, and political parties aren't faring much better—the anger doesn't seem to have translated into political action. A new poll from Harvard's Institute of Politics found that just 21 percent of young voters consider themselves "politically engaged." Other surveys have found similar lack of political engagement levels among the general electorate.

In the meantime, rich people are very active in politics. A recent study by researchers at Northwestern University looked into the political habits of the 1 percent, and found that the super wealthy reported a stunning 99 percent turnout rate in the 2008 election. The researchers concluded that "by several measures, wealthy Americans participate politically at two or three times the rate of members of the general public as a whole."

According to Sanders, the wealthy and powerful have a vested interest in keeping things this way. In his view, the electoral system is set up to deter those outside the political process from getting involved, insulating those inside the process from any inconvenient consequences of democracy.

"How do you change political consciousness? Well that requires really a revolution in every sense of the word," Sanders told me in an interview last fall. "You are taking on a society that spends a huge amount of money, in a variety of ways, trying to convince people that politics is irrelevant to their lives, that to the degree it is relevant, it has to do with candidates' personalities or characteristics that have absolutely nothing to do with the real issues."

Sanders believes, perhaps quixotically, that most of those voters would support his positions—higher taxes on the wealthy, more infrastructure investment, expanding Social Security, raising the minimum wage—if only they could be persuaded to vote. Most politicians avoid advancing any narratives carrying even a whiff of "class warfare," but Sanders isn't shy about his vision for an uprising of trade unionists, fast-food workers, indebted students, and traditionally Republican voting blocs like old people, white working-class voters, rural farmers—mobilizing against the entrenched corporate interests keeping them down.

That all these groups will suddenly embrace Sanders's beloved vision of Scandinavian socialism is dubious and almost endearingly naive. The senator's focus on class and inequality seems to ignore the fact that people often don't vote in their own economic interests, and Americans almost never back self-described socialists. And though Sanders is incredibly popular in Vermont—he cruised to reelection with 70 percent of the vote in 2012—he doesn't seem to have quite worked out the details of creating a national movement.

"In one way or another, in a thousand different ways—and this is what I mean by a political revolution—we've got to educate, we've got to organize, we've got to make people understand that what happens in the state house, what happens in Washington, happens in their lives," he said. "What I can guarantee you is that if we don't do that, this country will move pretty rapidly toward an oligarchy."

For all of his "let the ruling class tremble" rhetoric, Sanders's socialism is decidedly unsexy. But neither is Sanders sexy, unless you go for septuagenarian ex-hippies who talk like Brooklyn deli countermen. He doesn't have Barack Obama's gift for ringing oratory or Bill Clinton's talent for flirtatious charisma. Most often described as "curmudgeonly" and "rumpled," Sanders is perpetually outraged, and obsessively focused on even the most mundane fights against inequality. He is, as Matt Taibbi described in a Rolling Stone piece praising Sanders' presidential bid, "the kind of person who goes to bed thinking about how to increase the heating-oil program for the poor."

Sanders' commitment to both political ideology—he calls himself as a "socialist democrat"—and to the more mundane aspects of governance has been the hallmark of his unlikely political career. He first won elected office in 1981, when he became the mayor of Burlington, where he became known for establishing diplomatic ties to Marxist governments and for his impressive dedication to snow removal. It's made him a revered, if not beloved, political institution in Vermont, where he's known simply as "Bernie."

"We always joke that he has ten brains," a Sanders staffer told me when I asked about the Senator's constituent services. "I'm not sure he ever sleeps. He's always thinking about the big picture, but then he also has a hundred ideas about things we can do to help, to get the government to work better for people."

Sanders's political success has been built around his ability to prove that the government can work for voters—a task that is possible in a small state like Vermont, but hardly feasible in a presidential race . And for all his talk of revolution, it's unclear how many voters will get behind his plan for class war.

Still, Sanders seems to have struck a chord, particularly among liberal voters looking for someone to challenge Clinton on the left. His campaign raised $3 million in four days following his announcement, and claims that 185,000 supporters have signed up on the Bernie Sanders for President website. To the Anyone-but-Clinton crowd, Sanders is an excellent foil: authentic, untethered, with a shamelessly liberal agenda. Clinton, by contrast, is seen as scripted and stage-managed—and between the Clinton Foundation's fundraising, and her own efforts to woo corporate campaign donors, she's clearly not afraid of mixing money and politics.

Although Sanders has almost zero chance of beating Clinton for the nomination, his candidacy could push her into taking more specific policy positions, particularly on issues like trade, increased government spending, and higher taxes on the wealthy—key liberal tenants that Establishment Democrats have tended to dance around in order to avoid being attacked as wealth redistributionists. Already, Sanders and other progressives like Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren have pressured Clinton into softening her support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, and Sanders isn't letting up.

"I have voted against every disastrous trade agreement coming down the pike and [am] helping to lead the effort against this Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would mean the outsourcing of more good paying jobs to low-wage countries," Sanders said in an interview with CNN on Wednesday. "People have got to look at Secretary Clinton's record."

Of course, Sanders knows he's not going to win, that the revolution he's trying to launch may never materialize, at least not in 2016. Still, he insists that he's running a serious campaign, that he's "running to win." And while it might be tempting to dismiss all this as the romantic ravings of another doomed progressive from Vermont, there is something simple, and powerful, about the idea that American democracy can still respond to popular action, that rather than disengaging from the electoral system, voters can make it work for them. In an election that is expected to cost upward of $2 billion, and where the outcome seems predetermined, it even sounds a little revolutionary.

Follow Grace Wyler on Twitter.


VICE Vs Video Games: I’ll Never Love a Console Like I Loved the Sega CD

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Artwork from 'Sonic the Hedgehog CD.'

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

I assure you, I've not recently been in an accident, still suffering the effects of some minor head trauma, and nor am I being a deliberately contrary so-and-so simply to get your eyes on this page (but hello, all the same). And I'm certainly not saying that Sega's CD unit expansion to their all-conquering 16-bit Mega Drive system (Genesis stateside, making said add-on the Sega CD) represents the greatest achievement in console hardware of all time.

But I loved it. I loved mine. I still have it, albeit in the loft. It comes down from time to time, but there's no space for a permanent position beneath the telly. Blame this damned thing we call progress.

The Mega-CD was one of the most brilliantly botched black boxes of nuts and bolts in gaming history—a device that nobody really wanted, its very existence led more by an obsession with the technological arms race than any strictly gameplay-based reasons. Nintendo didn't have a CD-based system (though they so nearly did), so Sega saw that as an opportunity, regardless of whether they should have gone down said road or not. They soon realized what a mess they'd made, and were relatively quick to put it to the sword—though they'd soon enough kill another of their own with even more ruthless haste. From the very beginning, the signs of it doing well were completely absent: its development was led by Sega of Japan, with American counterparts largely kept in the dark as to its specs, until it was almost too late.

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Sega's Mega-CD, slotted beneath an original model Mega Drive, via Wikipedia.

According to Scott Bayless, a senior producer at Sega of America at the time, when the States did get a fully working unit, it was a disaster waiting to happen: "[It] was designed with a cheap audio CD drive, not a CD-ROM. The quality assurance teams started running into severe problems... I mean units literally bursting into flame."

I won't get into all of the technical details here—you're online already, so go look them up if you want to—but after what sounds like a painful QA process, Sega was finally able to launch the Mega-CD in 1991 in Japan, with the machine reaching North America in October 1992 and Europe the next spring. I remember reading all about it, in the pages of Mean Machines (Sega) and Sega Pro. I was fascinated with what seemed like the future, now; movies, but games. In 1993 I still had a Master System and a stack of software, but I was about to upgrade to the Mega Drive, my parents buying me (after no little pestering) a pack bundled with the two-on-one cart of EA Hockey and John Madden Football. And I didn't intend to stop there: A Mega-CD would be mine.

I'd not bought the Master System new—it'd been picked up a couple of years earlier when a school friend wanted rid of it to finance the acquisition of more games for his new Mega Drive. Having previously been denied ownership of a "games-only" machine by Amiga-pushing parents (I could do my homework on that, see), I gladly took it off his hands—the console was on its last legs in terms of developer support, but plenty of other friends had one, so swapping our games for weekends or more became a regular thing. Anyway, if it's nostalgia for the Master System you're now after, click here; I sold mine to buy Ash's 1977 and that double album from the Smashing Pumpkins in 1996 (idiot). And that same year I finally got a Mega-CD, as the very same friend who'd flogged me Sega's 8bit darling dangled his one in front of my eyes. He was after a Saturn now. I didn't say no.

Sega would officially discontinue the Mega-CD just months after I had one to call my own, but games for it lined the shelves of my local bring-your-shit-here-to-get-money-to-buy-drugs pawnshop palace, so adding to my collection was easy enough after new copies fled Tandy, Dixons, and Woolworths. Buying second hand meant I immediately received a fairly substantial library, ranging from the pack-in retail discs of the Classics Arcade Collection and the Sol-Feace and Cobra Command double-header to the essential Sonic the Hedgehog CD, one of the brightest jewels in the Mega-CD's 200-titles-deep catalogue, and a spread of full motion video games. You know, Night Trap and that. You couldn't not know about Night Trap, even if you'd never gone near a CD-based console in your life.

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A screen shot from 'Night Trap,' via YouTube.

I played Night Trap. I finished it—initially by purely fluking my way through trapping enough "teenage" girl-kidnapping vampire minions, and then later with a perfect record courtesy of an in-mag guide. It was shit. I didn't get the fuss over the (awfully staged, barely even there) violence, and even as a teenager I could quite clearly see, through the fuzzy, 32-color visuals on offer, that the game was about as titillating as camping through a wet weekend on the Suffolk Heaths with the Norwich region's premier Mr. Bean impersonator. But there was another game from its makers, Digital Pictures, that I did enjoy a lot more.

Ground Zero Texas came on two discs in a bigger-than-a-DVD-case-sized box (rather than the standard Mega-CD packaging). It had a fat manual. It was so delightfully old school, from its artwork to how it played: a simple target shooter in the vein of Mad Dog McCree, with enemies popping out from beneath bars and behind bales of hay. It was gloriously rubbish, but with The X-Files massive at the time its story of an alien invasion in rural Texas (though filmed in California) resonated with me.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/fpREyMjFoYc' width='560' height='315']

The full 60 minutes of 'Ground Zero Texas'

Despite its grainy visuals, Ground Zero Texas seemed to have been made with a much bigger budget than Night Trap—which proved to be the case. A full Hollywood crew was used in its production, the cost of which came to $2 million, and director Dwight H. Little had previously helmed several movies, including Halloween 4. He'd go on to direct Free Willy 2 and Murder at 1600 before moving into TV and earning credits on series including 24, Prison Break, and Castle.

Ground Zero Texas was far from a showcase for what the Mega-CD could actually do, though. To really get the most out of its extra storage—the CD format offered developers 320 times the space that a ROM cartridge could provide—and (slightly) faster processor, games makers turned away from the "interactive movie" affairs offered by Digital Pictures and towards more traditional graphics, albeit of a quality that the Mega Drive alone could never have handled.

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Overkills and Sudden Deaths from 'Eternal Champions: Challenge from the Dark Side'— the ticket-seller shotgun finish at a minute in is why I won't go to the pictures alone.

This approach bore bloody fruit with Eternal Champions: Challenge From the Dark Side, a one-on-one fighter that was, for my money, a Mortal Kombat (of the time) beater, certainly in terms of splattery deaths. The superbly crisp, boisterously bright visuals made the game's finishing moves, of which there were many, pop from the screen. It used a little FMV, albeit of the CG variety, for an overlong intro sequence and bout-ending "cinekills," but for the most part it was a sprites-only offering, and it looked gorgeous. My copy still has pages of notes in the box, walking me through how to pull off every single fatality. Hideo Kojima's Snatcher was equally generous with its gore, and the Mega-CD port of Konami's old MSX2 cyberpunk adventure is, perhaps, the most beautiful of all its versions. (You can read a lot more on my time with that game here.)

I became obsessed, for a while, with Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, which used its FMV sparingly, focusing the gameplay on puzzle solving (obviously). Like Eternal Champions, my boxed copy of the game is bursting with torn-out notepad pages, scribbles of clues and suspects spilling over them. Final Fight had never looked better in its play-at-home guise as it did on Mega-CD. The system's version of FIFA International Soccer—given a "Championship Edition" subtitle, and starring David Platt on the artwork—had one of my dad's mates come upstairs to see what match was on, so realistic was its crowd noise (even though, if memory serves, it was actually recorded at a lackluster game involving Tranmere Rovers). I loved that it featured clips of Italia 90 in its intro and between the interactive action, including Platt's remarkable over-the-shoulder volley against Belgium, as that's the World Cup I remember clearest from my childhood.

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A complete playthrough of 'Sonic CD,' which is like a favorite album to me when heard and not seen.

Core Design brought Mode 7-style visuals to the Mega-CD with celebrated helicopter shooter Thunderhawk and the multi-viewpoint sci-fi blaster Soulstar—I owned both and played them hard, and the latter featured a stirring orchestral soundtrack that you could access by popping the disc into any regular stereo. I picked up games I never got anywhere with, like the RPG Eye of the Beholder, which I got simply because it had a new soundtrack from Streets of Rage series composer Yuzo Koshiro.

But my absolute favorite game for the Mega-CD was, is, Sonic CD, a (mostly) 2D masterpiece that took the best of the Mega Drive titles, set those qualities against visuals so sparkling they could dazzle a nosy neighbor through two sets of net curtains, and came with a suite of music so incredible that I wish it was on my iPod right now. For once, just ignore the damsel-in-distress plot—I know I did. Instead, focus on the amazing speed, the innovative time-travel dynamic that opened up fresh perspectives on each stage, the 3D special stages, and that exquisite soundtrack on the PAL and Japanese versions. (You can read more about the game here.)

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An original Mega Drive, a Mega-CD II, and a 32X—maybe the ugliest combination of components ever seen in gaming, via Wikipedia.

I missed several of the Mega-CD's so-called essential games entirely—they were either beyond my price range, or simply never discovered on the racks, between countless copies of (the perfectly enjoyable, for one playthrough) Road Avenger. But the system itself is one that I will forever hold dear, its arrival in my bedroom coinciding with a budding romance—we'd play some of these games together—and my transition into adulthood, I guess. These games were more mature than those I'd had on prior Sega systems; they challenged me in new ways, and I responded to them with an affection that would soon shift to other obsessions, resulting in something of a gaming hiatus that'd last until the Xbox 360 came along.

I took my passion for all things Sega further, picking up a 32X in 1996, but even with decent versions of DOOM and Virtual Racing to call my own, it was to the Mega-CD that I consistently turned, until university took me away from its permanently grinding, reset-to-open drawer. As awful a failure as it was for its manufacturer, the first sign that Sega were going to fall out of competition with Nintendo and, soon enough, Sony, the Mega-CD is the one console I'll probably always hold a place in my heart for. I can still see its green and red lights blinking away; I can still hear its home menu music and see the Sega logo spinning through space. I know it's a bit crap, really, but it deserves better than the loft. Maybe if we ever move to a bigger place, and then the kids leave home...

Follow Mike on Twitter.

Comics: Leslie's Diary Comics - 'Whiskey for Dinner'

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[body_image width='789' height='1000' path='images/content-images/2015/05/07/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/07/' filename='leslies-diary-comics-whiskey-for-dinner-290-body-image-1431022831.jpg' id='53812'][body_image width='767' height='1000' path='images/content-images/2015/05/07/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/07/' filename='leslies-diary-comics-whiskey-for-dinner-290-body-image-1431022846.jpg' id='53813'][body_image width='772' height='1000' path='images/content-images/2015/05/07/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/07/' filename='leslies-diary-comics-whiskey-for-dinner-290-body-image-1431022882.jpg' id='53814']

Follow Leslie on Twitter, Tumblr, and buy her books from Fantagraphics.

The Women Working in NYC's Nail Salons Are Treated More Terribly Than You Can Imagine

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Photo via Flickr user bettyx1138

This morning, the New York Times came out with a mammoth investigation into the city's nail salons that took more than a year to put together. If you've ever wondered how the women providing you with pedicures for $15 a pop can afford to live in a town that literally eats money, reporter Sarah Maslin Nir found the answer: It's because they share cockroach-infested rooms with a dozen other women while making $10 a day—if they make anything at all.

"The Price of Nice Nails" is more than worth reading in its entirety, and the Times has published it simultaneously in four languages so that the more than 100 women Nir interviewed for her piece can read about their lives. I talked to her about how it came together.

VICE: How did you get interested in the story?
Sarah Maslin Nir: About four years ago, I was at a 24-hour spa in Koreatown. It's one of the Vogue top-secret best-bet salons—a really unusual place. It was my birthday, and I treated myself to a pedicure at 10 AM. And I said to the woman, "It's so crazy that this is a 24-hour salon. Who works the night shift?" And she says, "I work the night shift." And I said, "Well, it's daytime. Who works the day shift? What do you mean?"

And she said, "I work six days a week, 24 hours a day, I live in a barracks above the salon, and on the seventh day, I go home to sleep in my bedroom in Flushing, and then I come right back to work."

And I was like, This woman's in prison. People had to shake her to keep her awake. And then she would do a treatment. I just thought it was crazy.

"And she said, 'I work six days a week, 24 hours a day, I live in a barracks above the salon, and on the seventh day, I go home to sleep in my bedroom in Flushing, and then I come right back to work.'"

So once you got the go-ahead from your editor, what was the first piece of reporting you did?
Well, one of the first things I did was I had translators in the Korean language, and [did] Chinese language and Spanish language prep. Because I thought, if this is just so open that this woman is speaking, maybe it will just come out. And I found a lot of stories about people being robbed by their bosses—stolen wages.

And then once I had these tips, I started looking into lawsuits that people had already filed, because I figured if someone's brave enough to file a lawsuit, maybe someone's brave enough to speak with me. So I guess I started with the bravest, and I ended with the most fearful.

The story starts with the anecdote of people standing on the street corner waiting to be picked up and shipped to different parts of the state and parts of the country to salons. I actually spent every morning for about three months at those pick-up spots with a translator or two, going from woman to woman saying, "I wanna tell your story. Will you tell it to me?"

Did you ever just go from nail salon to nail salon, or was that too risky?
I started doing that toward the end, because it's a very collusive industry. Everybody conspires. The experts I've spoken to say the owners teach each other the methods of how to exploit the workers and how to avoid prosecution. So I was afraid if I started going from salon to salon, an owner would catch me and tell all the others, and it would all get shut down. So only toward the end would I go to salons, and I'd actually go get a manicure and talk with the women, sometimes with a translator sitting next to me, and just have these quiet conversations.

One of the most interesting things about the story is I learned how to ask questions. At the beginning, I'd ask, "Where do you live?" And they'd say, "Oh, I live in a one-bedroom in Flushing, Queens." And then I realized that when they live in a one-bedroom, they lived with six to eight other people. So my questions changed. I would say, "How many people do you live with?" and they'd say, "Oh, twelve."

One of the most shocking things is that you got the owners to respond to you, and they basically admit to operating on slave labor. Why did they talk to you?
I think the owners see themselves as heroic. They're hiring a really difficult-to-employ class of people—people without papers, people [who don't know the] English language, and with few transferable skills. So they think they're doing their countrymen a favor.

Besides the anecdotes you got related to nail-salon culture, what's the most shocking thing you found?
It took me over nine months to get the Labor Department to give me information from their database, which they are legally required to do based on the Freedom of Information laws. And the most shocking thing was how little they go into salons. They have two people who speak Korean. Nobody's looking.

Your story makes these abhorrent conditions seems so pervasive that it seems like there might not be a guilt-free place to get your nails done in the entire city.
I did not find any good actors. Out of all the people I spoke to, only three said they were paid in a way that seemed proper—hourly, with different types of compensation. And two of them had worked at the same salon.

The idea of cheap luxury is an oxymoron. It doesn't exist. The only way that nail salons exist and manicures exist at the price they are in New York City is with someone else bearing the cost of your discount. And in New York City the person bearing the cost is the worker—and that's the person who can least afford it.

Follow Sarah Maslin Nir on Twitter.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

These UK Election Candidates Think Voters Should Get to Decide Every Issue

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Bez campaigning with the Reality Party.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

As voters head to the polls in a very uncertain election, one thing seems certain: a lot of people are going to be pissed off at the results and feel like their democratic muscles haven't been properly flexed. With a national debate about the nature of our democracy likely on the cards, I spoke to some candidates standing today who argue that public voting should be something that happens more than once every five years. If people could vote on every issue individually, it might make TV an endless barrage of swingometers and David Dimbleby might keel over from exhaustion. Maybe E4 would go off air forever, leaving fans of the Big Bang Theory shadows of their former selves. More importantly, these guys reckon it would also fix Britain's broken democracy.

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Bez, 51, formerly of the Happy Mondays, is standing for the Reality Party in Salford. As well as halting fracking, they want instant referendums via social media and a consultation on compulsory voting.

VICE: How's the canvasing?
Bez: Great response. We've helped 60 people, many homeless, who'd never voted before, to register, as well as people staying in a couple of homeless homes. I'm hearing some horrific stories as I'm canvassing. It's unbelievable the suffering that benefit sanctions have caused round here. I met someone today disabled with multiple heart attacks, who's worked all his life and been sanctioned. People are going hungry.

What's wrong with the current system of democracy?
We don't live in a democracy any more. The greatest example of that is TTIP [The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership]. In the 1970s we had a referendum about Europe, but at the moment our sovereignty is being given to corporates and we have no say. TTIP will allow any country that tries to make decisions to protect its people, to be sued by corporates if it interferes with their profits. On his last day in power, with no debate, David Cameron added an extra clause to the infrastructure bill preventing local communities objecting to nuclear dumping. All this is being done without public consultation.

How do the Reality Party want to increase democracy then?
We live in a digital age. There's nothing stopping us having instant referendums. On your phone you could have a yes or no button and a few days to make a decision. With social media we want debates about the consequences of decisions and more involvement of people on decision-making. And we have to end lobbying—it's legalized bribery.

After the election is over we will carry on defending our country for future generations. We are not being consulted, they are taking our democracy away form us. I consider this to be the most important election of our time. Democracy has never been in such crisis.

Lucy Hall, 25, is an independent candidate for Bermondey and Old Southwark. She would let constituents tell her how to vote on every bill with a phone app.

VICE: What's your big idea?
Lucy Hall: Constituents would vote through an app and website on every bill parliament debates. I'd vote for the people that vote me in rather than my party. Democracy was born in Athens and it was direct democracy. The state got too big to enforce it, but now we have technology to enable a more direct form of democracy.

What would be the point of an MP then?
The role of MP would be as representative, and to inform and educate constituents. When you look at a bill on the app, there would be an "ask your MP" button and I would be able to answer questions.

So your opinion wouldn't count?
I would be vocal about what I thought was best for the community. People would be able to discuss that with me. But I am one person—why should my views override everyone else's? Simon Hughes is the Lib Dem MP here. He abstained on same-sex marriage on grounds of his religious beliefs. I thought, fair enough but you're making a decision on behalf of 75,000 registered voters, based on your personal religious beliefs.

So if elected, all your votes would be decided by constituents vote for on your app?
Exactly.

Even if you don't agree?
The idea goes hand in hand with political education. The right information, more often than not, will provide the right decision. My overriding belief in democracy trumps everything.

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Phil Badger, 26, is standing for the Democratic Reform Party in Lewisham Deptford. Their "Online Parliament" hopes to include everybody in debates and policy.

What political experience do you have?
Phil Badger: After studying politics I worked with Nick Dubois, Conservative MP for Enfield North until I got very frustrated.

Why's that?
The more time you spend in Westminster the more party politics takes over. Careerists in safe seats spent a lot more time in Westminster power-playing, while those who had to win their votes, spent a lot of time in constituency representing their constituents to secure their seat. MPs represent a party whip more than their constituent and that's something we need to change.

How could it change?
We are signed up to the European Union which has a principal called subsidiarity. That means power should be devolved to the lowest possible level. We need parliament to let go of power and let people with local knowledge make decisions themselves. It's the only way to change things and get people involved in politics more than once every five years.

Related: The New Wave: Labour


What's the big idea with the Democratic Reform Party?
Government should be a simple business model. It provides a service. And you can't serve the customer without knowing what they want. We want everybody to participate in our Online Parliament.

What's that then?
It's a tool which allows people to make suggestions in an open setting, to determine policy democratically. At present there is no party that does this. They make policies behind closed doors.

What's the difference between this and a focus group?
A focus group can be dismissed. We have to move away from the idea that only party whips determine policies. There's great ideas out there, but parties don't want to hear them. We need to bring the public and new ideas in.

If elected would you be bound by an Online Parliament? What if the fox hunting comes up again in the next parliament. Say you really loved foxes—would you vote with your heart or according to what most people want in your Online Parliament?
The Online Parliament would collate people's knowledge and opinions on fox hunting. It's up to me as a representative to find the best balance of what's best for the constituency as well as their views. It would be difficult, but representing people is morally better than being told by a suit how to vote.

There is a great demand for representatives to step away from party politics and digital is a great tool. The demand for new digital platforms for political activity like e-petitions demonstrates that.

Whoever wins this seat and others, we hope to see using more local consultation with our Online Parliament, so that they represent voters, not just their party whip.

Follow Ben Gelblum on Twitter.

'Girlhood' Gives Young Black Girls Some Much-Needed Screen Time

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"I just had seven speed-dates with journalists, and so far I've slept with no one," says Céline Sciamma, shrugging as she blows smoke out of the window.

The French director and screenwriter is here to talk about her latest film, Girlhood, the story of Vic (played by first-time actress Karidja Touré), a young black girl living in the Paris banlieues. Vic is a teenager enduring an abusive relationship with her older brother while navigating the rites of joining a gang—first a girl gang with three other girls, and later a mostly male gang for whom she becomes a drug runner. Vic struggles to come to terms with what exactly her identity is, and it shifts dramatically from childlike to sexualized, to sometimes-lost throughout the film's three acts.

"Mentored" at film school by director Xavier Beauvois, Sciamma's films strike a distinct aesthetic of their own—clean compositions, block colors, and wide angles. Almost every shot looks like a photograph. Although her films are somewhat comparable to Xavier Dolan or Lucía Puenzo in look or subject matter, they're pretty unique for queer art-house films, in that they're neither cringe-inducing nor pretentious.

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Girlhood is Sciamma's third feature film, her third coming of age story, and her third film set in the suburbs. This is all deliberate: she considers Girlhood the last in a trilogy. The theme throughout her films, says the director, is "the search for identity; the game around trying different ones out," and, of course, "the consequences."

First there was 2007's Water Lilies, the story of two 15-year-old girls who find themselves mutually attracted after meeting on a synchronized swimming team. The bad swimming costumes, colored light filters, and soundtrack by French electro producer Para One give it a distinctly 80s feel, all without submitting to cheap sentimentality. Sciamma tells me this is the film she feels closest to personally in terms of plot, although she never got around to synchronized swimming herself.

Her second movie was Tomboy (2011), the story of ten-year-old Laure, who, after moving to a new area, decides to reinvent herself as a boy. In an attempt to convince the other kids she is "Mikäel," Laure makes herself a fake penis out of plasticine, which she later tucks into her swim shorts. The film unfolds through snapshot moments that are innocent but powerfully deconstructive of binary gender codes.

This time, with Girlhood, Sciamma places the search for sexual and gender identity within the wider context of Vic's racial identity. "I thought, If I'm gonna go for it for one last time, I want it to be more contemporary, to be more political," she tells me. "So I decided to go for that very classic coming of age story: a young girl wanting to live her life, having to put up with society, the place she lives in, her family... Very Jane Austen-like, but I wanted a young face and a black character to be the Romantic heroine of the 21st century."

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This decision was very much about giving screen time to vastly underrepresented faces. "I was struck by the lack of representation of women—of black women—and I thought, OK, I wanna film these girls. So I decided to go all the way for it," says Sciamma. "I could have balanced things out—that's usually how you do it. But I decided to go for a 'full black' casting. Because I feel like this balance that's supposed to give us good conscience actually doesn't give us anything."

Girlhood isn't about a particularly French kind of black youth culture—although the film's setting harks back to La Haine (which, incidentally, is turning 20 this year). No, Vic and her all-black girl gang could really be anywhere: they fight and pull each other's hair extensions, they get drunk on vodka-and-cokes, they rent cheap hotel rooms, they take selfies on the metro and sing along to Rihanna. "I didn't come across a story for Girlhood," says Sciamma, "because there is no story to come across. It's an eternal story, just with a new character."

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During the film, Vic's gender identity gradually adapts to her environments; downplayed at her Senegalese family home, super-girly with her heterosexual and all-female friendship group, masculine and tough when she starts working for the local crime boss. I ask Sciamma if she intentionally kept the changes subtle, to mirror reality's subtleties. "It's about ambiguity," she tells me. "The gender changes Vic goes through are really a performance she is putting on. She is trying out identities as costumes. It's like a super-hero: she sees what sort of power each costume gives you."

Sciamma continues: "These are really identities that society designed for her. It's not something she invented. She's just experiencing it. It's not like in Tomboy, where it's all inherent. Mikäel's projecting fantasy in the world, whereas Vic is endorsing the fantasies that exist in the world, trying them out. It's more like a performance. So in that way, the film is kind of queer. But it's not about expressing a freedom."

The only moment of freedom, says Sciamma, comes at the end of the film, which it does admittedly take a while to get to, given the meandering of the plot. This is a reflection of Sciamma's contrarian nature: "Of course I didn't want to leave Vic at the moment that was expected! That would have made everybody happy. I wanted to go all the way to adulthood."

Related: Our film on Uganda's new wave of ultra-violent DIY action cinema:

In the last shot we're left with a lot of questions, as we see Vic with "the braids of childhood, the make-up of a young girl, and the clothing of a boy," unsure of what to do next. In this moment, says Sciamma, Vic is everything, and at the same time sheds the stylized identities she's been experimenting with. "She'll become an adult. It's not a game any more." Sciamma acknowledges that some of her audience will be left feeling pessimistic; others, hopefully optimistic.

What about Sciamma, though? What's next for her? "I want to look at another genre now. More and more, I'm trying to stress the fact that movies shouldn't be what they are expected to be stylistically," she says. "It could be horror, it could be anything—I just wanna do something completely different."

She tells me that all three of her stories say something about who she was when she was making them, but—like Vic—she's happy moving on to the next thing. And for now, at least, that's speed-date number nine.

Follow Amelia on Twitter.


TONIGHT: Watch VICE's Alternative UK Election Night Coverage

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Tonight, for the first time ever, VICE will be broadcasting its own alternative election night coverage. For three glorious hours, The VICE Guide to the 2015 UK Election will air on our YouTube channel. (We'll embed the stream in this post, so be sure to bookmark if you wanna check back here.) The party kicks off at 10 PM local time—5 PM EST—by which point we may be slightly closer to knowing who will be running the country for the next five years.

Or perhaps we won't. With Parliament likely to be hung once again, we'll aim to highlight the issues beyond the Westminster gamesmanship and the problems that will have to be solved by whichever party—or coalition of parties—manages to come out on top.

Taking in the housing crisis, poverty and food banks, mental health, student protests, political disillusionment, and spin, tune in from 10 PM as VICE UK's political correspondent Gavin Haynes uses the films we've been busy making in the run-up to Election '15 to examine the past five years of coalition rule and what the future holds for young Brits.

To check out all of our Election '15 coverage so far, click here.

How Indian Status Figures Into the Unsolved Case of a Murdered Aboriginal Woman

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In the summer of 1998, Mag Cywink, her husband Tom, and a medicine man from Pine Ridge, South Dakota, travelled to southern Ontario. The purpose of their trip was to release two spirits: the spirit of Mag's sister Sonya and the spirit of Sonya's unborn child.

Hundreds of friends and family had gathered amid the greenery of Southwold Earthworks, a 40-minute drive southwest of London. Four years earlier, Sonya's body had been found in that exact spot. They were about to perform the ancient ceremony when the medicine man, Floyd Looks for Buffalo Hand, turned to Mag and asked, "What is her Indian name? Does she have an Indian name?"

"No," Mag told him, Sonya didn't.

He paused, then told Mag: "I'm going to give her a name."

He thought for a few moments.

He gave Sonya a name from the Lakota tribe, into which Tom had been adopted. Mag can no longer remember the Lakota version, she's since had it translated into Ojibway: "Biiskwaa-noodin-kwe."

It means, "Whirlwind Woman," Floyd told Mag—like a column of air swirling dust or snow or rain; like a tornado. He said, "Whenever you see that, you'll know that Sonya's bringing a message."

For an aboriginal person in Canada, status is significant. It gives those with it access to numerous federal programs and services. Yet the designation is not an indigenous concept—it's a construct of the federal government. And the rules that govern this construct are complex.

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Sonya's vamps for the commemorative art installation for the missing and murdered women of Canada and the USA. All photos courtesy of Mag Cywink

The federal government has a responsibility to status Indians under the Indian Act, as well as a responsibility to Inuit people. The Supreme Court will hear an appeal this fall on a long-running court battle about whether Métis and non-status Indians are legally "Indians" and therefore have the same rights as the Inuit and status Indians.

In Mag and Sonya's family, their father had no status, their mother had status but lost it, and Mag and Sonya and their brothers and sisters never had status at all.

"Your status as an Indian, according to the federal government now, acts very much like a proxy for traditional membership in an aboriginal community, even though it shouldn't," says Larry Chartrand, a Métis law professor at the University of Ottawa who specializes in issues of indigenous identity. "If you don't have status, it's often assumed then that you're not Indian enough to be part of the community, and that can have pretty devastating impacts."

Without status, Chartrand says, "You can't live on the reserve anymore; you can't participate in community decision-making or benefits. It means more than just losing status or being discriminated; it's actually a loss of culture and way of life."

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Sonya in 1989, five years before her death

A First Nations woman used to lose her status if she married a man without status. What's more, any First Nations person, male or female, used to lose status by earning a university degree, becoming a doctor or lawyer, joining the army, or—until 1960—registering to vote in a federal election.

Bill C-31, which amended the Indian Act in 1985, solved some troubling, automatic loss-of-status problems, but did so by categorizing First Nations persons as either non-status, status 6(1), or status 6(2). This change discriminated against women because status was still more easily passed down by men than by women.

Women with reinstated status were 6(1), but their children were 6(2). In comparison, men with status who married non-status women could confer their status—6(1) or 6(2), as applicable—on their wives, whether these women were aboriginal or not, and this made their children 6(1). Thus, women who choose to "marry out" have fewer entitlements than men who do so—and this disparity extends to the children of such unions.

This injustice was more recently addressed when a legal battle led to Bill C-3, the government's attempt to remedy Bill C-31's inherent sexism. But even that change, many say, is problematic. The implications of losing and regaining status remain severe, Chartrand says. A number of communities have waged court battles to prevent those with regained status from returning to their communities.

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Southwold Earthworks, where Sonya's body was found, as pictured in August 2014, on the 20th anniversary of her death.

Estelle Ruth McGregor, Mag and Sonya's mother, was a member of Whitefish River First Nation and a status Indian. However, Estelle—of mostly Ojibway ancestry, with a little Scottish mixed in—lost her status in the summer of 1949, when she married Wilfred Laurier Cywink, Sr. Wilfred's mother was Ojibway and Odawa with status, but his father was Polish, so when they married Wilfred's mother lost her status too.

Thus, when Sonya Nadine Mae Cywink was born in Little Current on Manitoulin Island on August 19, 1963, she—like her siblings—entered the world without status. The children grew up in Whitefish River First Nation, but not really in Whitefish River First Nation. They lived there, but only because it was a plot leased by the Canadian Pacific Railway, Wilfred's employers. Among other things, their lack of status meant that they had to acquire their educations off the reserve: they had to be bussed daily to and from school in Espanola, roughly 30 minutes away.

With her children's options limited, Estelle taught them assimilative techniques: the family spoke English at home, while the children acquired just enough Ojibway to understand their mother's commands. Estelle continually impressed upon them the importance of getting educated and then building a life, being a productive member of society—elsewhere. Both Estelle and Wilfred worked hard to make sure their kids were educated and ambitious. Often that meant boisterous debates over the dinner table.

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Sonya was both smart and driven. She was also attentive and kind to all she knew. However, she was sexually assaulted as a teenager, and after this trauma, she began to struggle greatly. Sonya got pregnant, dropped out of high school, and gave birth to a baby boy. The boy was adopted by a relative, as is traditional in such situations. After the adoption, Sonya used drugs and alcohol to cope, and in the years before she was killed turned to sex work.

Yet Sonya could still summon her drive. In February 1991, Mag drove Sonya to a treatment facility in London. She dropped her little sister off to get clean, and Sonya did. Sonya would remain in London until her death, attending both Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous. She was a struggling young woman making a concerted effort to regain control of her life.

But Sonya was also "the great eluder," Mag says. She'd put on a smile, she'd laugh, and she'd make you think everything was alright, that she was alright, that you didn't need to worry.

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The last time Mag saw her sister was July 1994. Mag and Tom held an informal family reunion at the Anishinabe Spiritual Centre in Espanola. Sonya made the six-hour trip from London. Mag remembers her sister as looking gaunt and sick. That night, she could hear Sonya's seemingly endless coughing through the apartment's thin walls.

"None of us even got it. None of us even—we didn't even—I don't think anybody gave it any thought that she was that sick," Mag says. "It should have been the first sign, the last sign, for us to realize something wasn't right."

Mag thinks Sonya must have fallen back in with the wrong crowd, that she must have started using drugs again. But what exactly happened between the day of their reunion and the day Sonya's body was found, her family doesn't know. Mag says she only learned Sonya was pregnant from her sister's friends at Sonya's funeral. She's named her unborn niece or nephew, Jacob, in the hopes justice—when it comes—might be for both Sonya and her child.

Mag says she was told her sister died from blunt force trauma, but a spokesperson for the Ontario Provincial Police says investigators have no plans to release Sonya's cause of death or to publicly identify any suspects. Last summer, on the 20th anniversary of Sonya's disappearance, a $60,000 reward for information was renewed; $10,000 of which comes from Mag and Tom.

The case remains unsolved.

Part 2, tomorrow: Despite her sister's death, Mag Cywink has taken a stand against a national inquiry into murdered and missing aboriginal women. It is not a popular position.

Follow Jane Gerster on Twitter.


The Rise of DIY Libraries

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Biblioteca Aeromoto photo by the author.

In March, a group of New York library officials released a statement declaring that a "staggering infrastructure crisis" has crept up on the city's public library system. In Brownsville, Brooklyn, one branch is "routinely forced to close on hot days" due to problems with air conditioning. Others are plagued with water-damaged books and facilities that are too small to accommodate everyone in their community. General interest public libraries are no less necessary than they were in 1901, when Andrew Carnegie donated the equivalent of $147 million to construct 65 of them across New York City, but their focus is increasingly shifting away from books and toward things like English classes, job training workshops, community meeting spaces, or just places to read the news online for those without internet access. While the public must continue to fight for these more practical resources, a number of oddball independent libraries cropping up around the North American continent offer an experience that can't be found in their traditional counterparts.

These boutique libraries are working to stretch our very idea about the word "library," creating a real living community around the often very lonely act of reading. "We've been taken since the beginning with this idea of the social life of the book," says Rachel Valinsky, a founding member of the alternative library space Wendy's Subway, which opened a year ago in a stark industrial space in the outer reaches of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I spoke to three of their organizers around the long plywood table in the center of their book-laden loft space about the history of revolution and the avant-garde. "We're interested in the ways that we can activate the book beyond the shelf and have people engage with the idea of the library more broadly as a place of coming together."

They pay their rent with a monthly membership fee, and each of their 35-odd members receives a key to the space that guarantees 24-hour access to their reading room, a wi-fi password, and hopefully a couple fresh rolls of toilet paper in the bathroom down the hall. Their library, which is pooled from founders' personal bookshelves and from collections gifted by other high-profile bibliophiles, is non-circulating, meaning the books can't leave the space. "Hopefully that means people are reading them here, together, and not going off into their homes and reading them alone," Valinsky said. "This model is an interesting way to have a sustained membership of people who are engaging with the space as much as they are engaging with the books."

The library model, as opposed to the standard bookstore concept, also sidelines the commercial aspect, emphasizing the power of the collective over the power of cash. "I think there's something disruptive about the library model within a larger system of commerce or economy of books," Valinsky told me. They're currently preparing to set up a temporary library at NADA in May, a mega-money art fair where they will deploy their custom-designed mobile reading room, a collapsible furniture set that transforms on the fly into a mini library of 500 books. "[NADA] is an overtly commercial three-day event, [and] we're installing this very non-commercial project as a space where people will sit and stop traffic, which [goes against] the point of being in an art fair where you're supposed to walk around and see everything."

In North America alone there is a vast, loosely-connected network of grassroots and independent organizations offering some variation on the library model, from the zine libraries that have existed in New York, Chicago, and Boston for upwards of two decades to the more elevated art and literature hubs like Aeromoto, which have begun to spring up in recent years. Rather than attempting to provide the same services as "big box" public libraries, however, they tend to have a more single-minded focus on their own esoteric interests.

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Photo courtesy of Personal Libraries Library.

The Personal Libraries Library is a tiny, subscription-based lending library run by artist, printmaker, and researcher Abra Ancliffe out of her living room in Portland, Oregon. Now nearing its five-year anniversary, the library's concept is that it recreates—down to the exact edition—the personal book collections of history's great artists and thinkers, a list that thus far includes Argentine literary hero Jorge Luis Borges, Italian absurdist Italo Calvino, and 60s art star Robert Smithson, of Spiral Jetty acclaim. Membership costs $15 for two years (a price she chose so that it might be accessible to her students at the Pacific Northwest College of Art) and it comes with a twice-yearly shipment of printed matter—posters, essays, and odds and ends—that arrives at your doorstep via her own in-house publishing venture.

Visits can be made by appointment, or simply by wandering in during open hours, which vary according to the season. "In the summer the reading room hours work really well because I live next door to a farmer's market, so people just wander in," she told me over Skype from her home-slash-library in Portland's King neighborhood. "I'll open my front door and I'll put a sign out that says "Personal Libraries Library." It's not like I'm hawking people into my home, but I think people just come from the farmer's market and they're feeling really like, I don't know, free."

The library sprang forth from Ancliffe's romance with the embodied beauty of the book itself. Which means she's carrying the torch for an increasingly arcane art form, especially as larger libraries shift their focus away from physical book storage, replacing shelves with classrooms, computers, and e-books. "It's not just the text of the book that matters," she explained, "but all the para-text: the design of the book, the materials that were used, the type of paper, the typefaces, the way that illustrations were printed, the binding. I find that all the material considerations and design considerations are incredibly important, and something for me to really revel in."

The rise of powerful search engines and online databases means that those with internet access and media literacy are less dependent on libraries as large, centralized nodes of knowledge production. That means the concept will naturally pivot if it wants to survive, Ancliffe said. "Now libraries can target a specific community or audience rather than having to be scattershot," she says. As the library model becomes an increasingly rarefied form, it's attracted artists and thinkers who are interested in exploring and re-inventing it from the ground up. "As things become more on the fringes, that's where artists start to pick it up and use it for their own means," she continues. "That happens with techniques like letterpress and all these commercial production techniques. The minute they become outdated, artists begin to pick them up and use them." There's a reason that Polaroid instant film appeared on the market again alongside the $180 retro cameras they sell at Urban Outfitters.

Related: Death of the American Hobo

At its most minimalist interpretation, a library can just be a space that facilitates the exchange of books between friends. "We wanted our books to be for other people to read them, and stop being on our bookshelves," said Maru Calva, a founder of Mexico City's Biblioteca Aeromoto, which opened its storefront in February of this year. They have three differently priced subscription options and are open from Wednesday through Saturday, with a library that's mostly culled from organizers' own collections—though more donations are starting to roll in from various museums and foundations. "We had this idea that everyone would bring their own books, and instead of you being able to read ten books you can also read the other 40 books that the others shared."

The idea is simple, yet radical, in that it creates a way of using shared resources without having to possess them—much the same as with other co-operative endeavors like bike tool libraries, where one can rent equipment or parts for fixing bicycles, or seed libraries, which have similar models for helping would-be farmers grow their own produce. "[The founders] have always talked about this, about how life would be so cool if there was no money, no?" Maru said, laughing at her own idealism. "I think in a way Aeromoto responds to this idea. Yes, we have to pay our rent, but in a way we are proposing other kinds of economies, I think."

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Photo by the author.

But the boutique library also breaks with the historical tradition of what made the grand libraries of modern America so great in the first place: practical educational resources for all walks of life, especially those who otherwise wouldn't have access. "What I see happening in many alternative or independent library spaces—not always, but often—is a deemphasis on the need for a site of practical space where people, particularly the disenfranchised (in the widest sense of the word), can congregate," said Judah Rubin, a Baruch College professor, poet, and library nerd. Despite their vocal tendency toward hard-left revolutionary politics—with lip service paid to buzzphrases like "community outreach" and "inclusiveness"—these organizations have the potential to drift even further out of touch with the needs of a wider demographic. It's partly because their funding tends to come from within their own hermetic bubbles, meaning organizers aren't accountable to a wider public.

That being said, let us also not underestimate the average person's interest in books. "We are really starting to build this public program with activities for different ages, different disciplines, with the book as a base all the time, or as a support," said Aeromoto's Calva, pointing to the Institute for Graphic Arts in Oaxaca—an exhibition space, cinema, and library opened by Mexican artist Francisco Toledo in 1988—as an example of how these institutions can successfully connect with a wider public. "Every time you go to IAGO, all the time there are young people, old people, children reading. That's what we dream of. We dream about it being open all the time, and always having someone researching or giving a lecture or learning something. We're starting to realize that this was something other people want too." After all, everybody loves books, even if they don't know it yet.

Follow Max Pearl on Twitter.

I Tried a Four-Week Workout Regimen to Strengthen My Dick

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All photos by the author

For the first time in my adult life, I am finally getting to a place where I can enjoy the routine and rewards of regularly going to the gym. But as my dadbod transforms into a slightly-more-toned dadbod, there was one muscle system that wasn't getting pushed to the limit with the rest of me: my penis.

So when I was made aware of Private Gym, a program that claims to be "simply the world's best personal trainer for your pelvic muscle system," and "as good as Viagra," I was intrigued. It's Kegels for dudes—and there's a slew of research indicating that a regular Kegel exercise program can benefit a woman's health in myriad ways, such as reducing instances of urinary and fecal incontinence, preventing prolapses, and restoring vaginal sensation during intercourse. The medical community also seems to be in agreement that men ought to be doing similar exercises to achieve similar health benefits, but not too many men heed that advice, probably because men are stupid.

I'd thought my sexual and urinary health were pretty solid, but I had to stop and ask myself some of the hard-hitting questions the Private Gym site was asking me: Was my prostate really as healthy as it could be? Did I have supreme control over my bladder? Were my ejaculations "forceful" enough? Reader, I bought the gym.

What later arrived in the mail wasn't quite the Bowflex of pulleys and cables I'd imagined. The package contained a book, a DVD, a carrying case (for when I take my dick gym on vacation with me), and a rubberized snap bracelet to slip over the head of my penis with a 2.5-ounce weight attached to the bottom. There was also another 2.5-ounce weight I could magnet on to the first one once I had built up my love muscle a bit.

So I wasn't getting the high-tech Ivan Drago treatment. But if simple exercises worked for Rocky, they could work for my penis.

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I cracked open Male Pelvic Fitness, the 150-page tome in front of me, and started absorbing the words of Dr. Andrew Siegel, a physician, urological surgeon, and prolific health book author. His other titles include Finding Your Own Fountain of Youth: The Essential Guide for Maximizing Health, Wellness, Fitness & Longevity and Promiscuous Eating: Understanding And Ending Our Self-Destructive Relationship With Food. The text combined the claw-your-eyes-out-from-boredom dryness of an anatomy textbook with the slimy "Yeah, bro! You ready to smash?" vibes of a PUA subreddit.

But I wasn't here to read, dammit. I was here to pump iron with my dick! Eager to get started, I watched the instructional DVD, which vocally guided me through a workout plan from basic training through resistance training.

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Every other day, I squeezed and released my pelvic floor muscles for ten minutes at a time, sans erection, to build up my base strength. Private Gym said I was performing a bunch of different exercises, but really it came down to whether or not I was holding my squeeze for one second or three and whether or not I was squeezing or squeezing hard. I did this routine while crawling in traffic, while watching a movie, and while seated at cafes with nice families strolling by, blissfully unaware of how hard I was squeezing.

After the first week, I wasn't really noticing any of the DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness) I'd experience at the non-penile gym. Was this even working? Had I just shelled out $100 for a cock workout that didn't even work? I wasn't sure, but I pushed onward, and after a few weeks of basic training, I was ready to start using the weights.

Related: VICE visits Miami, Florida, to speak to one of the leading penis doctors in the country and find out what it's worth to get your penis operated on.

Women have the option of discretely going about their day carrying around Ben Wa balls or the like as a way of strengthening their pelvic floor muscles. I had no such luck when it came to my weight training. These weighted exercises required me to be pantsless and erect for their duration, with some mid-workout re-stimulations inevitably required. I live alone, but the idea (unlikely as it may have been) of the police or a burglar breaking down my front door and catching me in the act was enough for me to relegate all that undignified nonsense to the shower.

More squeezing. More releasing. Inevitably, I'd lose my hard-on after a few "reps" and have to joylessly stroke myself back to rigidity able to hold the weight. My dick seemed to know this ploy was not rooted in pleasure, and stubbornly refused to cooperate. Just get through these next few minutes, I coached it. I promise to reward us if we make it to the end. And so we did. But it was as perfunctory and boring a jerk session as you'd might imagine. And I had no way of telling if my orgasms had become any more forceful than before I set out on this path.

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After a month of training, it was time for an assessment. I asked a sex partner if she'd noticed any differences in my performance before and after.

"I mean, you were pretty fucking hard last time, but I also don't think we'd drank anything that night so it's hard to compare it to a previous time," she said. "Sorryyyy. I should've paid more attention to see if there was a difference."

I wasn't exactly imagining my dick was going to suddenly grow a bicep with a waving American flag tattooed on it like I was living in a Popeye bit, but finding out there was no discernible change in performance was a bit disheartening. Then again, maybe it was all a matter of perspective. Maybe my dick had already already been performing at the level of a Pumping Iron–era Schwarzenegger. Yes. That had to be it.

For the time being, I've retired the Private Gym to a place of honor beside my other work-out-at-home schemes in my coat closet, where it sits next to P90X DVDs and a doorframe pull-up bar. I'll continue to make myself go to the gym, however—at least those results are visible. And who knows? Maybe I'll keep flexing my taint during rush hour. LA traffic isn't getting better any time soon.

Follow Justin Caffier on Twitter.

Fancy an Octogenarian?: What It's Like to Be an 82-year-old on Grindr

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If there's one thing gay men recognize about their milieu, it's the rather severe ageism that pervades it. Profiles on sex sites often set strict guidelines around age: No one over 40, no one over 30, some even say no one over 25. Not only is being gay expensive—a new leather jacket is required every year—but it's also, apparently, a young man's game.

Thus Montrealer Chris Wilson—out and proud since the early '70s—is definitely a trailblazer. At the age of 82, he remains active on the sex and singles' scene in la belle province, cruising sites like Grindr, Adam4Adam, and Squirt. Wilson sat down with VICE to chat about what it's like to meet up online when you're an octogenarian.

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Chris Wilson. Photos by Keith Race.

VICE: When did you first get into sex sites?
Chris Wilson: About seven years ago. I think I got some spam, which interested me, and I went to a site called "Horny Matches." Everyone seemed to be really fake and never around. Then I saw an ad for Squirt. So I started Squirting! About five years ago I was visiting with a friend from Concordia, a hustler, who introduced me to Grindr. Very slowly I looked at it and it took me a while to get acclimatized. There are various codes you have to pay attention to, and ways that people communicate things. For me it's really important to have a sense of how distant people are, and Grindr does that. I'm happy to chat with people in Montreal, but to chat with people across the border, not so much, because there's so much scrutiny of people crossing the US border these days, I wouldn't want to end up on any watch lists. I don't do any chats with people in Ottawa, because it's too far and the city is too boring.

You weren't daunted by the ageism on Grindr? It seems like it's mainly younger people who use it.
When I first started on Grindr, there were a number of offensive gay men, who would say, "What are you doing on this site?" My response would be that I'm gay, that this is a gay site, and that gays come in all ages and sizes. I would say, "I've as much right to be here as you, and watch what you say because you'll be my age soon." I don't pick quarrels with users. Occasionally I see something offensive. If I see something about bestiality I will report it. Generally speaking, the people are more polite lately. I used to work for a volunteer help line, The Gay Line, in Montreal, and that gave me a handle as to how to deal with chatting online. I had chats with people on Grindr and ended up talking to them about how sad they were, and ended up counseling them out of suicidal talk.

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Have you found romance on these sites, or is it mainly about sex?
I wouldn't say romances, because I'm past the stage of looking for that. I have a straight roommate and we get along very well. But having a handsome straight roommate means I sometimes get horny and restless, and Grindr is good for that. I have four friends-with-benefits situations going on. One is from Sri Lanka, he's a nurse and comes over to my place every now and then. It's very relaxing. I met another friend from Lebanon.

Your sex life sounds like a bit of a UN tour.
Yes, it does! I have travelled a lot and like men from all over the world.

Do you visit sites other than Grindr and Squirt?
Adam4Adam and GayRomeo, too. The problem with GayRomeo is that I'm always being hit on from overseas. I get hit on by guys from India or Jamaica. I think when people see an older guy they think that they can get money out of me, or gain entry to Canada. My profile reads, "Fancy an octogenarian?" Occasionally, someone will ask me what an octogenarian is, and that's a good filter, so I don't get together with someone stupid. I also write, "I'm not your daddy, but I could be your dirty old uncle." That works, it gives them the message that I'm not really into being a sugar daddy—I don't want to support someone who would become my dependent. I get hit on by guys who have fond memories of being hit on by their dirty old uncles.

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Is there anything too kinky that you've been asked to do?
Sometimes I show pictures of my dogs. Once I was asked about bestiality. I report them right away.

Did you see the film Gerontophilia?
Yes. I teared up a few times. I think it was very well done. I think it appeals to the boy still lurking in old men. It was also illuminating. There's a lot of ageism in gay society, and I think it's important people talk about it.

Do any of these sites offer a seniors' discount?
No, not yet.

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Do you take Viagra?
I tried Viagra. I prefer Cialis, but it doesn't kick in until the next day, so I have to plan ahead. These pills work, but for me they're not necessary.

On your profile, included in your likes are "younger guys." I thought it was a good thing that you aren't into older guys as there can't be many guys older than 82 on these sites. Do you bump into other men your age anywhere online?
No. There are definite age groups on the sites. There are a number of guys in their 60s. Fortysomethings and 45s are very active. And then there are those in their 60s. I think it's a big turnoff when someone says they're lonely. Enjoy your solitude. There's a difference. I'm never lonely.

You seem to spend a lot of time online—you've got your phone on now to Grindr. So how often do you hook up?
About twice a month—that's my batting average. I'm not really a top anymore. With a great deal of persuasion I could be, but mainly I like to give oral or bottom. There are people who are quite happy with that, even with an older person. Sometimes if they had an early experience with an older person, they're comfortable with it. Some young people aren't that into their own age group. I'm happy to share my intimacy with them. I love culture, so sometimes I might just go to a concert with someone.

You came out a long time ago. How would you compare cruising then to now?
Coming out in the '70s meant going out to bars and people were often drunk. You could stay somewhere all night and not get picked up, or take someone home who you weren't sure of. Going online gives you a lot of options. Obviously, you have to figure out who's sincere and who's not, but once you do that, you can set your own parameters and filters, and meet people you're genuinely into. I find Grindr especially helpful when travelling. When I was in London, England, I got hit on by about 40 guys. I had sex eight times in seven days!

The British seem to have a real inter-generational thing going on.
Yes, they do.

So you really don't experience much ageism online?
I've seen "no old men" on profiles, or age limits. But I don't feel threatened or upset by that, because when I was younger I had exactly the same feelings. I didn't like older guys. I can respect that preference, but people should put it in a way that's polite and respectful.

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London, Ontario Was a Racist Asshole to Me

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Downtown London, Ontario. Photo via Flickr user phrawr.

In the four years I've spent in London, Ontario I've been called names like Ebony, Dark Chocolate, Shaniqua, Ma, Blackish, and Boo. I've encountered blackface on Halloween and been told to go back to my third-world country (twice). I've been pushed off the sidewalk by white kids. I've been humiliated by white guys shouting, "Look at that black ass!" as I walked down a busy street. I've been an ethnic conquest for curious white men. I've witnessed my boyfriend get called a nigger over 20 times, been called "you people" and been asked by white friends if it's okay to "use the N-word" around me while desperately trying to rap to Yeezus.

But, yes, after all that, I went back to Jack's a month ago, a charmingly shitty bar that reeks of bleach and tequila and where I spent most of my undergrad acquiring alcoholic gastritis (I graduated from London's Western University last June). And not even 20 minutes into an Ariana Grande song, I feel my left ass cheek fly way up. I turn around to see a white guy walking back to his table of cheering 20-year-old Justin Biebers.

I could have confronted them, but then I'd be that angry black girl. I could have slapped him, but after what happened to Aaron Ferkranus, a healthy, young 26-year-old who went into medical distress after being restrained by bouncers at Thorny Devil nightclub (a short walk from Jack's) and died this February, no black person in London is safe from a perfectly normal bar scrap. I could have also dumped my nice, cool beer on his young, receding hairline, but that would be a waste of $2.75. So instead, as I had been doing for the past few years in this city, I bit my tongue and allowed it.

Minutes later as I stood by the trough, a plaid-wearing white guy tried to introduce me to his only black friend.

"Isn't he good-looking?" he said. The black kid smiled. He looked like Urkel.

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The welcoming sign at a local bar. Photo by Eternity Martis.

I resisted the urge to tell this little fucker that just because he's black and I'm black, doesn't mean there's a love connection. I downed my beer and walked away, wondering why the hell I bothered coming back to London. Obviously nothing has changed, and this familiar feeling—this sinking, sickening feeling of uncomfortableness and humiliation was bubbling in my gut again, like it did every day I spent in this city. The lights and shitty music started to make me angry, and a random hand reached and grabbed my boob as I walked through the sweaty, jumping white kids who don't know how to dance. I searched through the crowd, looking for a black face—any face besides a white one. Only Urkel now. I was sweating and panicked. The buzz was gone. I couldn't be there anymore.

I called my ex-boyfriend, Amir*, who still lives in London. We haven't spoken in eight months. He asked where I was. "You already know," I said. "Now come and get me."

London for black people is like Harvey Dent's face: beautiful, white, and smiling until he turns to the right. For me, London is still the place that I call home, and yet it's a home that makes me feel unwelcome. And while some of the idiocy I experienced in London was unintentional ("I love black people!" "Your English is excellent!" "Yo girl, wa gwan?"), this ignorance has rotted London to its core, and has a long history of far-right ideologies stemming back to the mid-1800s.

London is an old white man in a Klan hat

Ironically, there was a time when London was considered one of the more accepting cities of black settlers. By the 1850s, London was an active little city that was home to some of the richest black settlers in Ontario, many of whom had come through the Underground Railroad as refugee slaves. But ex-slave Dr. Alfred T. Jones said that in London, there was a "mean prejudice" that couldn't be found in the States. By 1863, segregated schools were in the works, but a lack of funding crushed the dream.

Ola Osman, now a student at Western, tells me about growing up in London's school system. In Grade 7, she asked her white teacher why they weren't talking about black history. "His answer was, 'because it's not important,'" she tells me. A few days later, the same teacher put together a slideshow of brutalized slaves.

"A slide came up of a black man being lynched," Osman says. "My teacher pointed at the picture, and said, 'This, is a nigger.'"

Osman never reported it because she wasn't sure if it was an actual issue. "I was so young. I knew I was uncomfortable but I couldn't articulate why," she adds.

It's not surprising, considering the city's supremacist history. The Ku Klux Klan made their grand debut in London by 1872. A decade later, a group of white hoodlums burned down the house of a black man named Richard Harrison. More than a century after that, fearing we'd eat up all the white people, the white supremacist group, Northern Alliance, formed in 1997 and is still active today. The esteemed group even has its own mailing address on Richmond Row, the city's main street.

I often re-play an escape scenario in my head should I ever be waiting for a bus late at night across from their office. I think I'd pull a Tyler Perry in A Madea Christmas when she stumbles across a KKK meeting in a barn. She pounds the pavement running, tits flapping and all.

Luckily, I had no tit-flapping moments while I lived in London, although I did come face-to-face with a white supremacist/neo-Nazi at a Jewish friend's wedding (ironically, he was the best man). He seemed a little too eager to hold my hand during the Hora dance (I'll bet you Ebony porn is his favourite), although he tried to brush it off by calling me a nigger girl all night. I'd have been more afraid if he wasn't Persian and morbidly obese.

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Beautiful London in the winter. Photo by Eternity Martis.

White Pride marches freak me out more than a fat, sweaty Persian kid who's a convinced Aryanist. I was probably hungover on Mar. 24, 2012, when boneheads decided t'was a lovely day to show a little white pride. However, anti-racist protesters (thanks, y'all) scared them off.

If white pride marches are something entirely strange to you, you should also know that they are frequently sponsored through the generosity of the Southern Ontario Skinheads (SOS). Take, for example, this fucking idiot, who would "like to thank [SOS] for the invite, warm reception and hospitality." Basically, they flare-up in London like a pimple with roots.

When I speak to Barbara Perry, a professor of social sciences at UOIT specializing in hate crimes, she is not surprised. "London has a lengthy history of viable right-wing extremism that's been visible for much of the last two centuries," she says. "The fact that they don't have to hide says something."

London loves hate crimes

According to 2010 Statistics Canada data, London ranked fifth in all of Canada at 8.1 percent for police-reported hate crimes. In Ontario, Guelph ranked first at 15.2 percent, followed by Peterborough (12.3 percent) and Kitchener (10.5 percent). But need not worry, Londoners: Hamilton's black community remains the greatest target of hate crimes.

While the number is uncertain now, London newspapers covered the most amount of hate crimes from 1997 to 2000 of all of Ontario dailies. I found an 2002 Western Gazette article about a black female student who was punched in the face by a white guy after leaving a bar. The reason? She asked what his shirt said. The answer?"[T]he shirt says, 'I hate motherfucking niggers.'"

I've had eerily similar experiences, though minus the violence. Ten years after the Gazette article, a drunk arsehole asked me and my ex, Amir, where he and his friend could get food. When Amir answered, the drunktard told him to "shut the fuck up," then turned to me and said, "go back to your third-world country, you bitch" as he approached, promising to beat the shit out of me.

Naturally, I told him his father loved third-world country women, and turned to leave.

"Your boyfriend is a nigger," he yelled, and the Jerry Springer bell went off in my head. It took two guys to hold me back while his horrified friend pulled him away, apologizing.

Amir didn't flinch at being called a nigger; it was something he was used to since he started driving a cab two years ago to pay for school. Most of his nights consisted of being treated like shit by entitled drunk white boys.

But Amir told me white female students were worse. He'd let me listen through his phone. They would take off their panties, tell him they loved black guys, tried to grab said black guy's junk (once, a girl leaned and said, "What would happen if I sucked your dick right now?"), and would ask him to come inside. "One girl even got into the front seat against my will," he tells me. "When her friend started arguing with her, she said 'just let me be with a black man for 10 minutes.'"

Sounds like a dream? Mostly, they would call him a nigger, a fucking immigrant, beat him with their purses, make fun of his English, and threaten to tell the police he raped them if he didn't give them a free ride home.

Last October, Amir picked up two female students from Jack's. When he asked one of them to repeat the address, she said, "Do you not know how to speak English, negro?"

Her friend asked why she was being such a biatch, and she replied, "because they're so annoying."

But Amir is unfazed. "People think that we're shit, like you're somebody that came from the village yesterday," he says.

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A guy dressed up as a terrorist at Thorny Devil this Halloween. Photo by Eternity Martis

Racism at Western University

Western University's "zero-tolerance policy" for racism and sexism was part of the reason naive 18-year-old me decided to go there. But when I got there, I was the token black person that nobody wanted to talk to. White kids walked through me like I didn't exist.

During a class discussion on racism in my third-year, an offended white girl raised her hand and said, "Like, I don't get why we're still talking about slavery. Like, it's done. Get over it."

Like, that girl made the mistake of forgetting there two black girls in the class. We chewed her up (she tasted like Juicy Couture and stupidity), but—surprise!—she still didn't give a fuck about slavery.

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A popular local Facebook page known for racist posts.

White kids at Western were also dealing with a lot of stress this Black History Month.

On February 9, a student hacked the Recreation Centre's Twitter account and posted a tweet that said, "Fuck all niggers." It was taken down and the university has since apologized.

But it gets better, I promise.

Days after the Gazette published its Black History Month edition, a comment ran in the "Dear Life" section that read: "Why does it seem that the point of Black History Month has changed from celebrating black culture to making white people feel bad for being white?"

The day before I spoke to international first-year student Salha Hamad, she was walking back to her room in residence when she noticed the word "Nigga" scrawled on one of the clean, white walls. She wrote a post-it note condemning it, then taped it to the wall. When she came back hours later, the note was crumbled on the floor and stepped on. Almost two weeks later, the writing has just been painted over. "Like, how do you not see this?" she says.

London nightclubs aren't for everyone

Perhaps the biggest eye-opener to racism in the city was the recent death of Ferkranus on February 15 at Robinson Hall/Thorny Devil. According to the video footage, Ferkranus was restrained outside the club by bouncers after knocking a guy out around 3 a.m on February 14. He was unresponsive and taken off life support the next day.

A candlelight vigil for Ferkranuswas held on February 22, and a petition urging for transparency has over 1,700 signatures. Some in the black community have boycotted the club, also calling out Cobra, Jim Bob Ray's and Jack's for their ill-treatment of black people. A business owner known as "Freash" tells me since moving from Toronto to London 12 years ago, bartenders have refused to serve him or even let him in.

I can barely count the few times I've seen black men start a bar fight—and I partied almost every night for nine months straight. Every Thursday, black people would go to this event in the backhouse of a local bar. No surprise, it was the only night in the city that had scanners and pat-downs. Meanwhile, white guys would kick the shit out of each others, roofie girls in a nearby alleyway, and smoke weed, all right outside clubs and bouncers had the shits and giggles watching. What a coincidence that none of them died.

London makes me feel sad

But also of importance: how does London make us feel?

Hamad, who is originally from Tanzania, feels that racism has taken over her life since moving to London. "I'm anxious, I have heavy breathing. I have constant images of being attacked," she says. "Wherever I am, I'm always aware of where the doors are. I'm in constant fear."

Lwam Berhe, a Western student and vice-president of the Black Student Association, feels that she is carrying a burden by virtue of just being black. "It may not be your history, but they make it your history," she says.

I agree with Berhe. Growing up mixed race with my mom's Pakistani family, I suddenly took on the full heaviness of being black. In four years, I went from never thinking about race to seeing it everywhere. I've morphed from MLK into Malcolm X. I'm skeptical of white people. The world is no longer full of rainbows and unicorns as it once was, but now full of dead black kids and Klan hats.

But more than anything, I'm tired. I haven't met a black person in London who isn't. The comments, the glances, the denial, the jokes—are mentally exhausting.

I honestly don't know what can be done for the city. The people making progress in London are the very people experiencing the racism, and that's the biggest problem—the actual inhabitants don't care. Whether it's a banana peel thrown at a black NHL player or a city councillor's signs being vandalized with fried chicken and watermelon, Londoners have no shame, and it's embarrassing.

But in a strange way, London has shaped my identity. It's made me critical, strong-willed, educated, and most of all, experienced. It's where I became an adult, and where I made the most epic memories. But it's an asshole. A big, gaping, racist asshole that will shit you out once you're inside, back into the white porcelain pot called life, and flush you into the sewage tank with the rest of the shit, condoms, and dead goldfish. But I'd rather be down there than with the trash on land.

Follow Eternity Martis on Twitter.

What the Fuck Is the ‘Precariat,’ and Why Should You Care?

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Occupy Wall Street protestors. Photo via Flickr user Paul Stein

It's not news to anyone that the economy fucking sucks for pretty much everyone in the world who isn't a Koch. Since the financial meltdown of 2008, discussions about the 99 percent, wealth inequality, and the many related economic and social issues have been prominent. Those discussions, and the widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo underpinning them, have even leaked into the institutional political realm: an NDP government in Alberta, the Scottish National Party's surge in popularity, a staunchly left-wing government in Greece, and avowed social democrat Bernie Sanders is running—and is a credible candidate!—to be the US Democratic presidential candidate.

So it might seem that there's not much new to say about economic inequality; that we need to keep talking and working for change, but we already have all the critical information.

Guy Standing would disagree.

Standing, an economist and professor at the University of London, has done extensive work on economic inequality and how to fix it (he's also a founder and honorary co-president of the Basic Income Earth Network). Recently he's turned his attention to the growing numbers of precariously employed workers, and he's written two books about what he calls the "precariat."

Precarious work has been a growing portion of the labour force since globalization started taking off around the 1980s, but Standing says it really took off after 2008. And with the explosive increase in people who may be able to make ends meet today but have no long-term security, he told VICE that "we've seen a breakdown in the 20th-century income-distribution system, where profits and rental income are going to the plutocracy and elite. At the top, we've got a top one percent, who the Occupy movement portrayed. It's [actually] much smaller than that. But below them, you've got a salariat, people who've got long-term employment security.... But that group is shrinking. And the precariat, that's growing instead of the old working class, consists of people who are being told they must put up with unstable, flexible labour."

The precariat is similar to the blue-collar workers of yesteryear in that they earn less than what Standing calls the salariat, but they are unique in that workers in manufacturing jobs, for instance, tended to have job security, benefits, and often union protection (which played a large part in the presence of the first two). Today's precariat usually has none of that, and spans income and education levels, from sub-minimum-wage illegal migrant work and low-wage retail or service work to highly educated but contract- and freelance-dependent industries (like, ahem, journalism). Members of the precariat also, unlike their working-class forebears, have to put in an alarming amount of work that no one considers "work" or compensates them for.

"Because they're shifting in and out of short-term positions," Standing said, "they have to apply [for jobs], they have to keep up their CV, they have to send around their CV, they have to apply and apply again, and when they do apply for jobs they're often put through hoops of going through, you know, 15 procedures, like filling in aptitude tests, and going for interviews, and then going for more interviews."

Okay, so the precariat is a huge and still growing social class that spans the globe. According to Standing, estimates put the precariat at around 40 to 45 percent of the labour force in many countries, although he says recent research on Japan has concluded that it's more than half the labour force there. But what do we do about this bullshit state of affairs?

Luckily for the hundreds of millions of precariat workers around the world, Standing has also put some thought into ameliorating the massive, multi-dimensional inequality you face. His book A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens contains 29 demands aimed at providing the precariat with both the economic stability and political power to live comfortably and participate in society. Those demands include restructuring labour unions so that they can work for contract and other precariat workers; regulating flexible labour; ending means-testing for benefits; and reforming migration policies that are currently class-based.

One central demand Standing makes is for the establishment of a universal basic income. Having the Canadian government provide all citizens (or all residents regardless of citizenship status, if you want to get really radical) would allow people to live without fear of things like starvation and homelessness, and would actually, according to research done on the subject, lead to low-income people working more.

The current employment insurance system in Canada, which pays a portion of a person's last salary but ends payments once they've found work paying 20 percent more than their benefits, disincentivizes people from accepting work that might be temporary or with unstable hours. Getting a meager yet reliable amount from the government makes far more sense than taking a job whose hours you can't depend on—especially when you know that should your job end, it will be a month or more before you see any new benefit money coming in.

"In effect," said Standing, "the system for the precariat has a huge disincentive for people taking low-wage jobs and punishes them for doing so. That is thoroughly unfair."

In spite of the obvious unrest spanning the globe, most of the mainstream political parties worldwide have failed to address these issues in any meaningful way. "They're still opting to try to appeal to the concept of the middle class and are failing to understand the precariat," Standing said when VICE spoke to him a week ago, and that proved eerily prescient this week, when Justin Trudeau announced a tax break for the middle class.

There is still no serious discussion among the major parties in Canada of issues pertaining to the millions of part-time and "flexible" workers, and certainly no recognition that those workers form a distinct social class with distinct needs. However, the global shift toward recognizing economic inequality offers some hope for change. Whether mainstream parties begin to address precariat concerns or fringe parties attract unheard-of numbers of votes—as in Greece and, arguably, in Alberta—the centre, be it of the political spectrum or power, seems unlikely to hold.

Follow Tannara Yelland on Twitter.

VICE Vs Video Games: The ‘Destiny’ Sequel Needs to Actually Reward Our Curiosity

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When first I learned of Bungie's Destiny, it was like receiving a signal from another planet. My editor at the time had flown to Seattle to see the game—or, at least, various lavish concept artworks—up close, and I was handed the job of transcribing all the audio. With the online coverage embargo looming, I laid into emergency supplies of caffeine and Cheerios, sat up into the night and chewed my way through three or four hours of stagey, meandering disquisition about gameplay "pillars" and technical "breakthroughs," sprinkled with hushed allusions to the plot and setting. Voices in the dark, enthusing, hinting, against a celestial background hum of jet-lagged editors burning holes into their keyboards.

It was a typical reveal event in that very little was revealed. A flying squad of Bungie and Activision execs talked us through the broad strokes of the project—persistent online worlds, character classes, co-op focus, the idea of reclaiming the solar system from alien invaders—but there was no playable build, not even one of those much-derided CGI "target gameplay" demos to reassure attendees that Destiny existed anywhere save the inside of a PowerPoint presentation. As I listened, however, I became fascinated by the names of certain weapons, or rather, the cryptic, meme-ish turns of phrase that had somehow adhered to those weapons during the long journey from concept to implementation. "Pocket Infinity," "The Fate of All Fools," "Super Good Advice"—an arsenal of musty ciphers, spiraling around the unseen game like planets wobbling along the event horizon of an enormous black hole.

Where guns in most games are the most unromantic of objects, instruments of a player's bloodlust distinguished from one another by brittle questions of range, damage, and aiming speed, these felt like crystalized histories, pungent with tales of strife and tragedy. I wanted not simply to wield but to understand them, to know about the people who had once owned them, to solve the riddle of each gun's moniker.

At that stage in Destiny's publicity cycle, this was very much the point of the experience. An online shooter that has come to be celebrated for the cunning ways it persuades players to care about well-judged but unadventurous class variables and gear upgrades was hailed initially for its sheer mystique. Anything, we were told, could be waiting out there on the dunes of Mars or in the dripping, partly-terraformed foliage of Venus: the ruin of a starship scuttled during humanity's Golden Age, when many of the game's Exotic and Legendary items were forged; a party of fellow Guardians, locked in combat with some hectic starfish of a Vex war machine; a delectable firearm or two, propped in a corner for centuries.

While par for the course in the fantasy role-playing genre, this promise of discovery—true discovery, rather than a grubby, workmanlike process of "unlocking"—was an intoxicating contribution to the landscape of the first-person shooter. It got the blood flowing in ways no ever-so-grown-up reference to contemporary politics or roaring, over-compensatory fist-bump of a Call of Duty firearm could hope to rival. An entry from the Grimoire, Destiny's internet lore bible, sums Bungie's achievement up very nicely: "We have found new ways to weaponize curiosity—pathways into the darkness." Destiny manages this in part by turning weapons into curiosities.

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If Destiny is a game that elicits curiosity, however, it isn't an enterprise that rewards it. This is, it turns out, very much a game about unlocking and upgrading, about punching enemies until the desired flavor of loot falls at your feet. Beyond your first tour of each planet, enjoyment is to be derived from the internal journey of the character under your hand, from the slender gratifications of a loadout tuned to perfection after a dozen hours of repetitive graft. There's nothing wrong with this sort of slow-burn, acquisitive thrill, but for me it represents a betrayal of the pioneer ethic I heard expressed back in winter 2013.

On top of this, Bungie has piled timed activities that have the effect of creating a bizarre sort of in-game commute, as players traipse between the time-limited activities that lead to the most valuable upgrades and the NPCs who convert encrypted Engrams into treasures. Here's another bit from the Grimoire that encapsulates the tension between this quotidian trudge and the soaring language of the supporting fiction. "This wargear demands Ascendant Energy and Ascendant Shards—burning fragments of the universal fundament, earned through mighty acts of heroism," it bellows. And then, a touch apologetically: "Look for them in daily Story challenges and Raids."

In an odd way, I'm also saddened by the care with which Bungie has ironed out exploits and chinks as the community has uncovered them. This is standard practice for an FPS developer, and for good reason—it's hard to preserve a balance of power in competitive multiplayer if players are free to shortcut your progression system. But Destiny is primarily a cooperative game, which means that artificial gulfs between one loadout and the next are less of a bother, and "cheesing" a mission or foe (that's to say, beating it by seizing on a technical issue or design flaw) is often an activity that takes real teamwork and skill.

An effect of Bungie's fixes, well-meant though they doubtless are, is to remind us that the developer doesn't want players to delve too deep into the environments they're given, however loudly the narrative trappings bang on about the can-do spirit of life on the frontier. Exploration and investigation are encouraged only inasmuch as they follow in the footsteps of the designers. You're only allowed to probe so far.

Another and more straightforward criticism is that, up close, the fiction feels more evocative than elaborate. There's the suspicion that Bungie has merely cooked up a few crazy terms by slamming together bits of cultural baggage, tossing the resulting, sticky mess into the game in the confidence that nerdier diehards will do the donkey-work of putting two and two together (i.e. the actual process of composition). This might be less annoying if the tone weren't one of self-congratulation. There's something desperately smug about far too much of Destiny's writing—its pseudo-philosophical exhortations, its swaggering cult of warrior-heroism, its oily sense of its own grandiosity. It keeps reaching for crescendos it hasn't earned.

I think the critical issue, though, is that the lore doesn't form part of the play experience in any tangible way. The game's Grimoire is home to some nicely compact, stirring slices of context—an inventory carried out by a Fallen Dreg that ends in an outbreak of religious ecstasy; academic disputes over the origins of the Traveller, the Big Dumb Object responsible (well, if you believe the stories) for humanity's continuing existence; a dialogue between researchers who've realized that they may, in fact, exist as simulations within the Vex AI core they're studying. But you can't dip into any of that while you're out and about in the game, and the consequence is a series of undeniably beautiful landscapes that are as warm and smelly with secrets as a clockwork railway.

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There are any number of ways, many familiar from other releases, that the Grimoire might have formed part of the game. Bungie could have turned Grimoire entries into simple vidocs or audio diaries, perhaps played back on holographic displays as you tour the Tower, Destiny's social and customization hub. It could have made it so that viewing a Grimoire entry unlocks a secondary objective, like visiting a particular planet at a certain time to duel a high-level foe, as with Skyrim's prodigious library of skill and quest tomes.

One thinks of the witty environmental asides of a corridor adventure like Portal, or Metroid Prime's first-person scanner—a tool that tells you things about the planet's past, even as it teaches you how to negotiate it in the present. Bungie could have at least capitalized on the example of its very own Halo 3: ODST, in which a city's AI overseer tries to communicate with you by setting off car alarms and traffic signals as you search for the rest of your squad. The developer's failure to do any of this lends credibility to the rumor that the Grimoire was a last-minute addition, dropped in to prop up a storyline that consists of jumping through tedious hoops proffered by a world-weary Peter Dinklage.

The annoying thing about all this is that I suspect Destiny wouldn't have sold any better for engineering a more compelling relationship between the act of cranking out upgrades and the mouth-watering idea of reclaiming a dead civilization, planet by planet. While many were underwhelmed by the game's story and the reliance on repetition, a sizable core of players is firmly hooked. And if Destiny is fundamentally the same old grind, the art does a brilliant job of representing it as something nobler. The map screen, for instance, remains one of the most inspiring examples of UI design that I've laid eyes on, a sheath of ornamental cartography that transforms the interplanetary void into a delicately contoured, frozen ocean.

Still, if none of the above has proven crippling, these are obvious areas for improvement as regards the inevitable sequel—or even, an especially ambitious DLC pack. When I first heard Bungie talk about Destiny, I thought it sounded like a classic in the making. The reality isn't quite as captivating, but perhaps the developer's next communiqué from the abyss will remedy that.

Follow Edwin on Twitter.

We Asked a Military Expert How Scared We Should Be of an EMP Attack

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Electromagnetic pulses, or EMPs, usually show up in pop culture as a temporary way to disable electronics. In Ocean's Eleven, one knocks out a casino's power supply during a heist. In the Matrix movies, an EMP is a CGI energy blast that Morpheus uses to stop the Sentinels from attacking Zion.

In real life, however, EMPs are a potential threat to national security.

First imagined as a troubling after effect in the wake a nuclear attack, EMPs have recently reemerged as non-nuclear e-bombs that silently attack precious electricity. A burst of energy that fries electronic circuits within a blast radius, an EMP could theoretically knock out a power grid if it were large enough. That in turn could send a major city back to the Stone Age, or knock out a strategically significant military installation in an instant.

But is such a large EMP a plausible fear? Peter Pry, director of a bipartisan congressional commission called the EMP Task force, seems to think so. He went on Fox News this week to say that "nine out of ten Americans could die from starvation, disease and societal collapse, if the blackout lasted a year." Pry isn't the only one worried: In a letter to investors last year, billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Singer warned that EMPs are now the "most significant threat" to American security.

EMP scaremongering has been a longtime staple for the tinfoil hat crowd, with popular conspiracy blog ZeroHedge claiming that an electromagnetic pulse attack would be "one of the fastest ways to cripple America and end the dominance of the United States in world affairs."

But now, the US military is reportedly carting equipment into bunkers to shield it from EMPs. In April, some of the critical communications equipment at North American Aerospace Defense Command was moved into a bunker inside Cheyenne Mountain, a Cold War relic in Colorado that you might remember from the Matthew Broderick movie War Games.This was after the government had already disclosed a plan about a year ago to build a similar $44 million facility in Alaska for housing interceptor missiles.

Related: The Business of War

So how scared should we be? I wasn't sure, so I contacted a military analyst at the global intelligence firm Stratfor, the exquisitely named Sim Tack, to find out if we all need to buy EMP-proof iPhone cases, or whether EMPs are something we can put off studying until Skynet comes online.

VICE: First thing's first: Is an EMP a real weapon?
Sim Tack: It's not a work of fiction. It's an actual technology that exists. It's being played with in some capacity, and will potentially play a much greater role in future warfare. With the increasing importance of electronic circuits on the battlefield... There's only more and more reason to create weapons that specifically target networking ability and electronics dependence.

Has the US entertained the idea of making EMP weapons?
Yes. That's definitely something the US has looked into. EMPs were recognized as an effect of using nuclear weapons during test launches in the sixties. As with any type of natural force that is discovered, it became "Hey we can actually try and harness this power for military means."

And have other countries built them?
Different countries have experimented with EMPs. Russia has. There was some stuff in the media recently about North Korea getting some EMP technology from Russia, although that technology is somewhat limited. But the general idea of using EMPs in warfare? That's not just limited to the US.

Will a real EMP weapon work like the ones in The Matrix?
Well, an EMP overloads whatever weak circuits it can manage to overload, and basically destroys them, requiring that they be replaced by new electronic components to make that system functional again.

Right. And meanwhile in The Matrix it seems like the systems come back after a while.
That could potentially be what happens with hardened systems. Those might have the capacity to absorb an EMP, or work their way through that surge, and be operational again.

"Placing some explosives on the power lines coming out of that power plant would be a lot easier, a lot less complex, and a lot cheaper than building that EMP weapon."

How might someone do serious damage with one right now?
You might spend a ton of money and time generating an EMP near a power plant. But—for instance—placing some explosives on the power lines coming out of that power plant would be a lot easier, a lot less complex, and a lot cheaper than building that EMP weapon.

What would be an example of this "future warfare" you speak of, where EMPs might come into play?
The US has not really been focusing the development of its military capability on peer-to-peer conflict per se, so from that point of view, it hasn't been the main priority. If you look at the conflict in Eastern Ukraine... One of the things that's been interesting to see there was how the electronic element of warfare has played out.

So to be clear, the Ukraine-Russia conflict doesn't involve EMPs, but it's an example of a modern conflict that might have a use for them? How so?
[The Russians] started to jam Ukrainian communications, and tap into [them]. They started to jam the operations of drones that were observing the separatists and the Russians. Then as a countermovement, the Ukrainians have had to look into getting drones that are more hardened against jamming. At the same time they've had to try and restructure their communications, and tried to keep their combatants from using cell phones.

So EMPs might come into play when two very developed countries go to war?
Yes, and Eastern Ukraine is just a blip on the radar... Imagine the importance of that kind of time to disrupt the network-centric warfare of your enemy in actual warfare.

Do functioning standalone EMP weapons already exist?
I know that [the US has] built prototypes, and used those devices to test the hardening of other devices, so that they don't have to set off a nuclear explosion to test circuits against EMPs. Of course, those prototypes and test devices aren't in a format that you can simply drop over an enemy city tomorrow.

So I shouldn't be worried about Al Qaeda using one to knock out the power grid? Paul Singer seems to think I should.
It's not that EMPs are not a threat. It's just that—although the effect would be massive—currently they're not really a risk apart from nuclear strikes, so highlighting them as the greatest threat there is might not be entirely realistic.

But I've seen videos of people making them at home...
When we're talking about realistic versus unrealistic threats, currently generating an EMP with a nuclear weapon is the most feasible way to do it. Homebuilt EMP weapons aren't very feasible. The cost you would put into building such a system versus the benefit that you would actually gain is very, very impaired.

What's the main challenge stopping small militaries from using them?
Besides the weight, and the cost of whatever you use to generate that kind of electricity—a capacitor, a large amount of batteries, or whatever power generation method—the cost would be so high, but the damage you can do with it would be so limited, that other much cheaper methods might be more efficient when it comes to damaging the area that you're targeting.

OK, let's talk about how to defend ourselves from these things. What's "hardening"?
Hardening is designing electronic circuits to deal with the sudden power surge that comes from an EMP. That in some cases means using thicker, heavier conductors, or creating redundant circuits, or avoiding using sensitive elements within the circuit.

And how would I "harden" my electronics?
Basically, it's the same as protecting a circuit from power surges, but you're dealing with the fact that this kind of power surge affects every part of the circuit, rather than entering the circuit at one certain point.

And you really think we're likely to see the kind of warfare that would involve this kind of thing?
Well, we haven't reached Francis Fukuyama's "End of History" just yet.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.


We Blew It: A Time Line of Human Impact on the Planet

Ferguson Witness Dorian Johnson Got Arrested After Filing a Lawsuit Against the Police

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Police in Ferguson. Photo via Wikipedia

On Wednesday, Dorian Johnson sued former Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson and Officer Darren Wilson, as well as the municipality itself, for assaulting him, inflicting emotional distress, and violating his constitutional rights when Wilson shot and killed his friend Michael Brown last summer. In the suit, Johnson, who was 22 at the time of the incident, asked for at least $25,000 in damages.

In their lawsuit, Johnson's attorneys quote heavily from the US Department of Justice report that found local cops and city officials colluded to use Ferguson's black population as a revenue source by saddling them with questionable charges and tickets. For instance, they mention that African Americans account for 67 percent of the Ferguson population but comprised 93 percent of arrests between 2012 and 2014.

But within hours of the lawsuit being made public, Johnson got arrested in nearby St. Louis.

An anonymous St. Louis Police source told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that officers were called to investigate a large gathering of men on Wednesday afternoon around 3:30 PM. One of these men allegedly grabbed the arm of a police officer to prevent him from patting down another man with a large bulge in his waistband. When Johnson then yelled at the officer, he was arrested, and is now being charged with resisting or interfering with arrest. (Johnson also allegedly dropped cough medicine mixed with a narcotic on the ground, but rumored drug charges seem to have gone away after the drink was found to contain no drugs, according to the paper.)

Johnson is an especially contentious figure in one of the most explosive American crime stories of the last decade. On August 9, according to his own witness testimony, Johnson met up with Brown, a new friend of his, to smoke a blunt. The latter stole a pack of cigarillos from a convenience store, and on the way home, they got into a confrontation with Wilson.

There remain plenty of differing accounts about exactly what happened next. Johnson maintains the cop grabbed Brown from inside his police car, starting the altercation that left his friend dead.

However, a grand jury declined to indict Wilson, and a separate federal probe concluded that, contrary to Johnson's account, Brown's hands probably were not up when Wilson shot him.

Of course, the news of Johnson's arrest invited speculation in some corners of the internet that it had something to do with the lawsuit. Ramsey Orta, the man who filmed the video of Eric Garner's death on Staten Island this past summer, was arrested for allegedly carrying a handgun after that story blew up, and Orta's supporters insists there's a smear campaign against him.

Johnson's attorneys, on the other hand, did not return requests for comment. As of this writing, it's unclear if their client is still in police custody.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Toxic Whiteness: Ivory Coast Has Banned Skin-Whitening Creams

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Photo via SIA KAMBOU/AFP/Getty Images.

Skin lightening is a big thing in Africa. In Nigeria 77 percent of women use lightening products, but it's also a regular part of beauty regimens in Togo, South Africa, Senegal, and Mali, where 59, 35, 27, and 25 percent of women use them, respectively.

Yet despite their popularity, many of these skin-lightening creams contain stuff that can kill you. That in mind, yesterday Ivory Coast banned creams containing cortisone, hydroquinone (in concentrations over 2 percent), mercury, or vitamin A and its derivate. According to Ivory Coast authorities, the health risks associated with the creams can include increased risk of diabetes, hypertension, and skin cancer, which, given their popularity, could transform a beauty trend into a public health crisis.

"The number of people with side effects caused by these medicines is really high," local pharmaceutical authority Christian Doudouko told the Guardian.

Skin lightening products are also hugely popular in Asia, with the largest global market being in India, where over 60 percent of women (and a growing number of men) consumed 233 metric tons of the products, including vaginal bleaching washes, in 2012. That year, the $400 million-plus market outsold fucking Coca-Cola. And the trend is growing worldwide—at a rate of 20 percent per year in India, but by similar rates in other countries.

In Asia, the preference for light skin and use of whitening products dates back hundreds to thousands of years, and is most often attributed to the connection between fairness and wealth and luxury (allowing one to stay out of the sun). In Africa, however, if the practice has ancient roots they are largely unknown or unrecognized popularly. Local psychologists describe the trend as an expression of self-hatred and inferiority stemming from colonial racial attitudes, reinforced by local and global media stereotypes and aggressive modern cosmetics industry ad campaigns associating wealth and status with light-to-white skin.

"Black people are seen as dangerous," Jackson Marcelle, a Congolese hair stylist living in South Africa who regularly uses skin lightening creams, told the BBC of these stereotypes in 2013. "That's why I don't like being black. People treat me better now because I look like I'm white."

Most skin whitening products produced by major global corporations, if used in moderation, appear to be safe. These creams use well-tested compounds like arbutoin, kojic acid, niacinamide, retinoic (derived from vitamins or things like bearberry or licorice) to either inhibit melanin production or slough off top layers of darkened tissue, revealing lighter natural skin.

But many cheaper products made by smaller companies (and common knock-offs of major firms' cosmetics) use the ingredients banned by Ivory Coast as they tend to be cheap and effective, despite the fact that they are all well-linked to major health problems. Cortisone and similar steroids can thin skin, prolong the healing time for wounds, cause hypertension, create or exacerbate blood sugar issues, lead to stretch marks, or suppress natural steroid production. Hydroquinone, although it can be used in high concentrations to treat eczema, psoriasis, and vitiligo, can lead to anything from redness and irritation to permanent skin color change or skin cancer when used without doctor supervision. Mercury, an especially common melanin-blocker, is especially easily absorbed through the skin, leading to brain damage, organ failure, or a variety of cancers if used for prolonged periods of time. And a new product not banned in Ivory Coast but increasingly popular in India, glutathione (usually used to help patients in chemotherapy), is associated with thyroid and kidney disorders and skin necrosis, among other health conditions.

Due to a lack of research on skin whitening product usage, and the extreme variability in the cosmetics themselves, it's hard to make definitive statements about the scale of the risks these products pose. However we do know that in India, a 2014 study by the local Center for Science and Environment found that at least 44 percent of the products on local shelves contained harmful materials (32 of them contained toxic levels of mercury). A 2002 poisoning scare in Hong Kong revealed that some of these products contain 9,000 to 65,000 times the acceptable dosages of mercury. And a 2000 BBC interview with dermatologists found that some believed up to half of their patients suffered from problems related to skin lightening creams, of which they used between one and two bottles per day over the majority of their bodies. It's also telling that the British Skin Foundation recently found that 16 percent of the UK's dermatologists believe that skin whitening products are never safe, and 80 percent believe they should only be used with doctor supervision.

Other nations have banned skin lightening creams in the past, including Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa. In 2006, the US Food and Drug Administration tried (but failed) to institute a blanket ban on all over-the-counter whitening products, even those with safe ingredients.

Yet these bans have never been especially effective. In Africa, black markets keep a steady supply of dangerous skin whitening products flowing into local markets on the cheap to satiate continued demand against unwitting or unconcerned consumers. And even in America, the scale of poorly labeled cosmetics imports overwhelms inspectors—in 2010, the Chicago Tribune launched an investigation of 50 over-the-counter skin creams found near their offices or ordered online which revealed that over 10 percent contained unacceptable levels of mercury.

This precedent suggests that mere bans like that promoted by Ivory Coast this week will not be enough to overcome the health risks of skin lightening products. Instead, nations will have to find ways to cut back on the massive levels of demand that incentivize the creation and importation (slash inundation) of cheap and dangerous cosmetics. There are signs that such measures are coming into effect in India, where a major Bollywood actress launched a highly visible Dark Is Beautiful campaign in 2013 and where the self-regulated Advertising Standards Council of India decided to ban ads depicting dark skin as negative or inferior to light skin in 2014. Yet whether these measures will manage to take a cut out of that nation's massive skin lightening market and then prove exportable to other nations like Ivory Coast remains to be seen.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

The UK General Election Result Will Probably End Up Changing Britain Forever

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Photo of Prime Minister David Cameron by Harry Metcalfe via Wikipedia

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

When the BBC announced their exit poll at 10 PM last night as polling stations across the country closed, the results they projected were nothing short of a shock. While survey data in the days leading up to the election had predicted that the Conservatives would be the largest party in parliament, nothing had hinted at the size of the lead they now seemingly held.

Labour looked fucked. Any chance Ed Miliband had of forming the next government was negligible, with his primary concern being political survival as Labour leader.

However, perhaps the biggest story of the night was in Scotland, with the SNP taking nearly every seat north of the border. When the final results came in, they had won 56 out of 59 seats. To put that in context, they won just six in 2010.

And it is there, in Scotland, where the vast majority of Labour's losses have been incurred. Alongside that, they have failed to make any headway in England and Wales. Everyone assumed ex-Lib Dem voters would head for the center-left embrace of Labour, but many voted Tory. Just as the rising UKIP vote seems to draw upon former Labour voters as much as Conservative ones, so too were Liberal Democrats more right-wing than many previously realized. Those two factors account for Miliband's night to forget.

While in the short-term that bodes well for the Conservatives, in the longer-term it means political union between England and Scotland will be put under more stress than ever before. At no point in the history of British democracy have the two nations voted so differently, with the SNP enjoying the most impressive success of any party in the postwar period, and all on an anti-austerity ticket that refuses to spend £100 billion on replacing Trident. When you compare that to England, where UKIP and the Conservatives seem to have won around 50 percent of the popular vote between them, it's difficult to see how such difference can be reconciled without major constitutional reform. You can't have one nation backing austerity and another panning it without something breaking.

While the referendum on Scottish independence was only last year, expect concessions to the SNP now that the Tories are back in—probably on a major devolution of powers.

WATCH: The New Wave - Conservatives

Just as few rises have been as meteoric as that of the SNP last night, few falls have been as catastrophic as that of the Liberal Democrats. The party won 57 seats in 2010, but only eight this time round. Some of their safest seats in the country have fallen in the process, from Vince Cable to Simon Hughes, Lynn Featherstone and Danny Alexander. Indeed, the only real Liberal Democrat of any stature to remain standing, if bloodied, is Nick Clegg, who saw his majority in Sheffield Hallam whittled down from 15,000 to 3,000. In a short speech after that victory the deputy Prime Minister strongly hinted that he would resign as leader of the party.

While its easy to see the result as a business-as-usual Tory victory, it is anything but. On the one side are UKIP and the Greens, who could see millions of votes leading to only a handful of seats; on the other is a party, the SNP, which is the greatest democratic challenge to Westminster politics since the electoral success of Sinn Fein in 1918. Yesterday's election was only the start, and on the other side of what looks to be days—if not months—of deadlock and negotiation, lies electoral and constitutional reform. What, and to whose advantage remains unclear.

What we can say is that because of how we voted, from our membership within the EU to even the political union of our country, Britain is likely to look very different in a few years time.

Follow Aaron on Twitter.

I’m Going to Hell Because I Played SimCity Like an Asshole

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