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Sex, Drugs, and Luxury: The Life of a Bellboy at a Five-Star Hotel

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Photo via Flickr

This article originally appeared on VICE Spain.

You've probably seen me hundreds of times: standing patiently in the background of some important economic summit, opening a car door under a hail of paparazzi flashes, sneaking the main character of a 90s movie into some VIP room so they can chase their unrequited love. Yeah, that's me: the bellboy.

It's my job to see and hear everything. I am aware of every little detail of our customer's personality so I know exactly what they want—oftentimes before they do.

I'm not going to lie. It's a job like no other. I show up half an hour early for my nightshift so I can take care of the things you have no idea need to be taken care of. Believe it or not, we aren't just mannequins that stand frozen in the corner waiting for you to ring a bell. There's a whole lot more going on in the shadows.

I remember my first night on the job. It was hectic. We had a bunch of Saudis staying at the hotel. Lavish businessmen, of the "nouveau riche" type, who had booked half a floor for themselves. They'd just put their families to bed, when I arrived. It wasn't the first time that the hotel had such guests but it was the first time I had to deal with them personally. My boss told me that I needed to stay by the phone to field all requests, jokingly assuring me there'd be more than a few.

And there were. They called looking for blondes, brunettes, and redheads—there would be nobody sleeping alone that night. It only took a few hours for the six rooms to go through 50 bottles of champagne. Of course, all of this happened in total discretion—no one knew what was happening in those rooms other than the people inside them and me. That night I realized I had found my dream job.

Another time, a well-known Spanish businessman showed up. He'd recently married a gorgeous, famous actress who was pregnant with their first child. I remember him telling his wife that he'd go to the terrace to smoke a cigarette but what he actually did was rent a private room so he could get pissed with his mates and partake in all manner of activities that his wife shouldn't know about. I guess he must have even asked the drug dealer to stick around for a few drinks because the guy was in there for a while. Naturally, I stood guard in the hallway—it's a key part of my job to monitor and record any movement outside the room. For the guest's "safety," of course.

After having worked for hotels for a while, I'm pretty confident in saying that I've seen it all. I've met kings and queens, male prime ministers with a serious high heel fetish, and closeted homosexual singers who dare to break character during their stay. But those who I really like are the more anonymous customers—people who have the freedom to indulge in whichever fantasy they want without having to worry about what public outcry.

For more on partying, watch our doc 'Big Night Out: Ibiza':

For instance, not long ago I was busy catching up on some necessary (read: fucking boring) work, when a customer arrived. She was quite obviously wasted:

"I have a reservation in my name. Here's my ID," she said.

"Welcome, Mrs. Drunkard. How was your trip?"

"Well, just look at me."

I'm just the bellboy so normally, I don't check people in. If the concierge is busy, I try to entertain the guests a little until my colleague is ready to deal with them. That obviously wasn't going to be good enough this time.

"Bring the most expensive bottle of champagne you have to the room. My husband will tip you when he arrives," she demanded.

Yes ma'am. I quite like it when guests stop seeing me as some useless piece of junk or a glorified baggage mule. It's great when they actually consider me as someone who's interested in helping them have the night of their lives.

I wasn't at all surprised when she called me on the special number reserved for VIPs instead of calling the front desk. I knew she was in need of some vitamins to keep the night going. It goes without saying that I'm no dealer, but my clients' welfare and experience is my top priority, so what else could I do?

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/GD4u4sIjHmY' width='100%' height='360']

More recently, I had a trio come into the hotel. The one who seemed to be in charge was a tall man in his 50s—rather attractive. He'd brought what I thought were his two kids with him. A girl with beautiful blue eyes and long brown hair and a guy, who I figured was her brother.

I carried their suitcases up to their room and put some house music on the TV as per their request. I noticed their beds—a single and a double—and quickly began to realize that this probably wasn't a family. Well, at least, not a normal one. They asked me to unlock the windows—which always remain closed—so I needed to run downstairs to fetch a key. When I returned less than five minutes later, it was obvious they'd already kicked the party into action. The young girl was running around in her underwear, while her "brother" barely had any clothes on either. At least the older guy was holding it together in a way. It took another 15 minutes before the whole corridor could hear them moaning with pleasure.

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Generally speaking, things calm down as the night goes on. An air of peace descends on the hallways as the rooms' inhabitants drift off to sleep. It's that very calm that lets me know I've done a good job. Everyone is satisfied and tucked in.

It's around that time of the night, when the morning shift start clocking in to take care of breakfast, fix the things that I haven't had time to, and set up for the day. It's time for me to call it quits. Quite often, as I'm walking home, I try to predict what sort of debauchery the following night will bring, but it's always impossible to guess.

That's probably why I love my job.



The Mexican Town That Bashes Piñatas Full of Live Animals

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This article originally appeared on VICE Mexico.

Warning: Some of the below images depict violence against animals.

Every year, without fail, the locals in the Yucatán city of Citilcum,celebrate a tradition known as Kots Kaal Pato. Basically, it's a day when the whole town puts on their best clothes, gathers around a huge city center scaffolding and then proceed to kill a whole bunch of innocent animals, mostly for the lols.

Kots Kaal Pato isn't actually that different from the Mexican tradition of piñatas, only instead of filling colorful paper-mache figures with candy, people fill them them with live animals—or vermin, as they're called—that the town's children have rustled up. For the most part that means iguanas, but the game's most sought-after stuffing is an endangered marsupial called an opossum.

Then, just like with a regular piñata, people take turns at beating the holy crap out of the toy with sticks. Unfortunately, the animals that survive the initial shovel whacking don't tend to last much longer. If they somehow miraculously escape the festive deathtrap, the crowd will catch them and trample them to pieces.

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After they've exhausted their opossum supply, the people of Citilcum bring out a duck, the day's guest of honor. The bird is tied up and hung from a makeshift wooden structure so contestants can clamber over each other in an attempt to try and grab it. Whoever manages to catch it wins.

Obviously, the duck dies instantly when its neck is broken but it can take quite a while for the champion to tear the bird's head off—which is naturally what people are encouraged to do. The audience gets completely splattered in blood as they cheer on this rather morbid spectacle. They're not bothered, though. Shockingly, they seem to love it.

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Given that it's such a big event for the town, it's a little strange that no one present was capable of explaining the origins of the tradition to me. Not even the village elders.

"We don't know where this tradition comes from. I was taught by my parents, and my parents from their parents and so on. It used to be done in a large kapok tree nearby, but in 2002—when Hurricane Isidore hit Yucatan—the tree fell," recounted Idelfonso Tec, an elderly gentleman who was born and raised in Citilcum.

For more on Mexican tradition watch our doc on the life of supposed saint, El Niño Fidencio:

Since then, the celebration has taken place in a park right beside the city's municipal buildings.

Freddy Poot Sosa, a Mayan culture researcher, seemed equally confused by the event. "I had no clue that such a celebration existed, I guess it must be a very local and exclusive tradition," he told me.

Nobody may know where this all started, but one thing is for sure—Kots Kaal Pato is something still happening in 2015.

We Talked to the Dude Who Plays a Flame-Throwing Guitar in 'Mad Max: Fury Road'

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We Talked to the Dude Who Plays a Flame-Throwing Guitar in 'Mad Max: Fury Road'

Comics: The Honeycomb Rabbits - 'General Woundwort'

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Check out Steven's Instagram, Tumblr, and his online shop.

Does New York City Really Need Hundreds of Cops Devoted to Fighting the Islamic State?

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Photo via Flickr user mpeake

Since September 11, 2001, New York City has left the rest of America in the dust when it comes to assembling a massive counterterrorism apparatus.

Known as the the New York Police Department (NYPD) SHIELD program, the extent of the city's Counterterrorism Bureau's power can be seen everywhere, from the M16-strapped Hercules units stationed at train hubs like Grand Central and Penn Station, to the Critical Response Vehicles that are fixtures at protests and major public events all over the city.

So when NYPD Commissioner William J. Bratton announced on the radio Sunday that he wants 450 cops to fight the Islamic State, he wasn't saying anything particularly shocking so much as latching on to the latest threat.

"I'm going to put another 450 police officers—if we get the approval... into our counterterrorism operations to increase the ability of our officers to protect critical sites around the city," Bratton said, according to the Daily News.

But with a bevy of counterterrorism initiatives that can often seem more dystopian than practical, it's not easy to distinguish what's necessary to protect New Yorkers, and at which point it veers into overkill. There are already about a thousand cops assigned to the terrorism beat in New York City, and another 350 in charge of monitoring protests. Are 450 more cops really necessary to fight the emerging Islamic Caliphate?

"Once again, there are questions as to who does NYPD oversight and whether they are spending existing resources prudently," Eugene O'Donnell, a professor at CUNY John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a retired Brooklyn cop and prosecutor, told me in an email. "Beyond that, what are the details about how these officers would be deployed? The Department has said it has 1,000 officers deployed in anti-terrorism roles already. Does anyone know their roles and the results we are getting?"

Related: How does the NYPD compare to Ferguson's police department?

Since Bratton was appointed commissioner in January 2014, he has stressed counterterrorism as his top priority, as did his predecessor, Raymond Kelly, who— tellingly—was in the running for the Secretary of Homeland Security job at one point. But Bratton has done things a bit differently. While Ray Kelly's force basked in post-9/11 overreach, like spying on Muslims and baiting informants, Bratton has decided to streamline the Bureau's efforts and boost community outreach.

It's kinda like going from George W. Bush to Barack Obama—the overall strategy is the same, but the tactics used to achieve those ends have undergone a cosmetic and tonal shift.

And though the specific groups that are supposedly threats to the country have changed—it's safe to say the Islamic State is the new al Qaeda—the idea that America as a whole and New York in particular are in danger has remained the same. With the death sentencing of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev fresh in our minds, the terrorist menace lingers in the popular imagination. After the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, Bratton told a roomful of reporters, myself included, that the event was "very concerning." And at the ASIS Security Expo in Manhattan last month, I watched the Commissioner tell the crowd that we were living in a new world of threats that demand new and improved strategies to keep New Yorkers safe.

On the radio this week, Bratton reiterated that urgency. "We need to be very concerned about terrorism," he said. "That threat has expanded significantly in the now 16 months I've been police commissioner."

Even O'Donnell, who called himself a skeptic, admitted that "the threat of young Americans going overseas to be radicalized is quite real." It's not crazy to believe that Islamic State really does threaten New York City—recently, an Islamic State fighter told VICE co-founder Shane Smith that the NYC subways were a target. After all, three Brooklyn men were arrested in February for allegedly plotting to join the Islamic State, and another two women—possibly influenced by al Qaeda—were arrested in Queens for allegedly planning to build a bomb just last month. (It's worth remembering that just because the feds arrest someone for flirting with the Islamic State, they also often prod suspects into taking action with undercover officers.)

But these arrests were led by the FBI, an agency that—crazy as it sounds—is smaller than the NYPD, which now counts about 35,000 officers in its ranks. Also involved was the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), an interagency collaboration between municipal police forces and the feds that serves as just another symbol of how intertwined local cops and the upper rungs of the national security state have become.

Watch: Journalist Radley Balko on the militarization of America's police.

At that same security conference at which Bratton spoke, Naureen N. Kabir, a senior intelligence research specialist in the NYPD Counterterrorism Bureau, told a seminar room that the department was hard at work beefing up security. A maritime unit is being built to detect drones. Open-sourced data from social media is continuously analyzed around the clock, to keep the force aware of any "lone wolf" threats. And another initiative is tasked with monitoring several thousand cameras installed across Lower Manhattan.

So again, it's not easy to discern what 450 more cops would actually do in the grander scheme of things.

"Whenever NYPD wants to expand programs or practices, it's never clear to us what exactly the role of these additional... officers are in the fight to counter terrorism," Linda Sarsour, the head of the Arab-American Association of New York and a well-known critic of police practices, told me. "How will we ensure that the NYPD will not expand unwarranted surveillance and targeting of American Muslim communities in New York City and beyond?"

VICE reached out the NYPD for comment regarding the intended use of the hundreds of additional cops, and have yet to hear back. Until then, the precise focus of this proposed Islamic State squad remains murky, as does the fate of the NYPD's program to spy on Muslims. (Although Bratton loudly disbanded a centerpiece of that surveillance scheme, the city is still defending the program's legality in court.)

Regardless, the "approval" Bratton mentioned will have to come from Mayor Bill de Blasio and the City Council. Last month, Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito called for the hiring of 1,000 more cops in her proposed budget, although she didn't tag any of them explicitly for going after the Islamic State. Mayor de Blasio balked at the request and didn't include it in his executive budget. So this 450 figure from Bratton is presumably meant to be a compromise: fewer cops, with a more specific mission. The proposal could corner the mayor given the way our politics works; being blasé about national security is just not cool.

Final budget negotiations are set to wrap up by late June. A budget spokesperson for the mayor's office pointed to recent comments made by de Blasio in which he appeared open to hearing out the other parties. Meanwhile, a Council spokesperson told VICE that they look forward to hearing more about the proposal at the next budget meeting slated for May 21. But perhaps because being terrified of the Islamic State is now an American pastime, Bratton seems to think it's just a matter of time before he gets his new unit.

"Politics is the art of negotiation," he said on Sunday. "I think there's going to be common ground.

Follow John Surico on Twitter.

VICE Vs Video Games: Why EA’s ‘Star Wars’ Games Need to Betray the Fans

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

As you go about your business today—unmolested, one would hope, by excitable people dressed as lanky alien teddy-bears and Nazi astronauts—spare a thought for the men and women of DICE, creators of the Battlefield shooters and the forthcoming Star Wars: Battlefront (pictured above).

When last I saw them, the studio's top creatives were sandwiched between Lucasfilm moguls on a stage in Anaheim, crisping gently in the radiation clouds of joy and frenzy given off by a thousand-strong audience of lifelong Star Wars nutters. An audience that all but threw up over itself at talk of a downloadable map set on a planet that features in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, emitting hoarse sobs of "OH MY GOD" when it transpired that, yes, there are speeder bikes in the new game and yes, you can indeed smash them into trees.

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'Star Wars: Battlefront' reveal trailer.

An audience ready to shed blood at the slightest mishandling of Lucasfilm's universe, and armed, what's more, with a fearsome assortment of homebrew blasters and lightsabers—hand-tooled batons of solid plastic, that is, not those weak-sauce telescopic blades they sell in Toys "R" Us. As a reformed Star Trek aficionado, I've always been a little wary of the Force's disciples, but at that moment, in the heart of the crowd, I was terrified of them. "We're one Jar-Jar joke away from a riot," I thought, sinking into my seat. "Perhaps today is a good day to die."

DICE, a subsidiary of Electronic Arts, has more than cosplayer blowback to worry about when it comes to Star Wars: Battlefront, of course. The new game will serve partly as pre-launch marketing for The Force Awakens, which has been trumpeted as the franchise's second coming in light of its director's incredibly successful (though divisive) reworking of Star Trek. It's the first in a series of Star Wars games from EA, and the first Star Wars game to leave the hangar since Disney scuttled Lucasfilm's old game division LucasArts after acquiring the company for roughly $4 billion in 2012—junking the highly anticipated Star Wars 1313 and various other titles in the process.

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'Star Wars 1313' did look pretty cool.

The pressure from on high may never have been greater, even in the absence of crusty old patriarch George Lucas—and DICE appears to have responded, like many a licensed game developer, by applying itself reverently to the look and feel of the movies while sticking firmly within the narrative and thematic boundaries laid out by their creators.

The new Battlefront allows you to blast Rebels and Stormtroopers on maps based on set-piece battles from the original trilogy—showdowns with Imperial Walkers over the glacial wastes of Hoth, wet work in the pine forests of Endor. The old props, costumes and sets have been photographed and modeled with an exactness that borders on the slavish, while the gunplay walks a careful line between the quasi-realistic military tactics of Battlefield and the looser handling of the original Battlefront titles on PS2 and original Xbox. There's no traditional single player campaign to speak of, and thus no risk of the game treading on the toes of a past or present movie scriptwriter.

It's a deeply conservative project, long story short, and I'm in two minds about that. On the one hand, DICE's taste and talent for photorealism speaks for itself. If you're going to transplant a movie's scenarios and visual texture into a video game, these are the people to call. On the other, a sin shared by many of the worst Star Wars adaptations is that they're too subservient to the film trilogies, to the more obsessive fans and to the claustrophobic creative politics of the Lucasfilm empire. The best of the bunch, by contrast, are those that strike out into uncharted territory, emerging from Lucasfilm's shadow not as devotees, but collaborators.

Related: We sat down with the director of 'Mad Max: Fury Road,' George Miller

I'm thinking principally and predictably here of BioWare's Knights of the Old Republic, one of the finest role-playing games of all time, and its successor, a rushed but spectacular effort from Obsidian Software. I'll admit to not having completed either—I had my hands full with landmark experiences like Sonic Spinball and Jedi Power Battles, obviously—but I've played enough to know that their achievement is to step away from the movies, delving into (or inventing) aspects of the fiction that had never been aired on cinema screens.

Among other things, KOTOR rewound the timeline a few hundred years to show us clashes between entire legions of Jedi and Sith, sarky assassin droids, and a potted history of Luke Skywalker's home planet Tatooine, as told by the Tusken Raiders. In a move that surely had many a Light Sider spluttering into his herbal tea, KOTOR 2 played with the notion that a Jedi's true enemy isn't the Sith but the tyrannous ebb and flow of the Force itself. Blasphemy, right? And for that reason, utterly fascinating.

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Artwork from 'Knights of the Old Republic.'

Creative departures don't have to be as grand as those above. It can be as much a case of drilling down into what we already know, as 1313 threatened to do—literally—with Coruscant, the planet-sized capital of the Old Republic. Take the Jedi Knight series and, in particular, 2003's Jedi Academy. It is, somehow, the only game ever to deliver lightsaber duels that are genuinely delightful, building out the films' often-wobbly choreography into a surgical matrix of stances, evasive moves, saber types, and Force powers. The result has been a competitive multiplayer community of unnatural longevity—skirmishes still occur in the shadowy corners of the internet, such as this desperate clash between Jonah Hill and an unusually nimble Stormtrooper.

Where DICE's game is a work of tremendous caution, these games at least feel like the work of designers who aren't totally in thrall to a distant, ruling council of Hollywood executives. Perhaps that's why they've all been stricken from the canon retrospectively. In April of this year, Lucasfilm announced that all existing expanded universe content—that's to say, the stuff that doesn't form part of either movie trilogy—is no longer to be considered part of the official chronology.

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The second official teaser for 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens.'

This is meaningless inasmuch as it doesn't, of course, deny you the ability to play and enjoy these games, and you can absolutely make the case that after several decades' worth of spin-offs and adaptations, the franchise is in serious need of a haircut. But the rigor with which Lucasfilm has reset the gauges and cleared the stage casts a bit of a shadow over the games that will form part of the canon, amongst them the unannounced titles in development at two further EA-associated studios, Mass Effect HQ BioWare and Battlefield Hardline makers Visceral.

Those are good outfits, Hardline's middling reception notwithstanding, and what little we know of their projects is tantalizing. Visceral is said to be putting together a third-person action-adventure starring Han Solo, with Uncharted and Naughty Dog veteran Amy Hennig on board to write the script—teaser images on Twitter (see below) hint at a prequel recounting how the Millennium Falcon's captain turned to piracy after a career in the Imperial Navy. This seems a premise that demands a certain amount of artistic license—but will there be room to maneuver, or will Visceral's effort emerge, like DICE's Battlefront, as a game that's palpably beholden to wider franchise priorities?

More into science than fiction? Aim your eyes at Motherboard.

The tale of Star Wars adaptations has broad relevance because it's also the tale of the shifting balance of power between cinema and the video games industry. An art and entertainment form that was a homely niche pursuit at the time of A New Hope's release has swelled into a major player, rivaling film in terms of both sales and cultural impact.

Game developers are no longer following in the footsteps of moviemakers—quite the contrary. Even the on-rails corridor shooters often decried as blockbuster movies in all but name have evolved their own, distinct vocabularies and traditions, such as tedious QTEs or those magic hostage-taker doors in Call of Duty, the kicking-down of which plunges the gunplay into slow motion. And directors have begun, of course, to incorporate references to games or gaming devices into their scripts and strategies, whether you look at the recent Tom Cruise 'em up Edge of Tomorrow or the work of Edgar Wright.

Any transmedia enterprise that obliges the video game to play second fiddle to film at this stage risks cheating itself of everything the former has to offer – not just in the sense of underwhelming revenues, but in the sense of losing out on new ways to give the core fiction life. I hope the current rulers of the Star Wars universe are bearing this in mind.

Follow Edwin on Twitter.

Narcomania: This Is What Happens When British Soccer Players Start Selling Drugs

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Bricks of cocaine (belonging to a Colombian drug dealer, not a former soccer player). Photo courtesy of the DEA via.

There are a few notable similarities between drug dealing and playing professional soccer. There are the back-room deals, the lucrative international transfers, the reliance on foreign imports. Big players must understand the art of pressing, stamping, and the need to avoid potentially damaging interceptions.

But where soccer and the drug trade really meet eye-to-eye is in Britain's jails. Of the 147 ex-professional soccer players currently in adult prisons, 128 of them—87 percent—are inside for drug offenses.

These are not stars at the end of their careers. Most professionals hanging up their boots these days have enough stashed away to buy themselves most of Cheshire, so there's obviously no reason to start messing about with any repressed Escobar aspirations. These are players—the vast majority of whom are under 25—who've been released from their contracts and aren't inside for petty drug offenses. Virtually all of them are serving stretches after being caught supplying class A drugs.

Not long ago, the classic maneuver for the ex-soccer player who saw crime as a handy way of avoiding a normal job—you know, like setting up a sports clinic or running a pub into the ground in Kent—was to get involved in some kind of money scam, a dodgy investment scheme, usually alongside an old school pal or a shady brother. This still goes on and can be extremely lucrative, especially if you target other players.

Most soccer players dropped at a young age will take the hit and go onto other careers. Some will end up unemployed. But for some players let go by clubs—those who were expecting to earn hundreds of millions by retirement age—a shortcut to cash can be dangerously tempting.

So it was for Michael Kinsella, a former Liverpool FC under-15s keeper with the world at his feet. But his promising career never took off. Within months of being released by manager John Aldridge at Tranmere Rovers at the age of 20, he had started selling cocaine on the streets of Liverpool. In 2007, police raided his home and found £300,000 [$470,000] worth of cocaine, £2,000 [$3,000] worth of heroin, and a list of dealers. He was sentenced to seven years.

His involvement in the drug trade unravelled when he was sentenced to another nine years for being part of a Liverpool-based international cocaine smuggling ring that imported hundreds of kilograms of cocaine, ecstasy, and heroin onto the streets of Merseyside from Amsterdam and Spain. Detectives identified Kinsella as being a key player for a gang and said he had made £1.6 million [$2.5 million].

Now out of jail, Kinsella has set up Onside, a sports and education academy that helps young soccer players who have been released from their contracts. I called him up and asked him why he and others decide to start dealing drugs after their soccer careers take a nosedive.

"There are some footballers who go on to have good careers outside of the game. But selling drugs is easy, quick money," he said. "It's hard to get a job at the best of times, and education-wise footballers are not the best. Some of them are very bright, but some of them aren't. People end up wandering into it."

But this isn't something that happens to rugby union rejects, is it? "They just know [the people who get them into the drugs trade], don't they?" said Kinsella. "They're mates who grew up playing football together—they're the same sort of people. It's an underground business, but it's a social thing. If someone says they need to earn some dough, there are people who can help them do that. That's how it happens, even if you haven't been a footballer.

"For me, I needed money, and I started on the street like everyone else. I was selling cocaine when I was 20, and after going to prison a couple of times you meet people in prison and you work your way up."

Related: Rivals – Rangers & Celtic

Behind every successful Premier League player stands the shadows of thousands of kids who didn't quite make the cut. The real pain of professional soccer is not with the fans who see their team disappoint, but with the young players rejected just when they thought they had won the soccer lottery.

Britain's soccer factory is, in reality, an intense whittling-down process, the bi-product, unfortunately, being the broken dreams of countless young players. Of the 10,000 or so kids who make it into the top soccer academies, just 1 percent will play for a living.

Even those who make it to scholarship at 16—unlike Brooklyn Beckham, who was rejected by Arsenal in February—or those who are given a money-spinning professional contract at 18 are unlikely to make it much further. Most are discarded before they reach the age of 21.

Signs would suggest that soccer rejects getting into drug dealing is on the rise. Xpro—an organization supporting the health and welfare of former professional players, which has gathered the statistics on ex-players in jail—estimates that there are a further 150 ex-professional soccer players aged 18 and 21 inside the young offenders prison system, most of whom are thought to be inside for drug-related crimes.

Xpro's chief executive, Geoff Scott, is a former Stoke City defender. He has visited more than 100 ex-players in jails across the UK. He feels that with all the money sloshing around the game, clubs, and soccer authorities—especially the Professional Footballers' Association (PFA), which has an £8 million [$12.4 million] education budget to train former players in new careers—should be doing more to help the hundreds of players teams shed each year.

"They are brainwashed into thinking they are all going to make it. They are in and around the trappings of success—they can see the Range Rovers and Maseratis; they are exposed to this culture," he said. "But then, from age 15 onwards, they are rejected, with little support, with little or no life experiences. There are some 18-year-olds on £1 million a year. When they are discarded they think, 'How can I earn the same kind of money for the least work possible?' Most players under 25 who are in prison are there because they have been trying to make up for the amounts of money they feel they would have been earning if they had stayed in soccer. They get given a package of cocaine to take from, say, Liverpool to Birmingham, for £1,500. So they've earned that in about two hours. Most of them aren't thinking about being drug dealers; the mentality is all about the money. Then they get greedy."

Related: Sisa - Cocaine of the Poor

One of the people visited by Geoff is the former Everton player Michael Branch, once tipped as one of the next big things in British soccer. He made his debut at 17 in the 1996-7 season, playing alongside Neville Southall and Andrei Kanchelskis, and got rave reviews from the Times. Ten years later his career had nosedived, via stints at Wolves, Bradford and Chester, before he finally retired at 27. In 2012 he was jailed for seven years when police went to his home and found a kilo of 82 percent pure cocaine.

According to Geoff Scott, Branch was short on cash and, out of desperation, started selling drugs. At first, he intended to do just the one lucrative deal to get him out of trouble, but carried on because it was so easy.

"When I went to visit Michael, at first he thought I was police, because no one from football had gone to see him," said Geoff. "He had just been forgotten. He told me he was doing his coaching badge, but I told him no one would employ him to teach kids with a drug conviction. So he's taken advantage of the education in prison, and he's now qualified in his chosen profession."

The drug business is never too far from the world of professional soccer. Steven Gerrard's "uncle Bobby," Robert Gerrard, reportedly his second cousin, is one of Britain's most wanted fugitives, sought by police over an alleged £60 million [$93 million] cocaine trafficking plot. The brother of former Premier League defender Zat Knight was jailed for dealing in heroin and cocaine in 2008, while John Terry's dad got a suspended sentence after being caught selling cocaine to an undercover reporter in 2010.

Regardless of family and old school friends, the large amounts of money made by drug entrepreneurs and some teenage players means they often end up as neighbors after moving away from where they grew up to leafy suburban areas such as Cheshire and Essex. Not only will they be buying the latest Range Rover from the same car dealer, but they'll probably be hanging out in the same swanky clubs and bars.

Read on VICE Sports: A Drug Kingpin and His Racket, the Untold Story of Freeway Rick Ross

A former Premier League player, who writes anonymously about the inside world of the game under the pseudonym The Secret Footballer, tells me that young soccer players—some of whom are on £5,000 [$7,800] a week—can quickly become accustomed to a way of living, before being dropped from a great height.

"A lot of the players that wind up dealing drugs see it as the quickest and easiest way to earn the levels of money that maintained a lifestyle that they briefly enjoyed as a footballer and are desperate to maintain," he said. "It's possible to make the case that these players, who have generally lost the money earned from playing football, are easy targets for those higher up the drug dealing chain when looking for distributors that have influence over the younger people in large communities."

The route from being a one-off, to a cast off, to jail for drug dealing is now well trodden. Joel Kitamirike made an appearance for Chelsea at 17 in a European match alongside Frank Lampard and John Terry, before being released. He ended up playing at Chelmsford City and, in 2008, was sentenced to 20 months for selling cocaine and heroin on the streets of Ipswich.

In 2013, former Newcastle academy player Andrew Ferrell was one of a gang of drug dealers jailed for a total of 44 years after police seized £1.5 million [$2.3 million] worth of cocaine and amphetamine. Ferrell had joined Newcastle in 2002, was released two years later and tumbled down the leagues before ending up being paid £250 [$380] a week at Bedlington Terriers.

Former Leicester City under-18s player Ellis Myles-Tebbutt, 21, was jailed last year after being caught with 30 wraps of crack and heroin. His defense barrister said he has lost direction after his "full professional hopes" with LCFC were dashed and he was released from the academy without a contract.

For people across the board locked out of the mainstream economy, due to a poor education and a lack of opportunities, the drug trade offers an attractive way out. It takes no leap of the imagination to realize that a young player who has been handed the golden ticket of a top club scholarship or a professional contract, a taste of the big time for doing something they love—only for it to be swiped away at the last minute—might be tempted by the offer of a lucrative but illegal new job.

With so many young ex-players in jail for drugs, it seems that if someone doesn't start looking out for these kids properly, many more of them will end up locked up and forgotten, the modern day cannon fodder of today's soccer franchises.

Follow Max on Twitter.

The Zac Efron Movie About EDM Will Be the Greatest Movie of Our Generation

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The Zac Efron Movie About EDM Will Be the Greatest Movie of Our Generation

Why We Should Care About the Future of the BBC

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John Whittingdale, Minister for Culture, discussing the future of the BBC. Screenshot via

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

"Worse than a poll tax" said the UK's newly appointed Minister for Culture, John Whittingdale, in an interview about the BBC's license fee. But in a week that saw someone who voted against gay marriage appointed equalities minister, it came as less of a surprise that the person in charge of the BBC's future has already said he believes it to be "unsustainable."

For a party so obsessed with keeping the union and "upholding British values" (although not Human Rights), it's ironic there is a strong faction within the Conservatives apparently intent on breaking up the very institutions—like the BBC and the NHS—that uphold those values and unite us.

Why should we care? Mainly, because the grounds on which these voices make their arguments—that the BBC is inefficient or left wing, for instance—just aren't true. The dismantling of the BBC would be a huge win for Tory ideologues intent on forever changing the nature and course of the country, regardless of the wishes of the greater part of the population—i.e. the whopping 76 percent who don't necessarily support a Conservative government.

One of Whittingdale's first jobs as minister is to negotiate the BBC's charter renewal, which sets the license fee—currently £145.50 [$225]—and the terms under which the corporation operates for the next ten years. Although in a recent inquiry into the future of the BBC chaired by Whittingdale—a former political and private secretary to Margaret Thatcher and often dubbed her "toy boy"—he said there was as yet "no better alternative." So the license fee is probably safe for now.

But Whittingdale has also said that the TV license is "becoming harder and harder to justify" given changes to technology. He believes that satellite broadcasters and subscription TV like Netflix are taking over from the conventional free-to-air channels, so it should be turned into a subscription service where you only pay for what you want, like a Sky package.

Only, we're not as feckless with our viewing habits as that. The pace of change is extraordinary, but even in UK homes with Sky, 58 percent of all viewing is of the traditional channels.

More importantly, there's no public demand for the license fee to be reformed. Despite the Savile revelations, accusations of a bullying culture and the absolute pig's ear made of getting rid of Jeremy Clarkson, belief in having a strong national broadcaster—and a commitment to paying for it—remains high. At 40p per day per household, most people seem to think they get their money's worth. And they do. By comparison, Sky's most basic package costs £21.50 [$33] per month, and that's without the channels you actually want.

"There is a feeling here that this is the end of the BBC" – an in-house producer

"It's astonishing value, despite increasing and enormous animosity from the anti-BBC propagandists. You're getting more and more for your money," was the passionate defense from Professor Patrick Barwise, the co-author of a 2014 report called What If There Were No BBC Television? He's optimistic that fear of a public backlash will save the BBC, given that Cameron's government is already fighting huge ideological battles on other fronts, like shrinking the state to previously unimaginable levels through austerity measures and potentially being the PM that takes us out of the EU and loses Scotland.

Barwise believes the renewal will see the BBC undermined by a continued freeze on the license fee (it's been frozen since 2010, which in real terms has meant a 20 percent cut in budgets), and the fee further "salami sliced" by diverting funds from program-making into other functions, like paying for the rollout of broadband, or for free licenses for the over-75s, currently paid for by the government.

Some working within the BBC believe irrevocable damage has already been done by Cameron's freezing of the license fee and that the corporation cannot withstand any further pressure.

"There is a feeling here that this is the end of the BBC," an in-house producer who wished to remain anonymous told me. Eventually, that pressure will affect the broadcaster's output. "They're trying to wring the same standards out of the fee. It isn't cutting the number of programs, or quality, or duration, so people are working much longer hours for less pay."

The real problem that the anti-BBC brigade has is with a perceived left-wing bias. In his 2007 Hugh Cudlipp Lecture, Paul Dacre, editor of the Daily Mail, declared: "It is, in every corpuscle of its corporate body, against the values of conservatism... by and large BBC journalism starts from the premise of left-wing ideology."

But that's just not true. "I know lots of right-wing people here," the BBC producer told me. And in the recent election, there was a feeling that the broadcaster's coverage was led by our overwhelmingly right-wing press. "Far from being in the pocket of Labour, the BBC was too easily swayed by newspapers that support the Tories and are heavily invested in Labour's defeat. It contaminated everything, from the questions that were asked in interviews, to the lazy assumptions that were made about Ed Miliband," said Tom Baldwin, a senior Labour Party strategist.

The Conservative right is determined to reorient the country economically and socially. Speaking two years ago, Whittingdale criticized a "BBC world view" and said the attitude that anyone who disagreed with it is "plainly mad." Grant Schapps has said he thinks it should do "fewer things, better"—which is ironic for a Minister most notable for running another business under a pseudonym.

Perhaps they would prefer the BBC to be making things more in line with their own worldview, which, given Whittingdale's voting record, could make for some interesting viewing. This is a man who voted against equal gay rights, equal marriage and the fox hunting ban. He and other MPs who sit on the Conservative Party's right-wing and influential 1922 Committee may say the BBC is too large or too liberal, but will that stop them from finding ways of imposing their own morality on it?

In fact, Whittingdale isn't the worst person David Cameron could have appointed. The former chair of the Culture, Media, and Sport Select Committee is highly experienced in this field, and will be moderating the demands of people who care less about the BBC than he does.

Related: The New Wave: London's Black Revolutionaries:


So much of what is said by the Tory right about the BBC is questionable. Senior executives are paid a lot, and some of those roles might need looking at again. But they're not paid as much as their rivals at ITV or Sky, and are producing programs that are watched, respected, and sold around the world. Let's not forget that MPs are also paid "out of the public purse, and on course for a 10 percent wage increase this year.

By making less programming, the BBC could end up like PBS in the United States, churning out documentaries no one else will make, a sliver of sensibility in that mind-boggling landscape of visual shit that is most of American television.

"I want to bring our country together, our United Kingdom together," said Cameron on election night, when it became clear the Conservatives were on course to win a majority. But his own party is prepared to turn on the institutions that carry out that very function. The report by Barwise and his co-author Robert Picard, found that without the BBC, investment in new UK programs would drop by between 25 and 50 percent. And that's before all the citizenship arguments about its role in making children's television, regional programming, or its huge influence internationally.

"I go around the world and everywhere else people would love to have a public service provider not in the pocket of the state or a millionaire mogul. This matters—the BBC is not perfect but it is so much better combined with our private sector press than what is on offer just about anywhere else," said Professor Charlie Beckett, Director of journalism think tank Polis.

But the 1922 Committee Tories that were silenced during the coalition are now going to have their say. And they simply can't bear that the BBC was created to be free of the market, independent of political manipulation and to cater for everyone regardless of their place in the pecking order. To Tory militants, those institutions no longer have a place in British society.

Follow Cat on Twitter.


The Israel-Palestine Conflict's New Wrinkle: A FIFA Vote to Suspend Israel

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The Israel-Palestine Conflict's New Wrinkle: A FIFA Vote to Suspend Israel

Is Australia Really Drowning in Spiders?

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A rare image of spider ballooning in May 1974. Albury, NSW. Image via Keith Basterfield

You might have heard that Australia is drowning in spiders. "Tiny spiders 'rain' down in Australian town," read a headline in USA Today, while CNET ran the similarly titled, "Welcome to Australia, where even the rain is spiders." But the click-ready headlines don't really get to the point. What actually happened is that for a brief period on May 4 some spiders in Goulbourn, New South Wales, did what spiders do all around the world. Then a man studying UFO conspiracies called the local paper, and the story went viral.

Spider ballooning is a little-understood phenomena in which spiders use their webs to migrate. In clear conditions with a light wind, juvenile spiders produce thin strands of web called gossamer in a triangular shape to get airborne. Using their web as a parachute they can travel hundreds of kilometers, although the why of this phenomenon is still somewhat unclear. The point is that it's something lots of types of spiders everywhere in the world can do, which is made clear in this YouTube video from Brazil.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/6cAR1xU7TD8' width='560' height='315']

Once on the ground the gossamer, or "angel hair," doesn't last long. A few hours tops. But as ballooning often occurs during the night, it means people wake up to landscapes covered in web. This is what happened in Goulbourn. A man named Ian Watson found his house covered in webs, and then took to the Goulburn Community Forum on Facebook to write, "You can clearly see hundreds of little spiders floating along with their webs and my home is covered in them. Someone call a scientist!"

Related: Watch these drones act like spiders.

The man who responded was a South Australian social scientist and UFO researcher named Keith Basterfield. "I contacted the Goulburn Post," says Basterfield. "And it turns out that Ian had already called them but they needed a push."

Basterfield, who has been cataloguing spider ballooning since 2001, explained the situation to the paper's editor, who then assigned the story. "I've been studying this for years," says Basterfield. "I first noticed ballooning because conspiracy theorists claim it's a byproduct of UFO propulsion systems. That is, of course, ridiculous."

It's unknown what species of spider was involved, but as it's a phenomenon associated with babies it's unlikely they were dangerous. Keith explains that in the Southern Hemisphere, May is the month for spider ballooning and especially after heavy rain. He claims it's likely to happen again and wants people to take photos. As he points out, every article has contained only one of two photos, simply because that's all that exists. The one at this top of this article was taken in 1974, just as a quick example. "So if you see an area covered in spider webs, please take a photo," implores Keith. "This is one of the reasons I wanted this story out there."

If you have a photo of spider ballooning please contact Keith at keithbasterfield@yahoo.com.au.

Follow Julian on Twitter.

I Wish There Were Simple Answers for Why I Self-Harmed for Seven Years, and for Why I Stopped

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Photo via Flickr user Christiaan Tonnis

Warning: Story contains graphic discussion of self-injury

From age 14 until a few months before I turned 21, I was a regular self-harmer. My choice form of abuse was mainly cutting, usually done with a box cutter or blades pulled out from pencil sharpeners. At least once a week, I would drag a razor across my skin and watch as little red beads of blood burst to the surface and merged into a bright scarlet line. Some weeks, my wrists, arms, stomach and thighs were barely touched; at other times, I'd start running out of space and contemplate whether I could afford for another part of my body to be covered in scars.

I'm not going to feed you that bullshit about coming out a stronger person or that I'm glad I went through that phase, because it fucking sucked. But for seven years, cutting took over my life.

From an outsider's perspective, it's hard to wrap your head around why, when humans instinctively avoid pain, someone would actively and regularly seek it out.

I don't remember what caused me to cut for the first time, but I remember feeling the sensation of cutting myself suddenly clearing away the negative thoughts that had been ruling my mind. And I was hooked.

Sometimes, my thoughts would race too fast and I couldn't handle not being able to grasp on to a single idea for more than a few seconds. Other times, I'd experience such crushing despair that it'd feel like my chest was about to implode. Sometimes it'd be rage and frustration, or nothing at all. No matter what it was, when I hit an emotional extreme, physical pain could "ground" me, remind me that, yes, I was still alive and that other things existed besides the torment in my head.

Dr. Susan MacKenzie, a psychiatrist with the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health who works with self-harmers ages 14 to 24, put it another way.

"For some people, [self-harm is] a powerful way to calm emotional distress in the moment, and these are often people who experience, probably, a more extreme range of emotions than the average person," she said.

Situations that triggered my urge to cut didn't always strike at convenient times or places; I remember hiding behind a tool cabinet to cut during high school robotics club because I knew I'd have a mental breakdown if I didn't. Another time, I retreated to a university washroom because I was panicked that someone would find out about my habit. I dealt with the anxiety by cutting even more.

There might be a few biological reasons behind self-harm, too. Rebecca Kaushal, a psychology and anthropology undergrad student at the University of Toronto, has been studying the biology and neuropsychology behind self-harm and said there are several genes linked to aggression that might predispose people to self-harm and suicidal thoughts. As well, the body releases a rush of endorphins in response to physical injury, which can lead to feelings of euphoria and explain why some people come to enjoy certain kinds of pain.

"I remember someone saying [that] there's nothing that can help override the emotional pain you feel than how physical pain feels in a euphoric sense," Kaushal said. "It doesn't necessarily hurt anymore, it's a different kind of pain."

Self-harm usually starts to manifest itself in early adolescence. According to the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI), around 2,500 youth (ages 10 to 17) were hospitalized for self-harm in 2013-2014, which works out to about a quarter of all youth hospitalizations. Girls made up 80 percent of that number, and over the past five years, the number of girls hospitalized for self-harm has increased by more than 110 percent (35 percent for boys).

In Ontario alone, 3,411 youth visited an emergency department in 2013-2014 for self-harm, a 98 percent increase for girls and 30 percent increase for boys since 2009-2010. It's not clear whether self-harm is on the rise, or if more people are seeking help.

MacKenzie said the majority of people she sees are cutters. Females are more likely to cut, while males tend to turn to reckless behavior like irresponsible driving and substance abuse. She also said it's not clear why self-harm starts in adolescence or why the method differs between genders, but that the emotional turmoil that seems to trigger it tends to naturally subside in one's mid to late 30s or 40s. The youngest person she's worked with was 11.

I never really talked to anyone about cutting. Throughout school, I would hear my peers dismiss self-harmers as dumb emo kids, desperate attention-seekers, or dangerous people who should be institutionalized and I didn't wanted to be associated with any of those things. The few people I did confide in usually told me I was fucked up and should stop, so I took that as a cue to hide my cuts and scars as much as I could.

"There's a huge stigma around suicide and self-injury, and therefore it's a great big secret you can't tell anybody because, heaven forbid, if you speak to the wrong person, they might just kind of further invalidate your experience and tell you to get over it," said Yvonne Bergmans, a suicide intervention consultant at St. Michael's Hospital's Suicide Studies Research Unit in Toronto. "'Why are you doing this?' or 'Does your mother know you're doing this?' or 'For such a pretty person like you, why do you want those scars? Why are you doing this to yourself?' And those are comments that miss the entire point of the emotional pain."

Any cutters who favour their arms know that long sleeves and bracelets are their best friends, no matter how warm it is in class or how sunny it is outside. Being uncomfortably warm for a few hours is a better fate than having your friends, or even worse, a teacher, notice last night's cuts and start asking questions.

It's also surprisingly effective to just position your arms so that any cuts are facing your body. Lying also worked. My go-to was blaming my cats. When that was no longer a plausible answer (an acquaintance once responded with, "What the fuck kind of cat do you have, a goddamn tiger?"), I'd make up a story about falling down drunk or riding my bike through a particularly prickly bush. I'm not sure anyone actually bought my stories, but they stopped asking questions and I considered that a victory.

There were also the small things I did to keep up an appearance of normalcy: hiding my razors; always making sure I had fresh bandages; cleaning the blood off my sheets and clothes; wearing a lot of bracelets; not cutting on my arms before things like going to the doctor, getting on a plane, or attending an event where I'd be in a sleeveless dress.

For the longest time, I thought I'd live the rest of my life that way.

And then, as suddenly as it came, the urge to cut just disappeared. I still get "cravings" to cut, but the motivation to act on them is mostly gone and I've been clean for almost a year now. What I'm left with is seven years' worth of scars; sometimes, I wish I had got help so I could've put an end to it sooner. There are a hell of a lot more coping mechanisms that are much safer and healthier than running a razor over your skin. But for all the angst and anger and rage and sadness that scars me, there's also a little bit of hope. One year ago, I was convinced I would cut forever. But I've finally reached a place where I don't want to add another scar to the collection again.

In distress and want to talk to someone? Call 1-866-531-2600 for the Ontario Mental Health Helpline or 1-800-668-6868 for the Kids Help Phone.

The Alberta Doctor Who Claimed Tar Sands Are Connected to Cancer Was Fired

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John O'Connor. Photo courtesy Charlene O'Connor

One of the Canada's most outspoken advocates on the ties between the tar sands and adverse health effects has been dismissed from his job without notice.

Earlier this month Dr. John O'Connor received a brief email informing him of his termination from the Fort Chipewyan (Fort Chip) Health Center where he was working remotely as a consultant. O'Connor started his position at Fort Chip in 2000 and early on, he started noticing abnormal amounts of rare cancers of the bile ducts among his patients. This included cholangiocarcinoma, the same type of cancer that killed O'Connor's father a decade prior.

Fort Chip is located 300 km north of the heart of Alberta's tar sands, Fort McMurray, and O'Connor raised concerns that these rare cancers could be linked to industry and pushed for further research.

"There's definitely a relationship between development and industry and the abnormalities that are being detected. And when you look at the population that's been most impacted in Fort Chip, you would definitely figure it's related to consumption of traditional foods that have been impacted by industry," O'Connor told VICE in an interview last year. "But there are other people that got sick that wouldn't have been around long enough to have had all that level of exposure."

"There's nothing clear-cut about this at all. It emphasizes an underlying need for a comprehensive health study."

Dr. O'Connor's whistleblowing raised what can only be described as a shit storm among pro-oil advocates and the doctor experienced one hell of a backlash. He was labeled as an alarmist and charlatan and Health Canada reacted to these claims, and others, by charging O'Connor with four accounts of misconduct. These including blocking access to files, billing irregularities, and causing "undue alarm." If found guilty, O'Connor would have been stripped of his license to practice. Eventually though, the charges were dropped.

"So, the charges were absolutely trumped up, no-basis in reality," O'Connor told VICE. "And it took me two years and eight months to get this off my back."

"Not one of my colleagues—no physicians at all—criticized me. I got nothing but support. But it was in three years of hell, without knowing what the outcome would be," he added. "I wouldn't want to go through it again. I wouldn't wish it on anyone."

After the majority of charges were dropped O'Connor left the community in 2007. He continued serving Fort Chipewyan 24/7 remotely by phone, advising nurses, referring specialists, etc. It was in this function that he served until his position was suddenly terminated.

The email offered no explanation on why he was let go, but Mikisew Cree Chief Steve Courtoreille told the Edmonton Journal that the fact that O'Connor was only doing phone consultations played a part in the decision. The letter dismissing O'Connor also informed him that he no longer can speak on behalf of Fort Chip and the other communities that the Nunnee Health Board represents.

"In addition, you have no authority to speak to or represent the Nunee Health Board Society in any way to any other individual, party or entity," the letter read.

Essentially O'Connor can no longer advocate for the people of Fort Chipewyan.

The doctor was shocked at his dismissal from his long time post. He was being paid $5,000 a month for his services, but because of his attachment to the community had offered to reduce his pay and even do the job for free.

"I emailed back and asked them 'why?' but didn't get a response," O'Connor told APTN, who originally broke the story. "It's like losing a very close family member except they're still there."

"Like I've been put into exile."

O'Connor did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story.

Follow Mack Lamoureux on Twitter.


Saskatchewan Strippers Take Their Poles on the Road in Effort to Skirt Province’s Draconian Laws

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Photo via Facebook

To strippers working in Saskatchewan, Premier Brad Wall is the ultimate tease.

For decades, the province was the only place in Canada where it was illegal to strip in bars, clubs, and other places that serve alcohol. Then, in a surprising move last January, Premier Wall reversed those laws, finally allowing strip shows and wet t-shirt contests at bars and clubs.

While the province's longstanding ban on full frontal stripping remained intact—with strippers required to wear nipple covers (pasties) and g-strings at a minimum—strippers and bar owners across the province were overjoyed by the new business opportunities. Strip shows hosted in bars in rural towns brought in waves of tourism and boosted the local economy.

"We were so stoked with all the bar gigs we were getting," Kruella Kraken, a stripper based in Saskatoon, told me. "Everyone was finally accepting us and the shows. It was awesome."

But those glory days were short-lived. In March, just over a year later, Wall changed his mind again and reinstated the old laws, once again making it illegal to strip in licensed venues. Many in Saskatchewan were annoyed by the abrupt change, but not surprised. Then things got weirder when Wall announced last month one exception to the ban: stripping would be allowed only once a year—for charity.

Now, local strippers are combating the province's erratic stripping rules by taking the industry into their own hands—a move they say also comes with its own set of risks. Even though, technically, they could put on shows at dry venues, you just can't have a strip show without booze, they say.

So, a couple weeks after the law was reinstated, Kruella Kraken founded The Pink Champagne Girls, the province's first traveling strip show. With poles and stage in tow, she and her fellow strippers are bringing the strip club experience to private homes and hotels across Saskatchewan. "This is what we have done to combat the government," she told me.

Demand for their services—mostly from men—has been steady, and they expect the number of clients to increase throughout the summer. Burlesque troupes, club owners, and strippers are also banding together to put on a stripping bash for charity in the next few months.

The fallout is just another episode in the province's long history of cracking down on stripping. One club was fined in 2012 when a dancer's shadow could still be seen from behind the stage where she was removing her jacket. Another club got a verbal warning when a dancer removed a glove during a performance. And the list goes on.

In 2001, Cory Thompson—also known as the "strip club crusader" for flouting the province's stripping laws—attempted to challenge the ban of stripping in bars at the Supreme Court, arguing it was a violation of freedom of expression. The court declined to hear his case because the ban applies only in places that serve alcohol.

In January, when stripping in bars was still legal, the city council in Regina denied an application to open a strip club. Dozens of concerned citizens and a coalition of evangelical churches showed up to the meeting to voice their opposition. The crowd cheered and gave a standing ovation when the council read its decision.

Wall has said his latest decision was not influenced by lobbying from community groups. He and the province's liquor and gaming minister argued it was in the interest of making women safer and preventing organized crime by folks like the Hells Angels. "The whole point is to get away from it being a business," the liquor and gaming minister, Don McMorris, told reporters.

I spoke with several strippers based in Saskatchewan who refute the claim that exploitation is rife in the industry and say neither they nor any other strippers they know are being forced into it.

Wall's senior communication advisor wrote to me an email that the government's decision came after the premier "had discussions with police officials" who told him that "close to 100 percent of strip clubs in Central Canada were operated by the Hells Angels." He refused to say what evidence or statistics the premier had about the extent of human trafficking in the province nor how these laws would prevent it and organized crime. "The government decided that it didn't make sense to risk even the possibility of an expansion of organized crime and human trafficking in Saskatchewan through the establishment of strip clubs," the email concluded.

Kruella Kraken and her colleagues told me the new ban will have the opposite effect because it's already driving the industry further underground. While her travelling strip show business is off to a promising start, she says there are serious downsides to working in private homes. "We never really know what we're walking into," she told me. "It's always a little scary. I would much rather work in a strip club where I know I'm going to be protected, where it's regulated."

Evey Rose, who performs with Kraken, says she tries to be prepared for any scenario, including paying extra for security guards, but the guys at house parties who hire them are usually more belligerent than those partying at strip clubs. "If the guys are drinking, that's totally legitimate, but it's hard to keep someone sober to get everything set up beforehand," she told me. "If something were to happen, it's just much less safe an environment, whereas a club has bouncers and more of an ability to kick out people who are misbehaving."

I spoke to another stripper, Jasmin Bieber, who owns the Regina-based burlesque and strip show company Bare Essentials. Since the ban came into effect, her company has ramped up its private event bookings. She echoes Rose and Kraken's concerns and says that even in the few weeks since the new stripping ban came into effect, a handful of the girls who work with her are turning to sex work to make up for the business they've lost at the clubs.

"We wonder why the government is pushing the industry underground when that's going to also push other girls into different means of making money," she told me. "It can push them into prostitution, and that's what the government says it's trying to prevent. You're not preventing it, you're encouraging it without even realizing it."

Bieber is planning protests and petitions to urge the government to change its mind. Other dancers have started Change.org campaigns and taken to Twitter to bombard the premier's account using the hashtag #NippleHour. "[Y]ou can bitch, but the strippers gon' keep strippin," tweeted Jacqui Daniels, who manages Tiger Lily Cabaret, a burlesque company in Saskatoon.

Kraken and Bieber admit it's difficult to work in such a restrictive environment, but neither of them would want to move anywhere else. Stripping around Saskatchewan has reinforced Kraken's love for her home. "It's amazing getting to see so much of this province through my work," Kraken told me. "I've considered moving to another province where my work is more respected. But I won't let the government push me out."

Follow Rachel Browne on Twitter.

Trigger Warnings Should Be About Sensitivity, Not Censorship

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Columbia University's campus. Photo by Flickr user Mike Steele

The Metamorphoses, widely considered Ovid's magnum opus and one of the best-known examples of classic Roman poetry, is a narrative work of love and death, mythology and war. It also contains several graphic depictions of assault and rape.

After a class at Columbia University read the poem, one student spoke out about her painful experience with the material as a survivor of sexual assault. Four students on the school's Multicultural Affairs Advisory Board penned an op-ed for Columbia's student newspaper, urging faculty to teach provocative or potentially upsetting material with increased sensitivity.

"As a survivor of sexual assault, the student described being triggered while reading such detailed accounts of rape throughout the work. However, the student said her professor focused on the beauty of the language and the splendor of the imagery when lecturing on the text... She did not feel safe in the class."

The actionable lesson here, the op-ed suggests, is that professors need training to support triggered students when dealing with sensitive material, and must be aware when academic texts and class discussions might cause some students to feel marginalized.

The Columbia students' op-ed is the latest evolution in the debate over how potentially triggering material should be presented in the classroom. Obviously, all students come to class with personal baggage, but we've only recently started a dialogue over the extent educators should acknowledge this and factor it into their teaching.

"What happens in the rest of students' lives is affecting their intellectual engagement in the classroom," says Heather Lindkvist, the Title IX Coordinator and Clery Act Compliance Officer at Dartmouth College. "If we think about what Title IX is about, it's about ensuring that students have an environment free of hostility; that they feel safe, welcome, and secure on our campuses, and that includes our classes."

On Motherboard: Teachers Are Worried Google Will Data-Mine the Classroom

In the past, students have urged for blatant "trigger warnings" to preface sensitive material. Last year at the University of California, Santa Barbara, literature student Bailey Loverin made headlines by campaigning for professors to warn students before exposing them to graphic material in class. "Without a trigger warning, a survivor might black out, become hysterical or feel forced to leave the room," she argued. "This effectively stops their learning process."

The " Resolution to Mandate Warnings for Triggering Content in Academic Settings" found support and praise on campus, and ignited a nationwide discussion as academics cocked their heads at the notion of giving trigger warnings before teaching classics such as The Great Gatsby or Catcher in the Rye.

Related: Vice News investigates racism in college fraternities.

To be sure, there have been many critics. The criticism generally falls into two camps: a push for maintaining academic freedom, and head-shaking at millennials' hypersensitivity.

"While keeping college-level discussions 'safe' may feel good to the hypersensitive, it's bad for them and for everyone else," wrote Judith Shulevitz, a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. "They'll be unprepared for the social and intellectual headwinds that will hit them as soon as they step off the campuses whose climates they have so carefully controlled."

These sentiments were echoed in a New Republic essay criticizing Loverin's proposal, and again in an essay published in the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled "Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe." In the latter essay, Northwestern professor Laura Kipnis warns that increased use of trigger warnings will result in students "cocooned from uncomfortable feelings," to their own disadvantage.

This perspective on trigger warnings has also been supported by experts on anxiety disorders, such as Richard McNally, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, who wrote a piece for Pacific Standard magazine outlining how classroom trigger warnings might actually impair the recovery of those who have suffered serious trauma. He pointed out that confronting triggering material is actually an essential part of the popular treatment method known as prolonged exposure therapy, which aims to help survivors of trauma overcome their PTSD.

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Do trigger warnings infantilize students? Photo by Flickr user Ilmicrofono Oggiono

Although trigger warnings are perceived by the aforementioned critics as a one-size-fits-all heads-up slapped onto provocative material to cover their bases—much like an R-rating for a raunchy movie, or a Parental Advisory sticker on an album—that's not what the Columbia students are calling for. Instead, the Columbia students want to see more sensitivity training—not censorship. In their op-ed, they detail a three-pronged plan to deal with this issue: 1) send faculty a letter about potential trigger warnings and how to support students, 2) allow students to anonymously report feeling triggered in class, and 3) create a sensitivity training program for faculty.

The op-ed makes clear that the goal isn't to censor anything or let students get out of doing their homework. "Our vision for this training is not to infringe upon the instructors' academic freedom in teaching the material," the op-ed says. "Rather, it is a means of providing them with effective strategies to engage with potential conflicts and confrontations in the classroom, whether they are between students or in response to the material itself. Given these tools, professors will be able to aid in the inclusion of student voices which presently feel silenced."

It's not about shying away from challenging ideas, but making sure to give them a proper frame of reference before diving right in. Lindkvist, who taught for 11 years before taking on a leadership role at Dartmouth, recalls how she dealt with difficult material in the classroom.

"Before we even entered into a discussion about race, [we talked about] the different approaches to thinking about race and ethnicity through an anthropological lens and then the national conversation about race and ethnicity and just putting it out there for students to think about," she says.

She says that these conversations only served to deepen the discussion for both students and teacher, not limit the topics covered. "I don't see that as infringing on my academic freedom whatsoever," added Lindkvist.

It becomes an issue of academic freedom when teachers are tasked with shielding students from material rather than contextualizing and supporting them through it. When students at Oberlin pushed last year for more sensitivity in the classroom around provocative material, the administration issued a letter encouraging teachers to avoid including nonessential triggering material in their lessons. They quickly realized their stance could potentially compromise academic freedom and withdrew the statement to revise (a year later, it is still under revision).

On Oberlin's website in the "Sexual Misconduct Policy" section is the statement: "We believe that academic freedom and support for survivors are not oppositional values. Both play a central role in creating effective learning environments."

The bottom-line is that students have a constitutional right to feel safe in the classroom, and their teachers are in no way adversaries on this. Call it a trigger warning or contextualizing, but opening a preemptive conversation about why something in the classroom is challenging and also why it matters will only serve to advance the interests of both students and professors.

"I think we continue to hold to principles of academia, of intellectual engagement, of academic freedom," says Lindkvist, "That we continue to value those and hold them dear while simultaneously thinking of different ways that we can use challenging material in the classroom in a way that students find it accessible, find that they can fully participate in that discussion."

Follow Ali Jaffe on Twitter.


Inside the Thriving Online Market for Women's Dirty Underwear

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A woman wearing underwear. Not a seller, just a stock image of a woman wearing pants. Photo by Julia Michelle Lopez via Wikimedia Commons.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

You've heard about Japan's used underwear vending machines. They were in the Telegraph; they were in countless listicles about why Japan is a wacky place full of things that scare people from Middle England; they were probably referred to in one of those shit jokes Jimmy Carr does at the beginning of 8 Out of 10 Cats. You know about them.

However, what you're possibly less familiar with is the UK's steady trade of soiled-to-order knickers. Should you want, you can get your hands on pants stained with whatever manner of bodily fluid you desire, all of them produced bespoke by local British underwear artisans.

"Veronica Vixon," 23-year-old who lives in Bristol, started selling her dirty knickers for £15 ($23) a pop on Craigslist when she lost her job as a care worker. She lives with her boyfriend, who takes photos of her modeling the merchandise for clients. I asked her what her boyfriend thinks of men using her sullied knickers as masturbatory aids. "He quite likes it, actually," she told me.

In fact, Veronica's boyfriend sometimes plays a crucial part in the pants she sells. Veronica explained how, very vividly, before running through some other popular requests. The main one is to wear the pants while masturbating, and "quite a lot want me to wee in them." A couple of punters have asked that she shit herself while wearing the underwear they've commissioned, but, understandably, it's not really something she wants to do.

Speaking to Veronica, I wondered who these guys were and what exactly motivates them to spend £15 on a pair of pants. Obviously the motives are sexual—as far as I can see, there's little other reason you'd want to pay for someone else's underwear—but what specifically do customers get out of the deal?

Paul founded the website SellYourPanties.com a few years ago with two of his friends. He says they were all "kind of geeks," and that after one of them had read about Japan's vending machines they figured they could move the business model online. One successful site later, Paul was ready with some statistics that began to shed a bit of light on who it is paying Veronica and her peers for their dirty underwear.

Sixty percent of buyers are under 40, he told me, and 92 percent are men. The other 8 percent, as you might have guessed via a basic knowledge of human biology, are women, some of whom are sellers on the site. A third of the buyers are married and most are regular customers. Paul also gave me a breakdown of what the buyers do when they receive the used knickers; according to his stats, 31 percent masturbate with them, 30 percent smell them, 13 percent wear them, 12 percent put them in a drawer, 8 percent lick them, 5 percent just look at them and 1 percent wash them and wear them.

WATCH: The Japanese Love Industry:

I wanted to get a more personal perspective on the type of people who use Paul's site, so I reached out to a number of them for a chat. One guy, who describes himself as a "human toilet," was pretty representative of the more invested end of the scale. He told me that he's collected a couple of dozen pairs in the last 12 months, likes them "as dirty as possible" and enjoys burying his face in them.

Mid-range, there were the guys who've bought fewer pairs and prefer to wear them normally rather than over their face. "I'll put them on, pull them to one side and wank," said Satinpantlicker, a 32-year-old who lives in the UK. "In short, I do a lot of wanking!"

Romain, a single 31-year-old French guy, summed up the more—for want of a better word—romantic customers with this statement: "[I like to] look at them and imagine [the woman's] butt in them." And representing the somewhat innocent lot, 24-year-old Mark—a single guy from Australia—told me he wants used knickers simply so he can "keep them in a drawer." He's after pants worn by Angelina Valentine, his favorite porn star, who he's approached on Twitter. "I just want to have something of hers," he said.

According to Paul, buying the pants is a means to an end for most of his customers. He says that what the guys really want is someone to chat to—an online girlfriend. He told me the women who sell the most on his site are those who interact with their customers the most and build up their confidence in them. He admits that they also tend to be quite pretty, but makes it clear that "that's not the main criteria." What the guys really want, he says, is "open mindedness—someone who's open to discussion, who'll be a psychologist and a confidant."

Veronica Vixen agreed: "It's part of it, really. They enjoy that communication. They like to chat to you a lot through email, and you feel like you've got to know them, like a Facebook friend. They want someone to talk to."

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Goddess Alexis

Goddess Alexis, a 41-year-old dominatrix from Leeds, told me about the relationships she has with the guys she sends her pants to. "We talk about everything," she said. "You know, it's not just about bondage and fetishes. I'm their friend as well—their agony aunt. They talk to me about anything and I try to put their mind at ease. A lot of them feel like they're freaks because they have a certain fetish, but I say, 'Look, you're not—there are millions of people that are into this, it's just they don't talk about it at the bus stop.'"

I asked Romain if he likes to chat to the women he buys pants from. "Of course. It's a prerequisite to buy something from a girl," he explained. "I love letters and words. French is a language so vast, with so many different meanings. I appreciate [the] exchange with them. It's only this way a man can exclude girls who do it for money from those who do it to give pleasure to me and herself."

READ ON MOTHERBOARD: The Fetish for Video Game Characters Trapped in Quicksand.

Talking to friends about the used pants trade, many pointed out that it's probably not a bad way to make a living. But I'm not so sure it's quite the money spinner it first seems; Veronica charges £15 as standard, upping the price to £20 ($31) if the customer requests that the pants arrive containing a bodily fluid of their choosing. But selling an average of five pairs a week, that's an absolute maximum of £100 ($155), minus the cost of knickers, postage, and packing.

Paul told me the average price on his site was €25 (approximately $28), and Goddess Alexis had just set up an account on Panty Trust—a competitor to Paul's site—where she'll be selling her pants for £15, including postage and packing. She currently sends them to her slaves as a treat. "I like to send some panties through the post and make someone's day—I know I'll get something back," she said. "They visit my wish list, they send me gift cards—oh, they look after me!"

Paul claimed that the most successful sellers on his site could make $2,300 to $3,300 a month. I asked Veronica Vixen and Goddess Alexis if they made enough to live on. Veronica told me her boyfriend is the main breadwinner, saying, "He pays the rent and bills. Anything I make is spending money." Goddess Alexis said she worked part-time, and Veronica added, "I do the odd cleaning job for ladies on my road."

So it's clear this is still very much a side earner for sellers, something they put considerably less thought into than some of their buyers might assume. However, that's not to say they're not somewhat invested in the men buying their pants. For many buyers, as Paul pointed out, the motivation seems to be the feeling that they're in a relationship with these women, that the online interaction is the first, second and third date, and that the knickers arriving in the post is the physical consummation of that relationship.

Of course, that can't be said for everyone. Some of them just enjoy finding really creative ways to wank.

Follow Samantha on Twitter.

Speakers' Corner: Photos of 35 Years of Radicals and Religious Ranters

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"Holy Bob," an Evangelical Christian, at Speakers' Corner in 1978

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park, London, is a remnant of a bygone era when people used to stand on irl soapboxes and shout their opinions indiscriminately to passersby. Today, most soapboxes have been replaced with 140-character proselytizing, but in Speakers' Corner's heyday, political radicals preaching revolution stood next to religious fundamentalists screaming about the end times to anyone who would listen. Now, the Corner is one of the last remaining places in the UK where you can still yell at strangers about your political beliefs without the risk of being sectioned or hassled by the police.

Philip Wolmuth is a photographer who has been taking photos of the scenes there for 35 years. His new book, Speakers' Corner: Debate, Democracy, and Disturbing the Peace, came out in early May. I chatted to him about how the world of standing in a park shouting at strangers has changed in the last three and a half decades.


VICE: You started taking photographs at Speakers' Corner 35 years ago. What was it like back then and what do you think the biggest changes have been over the years?
Philip Wolmuth: The crowds were much bigger, that's one of the biggest changes I think. There were more political platforms, they weren't mainstream by any means, but they were things like the London Anarchist Forum and there were things that were not religious. The proportion has shifted and there are now more preachers of both Christian and Muslim faiths than I think there were back then. There were some preachers who used to go there and rant and rave and other people used to go there and heckle them. In one instance that I saw in one of the newspapers, they even chased them away.

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Steve Ross of the Socialist Party of Great Britain addresses a crowd in 1978

George Orwell wrote a little essay about Speakers' Corner in 1945 talking about Indian nationalist's speaking. I know that quite a few of the people becoming first leaders of newly independent African countries used to frequent Speakers' Corner and there was quite a lot of anti-colonial campaigning talk. I guess that was quite directly relevant to the politics of the day in a way that the politics there now is less so—it's more fringe.

What was it you enjoyed most about your time at Speakers' Corner?
The things I like the most are when there's an intelligent discussion going on. I also really like some of the humor, the heckling. There's some very funny heckles you get that are sometimes said quite quietly. There's an elderly Irish guy who's been around for some time and he seems to stand at the edge of crowds and just mutter while people are talking. There's some born again Christian preacher really ranting and raving and he just says things like, "I don't want to be born again, look what happened to me the first time." Really funny lines and he just comes out with them; really quick-thinking people.

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Jim Huggon, Hyde Park Anarchist Forum.

Has Speakers' Corner been pushed out of mainstream political discourse over the years?
Completely. It's certainly not part of mainstream political discourse. Speakers' Corner is the last one surviving of the public debating places in London. Up till about the Second World War there were about 100 outdoor meetings a week in different places around the capital: Victoria Park, Blackheath, there used be a spot outside Foyles just on Charing Cross Road in a side street, Tower Hill, and quite a lot of other places. They've all gone.

Why's that?
The reason is not that they've been pushed out deliberately, but radio and television. I'm sure that's the main driving force, so they've become irrelevant. Politics, which doesn't happen anywhere now except in the corridors of power, used to happen on the street. It doesn't really happen in Speakers' Corner now. There are political speakers there and they're very interesting but they're not mainstream and they don't impact on mainstream politics in any way. I think it's what's really missing.

Related: Watch our doc 'The New Wave: London's Black Revolutionaries':

It was very interesting in the middle of the election campaign—people keep talking about "the British people want this or British working families want that." But nobody actually gives them a voice, they never get a chance. Even when there's the leaders debate on television, you're not left to listen to the leaders speaking and make up your own mind. Within seconds of it finishing, the pundits are on there telling you what the result was and what it meant. You can't answer back, you can't participate in any way. You're just subjected to other people's opinions and that's not the case at Speakers' Corner—you can always answer back.

At Speakers' Corner if someone challenges you you've got to come up with an argument. You can't get away with things. That's what is fascinating about the place. Even online these days it's very different. People shout at each other at Speakers' Corner but there's not the sort of vile abuse that you get on social media. It's a different type of interaction, although social media is probably the closest present day equivalent.

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Is Speakers' Corner a symbol of free speech or is it just people shouting into a void?
Well historically it is a symbol of free speech and, more than that, really—freedom of expression, freedom of assembly. It became Speakers' Corner because of massive riots in the 1860s that were the result of the Reform League campaign to get the vote for the majority of the population, which didn't have it at the time. There was very violent rioting there with thousands and thousands of police and soldiers. All the railings of Park Lane along the length of the park were ripped out by the demonstrators when the police denied them entry. It's played an important role in people getting the vote. Even when Lord Soper first started speaking there in 1926, women under 30 didn't have the vote. What we call democracy is quite a limited form of democracy in my opinion, in that people don't have much chance to have their voices heard.

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Does Speakers' Corner have a future now that social media has basically replaced it?
Yes, the people who go there, quite a few people are really into the whole idea of making their voice heard. Not all for particularly edifying reasons—there's a lot of religious people. I'm not a religious person so it's all a bit alien to me. I don't think they're going to go away.

What have you learned from being around Speakers' Corner?
I think what I draw from it hasn't been anything somebody's said or told me directly, but more the intransigence of people who are fervently religious. It's a good illustration of that. In a way it does relate to the broader political scene at the moment because you can begin to understand how some of these conflicts run and run when there's a religious element to them. You see how people come back week after week to challenge people over the same minor point in the Bible or the Koran or something and it gives you an idea of how that might work in the wider world.

Speakers' Corner: Debate, Democracy and Disturbing the Peace is published by History Press

Scroll down for more photos

There's Finally an Artisanal Pencil Store in New York

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From the column 'The VICE Guide to Right Now'

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Photo via Flickr user Rex Boggs

New York City is just like the internet, in that you can find whatever you want extremely quickly. If you want drugs, you can text a number and a sketchy person will pull up in front of your apartment within the hour. If you need a skull of some sort, there is a store that sells them. If you want a store that restocks its entire inventory every six weeks, there's that too. Japanese toys? Yup. Exotic and rare flowers? That too. Mayonnaise? Boom. Now, we can add "pencil store" to the endless list of specialty retailers in New York City.

As written up in the New York Times, C.W. Pencil Enterprise specializes in pencils, both new and vintage, for collectors as well as people who just need to write stuff down. The store, owned and operated by 24-year-old Caroline Weaver, has been open since November 2014. Weaver, obviously, is something of a pencil obsessive. She stocks John Steinbeck's favorite pencil, pencils that write thick enough to be read when scanned, and high-end pencils from the 50s that will set the buyer back $60. If you can't get to the store's Lower East Side location, you can always order from them online. And if you've got a writing nerd in your life, you can sign them up for the Pencil of the Month club, which seems sort of amazing.

Want more in-depth Stuff about writers and writing?

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Watch the Trailer for 'Future Sound of Mzansi,' Spoek Mathambo's Documentary About South African Electronic Music

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Watch the Trailer for 'Future Sound of Mzansi,' Spoek Mathambo's Documentary About South African Electronic Music

Riding with the Oldest All-Gay, All-Male, All-Riding Motorcycle Club

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A crew of burly, bearded men wearing black leather pants, hats, vests, and jackets appeared in the doorway of Rockbar, a dive at the very edge of the West Village in Manhattan. They looked around, confused, at the the sight of long-haired guys in broken glasses wearing comic book T-shirts. I realized this bar must normally be the group's haunt of choice and the nerdy comedy show I was there to see was perhaps not first on their list of amusements. They turned and walked out, not before I saw the back of one leather vest—a yellow circle enclosed by a blue and red male symbol and the words Empire City MC.

A few months later, I'm waiting in a coffee shop for "Evil" Ed Caraballo and Chaz Antonelli, the current president and secretary, respectively, of what I have learned is the Empire City Motorcycle Club, or ECMC. The club is one of the oldest all-riding, all-gay, all-male motorcycle organizations in the world. Founded in 1964 by a group of 12 bikers from the New York metropolitan area, the club celebrated its 50th anniversary in October 2014. While other motorcycle clubs have perhaps been active for longer periods of time (at least one group disputes that they are the oldest all-male, all-gay group) Empire City is the only one that requires, and has always required, all of its members to ride a motorcycle.

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Motorcycle organizations popped up all over the country in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, following the burst of soldiers coming home from the World War II who were hungry for the same sense of danger and excitement they experienced in combat overseas. The popularity of bike clubs were bolstered by the romanticization of the "bad boy biker" image that exploded across America in the 50s thanks to the iconic film The Wild One. In the movie, Marlon Brando stars as Johnny Strabler, a tough character outfitted with a leather motorcycle jacket and cap, tight jeans, and—of course—a trusty bike. Brando's Strabler character and Tom of Finland's illustrations of burly, leather-bound tough guys on bikes became images to aspire to, a representation of freedom and danger at the same time. Motorcycles have had that same reputation ever since.

Admittedly, I too associate motorcycling with general badassery and my visions of it are always soundtracked by Steppenwolf's " Born to Be Wild." When Ed and Chaz stride into the coffee shop, they uphold my expectations. They're both cloaked in well-worn leather jackets and denim jeans held up by black leather belts with big silver buckles. They wear thick, black boots and they walk with strength and purpose. They are friendly, gracious, knowledgeable—and they are not to be fucked with.

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Chaz, 48, has a thick, bristly horseshoe of a mustache peppered with brown and gray, and a tattoo of a leather-bound heart on his neck. Over his leather rider he wears a frayed denim cutoff jacket. On the vest are sewn all manner of patches, from flags of different countries that he's visited to pride flags to patches bearing statements like "It's only kinky the first time"—all surrounding the ECMC logo at the center. Ed, 46, is sleek in jeans that end perfectly above his boots, and a crisp black turtleneck sweater under his black leather Empire City vest. His beard is shaped into clean lines around his face. Ed has been a member of Empire City since 2010; Chaz officially since 2008, though he has been spending time with the club since 1989.

"Personally, I feel when you're in a group of guys who are into motorcycles, you all have the most common bond in that you're into motorcycles, but you like a little danger," Ed says. "Being a gay biker, being in a group, you find yourself with people who have the same interests, the same comfort level," he goes on. "Not just to be talking about it, but to experience it together."

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Empire City currently has a total of 16 members, associate members, and pledges. Full members range in age from early 30s through mid-60s, from a variety of ethnic backgrounds. About 95 percent are professionals, in fields as diverse as landscaping, chemical engineering, teaching, law, psychology, and hairdressing. Some are retired. They're all required to be responsible, especially in regard to maintenance of their motorcycles—they're not raging on the road or in the bars where they hang out, though they definitely do love to have a good time. In Ed's words, the club is made of mature men who come together over a love of riding motorcycles and are comfortable enough with themselves to feel they can contribute to the group dynamic, no matter their stage in life.

Part of that group dynamic involves participating in a variety of riding and social events throughout the year. Some of these events include their annual Memorial Day Biker Weekend, where they have a catered picnic and a traditional bike blessing—you choose a name for your bike and the club's chaplain blesses it—and the annual Holiday Party and Toy Drive, benefitting the Leake & Watts foster care organization. The club also goes on many rides for charity like Hogs for Hope benefitting the Ronald McDonald House, volunteers at benefits like the Imperial Court of New York's annual Night of 1,000 Gowns, and participates in the annual New York Pride Parade.

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In our digitized culture, ECMC is still around because it offers its members something they can't find online. "The club community has survived because different needs have existed that the clubs have filled in," Chaz says. "With a motorcycle club, the bonds are even stronger than that of your generalized leather club or MC [men's club] because we have a lot more in common with each other," he says. The Men's Clubs, which often have a fetish focus like leather, might have a few members who ride motorcycles, but they're not all 100 percent all-riding motorcycle clubs like Empire City. "We ride together, we protect each other. When we ride in formation, we are a well-oiled machine. We watch out for people on the road; when we change lanes, we make our presence known."

Chaz himself came to the club through the leather community, in which both he and Ed are active. Many of the ECMC members are—though it's not mandatory to join. For some in Empire City, a motorcycle is the ultimate leather accessory, but others just like to ride.

Ultimately, though, Empire City is all about riding and brotherhood. Members join and stay for long periods of time—20, 40, even 50 years—and they bond over the freedom, experience, and trust created when riding a motorcycle in a group.

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Emil Solis, 81, has missed only two ECMC Christmas parties in his 50-year membership with the club. And one was the very first party, in December 1964, before he became a member. Though Emil stopped riding in 1996, he is currently an ECMC Emeritus member, meaning he doesn't have to own a bike or license designation, or pay dues.

In the 1960s, when Emil joined, "gay" was not something you discussed and "out" was not something you were. ECMC began as a secret organization because it had to. Being openly gay put you at risk for losing your job, your apartment, your family, and friends.

"When I came with my late [partner] Bill into the club in June of '65, they had no name of the club yet," he says. "They were called some fancy name or something more traditional than Empire City. Empire City, that suited everybody well. It doesn't mean that you're gay, it doesn't mean this, it doesn't mean that. We're just New York City, Empire City. That's how it stuck."

Emil lowers his voice when he says the word "gay," even though we are chatting in the lobby of The Center, as New York's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Center is known. Even in the age of Lady Gaga's "Born This Way," the oppression Emil experienced throughout his lifetime is hard to shake.

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Following ECMC's history is a bit of a Forrest Gump-like experience of gay history post-1950: Emil himself was a member of the Mattachine Society which, established in 1950, was one of the earliest gay rights organizations in the country. ECMC also predates the influential Stonewall Riots in 1969; Emil actually participated in Christopher Street Liberation Day, which is now considered the first ever gay pride parade, in 1970. ECMC survived the AIDS crisis of the 80s and 90s; and today some members have married their partners with the passage of gay marriage in New York State.

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"In the 70s, you lived Monday through Friday a regular, closeted life," Chaz says. "A life that was not really you. When the weekend came, you hooked up with your friends, you went out to the bars, you went to club runs, and you hung out with people that were just like you. It was the only time you could let your hair down and be yourself. And because those were so important, people were joining clubs in droves because that was our only social outlet. That was Facebook at the time."

Today, ECMC is vocal about its existence—members wear those aforementioned leather jackets and vests without fear of repercussion; they recruit members at fairs like Folsom Street East, the largest outdoor fetish festival on the East Coast; and they hold meetings the first Wednesday of every month at The Center, which all interested men and prospective members are welcome to attend.

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To be a member of the ECMC, you must be a gay man over the age of 21, you must own a motorcycle, you must be insured for said motorcycle, and you must be licensed to ride a motorcycle. To be a full member (as opposed to an associate member, which has fewer event attendance requirements to uphold) you must live within a 50-mile radius of Columbus Circle. If you meet those qualifications, you can apply.

After applying, you must attend one general meeting and one official club ride and obtain sponsorship from two full members who will vouch for you before you are either accepted or rejected as a pledge. There's a mandatory pledge period of three to six months, and during that time you'll be asked to get to know other ECMC members, attend club events, rides, and meetings, and fully acquaint yourself with all 22 pages of the ECMC Constitution and Bylaws. After that time, your membership will be voted on. And the gentlemen don't bend the rules.

The strict adherence to this structure is undoubtedly one of the reasons why the club has lasted so long. Everyone has always been held to the same very high standards of responsibility and brotherhood. "We're not fair-weather friends. That's what our vetting process does, it makes sure you're a person of good character," Chaz says. "We don't just want to be there for them, we want to make sure they're there for us, too. It's a two-way street—we're a family."

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The best way to see the brotherhood in action, though, is to be on a ride with them.

On a Sunday morning in April, ECMC members begin rolling into the Lexington Candy Shop, a regular meeting spot before rides. The waitress behind the counter knows them by name and calls them honey and sweetheart and knows their orders by heart. Today I will be riding with Chaz on the back of his bike, a 2004 Yamaha Road Star. We head outside and shortly there's a symphony of carburetors purring awake. Helmets are strapped to heads, leather jackets are zipped closed.

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Today it's a smaller gathering of gentlemen—Chaz, Eddie, Mark, Joe, Geno, and an ECMC pledge, Aaron (who has since become a full member). For some of the men, this is their first ride of the season: Bikes have been hauled out of garages, hands must reacquaint themselves with clutches, and faces must adapt to the cold wind. Geno, the Road Captain, will be leading the ride, and Chaz is the safety, or the tail. He will guard the other ECMC cyclists from oncoming cars, making sure there's enough room for the bikes to change lanes, make turns, and enter traffic throughout the trip. The ultimate goal is always to stick together, on or off the bike.

As we move north on the West Side Highway, I get it. Motorcycling is incredibly dangerous and when you invest your trust in people to watch out for you, to ride safely, to essentially take your life in their hands, having them so closely and carefully uphold it makes you feel closer to them. I feel the wind in my face and the corners of my mouth naturally upturn and they just stay there, involuntarily. The freedom and the openness of riding a bike are so powerful that it makes dealing with the danger of it worth the trouble. When you get to experience that along with a group of people even for a day, like me, you begin to develop a sense of camaraderie and community, so I can only imagine what it's like when you've been riding with these people for years. The motorcycle may be the foundation of Empire City, but the people are what gave, and continue to give, the club the soul that has been making it a home and a family for over 50 years.

Follow Elyssa Goodman on Twitter.

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