Quantcast
Channel: VICE CA
Viewing all 38002 articles
Browse latest View live

Fake, Drug-Test-Foiling Dicks Are a Growing Business in Queensland

0
0

A kit to beat drug tests containing a fake penises, heat pads, and a sachet of fake urine. All images run with permission from passmydrugtest.com.au.

Miners in Queensland are using prosthetic penises and synthetic urine to beat drug tests. The trend comes as mines are moving away from saliva testing in favor of urine, following research by the Australian Mine and Metals Association proved urine was more reliable.

Individuals need to be clean for 72 hours to give a drug free urine sample. Unless you have a fake dick and pee, then you can do whatever you want.

The prosthetic penises gaining popularity in the area contain a reservoir that can hold at least 60 ml of synthetic urine. The reservoir is a squeeze bottle with a syringe at the end of it, all of which is covered by a prosthetic dick. This is then strapped onto a man's back and heat pads are used to keep the urine at body temperature.

A selection of prosthetic penises.

In a video by Huffington Post, Richard Cusick, Associate Publisher of High Times Magazine, estimates the "drug test solutions (beat the test)" industry to be worth 10 percent of the $6 billion drug testing industry. This is making drug testing on mining sites even more complex. Products used to beat the compulsory tests can be purchased online for as little as $35 for a starter dick, and up to $320 for a sophisticated kit made up of strap on penises, heat pads, sachets of fake urine, and additives to make the pH levels and color look like real urine.

  • The main players in this business are the Whizzinator, Sweet Pee, and Monkey Dong. Online supplier, Jay, from the website passmydrugtest.com.au, told VICE he has noticed a steady increase in sales over the past 12 months. He puts this down to the legalization of cannabis in regions around the world.

A synthetic-urine pouch

Despite improvements in testing, Diagnostic Laboratory Services (DLS) reported an increase in synthetic urine usage in 2015. Scientific Director of Toxicology, Carl Linden from the DLS said, "We were a little bit amazed to see the increased level of synthetic urine usage as it reduced substantially last few years after we found a method to identify it in 2010." Linden puts the increase down to improvements in undetectable formulas in new products.

The undetectable formula is believed to be synthetic creatinine that works in the same way organic creatinine does. Creatinine is a protein and by-product of muscle tissue breakdown found in pee. Tony Graham from the Australian Workplace Drug Testing Services told VICE, "In the good old days we could do a test on it and determine there was no creatinine in it."

The penises are available in a range of colors.

Following the recent reports of synthetic urine usage, Tony has had to increase his seminars aimed at educating workers and construction bosses about drug testing and cheating from one a year to 20.

Senior Gold Coast police officer Superintendent Jim Keogh said the synthetic urine market was booming and authorities are finding it difficult to crackdown due to the legitimacy of buying and selling fake urine. Given its legal status, the parameters of restricting it are complicated for authorities. "In reality, all they're doing is making a chemical compound in liquid form and selling it. They're not indicating what the purpose of the purchase is, at the time of selling it, it's certainly not a dangerous drug," Superintendent Keogh said.

Tony explained that he doesn't try and catch people, which will inevitably get them sacked. Instead, he tries to offer education on safety. "It does matter if they are high of legal drugs or not, we just want people to be safe when they are operating machinery."

Follow Dan on Twitter.




Inside the Nightmarish Body Habit Disorders That Affect 'One in 50 People'

0
0

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

We all have habits that we find difficult to stop. Some of us chew the ends off pens, others spend real human money on Candy Crush. Neither of those are great, but at least they're relatively harmless. Some of us, however, aren't so lucky. Some of us bite our nails to the point that the skin on each finger is always in a state of bleeding or scabbing over, and each nail is only a millimeter long.

Evelyn, a 24-year-old student I spoke to, told me she compulsively picks at blemishes, tiny scabs, and open wounds on her head and face. These sores often hurt and bleed, yet the small scars dotted around her face illustrate the fact she's repeated this process thousands of times regardless, because the picking is something she can't control.

The medical term for this behavior is excoriation disorder, more colloquially referred to as compulsive skin picking (CSP). The disorder is part of a family of self-grooming behaviors that fall under the umbrella term Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviors (BFRBs). Other forms of BFRBs are compulsive hair pulling (trichotillomania), compulsive nail biting (onychophagia), and compulsive biting of the inside of the cheeks.

Roughly one in 50 people exhibit at least one BFRB. That's 2 percent of the global population, or around 146 million people. However, Jennifer Raikes, Executive Director of the Trichotillomania Learning Center (TLC) in the US—one of the world-leading institutions dedicated to ending the suffering caused by BFRBs—told me via Skype that TLC actually "see skin picking as potentially higher than" this conservative estimate.

Dr. Jon Grant is a Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Chicago and has been studying BFRBs for almost 20 years. Considered among the foremost scholars in the clinical study of BFRBs, he defines them as "problematic, non-functional behaviors directed at the body, with a loss of control, and resulting in negative consequences."

Principal CBT therapist Simon Darnley is Head of the Anxiety Disorders Residential Unit at NHS South London and Maudsley (SLaM), and Head of Clinical Pathways for Lambeth Mood, Anxiety, and Personality Disorders. With over 20 years of experience working with habit disorders, he compares them to the way many of us eat popcorn at the cinema. Before you know it, your fingers are scraping the bottom of the box and all the popcorn is gone.

BFRB sufferers often speak of a trance they go into when they pick or pull or bite, only realizing after some time that they have been doing so. Also like our popcorn ritual at the movies, many sufferers have exclusive situations or environments when they engage with their compulsive habit, like sat in front of the TV.

BFRBs are often mistakenly associated with obsessive-compulsive disorder, but it's common for people to experience their compulsion without obsessive thoughts. Jennifer Raikes from TLC told me that "depression and anxiety can coexist with these disorders." Indeed, a lot of the time, BFRBs can be linked with stress and can be part of a bigger problem like body dysmorphic disorder (BDD). However, people can also be perfectly relaxed and content with their lives, save for the fact they can't stop compulsively pulling their hair out.

These habit disorders are likely genetic. The student I spoke to told me that when she began to open up about her skin picking, her father revealed that his mother (her grandmother) has the same disorder. BFRBs are also closely connected to the nature of addiction. One of the world's leading BFRB therapists, Dr. Suzanne Mouton-Odum, runs a private practice in Houston, Texas. She confirms that BFRBs are not "the result of earlier trauma" or "bad parenting," but are in fact "complex human behaviors that require complex intervention," i.e. there's not an easy fix.

BFRBs typically start in the early teens, and are very common among males and females alike. For around 2,500 years, BFRBs have been on the radar of the collective human consciousness. In Epidemics Book 1, the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates tells young doctors, "We must note whether he plucks his hair, picks at his skin, or weeps."


Watch our film 'Swansea Love Story,' about a group of young addicts caught up in South Wales' heroin epidemic:


At a recent BFRB conference at King's College, London, Dr. Mouton-Odum asked the audience how many of those suffering from BFRBs would want to get rid of them if they could. Many hands shot up into the air. She then asked that if they could engage with picking or pulling without any hair loss, skin damage, etc, would they still want to stop? Only two hands remained up in the air. A significant element to BFRBs is that they actually help people in some way, whether it's that they soothe the nervous system or that they provide relief from discomfort.

So if BFRBs have positive affects, why is it important for people to stop engaging with these behaviors?

Over time, these disorders can erode a person's courage, hope, social relationships, self-esteem, and even have detrimental effects on educational and career prospects. A person's quality of life can be deeply affected. I've been told of one woman who became a nun as a result of suffering from BFRBs. Jennifer Raikes has "known people who have felt suicidal" as a result of their picking or pulling.

People with BFRBs often avoid going to the doctor, but this can lead to potentially dangerous consequences, as problem areas can be the eyelashes or the pubic area, i.e. sensitive areas at risk of infection. Some people eat the hair they pull and, in the most extreme cases, people can develop a build-up of hair in the stomach that is hard to digest and can become life threatening if not detected and extracted.

I spoke to a 42-year-old merchandiser called Sarah about her struggles with BFRBs. She told me, "The most difficult thing is the emotional suffering for me, the shame, the scars, and the disliking of what I do."

TRENDING ON MUNCHIES: This Man Created the Ice Cube's Multimillion-Dollar Industry

How much research has been dedicated to BFRBs? Hardly any. How available is effective treatment? Jennifer Raikes claims there is "a real dearth of specialists in this field, not just in the US." There are just under 300 specialists based in the US listed on the TLC website, with a handful based in Canada and one in Mexico. The situation currently looks pretty bleak if you're not based in North America and in need of treatment for your BFRB.

I asked Dr. Grant why he believes BFRBs are so under-researched and underfunded. He said that the main reason was that "people consider them simply habits that one should be able to change on one's own instead of complex behaviors that result in problems for people."

UK-based Simon Darnley believes "there is treatment out there" in the form of "anxiety therapies" conducted by "good therapists." The problem is that he typically sees five to 10 cases per year.

Why so few cases? Jennifer Raikes spoke of a "catch 22" situation where "people who have these disorders do not talk about them." There is little public awareness of the existence of these disorders, so people don't know they even have something that requires treatment.

Shame is what sends people into the shadows. Mr. Darnley says the lack of awareness of BFRBs is due to "shame and embarrassment as people partly believe their BFRBs are their own fault." People need reassurance that their habits are not their fault, and that they should feel confident to address them and talk about them.

Taking a hard-line approach with someone and telling him or her to stop something they can't control only perpetuates the shame they feel and subjugates them into more silence. It's like ordering someone with a broken leg to stop limping. There's a reason for the limping, and that's a broken leg. There's also a reason for the existence of BFRBs. They are incredibly complex behaviors, but they sometimes seem trivial when spoken of. They come with the confusing baggage of mixed feelings and paradoxical emotions, and recovery cannot be attained without correct therapeutic intervention and time.

GPs need to start asking about these behaviors, and healthcare providers need to educate themselves about BFRBs and how to treat them. –Dr. Jon Grant

Lack of a call for supply inevitably results in a lack of demand for services. The five to 10 cases that Simon Darnley typically sees each year are only those extreme cases where people have reached breaking point and have nowhere else to turn. Applying our earlier estimate of 2 percent to the population of the UK, there are currently 2.3 million British people whose quality of life would be improved significantly if a strong network of BFRB treatment providers was established here.

What is the best way to treat BFRBs? Simon Darnley says, "We know CBT (Cognitive Behavior Therapy) is really helpful when combined with HRT (Habit Reversal Training)," before stressing that "understanding yourself and your environment" are important checkpoints on the road to recovery.

What steps can be taken to improve the lives of those living with BFRBs? When I put this to Dr. Grant, he answered, "GPs need to start asking about these behaviors, and healthcare providers need to educate themselves about (BFRBs) and how to treat them."

Simon Darnley calls for "more research into other habit disorders" and also wants "more people to come forward for treatment" in order to "increase awareness."

Sufferers of BFRBs can take action right now. They can start support groups, which would amplify their collective voice. Jennifer Raikes certainly supports this idea, as she regards support groups as important tools for "shame-lifting." She told me that "one person has huge ripple effects with any action they take"—and she should know, being one of the founding members of the New York City Trichotillomania Support Group, having suffered from hair pulling and skin picking for many years. Jennifer would like to see more "treatment providers who are experts in this field," a hope I'm certain sufferers would also like to see fulfilled.

Names of BFRB sufferers have been changed

For more information about Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviors, visit trich.org.

More on VICE:

My Fear of Vomit: The Nightmare of Living with Emetophobia

You Have No Idea What the Term 'Depressed' Really Means Until It Devours You

How It Actually Feels to Live with Severe Anxiety

Jonathan Galassi's 'Muse' Is a Send-Up of the Publishing World from the Inside

0
0

These days Jonathan Galassi could be doing worse: president and publisher of the storied Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, eminent editor, distinguished translator from the Italian (including poets Eugenio Montale and Giacomo Leopardi), accomplished poet, and now, acclaimed debut novelist, with his new book Muse. (VICE published an excerpt in this month's fiction issue.) Where others might be resting on their laurels, Galassi has sought out new paths for himself, in his writing as well as his personal life. A consummate man of letters, he is also a shrewd businessman with a history of sharp decisions: Among his most famous early coups was his signing of Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent, the best-selling legal thriller published in 1987, made into a 1990 film. Galassi's authors have won Nobel Prizes (Seamus Heaney), Pulitzers, and National Book Awards. He is noted for his longtime shepherding of the work of Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides. Full disclosure: I myself am lucky to be one of Jonathan's poets. He's edited me since he accepted my first book of poems, Same Life, in 2007.

Muse channels a complex range of Galassi's experience, offering a gently satirical insider's take on the publishing industry—or the way it might have been in the late 20th century—as well as a hymn to writers and their work. The novel operates at a brisk, frequently witty clip, introducing us to a cast of semi-recognizable yet enjoyably scrambled characters: charismatic, decidedly un-PC publishers; romantic young strivers; and authors galore, bearing down on their work, occasionally throwing fits, more often engaging ardently and seriously with "the fascination of what's difficult," as Yeats put it. We get sexual shenanigans, European set pieces, double-dealings in business and love. The novel encompasses much, and centers on its figure of romance, Ida Perkins, celebrity poet of the 20th century. In the gloriously confected Ida (siren, muse, best-seller, hailed by apparently everyone from T. S. Eliot to rock musicians), literature—and literary history—has the heroine it wished it had.

Galassi's debut is, then, both a love story and a comic opera. We already know the publisher to be a sensitive, erudite poet and essayist, but with Muse, Galassi lets his comedic freak-flag fly. Yet there is throughout this book a combination of delicacy and vigor. It's as if the more expansive zones of the novel genre allowed him to work in multiple modes, to bring his capacity for sharp social observation in line with his lyrical abilities. Indeed, Muse features extracts from the (imagined) volumes of Ida Perkins. This is one of the many pleasures of the novel—its deeply serious commitment to play.

This past spring I was in Florence, visiting some of the places Galassi had recommended—not least places important to Montale. We have a fairly regular email conversation going, and I wanted to hear Galassi say more about Muse, which is both a departure and, for now, a culmination. He obliged, and our edited exchange appears below.

VICE: Who—or what—was the muse of Muse?
Jonathan Galassi:
I think the muse of Muse is an idea: The idea that there are muses, that writers and their art can actually mean the world to us, can change how we feel and think and live.

Muse reads in part like a juicy roman- à clef—with hilarious and dead-on portraits of this famous publisher, that lauded author, that notorious agent, the Frankfurt Book Fair, all kinds of wheeling and dealing and assessing and ranking. As the president of FSG, did you worry about the knock-on effects of publishing such a potentially scandalous book?
Well, let's remember that the book is fiction, and not necessarily straight-up realist fiction at that. It looks at its subjects through a slightly distorted, rose-colored—and maybe occasionally jaundiced—comic lens. Nothing and no one in it is meant to be taken literally. Some may feel they recognize traits or foibles of this or that figure, occasionally with reason, no doubt, but the characters are meant to be iconic, avatars of a time and place that has largely gone by the boards. I started from what I knew—that's what they tell you to do, isn't it?—and I took off from there.

For all its worldly aplomb and satirical elements, Muse is, as the narrator observes, "a love story," a multilayered romance—with poetry, literature, and publishing itself. What are your thoughts on romance, optimism?
Yes, it's a love story, a kind of elegy for a colorful, affection-inspiring way of life that has become historical in many senses, though I'd say the very core of the publishing process, which is the editor's passion for the writer's work, hasn't changed one whit. Everything else has transformed around it, but that foundational recognition, that commitment, is still what it's all about. It's an utterly genuine kind of romantic love, with all the pitfalls and rewards and chances for misunderstanding, betrayal, and disillusionment—and, yes, lifelong fidelity—that youthful infatuation involves. It's still happening every day, which means that this game is going to keep on being played, though on a different-looking board, no doubt.

As a young editor, I can remember moping for weeks and weeks about losing certain projects—and some of that pain lives on in me still.

Muse offers en route a brilliant alternative history of modernism and of 20th -century literature. "Real-life" figures mingle with invented characters, particularly with, A. O. Outerbridge, a kind of left-wing Ezra Pound, and Pepita Erskine, who registers as a Sontag-figure crossed with Angela Davis. To what extent is Muse also a semi-clandestine work of literary criticism? Of cultural history?
There's a certain tongue-in-cheek attempt at alternative history. I remember features in Life as a boy: "If the South Had Won the Civil War," etc., which always enthralled me. I decided to suppose that Arnold Outerbridge was a hugely popular Stalinist poet—which is highly unlikely beyond the realm of alternative literary history—and that Pepita Erskine, the wildly popular and wildly controversial darling of the self-satisfied liberal ascendancy, was African-American. Why not? This book is meant to be cheeky, irreverent—about something I take utterly seriously. There certainly could—and should—have been an Ida Perkins in our literature. We'd all be much better for it.

Muse gives us two publishing lions-in-winter, Homer Stern (whom many will read as resembling Roger Straus, co-founder of FSG) and Sterling Wainwright (who shares certain features with New Directions founder and publisher James Laughlin). Both men obsess about "the one that got away"—the great publishing coup they missed. For Wainwright, it 's Lolita. For Homer, it's Ida Perkins herself. Do you have an Ida Perkins?—the one that got away?
If I do—and I have a number—I'm certainly not saying who they are. But all editors have authors they admire whom they wish they'd been able to work with. You'd have to be a block of stone not to. It's part of the game. As a young editor, I can remember moping for weeks and weeks about losing certain projects—and some of that pain lives on in me still. It's the worst kind of nostalgia, kind of perverse, really: mourning something that never was. I'm sure there's a name for it.

A good editor helps you to a better understanding of your book—your understanding, not his or hers.

Our hero, Paul Dukach, is a young gay man arriving from the provinces to New York City in the 80s to attend NYU; he then enters the publishing world. There's an attentiveness to a range of sexualities in the novel. To what extent is Muse a queer book?
Without giving away too much of the plot, let's just say that one of the things Paul learns to appreciate in Muse is that love keeps happening to people in all sorts of surprising ways. Ida is someone who has never been an observer of conventions—except maybe certain poetic ones. She's had four husbands after all, and a long liaison with Arnold Outerbridge, too. Homer and Sterling are likewise pleasure-seekers as well as seekers after the word. And one of Ida's great poetic rivals, Elspeth Adams, is a lesbian, though a closeted one—which was SOP in her day. But whether straight or gay, Paul sees his heroes contend with eros in ways that very often don't fit onto the conventional grid. One of the sub-themes of Muse is the liberation of the gay but shackled Paul Dukach. Is that queer? I hope so. Queerer than any single form of sexuality.

At a certain moment Paul observes of Sterling Wainwright's own poems: "Sterling's love poems were generically idealizing, maybe even a little saccharine. Basically, Paul thought, he was too nice." The book tacks interestingly between an admiration for ruthlessness—in publishing as well as writing—and an ethic of care. Is there a danger in being too nice? Another kind of danger in being, say, a jackal?
The heroes and heroines of Muse don't "live at five percent," as one of my other heroes Eugenio Montale says he did. They reach out and grab life. Paul observes this with a certain baleful appreciation, and as time goes on he finds ways of incorporating a modicum of this sometimes selfish lust for experience into his own life. You're asking, I think, if adherence to the Golden Mean, aurea mediocritas, can involve a kind of mediocrity. I'd say the jury's out on that—but Ida's life and work represent freedom. And I do think that is art's ultimate value, for us all.


Watch our interview with Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of the international literary sensation, 'My Struggle':


There are beautiful passages in Muse on the work of editing, the shepherding of authors and of books into print. Paul is a great spokesman for the complex project of editing. What has it been like for you, being edited as opposed to editing?
Robin Desser, my editor, has been loveably relentless—always encouraging me toward greater clarity, concision, consistency. Muse is a much better book because of her pushing me to refine and center it. I don't think we necessarily see it entirely the same way—I think she is more of a believer in realism than I am, for instance—but that tension forced me to enhance the book's interior coherence, which made its comedic elements stronger.

A good editor helps you to a better understanding of your book—your understanding, not his or hers. I tried to show this in the novel, and I've certainly experienced it with Robin.

The hardest lesson of all for me at least was cutting. Cutting adjectives, cutting big words, cutting beautiful writing and even irrelevant portions of the book.

How important was your own experience as an editor in writing this book, on a craft level?
Not surprisingly, all the advice I've blithely given over decades was probably not as much help to me as it should have been. I needed to hear it from someone else—in my case from Robin Desser—and the hardest lesson of all for me at least was cutting. Cutting adjectives, cutting big words, cutting beautiful writing and even irrelevant portions of the book. You'd think I'd have known better—but doing is different from observing. At least it was for me.

Muse, like your last book of poems Left-Handed, moves between country and city and has a lovely disabused appreciation for both. Were you composing these books simultaneously? How did they cross-pollinate?
No, I only decided to try my hand at fiction after completing Left-Handed, though I think its poems do tell a story, which probably encouraged me in the direction of fiction. I took it on as a challenge. Perhaps I thought I'd gone as far as I could with the interior narrative my poems involved. It was time to write about something more external. The city/country alternation reflects how I've lived my life. I grew up in the country always wanting to be in the city, but as an adult city-dweller I've found the country necessary and rejuvenating.

I don' t want to give anything away, but there is a tremendous scene in Muse set in Venice. What has Venice meant to you?
I think I call it "Disneyland for grownups" in the book. Venice is an overwhelming confection of beauty, art, sensuality, and decadence, an entirely unnatural environment, the ultimate aesthetic, or synaesthetic, experience—which is also, unfortunately, no longer really alive. I know a woman who held her funeral in advance in Venice, so she could be there for it. Ida lives in Venice because it is an end of the Earth, a last outpost, but it's also the ultimate cave of making. It had to be in the city of James, Sargent, Proust, Mann, Diaghilev, Pound, and Brodsky, just for starters, that Paul comes face to face with his idol and has her demolish his bookish, conventional ideas about her. In the not-quite-real, oneiric world of Muse, where else could this happen? And let's not forget that Venice is the setting of James's "The Aspern Papers," in which the original "publishing scoundrel" plies his underhanded trade.

Muse offers a fusion of your several literary vocations: editor, poet, publisher, critic, translator, and now, novelist. What of this alchemy? Can we expect further novels from you?
I'm afraid I've gotten the bug and am working on something entirely different. The classic second novel. It's now or never at my age, after all—but I also have no desire to stop doing the things I've enjoyed so much. Everything I'm interested in seems to more or less flow into everything else. Writing Muse has certainly made me more sympathetic to writers' vulnerabilities, but I think what mattered most was learning that I myself (which is to say, anyone) could take a shot at something I've always so admired and find that it isn't actually magic. Giving oneself permission to write, to do anything, is the fundamental thing. It involves a kind of existential courage. When it emerges, anything can happen. I didn't follow any conscious model in writing this little book. I hope I absorbed a few things from the great writers I've had the good fortune to work with over the years—others will judge how well.

Muse by Jonathan Galassi is out now from Knopf.

Maureen N. McLane's most recent book of poems, This Blue (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), was a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry.

PLEASE LOOK AT ME: You've Got Male

The Bizarre Mystery of Jim Webb's Presidential Campaign

0
0

You may not have noticed, but late last week, just as everyone in America was shutting down their laptops and sneaking out from their sad desk jobs for the long weekend, another candidate jumped into the 2016 White House race, this time on the Democratic side. On Thursday, former Virginia Senator Jim Webb officially launched his presidential campaign, becoming the fourth man willing to let Hillary Clinton bulldoze him on her inevitable path toward her party's nomination.

The timing of Webb's campaign launch, on the afternoon before a major federal holiday and three-day weekend, was obviously weird. But Webb didn't seem to notice or care if anyone paid attention to his surprise news. The announcement, detailed in a 2,000-word blog post, seemed more like a courtesy—a heads up to the American people that Webb would like to run their country.

It was, in many ways, a fitting entry for Webb. In a presidential race that includes, among others, a pediatric neurosurgeon who doesn't believe in evolution, a former horseshoer, a Socialist, and Donald Trump, Webb may actually be the strangest candidate of the bunch.

By strange, I do not mean "promising" or "surprisingly legitimate" —Webb hasn't held elected office since his one and only term as a senator, which ended in January 2013. He didn't run for re-election because he hated campaigning, which isn't a great sign for a presidential hopeful. Before that, he was a Republican who did a short stint as Secretary of the Navy for Ronald Reagan, which isn't likely to make any Democrat think, "Finally! That's the guy who can beat Hillary." And with 2 percent support in most current polls, it isn't like there's a national clamor for this dude to take the reins for the nation's liberal party.

In fact, Webb isn't not much of a Democrat at all, at least based on where the party is at today. He is conservative on immigration, has a terrible record on climate change— including voting against cap and trade and calling for delaying EPA regulation of green house gases—and refers to Ronald Reagan as his hero. In a Facebook post last month, he called for "mutual respect" in the Confederate flag debate, which is a bizarre thing to say in the best of times, and an even worse thing to say when the entire Republican Party and every major American retailer is taking the flag down.

Webb does have some progressive bonafides. A decorated war hero who fought in the Vietnam War, Webb has long opposed American military intervention overseas, and voted against the Iraq War, one of Hillary Clinton's biggest weak spots. He's also been calling for calling for criminal justice reform for years, which puts him way ahead of the curve on that issue. Still, it's unlikely that many of the Democrats who were waiting for Elizabeth Warren are going to flock to a pro-gun politician who thinks affirmative action has outlived its usefulness, and whose past comments about the role of women in the military include the observation that a Naval Academy dormitory was a "horny woman's dream."

The area where Webb has found the most success is in his writing. He's written at least nine books, including memoirs and a bunch of war novels. But while his books are much better than the average ghostwritten political autobiography—and some are actually pretty good—some of it is definitely... unusual stuff for an aspiring president to have written about. A few examples:

"Fogarty . . . watch[ed] a naked young stripper do the splits over a banana. She stood back up, her face smiling proudly and her round breasts glistening from a spotlight in the dim bar, and left the banana on the bar, cut in four equal sections by the muscles of her vagina."

"He saw the invitation with every bouncing breast and curved hip. . . . He was thirteen... She was fifteen... In a few moments she drew him to her and he murmured in his quiet voice, 'I am still small.' 'You are large enough,' she answered. And he found he was."

"The man grabbed his young son in his arms, turned him upside down, and put the boy's penis in his mouth."

What makes Webb's candidacy particularly weird is that he doesn't even seem like politics. In fact, he hates politics. Explaining his decision not to run for reelection in 2012, Webb wrote in a recent book, "I faced the Hobson's choice of either turning into a perennial scold or surrendering a part of my individuality to the uncontrollable, collective nature of group politics. I was not ready to do either." Not sure what he thinks being president would be like, but it probably isn't much different.

Webb also doesn't sound like a particularly fun guy to be around. In one of the Clinton emails recently released by the State Department, the Secretary of State's advisors mention Webb explicitly, apparently noting observations from a June 2009 hearing: "Jim Webb arrives, looking typically angry," the email reads. That was kind of Webb's vibe when he was in the Senate. In a new book unearthed by the Daily Beast, onetime Pentagon official and former US Ambassador to Qatar Chase Untermeyer seems to confirm this depiction, with a story about the time Webb almost killed a biker with his bare hands.

"I had him by the hair and was beating his head on the sidewalk when he suddenly went limp on me," Webb recounted. "Then it came to me: I had killed the fucking son of a bitch, and I would be put on report back at the Academy! So I revived him—whereupon he came to and kicked me in the head about ten times till I was able to grab his leg... Moral: Show no mercy in a fight."

Needless to say, it's unclear just who exactly this guy will appeal to, particularly in a Democratic presidential primary. Could Webb ride a silent, heretofore unknown majority of socially conservative, fiscally progressive, working-class, war-mythologizing anti-war voters into the White House? I guess. I mean, it isn't impossible. In all possible universes — let's say, a billion, billion universes — there is probably at least one in which Jim Webb wins the presidency.

Follow Kevin Lincoln on Twitter.

VICE Vs Video Games: Odds Are eSports Betting Is Here to Stay

0
0

In the years to come, you'll be able to bet on 'Heroes of the Storm' just as easily as you can the 14.00 at Haymarket.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

I've been known to have the occasional flutter on a sports ball match or an equine quickness test. But while I was perusing some of the major betting sites recently, looking for an intriguing offer or some half-decent odds, I stumbled upon something curious. The world of eSports has quietly worked its way into betting markets. But is either industry ready for the coming together of slapping cash down in hope of complete strangers outperforming rivals and these little things called video games?

William Hill is amongst the first bookies to offer odds on eSports events. "[The idea] was actually from a couple of young guys who work down in the Darwin office, in Australia," Rupert Adams, International PR Manager at the company, tells me. Two 20-year-olds, gamers in their spare time, got in contact with compilers at William Hill's head office in Leeds—compilers are responsible for deciding whether a new market is going to be created for people to bet on. The two Australians go to gaming tournaments every now and then, and wondered why there wasn't a way to combine work with pleasure. Would it be possible to bet on video games?

That was a few months ago—and today, you most certainly can bet on eSports. Which makes perfect sense, as the audience is there. According to SuperData Research, there are over 134 million eSports viewers worldwide as of May 2015. The market in Europe is worth $72 million, North America $143 million, and Asia is the biggest at $374 million. A lot of people are watching, and a growing number of sponsors are pumping money into the eSports industry. So it was never a matter of if eSports would be getting betting markets, merely a matter of when.

We are still in the early days though. William Hill is neither losing nor gaining money from its eSports markets right now. Rupert tells me this is always the way for new markets at the start. "If you had told me ten years ago that people would be betting on the winner of The X Factor, I wouldn't have believed you. But now we make £1 million [$1.5 million] from the final."

I was interested to learn about which new markets get picked up—after all, it's not every day that an entirely new sport comes around. "Other than one-off markets, like whether we'll have a white Christmas, or who's going to win The X Factor, it just doesn't happen often," Rupert says. "I guess the last big one I can remember was for WWE Wrestling." (Which seems odd to me, considering there are a group of people who actually know the outcomes of those bouts ahead of time.) Betting on eSports is certain to increase over time, but whether it will ever get as big as gambling on football games and horse races remains to be seen.


Related: VICE's documentary on eSports

Also check out 'The British Wrestler'


I decided it was time to speak to someone who had experience from the other side of things. Stephen "Snoopeh" Ellis is a former professional League of Legends player. As the jungler for Counter Logic Gaming Europe, he played in the Season 2 World Championships against some of the world's best. With his playing days behind him, he is now Vice President of Business Development at Unikrn, a company dedicated to offering eSports betting.

"We aim to provide a safe, legal, and responsible environment for people to bet on eSports," he tells me. "During my tenure as a professional gamer I was always passionate about the business aspects of eSports, and when making the transition into the next chapter of my career I had the opportunity to visit Unikrn's founders Rahul Sood and Karl Flores, as well as the rest of the team in Seattle, and knew these were the guys I wanted to work with."

"Also, there is a wealth of evidence out there which points to betting increasing engagement and viewership in sports," he continues. "There are some examples already happening in eSports, despite there not being a platform dedicated to it like ours. I see Unikrn as one of the catalysts in helping eSports grow and bridge the gap between the mainstream and hardcore audiences."

A Snoopeh selfie, via Twitter.

I ask if he sees the mainstream sites, such as Bet365 and William Hill, as competition for Unikrn, or whether he thinks gamers were more likely to turn to his company, since it's a dedicated eSports platform.

"The difference between those mentioned and ourselves is that we are completely vertically integrated in eSports. We are also hardcore gamers—you'll often find our CEO squeezing in as many games of League of Legends as he can. We seek to bring the level of legality and safety that these mainstream sites bring, at the same time as being gamer focused and re-investing into the eSports scene."

With the eSports industry growing all the time, I've always thought that betting was an obvious step in its development into the mainstream, and Stephen agrees. "Betting is one of the next logical steps in eSports. There is an emerging body of research in traditional sports, which if you've ever bet on traditional sports, you will know about. For one thing, betting increases engagement. People are more likely to watch to the end of games, people are more likely to watch less-significant games, and this is already very evident at some eSports tournaments." I know all about that, having added an extra dimension to Argentina against Iran in the 2014 World Cup by putting a little of my own money on the line.

Gameplay from 'League of Legends'

I wanted to get Stephen's views on whether the eSports industry was ready for betting, both in terms of it still being in its infancy, and the fact that many eSports fans are not of legal age for gambling.

"It's a good question, and we should all be wary of younger people betting in any sport, never mind eSports. That is why we've partnered with TabCorp, which is one of the largest wagering firms in the world and, for the past nine out of ten years, has been recognized as the most responsible wagering platform in the world. They have strict verification processes, so betting goes through us on the front end but is completely checked by them on the back end."

After leaving the professional gaming scene and moving over to Unikrn, Stephen posted an AMA on Reddit, answering questions and concerns that his fans had. In it, he spoke about a strong desire to combat match fixing, something that has been a massive problem in the past. I asked him to elaborate.

"Competitive integrity is something I am very aware of as a former professional gamer, and the team here at Unikrn is making that a top priority. Not only will we blacklist anyone who is directly or indirectly involved in the competition—that's coaches, analysts, players, owners, league organizers, admins, whoever—but we are also working on a comprehensive competitive integrity certificate which leagues and tournaments that we offer betting on must adhere to, or else we will not offering betting on their tournaments."

Unikrn has measures in place to prevent any sort of foul play. "We're also monitored by LuxBet, and they have decades of experience to catch irregular betting patterns that we can flag on our system. There are various other checks and balances we will be implementing, but I can assure you we are taking competitive integrity very seriously."

On Motherboard: How the Frag Dolls Blazed a Trail for Women Gamers

Having spent so many years in the eSports industry before getting into the betting side of things, Stephen believes that gambling won't have a negative impact. "I believe that betting will create more engagement, not only for the hardcore gamer but also for the casual. I love eSports—it's given me so much, and I wouldn't have joined Unikrn if I thought its practices were detrimental to the health and prosperity of the scene."

It appears, then, that the eSports industry and the gambling industry are ready for each other. Some may scoff now, but in ten years it's pretty likely that we'll be just as ready to bet on who's going to win the 2025 League of Legends World Championships as we are on whether we'll be getting snow on Christmas Day. And if the right measures are in place to protect young people and prevent cheating, then I, for one, don't see a problem with it. Now, to find the Dota equivalent of the Honduran national soccer team and make their matches all the more exciting.

Follow Matt Porter on Twitter.

What We Know About the Child Porn Allegations Against the Guy Who Ran Subway Jared's Foundation for Kids

0
0

A subway restaurant in Indiana. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Early Tuesday morning, law enforcement raided the home of Jared Fogle, the guy who famously ate himself thin and showed it off on national television in the 90s. Members of the FBI, state police, and US Postal Service were observed removing items from the Subway spokesman's Zionsville, Indiana, residence and placing them inside a large truck, and Fogle was driven away in a black Lexus by his attorney, the Indianapolis Star reported.

The Department of Justice has yet to confirm or deny the existence of an investigation, but Fogle's lawyer, Ron Elberger, wrote the Star, "Jared has been cooperating, and continues to cooperate, with law enforcement in their investigation of unspecified charges and looks forward to its conclusion. He has not been detained, arrested or charged with any crime or offense."

So we don't know exactly why cops are poking around Fogle's house just yet, but it's more than plausible that the flurry of law enforcement attention has something to do with the fact that Russell Taylor, former director of Fogle's Jared Foundation, was arrested in April on eight child pornography charges. In fact, the sandwich chain released a statement Tuesday afternoon making that very connection.

"We are shocked about the news and believe it is related to a prior investigation of a former Jared Foundation employee," Subway's statement reads. "We are very concerned and will be monitoring the situation closely. We don't have any more details at this point."

According to a federal criminal complaint prepared in May, Taylor enjoyed sending illegal porn to his friends via text message. An unnamed woman who knew him through her husband told police about the text messages after having participated in them for some time, even after her husband died in 2013. During an October 2014 interview at her home with Indiana State Police, she said that she still had the texts saved on her phone and agreed to turn them over.

It's unclear why the woman hesitated to alert the police—or why she'd want anyone to know about what she herself had participated in. For instance, Taylor asked if he could come over to her house and, along with another woman, fuck a horse she kept on her property. When later asked if this request was made in jest, the woman told an officer, "You could tell he was serious." Still, she apparently continued the relationship.

Taylor also sent images that suggested he was legitimately interested in bestiality. One of the images was of a dog "licking the nude genital area of an adult female." Eventually, the woman told police, he asked her if she wanted to see "young girls" and hinted that he'd traveled to Thailand in the past.

When police asked her if Taylor had ever sent explicit images of young girls, she told them no, and when asked if he'd talked about sex with children, the woman responded, "Not that I can remember, but he's the type of person that seems to be very sexually involved in whatever goes."

Eventually, the FBI put together a timeline of the woman's exchanges with Taylor, who she said was into "messing around" with horses, among other activities. The agent determined that they talked about child porn, bestiality, and "meeting for sexual purposes," according to the criminal complaint.

On April 29, officers raided Taylor's home looking for videos and images of bestiality. During their forensic search, though, they came across images of child porn. These included included separate videos of three naked girls and a boy—who later told police they were unaware they were being filmed—entering and exiting a bathtub, which were later determined to likely have been shot at Taylor's previous home. Police also found a commercially-made video of a 12-year-old from Eastern Europe, and an 8GB thumb drive with more images and erotica mixed in with documents related to an unnamed foundation.

In all, the police reviewed more than 500 videos apparently set in both Taylor's former and current Indiana homes. His relationship to the four children depicted in the various videos—between ages 9 and 16—has not been revealed, but they were all known to "sleep at Russell Taylor's residence at various times," according to the complaint. In an interview with law enforcement after being advised of his Miranda rights, Taylor conceded that he placed "clocks with concealed cameras in various rooms throughout the house," and added, "I've had Nanny cams forever." He also copped to placing a camera in his step-daughter's room, citing his wife's alleged concern that there was "underage sex going on," and claimed he did not review the video footage himself.

Taylor was ultimately charged with seven counts of producing child pornography and one count of possession.

So were the cops looking for evidence that Subway Jared was involved in the same twisted shit Taylor allegedly was? We can't say for certain yet, as there's no mention of the sandwich chain spokesman in the original federal complaint, nor in any of the subsequent court documents related to the case pending against Taylor. However, a local CBS affiliate, citing FBI sources, reported Tuesday that the warrant on Fogle's home was, in fact, served in connection with a child porn probe.

Now, there's obviously a huge leap between being a porn connoisseur as a college student and hoarding kiddie porn as an adult, but there is at least some evidence to suggest that Fogle might be more interested in smut than your average dude. On Tuesday, Gawker dug up an old VH1 exclusive on the Subway guy's origin story. Although the New York Daily News has reported that Subway is the only job Fogle's ever known, before he amassed $15 million as the face of vaguely healthy fast food, Fogle was apparently a massively overweight guy who ran a porn library out of his college dorm.

Back in the day before feds had hard drives to raid, Fogle's job was to rent out physical copies of videos to his friends for a buck a piece, according to VH1. In fact, if the outlet's lone source is to be believed, the whole reason Fogle started subsisting on Subway is because it was so close to his home office.

After achieving national prominence by shedding well over 200 pounds, Fogle went on to start the Jared Foundation in 2006, an organization focused on reducing child obesity. Taylor, who is currently being held by the US Marshals Service, served as its director before Fogle announced he was "severing all ties" amid the child porn investigation into Taylor this April.

According to the Indy Star, two days after charges were brought against him, Taylor attempted suicide and had to be placed on life support. His condition has since stabilized.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

What It’s Like to Work In a Breastaurant That Gives People Coronaries

0
0
What It’s Like to Work In a Breastaurant That Gives People Coronaries

What Computers Dream of When They Look at Porn (NSFW)

0
0
What Computers Dream of When They Look at Porn (NSFW)

While Mulcair, Trudeau Make Their Pitches to Assembly of First Nations, Conservatives Stay Home

0
0

Justin Trudeau receives a gift of sweetgrass and a canoe from National Chief Perry Bellegarde after addressing the Assembly of First Nations congress. Photo courtesy Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press

Federal party leaders made their pitches to Canada's top First Nations organization on Tuesday, with Justin Trudeau and Thomas Mulcair each promising a new "nation-to-nation" relationship, a renewed emphasis on education, and a national inquiry into missing and murdered aboriginal women.

But there was one notable absence as the Assembly of First Nations annual gathering converged on Montreal: neither Prime Minister Stephen Harper nor his Aboriginal Affairs Minister bothered to show up, apparently writing off an increasingly politicized voting block that seems to be mobilizing against the Conservatives.

Green Party leader Elizabeth May will be addressing the Assembly on Wednesday.

In a keynote speech to the Assembly, National Chief Perry Bellegarde called on First Nations across the country to come out to vote, stressing that they could turn the tide in swing ridings.

"I want us to mobilize the vote," he said. "We can make a difference in at least 51 ridings."

According to Elections Canada, turnout on First Nations reserves was under 45 percent in the 2011 election, compared to 61 percent for the general population. Community initiatives are rolling out efforts to close that gap, planning rallies, social media campaigns, and registration clinics to boost participation.

In the wake of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's scathing report on the history of residential schools, First Nations leaders are demanding more than empty apologies. For the federal government to show that it takes reconciliation seriously, Bellegarde said, it needs to end the "patriarchal imposition" of policies, address funding gaps, protect Indigenous languages, and call a national inquiry into missing and murdered Aboriginal women.

Mulcair and Trudeau each tried to convince the assembly that their parties are best suited to change the relationship between the government and First Nations. Mulcair promised a "new era" of real consultation between equal partners. He said he would create a cabinet-level committee—which he would chair as prime minister—to ensure that government policies respect rights recognized in treaties with First Nations, and would tone down the expensive legal battles Harper's government has fought against Indigenous land rights.

"Meaningful consultation is not just a catchphrase," he said. "It's the law."

Though Mulcair promised to "end the discrepancy in education" that holds First Nations children back, he did not provide details about how much funding he would contribute to address problems on reserves. Apart from sub-standard education, many reserves in Canada suffer from dilapidated housing and contaminated water supplies.

Trudeau's comments on funding were slightly more concrete. He promised "equitable funding" for education, on-reserve child and family services, and protecting Indigenous languages. He said the Liberals would restore the Kelowna accord, a funding arrangement that the Conservatives shelved after coming to power in 2006, and "immediately lift" the two percent funding cap on First Nation programs.

Trudeau also said that he would "conduct a full review of the legislation unilaterally imposed on Aboriginal peoples through the Harper government" and would rescind anything inconsistent with treaty rights. Like Mulcair, he promised an end to top-down policy and to introduce measures to enhance Aboriginal self-governance.

"Canada needs a renewed nation-to-nation relationship with aboriginal communities," he said. "We will develop a federal reconciliation framework in full partnership with aboriginal peoples."

Both party leaders promised to promptly call a national inquiry into missing and murdered Aboriginal women. Mulcair said he would do so within his first 100 days in office, and would work with Indigenous leaders to set out its parameters.

Neither of the two missed out on the opportunity to blast the Conservatives for ignoring the file, and for their lukewarm response to the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Mulcair said he fully accepted the Commission's finding that Canada's residential school system was a form of "cultural genocide" and said he had pressed Harper to request an apology from the Catholic Church for its role in running the schools, to no avail.

He also criticized Aboriginal Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt, who sat beside him as the Commission's summary report was read, for remaining silent in the midst of ringing applause. Valcourt, who snubbed the Assembly's conference, was unable to take the stage and defend himself.

Valcourt's office released a statement saying he couldn't make it to address the nation's largest Aboriginal association because he had to be in his home province of New Brunswick for "important events." According to a federal government press release, he was due to attend a rodeo festival.

Follow Arthur White on Twitter.

VICE Premiere: Two Days in Appalachia

0
0

Elkhorn City, Kentucky, Sunday, June 7. A churchgoer's hand during special singing at the Poor Bottom Freewill Baptist Church.

This article appears in The Photo Issue 2015

Appalachia is beautiful. The mountains and the forests make it so. But the region's topography has a strange effect on those who call its habitable valleys, crevices, and crannies home. Most of the towns exist, to some extent, in isolation. Sure, roads and technology connect them to the outside world, but when you're inside, they can feel like landlocked islands. The result is that God is everywhere. That is to say, you encounter religiosity everywhere, not just because of the population's devotion but because that devotion has nowhere to go. It's born into the world, only to bounce off the mountains and echo right back to Main Street. The pot has nowhere to overflow, so every person in Appalachia has a relationship with God, intentionally or otherwise. You could say the same thing about these pictures.

The World's Biggest Greek Community Outside Greece Is Preparing to Get Bigger

0
0


Image via Flickr user EnKayTee

Last week, Greece defaulted to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), after missing the deadline for its €1.5 billion [$1.65 billion] repayment. Then, on Sunday, a referendum to decide whether to submit to its creditors' repayments resulted in 61.3 percent of Greeks voting no thanks. Greece now seems poised to make a gut-wrenching exit from the Eurozone.

Whatever happens next, Australia will undoubtedly be affected. Economically speaking, today the Australian dollar is trading at $ 00.75, the lowest it has been in six years. Socially, the effects could be even more far-reaching.

Australia is home to thousands of Greek nationals, while Melbourne holds the world's largest Greek community anywhere outside of Greece. Bill Papstergiadis, the president of the Greek Orthodox Community of Melbourne, told VICE that since the financial crisis broke in 2008 there's been a major influx of Greeks into Australia. Like many others, Bill feels this is likely to continue.

"The majority of those coming are dual citizens," he says. "They're young people aged 18 to 50 who are looking for better career prospects."

Indeed, between 10,000 and 20,000 Greeks are estimated to have arrived in Australia since mid-2013. Given the Australian government's frequent rejection of asylum seekers on the unsubstantiated grounds that they're "economic migrants," there's an irony to this news that Greeks are migrating to Australia while Greece flounders in economic meltdown.

However, of the new arrivals, nearly 60 percent are Australian citizens or permanent Australian residents of Greek decent, returning to Australia after many years living in Greece. This has been the largest wave of immigration from Greece since the 1940s, when more than 150,000 people fled to Australia during the Greek civil war.

This time around though, it's not the needy and battle-scarred. Figures show these are young, highly educated people, with around 60 percent possessing tertiary-level qualifications. As Papstergiadis puts it, "It's not pensioners who are coming back, these are well educated people, coming for work, and Australia didn't have to spend money educating them."

Sotiris Hatzimanolis, editor-in-chief of Neos Kosmos, Australia's largest-selling Greek newspaper, agrees that Greece's brain drain can only be a good thing locally. "For Australia, both for the community and economy, it's good," he says. "Though many have difficulty getting work when they initially arrive, once they've broken into employment they have a lot to offer Australia."

Similarly, the Australian Greek Welfare Society (AGWS) writes, in a recently published report, that, "if harnessed appropriately," these migrants "bring benefits to Australia." However, it also raises numerous concerns about the difficulties the people are facing when first arriving in Australia. These include financial hardship, emotional distress, and social isolation, along with difficulties in accessing affordable housing and gaining employment.

Likewise, Papstergiadis says that many of the recent arrivals are struggling to get work in their field once they arrive in Australia. These are IT professionals, engineers, and medical specialists who are now taking menial jobs out of necessity. Yet he says there's a palpable desperation back home and unskilled work isn't a disincentive. "I've had well over 1,000 letters from people in Greece asking me for help," he says. These requests have come from Greeks of all walks of life saying they'll take any work, because they're struggling to feed their families."

Considering that Greece's unemployment levels hit 28 percent in 2014, with youth unemployment closing in on 58 percent, and suicide rates growing rapidly year-by-year since 2010, it's no surprise Greek's are looking for an overseas exit.

Harry Tsindos, co-owner of Melbourne's Tsindos Greek Restaurant, has witnessed the migratory influx first-hand. He described how highly skilled people have been coming to the restaurant looking for work. But the most concerning part for him is how the rest of the country now perceives Greeks.

"You say you're Greek and people joke at you saying, you don't pay tax, you don't bother working, or you can't pay us, things like that." While he's aware it's usually a casual jibe, he says he routinely finds himself defending his fellow countrymen.

In a country where it's common for southern Europeans to be called wogs, this kind of casual racism isn't surprising. And, though the crisis may have provided fresh cannon fodder, it's really nothing new. In the 1960s and 70s, southern Europeans were the recipients of the sort of racial attacks that have now been diverted towards the Muslim community or Asian foreign students. Yet, the fact that Greeks have it better offers Harry little solace.

He says that bowing to austerity measures has been humiliating for Greeks, while not keeping up with IMF repayments "cuts deep to the soul." But he's adamant there's not a cultural issue. "I've been a close observer of this and there's a lot of misinformation going on," he says. "I don't accept this is a cultural issue. The Greeks are industrious and hard working."

Which is why Tsindos says watching the Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras on TV with "the weight of the world on his shoulders" after defaulting to the IMF was heart breaking. "I don't agree with everything he's done," he says, "but I'm proud of him standing up for Greece."

Follow Max on Twitter.

Drinking with London's Furries Taught Me Some Valuable Life Lessons

0
0

London's furries hanging out by the Thames. Photos by the author.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

"I've never had relations with a snake-lion before. There's something about raccoons, though. And wolves, too. They're kind of sexy."

It's 2 PM on a sweltering Saturday afternoon in a wine bar near St. Paul's Cathedral. During the week, this place would be populated by the investment banker types that give Occupy protesters fever dreams. Today, however, it's playing host to a meet-up of London's furry community, people who dress up in animal costumes—or costumes of new, imagined creatures—and hang out in wine bars, or other suitable venues.

The guy I'm talking to is wearing a badge with "SciBat"—his furry name—written on it, alongside a hand-drawn illustration of a faux-mythical, disconcertingly buff creature with bat ears. More prosaically, SciBat—who's real name is Gavin, a computer programmer from Hither Green—has thinning hair tied into a ponytail and wears an ill-fitting shirt covered in psychedelic patterns.

London's fur-wearing enthusiasts congregate here twice a month for a friendly knees-up in which they sit around playing complicated fantasy board games like Space Alert, draw animal cartoons in sketchpads or simply drink and shoot the shit about the difficulty of buying a unicorn outfit to fit a 48-inch chest. From where I'm standing, I can see at least 20 fully-grown adults in colorful animal outfits being served by slightly bemused weekend bar staff. There's a Japanese guy wearing a ratty dinosaur's tail; a man in a plaid shirt with a multi-colored raccoon's head; a white tiger with a perky tail; a kitten with giant, sad eyes; several wolves; and a dinosaur with a yellow Mohican. I'm here to try to understand just what it is about dressing up as a big sad cat-human in public that's so compelling.

Before coming, I'd worried about what to wear, but there was no need. According to a recent survey, only 15 percent of furries actually dress up. However, a majority have anthropomorphic avatars, animals with which they identify and feel "an important emotional or spiritual connection" to whether the creature is "real, fictional, or symbolic." Buying all the gear isn't cheap—a partial animal costume, including a head, paws, and tail, will set you back £300 [$460]. A bespoke full-body suit can be ten times that or more.

"You've got to decide whether you're natural or a toony," Rufus the Tiger tells me, his tail straggling over his blue camo trousers. "A lot of people are toonies." Looking around, I see what he means. There are very few realistic animals here. Most costumes are a blend of two or more creatures—there's a goat with a dorsal fin enjoying some pork scratchings at the bar, for example. Many more veer towards the fantastical, with Pokemon and Japanese manga influences both popular.

I turn back to SciBat. What's the most important aspect when creating a costume?

"How cute it is."

Cutesiness definitely appears to be a big factor, with a lot of the mascots gamboling around the room or whooping and cuddling in the garden outside. Many don't respond verbally when spoken to, instead cradling their cheeks with an "oh me, oh my" coyness. While most are chilled out, there is a sense of hyperactive near-hysteria among others, as though they're a bunch of nerdy kids in the playground given an hour's respite while the school bully's inside bog-washing emos.

No doubt this is partly due to the crowd's composition. The first thing that strikes me is how young a lot of the people are, with many either 17 or 18. One 24-year-old tells me he feels ancient, though in reality there are plenty here in their 30s, 40s, and above. The second thing I note is the scene's inherent geekiness. This is a room full of desperately nervous young men, the snaggle-toothed, soft-bellied, and pony-tailed. It's a room in which Game of Thrones viewers will have already read all the books, a fact they will remind you of regularly.

The so-called "furry fandom" itself is relatively new, born out of sci-fi and comic conventions in the 80s and then disseminated via fanzines and the internet. Furriness is an 80 percent male persuasion, though girls are increasingly getting into the scene, with some here today. Like all subcultures, this one has its own vocabulary. Terms include "scritching" (mutual grooming); a "fur pile" (when a bunch of furries lay on top of one another); "yiffing" (having sex) and "spooging" (ejaculating).

TRENDING ON VICE SPORTS: Should Women Be Paid as Much as Men in Tennis?

I get chatting to two very cute dogs by the fruit machines. At least, I assume they're dogs. One turns out to be a "Mango"—a mixture between a mongoose and a dingo—and the other is a prairie dog called Éclair. One of the things about this environment is that you tend not to have any idea of the genders beneath the suits, and I'd been under the impression that both were guys. In fact, Mango is an IT worker called Antony, and Éclair is a girl called Anne-Marie. I ask how long they've been into dressing up.

"He's five years old," Antony says, referring to Mango as though it were a separate, sentient being.

Are he and Éclair a couple?

"Yeah, more or less."

Apparently they met on a furries dating website called pounced.com.

Just then, a man with a goatee and a ponytail turns up. It appears he is a furry-fancier, or "furvert."

"Can you bark?" he demands of Éclair over his pint of London Pride.

Éclair barks.

"You don't bark very loudly. But that's the kind of dog you are—a little yappy dog. Can you yap?"

Éclair yaps.

A koala bear at the next table looks on.

"And your nose—papier mâché, right?"

"It's plastic, actually."

"I bet it gets covered in cum," says the man with ponytail, breathlessly.

This seems like a natural point in the conversation to ask about the more sexual elements of the fandom, but Mango and Éclair amble out into the beer garden before I can bring it up.

The issue of how sexual the culture is won't go away. Furries themselves are understandably cagey; many distrust the media, who they say sensationalize things by making out that they're nothing but a bunch of perverts who get off on having sex in sweaty animal suits. Bar the excited furvert, I don't see much evidence of this. However, with the prevalence of furry pornographic images online, it's slightly disingenuous to claim that the scene has nothing to do with sex at all.

Opinions are split: in one survey, a sizable minority of furries—37 percent—said that sex is an important part of their activities, but then another quarter also said that it wasn't a factor at all. There are outfits specially modified for sex, "mursuits," but these are disparaged by many of the more straight-edge furries.


Not enough sex in the furry fandom for you? Try our documentary 'The Digital Love Industry':


"We're not all fucking in the toilets like back in 1999," says Mike wistfully. He's a red-haired guy with a bird's nest of a beard and a Panama hat who introduces himself as a fine artist catering to the furry community. "The fandom has had to get a lot more careful."

Is being a furry all about sex?

"You're asking the wrong question. It's not that furries are sexual, per se. Furries are human, and humans are sexual beings. They say we're weird, but what about all those people who go to Star Wars conventions? I bet some of them have had sex in their costumes. It's no different, but the media never picks up on that."

So then what's the attraction of donning a squirrel suit to sink a few pints of real ale?

"It's about freedom. I prefer not to live in reality. My inner life is so vivid that it would be a waste of time. I worked in an office once, but I had to leave. Others have normal lives, and good luck to them, but I needed something different. Being furry is a reflection of that."

As we chat, a trio of volunteers in casual clothes and name-badges yell for everyone in costume to gather outside.

"Right, everyone keep together," they shout by the entrance of the bar. "Walkies!"

A parade of furries leaves the safe confines of the venue and marches into the street. I wonder how people will react, but the crowds—mainly tourists and people enjoying their weekends—are overwhelmingly positive. Taxis beep their horns, people wave from buses, tourists stand and stare. Kids in particular get incredibly excited, laughing and pointing and high-fiving the animals as they pass. To the uninitiated, I suppose the furries could just look like a bunch of slightly nightmarish football mascots on a bar crawl.

"Where are we going?" I ask a grizzled older guy in a cape.

"To the Tate Modern," he says "We're no longer welcome at St. Paul's. We upstaged a wedding there once."

A hen-do on a beer-bike cheers. A Japanese woman says how sweet everyone looks and photographs her two daughters with the mascots. Soon we reach the riverbank and the furries mess around for a while, taking selfies at the foot of the Millennium Bridge. Then we cross the river. We're in front of the Tate's magnificent industrial façade. A street-performer blows huge, oily bubbles. The furries skip through them, goofing around with passers-by. A little girl plays with the pink tail of a dragon.

"It's like they're an exhibition from the gallery," a woman says.

"OK! Heads off!" shouts one of the organizers. He leads the group to a secluded spot by a nearby housing block. Here, everyone takes off the heads of their costumes and sits down, happy to escape the heat. Several of them place the heads on a row of bollards nearby. It's strange to see those heads all lined up there, disembodied, as though a bunch of revolutionary animals have just been guillotined.

"Orgy! Orgy!" the organizer jokes. "For the record, that's not happening."

When everyone's caught their breath, it's time to turn back. We cross Blackfriars Bridge, stopping for a group photo on the way.

Unexpectedly, I find the whole thing strangely moving. Many would regard furries as freaks, and even they admit that their interests are unconventional. But in defiance of people's opinions they're happy to reveal themselves to the world, coming out in public en masse, not giving a shit about what others think. And, of course, everyone we met along the way was accepting and positive anyway. Inadvertently, the furries have taught me a lesson—that it's OK to be who you want to be, and to celebrate it, as long as what you want to be isn't something super creepy that's going to bum out everyone around you.

As Mike says: "When you put on a fur suit you feel like you've changed, become better, something different, just for a while. You can do things you couldn't otherwise do."

All names have been changed.

Follow John on Twitter.

The Revolutionary Legacy of Nina Simone Remains as Relevant Today as Ever

0
0

Nina Simone in the Netflix original documentary 'What Happened, Miss Simone?' All photos by Peter Rodis. Courtesy of Netflix

There's a memorable scene in the new documentary, What Happened, Miss Simone? in which the legendary blues and jazz singer is being interviewed. The year is 1968, and we're at the end of the civil rights movement. "What's freedom to you?" asks the reporter, and Simone pauses. "I'll tell you what freedom is to me," she says finally. "No fear. I had a couple times on stage where I really felt free. And that was something else."

The black power icon Nina Simone was born Eunice Kathleen Waymon, the sixth of eight children to a poor family, in Tyron, North Carolina, in 1933. Her father, John Divine Waymon, was a handyman and her mother, Mary Kate Waymon, was a housemaid and Methodist minister. The family struggled, but Simone, who began playing the piano at age three in her mother's choir, caught her first break when her mother's employer saw her play. Uncharacteristically for the times, the white woman gave Simone private piano lessons herself, and eventually raised funds for the young singer to attend the Juilliard School of Music in New York City.

"What I hope people take [from the film] is the love of an artist, who is one of the greatest most influential artists of the 20th century," said director Liz Garbus in an interview. "After they see this movie, [I hope they] want to listen to all of her music and it gives to them as much as she has given to so many people for the past 50 years."

Told largely in Simone's own words, the film is about more than music. It weaves together Simone's interviews, dairy entries, and recorded performances as it portrays Simone at her unapologetically rawest. There are tense moments during the chaotic 1970s when a militant Simone speaks truth to power during that seem almost suicidal. In one scene that cuts between Simone and her friend and prominent member of the Black Panther party, Stokely Carmichael, Simone says, "Black people are never going to get their rights unless they have their own separate state. And if we have an armed revolution with a lot of blood, we will have our own separate state."

"It was intense at times because of her artistry," Simone's longtime percussionist Leopoldo Fleming told me. "Sometimes, when I was on stage, I would get emotional because of the way she expressed herself, because she was so strong and unlike any other singer."

In a time where blacks were struggling for full civic participation in America, Simone's quest to achieve some measure of the fleeting feeling of freedom she felt onstage underpins the soul-searching hour-and-a-half narrative that explores the pianist's life.

"She signified struggle," Garbus told me. "She was a person who grew up in the Jim Crow South and came up through the classical music world. But she was also someone who stood with Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, and all of these folks."

After performing for years in dives, Simone appears at Hugh Hefner's original Playboy Club in Chicago in early 1960s, where she dutifully plays her version of the Gershwin brother's "I Loves You, Porgy." The song was a breakout hit for Simone, climbing to #18 on the Billboard chart. It seemed that she was destined to be one of the great black starlets of the period.

"If I had to pick a favorite song, it was 'I Loves You, Porgy,' because it was a love story, and ain't nothing like love," said Simone's longtime bassist, Lisle Atkinson.

However, the scene is only the beginning of the complexity that marked Simone's life on and off the stage.

"My mother was a revolutionary from the stage," says Simone's daughter Lisa Simone Kelly, in a later scene. "My mother was Nina Simone 24/7 and that's when it became a problem," she says in reference to the physical abuse she received from Simone on several occasions after her marriage to Arnold Stroud, a former police officer, broke down.

On the subject of Stroud, his inclusion here is ultimately distracting. As an ex-husband who tried and failed to control his wife, Stroud abused Simone, and on at least one occasion raped her. And yet viewers get confusing moments where Simone's own dairy points to his inability to sexually satisfy her, as well as her willingness to provoke him to the point physical alteration. Rape is about power not sex, but given the way the film lays out Stroud's moments onscreen coupled with footage of their daughter talking about her parents' relationship and the diary entries, the message gets murky. And it's dubious that Simone's abuser should be given so much of an opportunity to shape a picture that seeks to tell the story of a woman who was so fiercely independent.

Simone followed up her pop-fused first album, Little Girl Blue, with the audacious record "Mississippi Goddam" in 1964. With her voice veering from demands for freedom to taunts of indignation, Simone sings, "You don't have to live next to me, just give me my equality," as her backup singers coo, "Go slow," in mocking response to the gradual approach President Lyndon B. Johnson and Congress took toward civil rights leaders' demands. The song also served as a response to the murder of organizer Medgar Evers in Mississippi and the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham that left four young girls dead. In the song, Simone not only skewers the America in which those in power often ignored such violence, but also the civil rights leaders who called for a non-violent approach in wake of the innocent killing of black people. In typical Simone fashion, she performed the song before an audience of 40,000 people, including Martin Luther King, Jr., right before she and other civil rights artists crossed police lines during the Selma to Montgomery marches for voting rights.

"I was not nonviolent," Simone declares toward the end of the film. "I thought we should get our rights by any means necessary." According to her guitarist and bandleader Al Schackman, Simone repeated this sentiment to none other than Martin Luther King, Jr. Simone saw herself as an artist who reflected the turbulent times in which she found herself. She saw it as her duty to shape and mold the country along with the others of her generation in the 1960s and 1970s.

As the civil rights movement gave way to the black power movement, we see Simone continuing her protest through her music. A Raisin in the Sun author Lorraine Hansberry penned Simone's black-power anthem "To Be Young, Gifted, and Black" and poet Langston Hughes wrote "Blacklash Blues" for Simone as she begin to tour the world to speak out against American injustice. "I could sing to help my people and that became the mainstay of my life," says Simone.


"My favorite time playing with Nina was playing in front of 100,000 people in Lagos, Nigeria," Schackman told me of the 1961 African-American Cultural Exchange festival held in Lagos that featured the singer with other notable black American artists, such as Langston Hughes and Hale Woodruff. "We landed and the doors opened and the smell of the jungle came in and the mist," Schackman said. "Then we heard the drums and there were hundreds and hundreds of people who had camped to greet Nina and hear what she had to say."

It's a sad twist that this unyielding and revolutionary approach to fighting oppression and brutality is what also ultimately drove Simone broke, forced to play small clubs in Paris to support herself. And yet it's also what resonates with artists today.

"What I saw was an artist who was just real," multi-platinum recording artist Usher Raymond said to me about the film. "Though there may have been a lot of judgment that came with her choices, the way she chose to use her talent took guts. Now maybe [this film] will deliver a message that will help understand the magic of what she was and change the reality of our circumstances now."

Circumstances that have led the soulful R&B singer Jasmine Sullivan to recently cover Simone's "Baltimore" in the wake of the recent Baltimore riots against police brutality.

"She spoke to the times and I definitely think as an artist now we can do a little more, so I admire her fearlessness," said Sullivan, whose stirring rendition will be featured on an upcoming Nina Simone tribute album. "I loved the fact that she was an activist for that time and I was allowed to honor that."

Perhaps the most poignant aspect of the film is the timeliness of it. In watching Simone's struggle, riff, and rhyme to support freedom and equality through her music, the conversations surrounding policing in American cities draws parallels to the questions Simone raised throughout her career. In the aftermath of the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray in Baltimore, who was arrested and suffered injuries to his spinal cord at the hands of six local police officers, and the suicide of 22-year-old Khalief Browder, who was held at Rikers Island in solitary confinement for three years without trial, Simone's fearless calls have a special significance today.

"'Mississippi Goddam' was a song sang by a black woman that was an incredibly bold and potentially life-threatening song at that time," said Garbus of the anthem that was at once a protest, call to action, and a challenge to voices that called for forgiveness in the wake of 1960s-era white power-fueled violence. "And we need that song today. Look at Ferguson, Staten Island, Cleveland, Florida, and South Carolina—we need her today just like we needed her then. She is a necessary voice we need right now."

What happened, Miss Simone? is streaming on Netflix and showing through Thursday, July 9 in New York City at the IFC Center. Director Liz Garbus will be present for a Q&A on Thursday, July 9 after the 7:35 PM show.

Antwaun Sargent is on Twitter.

I Wore a Mechanical Suit Designed to Make Me Feel Like a Decrepit Old Man, and It Worked

0
0

All photos courtesy of the author.

We're all going to die one day. This much is indisputable. The absolute best-case scenario is that it takes nature a bit longer to get the job done. While we might all be aware of this on some level, getting people—particularly those in the throes of their pink, invincible youth—to recognize it is a lot harder than you'd think. But what if there were a way to know how truly shitty it feels to get old, before you actually get old?

The Genworth R70i Aging Experience exoskeleton, sponsored by the Genworth long-term aging care insurance company, is trying to do just that, for some reason. The purpose of the suit, which I took for a test drive at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado last week, is "to help people step into their future selves and directly experience the physical effects associated with aging." At about 8,000 feet above sea level, Aspen was a pretty good setting for such a conceit, the thin air and steep hills already had me feeling winded and tired everywhere I went.

The suit was designed by Bran Ferren and his team at Applied Minds, a company that provides technology and design consulting services to the likes of General Motors, Intel, and Northrop Grunman. Ferren himself is the former president of research and development at Walt Disney Imagineering, and designed many of the Disney theme park rides. He also won a couple of Academy Awards for his technical work on films, headed up concert visual effects for the likes of Pink Floyd and Paul McCartney, and is an inventor who, among many, many other things, patented the "pinch-to-zoom" technology that we all use every day of our lives. He's essentially a brilliant mad scientist who doubles as the grandfather you wish you had.

Bran Ferren. Photo via Flickr user Darren and Brad.

My journey into old age began with two Applied Mind engineers affixing a heart rate monitor, leg and arm motors, camera goggles, headphones, and other assorted technical hardware that would help me, in theory, understand the effects of long-term aging. The fact that the engineers setting me up in the suit worked on special effects for a lengthy catalog of films like Jurassic Park 3, Transformers, and Kill Bill certainly added to the sensation that I was a superhero being fitted in my armor. It does look sort of like a mix between something out of Tron and Iron Man, but the intent is the exact opposite: to make you weak, slow, tired, and confused.

Superhero appearances aside, once I was lowered from the harness connecting me to the wall—the backpack containing all of the computing power of the suit is about 40 pounds—I was reminded more of Vonnegut's short story "Harrison Bergeron," in which the titular hero is equipped with weights to counteract his unfair strength advantage over others. This was an artificial handicap, and to be honest it was pretty stressful. I asked the engineers whether there was any chance of the motors and leg braces snapping my legs in half. They assured me there was little chance of that happening.

The fact that this suit, at a cost of, well, they wouldn't say how much, but it certainly couldn't have been cheap, was being underwritten by an insurance company seemed a bit on the nose. In a way it's the world's most elaborately designed piece of branded content, but the discussion they're trying to generate with the suit, I would soon learn, is worth having.

Earlier that day, during the public presentation, Ferren was joined by Genworth's Janice Luvera and Angela Bassett, the latter of whom is one of a number of celebrities the company has enlisted to help them spread the word about aging.

"The good news is that people are living longer," Luvera said. "The bad news is that they're not prepared for it. What people think about how they're going to age and how they actually do—there's a gap there."

"There will be 10,000 boomers turning 65 every day for the next 19 years," she went on. "We believe it's not just an issue for older people any more, but for society. How are we going to take care of this aging population?"

"Having a difficult conversation is needed," Bassett added. "Don't be afraid of it, don't wait until it's too late. It's easier to make clearheaded decisions ahead of time."

If that all sounds boring to you, that kind of explains why this suit is necessary. It's a pretty tall order to get young people to plan for next week, never mind decades down the line. I'm in my late 30s and don't really give much thought to any of this stuff, even when thinking about my parents. The suit at least provides a point of entry.

In designing the suit, Ferren said he asked himself, "How can we allow someone to see what it's like to get older, and do it in minutes rather than decades? What tech can we use having to do with vision, hearing, and mobility?"

The result, a couple years of work from a team of 35 people, was the R70i.

"As you get older you get fat," Ferren said. "At the same time, a cruel fate of life is your muscles get weaker, your joints start failing, you get stiff." The suit then "shows what it's like to get yourself up in the morning and walk around."

I learned what he meant later when I took my first steps in the R70i. Before I even made it out of the dressing room I was sweating, unsure of my body. I felt like I could fall over at any time, and I needed to lean on someone else to help me move. I even smelled weird, musty and gross from the jumpsuit, which, they told me, was only damp because it had been recently washed.

The suit simulates the aging experience in a variety of ways. The goggles alone can replicate 100 different defects, from glaucoma, to macular degeneration, to cataracts. For cataracts, for example, you'll see an image inside the goggles of yourself walking through a pleasant woods, but then slowly it's whited out and glossy. For hearing-related defects such as tinnitus, a persistent, high-pitched tone is amplified until it dominates your consciousness, although as someone who's spent so much of my stupid life at concerts without earplugs, this was something I was already well prepared for.

The author in his current form as a normal, non-aged man.

"If you're wondering why older people withdraw from social interactions, this is why," Ferren said. It's hard to hear people in conversation in crowded parties and restaurants, you might not be able to see someone across the room, or it just might be embarrassing to have everyone watching you walk slowly from place to place.

Worst of all the effects was the simulation of a disorder called aphasia, often occurring after a stroke, in which the parts of the brain associated with language are damaged. The result is choppy, or non-fluent speech. To recreate this, those wearing the suit were asked to recite a simple nursery rhyme like "Mary Had a Little Lamb." The speech was then delayed and broadcast back into the headset, making it almost impossible to speak clearly. Like many of the conditions it emulates, it's not an exact match for the symptoms, but close enough to get the point across.

Just like that the experience for me transformed from a superhero training montage into a body-horror nightmare. Black squiggly lines meant to represent floaters (sort of cobwebs in your field of vision), crawled in front of me like little wriggling worms. Could I see them? I was asked. "Yes. They're going to eat my brain," I said.

I was asked to walk on a treadmill. First one, then both of my legs were handicapped by the pressurized motors. Now I was walking with a limp. It was an intense effort just to stay upright.


Related: Watch our documentary on Japan's suicide forest.


When the pressure was turned down, it was like being healed rapidly. The effects of aging sloughed off like a snakeskin. Why don't Ferren and his compatriots get to work on something like that? Something that simulates the reversal of aging for IRL old people?

Ferren was asked just that, why they'd bother to go to all the trouble to design a suit to make people feel old when we're all going to get there anyway.

"It's the same technology that, moving forward in the future, is what's going to liberate people," he said. Some day they'll be able to return muscle strength that is gone. "It's the same thing as the next generation of hearing aids, and visual systems with implants to visual cortex, so people who have lost sight can have it replaced."

On Motherboard: Marriage Won't Make Sense When Humans Live for 1,000 Years

Most of us probably can't envision a time in which such inconveniences will become part of our daily lives, even if we logically know it's coming. Perhaps that's because we don't have any idea what it's like to actually feel old. We can see it in other people, but until you've experienced it yourself, you'll never really understand.

When it was over I was relieved. Putting on my skinny jeans and lacing up my boots back in the dressing room took almost as long as it did to get the suit on in the first place. This is just the opposite, I thought: a costume I still wear to simulate what it's like to feel young. For now I'm lucky to have the ability to move in the other direction, but it won't last forever.

Follow Luke on Twitter.


The Loud Fight Against Silicon Valley's Quiet Racism

0
0
The Loud Fight Against Silicon Valley's Quiet Racism

Speaking to an Astrophysicist Who Just Discovered a Five-Billion-Year-Old Galaxy

0
0

What have you done this week? Made it to work? Maybe did your laundry? Ordinarily we'd say that's pretty good, except for the fact that it's Wednesday and Australian astronomers have already announced they've discovered a five billion-year-old galaxy that predates our own solar system. The finding was made using a high-tech radio telescope setup—the CSIRO'S Australian SKA pathfinder (ASKAP)—in remote Western Australia.

Elaine Sadler is a Professor of Astrophysics at University of Sydney and part of the research team that found the galaxy. She leads the ASKAP-FLASH project that uses the radio telescopes to search for galaxies through detecting hydrogen gas in the radio frequencies they emit.

Though she was excited, Elaine's accustomed to dealing with intangible stuff that's a billion years-old on a daily basis. She spoke to us about how this could lead to hundreds more discoveries and explained they're really looking back in time.

VICE: I bet discovering a galaxy feels really good.
Elaine Sadler: It was very exciting! We've been working for two or three years to get to making this first observation. To make a detection so early was exciting because it means what we we're doing is working. We will over time find many hundreds of these galaxies in the distant universe and be able to learn about them.

How does one discover a galaxy anyway?
We look for signals at a particular radio frequency that come from cold hydrogen gas in the universe. It's like we have a receiver and we're tuning it to a radio frequency, so that every so often we get a signal.

Could you explain that again like you're talking to a complete layperson, which I am?
I'll make it as simple as I can! The hydrogen atom is a very simple atom, it's got a proton and an electron. They sit there doing not very much when the gas is cold. But every so often the electron will spontaneously flip and spin. And when it does that, it emits a very faint signal. If you look at the Milky Way galaxy that we live in, and the signals from gas in our galaxy, then convert the signal into a longer wavelength because of the expansion of the universe, you start to see the signature of hydrogen in galaxies far, far away.

Speaking of far away, this galaxy is five billion light years from Earth. That means what we're seeing happened five billion-years-ago. Does that mean it might not even exist anymore?
It probably does exist, but the light would have left the galaxy five billion-years-ago. Something may have happened to it in the meantime but mostly the stars will be there, some of them may have exploded. But the galaxy itself probably doesn't change very much over that time.


Related: Interested in space? Watch our documentary about getting to Mars below


But you're effectively looking into the past?
When these radio waves set out from the galaxy, our sun and our solar system hadn't even been born yet. While those radio waves were traveling to us, the sun was formed, the planets formed, life evolved on earth, all of these things happened in the intervening time.

What's it like to study something that can never be reached?
I think it's quite inspiring actually. It's like studying the past of human civilization. We know we can never go to the Roman Empire, but it doesn't mean it's not interesting to know more about it and how people lived in those days.

What can we learn from this?
Well, what's specific about our Milky Way galaxy is that it's full of gas where new stars form. There's a constant process of stars dying and new stars being born. In other galaxies that doesn't seem to happen—they seem to run out of gas. So one of the things we want to look at is what happens to galaxies to make them either able to form new stars or not able to form new stars. The other thing that we can learn about is black holes, and why some galaxies have these very energetic events in their centers.

Does it ever feel bizarre working with something so intangible?
No. It's actually one of the questions that many, many people around the world are interested in: How do galaxies change over their lifetime or the lifetime of the universe? It's a complicated problem that people would love to have more insight into.

Is detecting life out of the picture here?
No, it's actually a very serious question. We know now many of the stars in the Milky Way have planets, some of those planets are kind of like Earth so we might imagine that life could form there. And there's a serious attempt to look for radio signals from other planets, not as far away as this five-billion year old galaxy, but around stars within our own galaxy. Nobody's found anything yet, they've had questions about what they would do if they did find something, but really the signals even from the nearest stars take years and years to reach.

Follow Hannah on Twitter

Like this article? Like VICE on Facebook for more great content.

The Exclusive Story Behind Warhol & Basquiat's Boxing Photos

0
0
The Exclusive Story Behind Warhol & Basquiat's Boxing Photos

Weird Guys: Talking to Private Eye Derrick Snowdy Over Guns and Corned Beef

0
0

Weird Guys is a show about strange men, as seen through the eyes of VICE News reporter Hilary Beaumont. In this premiere episode, Hil' goes to a gun range to discharge a firearm for the very first time with Derrick Snowdy, a high-rolling, gun-wielding private investigator. After that, they discuss some tricks of his trade and a few of the high-profile political scandals he's been connected to over corned beef sandwiches.

Guns and beef. Enjoy.

London's Underground Will Start Running 24 Hours on Weekends but the City's Nightlife Is Dying

0
0

People enjoying the London Underground

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

London's tube strikes are a lot like Christmas: they bring everybody together. Admittedly, instead of meeting up with your family to share a lovely meal cooked by your grandmother, this afternoon you'll have to join a load of sweaty marketing consultants and city workers on a dangerously overloaded bus. Like Christmas, tube strikes are also a good time to spare a thought for those less fortunate than you—like the London Underground staff fighting for better working conditions.

In case you aren't aware of the reasons for this latest dispute, it basically boils down to this: the wonks in charge at the GLA want to bring in a 24-hour tube service on the weekends. To most people, this is a brilliant idea. Unless you happen to be a tube driver, in which case—according to drivers' union ASLEF—you suddenly face the prospect of an unlimited number of night shifts totally ruining your life. London Underground has since offered a 2 percent payrise, a £500 [$768] bonus for all staff and £2,000 [$3,000] for drivers affected by the night tube. However, the RMT union's general secretary Mick Cash has dismissed the offer as "divisive and unacceptable," saying it fails to address concerns around drivers' work-life balance. Further negotiations failed, and the strike looks set to run till Friday.

This failure to reach an agreement over working conditions would appear to be a fairly major stumbling block on the path to a 24-hour tube. Still, best not to worry about it too much. After all, with the war currently being waged against London's nightlife, what's the point of a 24-hour tube service anyway?

The desire for a 24-hour tube reveals a massive contradiction at the heart of public policy. Announcing the proposals in September last year, London Mayor Boris Johnson said: "London is a bustling, 24-hour global city and by this time next year we'll have a 24-hour tube service to match." He went on to say that the service would "provide a huge boost to our economy." The problem is, at the very same time that TfL is trying to negotiate terms for this new service, various other public officials are dead set on destroying the nighttime economy.

An industry which has done more than most to boost London's status as a world city is now in danger of being killed off entirely. The chief of the Met Police has called for bars and pubs to be shut down to tackle crime. Globally renowned nightclub Fabric narrowly avoided closure last year only to be slapped with some ridiculous licensing conditions instead. Soho is becoming a ghost of its former self. Bars, pubs, and clubs are closing down on a weekly basis, with the city's LGBTQ scene particularly under threat.

Alan Miller is the founder of Brick Lane's now defunct Vibe Bar and the chairman of the recently formed Night Time Industries Association, which is trying to fight back against the anti-nightlife tide sweeping across London. He believes that while some people at the GLA truly get the nighttime economy, they're facing a losing battle against a large number of local councillors, licensing officers, and the police. "The nighttime industry has some of the most dynamic and successful people in the UK," he says. "All of that is under threat because of what's happening."

Perhaps it just comes down to different ideas of what constitutes a good night out. One imagines that the 24-hour city which these people have in mind is one where you can safely stay for the end of a Bruno Mars set at the O2 in the knowledge you can catch a tube back to Hampstead at midnight.


For more on UK culture, watch our doc on the British housing crisis, "Regeneration Game":


Or maybe that's being too charitable. Because without a late-night culture worth bothering with, the 24-hour tube seems designed to help meet the demand for 24-hour working. While TfL's cost-benefit analysis of the night tube makes a lot of noises about nightlife, the reality may be less "stay out until whenever you like" and more "work whatever hours your boss tells you to."

The killing off of night culture and the promotion of a city of workaholics are linked. Fears over the existence of the Ministry of Sound were due to the peace and quiet of residents of swanky flats that haven't been built yet. The closure of Madame Jojo's was blamed on attempts to gentrify Soho. The only people likely to be able to afford to live in these places are probably working themselves to death.

What if the 24-hour city is in fact the city presented to us in that " American Psycho" luxury property ad—of "mornings that felt like night," of "days that melted into months, and years"? Viewed in this light, the 24-hour tube looks less like an opportunity and more like a nightmare as, one by one, we find ourselves forced to work day and night with only the dismal prospect of an early morning "exercise rave" to look forward to come the end of our shift.

Viewed in this light, the plight of our tube workers—and their attempts not to get sucked into too many night shifts—seem more worthy of our sympathy after all.

Follow Mark on Twitter.

Viewing all 38002 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images