VICE CA

Science Says Being Drunk and Falling in Love Are Basically the Same Feeling

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All photos by Robert Foster.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

You've got to give it to the Daily Mail, they're always looking out for us. They want us to have jobs, they want us to be healthy, they want us to know how we should look on the beach and at all those film premieres we go to. Now they're telling us, point blank, the exact age at which we should have achieved certain milestones in our lives. They're giving us the blueprint here and all they want in return are your clicks. Your life is a giant Lego Death Star ©, and Paul Dacre and the mandem are telling you which gray block goes where.

It's unfortunate, then, that their advice, presented in the form of an infographic compiled by Amigo Loans, is totally unrealistic. Amigo asked 2,000 people which particular lamestream rite of passage they were busy ticking off the bucket list at what age. The utopian vision of personal progression they've arrived at is something very few people will be able to buy into, especially as we watch our once green and beautifully pastured land swirl about in the toilet bowl of anguish before being pissed out of a pipe into a colossal fatberg of despair.

We appreciate the sentiment, Amigo, Daily Mail, but this is how it really goes down on the strip. This is the direction your life is really heading in. Take notes:

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AGE 15
What Amigo Thinks You're Doing: FIRST KISS
What You're Really Doing:
This one isn't as unfeasible as some of the others, but it paints a very chaste picture of being 15. The first kiss as envisaged by the Amigo infographic team is akin to the kind of peck shared by two toddlers in the heart-warming section of You've Been Framed. In reality, it's a blitzkrieg of jostling tongues, a shocking and intimidating experience that you share with someone whose death you will most likely never hear about or mourn. It's also the original gateway to foreplay. It's that moment in life when your hands stop just being receptacles for Xbox controllers and Berol handwriting pens, and start becoming instruments of pleasure. That is, if you don't squeeze certain things too tightly, or jam them in too violently. It's a rocky road, but our inbuilt survival instincts see that we all get there in the end.

Related: Watch our film 'Young Reoffenders' about a gang of "lost boys" from Oxford trapped in a cycle of crime and self-abuse

AGE 19
What Amigo Thinks You're Doing: FIRST FULL-TIME JOB
What You're Really Doing:
It's been a full four years since your first kiss, supposedly, and finding a full-time job is now the most pressing thing on your mind.

But is it? Is it really? Or: do you actually want some crash-bang-wallop state-sponsored fun, right fucking now? Do you actually want Mr. Government to pay for you to go to a city, or a town, far, far away from your family, so that you can drink shots that are unconventional colors and throw up over every surface you can find? Who cares that you'll be unable to pay the loan back? Who cares that some loan officer will be exhuming your corpse to crowbar the fillings from your teeth? You're dancing on the table at Revolutions and you're having a great time. You already have a full-time job: being a cunt and getting fucked 24/7.

AGE 20
What Amigo Thinks You're Doing: PASSING YOUR DRIVING TEST
What You're Really Doing:
If you're a city dweller, your need for a car at that age is almost non-existent. If you're not a city dweller, your need for a car is extremely existent, and you'll most likely have a license as soon as you are old enough. Your folks pop you on the insurance and bang: Bowl-a-rama hasn't seen regular custom like this since 1997. But a lot of 20-year-olds are still finding their feet at one of the country's premier brain-feeding facilities. It's only one year on from 19, and those bottles of Hooch mixed with cigarette butts aren't going to drink themselves.

AGE 22
What Amigo Thinks You're Doing: BUYING YOUR FIRST CAR AND MOVING OUT
What You're Really Doing:
What the fuck is Amigo's obsession with cars? It's not compulsory to own a car. We have Zipcar now; we have evolved beyond the need to own cars.

When it comes to moving out, again, it's something you may have experienced already when leaving for college. But for those not at college, moving out at 22 in the age of zero-hours contracts and no housing benefit for the under-25s is a privilege reserved for those who thought their mom was a kindly Filipino woman until last year. Unless your folks are bastards and are moving your bed incrementally closer to the front door each night as a not-so-subtle hint for you to get the fuck out, then don't sweat it. Their 17 vacations a year can wait a little longer.

AGE 23
What Amigo Thinks You're Doing: GOING ON VACATION WITH YOUR PARTNER / BEING A BEST MAN OR BRIDESMAID AT A WEDDING
What You're Really Doing:
It's optimistic but also very naïve of Amigo to assume that a 23-year-old would be in any way prepared to be a best man at anyone's wedding. Bridesmaids, sure: 23-year-old women are in their prime, they're beautiful and responsible, but 23-year-old men, emerging like an alien chest-burster from the ribcage of an exhausting second puberty, are not. What kind of dog shit best man's speech will a timid 23-year-old fart out? What on earth would they have to offer on the pathos of life and love? They've only just discovered there's more than one form of contraception, and neither of those are "just pull out."

AGE 25
What Amigo Thinks You're Doing: GETTING ENGAGED
What You're Really Doing:
I'm convinced that this survey was conducted using people exclusively from the Why Aren't Things Like They Were In The 1970s Forum (or Momsnet to give it its proper title). My parents got married when they were my age, but everyone was a little cooler back then, they knew what they wanted. Nowadays, HBO TV vehicles have made us think we're better than that. It's sewn the seeds of petulance in our brains and now we think the freedom to drown ourselves in 2-4-1 strawberry daiquiris once a week is an ample replacement for stability, love, and longevity.

The age of 25 rings in the fabled quarter-life crisis, i.e. still being relatively young but getting pretentiously concerned about the impact you've had on the world thus far and where you're going in life. It's the sort of thing that a steel worker in the 1920s would punch you in the face for even suggesting exists, leaving a big sooty fist mark on your moisturized millennial cheek. At this point you've probably got a job that you don't think pays enough, but you're quietly getting on with it, and seething, like Michael Douglas in Falling Down. Only difference is you won't go on a killing spree because you're more interesting in trying out that new bahn mí place than exacting change in your sad little life.

AGE 28
What Amigo Thinks You're Doing: HAVING YOUR FIRST CHILD
What You're Really Doing:
The sense of fear has finally become too much to bear. You started a relationship with someone you never really liked because you were terrified of the impending loneliness and now things are stagnant enough for the baby talk to begin. It's time to shit or get off the potty. Popular culture has taught you that you should be settled by now, that you're a living anomaly, a brewing zit that should have been popped long ago. You're in the government's manifesto as an example of something that needs to change. You are the physical personification of the feeling of being lost in a forest. The dark trees are closing in, the foliage is obscuring the sun and things are starting to get cold.

AGE 29
What Amigo Thinks You're Doing: BUYING YOUR FIRST HOUSE
What You're Really Doing:
You're a year into your fallacy of a relationship and though you have managed to not have a baby, it has become quietly agonizing. The differences between you gong louder in your ears every day, yet you cannot drag yourself away. What is the alternative? Return to a life of jejune hedonism? No, you're too old for that now. You have to eat different things now. You're still smoking, though. Why can't you smoke a salad? At this point, the prospect of buying a house is about as alien as buying a custom-built island in Dubai that's the same shape as your dick. You wonder if you'll ever have enough money for such a purchase, or if any bank will ever trust you again after applying for a sixteenth overdraft. But hey, at least you're starting to find some gray hairs.

AGE 31
What Amigo Thinks You're Doing: HAVING YOUR SECOND CHILD
What You're Really Doing:
Who at Amigo keeps trying to force this baby agenda? The sight of any and all children sends a shiver down your spine. They are tiny dribbling reminders of your own hastening mortality. You are in no position to teach another being about life, as you yourself are unsure of its full permutations. You are 31, smoking outside on a bar patio with your friends, who're all also 31, and you're wondering when it's all going to change. And when it does, are they coming with you?

AGE 36
What Amigo Thinks You're Doing: MOVING TO YOUR SECOND HOUSE / STARTING TO GO ON TWO HOLIDAYS A YEAR
What You're Really Doing:
Second house? Lolol, fuck off. But in some ways, things are looking up. Through sheer tyranny of will you have managed to sort your life out. It is not nearly as enjoyable as it once was, but you're at peace with that, because what is a life of constant enjoyment? Where is the time to think in such an existence? You start becoming at one with your own company. You like sitting in Sbarro by yourself. You're not concerned with the fact that everyone is looking at you with tremendous pity, because you have a slice of pepperoni and some garlic knots and a Peroni, and you don't give a fuck. You've sacked off the long-term relationship and now you're dating someone you like, and it's easy, because you're both just quite tired. Neither of you have the energy for a tumultuous and exciting journey of love. This isn't a Richard Curtis film, there are no bust ups in the rain and reconciliations in the snow, just a calm sense of enjoyment and routine flooding over you, a tidal wave of near tranquillity.

Alternatively, of course, you could just be a street alcoholic.

AGE 39
What Amigo Thinks You're Doing: LOOKING AT PROPERTY TO LET
What You're Really Doing:
By now you do actually have some children, and they provide a sense of comfort for you. For the mothers, a yearning for total and unconditional love has been achieved. For the fathers, a final project that some sense of pride can be eked from. There's a light at the end of that tunnel, though. There's a sense of freedom that comes with a lack of expectation. All you have to do is make sure your children are all right and don't go a bit "We Need To Talk About Kevin." You sit in your small garden and watch your sprogs on the trampoline, a gin and tonic—plastic cup—in hand, and you finally allow a smile to creep across your face.

(Amigo hasn't got a guideline for the ages of 40-59, but to be honest, if you haven't worked it out by now you're in a lot of trouble.)

AGE 60
What Amigo Thinks You're Doing: RETIRING
What You're Really Doing:
Now you see your own children experiencing the discontent of a western lifestyle and it pleases you to know that you have a kindred spirit in them. If only they were around when you were their age, you'd be the best of friends. Being 60 is great, you can have creepy Facebook profile pictures and people think it's totally normal. A photo of a bizarre old-timey marionette from a postwar kid's show, or a weird selfie taken from under the chin, unsmiling, like the sepia photos of American frontiersmen. Maybe you're a cool 60-year-old; being cool in the post office, being cool in the Barnes & Noble, being cool in the Starbucks. Kindly, glassy eyed, sweet. Now is your time to shine, grab it with both hands before your arteries pack in and your feet stop working.

Follow Joe Bish on Twitter.

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Image via Wiki Commons.

Last night around one in the morning, Olympia, Washington police responded to a call from a Safeway claiming that two black men had tried to steal beer from the store, only to throw it at the employees and run when their crime was discovered, reports Seattle's Komo News.

Shortly thereafter, the responding officer found two men with skateboards who resembled the descriptions provided to him. After what the officer in question described to investigators as a brief confrontation where a skateboard was used as a weapon, he shot both men—whom the police have indicated were not armed with guns—in the torso. The pair are now in the hospital. As of this morning, one was in critical condition, while the other appeared to be stable.

According to Komo News, the men are stepbrothers. The officer who shot the men has been placed on administrative leave while the Thurston County Critical Incident Team looks into the matter.

Five in-depth stories about police:

1. Seattle's Former Police Chief Speaks Out Against Police Brutality
2. We Need to Stop Trusting the Police
3. The Mostly Terrible Things I Learned By Listening to Police Scanners for Six Months
4. The LAPD Had a Wild Town Hall About the Shooting of Brandon Glenn
5. Video Surfaces of NJ Police Allowing Dog to Maul Man Shortly Before His Death

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Photo of money via Flickr user epSos .de

Every day, about $5 trillion changes hands in the global currency trade. It's the largest market in the world, and offers the traders who work with it a huge opportunity to skim something off the top. That's exactly what authorities say bankers working at JPMorgan Chase, Barclays, Citigroup and Royal Bank of Scotland have been up to for years.

On Wednesday, all of those banks pleaded guilty to activities that sound straight out of The Wolf of Wall Street: Operating in chat rooms with code names like "the mafia" and "the cartel," groups of traders colluded to fix the prices of the euro and the dollar to each others' advantage. As a result, the banks will be paying about $5.6 billion in penalties.

"Whenever an American investor, such as a pension fund, wants to buy or sell stock in a European company, for instance, they convert dollars to euros or vice versa," Brad Miller, a former North Carolina Congressman who worked extensively on financial regulation in Washington, tells VICE. "Mainly they used their clients' money to make such big trades that they moved the exchange rates, and they took advantage since they knew which way the market would move, and when."

The relative worth of all the world's currencies fluctuates 24 hours a day, except for two separate points per day known as "fixes." Those two windows—one a minute long, the other a single point in time—are what third parties use to determine how much each currency is worth. Working together, traders would make huge trades to manipulate the price of currencies. The maneuver is called "banging the close," and it made these banks tons of cash.

According to federal court documents, the London bankers would meet up in a chat room and work together even though they were supposed to be competitors. According to a plea agreement from Barclays, the scheme went on from at least December 2007 to at least January 2013. A consent order from that same bank also offers insight into how the bankers operated in their secret chats.

When one banker became the head euro trader for Barclays in 2011, he was desperate to join the cartel. He was invited, after much discussion within the group, to a one-month trial, but was told that if he screwed up he shold "sleep with one eye open." Apparently he passed his test and continued to cheat the market until being busted.

The bust represents a PR victory for the US Department of Justice, which has been regularly accused of taking a kid-gloves approach to white-collar crime in recent years. Criminal charges are not usually part of the splashy settlements struck with banks for breaking the law. But as usual in these kinds of deals, no executives have been charged, although the Associated Press reports that part of the investigation is ongoing.

"These resolutions make clear that the US government will not tolerate criminal behavior in any sector of the financial markets," the FBI's Andrew McCabe said in a statement. "This investigation represents another step in the FBI's ongoing efforts to find and stop those responsible for complex financial schemes for their own personal benefit.

The banks got waivers from the SEC that allow them to continue business as usual. Still, given the sheer brazenness of these crimes, it was clear the feds had to do something.

"This is a lot more than a broken windows prosecution," Miller says. "It's more like a truck bomb went off."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

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Photo via Flickr user JD Hancock

Beginning on July 1, the state of Kansas will limit the amount of cash welfare recipients can withdraw every day, making life even more difficult for those who need government benefits to make it through the day. As the Washington Post writes:

A single mother with two children would receive around $400 a month [in welfare] in Kansas, depending on where they live. The money is credited electronically to a state-issued card. Many use that amount to pay their bills, relying on the separate food stamp program to buy groceries. They might withdraw the money in cash using their card at an ATM and pay for things—whether it's rent or diapers—in cash.

In Kansas's system, every withdrawal incurs a $1 fee, and if the beneficiary doesn't have a bank account, they will have to pay the ATM fee, too. Those fees might be worth it for some families, though, because the card issued by the state of Kansas isn't like a debit card from an ordinary bank. Ordinary debit cards allow their holders to make purchases for free in stores. In Kansas, beneficiaries get two free purchases a month. After that, they pay 40 cents every time they use the card to buy something.

This is just the latest in a series of measures supported by Republican lawmakers in several states that would add to the misery of the poor. In Indiana, a proposal was floated (then eventually withdrawn) to force welfare recipients to undergo drug testing. In Wisconsin, the state legislature is considering a bill that would drug test people receiving public aid and prohibit food stamps from being used to buy "junk food." And one legislator in Missouri wants to make it impossible for food stamp users to buy lobsters or steak. These are obviously punitive schemes based on the idea that the poor are somehow living large on government benefits, and that they're too irresponsible to pull themselves out of poverty without more laws governing their behavior and diet.

These regulations are nasty pieces of work—but the one passed in Kansas might even violate federal laws about making sure that public aid recipients can withdraw money without facing onerous fees. That would cost the state a reported $102 million in federal funding.

"That's what can happen when lawmakers ram through legislation without proper vetting, and based on ugly stereotypes," wrote the editorial board of the Wichita Eagle.

Five in-depth stories about why it sucks to be poor:

1. How Cardboard Signs Changed the Face of Panhandling in America
2. Hostgator M. Dotcom's Struggle to Regain His Face After Selling It to Internet Companies
3. The Sad and Shocking Truth About London's Poverty Exiles
4. Food Stamp Reforms Are Killing Christmas
5. How New York's Record-Breaking Homeless Population Celebrates Thanksgiving

Follow Drew on Twitter.

THUMP's Guide to Raving Safely in 2015

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Photo by Patrick Slobodian

On a little island off the north end of Vancouver Island, there used to be a large brick building, standing close to the beach. Four stories high and painted gleaming white, it was the first thing you saw from the ferry as it approached the village of Yalis.

The second building you noticed was the Big House, a traditional gathering place for potlatches and other important ceremonies. Sitting up on hill above the shore, its wide front is emblazoned with a bold, staring face, with eyes gazing directly down at "St. Mike's."

Between 1929 and 1974, St. Michael's Indian Residential School was home to thousands of kids enrolled in often year-round boarding school. Under the watchful eye of RCMP officers, aboriginal parents were forced to give up their children as young as four-years-old to Indian agents, or face possible fines or imprisonment. From tiny communities across the coast of BC, the children were brought into the cold, brick rooms of St. Mike's. Run by the Anglican church under the authority of the Indian Act, St. Mike's was where those little kids learned that their hair and bodies were disgusting, that their families were demonic, and that no amount of work, physical and sexual abuse, or distance from their backwards communities would cure them of the stain of Indian-ness.

I took that ferry recently, and someone asked me if I noticed that the paint was peeling on the bricks of the old residential school. "See, they tried to make us white," he chuckled, "But it didn't work—we're still red."

The last residential school in Canada closed its doors in 1996, in Punnichy, Saskatchewan. With it ended a system that ran over 100 years—one that was touted, in 1931, as "the final solution of our Indian problem." Over 150,000 children attended residential schools between the 1860s and the 1990s, half of whom are still alive.

Many have urged the UN to classify the residential school system under the 1948 Genocide Convention. It seems to fall squarely within the boundaries, not only of the softer cultural genocide, but also as straight-up genocide, the definition of which includes "forcibly transferring children... with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group."

It was not lost on the architects of the residential school system that no aboriginal people meant no troublesome treaties or aboriginal title. As much as it was about cultural assimilation, it was about destroying the economic and political basis of Indigenous existence.

By the start of the '90s, the apologies had already begun flowing in. In 1991, the Catholic Church apologized for their part in running the schools with the federal government. The Anglican, Presbyterian and United churches quickly followed suit. Mostly they adhered to the Anglican Archbishop's model: "I am sorry, more than I can say, that we tried to remake you in our image, taking from you your language and the signs of your identity. I am sorry, more than I can say, that in our schools so many were abused physically, sexually, culturally, and emotionally."

A decade and a half later, in 2008, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) was established as "a sincere indication and acknowledgement of the injustices and harms experienced by Aboriginal people and the need for continued healing."

The TRC was partly set up in response to the fact that, at that time, almost half of Canadians (49 percent) reported never having heard or read anything on the subject of Indian residential schools. This May 31, the commission will finally come to an end and many will be asking whether it has made a dent in that statistic.

Between 2009 and 2014, the bulk of the TRC's public work consisted of gathering witness testimony from residential school survivors and their families. This happened in community "Statement Gathering" events in all the provinces and territories, as well as seven large National Events in provincial capitals. Statements were given confidentially, in recorded "Sharing Circles," or directly to commissioners in front of audiences of up to 2,000 people and a webcast. By all accounts, these events were profoundly moving.

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Photo by Arthur Dayu Dick

Though all events were open to the public, attendance varied. In Vancouver, CBC News reported that 10,000 people showed up in the rain for a Walk for Reconciliation. The last national event, hosted in Edmonton, boasted the highest turnout yet and ended in an Idle No More–led march on the legislature. It may be that the commission is ending just as it was gaining speed.

Next week, the Delta Ottawa will host the closing events of the TRC, and on June 2, its much-anticipated final report will be released. However, with the dates only recently announced, and most of it taking place between nine and four on Monday and Tuesday—workdays—it is unclear how many people will actually show up to this one.

One of the biggest questions will be whether Prime Minister Stephen Harper will be one of them. At previous events, Harper was repeatedly criticized for, among other concerns, his remark that Canada has "no history of colonialism," his lack of regard for missing and murdered indigenous women, and Canada's internationally condemned coercive attempts to get First Nations communities to participate in oil and gas development. Indeed, the final ceremonial close to the TRC takes place at Rideau Hall on June 3 and is listed in the program as open only to "invited guests."

It is an appropriate end to a troubled commission. From the start, the TRC has been plagued by confusion, particularly regarding its relationship with the federal government. One of the most common misconceptions about the TRC is that it was initiated by the government of Canada. In fact, it was part of the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement. But what is that?

In 2007, on behalf of the approximately 80,000 living former students, the Indian Residential School Survivors Society successfully sued the Government of Canada and the churches that operated the schools on their behalf. It took six years of negotiation, and remains the largest class-action lawsuit in Canadian history. While the government agreed to the compensation, it was the former students themselves who insisted on a truth commission. In 2008, the TRC was established, drawing its budget from that overall settlement. In other words, as TRC Commissioner Justice Murray Sinclair put it, "The Commission functions with survivor money."

The relationship between Ottawa and the TRC has remained tense from the start. By 2009, all three original commissioners had stepped down. They cited, among other concerns, an objection to ongoing meddling from the federal government. When Sinclair took the helm, along with commissioners Marie Wilson and Wilton Littlechild, one of their first acts was to move the headquarters from Ottawa to Winnipeg.

The TRC's Interim Report, released in 2010, was openly critical of the federal government, which it was forced to take to court twice over access to archival documents (it won both times). The commission described the federal government's "reluctance to cooperate" as "unacceptable." Last year, Commissioner Sinclair delivered a lecture actually titled, "If you thought the truth was hard, reconciliation will be harder."

As the years passed, the questions persisted even as the events drew larger crowds: What was this truth commission? Who did it belong to? Who was it for?

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Photo by Arthur Dayu Dick

Some looked to the South African TRC as a model for understanding our truth commission, and found that they look very different.

The image most of us have of the South African TRC is of black and white people embracing each other in the spirit of forgiveness and the world-historical glow of the end of apartheid. Leaving aside the dubious accuracy of this image, in South Africa, the TRC followed the end of a racist system of dispossession and oppression. In Canada, Indigenous people had to sue to the government to get a truth commission, and they're paying for it themselves.

The South African TRC also had both the powers of subpoena and immunity. The commission could compel, for example, former apartheid police officers who had summarily executed black political leaders to tell their families where the bodies were buried, without the threat of criminal charges. In Canada, the TRC has neither. That means that while in theory, the TRC gives space for victims and perpetrators to meet, it hasn't really looked like that.

In some ways, our truth commission is like any other truth commission: it has spent much of its time recording endlessly gut-wrenching testimony about the experience of living under a structurally racist institution. But mostly it has been aboriginal people speaking. Survivors, children of survivors, family members. There were periodic "Expressions of Reconciliation," statements from provincial and municipal levels of government, as well as from representatives of churches.

For its part, the federal government has been conspicuously and ironically absent. Its formal presence at the national event was limited to an information table, which seemed to be primarily giving away little Canadian flag pins and stickers. There were also copies of the government's widely criticized official apology to residential school survivors. These were printed in cursive typeface on aged-looking paper and rolled up, like treaties.

On February 18 of this year, a group of former residential school students gathered at the crumbling steps of St. Mike's in Yalis, on the unceded territory of the 'Namgis First Nation. They held a healing ceremony employing the very language, culture, and spirituality that staff and government administrators laboured for decades to erase from their minds. They sang and danced, sharing stories and crying.

Chief Robert Joseph of the Gwawaenuk First Nation described how he arrived at St. Mike's as a six-year-old, carrying only a small suitcase. He wouldn't return to his isolated Kingcome Inlet community until he was 19. After years of sexual, spiritual, and physical abuse, he returned, in his words, "a broken person."

The former Executive Director of the Indian Residential School Survivors Society and head of Reconciliation Canada explained why the event was named l'tustolagalis. "It means 'Rising Up, Together' in Kwak'wala," he explained. "It's a testament to our culture, to our resilience."

"The other reality is, of course," he added, "that we have many people who have come to join us in this country, and they are never going away. Somehow we need to find a way to coexist."

At the end of the ceremony, survivors and their families stood together and hurled rock after rock at the building's still-imposing brick walls, until a backhoe came to begin the demolition in earnest. It would be days before St. Mike's, one of the last residential schools still standing, was finally reduced to rubble.

Up on the hill, the Big House looked on.

Follow Mayana C. Slobodian on Twitter.

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Tom Knell's home. Photo via Facebook

The word "earthship" conjures up images of a new-age cult full of tree-hugging hippies, or maybe some weird new yoga trend. But the term isn't meant to represent some kind of literal or spiritual escape from reality. "Earthship" refers to strange-looking houses built with material like old tires, pop cans, and beer bottles, which are designed to be off-the-grid, with self-sufficient power and heating sources. The term is trademarked by American architect Michael Reynolds, who began todesign sustainable, off-the-grid houses that people without specialized construction skills could build.

"People think 'tire house' and they think you're living in a hovel sometimes," said Jim Knell, an earthship-dweller living near Belleville, Ontario. "Or a hobbit house since the back is buried."

But living in an earthship is much like living in any other house—with a few notable perks. To get a better idea of what these things are like, I talked to a couple of people who have been calling earthships home for several years.

Knell is far from the hippie type you might imagine would be best suited for earthship living. He served for nearly 20 years in the Canadian military before opening a recycling store that focused on salvaging everything from toilets to windowpanes from houses before they were demolished. He sold the stuff with in a recycle shop in Belleville, Ontario for 13 years before deciding it was time to retire. One day, a couple who was building their own tire house walked into their store to buy some homemaking supplies. The couple explained what they were doing, and a week later, the Knells were already looking for land. In 2011, roughly three years after they started building, their home in the farmland of Prince Edward County near Belleville—just down the road from one of the military bases Knell used to work in—was complete.

A lot of curious people drop by to check out the house, often for the novelty, and sometimes because they are interested in doing something similar themselves. "It's kind of cool to watch the people that come into the house and their jaws just drop," he said.

Keeping warm is the most essential thing for Knell and his wife, Lyn—who used to be a commercial pilot before she boarded an earthship—so they open the blinds on the large south-facing windows when they wake up. The houses, at least the ones located in the northern hemisphere, are usually U-shaped buildings with large, greenhouse-like windows facing south to allow for maximum sun absorption. The walls are often built from old tires filled with earth or concrete—any material that will absorb and store heat during the day and push it back into the house during the night.

"Everything revolves around the sun," Knell said. Earthships don't just look like a greenhouse—in a sense they are greenhouses, complete with a whole garden full of food behind the line of large windows. With limes, avocados, a kiwi tree, and a whole host of other herbs and spices, Knell's 28 square meters of garden is a source of instant breakfast when combined with fresh eggs from one of his six hens. "I'm looking at an orange right now that's turning bright," he told me on the phone. "It'll be ready to be eaten in a couple of days."

Around breakfast time, as the house starts to heat up (Knell explained that even in -20 C, he can usually walk around barefoot in shorts), he starts opening vents, windows, and doors in order to get air circulating. The greenhouse-like quality of the place means that it can gather a lot of moisture—enough that some mornings he wakes up and steps into a pool of water.

"You do have to control your house. You have to consider it a living, breathing thing," he said.

Housework often depends on the weather. He has a pair of wind turbines, but solar panels provide the majority of the energy needed for vacuuming, laundry machines, and other appliances that suck up a lot of power. A battery usually has enough power for him to watch TV and use the internet at night (the latter being the only utility bill he pays other than propane tanks for his stove).

He and his wife then usually head outside deal with crops, tend to their various farm animals, or work on building projects like a new greenhouse. They have four horses and an alpaca named Chester who provides a small amount of wool they stockpile to send off to yarn-weavers.

Earthships are built to make the most of their environment, though, and this means that what works for an earthship in rural Ontario may not work in a forest in Quebec.

For Helene Dube, there is no such thing as an average day. She had designs on building a cool house ever since she watched The Swiss Family Robinson, even if she forgot about the movie for years.

ButQuebec doesn't exactly enjoy the same immaculate weather of the South Pacific, and while working as a stock trader, Dube started to wonder whether it would be possible to live in a greenhouse in order to stay warmer during the winter months. She eventually discovered earthship guru Reynolds and his tire house designs. She quit her job and, with her husband, Alain, bought some land in Chertsey, a tiny place an hour and a half north of Montreal around 10 years ago. But unlike the Robinson girls who waited around in their pretty dresses for the boys to do the building, she dug in and the couple had built their home in the forest.

Living in a forest isn't quite as easy as the Robinson family's Disney lifestyle due to the kind of soil, which is less than ideal for growing. But Dube doesn't miss the city life.

"I don't find [the earthship] hard work compared to sitting over a computer, having a boss over my shoulder," she said. "I prefer to be outside chopping wood."

Dube also does a lot of work with the growing earthship community in Canada, teaching workshops and classes on her property to people interested in adopting all, or part, of her do-it-yourself life.

She and Alain still own a car and head into town from time to time, but she said she's gotten so used to the quiet life in the woods that going to the cinema gives her a headache.

But one of the problems is she doesn't have as much leisure time as she thought she'd have.

"I'm always busy, but busy doing the things that I like," she said. "It's not a boring life."

As far away from the city Knell may be, the urban environment still affects his way of life. While many earthships are built to collect rainwater in storage tanks for household use, Knell said that he didn't trust the air to be free of pollutants, being downwind from Detroit and Hamilton, so they dug a well instead.

For both couples, dinner is made easy by the garden, with tomatoes and some herbs within reach. While Dube forages in the midst of her daily dog walks around the area and does a lot of baking in homemade mud ovens, Knell is an opportunist. He keeps an eye on the ducks living in a slew on his property—some of them wander right into his front yard. If duck is on the menu that night, he'll knock one down with a good toss of a stick and wring its neck.

"We free-range everything out here," he said. He sometimes keeps domesticated ducks as well, though he still buys beef and other meat.

"We're not hardcore but we still like to not buy our meat in bulk," he continued. "We try to stay as pure as possible."

After dinner, Knell said they either hand around outside by a fire or stay inside and watch satellite TV until falling asleep to the sound of howling coyotes. Though the animals have given him trouble in the past—he's woken up to find nothing left from his birds but feathers and a few body parts strewn around the coop—the wild animals don't annoy him.

"It's actually quite nice. It's quite soothing," he said of the howling at night.

Follow Joshua Rapp Learn on Twitter.

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Follow Simon Hanselmann on Twitter and look at his blog. Also buy his books from Fantagraphics and Space Face.

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James Ellroy has a habit of introducing himself as "the demon dog, the foul owl with the death growl, the white knight of the far right, and the slick trick with the donkey dick"—which must be time-consuming at parties.

The 67-year-old is the author of more than a dozen novels—including LA Confidential and The Black Dahlia—which put him in serious contention to be considered the greatest living crime writer of our time. He's also a scholar—and a fierce defender—of the LAPD.

His latest work, LAPD '53, is a nonfiction collaboration with Glynn Martin of the Los Angeles Police Museum. The pair had planned a photographic history of the force but, having combed the archives, they realized that 1953 alone provided enough disquieting crime scene photography and lurid stories to fill their book. As he tells the story of each of the featured crimes, Ellroy's prose is wildly entertaining and frequently hilarious, full of wisecracks and hepcat affectations.

However, the book is also shot through with what he calls his "reactionary nostalgia": his unshakeable belief that America's current ills could be solved by returning to the social conservatism of the 1950s.

We called up Ellroy at the Los Angeles Police Museum where the author, who speaks with the same shit-talking, machine-gun wit as his characters, was in pugnacious form. We asked him whether poring over 60-year-old photos of mutilated corpses got his creative juices flowing, whether LA is still a "perv zone," and if he really thinks that the American police can go on without reform after the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and so many others.

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VICE: LAPD '53 is full of tales of violence, debauchery, and death. What was it about Los Angeles in 1953 that meant it birthed so many of these stories?
James Ellroy: LA is a city that has attracted émigrés from all corners of America and around the world. It's a repository for—well, someone once called it the land of fruits and nuts. It's a crazy place. LA is slightly tipped off the axis of planet Earth because there are so damn many people here who want to be somebody else.

There's a storied LA lunacy. It's also a very big, very good-looking place. In 1953 you had the movie biz, so you had studios with police forces, and studio abortionists, and studio-sanctioned dope dealers, a lot of hophead jazz musicians. You had the scandal rags like Confidential, Hush-Hush, and Whisper. You had Dragnet, which was the propaganda arm of LAPD. Jack Webb [who played Sergeant Joe Friday in Dragnet] was a good friend of LAPD chief William H. Parker. It was all shaking here in LA. Really, I got lucky that my parents hatched me here.

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One of the most striking early images in the book is of a man who's hanged himself using a system of pulleys, weights, and chains while wearing a woman's swimsuit, bathing cap, and white boots. It seems like a quintessentially LA mode of suicide.
Yeah, that actually happened in Laurel Canyon, which is the perv zone within the perv zone of Hollywood, within the perv zone of greater LA.

Is LA still a perv zone?
Yeah, it's still a perv zone, but it's not a perv zone I recognize anymore or find any way to engage in. I was five years old in 1953, so I wasn't seeing much of anything, but I live in my imagination as far as LA and the Los Angeles Police Department goes. I don't dig the LA that I see anymore.

Why not? Do you want to see society become more authoritarian, or less?
Oh, I always want more authority, brother. Let's take care of that one right now. LA today is too explicit. There are too many people. There are too many cars. There are too many people walking down the street checking their text messages or their emails. There's a giant safe-sex billboard a couple of blocks from where I live with a picture of a condom with the words "Why worry?" emblazoned on it. That's too explicit for me.

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Did you have a personal favorite of the stories in LAPD '53?
The Mabel Monohan case [the murder of a 64-year-old widow who was thought to be sitting on a fortune in cash]. I went into that in great detail. LAPD assisted on that case, but it was actually a crime from Burbank, an LA suburb which has its own police department. It was made into a ridiculous anti-capital-punishment weeper called I Want To Live! with Susan Hayward, directed by Robert Wise, in 1958. It's got a great jazz soundtrack by Gerry Mulligan, the king of the baritone sax. It's a real hophead soundtrack. It made me want to shoot up.

What was it about that case that made it stand out?
The viciousness of it. They beat an old woman to death for a stash of $100,000 that never really existed. It was also the fact that the two killers, Jack Santo and Emmett Perkins, had killed six people up in Sacramento County, including an entire family: a grocer, his wife, and two of his children. Barbara Graham, Jack Santo, and Emmett Perkins were all sent to the gas chamber in '55.

In the past couple of years we've seen incident after incident where the actions of American police officers have served to increase social tension and unrest. Does the American police need to be reformed?
I don't think the police need to be reformed.

You don't?
No, I don't believe the police need to be reformed right now.

Watch our interview with journalist Radley Balko about the militarization of America's police forces:

OK, but let me ask you this: In the book you write: "If crime rates are higher in Negro and Mexican enclaves, those indigenous populations will sustain the highest level of interdiction. Said interdiction will provide for a greater degree of safety for the law-abiding majorities of those enclaves. If this creates a sense of persecution, too bad. Crime is a continuing circumstance. Crime is individual moral forfeit on an epidemic scale. The root causes do not apply. Your right to hit your neighbor ends where his nose begins. Your shitty childhood and the established facts of historical racism do not mean shit." Isn't that exactly the attitude that's causing rioting across America?
Let's hold on here. I'm not going to comment about anything pertaining to America or police work in America right now. As far as I'm concerned, it's 1953 exclusively. When I drive around and look out the window I see 2015 LA—and I don't like it. I wasn't cognizant of anything very much outside of my crib in 1953, but if I could hop in a time machine back to '53 and live then, I'd do it in a heartbeat.

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One of the stories you tell in the book is about a man named Edward Gonzalez, who was shot and killed while running from police after being caught in possession of heroin. You write: "It was an in and out, clean caper. It's 1953. That was Then. The world was cleaner than it is Now. A minor dope bust, a single shot fired." Do you seriously think that's a good way to police society?
Well, he ran, and they nailed his ass. Brother, if you live freaky, you die freaky.

You write that part of the appeal of looking at these photos is that it "allows us to time travel. We're back in a less circumspect time, constrained by rigid laws that we believe in but violate with a wink. Booze and tobacco are not yet demonized." Don't you think it's good if individuals in 1953 were trusted to live their own lives?
There is that, but I would caution everyone not to drink alcohol or to smoke cigarettes or to use drugs. We were heavily sanctioned, at that time, not to do it. I think it would be a good thing to reassert those messages.

You mentioned LAPD chief William H. Parker earlier, and he's a key figure in the book. Why was he so important?
I love William H. Parker. He was the hero of my most recent novel, Perfidia, but I also wanted to write an ode to him in essay form and talk about his town way back when. And I did. He was a man of titanic paradox, but he was a great reformer. He put LAPD under strict civil service guidelines. He stamped out monetary corruption. He made the LAPD a very, very exclusive club of extremely well-qualified young men.

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Have you used crime scenes photos before to help you research books like The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, or LA Confidential?
No, this had nothing to do with my fiction. I either hire researchers to compile fact sheets and chronology, or I make it up flat-out. This was entirely different. This was extensive photo research to get the best photos and the facts surrounding them.

You've developed a unique narrative voice over the years, one that now seems as much a part of 50s LA as bebop music or film noir. In LAPD '53 it seems even more pronounced than usual.
This book is an extremely shortened, tightened, and inflammatory version of my style. In my last few novels I've relaxed the grip on that considerably. I don't like bebop, but it's a cohort of film noir and thus of the photographs we have in this book. I don't listen to music while I write, but I love the American idiom. I love the English language. I love racial invective. I love alliteration. I love Yiddish. I love black hepcat hipster jazz patois. I love all that shit.

Were there any stories you came across while researching this book that you could see making their way into a future novel?
No. I wrote LAPD '53 because in the process of putting together these photographs from 1953 it elicited the opportunity to praise William H. Parker, and to honor him, three years into his illustrious stewardship of the LAPD. Also, the photographs themselves are just so damn beautiful.

Follow Kevin on Twitter.

LAPD '53 by James Ellroy and Los Angeles Police Museum came out on May 19 and is available for purchase here.

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All photos by Chris Bethell.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Today, Manchester finally sees the opening of its confusingly named new cultural hub HOME ("see you at home, mate"). It will kick things off with a "sonic firework display" curated by Danny Boyle just in time for when everyone's finishing work, before making way for a bank holiday weekend of DJs, events, and a program of theater, films, and all manner of cultural shenanigans. It really has been a long time coming.

HOME has been built partly to rehouse Manchester's iconic Cornerhouse cinema. The Cornerhouse closed its doors in April with a huge rave, filled with live music, strong men, belly dancers, Manc drag royalty "Sisters Gorgeous," and a load of DJs, who collectively smashed the windows—literally bursting their way into the building through the windows to bid farewell to the old place.

In its time, it hosted the UK premier of Reservoir Dogs and was the first public gallery to showcase British Art's master trollsmith, Damien Hirst, who serves as a patron alongside Danny Boyle and Helen Mirren. The place has been a central hub of film, art, and more since 1985, when it screened its first film, Nic Roeg's Insignificance. The main building was built in the early 1900s and was a furniture shop right up to the mid 80s, when it transformed into what the city knows it as today.

The Cornerhouse.

The sad farewell to the Cornerhouse and the exciting opening of HOME tells a story about Manchester right now. In the shadow of redevelopment, Manchester could actually be losing a lot of the character and the heartbeat that has helped to shape the city. Future developments could be built on the graves of cultural institutions. There's a lot of good coming Manchester's way—but is it coming at a cost?

Read: What the British Uni You Go to Says About Your Drug Taking

The move, which sees the Cornerhouse merging with the Library Theatre Company, came about along with plans to redevelop the area around Oxford Road. While the building itself is safe for now—thanks to Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) moving in to use it for teaching space in the short term—there are fears that site could end up being flattened in favor of something, to paraphrase the first flick shown at the Cornerhouse, largely insignificant. There are rumors of hotels, newly built flats, and some inevitable mini-me supermarket chains where there was once a vibrant cultural venue.

Ken Bishop, senior director at DTZ, which has been appointed to oversee work on the area, says, "This opportunity has great potential to make a significant intervention and contribution to the regeneration of this part of the regional center." Great potential could also mean the potential destruction of many of Manchester's alternative spaces. Under threat are some of Manchester's alternative venues, such as The Salisbury, Thirsty Scholar, and Grand Central. Nearby Sound Control, Black Dog NWS, and more could face closures, as Network Rail remodels the arches to make way for an improved rail system.

Polly and Vicky in the Cornerhouse.

Polly Bentham, part of the Save Oxford Road Corner protest group, hopes that the area will retain the character that it is famous for, but is a bit worried. "We want the Council and Network Rail to commit to keeping the buildings and find other viable uses for the two Cornerhouse buildings. The very fact they won't commit implies the buildings will go."

Vicky Payne, also of the protest group, added, "I'm worried that the Council's tactic is just to create confusion in the hope that, by the time a planning application is made, it will be too late."

Related: Watch our interview with the director of 'Mad Max: Fury Road'

There's also a huge amount of cynicism at what will happen when MMU moves out after the short-term agreement. As Bentham told me, "The council statement about MMU was deliberately ambiguous so lots of people may now think the buildings are safe—which they're not—and there's the risk that people will forget about the buildings now they've been taken out of public use and Cornerhouse has moved to HOME. We know 70 Oxford Road is in need of renovation so there's also the risk the council start making noises that it would cost too much to do this and the buildings are structurally unsound and what have you, well before the planning application, just to strengthen their case."

Nearby, Whitworth Street West is set to be pedestrianized, with the railway arches being strengthened and patched up. Oxford Road train station itself, is getting a makeover. A lack of clarity from those behind the redevelopment has got local sole-traders worried.

Graham Hall.

At Harry Hall Cycles, there's a fear from staff that they'll be evicted. Graham Hall, son of the legendary and eponymous Harry, worried that the family-run business could be invited back to the site of their shop after work has been completed with no compensation and an additional kick-in-the-teeth of doubled or tripled rates. "We're worried we won't be able to stay here" he said, adding, "We're looking at our options and we may have to move out of the city centre altogether."

The closed Wim Wham Café.

Yards away, the Whim Wham Café has already closed after they faced eviction from the redevelopment plans. In a statement, they said that they had no choice but to leave: "As an independent family business, still in its infancy, our position is too fragile and the business is not strong enough to hold on whilst further details of eviction come to light."

In a bitter irony, it was changes to the area that attracted them here in the first place: "Our business plan was one which was based on other long term changes in the area, with the redevelopment of the First Street site, eg HOME, being the key factor in locating at Arch 64."

One trader privately told me that they have heard of plans which would see escalators being built straight through the middle of his unit.

The area also houses some of Manchester's best alt. rock spots. If they go, Manchester will be losing more than it gains.

At The Thirsty Scholar bar, the manager said that Network Rail already had compulsory purchasing orders, which is hoped that this just means the premises can be accessed for any work that needs doing, rather than to evict existing businesses: "This area is one of the best parts of Manchester—self policing, safe, and not really like anywhere else—we hope to still be here after all this."

John.

John Rawlinson, landlord at The Salisbury—frequented by bikers and noise lovers—is more confident that bureaucracy could work in favor of this part of the city. "These things take such a long time that I think we'll be all right for a while—and if any redevelopments want to build around us, rather than on top of us, then fine... but I won't let anything happen to my pub though, if that lot try owt," he said.

If the area is transformed, it'll take years of work to try and build something that is already there—notably, a hive of activity and a hub of creativity. While the Cornerhouse's output is moving down the road, that shouldn't mean that the buildings it vacates can't bring some new artistic and culture endeavors of its own.

Manchester is very keen to espouse the idea that "we do things differently 'round here," but there's a collective sense of trepidation that some of Manchester's quirkier places could succumb to London style redevelopment, blandification, and gentrification. The fact that the 20 acre First Street area is being sold to a property developer and news that some of the first new tenants will be a Sainsbury's and a Pizza Express, will do nothing to allay these concerns.

At the same time as the Cornerhouse's closing party, The Thirsty Scholar, Sound Control, and The Salisbury were hosting parties of their own. We can only hope that these places won't be throwing their last bashes too soon, to become rubble buried under rent-increases and plate glass new-build. If we're not careful, the combined forces behind the redevelopment are going to steamroller all the character out of Manchester.

Follow Mof Gimmers on Twitter.

Follow Chris Bethell on Twitter.

Gwar Interviews for a Job at Noisey

The Venice Biennale, if you've never been, is a kaleidoscopic maze of countries and continents and the art and people therefrom. Attendees walk dazed and jet-lagged through the narrow, cobblestoned paths of one of the oldest and most astonishing cities in the world, in search of the best art.

As it was impossible to meet a new person freshman year of college without being asked, "What's your major?" the refrain is similar during the Biennale: "What did you like best today?" or its more pretentious cousin, "What's unmissable?" Then, hedging bets, everyone dashes out the next morning to find the Spanish or Finnish or American pavilions, only to find that they really prefer the Singapore or Belgian pavilion after all, and can't quite figure out what it was that other person was going on about when they gushed over the technique or process of the artists representing Germany or Hong Kong or the UK. One quickly comes to terms with the futility of picking favorites.

Scratch that: The Nordic pavilion was the best. Of course, when I convened on the square afterward to join a crew of Aperol-spritzing comrades, blissed out after an otherworldly sound performance from Camille Norment and David Toop as part of Norment's Rapture, some agreed with me in regard to its value, but no one was impressed the way I was.

"But the performance," I said, "how could you not be just bowled over?"

"What performance?" they asked.

It turned out that others who saw the pavilion hadn't seen the performance. But that's the way it goes with the Biennale. No one sees the same thing.

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Installation view of 'Rapture,' by Camille Norment. Nordic pavilion, Venice Biennale 2015

Perhaps the sane way to go about viewing the Biennale would be to take a week or two to slowly stroll the pavilions at Arsenale and Giardini one by one, taking time to savor each piece, pausing between galleries to have an espresso in the shade of a cypress tree and reflect. But I don't know anyone that sound of mind.

I took the Biennale during the preview, which is three short days long. Three days to see art from 136 artists representing 89 countries (plus many collateral exhibitions) results in a situation some have termed "art dump," which seems on point to me. So, then, an art throw-down seems most appropriate, a written compilation of the highlights and lowlights of the 56th Venice Biennale.

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In the Dutch pavilion, Herman de Vries's To Be All Ways to Be comprised subtle elements of nature in modernist modalities. One hundred and eight pounds of dried rosebuds made a precise pile on the floor. Pigments from all over the world were displayed on an elaborately catalogued wall of 84 "earth rubbings," smears of dirt hailing from all areas of the world against paper. On another wall, bits of flora and fauna from the Venice Lagoon appeared pressed and tucked, collated into a visual travelogue.

Jeremy Deller. 'Hello, Today You Have a Day Off.' Giardini, Venice Biennale 2015

At the central pavilion of Giardini, Jeremy Deller's bright, in-your-face room, a meditation on capitalism, included a cheeky blue banner made by Ed Hall imprinted with "Hello, today you have day off," from an SMS sent to a zero-hours worker, which informed him that his services wouldn't be needed that day. Near the banner, Factory Records had a jukebox playing 40 recordings from Britain's industrial past and present. There was also a collection of images by photographer William Clayton of anonymous women workers from the Tredegar ironworks in South Wales called The Shit Old Days. For most of these women, this was their first time before a camera—their expressions ranged from blank to angry and back again.

Watch the VICE Guide to the Venice Biennale

Another hit at Giardini was Hans Haacke's Gallery-Goers's Birthplace and Residence Profile, Part 1, which asked visitors of a solo show at the Howard Wise Gallery in 1969 to mark their birthplace with red pins and current residence with blue on maps of various areas, including New York City. Two lone blue pins appeared in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, a far cry from the city's average gallery-goer today.

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Hans Haacke. 'Gallery-Goers' Birthplace and Residence Profile, Part 1.' Giardini, Venice Biennale 2015

Other works of Haacke's from that era were displayed with recent work: World Poll, an interactive iPad installation that asked pollees such questions as, "Do you think your ethnic background has a positive, negative, or no effect on your safety and advancement in life?" Results were projected upon a wall in live time. When I passed through, 66 percent had answered "positive," 17 percent indicated "negative," and 17 percent thought their ethnicities had no effect on their safety and advancement in life at all.

Readers at ' Das Kapital Oratorio.' Venice Biennale 2015

One particularly buzzy ingredient of the Biennale this year was a nonstop oration of Karl Marx's Capital, A Critique of Political Economy, titled Das Kapital Oratorio and directed by Isaac Julien. It was read in English when I was there by Antonio Pauletta and Steven Varni upon a thematically appropriate red stage. Attendees sat stadium-style in an auditorium, halting from the barrage of visual stimuli for a minute or an hour to listen to Marx's incredibly dry musings on money. There's something deliciously subversive about listening to someone drone on about the way commerce operates in the center of one of the world's most important art exhibitions in the age of highly commodified art, especially when that droning is the anchor of the whole exhibition. I watched Pauletta and Varni make their way through Volume I, Book I, Chapter 3: "Money, or the Circulation of Commodities."

On the Creators Project: The 'World's Most Important Art Exhibition,' a Film About the Venice Biennale

Less successful was the Russian pavilion, Irina Nakhova's The Green Pavilion. Nakhova, who has contributed to the development of Moscow Conceptualism, played with color, painting each room a different hue, but the device felt like little more than just that—what of it? In one room, worms were projected onto the floor; in another, Nakhova's eyes appeared in the goggles of a sculpture of a pilot in helmet and gas mask. But the whole thing fell flat—too stark, too obvious, and not enough cohesion among the three spaces of the pavilion.

That said, there I was accosted by the independent art project #onvacation, which aims to blazon Russia's recent occupation of the Ukraine, in which the Russian government claimed that troops were merely "on vacation" there. Part activism, part social-media blast, the #onvacationers asked participants to don gratis camo-print jackets and tote bags and post selfies on Instagram and Twitter for a chance at a free vacation to the Crimean peninsula, in the seaside town of Balaklava—the very site invaded by Russian soldiers last year.

Installation view of Adel Abdessemed 'Nymphéas' and Bruce Nauman 'Human Nature/Life Death/Knows Doesn't Know.' Arsenale, Venice Biennale 2015

In the Arsenale, Adel Abdessemed's daggers (Nymphéas) alongside some of Bruce Nauman's seminal fluorescent-sign art (Eat/Death, American Violence, etc.) created an exceptional opening scene. Twelve Years a Slave director Steve McQueen's film Ashes, shot in Grenada on Super8, was mesmerizing. Many, myself included, stayed for more than one full loop on either side, watching various images sail by. The deceptively simple film documented plainly the story of a drug-related murder, and it was hard to tear myself away.

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Steve McQueen. 'Ashes' (2014). Courtesy Thomas Dane Gallery

Art truly is everywhere during the Biennale. Right next to a man taking a late-afternoon siesta on a bench along the Viale Trento in a lushly verdant park near the Giardini was a line for Joachim du Bellay's "Les Regrets" sonnet XXXI (circa 1558): "Qui comme Ulysse a fait beaux voyages" ("Who like Ulysses had beautiful journeys").

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A side street in Venice

On a side street festooned with freshly hung laundry, impromptu stencils turned timeworn stone walls into canvases for political activism and tiny masterpieces. Especially in these first magical days of the Biennale, it's hard to take more than a handful of steps without stubbing one's toe on more creative works. And then, finally, the sun sets and everyone sits down to another amazing bowl of pappardelle or gnocchi or linguine alle vongole, sated to bursting with art. È tutto.

The 56th Venice Biennale runs through November 22, 2015.

Bibi Deitz lives and writes in Brooklyn. Recent work has appeared in Marie Claire, Bustle, Bookforum, the Rumpus, and BOMB.

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

If you don't already follow Alex Sturrock on Instagram, you probably should. In his professional life as a photographer he shoots some exceptional portraiture and reportage, and has been working with VICE UK pretty much since we started over a decade ago. There are too many of those stories to link out to from here, but a couple of our favorites are his portraits of ASBO recipients from 2007, and a more recent project on the residents of Britain's most beleaguered seaside town.

On Instagram, Alex has been posting some of the best street photography we've seen in years. He sent us a few of those photos for the gallery below, and a couple of paragraphs explaining how the whole project came about:

I basically looked back at my work and decided that I only liked one photo I had ever taken. It was an image of two friends, one black and one white. They were in their early teens, and one had gone through puberty and was a couple of feet taller than the other. There was something about their bond that interested me, but also the fact that physically they were very different. It was essentially a street photo that I'd taken without any agenda other than my own. So I decided I wanted to go all out for a while doing work like that.

I've spent a lot of time in Finsbury Park and on Seven Sisters Road. It's a place that throws up contradictions—there's a massive church and two mosques, and a number of synagogues down the road in Stamford Hill. People wear traditional, restrained religious outfits, and that gets mixed in with modern clothing in all their lurid colors. It's eastern and western and old and new at the same time. But I do also like to travel around. I like going somewhere new and finding that it contradicts all the ideas that you've built up in your head about it. A wise woman once said, "It's what I have never seen before that I recognise." And that's what's really exciting—finding something familiar in something alien.

Follow Alex on Instagram here, and head to Offprint London—a publishing fair held in the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall from tomorrow until Monday May 25—to see (and buy) a selection of photos from this series.

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Photo by Flickr user Nick Gray.

As you know, coffee is a dark, murky liquid that can be served either hot or over ice. It supplies the person who consumes it with a dose of caffeine. I firmly believe that caffeine, and the coffee that contains it, is great. And I'm not alone. Over half of Americans drink the stuff on a daily basis. I drink so much of it that if I'm describing something as tasting "brown," I actually just mean it tastes like coffee. It is the reason I am able to type these words without falling asleep. If real life were Dune, coffee—which is also a publicly traded commodity—would be spice.

Because of its ubiquity, coffee is a thing that people enjoy researching, and then publishing the results of said research. Yesterday, the results of a new study were published, discussing the link between coffee and erectile disfunction. The verdict? Caffeine helps relax the muscles in and around your dick and makes them work better, thereby staving off the scourge of erectile disfunction. That's great. I always knew that coffee would save my penis.

But there are also an assload of studies that suggest coffee is bad for you, that it can increase the risk of miscarriages, raise cholesterol, and cause spikes in blood pressure, to name a few downsides. Also, anecdotally, I hear people saying on a near weekly basis that they're giving up coffee "for their health." On the other hand, it makes your dick work good, contains antioxidants, and may reduce the risk of prostate cancer. So much conflicting information begs the question: exactly what the fuck is up with coffee? Is it killing us or making us immortal? Let's take a dive into these muddy waters and try to figure it out.

First, the bad news: In 1976, a study concluded that the ingestion of "coffee, decaffeinated coffee, and pure caffeine in humans significantly stimulated gastric secretion." In other words, coffee acts as a cue for your body to pump acid into your stomach. That increased acidity can lead to all sorts of unfun stuff, including heartburn and acid reflux (though it's worth noting that this has been disputed—one researcher told the New York Times, "The evidence that coffee is injurious to the stomach isn't there." Caffeine can also increase the levels of calcium in your kidneys, which gives coffee drinkers a slightly higher risk of developing kidney stones.

Coffee has been associated with glaucoma, and caffeine has been shown to slow the body's development of collagen, which is the stuff that keeps your skin healthy. A while back, a bunch of people died from taking too much caffeine, which led us to try to determine how much caffeine could kill you. (Also, we smoked it, but that was mainly just for fun.)

Due to certain pesticides used on the soil coffee beans are grown in, lots of coffee beans contain carcinogens. A 1998 study determined, "There are more rodent carcinogens in a single cup of coffee than potentially carcinogenic pesticide residues in the average American diet in a year." That's the sort of thing that can inspire someone to freak the hell out, until you remember that rats are not people, and people have all sorts of immunities to the stuff that can make a rat keel over.

It's also been observed that naturally anxious people can be especially sensitive to caffeine, which is a bummer since in 1974 it was shown that high amounts of caffeine can trigger "symptoms that are indistinguishable from those of anxiety neurosis, such as nervousness, irritability, tremulousness, occasional muscle twitchings, insomnia, sensory disturbances, tachypnea, palpitations, flushing, arrhythmias, diuresis, and gastrointestinal disturbances."

Related: Korean Poo Wine

Up until a few years ago, conventional wisdom stated that regularly drinking coffee could lead to cancer and heart disease. However, it turns out that many of these conclusions were based on studies that failed to take into account the other unhealthy lifestyle factors of those it was tracking—in other words, it's hard to determine if coffee is killing somebody when they're also smoking cigarettes and not exercising very much.

And now for the good stuff.

In addition to strengthening our boners, it's been suggested that coffee helps protect men from prostate cancer. Specifically, noted one study, "Coffee contains many biologically active compounds... that have potent antioxidant activity and can affect glucose metabolism and sex hormone levels. Because of these biological activities, coffee may be associated with a reduced risk of prostate cancer."

Coffee also increases metabolism, keeping you thin and gives you a boost during physical activity. It's been linked to decreased pain when performing tasks at a computer. It also keeps you awake (duh), all of which adds up to the fact that coffee allegedly has tremendous short-term benefits, especially if you work in an office (also duh).

Related on Munchies: ISIS Is Trying to Lure British Recruits with Cappuccinos

Coffee has also been linked with longevity— one study found that coffee drinkers were less likely to die than non-coffee drinkers. Apparently, you can't die if you don't go to sleep. However, the study in question admitted that it had no idea if its findings were causal (if coffee was helping people live longer) or simply associational (if people who drank coffee just happened to be not dying).

Whatever the case, antioxidants are good for people who are alive, and it's been suggested that the amount of antioxidants present in three to five cups of coffee per day can help stave off dimentia. Studies also indicate that there's something in coffee that helps protect against Type II Diabetes.

Additionally, there seems to be something in coffee that may protect against liver damage as well as liver cancer, which is great news if you happen to be an alcoholic. Coffee has also been shown to have an "inverse association" with colon cancer, specifically in the development of tumors.

If, at the end of all that, you're still thinking what the fuck is up with coffee? I'm with you. The idea that coffee is some sort of miracle serum protecting us against dangers far and wide is false. People have been dying from stuff for years, and it's not like coffee has been actively protecting them from the icy grip of the afterlife. In a New York Times article discussing one particular study concerning coffee and the liver, the paper's lead author said that the study could be boiled down to a "reassurance that coffee and decaf are not harmful to liver function." And ultimately, that's what science has determined about coffee. It's not that it's all that great for you. It's just that it's not all that bad for you.

Follow Drew Millard on Twitter.

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Aarhus, Denmark. Photo via Flickr user neindanke

Earlier this week, Denmark's Radio24syv reported on documents in which the country's Security and Intelligence Service (PET) informed government officials that about 32 people had received a total of $58,000 in state money while fighting abroad with jihadist militias like the Islamic State.

The Danish intelligence services had been investigating the issue since at least last November, although by then they had only identified 28 possible cases, and had not been able to verify almost half of them. In light of the new stats, the investigation's duration, and the fact that only one case had been reported to the authorities by those actually responsible for keeping tabs on welfare fraud, the revelations have raised concern about profligacy in the Danish welfare and unemployment system.

But for all the sensationalized news coverage around the discovery (the right-wing site Jihad Watch opened its story on the subject with the line "The jihad against the West: funded with Danish taxpayer money!"), it's rather unlikely that militants were able to actually get their hands on this dough.

Broken down per person, the state paid out about $1,800 per militant, which sounds like a lot. But these payments came from two types of Denmark's (rather generous) welfare system. The first is Dagpenge, a daily allowance for unemployment, which pays up to 90 percent of one's previous salary for up to two years after the loss of a job (adjusted according to the individual's assets and with a cap of about $587 per week). Then there's Kontanthjælp, a cash allowance for those unable to support themselves or their families due to unforeseen circumstances that pays between $1,589.17 to $2,111.61 per month depending on age and family circumstances. This suggests that militants had likely only received on average around one month's worth of payments before payments stopped.

Although Kontanthjælp claims have fewer restrictions upon them, getting Dagpenge requires regular visitations to job centers, so you'd think that not showing up because you've left for Syria would raise red flags. But according to Niels Ploug, a welfare expert at the University of Copenhagen and director of Danmarks Statistik, the system doesn't grind to a halt the second someone leaves the country, so it's not unusual that it would have taken a few weeks or so for officials to notice someone had stopped showing up to job events and freeze their benefits.

Ploug says the money militants received during this grace period would have gone directly into their persona bank accounts and, theoretically at least, been accessible to them around the world. But experts on the activities of foreign fighters in Syria at the Terrorism Research and Analysis Consortium (TRAC) say it's highly unlikely active militants would have been able to use that cash.

As TRAC editorial director Veryan KahnIf put it, "If you're at the border, you can pass into Turkey and hit an ATM. But it's really risky [as it'd give up the user's location], so most don't bother."

The most noteworthy part of the latest Danish intel report may not be the sums paid out to jihadis, but the sheer proportion of those who left the country for jihad who were on the dole. As of mid 2014, PET estimated that more than 100 Danes had left the country to fight in Syria since 2011 (the country produces the most foreign militants per capita from any Western European country except Belgium). If this figure is correct, then the 28 militants identified as possibly receiving benefits at the time would account for over one-fourth of all Danish fighters in the field. This is not entirely unexpected, given the fact that social marginalization seems to play a large role in determining who leaves Europe to go off and fight with Islamic militant groups in Syria, Iraq, or elsewhere.

Check out our documentary about Syria's illegal oil wells.

And it's not worth freaking out too much about the welfare-to-militants issue in Denmark, as fewer Danes appear to be leaving for jihad. The latest estimates from April indicate that 115 Danes have gone to Syria since 2011, suggesting that perhaps as few as 15 people have done so since last June. This is due at least in part to programs like the one in Aarhus, Denmark's second largest city, dedicated to identifying disenfranchised and radicalizing youths (or at-risk returnees from Middle Eastern battlefronts). These initiatives lean on local and Muslim leaders to convince people that they're welcome in Denmark and that there is little to be gained (and a lot lost) by fighting in Syria or elsewhere.

In fact, making a huge deal over these welfare payments may just upset that de-escalation of the radicalization and departure process. If sensationalists or nationalist politicians were to take up the issue and make a fuss about welfare reform, calling out Muslim immigrant communities as sites of fraud, then, according to Tuva Julie Smith, a researcher studying European fighters' movements to the Middle East for the Center for International and Strategic Analysis, that could serve to alienate even more Danes, pushing them toward Syria.

"I would not say that a revised welfare [system] would alienate people [in and of itself]," says Smith. "[But] they might feel discriminated against and angry if a change in [the system] were to occur. And the feeling of revenge [might] arise."

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

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Illustration by Patrick Kyle

The sky god slept like a rock. In a yawning crater cut into the side of Manhattan's Central Park, a stone as old as the Earth had amassed a crowd. I found it in a huddle of selfie sticks, flapping brochures, and children slapping it with sweaty palms. But Tomanowos, a divine messenger to Oregon's Clackamas tribe, had suffered worse indignities over the years. Known to Westerners as the Willamette meteorite, the boulder crashed and burned many millennia ago. Glaciers raked the land with it an eon later. More recently, exhibitors amputated chunks of it that sold for astronomical sums at auction.

At the turn of the 20th century, treasure hunters took the idol from its worshipers and shipped it to the American Museum of Natural History. Here it sits in the Cullman Hall of the Universe, an enormous, white-tiled pit that funnels visitors straight into the meteorite's orbit. Tomanowos is literally magnetic, given that it is 15 and a half tons of iron. The stone, which melted into the shape of an arrowhead during its descent, is the largest, most impressive meteorite ever discovered in North America. Eventually, even I yielded to its allure and reached across the railing.

As I dragged my hand across the rock's cold, adamantine skin, it struck me as a harbinger of chaos, destruction, and entropy, the defining laws of nature. Native Americans hail the totem as a bringer of good luck. By an agreement with the museum, they hold private ceremonies in which they praise it in chants and bathe it in Labrador-tea and rose-hip elixirs. This attitude and its opposite, the irreverence of the children treating the stone like a jungle gym, suggested to me the spectrum of mankind's relationship with asteroids. Seldom do we experience terror when glancing up at the sky. Parents would be loath to let their toddlers play tag around the burnished shell of a retired Fat Man or Little Boy, but here they were, making a hobbyhorse of a bomb. A more appropriate response would be dread.

Every year the Earth attracts 44,000 tons of galactic ash, enough muck over a century to sculpt a dozen Empire State Buildings. All this soot, the exhaust of the stars, is the afterburn of a never-ending blitz. Fist-size balls of molten iron strafe us every minute, warm-ups to more volatile blasts. In the last two decades NASA reported nearly 600 exploding meteorites, many as large as 60 feet, rattling the thermosphere like dynamite. Between 2000 and 2013, 26 struck the world with atomic force. The emperor of Japan once bowed to a 15-kiloton mushroom cloud, but some of these asteroids packed as much as a 600-kiloton punch. Two years ago one of them burst 20 miles above the city of Chelyabinsk, near the Ural Mountains, smashing countless buildings and injuring 1,491 Russians. The flare shone 30 times brighter than the sun, temporarily blinding 70 people and opening the eyes of everyone else: Earth-shattering impacts, it seemed, hadn't ceased with the dinosaurs.

"There are at least a million near-Earth asteroids that could destroy a city or do worse," said Ed Lu, a former astronaut and a leading authority on meteors. More frightening than their abundance is their anonymity, since we can stop them only if we can spot them. "NASA has found fewer than ten thousand of these—less than one percent," he said of his former employer, which has devoted less than one percent of its budget to defending the planet against meteors. Man is as helpless as a brachiosaurus with its head in the sand.

Lu is one of the few scientists taking action against the threat of being collectively stoned to death. "NASA is reviewing a proposal to build NEOCam—the Near-Earth Object Camera—to look for asteroids, but it's competing against twenty-something other missions for funding," he said with a hint of doubt in his voice. Even if NEOCam gets off the ground, it will be a middling effort—catching only two thirds of asteroids larger than 460 feet, which could ruin vast swaths of the Earth, and overlooking many smaller hazards. Instead Lu has taken on the task of girding the entire world against the falling sky. He leads a team of astrophysicists at the B612 Foundation, an independent think tank named after the tamed space rock of The Little Prince. In the next few years they hope to launch Sentinel, a privately funded telescope that will map 90 percent of Earth-imperiling meteors. It will be the joystick in the human race's high-stakes game of Asteroids.

"Asteroids are hot, so Sentinel will have an infrared lens," said mission director Harold Reitsema, a veteran astronomer who discovered moons around Neptune and Saturn and designed some of the most important telescopes of our time. "But since infrared light's long wavelengths can't fully penetrate the atmosphere, we need to send it into space." They'll sail it deep into the void, anchoring it in the same orbital tide as Venus. Unlike other telescopes, Sentinel will point toward Earth rather than away from it, spying on objects darting across space. With its back to the sun, no glare will obscure its 170-million-mile watch. Sentinel will keep an unwavering gaze on the wandering rocks in our path.

Given its pedigree, B612's pride and joy should make a cinch of its mission. Built by Ball Aerospace, which helped design the Hubble under Reitsema's instruction, Sentinel will be an amalgam of older spaceborne aces. A Spitzer-inspired cooling system will keep the telescope at a constant negative 390 degrees, lest the ambient heat dazzle its infrared lens. Elon Musk's 224-foot rocket, the SpaceX Falcon 9, will catapult it toward the sun. Once it arrives, a Kepler-style camera will track all the trajectories that should give us pause.

If Sentinel finds an impending impact, it will be one of the few types of natural disaster we are capable of diverting. In fact, swiping away a protoplanet speeding at 45,000 miles per hour is easier than most imagine. Atomic bombs would bust a large rock into pebbles. A kinetic impactor would change the course of a lesser one by giving it a nudge. Though it's classic Newton, Reitsema helped prove the concept in the field during the Deep Impact mission, when a little shove from a minuscule probe rerouted a massive comet. For higher precision, we would send Lu's gravity tractor to the rescue. In the slipstream of space, the gravity of a satellite near an asteroid would rechannel its orbit.

Like all tragedies, our death from above would be a problem of timing. Our current observatories would be too late in spotting a potential collision. When asked what we should do if we learn that an asteroid has us in its cross hairs, NASA director Charles Bolden gave a sobering answer: "Pray," he said. Lu told me that if we found an asteroid headed in our direction, we would need at least ten years to divert it. Though Sentinel would buy us that time, not enough of us are buying the need for it, content to stick our thumbs in our ears and dismiss the people warning us as so many Chicken Littles.

Unsurprisingly, Lu and Reitsema say that Sentinel's crucial challenge is funding. The nonprofit has raised only a fraction of the $450 million cost, which is chump change for a planetary life-insurance policy. Though B612 originally slated the launch for 2016, it's had to delay liftoff to 2018 and, now, 2019. "The big question," Lu said, "is whether protecting the Earth is worth the price of a freeway overpass."

If humanity answered no it would not be surprising, given our refusal over the last few decades to spend even a pittance on shielding the sky. Neither NASA's Planetary Defense program nor B612 nor any other serious venture has aroused a healthy fear of celestial bombardment. "It's amazing that we humans have developed the ability to protect our planet from a process that's been going on for billions of years," Lu said. "But now the issue is whether we will have the foresight to follow through with it. This is the final exam for our civilization." Of course, there are other final exams for our civilization—like reversing climate change—that we have failed with flying colors. Seemingly intent on destroying the planet, we rival asteroids in our talent for indiscriminate carnage. The human race is embracing its demise with alacrity.

After I visited Tomanowos, the largest meteorite ever found in North America, I didn't think of it as benevolent sky god or as a quaint holding place for children's chewing gum. When it crashed to Earth 10,000 years ago it likely brought about mass devastation, and it conjured in my imagination darker, more biblical connections—for instance the image of Sodom and Gomorrah, razed in a brimstone downpour. Like that airborne catastrophe, asteroids have been and will continue to be a scourge of mankind. This is the case today more than ever, in an age of unlimited ability and infinite arrogance. If we are now so stupid as to let one hit us, we will deserve it.

The impact may even have an upshot. Billions of years ago, asteroids seeded the Earth with the carbon compounds that would give rise to everything that swims, crawls, slithers, walks, or talks. They mete out life as well as death. If a meteor annihilates the human race, it may ensure the world remains a home.

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The 2011 Dublin Gay Pride Parade. Photo via Flickr user William Murphy

On Friday, Ireland will hold a historic referendum on marriage equality. If the population votes Yes—as the polls suggest—Ireland will become the first country ever to legalize gay marriage by popular decision.

Inside the halls of the Irish parliament, the Dáil, all four major parties have already voiced their support for the constitutional change, but it will be Ireland's citizens that will dictate the course of the moment.

Polls published by Irish newspapers last weekend show marriage equality advocates have a significant lead, with somewhere between 63 and 73 percent of voters leaning Yes, 27 to 31 percent of voters leaning No, and the remaining chunk being undecided.

That said, polls don't always tell the full story, as we saw in the recent UK General Election, and it's possible some No voters aren't telling the pollsters what they really think, just as the "Shy Tories" did in the UK. Also, over the past month the polls have tightened, and both sides are working to mobilize the public in advance of the vote on Friday.

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Dublin Castle. Photo via Flickr user Liping Yim

The Two Sides

Unsurprisingly, the campaign has been heated—a fringe No group at one point distributed a hostile leaflet that claimed gay people contract cancer early in life, while the egging of a ten-year-old girl who was sitting on a No float attracted bad press for the Yes camp. Both sides have also accused the other of being bankrolled from across the Atlantic—the Yes coalition claimed the Nos were backed by right-wing evangelical groups in the US, while the No campaigners responded by saying their enemies were funded by an American billionaire.

The fact that the Minister of State for Equality, Aodhán Ó Ríordáin, was asked to remove his Yes badge on live TV shows just how contentious this issue has become. Aspirations and fears have been openly discussed by the public and representatives on both campaigns.

Behind the Yes campaign are a number of advocacy groups that have worked to change social perceptions and to champion LGBT rights, a push that's supported by Amnesty International and a host of Irish celebrities, including Colin Farrell, Chris O'Dowd, and Hozier.

The campaign has worked on winning the hearts and minds of the population, focusing on the personal stories of LGBT people. Marriage equality as a basic human rights issue is at the core of their message.

"This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to take a giant leap forward to change forever what it means to grow up LGBT in Ireland." –Michael Barron

"This referendum, at one level, is simple: It's about extending civil marriage to same sex couples," said Michael Barron, the Founding Director of BeLonG To, a national organization for LGBT youth. "However, it means so much more. It means creating a fair and equal Ireland for this generation and future generations of young people. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to take a giant leap forward to change forever what it means to grow up LGBT in Ireland."

The Catholic Church has voice support for a No vote, with a bishop writing a public letter emphasizing that "the union of a man and a woman is quite different from the union of two men or two women. Also backing the No vote are groups like Mothers and Fathers Matter and Lawyers for No.

For more of VICE's political coverage, watch our video of anarchists clashing with police after the UK General Election:

The No campaign has concerned itself with marriage as a institution innately tied to family and the raising of children. This is something that the Yes campaign tends to view as sidestepping the issue, given that gay and lesbian couples can already adopt in Ireland. The No campaign has been openly supported by respected sportsman and high profile GAA footballer Ger Brennan and journalist Paddy Manning, who is himself gay.

Tom Finegan, of Mothers and Fathers Matter, spoke to VICE outlining the No argument:

"A No vote is the only way Irish law will be able to protect a child's right to a mother and a father in laws relating to adoption, surrogacy, and donor-assisted human reproduction. If we vote Yes, same-sex married couples will have a constitutional right to procreate, which in practice can only be vindicated through use of donor-assisted human reproduction and surrogacy. In such a case, the constitution will require that children be deliberately deprived of knowledge and contact with their own biological parents in order to further adult interests."

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St Michael's Church in Creeslough, Ireland. Photo via Flickr user Steve Cadman

A Changing Ireland

If the data from the polls reveals anything, it's that Ireland has changed remarkably in a very short period of time. Same-sex sexual activity was only decriminalized in 1993; divorce was legalized in 1995, also by referendum. The divorce referendum was an extremely slim victory that was decided by less than 1 percent of the vote—though that did reveal that even then, Catholic monopoly on morality was declining.

A country that once historically identified as Catholic was seeing church attendance nosedive from as early as 1990. Even though 85 percent of the population still identifies as Roman Catholic, the number of practicing Catholics that attend Mass once a week has dropped from 90 percent in 1984 to 35 percent in 2011, according to a survey released by the Association of Catholic Priests in that year. As is common in much of the world, church attendance in urban centers is lower than that in rural communities.

"A No vote is the only way... to protect a child's right to a mother and a father in laws relating to adoption, surrogacy, and donor-assisted human reproduction." —Tom Finegan

The Church's standing has come under serious attack in recent years, at least partially due to the scandalous revelations of priest pedophilia and child abuse cover-ups. The institution that was at the heart of the Irish state and community saw it's credibility quickly erode. Rural communities, where the Church still has it's most committed attendees, are more likely to vote No than urban centers like Dublin.

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Photo courtesy of BELONGTO

The Youth Vote

The generational difference of opinion was also made clearest in a recent Ipsos survey that showed only 34 percent of those over 65 have indicated they'll be voting Yes. Meanwhile, 71 percent of 18 to 24 year olds say they're voting Yes—though that's also the demographic least likely to vote.

BeLonG To has utilized technology to build enthusiasm, producing a mobile-optimized WhatsApp-compatible site that includes a film, the ability to sign up for an SMS reminder to vote and to share that reminder with friends and family across multiple social media outlets.

"We know 100,000 new voters registered for this referendum," Barron told VICE. We suspect most of these were young people. We're now trying to mobilize them and get them to not only vote YES on Friday, but to also bring their family with them to the polling station. The youth vote is vitally important."

With tightening polls, voter turnout could be the decisive factor. Taxi services Hailo and Uber are both offering free rides to the polling stations via their apps, while the Union of Students in Ireland (USI) are using #votermotor to help connect students to a means of getting home in time to vote. A number of Irish universities and colleges have even rescheduled exams to encourage students to take part.

Tomorrow the polls will open and in the quiet of the polling booths there will be no more campaigning, op-eds or debates, just a simple Yes or No as marked by each individual citizen. Regardless of the outcome, it is statement of a revolution of values in the 20 years since decriminalization, almost 120 years to the day since Oscar Wilde was imprisoned by the state for his sexuality.

With votes scheduled to be counted on Saturday, the results will officially be in at 4 or 5 PM local time.

Follow David Gilmour on Twitter.

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The good old days. Image via Wiki Commons.

I have lived in New York City for 18 years. Someday, I will die here, probably in a bar bathroom or—given the realities of both global warming and rising real estate costs—on a reef. Still: I am not, nor will I ever be, a New Yorker. Now, I realize that there are all sorts of arbitrary rules about what makes someone who lives in New York a "New Yorker"—years of residence, age, how long you have been working the cheese market at Zabar's—but I Occam's razor through that noise and keep it simple. No disrespect to Patti Smith or Andy Warhol or even you (congratulations on making it through your second year out of NYU, by the way), but I'm going to side with my most provincial of native New Yorker friends and say you're only a New Yorker if you were born here.

For myself, I worship New York City like dead people love the grave, but I just live here. I am less a New Yorker than a New Yorker caption contest: a blank space that's occasionally funny.

Earlier this month the New York Times did a piece on the supposed trend of "young creatives" (read: mostly white people with a bunch of money and no kids) moving from New York to Los Angeles. Apparently the streets of LA are paved with artisanal, locally-sourced cheese, and former NYC residents are falling in love with what the Times calls LA's "scruffy bohemian spirit and laid-back mood." I say go with God, young Fievels. I will not engage in cross-coastal slander as the notion that one town is better than the other is, on the face of it, absurd. I don't hate LA. I like to go there and hang out in the sun with New Yorkers (who tend to gather and congeal in an expat smugness that I find appealing/bracing). I also don't buy the notions of the city being inherently vapid. Too much good thinking and genuine profundity has come out of LA artists (from Fleetwood Mac to Octavia Butler) to dismiss Angelenos as being the sun-soaked, THC-devoted, water-bugging-on-the-surface-of-their-own-existence Californicators that they sometimes portray themselves as.

Also, I get why you'd make that move west: It's impossible to win in NYC right now. The median rent in Brooklyn is nearly $3,000, a record high, and while wages are apparently going up marginally, that's not enough to make this town affordable. The upwardly mobile have migrated to more comfortable cities; the working classes, not having those resources, have drifted to the fringes of the five boroughs.

Some people—too many people—are forced to leave the city by economic forces. These are not natural forces like the wind, but manmade by your Bloombergs, your Giulianis, and the people like me: the artists, the DIY-ers, the well-meaning if self-centered "kids" who make up that first, crucial wave of gentrification. I refuse to offer moral defense of what cannot be morally justified, only rationalized. To those people born here who have been forced out, I won't even insult your intelligence by apologizing. You may hate me with abandon. But to those for whom leaving NYC means more floor space and perhaps a second ottoman for their pug I say, "Go kick rocks with no socks." I don't understand you at all.

Leaving New York for a merely more comfortable life would seem like such a betrayal of the city.

I moved to NYC to read poetry at open mics (first at Nuyorican Café, where I was correctly laughed out of the room, then at hardcore-mecca-but-sure-poetry-why-not-safe-place ABC No Rio), so defeat was written into the contract I signed with the city. I always knew I'd be second-rate on my best day. I just wanted to exist within the same physical geography of the New York School, even 30 years too late; My Dinner with Andre, even 20 years too late; and Born Against, even ten years too late.

Leaving New York for a merely more comfortable life would seem like such a betrayal of the city, a betrayal of my younger, mostly (or somewhat) harmless delusions. And while I have no problems with you people now leaving, I would like to ask a few favors: First, take Vampire Weekend with you; second, don't blame the gentrification you caused for your leaving if you're not from here (you sound like a lifelong cokehead railing against the cartels after he gets sober); finally, please don't write a "Leaving New York" essay. It makes us suspect that that was your plan all along.

Watch: VICE does New York Fashion Week

I can't exactly deny that New York City has changed. Some say it's gone from being full of the kind of sophisticated, romantic enthusiasm of a Frank O'Hara poem to being as mechanical and uncaring as the jeep that killed the man himself. Others say, conversely, that the city's once cutthroat streets have morphed into Disneyland, and not "Disneyland" as metaphor but LITERAL Disneyland, mouse ears and all. Worse yet, still others claim New York is becoming like Anytown, USA, dominated by the same chains you'll find wherever you go. You always think you want to go to IHOP but, really, you don't.

So why don't I leave? For one, despite everything New York is still my favorite small town. When I moved here, Manhattanites I knew wouldn't dream of visiting Brooklyn (yes, even Williamsburg) and the Beauty Bar on 14th street was (half-jokingly) called "uptown." I liked then and I like now that weird tunnel vision you get when you're in New York. The constant running into people you know, no matter where you are and no matter what time it is; it's a performance of Our Town that never ends, complete with ever-present death and an omniscient narrator who will eventually turn out to be James Franco.

New York is a destination spot if your soul is too pointy and unwieldy to fit in your hometown.

I won't leave New York because where would I go? Who would have me? Portland? I've seen an episode of Portlandia and I don't think that I would get along with those people AT ALL. Austin? After the way LBJ was portrayed in Selma? No thanks. Asheville? And be corrected on how to say "Moog" until the garage band of my heart breaks the fuck up? I'd sooner die. I thought the whole point of New York City was not that if you made it here you could make it anywhere, but the tautology of making it, just existing in New York, meant you got to stay. New York is a destination spot if your soul is too pointy and unwieldy to fit in your hometown, a place where you can let your freak flag, your ambition, your vestigial tail, and your terrible inability to ever shut up, really and truly fly. If you move anywhere else you'll be hated or, worse, ignored. I hear they have writers and singers in other towns now, but I'll see you all in hell before I compete with them.

If you say the town I'm describing sounds like your town and my love for it sounds empirically shaky I would answer, "Yes, sure." NYC has (or had, depending who you ask) an energy and vibration, a feeling unlike any other—and so does any hard-luck hamlet you could possibly adore. My New York is your Detroit or Chicago or Pittsburgh or anywhere else where defeatism has the sexual sheen of jeans on Kurt Russell. New York is my dead-end street and I dig the topography. I will never leave New York because I am, in my heart, provincial. And I have found my province of choice.

I will never leave New York City, no matter how high the rent and no matter how lame whatever influx of bad-hatted chumpery a new and terrible TV show will inspire. Everywhere else belongs to everyone else. In 20 years, find me on a rent-stabilized sandbar off the coast of Rockaway. Bring me the newest hardcore demo tapes out of Morgantown and a bowl of whatever South American scarcity crop is in fashion. Bring me news of what murderous cop the Post is defending and what Israeli atrocity the News is attempting to justify. Bring me some Starbucks... that shit is delicious but I can't be bothered to wade to the next reef to get some. And let me cover your bar shift if you can, as I'll probably be a bit short on rent.

Zachary Lipez is on Twitter.

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Mug shots via Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department

The Masonic Fraternal Police Department is some kind of Los Angeles–based club that loves Freemasons, the Illuminati, and dressing up like the police. Its members do not appear to be actual police, or actual Freemasons—but despite facing criminal charges for impersonating police, as well as individual charges of perjury and illegal use of a state ID, it's also not obvious that they are any kind of rogue criminals either.

Their leader, "Police Chief" David Henry, appeared in court on Thursday for an arraignment, and issued no plea. He's due in court again on June 30, and his alleged accomplices, Brandon Kiel and Tonnette Hayes, are also due to appear that day. But with none of them opening up about what their police club is—and why they've been setting up meetings with law enforcement agencies around California—details are scarce.

VICE has reached out to all three known members of the Masonic Fraternal Police Department, but so far, none have returned our requests for comment. Henry's lawyer just said he was "unable to provide any statements at this time." Even the LA Times, who tracked down Henry at the courthouse Thursday, was only able to get three words out of him: "I can't talk."

But if we could get them on the record, here's what we would ask:

Where do you buy your fashion accessories?

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In court, Henry wore a suit and bow tie. On top of that, as in his now-notorious "Illuminati Grandmaster" photo, he wore what can only be described as a giant, golden chain of masonic symbols around his shoulders. CBS News called it a " traditional freemason chain collar."

I called a local Masonic shop to find out more about Henry's style piece, but the woman who picked up couldn't explain where he might have gotten his hands on his masonic gear. "We do sell chain collars, but we only sell those to members of fraternities," she said. "I do not sell those to the general public."

When I asked how much it would cost to acquire such a necklace, she declined to give me a price. "If you were to come in, I wouldn't sell it to you," she said. She also wouldn't tell me what it is for, telling me "I don't want to get involved in this David Henry thing."

What authority do you have in Mexico?
When the group's website was still up, it stated that the Masonic Fraternal Police Department was founded by the Knights Templar in 1100 BC, and was also "the oldest and most respected organization in the 'World.'" Obviously, those claims are hard to disprove.

But then there was the part about the Masonic Fraternal Police Department having jurisdiction in 33 US states, and Mexico. It's a detail that can really capture the imagination of the news-reading public, evoking images of Henry, Hayes and Kiel patrolling drug war-ravaged Mexico in full Masonic gear.

But back in reality, there must be some sort of explanation for that claim.

Why the hell were you (allegedly) going into police stations while impersonating police officers?
The Masonic Fraternal Police Department reportedly barged into police stations all over Southern California, in order to have some kind of meeting of the minds with their nominal colleagues. But while this might technically be illegal, it also flies in the face of all common sense about what impersonating a police officer means.

By which I mean, most people impersonate police officers so they can get away with something else, like robbing old ladies or making fake traffic stops. Telling the police you're also the police, but you're actually the 3,000-year-old Illuminati police with jurisdiction in Mexico isn't any more diabolical than calling up NASA to say you're from Venus and you need to be sent home.

While we're on the subject...

What was the purpose of your "elaborate ruse"?
This is one I'm pretty sure they'll want to answer.

Employees at the Backwoods Restaurant in Santa Clarita, California told the LA Times that Henry used to go in all the time wearing a full police uniform, and pass out business cards, apparently spreading the word about his organization's presence. "He was very big on saying 'I'm the chief, I'm the chief," a server told the newspaper. But why?

Local media has called it an "elaborate ruse," but I'd love to hear the Masonic Fraternal Police officers explain what exactly their end game was. Assuming there was an end game.

What does this have to do with Kamala Harris?
This is where things get weird. Kiel, one of the members of the MFPD, is an aide to California Attorney General Kamala Harris, who is also a frontrunner in the state's 2016 US Senate race. Harris's press secretary told us at the time of his arrest that Kiel "works at the Department of Justice but is on administrative leave." According to the LA Times, he's been on leave since April 30, but the Department of Justice still hasn't announced that he's been fired, only that Harris receives "regular briefings" about his case.

Given Harris's profile—and that the case revolves around Masonic jewelry and people claiming to work for the Illuminati—it seems like this response should raise some eyebrows. If all that's happening is that Harris's office is just waiting for the court to rule on Kiel's case before they decide whether to fire an otherwise good employee, then it might be a good idea to just come out and say that.

What's with the pictures of you with Bill Clinton and Jerry Brown?
Chief Henry is an avid user of Google+ (they exist, apparently), and he uses it to brag about himself. His boasts include posting photos of himself posing in various Hawaiian shirts with such distinguished politicians as former US President Bill Clinton and California Governor Jerry Brown, although there are more politicians, and more Hawaiian shirts.

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Photos via David Henry's Google+ page

I would love to hear the story behind these.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.