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Journalists Are Banned from Stephen Harper's Events and It’s Stupid Nonsense

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Stephen Harper is even meaner when he's playing the keys. Photo courtesy Larry MacDougal/The Canadian Press

The phrase "photo opportunity only (cameras and photographers only)" appears 90 times in my inbox.

All 90 emails are from the Prime Minister's Office regarding upcoming events with Stephen Harper.

That line means that if ever an enterprising print, online, television, or radio journalist were to dare enter the event, security would prevent them and, if need be, remove them from the premises.

I know, because I've tried.

I've driven a half hour to go to an event with Harper in the hopes that I might be bestowed the grand honour of asking the Exalted One a question (I wanted to know why we weren't providing weapons to our Kurdish allies). But after hearing a 20-minute speech, I had a friendly PMO staffer instruct me that I was to leave. I tried to resist—I slipped off my bright-red "MEDIA" badge—only to be confronted by security a hot second later. I was escorted from the school gymnasium.

We've all just given up, at this point. We've, metaphorically, put on a housecoat and pulled a half-eaten carton of Chunky Monkey from the freezer.

Which is why it was so adorable to watch American journalists recoil in horror when staffers for president-to-be Hillary Clinton guided them around on ropes. Such simple disdain for the media feels almost quaint by Canadian standards.

A day later, journalists in Alberta were bullied by PMO staffers at a joint event between the Prime Minister and Premier Rachel Notley. The advance team instructed the journalists that cellphone pictures were verboten. They later relented. Questions were still banned, though.

Update: A reporter from the event has contacted to inform me that reporters were, in the end, banned from the event altogether. The PMO was kind enough to send a recap of the meeting to reporters in the Press Gallery, however, because they're so fucking helpful.

Why? Because why not.

When you hold all the power, why not abuse it? If you run an event, why not ban the pesky media? If you control the flow of information, why not decide how it goes out?

It's been a problem since time immemorial. Whether it's editing Joseph Stalin's executed allies out of his photos or Barack Obama cherry-picking friendly media to roll out carefully packaged news stories, leaders always want to control the message.

But most leaders recognize that there's a balance between message-strangling and the public's right to know.

Not Stephen Harper, apparently. Not anymore.

I began working in the Parliamentary Press Gallery in September 2013. Since then, Stephen Harper has done fewer than six open media availabilities in Ottawa.

Every single one has been when an elected head of state has come to visit. You know why? Because we don't want to make our leader look like a goddamn control freak in front of our foreign allies.

When Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott came to visit, Canadian media were permitted two questions—one in English, one in French—at a joint media availability. Australian media were given two others. I asked the English question (on whether it was odd for Canada to be decrying the legalization of sex work when Australia, its leader on stage next to Harper, had some relative success after partly-decriminalizing the sex trade.)

One of the Australian journalists leaned over to me: "Hey, mate, is it normal for you guys to only get two questions?"

"No," I said. "We normally don't get any."

He began laughing. Then realized I wasn't joking. Then he stopped laughing.

At events in other parts of the country, Harper has sometimes taken open questions. PMO staffers have tried to create lists of who will be permitted to ask questions, but local media—who generally don't give a shit about their relationship with some Ottawa-based 20-something media relations czars—resisted, and so that died. Now, events are infrequent, and still tightly controlled.

So how did we get this way?

The easy answer is that we let it happen, but that isn't quite right.

The Press Gallery has fought back in the past. When journalists were banned from an open-door caucus meeting (one of those "photo opportunity only" events), the whole gallery staged a boycott.

"You won't believe what the Press Gallery just did in Ottawa," began the Conservative fundraising email that went out shortly thereafter.

After that, it all fell apart. Television reporters would never again sign on to a boycott that would mean creating holes in their nightly newscasts. Some print reporters became uncomfortable with becoming the story. Some of us, who didn't have to fill column inches or airtime, were a little more activist.

The most that came out of it was a strongly worded motion, adopted unanimously, that I'm sure elicited raucous laughter from the politburo within the Prime Minister's Office.

It's not that the PMO staff are bad people. I know many of them, and sometimes they're actively helpful in providing information, interviews, and details about stories.

But more commonly, they are actively trying to pile-drive Canadian democracy through a four-inch table as a stadium full of blood-thirsty partisans hoot and holler from the sidelines.

It's like there's a real fear that, given the chance, the Canadian media will walk onstage with Stephen Harper and tear-up a picture of the Pope, or begin yelling "BABA BOOEY" into the microphone.

We really just want to ask some questions. Reasonable questions. Questions about how our country is being run.

Instead, the only real opportunity we get is when Harper stands up to mouth off in Question Period, or when a stray minister wanders into the foyer of the House of Commons to answer questions.

There's a good chance that, by writing this, my future calls to the PMO will go unanswered. (Virtually every media request made to any department, MP, or minister ends up in the hands of a PMO staffer.)

If so, fuck 'em.

It's probably our willingness to accept these occasional handouts from the PMO that's keeping this system alive.

I spoke on a panel at the Canadian Association of Journalists conference last month, where my entire point was that making friends and contacts in control-freak governments such as this one is a good way to get around roadblocks to access. Which is true. But at what point is it contributing to the decay of a once-pretty-good system?

Because, while we in the media are notoriously guilty of inflating our own self-worth to mind-boggling proportions, we are still an integral part of the democratic process.

No matter how many episodes of 24/Seven the PMO produces, or how many infographics ministers send out, you still need the media.

No more of this bullshit. I'm done. Whether it's this summer, during the campaign, next year: I'd rather get tasered than put up with this nonsense anymore.

But also, please don't taser me.

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.


VICE Vs Video Games: Building a Mystery: Gaming's Crime Investigation Mechanics and the Beauty of Being Unsatisfied

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(Deep tissue) scanning for clues in 'Batman: Arkham Knight.'

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

When I was 11 or 12, I had a game for my Commodore 64 called Murder on the Mississippi. The goal, as you might have guessed, is to solve a murder that happens on a steamboat as it chugs down the Mississippi River. And I never did it.

The thing about the game that I didn't know back then is that it's possible to miss a chance early on to get vital information from characters; the game still progresses, and you're not told that it has become completely impossible for you to succeed. So time and again, I'd get to the climax, which employs the old dramatic device of having all the suspects gathered in one room so that the hero may theatrically unveil the killer's identity in front of everyone. But my crime-solving escapades always ended in an embarrassing whimper. I didn't have sufficient evidence to pin the killing on anyone. Again and again, I failed. Two mysteries remained unsolved: the murder mystery within the game, and the meta-mystery of "How the hell do I even play this game in order to successfully solve the mystery within the game?"

And even though I hated it at the time and believe now that my frustration with the game was, to some degree, a result of bad game design, the truth is that if I had been able to solve the mystery, I probably wouldn't even remember the game today. The reason why it still haunts me is because it remains forever unsolved, a manila folder stashed away in a file cabinet in my mind, but never truly forgotten.

Today, I could just go on YouTube and watch someone complete the game, but why would I want to do that, and deprive myself of that little nugget of frustration I carry around inside me over it? When I want the comforting pleasure of watching someone solve a mystery and impose a little bit of order on our incomprehensible world, I read a crime novel or watch Columbo. If a game wants me to care about solving the mysteries it presents me with, it needs to take advantage of its own interactivity and let me try to do some of the intellectual legwork myself. That means letting me draw conclusions based on the evidence, or letting me decide what's relevant and what's not. And that means allowing for the possibility that I might fail.

A screen shot from 'Her Story.'

Sam Barlow's new game Her Story is great largely because the experience of playing it is one of piecing together a mystery in your own head. Watching the video clips, I jotted down notes—actual notes!—as I tried to figure out which threads in the suspect's statements might lead me to more information. There is no in-game mechanism to test whether you've gotten it right, whether you've found all the pieces and deduced how they all fit together. It's entirely up to you to determine whether or not you adequately understand the crime that occurred.

This approach contrasts so sharply with how most games approach investigating crimes that some people couldn't quite wrap their heads around it. Giant Bomb's Austin Walker tweeted images from a message board discussion of Her Story in which one person told another that in this game, "It's up to you to decide when you are satisfied with the information you have found," and the other person replied, "How do I decide when I am satisfied?"


Related: 'Nest of Giants'

If you're just here for the games, watch our documentary on eSports.


I think I understand exactly why that person was so confused by the expectations Her Story places on the player. Far more often, we see the process of investigating a crime handled in ways that more closely resemble the approach taken by Batman: Arkham Knight. Batman is often referred to as the world's greatest detective, but at least in the Arkham games, this isn't really the case. Instead, it's more like Batman has used his tremendous financial resources to acquire amazing technology, and that technology is, collectively, the world's greatest detective. All Batman has to do is point his deep tissue scanner at a body and hold a button down for a few seconds and voila! Instant detective work! As we go through the motions, a completion percentage fills up. When it's full, Batman tells us what the technology has revealed. And thus, we know that we should feel satisfied.

The Witcher 3 handles crimes very similarly, with hero Geralt's "witcher senses" filling the role that Batman's gadgets do in Arkham Knight. We follow tracks, we select prompts to examine corpses, but we don't ever have to figure anything out for ourselves, or take a guess at something and risk being wrong, and experiencing all the dissatisfaction that might entail. These games play it safe, and give us bits of positive reinforcement to make us feel good about ourselves when we haven't really done anything. I'm so tired of sections in games that feed me little pellets of content that require me to do nothing more than respond to contextual button prompts and then give me a little pat on the back and a bit of narrative as a reward. This process, to lift a line from Morrissey, says nothing to me about my life.

Geralt's witcher senses make the things you need to poke at, pick up, or follow turn red.

My favorite crime novels of recent years are Swedish novelist Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander books. I love them because police officer Wallander lives in a constant state of dissatisfaction and uncertainty. In his personal life he has problems with his father and his daughter; he struggles with loneliness and dreams that didn't come to fruition. In his work, investigations often hit months of dead ends during which he and his colleagues can only drink endless cups of coffee and continue poring over the same few scraps of evidence they've gathered. The answers, when they do come, are fleeting and limited in scope. Wallander may solve the crime but he can't solve his life. Ultimately, the process of investigation is less about that moment when the crime is solved and more about facing the reality that in the larger mystery of our lives, we may never hit 100 percent completion and be satisfied. There may always be pieces missing.

Follow real crime stories from the real world on VICE News

I got a Steam achievement for seeing 75 percent of Her Story's database of clips, and I feel like I have a solid understanding of the game's central mystery. But I know I haven't seen it all, and there's a nagging sense that maybe I'm still missing an important piece of the puzzle. It eats away at me a little bit. The other night as I was trying to get to sleep, the thought popped into my head: "Have I tried running a search using the word 'daughter'?" When I tried it the next morning, it didn't lead me anywhere. For me, the case may never be completely solved. And that is so wonderfully unsatisfying.

Follow Carolyn Petit on Twitter.

Eurocentric Office Dress Codes Need to Go

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Not Eurocentric? No problem (ideally)! Photo via Flickr user Ministério da Cultura

Dress codes have been getting a lot of flak in the news lately. Rather than being hailed as equalizing forces, they're getting reamed in the media for being oppressive.

They harken back to a time when manners and civility were weaponized to clearly define "us" and "them." They stem from the Victorian period in England, where they were designed to help those in power draw a clear line between "god's chosen elites" and commoners. They were a means of social control to create clear categories between people—between the powerful and the powerless. Today, the "us" are upper-class, white, male, cis heterosexuals and the "them" are the rest of us, the Other, those in desperate need of policing.

Today, unless you work in a creative industry, you've probably felt that your individuality and sense of self were crushed not just by the soul-sucking work you do from 9 to 5 but by small-"c" conservative dress codes—with a slight respite on Casual Fridays. No shorts on men, no exposed toes or heels, no jeans, no shoulders, and, in some offices, no colours that are not navy, black, or white.

Often, the company line is that they'd like the attire of all drones—er, employees—to be uniform and professional in order to promote a productive workplace and maintain public image. However, these policies just end up being oppressive and reproduce racism, sexism, classism, fatphobia, and harmful gender norms and binaries.

Arisa Cox, the host of Big Brother Canada, has been a victim of office dress codes. At 24, Cox was faced with an ultimatum—wear her curly hair straight or lose her job. Cox chose her personal identity and cultural connection over corporate culture and a paycheque, and quit her broadcast journalism job. Like many Black women, Cox found her identity as a Black woman being policed by Eurocentric standards and norms through office dress codes.

Cox is not alone in this. Many Black women, and men too, have lost their jobs or otherwise been reprimanded because of their Africentric cultural norms. Braids, dreadlocks, headwraps, and afros have all been deemed inappropriate in work environments by a number of employers.

For Black women, they not only find their hair and headwear policed but their bodies as well. The societal hyper-sexualization of Black women plays out in the office and Black women find that they are more likely to be sexualized at work—even in a two-piece suit—while their white counterparts are not.

Enter any Catholic church and you'll be hit with a strict dress code, but just for women. No shoulders and no knees no matter what the thermometer says. Though these WASP-y, Judeo-Christian values can be traced to an earlier time, their remnants can be seen today, and not just in church. Even at your local accounting firm, women's bodies are sexualized—even a shoulder is deemed too damn enticing. These rules just reinforce the belief that there is something inherently wrong with women's bodies while also bolstering the idea that the sexual assault of women is somehow their fault. The sexualization of women's bodies is not women's problem, but the problem of those who interpret the sight of skin as a suggestion of sex.

Weight discrimination in offices is rampant, and plus-size women are often told to cover up their curves even when wearing the exact same outfits as their thinner coworkers. This weight discrimination reinforces the society-wide notion that bigger bodies are unattractive and need to be hidden. The dress code discrimination against bigger bodies is reflected in other aspects of the workplace: Bigger workers are less likely to be promoted or receive a raise and earn less than their thinner counterparts doing similar work.

Trans workers face a different kind of dress code discrimination. Not for wearing too much or too little but for not allowing office dress codes to dictate their gender expression. While there have been some gains—the University of Cambridge has relaxed its strictly gendered dress code to allow women to wear pants and men to wear skirts—workplaces are still sites of social control through dress codes for trans people. Most dress codes clearly delineate what is appropriate for men to wear and what is appropriate for women leaving those whose gender differs from the one they were assigned at birth or those who don't buy into the gender binary at odds with oppressive rules. Office dress codes do not allow for diverging from cultural norms or the full expression of gender. Many trans people have had dress codes used to discriminate against them.

On the school front, teenagers are finding their identities being strongly policed too. Recently, Etobicoke teen Alexi Halket raised the troops beneath the #CropTopDay hashtag when she was reprimanded for wearing a dress code-violating, belly-baring top to school. The Etobicoke School of the Arts student alleged that school administration sexualized her.

Toronto students have provided a more inclusive and intersectional critique of school dress codes. Central Technical School alumni Kerin Bethel-John, Erin Dixon and Andy Villanueva started Project Slut, an "anti slut shaming, anti victim blaming and anti sexual bullying campaign" that is pressuring the Toronto District School Board to abolish clothing guidelines.

"We want to bring to light the many ways that dress codes and how they are interpreted, police diverse people," said Bethel-John, Dixon and Villanueva. "Self-expression comes in many forms and how we dress can be fundamental to our identities. Dress codes tell us that we are something to be adjusted, tailored, hidden."

Graduates believe that dress codes disproportionately target not just girls but people of colour, women of colour, LGBTQ students, and plus-size students.

Dress codes are just another tool used to maintain the status quo and keep the boot of oppression firmly on the neck of those not born white, cis, or a man. Seemingly harmless, they are used to reinforce—or, rather re-enforce—rigid cultural norms and standards, assumed universal. The Office Fashion Police ("You down with OFP?") undress POC, plus-size, and trans bodies and uphold the discrimination behind hashtags like #BlackLivesMatter, #MMIW, and #YouOKSis.

In dress codes we hear whispers of plantation overseers punishing enslaved Africans for practicing African spirituality and playing drums. We hear whispers of Indigenous children being dragged from their homes, their hair cut, their native tongues removed, all the things documented in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada report. It's all there if you know where to look and what you're looking for.

Follow Septembre Anderson on Twitter.

Why These New Orleans Cops Are Making Doughnuts Instead of Fighting Crime

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Why These New Orleans Cops Are Making Doughnuts Instead of Fighting Crime

Night Journeys in Sète

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This article appears in The Photo Issue 2015

Each year, the photo festival image Singulières invites a photographer to the little southern French town of Sète to make a series of photographs. During my time there, I wandered around and, attracted by the atmosphere of the night, became curious about what was happening behind closed doors. Some kind people opened them, and a nocturnal vision of the city was presented to me. The surroundings had a cinematic, dreamlike atmosphere, and each visual poem in the series conveys the muted pulsations of a sleeping city. In the shelter of darkness and silence, these are real people, balancing on the thin line between fiction and reality.

British Taxpayers Are Funding the UK's Mass Surveillance Program

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Photo by Genesis12 via

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

In 2013, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the British government had been snooping on citizens on a mass scale. Every email entering and leaving this supposedly modern, democratic, and accountable country was being secretly intercepted, all in the interest of "national security"—which is totally justified, of course; people planning terror plots routinely send each other "just spilt some of the liquid explosive on my foot lol" memos from their unencrypted Hotmail accounts.

Over a seven-day period last July, things got worse. The Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act—which demands that communications companies retain their customers' data for up to 12 months—was rushed into being. If a government department makes a request, they are now allowed to access the details of any text, call, email, tweet, Instagram post, or Facebook update they like.

What this means, of course, is that your inane Twitter ramblings about Philip Schofield's weirdly smooth face have likely been viewed by a bigger audience than your 163 followers. But even worse is the huge amount of money being poured into this process.

"The costs of interception are largely met by the government, who pay service providers money to put in place the technology and processes to intercept emails," says David Mulcahy, a spokesperson for civil liberties campaign group Liberty. "We don't know the amount spent by government on this, but a report revealed that, in practice, it pays for 80 percent of the capital cost of new interception capabilities and 100 percent of the ongoing operational costs."

The full figures have not been made public, but the costs of the program have been estimated at around £11.1 billion [$17.27 billion]—a little more than the optimistic £1.8 billion [$2.8 billion] estimate back in 2012. "As far as I am aware, there was no explanation at the time as to how the figure of £1.8 billion was calculated," says Mike Jackson, a business professor at Birmingham City University. "Essentially, this was viewed as the amount internet companies would need to be compensated over 10 years for the additional effort of storing records."

The £1.8 billion figure supposedly took into account data retention by communications companies, training investigators, strategic work to cope with new and emerging technologies, and identification of (but not solutions for) the technical and operational challenges of the surveillance program. However, it failed to consider the cost of inflation, VAT, and depreciation, as well as the growing volume of data being transmitted and received in the UK. The government also didn't consult with communications service providers to calculate its figures, prompting companies like Vodafone, Twitter, Microsoft, and Facebook to question—and then distance themselves—from the estimate. Lord Marks QC, a Liberal Democrat peer, made his own calculations based on Labour's nixed plans to introduce national ID cards, and estimated an overrun of £9.3 billion [$14.47 billion] taking the total cost of the bill up to £11.1 billion [$17.27 billion]—or £500 [$778] per household—over ten years.

David Cameron has made it clear that tax rises are not on the agenda over the course of this parliament, but it's still the taxpayer who bears the brunt of this enormous and unnecessary expense. "A rise in the cost of accessing internet and mobile services has to be the [ultimate] outcome. Rather than raising direct taxes to pay for the defense of the realm, the government is effectively paying for it by indirect taxation," Jackson tells me. "Whatever the actual costs, there is an inevitability that, at some point, providers will be expected to meet them alone and charge the consumers an additional amount to meet them."



Watch 'VICE Meets: Glenn Greenwald,' the journalist who broke the Snowden story in 2013:


So, at present, a huge chunk of taxpayers' money is being spent on what is fundamentally a series of private contracts for commercial companies to conduct surveillance on the whole British population. And as soon as citizens stop paying through taxation, they'll be hit with extra charges from communications companies.

"The question is whether this generates a reasonable return on investment, given the financial costs involved, as well as the undoubted erosion to the privacy of individuals which it entails," says Mark Deem, a partner at legal firm Cooley in London. "The creation of data is rising at an exponential rate. More data has been created within the past two years than had ever existed before, and this trend is likely to continue. Whilst the cost of storage of data may be declining, the cost of genuine surveillance and interrogation of an ever-increasing data is not."

Jim Killock from Open Rights group, a community of digital rights campaigners, echoes the same concerns over surveillance costs and justifications. "It's hard to see that the expense is a better use of money than more police or investigators. Somehow, mass surveillance seems like a great government hope to do law enforcement on the cheap, and it won't work," he says. "It's more than just retention; it will be collection and analysis. Once it's in place, it will be hard to stop investigators asking to use 'predictive' pattern analysis, which opens up profiling and checking of the whole population."

The whole approach and methodology is also a cause for concern. One of the biggest issues is the request for communications companies to create "backdoors" into their products to make them accessible to security services, government departments, and local authorities. "The clear consensus among the technology sector is that any back-door into encryption has the potential to undermine security, rather than enhance it," Deem tells me. "There is little evidence at the moment that the government is taking this threat seriously."

READ ON VICE NEWS: Inside Washington's Quest to Bring Down Edward Snowden

Mulcahy also identifies this as an area of contention, as well as whether the government can be trusted to use and protect our data responsibly: "It's extremely worrying that the state can hack into computers and that the Prime Minister has called for an end to encryption. When technological weaknesses are in place on our computers and systems, not only can the state use them, but so can criminals and other governments. So we are faced with the possibility of not only the state misusing our private information, but lots of people doing so."

Where there are genuine concerns over criminal and terrorist activities, it's easy to see why some level of targeted surveillance is necessary. But there aren't many who would argue that local councils should be able to spend taxpayers' money on accessing private data to assess whether a family are within a school's catchment area—which, in essence, is what current legislation allows. If bodies like the police want to access this type of information, they don't even have to go to a judge for a warrant—they can get permission from another part of the same organization.

Liberty has taken the government to court to challenge these mass surveillance programs, and the case will now proceed to the Court of Human Rights. The organization wants to see changes to current laws and more attention paid to privacy implications in deciding how to tackle serious crime. "The state should only be able to access our information if a judge authorizes it, and they should only be able to access it for a very good and serious reason—those requirements simply aren't in place at the moment," Mulcahy says.

READ ON MOTHERBOARD: Britain's Intel Chief: 'Our Spies Would Rather Quit Than Do Mass Surveillance'

David Anderson's government-commissioned report last month concluded that current surveillance legislation in the UK is "undemocratic, unnecessary, and—in the long run—intolerable," and recommended that it be replaced with a new comprehensive law that is both transparent and proportionate. But it's already clear that some of the report's most important observations and suggestions are set to be rejected. "Government reaction to the report indicates that they are likely to disregard it and strengthen surveillance powers. In particular, they may be minded to puts limits on the strength of encryption that citizens are permitted to use," Jackson says.

Killock believes that larger political conflicts should be at the forefront of considerations when deciding what kind of anti-terrorism policies to introduce. "Let's try targeted surveillance and investigation first. But let's also remember that terrorism is firstly a political problem. While Iraq, Syria, and Libya are in chaos, we have real breeding grounds for terrorism," he says. "No amount of internet surveillance will deal with that. In many ways, it makes the situation worse, as surveillance sends the message that large parts of our community cannot be trusted and instead must be watched."

When the International Monetary Fund is calling inequality "the defining challenge of our time," it's difficult to understand why so much money is being spent on invading the privacy of citizens, when it could instead be spent on improving the lives of those same citizens.

"If we want to live in a free and safe world, we need our politicians to understand and accept the values of a targeted and proportionate system," Mulcahy tells me. "Mass surveillance, shutting down free speech, and trying to scrap the Human Rights Act do not send the message that we are a modern and tolerant democracy. How can we fight terror if we don't live the values we want others to respect?"

Follow Lauren on Twitter.

Season Two of 'True Detective' Must Be Taken on Its Own Terms

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All photos by Lacey Terrell. Courtesy of HBO

We're three episodes deep in the new season of True Detective. What have we learned? We've learned to never do anything out of hunger (even eating). We've learned that seven's the same as ten, and you can't round off zero. We've learned Vince Vaughn might have to suck his own dick. Mostly, we've learned that, for all its bangs, whizzes, and Carcosas, True Detective has been a ridiculous show since the beginning.

If you need proof that series creator Nic Pizzolatto is totally, completely invested in making True Detective the most True Detective show it can be, look no further than Vanity Fair's recent profile of him, which reads like fan fiction for the entirety of the human race. He summed up the season by saying to Vanity Fair, "The detective is searching and searching and searching, and the culprit is him." No one should be allowed to say that. Except of course Nic Pizzolatto is allowed to say that. Only someone who says something like that in casual conversation is going to write True Detective, one of the more batshit-insane shows to hit TV in recent memory.

What made the original season of True Detective so great was its total and complete adherence to the principles of focused insanity. It took place in the hot, damp, real-life hell that is Louisiana swamp country, and between the setting, Nic Pizzolatto's bizarre inquiries into the nature of existence, and the absolutely phenomenal direction of Cary Fukunaga, it felt more in line with the greater Southern Gothic literary tradition than anything else on TV. Meanwhile, season two takes us to the post-industrial wasteland surrounding Los Angeles, a trick pulled from Raymond Chandler andChinatown.

I'm going to engage in some speculative fiction. It's almost like Pizzolatto sat at his Screenwriting Typewriter (he doesn't use a computer; computers are for the weak), took a swig of some brown, alcoholic liquid (he doesn't drink water; water's also for the weak), tightened his bolo tie (of course he wears a bolo tie; he lent Farrell his favorite one for the show) and said, "OK, I did the Southern Gothic thing, let's do the noir thing." (Nic Pizzolatto fanfic ends here.)

And noir-it-up we have. After three episodes, all of us amateur sleuths have realized that True Detective season one and True Detective season two are totally different beasts. The source material—here, "source material" is defined as "the stuff that goes on in Nic Pizzolatto's brain"—is essentially the same, it's just that this time around, the material is being interpreted in a way that's totally dissimilar to the original. This is partially due to the fact that the actors aren't as strong this time around, and partially because we the audience have been conditioned to react to True Detective season two because of TD S1. We expect "True Detective stuff," i.e., grizzled people with dark pasts going around doing grizzly things in an equally dark present, all the while investigating other grizzled, dark things, blindly fumbling around for some sort of grizzly, dark redemption.

For all of their grizzle and grit, it's pretty clear that Vince Vaughn, Rachel McAdams, the guy from Friday Night Lights, and Colin Farrell cannot even begin to add up to the True Detectives that Matthew McCaughnahey and Woody Harrelson were.

What made TD season one sing was the pairing of Matthew McConaughey's scenery-gnawing Rust Cohle and Woody Harrelson's dead-eyed Marty Hart, whose idle banter about the state of the universe shitted on pretty much every other show's most dynamic scenes. Any time the show gave Must (their official TD/fiction couple name) anything fun to do, like infiltrate a biker gang or plant evidence at a crime scene, those conversations echoed back into the viewer's brain, and it was like the show was forcing your eyeballs to stay open so you didn't miss a single thing.

Rachel McAdams and Taylor Kitsch, wearing their Acting Faces

Even though all of season two's principles clearly signed on for the opportunity to do some capital-A Acting here, Vince Vaughn, playing a gangster turned businessman, is woefully, perhaps hilariously in over his head, delivering series creator Nic Pizzolatto's self-serious dialogue in the same voice he once used to tell Jon Favreau he was so fucking money and he didn't even know it. In Vaughn's best moments on the show, he comes across as the repressed dark side of the comedic yabbers he plays in movies like Old School and Wedding Crashers. This comes out a couple times in the show's third episode, especially when he engages in some impromptu bare-knuckle boxing with the guy he sold his old club to. But far too often, he falls short of the subversion he strives for and just seems like he's trying to deliver his lines so he can get the hell out of there.

Colin Farrell, meanwhile, has the hardest job on the show, since he's the one who has to play the de facto McConaughey "unhinged wack-a-doodle seeking redemption (or whatever)" role. Farrell plays a cop whose career is complicated by the fact that Vaughn has had him on the hook for years, ever since Vaughn nudged him in the direction of the guy who sexually assaulted his wife. So far, Farrell has suffered the ignominy of having: beaten up a journalist while wearing a ski mask; chugged whiskey while driving; assumed some kid shitted in a pair of Nikes (it turns out he just cut them up); beaten up said kid's dad over the aforementioned shoe shitting/cutting up; looked at a dead body missing a dick; had his car set on fire; compared vaping to sucking robot dick (presumably not related to said dickless corpse, but hey, True Detective has done weirder); been offered $10,000 by his wife just to "go away;" had an innuendo-heavy conversation with a beautiful woman with scars on her face; had a doctor tell him he had such bad health problems he wondered if he actually wanted to live; and died.

OK, well, as the beginning of episode three informs us, he didn't actually die. Still, Farrell was definitely shot in the stomach by a guy wearing a bird mask, which made us all think he died, but killing off one of your main characters three episodes in is an incredibly cheap move. Instead, Pizzolatto decided to send Farrell through a Twin Peaks-y dream sequence full of bizarre symbolism we'll figure out later, only to wake up and realize he was still alive.

Here are just a smattering of the lines Farrell has been asked to deliver without giggling:

"ASS-pen."
"You ever bully or hurt anyone again, I'll come back and butt-fuck your father with your mom's headless corpse on this goddamn lawn."
"Maybe it's just a little too close to sucking a robot's dick."
"I support feminism. Mostly by having body-image issues."
"12 years-old my ass. Fuck you!"
"And what? What? Shit in 'em???"
"A good beating promotes personal growth."
"Booze tends to take the edge off. I wanna stay angry."
"I ain't ever exactly been Colombo."

That he has had to do all of this while wearing a bolo tie and sporting a mustache so thick it could filter an Irish Coffee is admirable, if not superhuman.

Farrell's character seems to be Pizzolatto's primary vessel for proving that life is cold, and only the coldest—those who are willing to assault a man because his kid shit in a pair of Nikes (or cut them up, whatever)—get to wear this wind-beaten leather jacket we call manhood. By episode two, Farrell's ex-wife is straight up telling him, "You're a bad man." When Farrell visits his ex-cop now-pothead dad, watches a John Wayne movie with him, and then fishes his dad's old police badge out of the trash, it doesn't take a false detective, let alone a true one, to recognize that Pizzolatto is waving some gigantic flags full of symbolism in our faces.


Speaking of which, watch our documentary on the real 'True Detective':


Still. This season is beginning to pick up steam, and may even transcend the realm of "hot mess" soon enough. The investigation starts going in some sort of coherent direction—there's a bunch of sexy sex stuff going on, and some boring other stuff involving crooked business deals—which means we're finally starting to get some bites on the plot lines Pizzolatto has cast out for us. By the time the third episode wraps, it's overwhelmingly clear that McAdams, Kitsch, Farrell, and Vaughn are all acting as emissaries for forces greater than themselves—some literal, some spiritual.

Pizzolatto's real skill as a showrunner is delving into the complex psychologies behind his characters, establishing motivation, imbuing every step each takes with a greater purpose. At this point in the season, we've come to understand what's going through each character's head during every scene, the context governing every decision. Each scene both explains a character and adds more mystery to them, making the characters themselves the real case to crack. This slavish dedication to cause and effect is what made True Detective's first season endure, and, for all of its goofiness, what just might mark its second season's salvation.

Just as there's more than one way to interpret a song and Romeo and Juliet can yield both close readings played for high drama and Leonardo DiCaprio hopping out of a convertible to shoot John Leguizamo in the chest, True Detective can in one iteration offer gravity, while in the next season pull a 180 and go totally off the rails (even if it's not doing it on purpose). Do not damn True Detective season two because it doesn't live up to the template established by True Detective season one. Instead, if you look at the thing as its its own, eccentric beast, and if you open yourself up to it, it just might charm you.

True Detective airs on Sundays at 9 PM on HBO.

Follow Drew on Twitter.

The Man Who Found the Man Who Broke the Music Business

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Author Stephen Witt. Photo by Chad Griffith. Courtesy of Viking Press

With a smile on his face, author Stephen Witt told me that before publishing his first book, "There was no mention anywhere that the only reason the MP3 succeeded as a technology was because of the greatest wave of copyright infringement and piracy that the world had ever seen." MP3s are as ubiquitous as music itself, but have we ever really asked ourselves how this new technology came to be so universal, or who exactly was responsible for its pandemic spread, which crippled the music industry at large?

In Witt's incredible, possibly canonical How Music Got Free (out now from Viking), the writer traces how the audio compression technology went from almost dying in a format war with the MP2 (a Betamax vs. VHS type of battle) and tracks down the patient zero of music piracy and album leaks: a savvy rough rider named Dell Glover, who worked in a North Carolina CD plant and smuggled out almost every major album released in the aughts under his oversized belt buckle. Without this one tatted-out guy, online piracy would have been impossible, MP3s wouldn't have gained an online user base, and the technology would have likely become just be a blip in media history.

It's a story that's too bizarre to make up, but needed to be told. Over the course of 300 brisk, engaging pages, Witt's book focuses on three eccentric characters—Karlheinz Brandenburg, one of the men who invented the MP3; Doug Morris, the head honcho of Universal Music; and Glover, "the guy who destroyed the music industry to afford to put souped-up rims on his car," in the author's words. The subjects' unique positions within the music industry offer a succinct vantage into the evolution of how today's music landscape became the way it is. Forget about Napster and peer-to-peer exchange networks—these narratives are essential to understanding why people say the physical album is dead and how we got to a place in culture where everyone actually pays for services like Spotify.

Even if you're not a music geek, How Music Got Free is one of the most gripping investigative books of the year—my mind reels at who will play Glover in the inevitable movie adaptation. As brand-spanking-new streaming platforms like Apple Music, Google Play, Tidal, and Spotify gear up to destroy one another in a new type of format war, Witt's book could not have come out at a better time. The writer and I met in Brooklyn to discuss Robert Ebert's influence on how he approached writing a historical text, how he got access to his subjects, and why he's surprisingly optimistic about the future of the music industry.

VICE: What was the question that you wanted to answer in writing this book?
Stephen Witt: The original question was, "How did the MP3 [go] from being this obscure, academic German software to the pirate format of choice?" And that really happened—someone showed me an unearthed floppy disk with an e-zine on it that these early online software pirates used to send through snail mail. In the e-zine, they talk about how they might pirate music with this new technology. My first idea was to track down the first guy to pirate an MP3 officially. I failed to do that. But I learned a lot about this underworld of media leakers called the Scene. I thought, God, this shit is fascinating.

Can you tell me about how you found Dell Glover?
There's a government database called PACER—Public Access to Court Electronic Records. For a fee, you can download case dockets for every prosecution that the Department of Justice has ever brought against anyone. I probably pulled a hundred such cases, just getting names from FBI press releases and looking for interesting piracy cases. Eventually, I hit Dell Glover and I was like, fuck, forget the other 99 guys—this guy did more than the other 99 cases I pulled combined. It's just this one guy that leaked so much fucking stuff.

I asked myself, "How do I find this guy? How do I talk to him?" So I started hunting on Facebook for people that matched his name, his rough geographic location, and his general demographic situation. I found a guy in North Carolina, about the right age, ethnicity, who looked like he lived near the place where all the leaking was happening [at the PolyGram pressing plant]. I sent him a Facebook message saying "I'm a reporter, I'm writing about this stuff, I think your story's really interesting, give me a call." I never expected to hear back, but the next day he called me on my cellphone.

There is actually no real digital property, in a physical sense. The limits we decide to put on digital property rights are entirely arbitrary.

How did you convince him to tell you his whole story?
Dell was all phone calls for a while, and I used those conversations to write my master's thesis at Columbia. Eventually, he asked to read it, but I didn't want to send it to him because I was afraid he'd post it on the internet—well, leak it. I told him I'd come down to Shelby, North Carolina, and read it to him. So I drove down, sat on his couch, and I read him the entire thing. And he was like, "It's a great story, but there's a lot you don't know about..." and then he started talking about the DVD bootlegging ring, his souped-up car, and everything else. He's not a talkative person, and I was worried it would seem like I'd be trying to pry information from him, but I guess I gained his trust after reading him my master's thesis about him.

Now we're friends, especially after [the book came out]. At the time, he was a source. You have to be careful; you don't want to be friends with your source.

I met him in person four times, I believe, plus plenty of phone calls. I also got a lot of information from Facebook, photos, and people in his community [who] wrote close to 20 clemency letters for him. I even talked with his mother and father.

Prior to this book, was there any media coverage of Glover getting arrested or being a major player in the leaking scene? You wrote that it was included at the bottom of an FBI press release, but was that it?
No. Well, that's the thing. The FBI caught up to him in '07. They kept it very secret that they had caught him for a while because they were hoping to use him as an asset to flip against the other guys in the pirate groups, which they eventually were sort of able to do. They couldn't have any court documents related to his name in the public record that somebody else could find out about for operational security reasons. I think that's why the FBI covered it up.

But you still managed to find the patient zero of music leaks...
It was nuts. I don't think I'll ever be able to do that again. [Laughs]

So you wrote that he's working at a manufacturing plant for car grills now, but does he have any tech side-hustles? Is he actually removed from piracy and internet subcultures?
He has a side business, and he doesn't think it's illegal. He's buying these commodity computers in bulk—like, piece-of-shit computers from China. They have very limited computing power, but it's enough to run a home media server. They have Windows installed on them, he wipes it off, and then puts this home-media-software server on an open-sourced platform of sorts.

It's all legal. It costs him probably 50 bucks to get one of these computers and he can sell it for $200. Once you have one, and if you know what you're doing, you can go and find pirate media streams out in the ether somewhere and get HBO, Netflix, Hulu, whatever to stream in your house—for free. Dell does not install and doesn't point you to any specific pirate networks, though. You could use this to legally subscribe to Netflix, too. He's just selling a computer with some open-source home-theater software installed on it.

Remember, in the book I called him "the guy who destroyed the music industry to put rims on his car"? So now he's moving away from those interests, but he's gotten really into fishing. There's a lake near his house. I think now he's the guy who's undercutting the entire entertainment-complex cable companies to buy a pontoon boat. He's one of my favorite people I've ever met.

Everybody hates [the record-label executives], but they have their own goals and motivations. I became more interested in that perspective than the musicians' perspectives, which you can get pretty much anywhere.

Do you think there might be a parallel version of Dell Glover in movie pirating or other media?
Probably, but I don't know. Recently, I found something very interesting, and I haven't figured out who's doing it. Mad Men started leaking—Mad Men has always leaked, but typically the way TV piracy works is that pirates tape the show via DVR and then rip it. The last few episodes of Mad Men to air were leaked in this ultra high-definition format that exceeds even BluRay and has to be compressed once distributed by cable companies. So the only way these pirates were able to get that is they must've had someone further up the chain at the cable companies or television stations getting production-quality stuff and leaking that.

You could write a book about the top leakers of every media format.
Well, that actually was my original idea for this book. I thought I'd do video games, TV, movies, pornography, books, fonts, etc.—but that ended up being like a broad, general history text. But because it would have been a survey, there's no narrative thrust and you get bored and it's really repetitive. Actually, a lot of this shit works the same way. So all you really need to do is describe one guy's experience and that generalizes to everyone else. Once you know there's a guy like Dell Glover, the story of some other guy doing the exact same thing in the DVD plant isn't super different, right? And Glover was a more compelling character than a lot of these other guys, too.

What do you want readers to get out of this book?
First of all, I wanted to show that this story and culture existed. I just wanted to tell a good story, actually. I wanted it to be the case that when you started reading the book you found it compelling and you finished it. That was my real goal.

In terms of a broader, intellectual takeaway I just wanted to provoke people to think critically about what property rights mean in the digital era. There is actually no real digital property, in a physical sense. The limits we decide to put on digital property rights are entirely arbitrary.

Decisions made in the early days of computing gave the users an enormous amount of freedom to share files without limitations, to communicate without very many barriers, and to exchange information with almost no oversight. Now, in some ways, that's a beautiful thing. But it also enables a lot of very criminal behavior, right? Think about the Silk Road and child-abuse networks—it can enable very bad behavior. Since 2007, 2008, there's been a real shift. Before, the goal of the internet was to empower users. I don't think that's the mentality anymore. Now the user is treated like a customer from whom value is supposed to be extracted. Today, technologists and the rights holders work in concert to make that happen. For example, it's easy to download a torrent application to your desktop and start torrenting, but it's impossible to run a torrent off your smartphone.

We've given up a lot of rights to a sort of centralized authority that tells us what we can and can't have on our phones. Maybe it had to happen that way, but it is a significant limitation on our freedom. I wanted people to think critically about that. I don't have the answers. I just knew that a lot of this information had never appeared anywhere.

Something I was super curious about in your book was that the perspective of the artists was excluded. Was this intentional?
I didn't get any artists to weigh in. I did that on purpose. Artists always get their say. There's no shortage of coverage of musicians. The goal of the book was to present things from new and different perspectives that were very unusual and unexpected. So my portrayal of [Sony Music chairman and CEO] Doug Morris ends up being, essentially, sympathetic. That was the most unusual decision, because no one fucking likes recorded music-label executives, especially not the corporate guys like Morris. They're the butt of every joke; everyone hates them. But they have their own goals and motivations for the things that they do, and I became more interested in that perspective than the musicians' perspectives, which you can get pretty much anywhere.

There's no shortage of how the musicians feel or think about things. Musicians are also always creative types first. They will always be beholden to songwriting, their talent as producers, or their ability to play. So, in my opinion, that meant they didn't necessarily fit with the book.


Like books? Watch our interview with author Karl Ove Knausgaard:


You wrote that "unlocking stuff" can create value, like how music pirates filled a vacuum that the industry would not. Do you think entertainment and tech companies should be copying, mimicking, or even hiring tech-users like pirates?
You have to understand, the mistakes the recording industry made in the 90s they would never make them now. Anyone who runs a music company is thinking 20 years ahead.

It's the thing I said in the book: The record industry thought of the compact discs as inventory, whereas computer engineers saw it as an array of inefficiently stored data. Now, if you're working at a label you're constantly thinking about distribution, like technological methods of distribution ten or even 20 years down the road. Since 2007 or 2008, the technologists and the labels are really cooperating with one another. They've learned their lesson. They're not going to make those same mistakes again.

Technology is oftentimes unpredictable, though. Couldn't history repeat itself if these companies aren't malleable to any sea changes?
History can repeat itself here, definitely. But the industry will never make that mistakes they made in the 90s where they just completely ignored, and even tried and quash, some new pieces of technology.

They'll absolutely consider any new technology and they'll try and get ahead of it. And that's actually what happened with streaming. They were ahead of the pirates on streaming and they remain so. There aren't any great ways to stream pirated stuff. Like, Spotify is a superior service to [torrent archive] What.CD, in my opinion. Also, torrent traffic is decreasing, particularly as a portion of overall internet traffic. Younger people tend to be more willing to subscribe to legal services.

Your recent Financial Times article made it very clear that if one label pulled out of Spotify, it could be disastrous. I could imagine all the labels switching to Apple Music.
Apple could end up having conglomerate, monopoly power—Spotify could too. I mean, Apple has already tried to make moves into this market, and so has Google, and they failed. They're trying harder now, though. They put their best people on it, I can tell.

Could it be ruled an illegal monopoly?
The anti-trust guys would have to make that decision. YouTube, arguably, is in violation of anti-trust, right? It controls something like 95 or 96 percent of the video-hosting market. Similarly, Google's search engine is also in violation of anti-trust. It deserves to be—it's the best search engine. And YouTube deserves it; it's the best video-hosting site. But in cooperation, that gives them an enormous amount of power. Apple is actually not in danger of violating any anti-trust laws. They only control like 18 or 19 percent of the Smartphone OS market. Android is huge in the rest of the world, and even in the US it's like 50 percent of the market. So I don't see that happening.

For more on piracy, read Motherboard's article on the invisible-labor economy behind pirated Japanese comics

How do you imagine your book aging? Do you think of it as a snapshot of a specific time period, or will it be applicable and relevant even as technology and culture evolves?
I have an unusual mindset about this. Rogert Ebert once wrote about a movie called A Separation, which won the foreign language Oscar a few years back. It's an Iranian movie. His point was that it was a really detailed examination of Iranian social and political life. It's not a broad allegory of anything, but because of that, the more specific in detail it becomes, the more universal it can eventually be.

If my book is just a snapshot of a particular moment in time, which I hope it is, then people actually will refer back to it precisely for that reason. They will want to understand what the time was about and what it was like. If [the book] became too broad, it would portray biases that were inherent in my culture at the time. It wouldn't actually mean anything. I tried to make it pretty narrowly focused on this one period in time while thinking, This, or something like this, will only happen once. So if you want to know what this interesting time of experimentation with media distribution and technology looked like, make it as specific as you can to that time because then it has potential to be a more definitive document of that time.

I should say I don't think I've done that. I don't think I've completely succeeded. But the idea was to make it very specific and detailed about a particular period of time, because that's much more interesting to me than these hifalutin concepts of "what does it all mean in the end?" There's not very much of that in the book, actually. When it comes to the moral aspect of pirating, I want readers to ask if it actually is wrong. I don't want to tell them.

Streaming is absolutely the future, and I think if the big players do it right, if they get people to pay and subscribe, then it will be cash money.

I wouldn't describe the book as a polemic.
Yeah, it's not a polemic. Polemics date very badly. It's true, if you read political writing from some other era, you aren't interested in it the politics. You're mostly interested in how people led their lives at that time, and what their motivations were. That's what I really wanted to capture. Weirdly, if it's done very specifically, that can have a universal appeal later on. You need the characters too. I learned this all from Ebert.

Have there been any responses to this book that you've genuinely shocked or surprised by?
The most interesting response—which I should have predicted, but was still surprised by—has been that musicians really love it. Every musician I've talked to has been really into the topic and subject. They always have something really interesting to say.

Some musicians get really mad and really angry—and people regularly ask me, "How would you feel if someone pirated your book?" when, in fact, that did happen immediately. It was on What.CD about 16 or 17 hours before it was officially launched. There were a hundred seeds for the torrent. I loved it. For me, vicariously, it was thrilling. I don't think my publisher shared that opinion [laughs].

Other people have joked that they're going to make a photocopy of every page in my book and make a zine. That's maybe the most extreme response.

Are you optimistic about the future of the music industry?
[Zero hesitation] Yes, actually I am. Now the technologists and the rights holders are working together to recapture the profits they have lost. I'm paying $120 a year to subscribe to Spotify and that's a lot. The majority of people who subscribe are under the age of 27. This was a generation that was never supposed to pay for anything, but they love Spotify, they love Netflix, they love HBO Go, and it's real cash that they pay. I think that will continue to grow. Streaming is absolutely the future, and I think if the big players do it right, if they get people to pay and subscribe, then it will be cash money. People have proven that you can sell data. For a while it didn't look like it was possible, but the contemporary trend in computing, especially as we move towards centralized servers and cloud computing (and out of corporate libraries), is that we're going to pay real money for this technology.

For more on Stephen Witt, visit his website here.

Follow Zach on Twitter.


Strip Clubs Are Being Wiped Out of the South Bronx

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Photo via Flickr user Anthony Easton. All other photos courtesy of the author.

Last November, when Felix Cuesta walked through his South Bronx strip club, there were no naked women dancing on the poles, or men throwing bills at them. The club was pitch-black and completely silent.

Cuesta had closed down the strip joint, Platinum Pleasures, several months earlier when he lost his liquor license. But every week, he came back with a flashlight to inspect the shuttered gentlemen's club. In the unlit main room, he could only see what the beam of his light shined on: some red drapes, metallic poles running from the floor to the ceiling, and a golden glass-cased shower.

"That was for the weekly shower shows," said Cuesta. "We were one of the only clubs in the city that had one."

Platinum Pleasures was the latest strip club to close down in the South Bronx amid the crackdown led by local and state-level politicians. Their tactic has been simple and effective, particularly in the Hunts Point neighborhood of the South Bronx: Instead of going after the clubs themselves, they went after their liquor licenses.

"From day one, when I became district manager, we learned the process of liquor licenses," said Rafael Salamanca Jr., who serves as the Community Board Manager for Hunts Point and is leading the battle against the neighborhood's clubs. As of now, the five existing strip clubs in Hunts Point have all been shut down.

The legitimacy of the methods being used by Salamanca to close the clubs down has been questioned by researchers and those in the industry who believe a witch-hunt is underway without much factual evidence of wrongdoing.

There's a battle that goes on every day to keep the clubs open. - Jeff Levy

The secondary-effects doctrine, a legal tool that has empowered government officials to regulate strip clubs and adult-oriented expression, has come under scrutiny from those who believe it gives too much power to municipal officials to restrict adult entertainment and infringe on First Amendment Rights.

Using the secondary-effects doctrine, government officials claim adverse side effects, such as increased criminal activity, prostitution, and lowering property values around strip clubs. But the doctrine also allows officials to camouflage their aversion to businesses like strip clubs behind declarations of harmful effects. In 1988, Justice Brennan warned that the doctrine "could set the court on a road that will lead to the evisceration of First Amendment freedoms."

"There are people who love this industry and people who hate this industry," said Jeff Levy, the executive director of the Association of Club Executives of New York, a trade and advocacy organization for the industry.

"There's a battle that goes on every day to keep the clubs open."

On Motherboard: Although the government seems to directly be after adult entertainment businesses, it turns out that 2013's shutdown lead to an inadvertent boost in sex business.

For many cities, choosing where to permit different kinds of businesses is a hot-blooded political struggle. When it comes to zoning strip clubs, this fight becomes particularly fiery.

In 1976, Detroit became one of the first cities in the US to introduce zoning laws that were designed to counter the clustering together of adult businesses into a red light district. The law banned strip clubs from locating within 1,000 feet of any two existing adult businesses or within 500 feet of any residential area.

Eagerness to follow the Detroit zoning method quickly spread to other cities. New York City's former Mayor Rudy Giuliani famously abhorred New York City's adult establishments, once calling them a "corrosive institution." It was during his reign in 1995 that New York City Council amended certain zoning laws to ban adult entertainment in commercial districts like Times Square and barred them from operating within 500 feet of residences, schools, or places of worship.These restrictive zoning laws are what forced strip clubs to sprout in neighborhoods on the peripheries of the outer boroughs, like the South Bronx, an industrial zone.

"You had to be in certain zone requirements, and if you weren't in those zones, you couldn't operate as an adult entertainment establishment," said Levy. "As a result, adult entertainment was put in the worst zoning in a particular municipality.

Bordered by the Bruckner Expressway to the West and North, the Bronx River to the East, and the East River to the South, Hunts Point is located in one of the poorest congressional districts in the country. It has long held a reputation as a hub for drugs and prostitution, and the 41st Precinct, which polices the area, consistently records some of the highest violent crime rates per capita in the city.

"For years, Hunts Point has been known as anything goes," said Salamanca, "It has a huge portion that's industrial, so legally, it's where a strip club is supposed to be at."

Salamanca's campaign to rid his neighborhood of topless entertainment is part of his wider effort to change perceptions about Hunts Point both from within the community and outside of it. A year ago, Salamanca donned a bulletproof vest when he joined police on a nighttime raid of two strip clubs in Hunts Point. Afterwards, he encouraged other Community Board managers to do the same.

Between 2006 and 2009 there was a murder, three stabbings, three shootings, and two bottle slashings inside the strip club.

Platinum Pleasures had seen its share of violence. Before it was taken over by Cuesta, it was a strip club called BadaBings. Between 2006 and 2009 there was a murder, three stabbings, three shootings, and two bottle slashings. On most nights, a 41st Precinct police car could be seen outside the club, a use of police resources that Salamanca said distracted police from other quality-of-life issues in the neighborhood.

When Cuesta took ownership of the club, he bolstered security and tried to create what he called a "high-end gentlemen's club"—the kind where "you couldn't wear sweatpants." According to Cuesta, violence at the club diminished during his time running it, but Salamanca already wanted him out.


Watch: VICE talks to the Atlanta strip clubs that popularized twerking.


For Salamanca, the fight is personal, but he holds no ill feelings towards the owners themselves.

"It's a business, and these are businessmen," said Salamanca. "You can't knock their hustle, you can't knock them for that. However, the type of business they wanted to open was not appropriate for our community."

"We had power of voice when it came to liquor licenses, and we advocated," said Rafael Salamanca Jr. By working with locally elected state officials and requesting the New York State Liquor Authority (SLA) to revoke licenses, Salamanca closed four clubs in two years.

In Cuesta's case, he did not notify the authorities of the temporary closure of Platinum Pleasures due to construction work. Because Cuesta failed to obtain permission for a "substantial alteration," he lost his liquor license.

Once a liquor license renewal is rejected, owners must apply for a new license, which is far more challenging to obtain. Though the women kept dancing even without a liquor license, at Platinum Pleasures the patrons stopped showing up, and in 2013 it closed its doors. A giant FOR SALE sign was put up.

If you think a strip club without liquor sounds bleak, try a strip club without meat.

"They will do everything and anything within their power to put pressure on gentleman's clubs," said Levy. "Customers won't come if they don't have a liquor license. It's not very profitable."

One prospective dancer at Platinum Pleasures was turned off by the lack of job security once the club ran into trouble with the Community Board.

"It was a light switch—one day it was opened, the other it was closed," said Zionyi, 26, as she shook her mane of long black hair. "It seemed like an irregular job. Then you have to wait or find somewhere else. When I came back, it had shut down."

In February 2014, Pastor Reggie Stutzman of the Real Life Church walked by the closed doors of Platinum Pleasures and had an idea. For four years, Stutzman and his wife have been working in Hunts Point without a permanent location. His "church without walls" had grown to around 50 congregants who met in a nearby recreation center.

"We've had a four-year identity crisis," said Stutzman. He called the number on the FOR SALE sign and was inside the club 30 minutes later being shown around by the building's owner.

"I've never been in a strip club before," said Stutzman, "so it was just kind of crazy."

As the owner of the building gave Stutzman a tour of the club, they came across the golden-cased shower. A shower in the middle of a bar didn't make sense to him.

"I asked the owner what it was," said Stutzman. "He said guys get a turn-on by watching a woman shower."

Still, even standing in the presence of the shower, strip poles, and bottles of booze gathering dust, Stutzman saw a potential home for his congregation and began fundraising. He took his plans to the Community Board and Salamanca, who instantly supported him.

"It is unheard of," said Salamanca. "He's taking a piece of property which had a negative impact on this community, and he's turning it into something positive."

Related: Noisey goes out to a strip club with members of Doughboyz Cashout.

The bizarre symbolism of a strip club turning into a church was not lost on Stutzman. He used the attention he began receiving in the media to raise awareness for his church.

Yet, the main barrier between Stutzman and his new church was money. He didn't have much of it. Stutzman said that when he contacted Cuesta asking to buy his lease, Cuesta named his price: $1 million. He later lowered the asking price to $100,000.

After fundraising for the better part of a year, Stutzman had only raised about $50,000. Though one large donation of $10,000 was made, most of the donations only amounted to a few hundred dollars here, or a thousand there.

"I'm really waiting for God to put it on one person or a couple other people, and just say, 'Hey, we want to get this done,'" said Stutzman.

Pastor Reggie even began inviting his congregation to pray with him outside Platinum Pleasures. Lined up outside the building, the small number who showed up would put their hands on padlocked doors and pray as cars whizzed past.

Cuesta, who met with Stutzman, never believed Stutzman would raise the money required to take over the lease.

"He had no money, he had no way of doing this," said Cuesta. "I just think, personally, it was a way of him getting on television, asking for donations."

Cuesta said he was willing to work with Stutzman by bringing down his price.

"I wasn't against him putting a church there, I just needed to get a certain amount. I brought my price down. I did everything I was supposed to do."

Stutzman, still without a home for his church, has lost congregants in recent months.

"We're in limbo, and it's been very uncomfortable," said Stutzman. "This building has been a cesspool of a lot of bad things in Hunt's Point for a long time, and it just continues to be the thorn in everyone's flesh."

When Cuesta was 18, he was a bouncer in Manhattan nightclubs and had dreamed of one day opening his own. When he finally opened his club, albeit a "high-end" strip club, he felt he found his stride as an entrepreneur. He liked the high-energy and the respect he commanded inside the walls of Platinum Pleasures.

"You become a celebrity in your own right inside a club," said Cuesta. "And they make a lot of money... that was one of the lures to it."

For Cuesta, the fight to keep his club running has ended. For Levy, the fight is far from over.

"For me, it's always been about First Amendment rights, and being able as adult to choose for myself," said Levy. "This industry is nothing more than part of the colorful mosaic called America."

Follow Nadim Roberts and Yasmine Canga-Valles on Twitter.

We Calculated How Long It Would Take to Do Everything BuzzFeed Tells You to Do Before You Die

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Photo by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete

It's hard to look at BuzzFeed without being reminded of your mortality. The site spits out a seemingly never-ending bucket list of things we absolutely must do before we die: places to see, books to read, urinals to pee in. And as we all inch closer to our imminent deaths, BuzzFeed creates more and more of these articles, making it seemingly impossible to accomplish all of these things before we kick the can.

If you're as young and bored as I am, though, you might wonder: Could you pull it off? Could you actually check everything off the BuzzFeed bucket list, and if so, how long would it take? A little while ago, I set out to find out for myself. Here's how I did it:

First, I had to compile all of the lists BuzzFeed has published in its "Before You Die" format. At the time I filed this story, there were 182 lists. These ranged from appreciating the little things in life (like watching the sunset) to full-blown adventures (like going to South Africa's version of Burning Man). BuzzFeed writers also seem obsessed with food, since practically every other list is about stuffing your face with 21 amazing Aussie burgers or the ten best New Orleans po-boys or the 15 best cheese toasties in London.

Next, I cataloged each task on each of the 182 lists. There are over a thousand individual tasks.

On Motherboard: Counting the Hours I've Spent on the Internet

Next, I calculated the time it would take to complete each of the tasks. This is where it all got slightly more complicated, since the time it would take to do most of these things is highly individualized. Eating fish and chips, for example—how long does that take the average person? If you were really vying for time, you could probably scarf some down in five minutes, but I'd much prefer to spend an hour savoring of a nice, greasy plate. And what if the restaurant was really busy and it took a long time for your server to bring the fish and chips to you? I settled on 30 minutes for eating fish and chips, as well as the other food-related tasks.

Other tasks required a fair amount of research, like hiking the Camino de Santiago, otherwise known as St. James' path, between Spain and France, which is less like a path and more like a pilgrimage. The trail is nearly 500 miles long. According to the trail's official website, it takes four to six weeks to complete. I decided to allot 30 days to complete the trail, even though the website also noted that you would need to hike 18 miles per day without any rest days to finish the trail in that time, which seems completely insane.

I repeated this process for every single task on Buzzfeed's lists. Again, there are over a thousand individual tasks.

Here is a time table showing a small sample of the time I allotted for certain tasks:

Some of the lists contained fast, easy tasks that be completed entirely from your couch—like this one, which requires you to look at 20 pictures of miniature pigs before you die—but for most of them, you have to travel. Some of the lists, like the Five Highest Places to Visit Before You Die, require you to jet set from the Haiku Stairs of Oahu, Hawaii to the Petronas Towers of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to the Taihang Mountains in China. In order to accomplish all of the tasks most effectively, you would need to travel the world. So I decided to calculate the travel time that it would take to work your way around the world, in an order most efficient for accomplishing each of the BuzzFeed tasks.

I decided to begin my hypothetical bucket-list journey in Boston, where I live, and work my way west through North America. I would visit 36 states in the United States and stop in Canada and Mexico along the way. Then onto the Dominican Republic to explore the three shipwrecks of Bayahibe, followed by stops at Turks and Caicos, and Belize. Some stops later, I'd spend 175 hours and ten minutes flying from country to country in Europe, stopping in Estonia to see the beech tree in Hiiumaa before taking a quick ten minute flight over to Finland to go to the Kontula indoor skatepark in Helsinki. I'd make my way over to Turkey to swim in the crystal blue mineral waters of the Pamukkale Springs in Hierapolis and then pop over to Jordan to grab a drink at the Cave Bar in Petra.

I whittled the travel time down to one-hour flights over borders, stopping in some countries for only a few minutes to visit a bakery or for a few hours to watch a sports game. In total, the round-the-world trip would take 26 days in travel time alone, and would include 108 countries.

The last thing I calculated was sleep time. I figured a person would be fairly tired after spending months on end climbing mountains, reading plays, and visiting museums every day, so I allotted the doctor-recommended eight hours per night. I really enjoy sleeping, so this is painful for me to even imagine, but when you're racing to finish an extensive bucket-list in the fastest amount possible, I suppose luxuriating in the REM cycle shouldn't be a priority. I also factored in how long it took me to calculate the trip—around 40 hours in total—and how long it would take to actually book the flights, hotels, and day-trips, which would be possibly twice that.

In conclusion—drumroll, please—I determined it would take 1,448.7 days to do everything that BuzzFeed says you need to do before you die. That's 207 weeks, or just shy of four years.

I'll repeat that some of the timing calculations were arbitrary. You could get stuck in a restaurant with poor service and it might take double the time to eat your fish and chips, or you could arrive somewhere like the Trinity Church on King George Island in Antarctica and decide it was too boring to stay the full hour. Your flights could get delayed, or you could get food poisoning at one of the restaurants and choose to bail on the next day's activities. If you got the timing wrong, you might miss the small window when all 39 Christmas markets on the list are open, or arrive at the Mendenhall Ice Caves in Juneau, Alaska, to find that they have all melted.

But if you planned it just right and you had the time, money, and stamina to accomplish everything on the list, then you could definitely do it.

That said, I'm not sure why anyone would want to. There are a lot of things on that list that I, personally, have no interest in doing. Why should I visit 39 different Christmas markets across Europe? I mean, I'm sure they're beautiful and each have nice hot chocolate and giant, neon candy canes, but what's the harm in not seeing all 39 of them? Is it really worth the hours it would take to learn all 44 of these air guitar songs? Would I really be a lesser person for not having visited these 19 penis-shaped objects around the world?

I'm not saying I wouldn't do it. If someone offered me the chance to travel the world and see some of the coolest things this Earth has to offer, I'd be hard pressed to say no. Of course, I'll probably die before that happens. BuzzFeed has a handy quiz for that, too.

Follow Catherine Pears on Twitter.

How A Retired Air Traffic Controller Became One of the Maritime’s Most Unorthodox Electronica Artists

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How A Retired Air Traffic Controller Became One of the Maritime’s Most Unorthodox Electronica Artists

Should Women Be Paid as Much as Men in Tennis?

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Should Women Be Paid as Much as Men in Tennis?

The Subversive Science Fiction of Hip-Hop

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The Subversive Science Fiction of Hip-Hop

Bill Cosby Admitted That He Bought Quaaludes to Give to Women He Wanted to Have Sex With

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Photo via Wikimedia Commons

It turns out back in 2005, Bill Cosby said on record that he obtained Quaaludes specifically so he could give them to women he was trying to have sex with, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press on Monday.

Back in 2005, Cosby was testifying in a sexual abuse lawsuit, which he later settled for an unknown amount of money. In the testimony, he admitted to giving the plaintiff in the lawsuit three half-pills of diphenhydramine, which can cause drowsiness, dizziness, and blurred vision. According to the AP, he did not give the plaintiff the Quaaludes—instead, he used those on at least one unnamed woman, and "other people."

The AP's Maryclaire Dale wrote that her efforts to obtain the transcript of Cosby's testimony were hindered by Cosby's lawyers, who objected because the release was likely to "embarrass" Cosby.

The plaintiff in the case was an employee of Philadelphia's Temple University, where Cosby spent 32 years on the board of trustees. He resigned in December of last year.

That plaintiff, however, was just one of many accusers.Entertainment Tonight records 39 women who have at least informally claimed that Cosby sexually assaulted them, or attempted to do so, with the earliest alleged incident having occurred in 1969.

Cosby has never faced criminal charges of sexual assault.


Want Some In-Depth Articles About Sexual Assault?

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2.An Indonesian City Wants a Curfew, but Only for Teenage Girls
3. Meet the Activist Behind the UK's First Clinic for Women Trying to Reclaim Their Bodies After Being Raped
4.How India Is Fixing Its Rape Culture—and Why There's Still a Long Way Left to Go

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Experimenting on Animals: Inside The Monkey Lab

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Experimenting on Animals: Inside The Monkey Lab

Everything We Know So Far About Obama's Secret Trade Deal

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President Barack Obama has been riding high these last few weeks, cementing his legacy with landmark victories on healthcare, gay marriage, and opening a first US Embassy in Cuba for the first time since the Cold War. Between the rainbow flag waving and soaring eulogy-writing, though, it was easy to miss what may have been the president's most significant—and controversial—victory: the signing of a Trade Promotion Authority bill that gives Obama filibuster-proof superpowers when it comes to negotiating trade deals.

The legislation, formally known as the Trade Promotion Authority, passed the Senate at the end of last month, clearing a major hurdle for Obama's trade agenda after months of heated debate that divided the Democratic Party. Basically, it means that Congress will only be able to vote thumbs-up or thumbs-down on trade deals, specifically the massive Trans Pacific Partnership deal that Obama is currently trying to lock down.

The new law, and its connection to an eventual trade partnership, are understandably unclear to the average person in the US, or any of the countries that could be affected. It doesn't help that the law and the trade deal have similar acronyms: TPP for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a massive deal involving a bunch of countries; TPA for Trade Promotion Authority, which the White House believes is critical to the trade agreement, because it gives Obama wiggle-room to negotiate without having to worry about wishy-washy recalcitrance from Congress.

It's confusing as hell, so here's everything you need to know to be able to talk about this topic intelligently.

Here are some basics.
On the face of it, the TPP—which, to be absolutely clear did not suddenly go into effect just because Congress granted Obama this new authority—is a measure meant to bring about more trade between 12 countries around the Pacific Ocean, whose leaders all shook hands on a basic version of the agreement in March of this year. The biggest players in the deal are the US and Japan, but the deal also includes Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Peru, Chile, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, and Brunei.

Trade Promotion Authority is a controversial issue, because until this "fast track" TPA process came about, the TPP had been a very slow burn. Some form of the partnership has been in talks since 2003, and the current version has been the subject of rigorous negotiations for the past five years.

Now that the Trade Promotion Authority has been granted, according to Politico's Michael Grunwald, the "real horse-trading" can begin.

Why it matters to Obama
If the TPP deal goes through, it will unite 40 percent of the global economy in mysterious ways, and mark the crowning achievement for his administration's " Pivot to Asia," a term the president and his team have coined for the Asia-centric foreign policy strategy that they've been trying to implement for much of his second term.

Popular wisdom held that America's drawn-out 2016 election would have dominated all political discussion and kept the TPP off the table until a new president is in office. After all, the Trade Promotion Authority bill involved the unholy union of Obama with Senate Republicans, who normally get along like cats and velociraptors. Democrats in the House have fought Obama hard on this deal, despite being in his own party, and Senate Democrats at best grudgingly capitulated.

1999 WTO protest, via Wikimedia Commons/Steve Kaiser

Here are some basics on trade deals in general.
The Trans Pacific Partnership is in that category of trade deals that tend to spark episodes of unrest, like the explosive 1999 protests in Seattle during a World Trade Organization meeting. It's safe to say globalization is something that benefits major corporations, and the poor, well, aren't typically consulted about these deals.

The standard reasoning for a trade deal is typically: "It's so we can have free trade," although historically the corporations and governments that want that freedom have been terrible at explaining why. Labor unions and other worker's rights groups tend to see any move toward globalization as a "race to the bottom," granting jobs to the lowest bidder, wherever in the world they may be.

Obama acknowledged those concerns in his optimistic remarks Monday, claiming that "this legislation will help turn global trade—which can often be a race to the bottom—into a race to the top." To that end, he also put his autograph on something called the Trade Adjustment Assistance Act, which purports to help out those who lose their jobs because of deals like the TPP.


Container ship, via Flickr user Photocapy

Lots of people like trade deals.
The buzzword that shows up again and again in defenses of the TPP is " comparative advantage." Comparative advantage is one of those Economics 101 concepts that economists can only describe using elaborate metaphors as illustrations. Suffice it to say, comparative advantage explains why a country might want to import goods it can easily produce, or produce goods it can easily import, even when that seems counterintuitive. In order to facilitate this cleverness at every turn, trade barriers have to be torn down and replaced with ever more freedom, glorious freedom.

To create that nominal freedom, trade deals must paradoxically include a list of rules. The World Trade Organization's rules provide a basic foundation, but with each new treaty, in order to get to the other side of the free trade velvet rope again, countries set a stringent set of criteria, which often include enacting domestic reforms.

Reform can sound great. The US Department of Commerce provides a list of practices that get in the way of international trade, and some of them are no-brainers that should clearly be done away with. For instance, if you're a developing country, and you want to play in the big leagues, you should probably do something about customs rules that are vague, or are enforced sporadically. You might have some kind of inane certification program or a test that people have to pass if they want to trade with you. Your ports might be rife with bribery and corruption, and your private sector might practice brazen influence peddling.


Related: Watch Ken Vogel talk about campaign finance reform:


Theoretically, clearing those barriers can be worth it for the smaller fish. In places like economically depressed Peru, for example, open access to larger markets for their exports can be a big deal.

But some people hate almost all trade deals.
Labor activists are having flashbacks to the the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, a deal between the US, Canada, and Mexico, which went into effect back in 1994. The AFL-CIO says the US lost 700,000 manufacturing jobs to Mexico as a result of the deal, and there's some pretty solid evidence to back up that claim.

Trade deals are traditionally negotiated behind closed doors. While that conjures an image of world leaders gathering in smoke-filled rooms plotting ways to screw over their respective populaces—and that could definitely be the case—there are also perfectly valid reasons to negotiate in total secrecy. It keeps lobbyists and other crony capitalists from sniffing around, which is nice for everyone. There are also complicated, game-theory type reasons for what's called "noncooperative bargaining."

But there's also the fact that, although the TPP negotiations haven't been public, 500 people are allowed to participate. That means they, unlike the rest of us, get to know what's in the deal, and to meet with officials involved in the negotiations. This cabal includes higher-ups at the US Chamber of Commerce, Chevron, Johnson & Johnson, and a guy named Robert Roche, who chairs a marketing firm in China. There are also some activists and labor leaders in the group, and interestingly, representatives of the IASC, which stands for the International Association of Skateboard Companies.

So at least there's that.


Photo via Flickr user Neil Ballantyne

The Obama White House is being really secretive about this trade deal.
The White House has taken unusual measures to keep the details not just secret, but extra, super secret. Legal researcher Margot Kaminski wrote in the New York Times that since 2013, the US Trade Representative has been giving the relevant documents classified status, as if the agreement is a new stealth bomber.

Senators who wanted to read the TPP deal while the TPA was being negotiated this spring, had to do so in a soundproof chamber below the US Capitol building. To get in, they had to surrender their phones, and instead of being allowed to consult their own staff or counsel about the confusing language of the deal, they were only able to ask a member of the US Trade Representative—which is to say: They could only ask a White House official.

We do know a little bit about what might be in the TPP, thanks to a couple of leaks. In 2013 and 2014 Wikileaks published a draft of a section on intellectual property rights, and then a section on the environment. Earlier this week, Politico obtained and analyzed another leak, which shows that the TPP could give US pharmaceutical companies lots of protection against competition from cheaper drugs.

Possible intellectual property crackdowns are making the internet lose its shit.
Intellectual property concerns might be what caused some of the more over-the-top reactions online.

If you're looking for information about the TPP on Reddit, for instance, you might check the "TTP" subreddit, where you'll find the following somewhat incomplete description of the agreement:

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a secretive, multinational trade agreement that threatens to extend restrictive intellectual property (IP) laws across the globe and rewrite international rules on its enforcement.

This might be tunnel vision on the part of internet activists, but intellectual property is still a big part of the agreement. The Electronic Frontier Foundation fact sheet on the TPP points out measures included in the leaked draft would force countries like New Zealand to jump through annoying hoops to conform to American copyright standards.

There's also vague language in there about possible regulations that could result in legal action against whistleblowers for revealing trade secrets; and provisions that might make it harder to use copyrighted material under a fair use rationale. And it looks like there might be harsher penalties for copyright infringers who weren't even motivated by commercial gain.

According to Politico, it looks like the TPP also helps Big Pharma fight competition from generic drugs in markets outside the US, which could make it harder for poorer consumers to obtain treatment, and jack up the cost of Medicare and Medicaid. Rohat Malpini, a representative of Doctors Without Borders told Politico that, "There's very little distance between what Pharma wants and what the US is demanding."

Environmentalists are also losing their shit.
According to the Sierra Club's analysis of the leaked draft, the deal doesn't so much guarantee new pollution as it does possibly roll back previously negotiated environmental preservation measures, although the Sierra Club does make an argument for a possible increase in fracking.

The scarier part for environmentalists is a section on " investor-state dispute settlements" that gives corporations, such as oil companies, the right to sue signatory countries for enacting restrictions that hurt their businesses.

A little more about that whole "investor-state dispute settlements" bit.
This part could have a much bigger effect than just boosting oil companies' ability to fend off regulations. Investor-state dispute settlements are in that category of terms like "net neutrality" and "campaign finance reform" that activists scream in the streets trying to get the public to give a shit, but are just too boring for anyone to care.

However, investor-state dispute settlements might allow foreign companies to challenge US laws.

In her January op-ed in the Washington Post, Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren—one of the most vocal opponents of the TPP—detailed a worst-case scenario:

Imagine that the United States bans a toxic chemical that is often added to gasoline because of its health and environmental consequences. If a foreign company that makes the toxic chemical opposes the law, it would normally have to challenge it in a U.S. court. But with ISDS, the company could skip the U.S. courts and go before an international panel of arbitrators. If the company won, the ruling couldn't be challenged in U.S. courts, and the arbitration panel could require American taxpayers to cough up millions—and even billions—of dollars in damages.

Back in April, Obama said Warren was "wrong," adding, "I would not be doing this trade deal if I did not think it was good for the middle class." However, his argument comes down to "trust Uncle Barry," because remember: what's actually going to be in the final version of the deal is a secret, and even what's been leaked might all be erased in the final version.

Again, Obama is really into this.
To make their case that the TPP is great, without tipping their hand about what's in it, the White House published what it called the "outlines" of a 2011 version of the TPP. Much of that document is written in public relations lingo (the administration wants to "effectively implement" and "strengthen" a lot of things), but the document paints a pleasant picture of a Pacific trade region where efficiency is increased thanks to coherent and consistent regulations, and even the smallest businesses in developing countries will be able to benefit from international trade.

But the president's support stands at odds with other Democrats like Warren and , who say that TPP and other trade will hurt American workers while benefiting their corporate overlords. So why does Obama support a trade deal that other Democrats like Warren and 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders hate? In a word: China.

"China wants to write the rules for the world's fastest-growing region," Obama declared in his 2015 State of the Union Address. "That would put our workers and our businesses at a disadvantage. Why would we let that happen? We should write those rules. We should level the playing field."

It's not clear what's going to happen though.
During the Trade Promotion Authority debate, the opinion pages of newspapers featured dozens of predictions for the future.

For instance, according to a team of economists who wrote a pro-TPP op-ed in the Washington Post on March 12, while NAFTA may have burned US manufacturing, much to the benefit of countries like Mexico, the TPP might actually turn things around. So even though China's not in on this deal, and probably won't be, some of the signatory countries are among its key trading partners. Their participation will supposedly force the juggernaut that is China to play the trade game according to American rules, which the authors argue would benefit trade.

Paul Krugman's agnostic take on the TPP offers a clearer picture than most. Krugman won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for his discoveries in how geography shapes economies, so he approached the TPP differently than all the other pundits. Krugman compared the Pacific region to Europe, which benefits more easily from such trade pacts by being clustered together. He forecasts that by contrast, the TPP may not be a job-devouring nightmare, but that the gains will be minuscule compared to the uglier aspects, like the intellectual property advantages for Big Pharma:

If pharma gets to charge more for drugs in developing countries, do the benefits flow back to US workers? Probably not so much. Which brings me to my last point: Why, exactly, should the Obama administration spend any political capital—alienating labor, disillusioning progressive activists—over such a deal?

You'll be hearing a lot about this during the election next year.
Most Republicans are pretty friendly toward the TPP, according to a rundown by The Washington Examiner's David Drucker. Notable exceptions include Kentucky Senator Rand Paul who voted against the TPA bill, and Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who also voted against TPA, despite otherwise supporting free trade. In any case, frontrunners for the GOP nomination most likely won't make the TPP an issue in 2016.

But Democrats are a different story. After being rebuked by labor groups like the AFL-CIO during the TPA debates, Obama went to Wisconsin last week to tout a new trade proposal that labor likes. This is, according to Jim Kuhnhenn of the Associated Press, an attempt to repair the rift. The Democrats are, after all, going to need the unions on their side during the 2016 election.

The non-Hillary candidates—particularly Sanders—are vehemently opposed to the TPP deal. The Vermont senator wrote a piece about it for the Huffington Post saying it will "undermine democracy." Former Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley said recently the deal will "hollow out our middle class and middle class wages," although he has been somewhat supportive of the TPP in the past.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton is in a tough spot over the TPP. When she was Secretary of State, she called it "the gold standard in trade agreements." And let's not forget that her husband signed NAFTA into law.

But Candidate Clinton has been vague about the TPP. She criticized investor-state dispute settlements in her book, Hard Choices, and has said that any trade deal has to increase prosperity and create jobs. But the closest she's gotten to a clear opinion was in June when she said "the President should listen to and work with his allies in Congress," to come to some kind of agreement, and that "if we don't get it, there should be no deal."

Here's when the deal might potentially be finalized.
According to The Japan Times, trade talks between the two heaviest hitters in the deal might resume on July 9, and another meeting between all 12 countries is expected to be scheduled for July 23.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

We Found Some Goths in the Amazon

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All photos by João Paulo Machado.

This article originally appeared on VICE Brazil.

Manaus's goths really suffer for their art. They traipse around the Amazon capital in heavy black bodices, chunky black boots, and mountains of eyeliner, attracting the sun like a moody solar panel. Fascinated by their determination to stay goth in a place where the annual average temperature is 79º F, I tracked a few of them down.

I found 41-year-old stockman Lúcio Ruiz hanging around the Parque dos Bilhares park, one blazing hot Friday night. Ruiz first discovered The Cure's Head in the Door years ago. Fascinated by Robert Smith's red lipstick, blurred makeup, and messy hair, he began to research the goth subculture.

"I heard that song and began to wonder what it was all about. Where did people like Robert Smith hang out? Then I watched Edward Scissorhands and read Bram Stoker's Dracula. Eventually, me and some other people sort of created our own scene here. We started looking at Vincent van Gogh's art, reading Casimiro de Abreu's poetry, and then we realized that we were growing in numbers," he said. Ruiz now also runs Bela Lugosi Is Dead—one of the few events that celebrates goth subculture in Manaus.

Lúcio Ruiz

Lúcio was accompanied by his wife, 28-year-old Cristiane Ruiz. When they first met, she was a traditional forró dancer. It was much later on that she fell in love with gothic fashion and music. "I used to think that it wasn't for me. I thought it was too sad and a little bit stupid. Lúcio and I used to argue a lot about it but, little by little, I began to understand it," she said.

Many of the people I interviewed didn't consider themselves to be full-on goths, which made me think that being a goth must entail a certain amount of humility. "Considering myself goth is bit much, but I've been supporting the scene since 2000. I can't believe it's been 15 years already," continued Cristiane.

Luciana Silva and her sister (whose name we didn't catch)

Not unlike other similar scenes around the world, the Manaus goth scene is seen by some as having ties to Satanism, black magic, drugs, and murders. That could also explain people's reluctance to identify as goth. A quick Google search of the words "goth" and "Manaus" produces a series of tabloid news stories linking the subculture to murders and strange rituals. "This has created problems with our families as well as the general community. In a city like ours, which is a developing province, people carry certain prejudices," said Lúcio.

"Nobody seems to understand that someone can be a goth and pay their rent and taxes at the same time," he went on. "They don't get that it could be someone who raises children, who works and contributes to society. We shouldn't have to put up with that kind of bias."

Luciana Silva

Aside from the prejudice, there's one more thing that makes life difficult for Brazil's goths—the humidity. No hairstyle or makeup can keep up with it.

It took Lúcio three years to get used to wearing gothic clobber in the sweltering temperatures of Manaus. "The heat is something that contradicts our philosophy and style, which originate from a colder environment," he said. "But there are ways to deal with the heat. You just have to drink lots of water."


Related: The Real 'True Blood'


"Most of our events take place at night, when it gets a bit cooler so we can wear clothes that are a bit more elaborate," his friend, Valéria Smith, added.

Wearing a top hat that framed her meticulously curly hair, another goth called Luciana Silva exclaimed, "The heat is intense, but it's normal. It doesn't stop me from dressing the way that I want."

But things aren't as simple for Cristiane. "My mother and my sisters don't like any of it. They think it's strange that I dress this way when it's hot."

Basically, the city's climate functions like a natural selection system—filtering out those who don't take the lifestyle seriously. "It's only for those who really embrace our culture and really want to be goths," said Lúcio.

Unlike São Paulo, where goths have easy access to clothes and accessories at stores like Galeria do Rock, goths in Manaus have to be their own personal stylists. Lúcio and Cristiane look for clothes at second-hand stores or customize pieces themselves.

Luciana's sister (whose name we didn't catch), Luciana, and Angel

Twenty-one-year-old Angel Lorrane is a big fan of DIY. "I buy some of my pieces and make some other ones myself. I don't make a living through fashion, but I like to create my own style."

The city doesn't have many events dedicated to EBM, synth pop, dark-wave, or post-punk, but, when there happens to be one, people come out of the woodwork. "We make events that attract people from the punk, thrash metal, and black metal scenes. At first people seem shy. It's only if they see that nobody they know is around that they allow themselves to enjoy whatever music is playing. Manaus needs to achieve a musical maturity—people need to understand that everyone has different tastes and respect each other's space," Lúcio said.

Luciana, Angel, Murilo, Cristiane, Val Smith, and Luciana's sister.

It seems like these little black dots are determined to keep appearing around Manaus, overcoming any social, climate, or territorial adversities. "I would like to finish by quoting Lupicínio Rodriguez," said Lúcio at the end of the interview. "'There are people who leave the sky because it is dark so they search for light in hell.' That's a very gothic quote, but it is actually from a 1950s samba song. It all depends on the way each of us chooses to read art."

VICE Vs Video Games: Artist John Sweeney Illustrates His Process for Creating a New ‘Shenmue’ Piece

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John Sweeney's SEGA-approved 'Shenmue' piece

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Amsterdam-based art dealers Cook & Becker have been commissioning limited-run works based on famous SEGA franchises for a little while now, and when I found out that a Shenmue-themed piece was incoming, I wanted to dig into the creative process behind it.

The work of John Sweeney, a concept artist on games including Uncharted 4 and The Last of Us (do check out more of his work, it's amazing), this image captures the Shenmue series' protagonist, Ryo Hazuki, struggling to cope in the immediate aftermath of losing his father. It's based on events that happen early in the first game, setting the narrative off on a path through Yokosuka, Japan, to Hong Kong and into rural China.

Says Sweeney of his piece:

"I'm so excited that Shenmue 3 is finally happening. I wanted to capture the moment just after Ryo's father, Iwao, is killed by Lan Di. In the game, the scene stops with Ryo cradling Iwao and screaming, 'No!' I wanted to imagine a shot where Ryo is standing just outside the dojo where his father was just killed. It's cold and very early in the morning. Snow is falling. The light is still weak, and only some of the wood interior is catching light from outside. Ryo's pose already hints at him seeking revenge."

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The final print proper (which you can buy if you're into these kind of things) is above, as this article's lead image, but below we've posted some slides that Sweeney sent us documenting the creation of his work. One, marked "photoshoots," provides a glimpse of his work for The Last of Us. There's also a "making of" time-lapse video to check out, and photos of the final print.

Shenmue 3 was revealed at E3 2015, initially as a Kickstarter campaign (ten days to go) but it's now clear that Sony is going to pay a lot of its development costs. It's the long-awaited third entry in director Yu Suzuki's adventure series—Shenmue II came out back in 2001. This one had better not have forklift racing in it or so help me...

Follow Mike on Twitter.

​On Flags, Fireworks, Hot Dogs, and Torture

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Last week, as millions of Americans prepared to celebrate freedom, independence, and other lofty values on July 4, two men were quietly released from a prison in Afghanistan after spending more than a decade without charge or due process in US custody.

Oh, and they were brutally tortured.

Since 2005, with my students and colleagues, I've represented 15 prisoners of various nationalities—Algerian, Libyan, Saudi, Syrian, Yemeni—who have been caught up in the global network of shady and lawless prisons set up by the United States after the 9/11 attacks.

At America's behest, some have been held and tortured at proxy sites run by foreign governments, and they have been incarcerated at US military prisons such as Bagram, Kandahar, and Guantánamo.

Some of them were released long ago (to Saudi Arabia and Algeria, for example), while others were recently released (to Yemen and Uruguay, among other places). Many remain at Guantánamo, whether cleared for release or marked for continued indefinite imprisonment by the US government.

Redha al-Najar and Lotfi al-Ghrissi, the men released last week, were disappeared by the CIA and brutalized for years at its infamous "black sites" before being transferred to US military custody at Bagram Air Base, near Kabul, Afghanistan, where they were held for several more years.

They weren't the only ones, of course. Amin al-Bakri, a Yemeni national that my students and I represented since 2008 was likewise finally released last August, having been abducted by the CIA in 2002.

All three men endured torture at CIA black sites like the Salt Pit and others. Najar and Ghrissi were also subjected to "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques," a subset of torture practices that includes waterboarding, which the CIA reserved for select prisoners.

Of course, for many years, the US government refused to concede even the fact of their CIA detention in court. But when the findings, conclusions, and executive summary of the Senate's damning study of the CIA Rendition, Detention, Interrogation program was finally declassified and made public late last year, there were their names, plain as black ink on white paper, in the report's "Appendix 2: CIA Detainees from 2002-2008."

Najar, CIA detainee number 6 on that list, was imprisoned by the CIA for at least 690 days. Ghrissi, number 20, was imprisoned by the CIA for at least 380 days. Bakri, number 39, was imprisoned by the CIA for at least 490 days.

Why does this matter? Our accounts of their ordeals are often met with the response that President Obama outlawed torture and banned CIA black sites on his first day in office. In other words, their stories are essentially moot now. Our political system has worked, and has corrected the aberration.

Nothing to see here. Carry on, please.

But if one pays close attention, what President Obama did on his first day in office does not completely prohibit torture or CIA detention, but rather allows for their continued, if limited, use.

Here's why. One of President Obama's first acts in office was, indeed, ordering that CIA "detention facilities" be shuttered and forbidding the agency from operating prisons again. But an often-overlooked provision of that Executive Order ( number 13491), however, exempts "short-term, transitory" facilities from the ban.

Further, in a statement regarding CIA detention back in 2012, US Senator Dianne Feinstein, then Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, lamented the "long-term, clandestine 'black sites'" as "terrible mistakes."

The effect of all of these verbal gymnastics is to preserve the CIA's ability to hold prisoners directly, albeit short-term. Its authority carved out, the agency is free to define, in its internal regulations, what constitutes "short-term detention." It could, for instance, stipulate that indefinitely renewable 30- or 60-day terms of imprisonment are only "short-term."

And media reports offer good reason to believe that US special forces maintained parallel authority in Afghanistan and Iraq (and possibly in Yemen up until the recent upheaval when they stopped operating on the ground).

And while President Obama's Executive Order limited interrogation techniques to those listed in the Army Field Manual, that document was modified in 2006 to permit stress positions, isolation, and sleep deprivation—methods amounting to torture, according to human rights groups and other experts. Those techniques are now described in—and allowed by—the Army Field Manual's rather ominous sounding Appendix M (and, incidentally, they are depicted and glorified in popular movies like Zero Dark Thirty).

The idea that President Obama fully stripped the CIA (or the US military generally) of any authority to torture prisoners, then, is the product of either real or feigned ignorance.

Equally intact, so far as we know, is the US government's reliance on proxy detention, where foreign regimes do the dirty work of imprisoning, interrogating, and often abusing prisoners without process, at the behest (and sometimes with the participation) of US agents.

For Najar, Ghrissi, and Bakri the absence of alignment between American principle and American practice is not just some abstract contemplation.

As millions celebrated our country's independence and its foundational mythology that rests on the conceptual pillars of liberty, freedom, and democracy this past weekend, it would have been fitting to pause and reflect on the enduring ways in which that mythology is at odds with reality and historical practice.

For Najar, Ghrissi, and Bakri the absence of alignment between American principle and American practice is not just some abstract contemplation. They have experienced that dissonance in the most intensely concrete ways, through the pain deliberately inflicted on their bodies and minds by their American captors and torturers. That pain has rippled out beyond their beings, to their families, communities, and societies, its effects felt well beyond the point of initial contact.

This is not some trivial academic or historical detail. For those men and their loved ones, it is an injustice that ended only recently with their release. And contrary to popular perception and political rhetoric, what happened to those men can happen again to others.

Indeed, with the authority that has been so carefully carved out for the CIA and other components of the national security state, it could already be happening in the shadows.

Ramzi Kassem is a professor at the City University of New York School of Law. He directs the CLEAR project (Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility) as well as the Immigrant & Non-Citizen Rights Clinic.

What Greece's 'No' Referendum Vote Means for Europe

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Jubilant "No" voters celebrating in the streets of Athens on Sunday night. Photo by Panagiotis Maidis.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

In voting "No" to the the most recent offer from the "Troika" on Sunday, the Greek people refused to agree to more of the same medicine—austerity—which has led to 50 percent youth unemployment and a 25 percent fall in average wages. The "No" camp's victory means that the Greek anti-austerity movement is more than just a combination of radicals on the country's left—it is now the dominant force in the nation's politics.

While people are elated right now, the vote probably changes very little in relation to any bailout agreement. After all, the Troika, as well as the German government, have repeatedly made clear that they don't really care what the average Greek has to say about their country's predicament. So, despite Sunday's decisive vote, an equally decisive response from the Troika is unlikely to be forthcoming. They will see pesky old public opinion as an irritation rather than an intractable problem, although deposing the now hugely popular Syriza – as Brussels did in Greece and Italy in 2011 with the imposition of the interim administrations of Papademos and Monti—is no longer an option.

Such fanaticism was best captured when Jean Claude Juncker, the President of the European Commission, told France's Le Figaro in January that, "there can be no democratic choice against the European treaties." No matter how many referenda or elections show that ordinary Greeks have had enough of austerity, the European institutions will remain stubborn and pig-headed. They are, to put it bluntly, extremists. It is that zeal which will be the undoing of the Euro.

But while Brussels is unlikely to make major compromises, Sunday's vote could be transformational for the politics of the whole continent.

Channel 4 News's Paul Mason put it well when he spoke of how the result represented "the first time in the history of the Eurozone [that] people power has happened." That will have consequences for those other member-states across the Eurozone which have suffered since the crisis began: Spain, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, and France.

All of these countries, with the exception of Ireland, are facing problems similar to those of Greece: high unemployment, sclerotic growth, stagnant wages, and, most importantly, a commonly-held view that the politics of yesterday are unfit for the challenges of the present.

From the Parti Socialiste and the UMP in France to Spain's PSOE and Partido Popular, the supposedly distinct parties of the last several decades increasingly look like one-party systems. That is creating space for new actors.

Last month saw radical mayors elected in four of Spain's five biggest cities. If Syriza have landed the first few blows on the austerity consensus in the EU, it could be Spain's turn next, with general elections there this December. The Greek government will now be viewed across Europe as having punctured the myth that "there is no alternative" to austerity. They have shown that you can defy the continent's masters in Brussels and Berlin. They have built a national consensus in the process, and that could well be repeated across the rest of Europe's south in the coming months and years.

Risk can be contagious in the networked capitalism of the 21st century, but so is hope. People in different countries have access, like never before—through their televisions, phones, and computers—to political events and conversations. These portals feed into offline discussion in bars and pubs, beginning conversations like, "the Greeks have had enough, so have we." If that sentiment is as strong in Spain as the polls suggest, then Podemos—an insurgent party of the radical left—could well head up a government of some kind before the end of the year.

But what does all of this mean for Britain?

Firstly, the "No" vote and the large social base behind it, shows that the potential exit of any member from the Eurozone will almost certainly come on the back of popular social movements, rather than decision-making by the EU's elite. We are perhaps closer to the moment a country leaves the Euro than we think.

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While initially cataclysmic, leaving the Euro and returning to their old currencies would give Europe's south a model for export-oriented growth and job creation to—eventually—get their economies back on track. However, the messier the process, the more likely it will lead to a lengthy economic downturn—things could get worse before they get better.

Already some are comparing the idiocy of the Troika to those behind the fateful Treaty of Versailles in 1919—a document which humiliated the Germans and which was a major factor behind the rise of Nazism. Britain wasn't insulated from events then and it won't be insulated now. Any social or economic tumult in Europe would be felt here.


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The second point is perhaps even more important with Sunday's result strengthening a view some have whispered in recent months: that with the election of Syriza in January and radical politicians across Spain in May, 2015 is the year that a consensus around neoliberalism—at least in Europe—began to die. It is increasingly clear to publics across the continent that the powers that be—finance, big business, and centrist technocracy—has little to offer them.

In Britain, that zeitgeist could affect the referendum over membership of the European Union. This presents a challenge to the left, which is wedded to EU membership. For now, the EU is a rich-man's club, annihilating the economies of its south while pushing through trade liberalization deals at odds with the interests of the non-rich majority. Even though that's not really why UKIP and the Tory right want to leave, they'll certainly be able to play on that theme.

If Brits are going to vote to stay in, it will be because of a positive story about what the EU could become, rather than defending the status quo which is looking pretty bust at the moment. There's certainly a progressive case for staying in to be made, but it will have to start with admitting the union's present failings and outlining a radical, democratic alternative.

Sunday showed that populism is back, to an extent unseen in Europe since before the Second World War. Even if you have the media, the money, and the backing of the most "credible" institutions—as the referendum's "yes" campaign did—that doesn't matter in the face of popular anger.

That will almost certainly fuel the rise of the left across the continent, with others eager to imitate the success of Syriza and Spain's movements which are now in local government. Until now, those same energies have been limited in the UK to the rise of the SNP and, to a lesser extent, UKIP and the Green Party. That is likely to change with the same holding true in Britain as it does elsewhere: whether you vote for the Conservatives or Labour you get austerity. Across Europe, that is being undone, and in the long-term there is no reason why Britain should be an exception.

Follow Aaron Bastani on Twitter.

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