Photo via Wikimedia Commons

The Los Angeles City Council voted today to ban firearm magazines that hold more than ten rounds of ammunition, which have been called "the common thread "in nearly all mass-shooting tragedies in the United States.

It's already illegal in California to manufacture, sell, or import large-capacity gun magazines—but it's not illegal to possess them. Lawmakers in LA have been trying to close that loophole for close to two years, culminating in today's vote. Los Angeles residents will have 60 days after the ordinance goes into effect to remove, surrender, or legally sell their large-capacity magazines, or face misdemeanor charges.

The ordinance exempts on-duty police officers, military gun owners, licensed firearm dealers, and those who legally obtained firearms over 15 years ago that can only be used with such magazines. The union that represents the LAPD is also hoping to get an exemption for retired police officers who have concealed carry permits.

"People who want to defend their families don't need a 100-round drum magazine and an automatic weapon to do it," said Councilman Paul Krekorian, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Gun rights groups, unsurprisingly, disagree, arguing that magazines with more than ten rounds are considered standard for self-defense. The National Rifle Association and the California Rifle & Pistol Association, among others, are expected to sue LA over the new rules. Other groups, like CalGuns Shooting Sports Association, have pointed out that because Los Angeles is flanked by other cities where similar bans have not been passed, the effect on gun violence will likely be negligible.

Los Angeles city officials don't see it this way: All 12 members of the City Council voted in favor of the ordinance. Their decision was backed by groups like the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence and Women Against Gun Violence, as well as by Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti.

After their vote, Krekorian spoke to a cheering crowd that had gathered outside City Hall: "If the NRA wants to sue us over this, bring it on."

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The original "Happy Birthday" tune, first known as "Good Morning to All." Image via Wiki Commons

One of the ways in which the raging trash fire that is the modern music industry staves off its inevitable demise is through licensing songs: record labels can essentially get free money by charging people fees for using music from their catalog in movies, TV shows, video games, etc. It also means that if you're a musician who only released one hit—say you're Semisonic, who released "Closing Time," or Luniz, who released "I Got 5 on It"—you can effectively get paid for your one great song, over and over, despite having never written even a nearly potent follow-up.

Owning the rights to a song can also be almost like owning stocks. Some songs may yield no profits from licensing, others may yield insane dividends. Consider the tale of Michael Jackson, buying the Beatles' catalog after Paul McCartney lamented to him he'd been fucked out of his publishing earlier in his career.

Or, consider Warner/Chappell, which since 1988 has owned the rights to "Happy Birthday." Fortune reports that licensing fees for the tune nets the company $2 million per year. However, all of that might change.

Long ago in the year 2013, a filmmaker filed a class action lawsuit against Warner/Chappell for trying to charge her $1,500 to license "Happy Birthday," claiming that the track was in the public domain and that Warner/Chappell had no right to claim otherwise. The case dragged on, until earlier this week it was revealed that "Happy Birthday" was likely put in the public domain by 1922. The version of "Happy Birthday" Warner/Chappell owned the rights to was from 1935. This information was submitted to the judge overseeing the case, who has the power to rule that "Happy Birthday" has been in the public domain all along and that Warner/Chappell's claim of copyright is invalid.

This is very exciting news, especially for anyone that's had to sit through any of the alternative versions of the song that they sing to you in chain restaurants.

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2. White People Didn't Invent the Word "Squad"
3. Music Festivals Should Ban Bindis
4. Techno Parties Are Facing Political Corruption in Vietnam
5. Paradigm Now Owns Two of the Biggest Electronic Booking Agencies

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The exterior of Rudy's. Photo by Alex Norcia

On a weekday in July, I woke up in my Fort Greene apartment, meandered through the downtown Brooklyn streets flooded with young mothers pushing their strollers and attractive couples walking their mixed-bred dogs, and commuted into Manhattan to drink beers. A friend of mine with a night stint in radio, from 1 AM to 9 AM, recently told me about his mornings sipping cheap house lagers, and I decided to accompany him. I wanted to explore the subculture of overnight workers populating the city's dive bars. I hadn't been tipsy around breakfast since someone in college insisted kegs and eggs was a good idea, and I had never planned to be so again. But I'm not a stubborn man. I'm willing to make exceptions.

"Once you hit Ninth Avenue," my buddy instructed me, "you look for the pig."

Related: I Went Drinking with London's Night Shift

I got off the A train and searched for the hog in question, which turns out to be a statue that stands outside Rudy's Bar & Grill, a staple of Hell's Kitchen since 1933. Inside, red duct tape covers the booths and might be part of the furniture's structural integrity. Above the small, 7/11-like grill that cooks free hot dogs, photographs of Groucho Marx adorn the stained wall. (According to Rudy's lore, the comedian supported himself there as a server before finding fame.) We ordered a round of three-dollar pints of Rudy's Blonde, the bar's specialty beer. A couple of career alcoholics occupied battered stools and demanded Bud Lights, and a handful of men and women in casual business attire gulped hard liquor before leaving for their offices. And a group of CBS News employees gathered in a nearby booth—they had recently finished their shifts.

After an awkward introduction, we chatted for more than an hour, only breaking when my large iced coffee and Rudy Blondes mixed somewhere in the regions of my bladder, triggering a string of bathroom trips. The two with whom I spoke the most, Amy Bucknam and Brendan McHugh, detailed the pros and cons of such a professional routine. They defined their daily grind in constant opposition to the nine-to-five: For them, the subways aren't as full, the laundromats aren't as busy, the grocery lines aren't as long. However, being constricted to such an obscure schedule obviously affects their availability to hang out.

"You end up partying a lot with people from your job," Bucknam said. "It's fun, but the rest of my social life has suffered without a doubt."

Inside Rudy's. Photo by Brian Flaherty

There are few remaining Manhattan dive bars that lawfully begin operating at 8 AM (around ten, from my count), and more and more of the city's historic watering holes—Milady's, the Subway Inn, The Ding Dong Lounge—are now closing for good: The rent becomes exorbitant, or the building's owners force the tenants out in favor of more lucrative businesses. It seems like just a matter of time, then, before the legitimate options for a morning brew completely disappear.

Clearly, this eventuality isn't much of a surprise. In his blog "Vanishing New York," Jeremiah Moss chronicles how the city is "going extinct," and tracks how longstanding cultural institutions—record stores, coffee shops, and of course, dive bars—are all too commonly knocked down in favor of high rises. I understand his pessimism, but when it came to bars, I chose to ignore it. I stayed hopeful, and I developed a theory: I thought the mornings would be the one part of the day when dive bars retained some of the character that initially defined them. Surely, the tourists that crowd Times Square and Ground Zero in the early hours aren't searching for PBRs.

At Rudy's, there were distinct personalities, the type of men and women you come to expect at an old-school pub. The theater-goers and amateur softball teams that flood there in the evenings were naturally absent around breakfast time.

Watch: Shoenice22 Will Eat Anything for Fame

Another morning, I journeyed down Ninth Avenue and dropped by Billymark's West in Chelsea and Holland Cocktail Lounge near the Port Authority, where a senior citizen still believed it was all right to smoke indoors. Both places, however, were pretty empty.

The ceiling of Jeremy's. Photo by Alex Norcia

On another day, I stumbled into Jeremy's Ale House along the South Street Seaport. There, bras dangle from the ceiling and magic marker covers the plaster. As in most dive bars, it gives you the sense that, like covering a chair in fluorescent tape, someone's drunk idea has now become the trademark. In short, Jeremy's holds onto its heritage, despite the changing circumstances.

Before 10 AM, though, I was the sole patron—since the Fulton Fish Market moved in 2005, the dockhands aren't around to take advantage of their best deal: Jeremy's "Eye Opener" Happy Hour from 8–10 AM, when buckets of Coors Light go for $1.75. The bartender was wearing a shirt that stated, "Beer Isn't Only For Breakfast," and when a pack of what appeared to be summer camp children entered, he provided each of them with a soda. When I questioned him about the guests that usually arrived before lunch, he shrugged his shoulders, rambling off occupations notoriously associated with the graveyard shift: police officers, firefighters, steamfitters.

"Some days they're here," he said. "It depends."

Twenty-four hours later, at the Spring Lounge in Nolita, I learned the morning rush there is "streaky" as well, a painful shot to my waning optimism. Again, I was alone, despite this joint's true promise. Decked with Christmas lights and models of sharks (it's nicknamed "Shark Bar"), the Spring Lounge fully embraces the "ancient tradition" of morning drinking—the motto is"Life Is Short. Drink Early," and its website features a brief history of the "sophisticated" ritual, as well as some much needed encouragement to continue it: "As a number of our regulars have noted, washing the taste of toothpaste out of your mouth with a quality craft beer leaves one feeling like anything is possible."

The author's Early Morning Drinker's Society membership card

The Spring Lounge's site also invites you to apply to its elite organization: the "Early Morning Drinkers Society." I was curious about joining the club, and luckily, I didn't have any trouble finding out the particulars in doing so: Jay, the white-haired man pouring my Miller Lites, hailed from the dying species of sage-like bartenders, and displayed an impressive breadth of knowledge, ranging from the dangers of the Tour de France, the intricacies of college football's Patriot League, and the best cleaning techniques for keg lines.

After I inquired about joining the Society, he handed me an official card, noting that I had to come between 8 AM–2 PM in order to be stamped. Now, I'm 14 visits away from obtaining my T-shirt, and 29 from becoming a full-blown member who receives a dollar off his morning libations. Following his thorough explanation, Jay urged me to stop by as often as I could. In the hours we talked, we became so friendly I felt bad asking him for another round.

"You have to think real hard about bars open at 8 AM now," he said. "It's a sin."

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By 11 AM, other people started arriving, and it wasn't difficult to be social. I chatted with an advertising executive who claimed that, a decade ago, you'd run into way more people at this time.

"In Little Italy, the factories have shut down," he said. "And the union dudes have left. Along with the Italians."

But nostalgia, in the end, can't sustain a business. Where were the hotel doormen, the post office sorters, the orange-vested Con Ed guys I always saw on my road at night? Did I simply choose "off" days? Has the supply decreased from the dwindling demand? Or did I show up two decades late? I felt as if I were a stranger in a forgotten era, harboring romantic visions of a part of New York that has long begun to fade. I didn't quite know what to conclude, and really, I still don't. I lost track of time, and I departed the Spring Lounge in a hurry, thanking everyone for their generosity.

Though I said I'd return in the morning soon, I worried, whenever that was, it wouldn't be soon enough.

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Image via Wikipedia

Clinics have shut down and patients have been cut loose in what could be a massive backward step in the campaign to make ketamine a registered treatment for mental illness in Australia.

The clinics in question were a chain run by Aura Medical Corporation, where patients suffering from depression, bipolar disorder, and PTSD were receiving injections of the controversial drug.

In Australia, the restrictions around treating mental illness with ketamine are not cut and dry. The drug's indicated use is anesthesia, but doctors are able to obtain it under its Schedule 8 prescription status for use in "off-label" treatment, which is not governed by the Therapeutic Goods Administration. It's therefore legal to use it outside its intended purpose.

Related: I Used Ketamine to Treat My Depression

Aura claims patients responded well to the treatment, which is consistent with a raft of local and international research. The chain believes the closures had more to do with negative publicity surrounding their programs and links to the Advanced Medical Institute, a splashy erectile disfunction clinic which used to advertise with billboard slogans such as "BONK LONGER."

Speaking to VICE, the Australian Health Practitioners Regulation Agency (AHPRA) stated the clinics were closed because of a lack of psychiatric support and the supply of contentious self-injecting packs, whereby patients were given ketamine and needles to administer themselves at home.

Aura Medical Director Professor Graham Barrett resigned as part of the investigation, but defended the clinics. Speaking to Channel Ten he said, "Aura's not doing anything bad, there's nothing inherently bad about making money out of helping people."

Professor Colleen Loo, a clinical psychiatrist from the University of NSW and the Black Dog Institute is one of the world's leading ketamine researchers. Over the past few years, she has run ketamine trials for depression at the Wesley Hospital in Sydney. Speaking with VICE, Professor Loo stated, "Ketamine has amazing potential and we have seen incredible promise. It's unlike any other treatment."

That's not to say Loo supports Aura Medical's reportedly lax supervision standards. "There needs to be ongoing monitoring. Everybody's depression is different and it's about carefully conducting the treatment in a controlled environment, rather than letting patients take the dosages home and administer it themselves," she said.

In the wake of the Aura closures however, Loo is concerned about ketamine's future status in Australia. "The worst-case scenario would be if further restrictions were now put into place," she said. "Hearing stories like these leads to public concern, especially when a drug is being used outside the approved indication, we need to be extra careful."

Her fears aren't unfounded. In 2014, the UK government decided to ban all ketamine-related drugs and put ketamine itself under harsh restrictions, in a bid to crack down on recreational use.

Related: Interested in drugs? Watch our video on medical marijuana for kids

Professor Loo says the UK was a leading player in ketamine research before it became a class B banned drug. "If that was to happen here, all our work would be over."

Further revelations about Aura Medical won't help. Alarmed former staff and patients have spoken about how freely available the drug was prescribed, and the small number of consultations needed before being issued a take-home pack.

"They started prescribing and dispensing on the same day when the managers pushed for more patients to be seen," one former staffer told ABC.

Former patient Janette Jenkins was told Aura was running a "medical trial" after visiting a Sydney clinic: "I started to question things, even the first time I saw them and how short my appointment was, they didn't require anything from me."

But not all patients were as concerned. Former patient Peter Riley was disappointed when he found out Aura Medical would no longer be able to provide ketamine. After struggling with depression for a number of years, he told the ABC, "Ketamine has changed my life out of all sight, I've tried to commit suicide three times, I've been on eight different types of antidepressant."

Aura Medical Corporation was contacted by VICE but chose not to comment.

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Some little weed plants (Photo by A7nubis via)

Read: Ireland Is Locking Up Trafficked Cannabis Slaves

More good news for weed smokers. Following a petition to legalize cannabis attracting enough signatures to be raised in UK Parliament, and Durham's Police and Crime Commissioner effectively decriminalizing pot, a senior police chief has said that cracking down on weed has "never been a top priority," and that if police forces are made aware that small-scale cannabis farms might be operating, they would probably only "record" the fact, rather than carrying out am investigation.

Sara Thornton, the Leader of the National Police Chiefs Council said: "Crime is changing in this country. There are a lot fewer burglaries than there used to be, and a lot less car crime. The sorts of crimes that are on the increase—sexual offenses, concerns about terrorism, cyber crime—that's where we really need to focus.

Thornton also warned that those reporting a burglary should no longer expect officers to turn up at their house, due to a shift in focus following budget cuts and staff losses. "We need to move from reacting to those traditional crimes, to thinking about focusing on threat and harm and risk and really protecting the public," she said.

The former Thames Valley Police Chief says she wants to dedicate more police time to the threats of cyber crime and child endangerment, and believes that, on trend with the last four years, budgets for policing will be cut again.

Yuri on his motorcycle. Photos by Sasha Raspopina

"In Russia, bikers and gays are both oppressed groups," says Yuri, the founder of Homoto, the only gay bike club in Russia (as far as we both know). He explains, however, that the bikers' natural enemies—car drivers, police officers, and the merciless Russian weather—still have nothing on the homophobes raging around the country.

St. Petersburg, where Homoto is based, was the first Russian city to accept the infamous bill purporting to ban "gay propaganda" in 2012; it has since been implemented on a federal level. Most attempts at LGBT activism here, as in the rest of the country, are regularly banned and the activists fined, shamed, and persecuted.

Homoto (Гомото in Russian) is a new club, and this is their first season riding together. Yuri is a man in his thirties. He has an apartment, a job, a boyfriend (who hates motorcycles), a lover (who goes crazy for them), and a garage where the club members and LGBT activists sometimes go to hang out.

There is a historical precedent to Homoto in St. Petersburg—a smaller club called Dykes on Bikes that existed a few years ago. It had no connection to the famous Chicago-based lesbian motorcycle club of the same name, and its ambitions were more commercial. Svyatoslava, one of the club's former members and a current member of Homoto, explains that the biggest part of the DoB's activity was a small business of arranging bike dates where the club members would take lesbian couples on motorcycle rides for a fee, creating an adrenaline-filled experience for those wishing to "wow" their girls. Now Svyatoslava and a few more lesbian bikers are members of Homoto.

The majority of the club's members are male, and the girls tend to hang out separately. I had to arrange two different dates to meet them, as the girls were away on a ride to Belarus the day Yuri and the boys met me in the biker hang-out spot in the city center. I met the girls two weeks later by a pond in a vacant lot in a suburb. "The club is a support system," they explained. "We're not obliged to hang out together all of the time."

When I ask how many members there are in the club, Yuri hesitates—he's not sure himself, as they have don't have official initiation rituals or ceremonies for new members, nor a patch. Their VK and Facebook pages have about a thousand "likes" altogether, and Yuri created a website for those who want to follow the club's news but don't want to risk being accidentally outed by friends and family on social media. Many of the members, he explains, are over 30. They have good jobs, some family, and have learned how to conform to Russian society to a certain degree. Often that's how they can afford the expensive motorcycle hobby.

"It's not for me to try and break those habits," Yuri shrugs.

"A gay motorcycle club is not the same thing as a regular motorcycle club, or similar organizations. You don't get a membership card with us. If you have a bike and you identify as homosexual, you can be one of us. Actually, you're already one of us," he explains, adding that there about ten to 15 members who regularly show up to events and meetings.

This year's May Day protest in St. Petersburg was the first official outing of the club, when they rode with the LGBT section of the march, though not all their members took part. Yuri says that many of his gay friends have no interest in politics, and many more are simply afraid of taking part in a pride-esque event, which isn't too surprising considering the usual reaction from Russian authorities to those kind of things.

However, the protest went as peacefully as it could in Russia, with the only incident being the homophobic MP Vitaly Milonov shouting abuse at the LGBT section of the procession—an event that was caught on camera and subsequently went viral in Russia. In the video, Milonov yells, "Perverts, scumbags, fascists! Fascist scumbags! Whores, perverts!" as several policemen hold him back.

Related: Young and Gay in Putin's Russia

"I was there when it happened," says Yuri, "and it was then that I realized that Milonov is simply a clown." Yuri refuses to agree with the media rhetoric of Milonov as a villain—he sees the politician more like a kid throwing a tantrum in the sweets aisle of the supermarket, the policeman his embarrassed parents trying to calm him down. "As soon as people realized he was there, everyone just ran towards him, to stare at him like he was some sort of a circus freak," he adds.

"If we talk in political terms, then yes, he's evil, he's trash," says Yuri. "He's just like all the other toys on the shelf, until you pull the string and he starts talking and all the hate comes pouring out. Sadly, he has become the public face of St. Petersburg."

When talking about the club's activism, Yuri reveals a position that's different from most gay advocates: his strategy of destroying homophobia in the city is not just about saying the homophobes wrong; it's about showing that their key arguments don't hold up. "I want to position this club as a response to the majority of claims of modern Russian propaganda that frames gays as effeminate depraved perverts and pedophiles," he explains. "Men on motorcycles are so not what the propaganda wants people to associate with homosexuality. We destroy their stereotypes and their whole case has no foundation."

There are several other motorcycle clubs in St. Petersburg, but Homoto doesn't interact with them. Yuri sometimes takes part in the big ride in the spring when the biking season opens—though without any pride attire. "There are 6,000 motorcycles there, no one's gonna notice my tiny rainbow ribbon anyway," he says. When I ask Svyatoslava about publicly displaying LGBT symbols, she says she'd rather not wave flags, as it helps to avoid hostile reactions. "All bikers here try to be so tough and alpha-male; if they see a woman trying to take the same role, they don't react nicely," she tells me.

Is Homoto the gay answer to the ultra-patriotic, alpha-male motorbike club Night Wolves? Yuri says no, not because he's trying to avoid comparison, but because he doesn't believe the infamous bikers are really even a motorcycle club. "Night Wolves is a political organization. [Club leader and friend of Vladimir Putin, Alexander] Zaldostanov is a politician, just dressed in leather, not a suit."

WATCH ON NOISEY: Kanye West and Caitlyn Jenner Talk About Public Perception

Homoto is more closely associated with Grindr than it is politics. "Politicians use sex to sell themselves, so we do too," shrugs Yuri.

As far as the club's ambitions go, Yuri is rather modest: first of all, this is a hobby club, a hook-up service, and a support group. But if they do want to achieve notoriety, it won't be hard: "If we ever want fame as a club, we know we just need to make Milonov notice us, then he won't be able to stop promoting us," he says.

But, he points out, "going all Pussy Riot" is not really an option, as—for him—bikes and boys are still a more important feature of the club. "One of my favorite feelings in the world is stopping at a street light and seeing those who I call 'the married ones'—young hot husbands with strollers—staring at you with envy and desire as you speed past them when the green light comes on."

Photo via Flickr user John McKeon

Earlier this week, WWE scrubbed all mentions of Hulk Hogan, perhaps its most transcendent champion ever, from its web site.WWE no longer sells Hogan's iconic red and yellow shirts, and his name is gone from the Hall of Fame roster.The move represents WWE's efforts to distance itself from the recent exposure of Hogan's racist rants.WWE, after all, provides family-friendly entertainment with no place for racial slurs.In its statement on the Hogan matter, WWE affirmed its commitment to "embracing and celebrating individuals from all backgrounds as demonstrated by the diversity of our employees, performers and fans worldwide."

But what exactly does it mean to celebrate diversity, WWE-style?Maybe luchadors coming to the ring on riding lawnmowers?Or a Japanese tag team whose promos consisted of lip-synching to dubbed English?

When it comes to spotting and critiquing bigotry in pop culture, pro wrestling is low-hanging fruit. It has a long history of racism, xenophobia, sexism, and homophobia. Not only has it never been ahead of the curve, it often falls embarrassingly behind. Look, here's a headhunter from the jungle. Here's a black pimp and here's another one. Here's the owner of WWE, playing a fictional version of himself, dropping the n-word for laughs. I could pull up embarrassing characters and skits all day.

In light of that problematic history, the removal of Hulk Hogan from WWE's web site and Hall of Fame is more of a public relations gesture than a substantive stand against bigotry. In the more private, insulated realm of the WWE's subscription network, there have been no observable changes beyond the erasure of the 1980s Saturday morning cartoon, Hulk Hogan's Rock n' Wrestling. The cartoon might have been a glaring problem due to Hogan's name in the title, but the cartoon's casual xenophobia and ethnic stereotypes are pretty true to the network's broader content.

While Hulk Hogan's cartoon has been scrubbed away, WWE Network maintains its much more problematic archive of Tuesday Night Titans (TNT)—WWE's late-night talk show that ran from 1984 to 1986. TNT features Vince McMahon, CEO of WWE, as the host behind the desk, attempting conversations with the goofy menagerie of weirdos that he had cultivated, often expressing outrage at their behavior. Many of the characters are weird simply for their points of origin, their exoticized food and garb, native misogynies, and absurd claims of national superiority.

The show offers a fascinating portal into WWE's worldview. Watch any episode of TNT and you can climb into the deep recesses of McMahon's McMahon's racial imaginary, perceiving difference through his eyes. We get the devious Mr. Fuji in his tuxedo and bowler hat, inviting Vince to a sake ceremony at which Fuji verbally abuses the sake girl and raves about the importance of honor in Japanese tradition; the Iron Sheik similarly welcomes Vince into the tents of his traveling caravan, complete with camel and harem of dancing white women. Any given episode was likely to include a cooking segment in which wrestlers such as Tito Santana, the Wild Samoans, or Salvatore Bellomo present their ethnic foods, always provoking disgust from Vince's dignified British co-host, Lord Alfred Hayes. The exoticism applies to both heroes and villains. Sympathetic French Canadian wrestler Rene Goulet is shown drinking wine with a beret-wearing accordian player. Chief Jay Strongbow introduces Vince to Native American war dance in the studio's parking lot; the segment is interrupted in heel style by "Captain Redneck" Dick Murdoch.

In another segment, white heel Paul Orndorff calls Tony Atlas a monkey. White heels often resort to racist insults for heat, but it doesn't always read as a heel move. Much of the outward racism comes from white villains who are not simply "bad guys" but early versions of the wrestling antihero. They're bad guys who retain enough dickish charisma to court a segment of the audience (think Roddy Piper and Jesse Ventura). In his early heel days, Hogan himself resorted to race baiting, addressing Tony Atlas as "boy" and "brown clown" and suggesting that Atlas should shine his shoes. Of course, the good guys are also bigots, and their bigotry can still be found on the WWE Network. If WWE were to purge all of its racially insensitive material, I'm not sure what we'd have left.

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In comparison to later years, in which wrestlers were frequently defined by their second jobs (as in the wrestling prison guard, the wrestling barber, the wrestling Elvis impersonator , the wrestling repo man, the wrestling tax collector, the wrestling monk), wrestlers of the TNT era were more often totalized by racial and ethnic identities. But WWE's excessive racialization did not end with TNT, of course; throughout WWE's history, it's hard to find a wrestler of color whose gimmick is not entirely determined by his not being white. It could also be argued that the WWE's cartoonish exoticism was actually amplified in the early 1990s. Tito Santana graduated from the ethnic-hero era into the occupational-gimmick era by reemerging as "El Matador," wearing full bullfighter's regalia to the ring. Tony Atlas became "proud of his heritage," in Vince's words, and reemerged as Saba Simba. Amidst economic recession and resentment of Japan, the top villain of the early 1990s was a Japanese sumo wrestler whose name, Yokozuna, was simply the designation for highest ranking sumo.

As opposed to the 1970s and 80s, when WWE wrestlers could attain stardom by appealing to the immigrant communities of northeast urban centers, today's superstars are more likely to change their names and perform as white. The greatest women's wrestler of this era, April Vasquez, ascended to the top of WWE as AJ Lee; Sika the Wild Samoan's son, Leati Anoa'i, is better known as Roman Reigns; and Colby Lopez, current WWE champion, wrestles as Seth Rollins.

It's not necessary to catalogue each incident of xenophobia or racial othering in WWE history. We know that in every era, WWE has been populated with barefoot savages and freedom-hating foreigners, and that in WWE's 50-plus years, only one of the 46 men to win its highest championship have been African American. Despite the WWE's evolving culture as a publicly traded company, there remains little hope that WWE has grown more sophisticated in its thinking about race. If WWE wants to perform public gestures of caring about racism, it needs to take a serious look at its entire history and work towards creating a better archive.

Michael Muhammad Knight is the author of 10 books, including Why I am a Salafi. Follow him Twitter.

Thumbnail via Flickr user Simon Q

The cover of J.G. Ballard's High Rise via Fangoria

J.G. Ballard's 1975 novel High-Rise, soon to be appearing in theaters as an adaptation by British director Ben Wheatley, is the story of a luxury tower block and the descent of its well-heeled residents into tribal warfare and wanton destruction. A dark modern fable of the kind Ballard specialized in, it is, among other things, an ingenious examination of the mutable nature of our sense of reality. The book opens and closes with the image of Dr. Robert Laing, a 30-something medical school lecturer and resident of the high-rise, out on his balcony, reflecting upon "the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months." These events, which might be more accurately characterized as terrors, are set in motion when the services in the newly-built tower begin to stop functioning properly. The elevators fail, the garbage chutes get blocked, the electricity cuts out. As these inconveniences mount, they start to fray the fragile civic fabric that had initially ensured the peaceful co-existence of the hundreds of residents living together in this huge vertical settlement and soon sends them on a journey of spiraling violence.

A sinister carnival atmosphere takes hold in the high-rise, a strange mixture of revelry, aggression, and mutual suspicion, as tribal loyalties are formed among its different sections. With the melting away of the social order—based almost entirely, it turns out, on the smooth functioning of the machine-like building—a base set of primitive urges rise to the surface, a state of affairs quickly embraced by the more strongly constituted. Territory is guarded and fought for, the weak punished. Eventually, rape and murder become casual amusements in a hellish power game, the trashed corridors smeared with blood and excrement. With the worst of these excesses having subsided, Laing on his balcony is blithely satisfied, "that everything had returned to normal." The fact that he is squatting beside a pile of burning telephone directories, eating the hindquarter of an Alsatian dog he has roasted on a spit for breakfast, does nothing, it seems, to trouble this conviction.

"Reality is a stage-set," said J.G. Ballard, "that can be pulled down at any moment." This was a lesson learned from savage experience. Born in 1930, he grew up in Shanghai, where he and his parents (his father was chairman of the Chinese subsidiary of a British textiles company) lived in an affluent, ex-patriate enclave of the city's suburbs. It was a place that looked and felt a bit like the Surrey of the time, with large villas, tennis courts, and country clubs. An island of privileged calm, just down the road from a Shanghai which was otherwise a frenetic, Americanized city of cruel and garish venture capitalism. When the Japanese invaded in 1937, however, the comfortable existence of the Ballards, as well as the more perilous life of Shanghai's other citizens, was shatteringly overturned. No part of the city was immune from the chaos and destruction of war. After Pearl Harbor, the foreign concessions were occupied and he and his family were finally imprisoned alongside other ex-pats in Lunghua Internment Camp.

Tom Hiddleston as Dr. Robert Laing in Wheatley's film adaptation

Here, the young Ballard saw human beings stripped to their barest elements: the casual savagery of bored Japanese soldiers as they beat to death a helpless Chinese rickshaw driver; the fear and powerlessness of his parents, grimly hanging on in the tiny room that they shared with the young Ballard and his sister until the end of the war. In these extreme and frightening circumstances, Ballard saw how people pushed to the edge will do anything to survive, will believe in anything. He would later recount in his semi-autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun how his boyhood self even developed a perverse love of the war and came to embrace the life of the camp, as a kind of desperate stratagem for keeping his spirit alive. It was a brutal education that shattered all illusions—and it seemed to cause a wounding he would spend the rest of his life attempting to come to terms with, instilling a permanent skepticism about (in Joseph Conrad's term) the safety of his surroundings*: "I'm intensely interested in change—probably as a matter of self-preservation. What the hell is going to happen next?" He was 77 and a millionaire when he said that.

High-Rise, like just about all of Ballard's work, reverberates with the echoes of this childhood rupture in Shanghai. The formative experience of war and sudden social collapse not only shaped his obsessive imagination—his short stories and novels famously teem with images of abandoned airports, deserted hotels, and drained swimming pools—it shaped how he saw human civilization itself. It gave him the enduring sense that what we perceive as a stable, ordered world is in truth a fragile, improvised construction of convenient fictions around which we cobble together a makeshift sense of our own identity. The apparent solidity of civilized existence, particularly in the affluent, "suburban West" as he called it, disguises the flimsiness of human personality and the protean nature of our perceptions. The rules can change in an instant, the masks can fall from our faces, the roles we play become defunct. And like Conrad before him, together with this sense of the contingent, provisional nature of life, there is always the shadowy awareness that the human species is an animal with an immensely violent history, one that over a couple of million years of guile and brute force has struggled its way to a position of planetary dominance. For all our sophistication and enlightened rationality as modern people, says Ballard, we carry that history with us. In ways often imperceptible to ourselves, it plays a powerful role in shaping our motives and responses to the world in our daily lives. The ancient unconscious drives, including a taste for cruelty and the perverse, are always working away somewhere beneath the veneer of social convention, ready for any opportunity to come flaring to the surface.

Related: VICE talks to Joshua Oppenheimer about 'The Look of Silence'

This weltanshauung—a kind of compound of Thomas Hobbes and Sigmund Freud—is the foundation stone for the unique world of the novels, short stories, and journalistic essays Ballard wrote during the long writing career he established in England after settling here once the war was over. After a series of post-apocalyptic novels in the 60s that owed much to the paintings of Surrealists such as Max Ernst and Salvador Dali—using environmental catastrophe of various kinds to evoke transfigured landscapes of the psyche—the subject matter that came to dominate his work was the psychological effects of the technologically-driven consumer age. With an intensity of vision rarely found in English fiction, he looked at the impact of developments such as the car, air travel, mass media, celebrity culture, and the rise of computers, drawing out a more ambiguous, and sometimes more sinister, side to phenomena generally hailed by a self-congratulatory culture as the expressions of inevitable human progress. Such was his prophetic success in anticipating so much of the world around us today—not just specific technological developments, but something more elusive, an atmosphere, a latent logic—it is hard not to feel that Ballard possessed an insight into human psychology and social change in the modern world beyond the perceptual range of his peers.

The novels and short stories that outline this vision are not literal transcriptions of the world. Ballard was an eager advocate of science fiction at the start of his career as an alternative to the conventions of the 19th century realist novel, which he saw as being ill-equipped to deal with an emerging post-war society in the West that was "ruled by fictions of every kind—mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen." Reality had become so hard to decipher in the external world, the inner world of the self so fragmented, that the author could no longer claim to faithfully reproduce it naturalistically on the page. Science fiction of a type that sought to explore inner, rather than outer space ("Earth is the only alien planet,") was a form that had a better chance of getting at the truth of late-20th century existence. No journeys to distant galaxies, no time-travel. The type of SF stories he approved of were "extrapolations of the immediate present, nightmares at noon earned from the abrasive dust of the pavements we all walk." He liked to think of himself as a kind of scientist and his stories as laboratories where he could test a hypothesis on his characters in extreme situations and see where it led.

He called these cool, analytical interrogations, "extreme metaphors," and High-Rise is just that. A self-contained, maximized image of the modern world, an extrapolation of emergent trends: "Secure within the shell of the high-rise like passengers on board an automatically piloted airliner, they were free to behave in any way they wished, explore the darkest corners they could find. In many ways, the high-rise was a model of all that technology had done to make possible the expression of a truly 'free' psychopathology." – High-Rise, 1975

ON MOTHERBOARD: These Could Be The First Things Aliens Hear from Earth

The upwardly mobile professionals who have moved into this new high-rise are drawn to it because of the detachment and anonymity it offers. It's a world separate from exterior social reality. Freed from the struggle for food and shelter, unconstrained by wider social obligations or inherited moral frameworks, people such as these in modern societies, says Ballard, are able to explore their own desires and obsessions to an unprecedented degree. With his image of these residents inside the carefully designed hi-tech high-rise regressing into a savage infantilism, he highlights two seemingly contradictory trends that are such defining features of today's consumer capitalism: on the one hand increasing order, rational expediency, homogeneity, control; and on the other, the thirst for entertainment and excitement, pornographic stimulation, excessive consumption, mediatized violence, spectacle, the fantastical appearance of unlimited choice and possibility for the primary, desiring self. It's a central theme in Ballard's investigation into the psychic confusion of the modern world. The interplay that occurs between violence and boredom, madness and passivity, sensation and blandness; locating these dramas in the shopping mall atriums, airports, business parks, and apartment blocks that form the familiar backdrop of our lives.

Reading some of Ben Wheatley's recent interviews and from pictures that appeared online from the set, it's clear his film version of High-Rise is placed firmly, and with some relish, in the mid-1970s of the book's original publication. One hopes the sideburns and Ford Cortinas won't act as a nostalgic buffer, softening the power of the book's unsettling vision. The great writer of the present and the near-future would seem potentially ill-served by a retro period piece. But questions of adaptation aside—and Wheatley is a talented filmmaker who will surely serve up something that more than justifies the price of a ticket—a new stimulation of interest in Ballard is to be welcomed. Too often classified as a bleak dystopian, his dark fables are driven by a powerful moral instinct and a passionate urge to engage with the world as it is. His role, he would say cheerfully and without any shred of sanctimony, was to be the man standing at the roadside with a sign reading, "Dangerous bends ahead. Slow down." In the vagueness of life as it passes, it is very difficult to accurately gauge how personal and societal norms are shifting. We could do worse at this time of "inner migration," as he called it, the "opting out of reality" made available to us by rapidly evolving technologies that push us ever deeper into our own heads, than to stop and take a look at what Ballard had to say.

It won't change the world, but the rich feast of his imagination may offer nourishment, and even some guidance, for the road ahead.

*"Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings."

The author and his baby

Sup, fam? It's your boy, Kool A.D., professional rapper, visual artist, astrologer, male model, and now, apparently, parenting columnist. Ten months ago my wife/swag coach/fun-employed Islamo-futurist art swami Cult Days popped a tiny combo version of us out a slit a doctor cut a couple inches below her belly button. The baby is of the female variety and she's a keeper. Real cute lil' monkey—big eyes, the whole nine. It's been a wild ride but I gotta say we're true fuckin' pros at parenting, which is why I landed this sweet columnist gig. I'll be here every other week putting you on to all types of priceless parenting game. Nothing but gems and jewels my dudes and dudettes.

A baby's basically like a tiny person on too many shrooms—literally anything can blow its mind.

First rule of parenting is there are no rules. Feel me? Oh, the baby's sad? Slap the lil' fucker onto a titty and let it get some milk. Still grumpy? Maybe the baby shit its pants. That's no prob, just take the shitty diaper off, wipe dat azz, put a new diaper on, and presto. It's still pissed? Try rocking it to sleep going "ssshh" or singing a soft lullaby of some sort. Not tired? OK, just kick it then. Make a weird face and/or noise; babies love that shit. Crinkle up some paper or tinfoil or whatever, give the thing some playing cards, teach it how to play solitaire. Play some sick tunes; babies love sick tunes. A baby's basically like a tiny person on too many shrooms—literally anything can blow its mind.

Another thing about babies is they're always there. They never leave. They never take the hint, no matter how many times you check the time on your phone and yawn. The fuckers are here to stay. Babies are like girls in that they just want to have fun. Sometimes they get bored of grabbing your nose or trying to ram their eyeball into the sharpest corner available to them and that's when, after you've exhausted all other options, you can let them watch a lil' TV.

Some people are like "don't let the baby watch TV," but those people are either nerds or losers or both. Fuck that—let the baby watch TV, your dude be getting tired of making faces/noises. Teletubbies might be wack as fuck to grown regular normal people like you and me, but that shit is baby crack; they gobble that shit up. Like I said though, I try to make it a last resort because that show is wild annoying. Some TV my bb likes that I also like is Futurama, Bob's Burgers, and Bojack Horseman. Those go hard. Bojack gets a little adult sometimes but the baby has no idea what the fuck is going on anyway, it just appreciates the bright colors and "zany" voices. Remember, though: not too much TV. It's a bad habit.

But the main thing to do when a baby is bored is go outside. Show it some flowers or trees or whatever. Let it touch on a flower or feel grass on its tiny ass feet. Take it shopping or to restaurants, get it used to being in the world and around people. Dog, babies STAY looking at people. Manners don't exist to them yet so they'll just stare at somebody for like ten minutes. That's what's up.

It's crazy how a cow or horse will drop a baby cow or baby horse out the vajayjay and the bitch just starts galloping right off the bat. With a baby it's different.

What else? Oh yeah, the first few months you gotta tap them on the back after every meal till they burp cause for some insane reason they don't know how to burp yet. It's crazy how a cow or horse will drop a baby cow or baby horse out the vajayjay and the bitch just starts galloping right off the bat. With a baby it's different—you literally have to do every last damn thing for the lazy sucker for like three years. But I guess who cares, what else are you doing? U mad u had a baby? Shoulda pulled out then. Too late now, here's the baby and it is your boss now. The baby is a mean boss sometimes but the baby is also hella cute. You literally can't get mad at a baby; it's too cute. A baby can literally take a shit on you and you'll be like "aww, what a cutie." It's insane.

Anyway, that's all the game I'ma lace you with today. Tune in week after next and I'll put you on to some more baby science.

Follow Kool A.D. on Twitter.

Image via Ashley Madison

A couple of weeks ago, Ashley Madison, a dating website for married folk, was hacked. Those responsible said the attack was a response to the fact Ashley Madison does not delete users' personal information after they close their accounts, despite advertising that they do. Confusingly, if it's the users' privacy they're worried about, the hackers also said they would release the information they had gathered to the public. Soon, they implied, the landfills of England would be glittering with the sparkle of abandoned wedding rings. Maybe.

The thing about the Ashley Madison hack is that you can't help feeling smugly superior to the victims. We're not talking about a site for legitimate polyamory here—there's more than enough of that on OKCupid. This is a site for people who want to cheat on the people who love them, and we all love watching a cheater get caught. We all want to see the bad guy get busted.

I say "guy" because that's what most of us probably imagine when we think of the site—the marauding cad telling his wife he's got to work late, before speeding up the A30 for a half-hour tryst in an Exeter Travelodge. Of course, that's the first big problem with this sort of reaction: People could be on this site for all sorts of reasons. The site may be heaving with sleazy bastards and pube-shaving sugar babies, but somewhere in the big database of cheating spouses sits, say, a woman trapped in a loveless relationship with an abusive husband.

Exposing people for their "sins" without having any context for them is pretty haphazard and irresponsible. We assume the consequences are laughable because we assume the victims of this hack are deserving of the exposure. Perhaps most are, but for every hundred of them, another person may well be enduring domestic violence as a result.

The other big assumption we're all making is that this wouldn't happen to us. We're above it. Shit like this happens to other, stupider people. The thing is, we're getting to the point where it will. If you have a kink, a fetish, a "deviant" desire, a secret attraction, a porn habit, or any kind of sexual predilection you'd rather keep quiet, there's every chance it could end up on the web in the next few years.

And you're saying no, not me. I don't buy porn, I don't talk to dates online, I don't google or discuss my kinks; I phone people when I want to have sex with them. I'm immune. What you don't realize is that the technology arriving in the near future is so close to supernatural that it doesn't matter if you don't tell the internet what you're thinking—it can just read your mind.

Most people now understand that sharing private information on the internet can be dodgy. If you've used a credit card on a porn site, your purchases could be exposed. If you've got an online dating profile, it could wind up exposed, along with all the conversations you've had. If you post on the fetish site FetLife, that information could become publicly available. People get this, and they change their behavior accordingly. Even so, this information alone is scary: If some of the internet's big porn sites or fetish communities were hacked, the potential for harm would be pretty enormous. In fact, hackers have targeted users on sites like PornHub for some time.

WATCH: VICE meets young people addicted to Spice, a type of synthetic cannabis:

Artificial intelligence and information integration—the ability to easily merge large, messy datasets from different sources—are set to take things much further than that. Algorithms digging through your data can not only organize and highlight information you've posted online, but extrapolate new information that you didn't even mean to provide.

We've seen examples of this kind of work at Facebook, which by now has access to data on most adults in the Western world. Data scientists there are already looking at how to predict human behavior; like when do we fall in—or out—of love, and how will we vote. Supermarkets aren't far behind: American store Target famously figured out how to tell if its customers were pregnant—sometimes before their own families knew.

Much of the data we leave on social networks is public, or at least only "semi-private," and it's highly likely that the rogue descendants of these experimental algorithms will find their way into the public domain sooner or later. Kooky "who's my soulmate" sites that claim to analyze your Twitter feed exist already, but in the future algorithms could reach the point where a spouse could find out with 80 or 90 percent certainty if their partner was cheating without needing anyone to hack a dating website. And if the algorithms aren't completely accurate, well that just increases the chance of chaos.

And then we get into the realms of the truly terrifying—the terabytes of audio, video, and imagery uploaded to the internet's vast fields of servers daily. If you live in a city, the odds of your face ending up on a webcam or a live stream or a tourist's holiday snap or a cyclist's GoPro are increasing hourly. Facial recognition is progressing in leaps and bounds—and even if it's not entirely accurate, a computer could combine a rough guess with information about your location, people nearby and data from a possible match's social media account to come up with a decent idea of who the person is. From there, it's only a short step to putting your name in Google and finding yourself in the background of a YouTube video you never knew existed. If you were walking out of a café with your lover, and your boyfriend or girlfriend or husband or wife saw, things could get very awkward.

People like Mark Zuckerberg have long advocated for a sort of radical honesty when it comes to our lives online. Once everybody knows everything about everyone, the theory goes, stuff like embarrassing photos or what porn you watch won't seem to matter so much. Of course, it's easy not to worry what people think about you when you're a white, male, Harvard-educated billionaire who'll never have to apply for a job again in his life.

Ordinary people living fragile, complex lives may have a lot more reasons to hide. Increasingly, though, they won't be able to. Whether you choose to engage with the internet or not, its eyes, ears and algorithms will hunt you down. They will find you, and they will process every scrap of information they can about you until there are two competing realities—the you that walks this Earth and the approximation of you inferred and acted upon by a billion hungry machines and the companies that run them. When that time comes, dating site hacks will be the least of our worries.

Follow Martin on Twitter.

Photo by Flickr user Jennifer Lee

It's everywhere. From movie posters to music on the radio to commercials for everything from cars to clothing, sex is ever-present in the marketing schemes of our corporate overlords. As much as virgins try to ignore it, society seems keen on rubbing its corrupt genitals in our innocent faces.

Except, I'm not buying it. I'm 25 and I'm still a virgin.

For many people who have reached this point in their life without doing the deed, there's a degree of choice involved: They're "saving themselves" for religious reasons, or waiting for "the one." Those people might still have a pleasant, fulfilling first time. But if you're like me—meaning, celibacy isn't your intended goal—then you quickly start to realize that your first sexual encounter will probably be awkward, rushed, and riddled with false expectations.

The journey toward sexual intercourse is full of other realizations, too. Here are a few of them:

You Feel Like You're Having a Mid-Life Crisis
Settling into my mid 20s, I thought I was immune to having the kind of anxiety that comes with growing older. I was making peace with the slightly thinning (not balding, dammit) spot on the back of my head and the fact that I now inexplicably gain a pound of fat with each passing birthday. But when it comes to my sex life, which is nonexistent, I'm starting to panic. I'm approaching the twilight of my youth and I still haven't done the deed. Better act fast, I think to myself, which is a terrible mentality to have.

This kind of panic means going on dates with as many people as possible, often without feeling a real connection with them, and yet desperately wanting to. It's the same kind of hurried feeling I imagine women get when they feel like their "biological clocks are ticking."

Did you know VICE has a whole video series about people who just had sex?

When you're a twentysomething virgin, the best-case scenario is that the women you date will decline your proposition for a one-night stand. If a woman is friendly after a first date, then you risk latching on. And when she inevitably lets you down, you'll feel the real symptoms that people experience after ending a lengthy relationship—except that it hasn't been a lengthy relationship at all. This kind of emotional yo-yoing leaves you wanting to give up on the relationships altogether and ready to end your virginity any way you can, just to shut up your friends.

Your Friends Will Tease You, But They Don't Really Care
People are always surprised when they learn I'm a virgin, and I can hear the pause as they try to wrap their head around this discovery. It's almost as if I've told them that I've never watched television—it's so unfathomable, so foreign, that it takes people a second to think about what that must be like. Eventually, people kind of ease up and start brainstorming which of their friends they can hook me up with.

That's not to say my friends understand why I'm a virgin. It doesn't seem all that complicated to them, since they got it out of the way as teenagers in the basement listening to the Postal Service or whatever. At the end of the day, though, nobody is particularly mean about it. At worst, the conversations go something like: "Look, it's OK to be a virgin—you'll find somebody someday," which is basically the same way you'd tell someone with depression that they still have so much to live for. The reassurance feels disingenuous, and it's meaningless without proof.

Your Expectations Are All Wrong, Because Your Only Context for Sex Is Porn
Wait, you're telling me girls IRL don't all have perfect breasts, butts, and stomachs, or enjoy being in the most awkward, spine-ruining positions I saw in porn? Next you're going to tell me the kung fu moves I learned by mimicking Jackie Chan won't work in an actual street fight.

My relationship to porn has been strangely tumultuous, and how often I use it seems to coincide with how blue I'm feeling (that's not accounting for the state of my balls). If I'm feeling motivated enough to revel in the single life and all that it entails—focusing on passion projects, fulfilling professional obligations, staying in shape so I feel attractive enough to talk to someone—then I'm more likely to refrain from watching it. Occasionally, however, I go through a bout of negativity that is accompanied by loneliness and makes all things I have going for me seem like futile distractions.

Sometimes, though, porn is all a virgin has. It is the digital equivalent to the booty call for the sexless. While I have no idea what I should expect from the real act, I don't need my friends' anecdotes to realize porn is an exaggeration of the real thing—even though I'm still not sure what exactly the real thing feels like.

Think your sex life is sad? Watch our investigation into the Japanese love industry, designed to save a country where no one is getting laid.

Virginity Puts a Lot of Pressure on Who You Date
When you wait this long to lose your virginity, it builds a lot of hype on how it will eventually happen. One-night stands are basically out of the question. While part of me wants to lose my virginity to a stranger just to get it out of the way, I just can't bring myself to do it. It seems weird to me to hook up with a girl—who probably has way more experience—only once, knowing that both of us will probably leave unsatisfied. It's not like I'm waiting for "the one"—just someone who is capable of understanding.

On Motherboard: The Science of the One-Night Stand

Oh, you want my advice on when you should spill your secret? Well... actually, I'm still working on that. I rarely go on second dates, and the last time I revealed my secret to a girl, we basically became good friends. Still, I'd rather keep looking for someone who is understanding than go the one-night stand route.

Joking About Sex Is Always Uncomfortable
Have you ever listened to people talking about sex? Or, better yet, have you ever listened to yourself talking about sex? Almost everything the average person has to say about the act is completely trite, a way to derail otherwise meaningful conversations:

"So, what did you think of the movie?"

"A well-crafted narrative with excellent production value."

"Yeah, and Channing Tatum is so fuckable, right?"

That said, I wish I could join in these conversations freely. I wish I could use a that's-what-she-said joke without feeling like both a pervert and a fraud. It's not even that everyone knows or assumes I'm a virgin, but I'm sure I'm giving away some signals by my visible discomfort when participating in conversations about sex.

Being a Virgin Is (Mostly) Your Choice
I understand how nice it is to feel like you are the victim who has been robbed of something you're owed. In this case, it's easy to believe we're all owed love and physical intimacy and that by not getting any, we have all the right in the world to be angry. But for the most part, that's not the case: You're the one keeping it in your pants.

Throughout my life, my reason for remaining a virgin has boiled down to a lack of self-esteem. During my peak virginity-losing years, girls approached my friends but never me, and that crushed my confidence. Now, I suffer from an anxiety disorder that essentially makes every potential romantic or sexual encounter turn out like this: Oh, I see you've met a beautiful person. Think you're going to get lucky tonight? Ahaha! Think again, you prick! It's a vicious cycle, and I really need to overcome it before I can think about forming an emotional—let alone physical—with anyone.

Don't get me wrong: There are plenty of good reasons for not losing your virginity. Perhaps you're doing it for religious reasons. Perhaps you're saving it for the highest bidder or for an art project. Perhaps you're trying to focus on saving the planet or something, without the distraction of sex. Even Hugh Hefner was a late bloomer at the age of 22, so let's not be too hard on ourselves.

Follow Garrett Glass on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE France

The Black Dragons were a gang formed in the early 1980s in Paris by a handful of young people from Nanterre as a reaction to the dangerous rise of the extreme right. Founded by a man named Yves Le Vent, the Dragons were inspired by the American Black Panthers and their activities focused on the militant defense of minority communities.

Patrick Lonoh was one of the original Black Dragons. He was present at their first meeting and remained a member until the very end; which came at the beginning of the 1990s, when the legendary antifascist crew began to fight their allies in what he calls, the "Parisian gang war." Lonoh has also just written a book called I Was a Black Dragon, which tells the forgotten history of the French antifascist movement and the people who brought it to life. I met up with him for a chat.

Read: These Stunning Photos of New Zealand's Largest Gang Will Give You Sleepless Nights

VICE: What did it mean to be a Black Dragon?
Patrick Lonoh: At the beginning, we were skinhead hunters. The group was created in 1983 by Yves Madichon, aka Yves Le Vent. We wanted to pass the message that we were like anybody else and shouldn't be beaten up because of our skin color. But the Black Dragons were also a community—we took care of each other no matter what our religious beliefs were.

Were the Dragons a gang or a collective?
The Black Dragons were first and foremost a philosophy, which borrowed characteristics by certain martial arts disciplines. We wanted to be able to walk with our heads held high; we refused to let ourselves be walked over. The generations before us were more docile to racist attacks, as they were more concerned with surviving in a foreign country. Also, if the skinheads had never existed, the Black Dragons would never have appeared either. It was a war led by young people who did what they could to shape the world.

The notion of a gang was created over time. The gang war of the early 1990s was in many ways more violent than the war against the skinheads—it was like two brothers fighting. It prevented the transmission of the Black Dragons' philosophy.

The Black Dragons in Châtelet-les-Halles in Paris at the end of the 1980s. Patrick Lonoh is at the bottom left.

Was the movement inspired by the American Black Panthers?
Yes. We shared the same basic ambitions—we were fighting for self-affirmation. But our story wasn't the same. In France, we didn't look at slavery in the same way; we also didn't face the same kind of repression. We weren't at war with the police—our enemies were the skinheads.

You were assaulted by a crew of skinheads just before you joined the group. Can you tell us about it?
I had just walked out of school with two friends—one was white, and the other one was an Arab. We got to the train station to take the train home and when we passed the doors, we noticed there were some skinheads in the car. The doors shut and they started to insult us—they said things like "dirty nigger" and "fucking Arab," and they would not stop. We finally got out of the train at the next stop, just before they made a move to beat us up. That was my first encounter with skinheads.

Your parents were living in Congo at the time. What did they think of your involvement with the Dragons?
I have a story about that. One day a journalist came to take some pictures of the crew for an article about the gang war. Most of my friends refused to have their picture taken but I was happy to do it; I posed dressed in black, with a military beret on my head and gold chains around my head. When the article came out, some people sent copies of the newspaper to my parents in Kinshasa.

My mom was furious; she wrote me tons of letters asking for an explanation because she did not get it. But my dad knew what racism was. I wrote my book for him. My father had a lot of influence on me; He brought me to France, taught me about art and culture and passed down his humanist values on me.

A map of Paris showing the territories "run" by the Parisian gangs of the 1980s.

The Black Dragons were strict. In your book, you write that two members were thrown out of the group—one for getting drunk and the other for assaulting a woman.
There was a Black Dragon who assaulted a woman and then bragged about it; that was just unacceptable. When it comes to the alcohol, we had to be strict because of our general activity. We were young, athletic, and operated without adult supervision, which is why a certain amount of discipline was necessary.

Watch: The Subway Gangs of Mexico City:

How many people were in the group?
We were between 900 and 1000 but we could not count everybody. There were about 100 permanent members, and then we would do mass recruitments every now and then. Oftentimes we would recruit 40 people at once, like when an entire gang wanted to become Black Dragons. We would explain our philosophy to them, test their physical strength and fight behavior and, at the end, about half of them were allowed to join us.

You also write about the Miss Black Dragons gang, who had a lot of influence over the clan. Could you explain their role?
Yves Le Vent created them because he wanted some female representatives. They acted as intermediates between us and the black female community, but they were also warriors. They were independent girls, living their life. Of course some love stories flourished within the clan but, for the most part, they were like our sisters.

When and why did the gang war start?
The gang war started at the beginning of the 1990s, though the first tensions had begun long before that. Most of those tensions had to do with parties and girls.

The Black Dragons today.

What would you say was the trigger?
Some members of another gang—the Requins Junior (Junior Sharks)—and the Dragons met at a party, and there was a fight. The next day, the Requins Junior went on a punitive expedition at La Défense, the meeting place of the Black Dragons. The Black Dragons responded by sending a group to Gare du Nord, which was on the Requins' territory. This ended up spreading to most of the Paris gangs: the Black Dragons, the Mendy Force, the CKC, the Requins Vicieux (Vicious Sharks), and the Requins Juniors—we all fought each other.

What happened in the end?
The gang war took everything. It destroyed the heritage and the philosophy of the Dragons. Many of us were arrested during the war but the main problem was that the war, at its core, contradicted our reason of existence. We ended up fighting against the people we were supposed to defend.

Where does the group stand today?
The antifascist struggle is still real, but the rules of the game have changed. I am over 40 and so are many of my peers—we don't spend our days chasing skinheads. But we observe the evolution of our society and find many similarities. I hear things on TV—the racism is in many ways more prominent than ever and more widely accepted, it's just hiding in plain sight. The skinheads I used to fight have become adults and these days they wear a tie.

Mazdak & Alice are members of the collective Pepper. Mazdak is on Twitter.

Photo via Twitter/courtesy Meagan Taylor

Meagan Taylor has bright red hair. She takes cute selfies. She went to Iowa two weeks ago, a trip from her home in Illinois cut short with an arrest. Her name became a hashtag. She is black and transgender and young, and in a month that has seen at least five black women die in American jails, last Wednesday, Meagan Taylor left her cell alive.

How many women like Meagan Taylor will we never hear about?

On Monday, July 13 at 1:30 in the afternoon, Meagan Taylor was booked into the Polk County Jail in Des Moines, Iowa. She would not be there had the staff of the Drury Inn not called them to take Meagan Taylor away from the room she had paid for, after alleging—as cops put it—that she was engaged in "possible prostitution activity." Meagan Taylor told the Des Moines Register she saw hotel staff "acting really funny." Then police arrived at her room.

"It seemed like they were trying to find something to charge me with," she told the paper.

After seeing local news reports of her arrest, Des Moines activists Kaija Carter and Tony Tyler put out a call on Facebook for help. On Friday, July 17, they met at Smokey Row Coffee on Cottage Grove Avenue to talk about how to support her. Tyler told me around 30 people came out, and on Saturday, they rallied in front of Drury Inn, carrying a huge red banner with the hashtags #FreeMeaganTaylor and #BlackTransLivesMatter.

Black trans women don't need to be doing anything to be profiled: It's enough to just be breathing, to just be seen.

The West Des Moines Drury Inn and Suites is part of a Midwestern chain. CEO Charles Drury has said his hotels are owned and controlled by people, like himself, who are "adherents of the Catholic faith and wish to conduct their business in a manner that does not violate the principles of their faith."

Drury's declaration of faith came in an amicus brief filed to support Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. in their Supreme Court case to restrict employee access to emergency contraception. One generous profile of the Drury business in Lodging magazine lauded it as "Family Values Meet Real Business Value." Drury last made national headlines when it was reported that one of their hotels near Ferguson, Missouri fired a staff member for posting a video online that showed dozens of Department of Homeland Security vehicles parked there just ahead of the grand jury decision on the killing of Michael Brown by Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson.

At their West Des Moines protest, the local activists—who came together ad-hoc, Tyler said, and aren't part of any official organization—gave the Drury Inn 48 hours to respond to a letter seeking a formal apology to Meagan Taylor, as well as reimbursement for her hotel room and for the costs associated with her arrest. "We ask that the manager, Kim Bier, who as far as we understand is who called the police, sit down with Meagan," Tyler said, "and to go through a process of understanding what it was she initiated." They also asked Drury to commit to training their staff nationwide on working with LGBT people and people of color. "We need them not only to change how they perceive people, but institutional change as well."

Drury Inn has not yet responded to these demands.

On Wednesday, July 22, Meagan Taylor was released from Polk County Jail. She risked extradition back to Illinois on an outstanding warrant related to fines she had been unable to pay on a previous charge. The warrant was voided and her release was secured thanks in no small part to the work of Flor Bermudez at the Transgender Law Center. The ACLU is now also supporting her case. When she got out, local activists got her fresh clothes, and a place to sleep.

When I called the West Des Moines police that day to inquire about Meagan Taylor, I had to use a name she doesn't use anymore, a name the local press disclosed. Knowing all this, I still don't know what I thought I would learn from the police about the arrest of Meagan Taylor that could make sense of what had happened to her in what we call the criminal justice system.

Almost half of all black transgender people have been incarcerated at some point in their lives, according to the 2013 report "Injustice at Every Turn" by the National Gay and Lesbian Taskforce. Of the black transgender people they surveyed, 44 percent had done sex work. The trans sex workers they surveyed were also four times more likely to have been incarcerated than other transgender people.

There's also no disputing that police profile transgender women of color, often by describing them as sex workers. This presumes that any time a sex worker is visible in public, she must be also be doing sex work—that is, suspected of committing a crime. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, as well as community-based organizations like Make the Road New York and Alliance for a Safe & Diverse DC, have documented how often police target transgender women this way, how it funnels them into jails, and sticks them with criminal records that only make them more likely to be targeted by police again.

There are thousands of women like Meagan Taylor.

"What happened to Meagan Taylor is horrible and terrible and it is absolutely part of a larger problem of how the criminal legal system is designed to target people of color and trans people and people who are pushed into the margins of the labor market in various ways," Chase Strangio, staff attorney at the ACLU's LGBT Project, told me. "Her story is important because it shows us that this happens, but just because we know about Meagan doesn't mean this is the only person this has happened to."

Black trans women don't need to be doing anything to be profiled: It's enough to just be breathing, to just be seen. Drury Inn staff said they saw, as the police phrased it in their report, "two males dressed as females." Staff called police because they witnessed Meagan Taylor being a black transgender woman, not because they witnessed her doing sex work or using drugs. (Neither West Des Moines Drury Inn and Suites staff nor their corporate office responded to my request for an interview.)

Meagan Taylor wasn't charged with prostitution. After detaining her in her room and interrogating her and a trans friend traveling with her, police charged Taylor with offenses related to her legal identification and possession of hormone therapy (police say she had unmarked prescription drugs). Some of the news and commentary that followed made a point of telling readers that Meagan Taylor wasn't a sex worker, that she was only in possession of prescription drugs she needed, that she wasn't doing anything wrong.

Does it matter?

When we in the media report these stories of police profiling, in shaping the public's response and attempt to make sense of them, we can write ourselves into knots. What we might usually just call "walking the down the street" or "hanging out with friends" gets turned into something else: "not doing anything wrong." The "wrong" here isn't what Meagan Taylor was or wasn't doing. The wrong occurred when the hotel profiled her as a legitimate target for discrimination and arrest, or what I prefer to name directly, for forced removal from public. Meagan Taylor was marked because of her body. It didn't matter what she was doing—the hotel just wanted her body unseen.

These arrests are not news; they are the daily order of business in this country. It is time for the media to ask different questions: Would such discrimination, this forced removal, be somehow acceptable if women profiled as sex workers really were doing sex work? Should we regard the arrest of Meagan Taylor as a system error, or as evidence of the system at work?

At their core, all of these laws are meant to criminalize a body for its conduct, past, present or future.

The laws against prostitution the hotel sought to invoke have been up for debate from the founding of this country. Over the course of our history, under the rubric of fighting prostitution, we have outlawed being in public after dark ("nightwalking"), cross-dressing, or crossing state lines for "immoral purposes." Would someone be an acceptable target for profiling for breaking these more archaic laws? Why does breaking these laws, revised or rarely enforced now, no longer constitute doing something wrong?

At their core, all of these laws are meant to criminalize a body for its conduct, past, present or future. Today, the penalty for many municipal-level prostitution charges are so-called SOAP orders: "Stay Out of Areas of Prostitution." Law enforcement use these to keep bodies out of view, to control the movements of bodies no matter what they are doing. Certain bodies—black bodies, trans bodies—are already always suspect. Enforcing these laws provides rationale for the expulsion of those bodies from public, for making people invisible.

When we live under a punitive legal system like our American system, where many people have been cast as criminals for engaging in the same conduct as others who will never feel the bite of handcuffs on their wrists, why are we willing to draw these lines as if they are facts? To describe people targeted by this system, if we start by declaring, "She wasn't a criminal, she was..." anything that follows sounds like a pre-emptive apology: she was a mother, a teacher, a student, a daughter. And all these things are true and real—as real as the power of the police that can so quickly take them away.

I think here of Sandra Bland. She isn't here to reply to those who, in trying to make sense of her death in a Texas jail cell, want to know what she did wrong, why she was threatened with a Taser, who ask if it's legal for police to order you to put out your cigarette. We can watch her arrest over and over. Each time, it says the same thing about the power of the police. There are no answers there.

They may not be answers, but there is a struggle against that power in the demands to know #WhatHappenedToSandraBland. Activists have put critical pressure on the media, on elected officials and on those seeking office, as well as on all those who seek to support the movement for black lives. The answers may never be found in police records or autopsy reports, but in the struggle to redefine what bodies matter.

All that momentum has served Meagan Taylor, too. "I was really happy to see the community come together around Meagan," Flor Bermudez at the Transgender Law Center told me. "This just brings to the forefront the reality that there is such bias, racism and transphobia, and that the interactions hotel staff have with people can trigger so many things, like what happened to Meagan."

"Justice, as far as I'm concerned, is a world where Meagan wasn't arrested in the first place," Chase Strangio at the ACLU told me. "Already, we are starting from a place where every intervention we make is going to be a compromise. Even paying the bail and getting her out is a compromise."

"That doesn't mean we don't do it," he added, "but it means we have to question the system itself and what we can do to destabilize the dynamics that lead to trans women of color—and black trans women in particular—from being routinely funneled into the system and spending much of their lives navigating criminalization."

"The point of incarceration," Strangio went on, "is to cut people off from support and to make invisible what is happening to them."

What Meagan Taylor and her supporters have done is make her seen again.

Follow Melissa Gira Grant on Twitter.

Fentanyl patches seized in a drug bust. Photo via Ottawa Police Service

Amber Wasson remembers sitting with her brother David, watching his eyes roll back in his head, seeing his chin bob up and down in what she came to know as "the Fentanyl nod." His head would flop down on his chest and then jerk back up, as he tried to stay awake.

Fentanyl, a powerful painkiller that is 100 times stronger than morphine or 40 times stronger than heroin, produces "a feeling of peace and relaxes the whole body," Wasson explains. It was that high her brother sought when he died of an overdose in 2014.

In the "Chemical Valley" city of Sarnia, Ontario—a border town which sits about 100 kilometres north of Detroit—Fentanyl abuse is a serious problem according to police and medical officials. The local death rate is four times the provincial average.

The painkilling patches can be cut-up and sucked, heated on tinfoil and inhaled, or sometimes cooked in a spoon and injected.

But based on her experience watching her brother, Wasson says that abusers of Fentanyl are "playing Russian Roulette with themselves, hoping they'll wake up again."

While fighting for consciousness is what "the nod " is all about, what many users don't realize is that if they do pass out, they may not wake up. Passing out from Fentanyl is not like blacking out drunk; it's actually bringing you staggeringly close to death, according to Dr. Del Donald, an addiction specialist and veteran of the Sarnia ER who has treated numerous Fentanyl overdoses. Opioid pain meds such as Oxycontin and Fentanyl affect the human respiratory system, and the amount of drugs in your system required to render you unconscious is "only slightly below" the level that shuts down your breathing, the doctor explained.

Fentanyl turned up in Sarnia as a recreational drug "out of the blue" a few years ago, according to Donald, who added that it's become the drug of choice for opioid users in the area. After Oxycontin was de-listed from the approved drug list in Ontario in 2012, addicts went searching for a replacement. He expected heroin would become the main replacement as has happened in other places, but the heroin coming into Sarnia was "lousy," and users are "more comfortable when something has a pharmaceutical stamp on it."

The numbers show the city has a major problem with Fentanyl. Five deaths in 2013 may not sound like many, but for a city of 72,000 it's four times the province-wide rate, according to the Ontario coroner's stats. Sarnia police detective Mike Howell explained that, by comparison, London, Ontario, which has more than three times Sarnia's population, had the same number of Fentanyl fatalities that year. The drug appears to have disproportionately affected Ontario's smaller cities.

Sarnia in all its toxic glory. Photo via Perry Quan

There's pretty much no way for an abuser or a dealer to get Fentanyl other than from someone with a genuine prescription, according to to Donald, who is now medical director of the Bluewater Methadone Clinic in Sarnia. (There have, however, been reports of deadly illegally imported Fentanyl making its way to Ontario.) As local police and the medical community are trying to get a handle on the problem, they've decided that, since the plastic backing on the patch is still in place after use by legit patients, it would make sense to require patients to bring the patches back to the pharmacy before getting new ones.

Call it the "Beer Store" solution if you like. But Constable Howell thinks a "patch-for-patch" system may help keep Fentanyl off the streets. Howell, who's been heading up the campaign to bring the plan to the city, hopes the system will be up and running before the fall. If all goes accordingly, doctors will up their efforts to screen possible patients, and prescriptions will be faxed directly to the pharmacy, to avoid tampering with the prescription. (Adding a zero to the number of patches prescribed is a common trick, apparently.) Pharmacists will also give patients a paper to stick their used patches on before they come back for a prescription renewal. The returned patches will be examined carefully for signs of tampering.

According to Wasson, her brother David used to get the drug by abusing legit channels. A friend's father had a prescription, but didn't need it and "basically lied to the doctor," she told VICE. The father gave the patches to his own son to sell. The going rate is anywhere from $150-$400 a patch—and if someone is on social assistance in Ontario their prescription is paid for, so the money they'd get on the black market is "pure profit," according to Wasson. Even the used patches have quite a bit of value, as the residue can amount to more than half the total dosage, according to Howell.

Wasson's brother knew the dangers of Fentanyl and once tried, unsuccessfully, to keep a girlfriend from using it. Watching him come down from the drug was terrible, his sister recalled. He would get very agitated, complain of headaches, constantly scratch himself, and hallucinate. Things could be very quiet, but he'd ask her to identify a sound that never happened. He sometimes even saw the non-existent bugs he could feel crawling on his skin. His death in March 2014 came as a shock to the family as David had been on methadone treatment for quite a while and "seemed fine," she told me. He had just stopped his methadone treatments, but returned one more time to the "old habit." It was truly his last time.

Even though she's not part of the drug culture and hasn't lived full-time in the city for several years, Wasson said she "easily" knows 20 people who are abusing the drug here in Sarnia.

Arriving in Sarnia from the Oshawa area in 2011, Constable Howell was surprised to see how the local drug scene was "all prescription opioids or meth," instead of coke, crack cocaine, or ecstasy. "It's hard to account for, and it doesn't have anything to do with it being a border town either," he said.

Searching local news turns up hit after hit for Fentanyl, and some pretty wild stories, including several from just this month.

July 21, 2015 -- A 33-year-old Sarnia man is handed a six-year penitentiary term for selling prescription painkillers worth $22,000 on the street. Last October, police raided his home and found none of the 42 Fentanyl patches he had obtained on prescription the day before; just empty packages. He had convinced a doctor he needed the patches for pain from an injury and subsequent surgeries.

July 8, 2015 -- Police bust a grow-op in the centre of the city, find spent Fentanyl packs. Again, the prescription had just been filled just the day before. The number of empty packages was "well above" the recommended one-day dose, a police news release said.

The "super expensive" value of the patches on the black market is a temptation that some legit users just can't resist, said Donald, who has 20 years of experience in Sarnia's ER. Experience has shown him that if a patient on a disability pension has a prescription, and if money's tight, he or she may think, "Do I put on the patch, or suffer through this and feed the kids," Donald told VICE. "When you have a script worth 6,000 bucks, it can be hard to resist."

There are high hopes the patch-for-patch system will cut Sarnia's Fentanyl problem, but there are still loopholes and some legit users say the system will just add a hassle to getting needed medicine.

Right now there are just a handful of Ontario cities running the patch-for-patch plan within their own boundaries. Donald thinks the province should be running this across Ontario.

"I don't know why we're waiting for something to be done. It's so obvious. A government agency could do this in a second," he said, his frustration obvious.

Making the system province-wide is the intention of a private member's bill introduced in the Ontario legislature by North Bay Conservative MP Vic Fedeli in October 2014.

While the bill passed second reading this May, it's now languishing in legislative limbo, waiting for the summer break to end.

While pharmacies are getting organized in Sarnia for patch-for-patch to start soon, Amber Wasson wonders if the plan will help prevent more Fentanyl overdoses, such as her brother's. The plan is a step in the right direction, she said, as long as doctors think more carefully before prescribing it.

"They need to be aware of people's addictive potential," she said.

Follow Colin Graf on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Dennis Jarvis

Read: This Woman Is Fighting to Legalize Toplessness in LA

Topless women are having something of a moment this week in Canada, though not without conflict. Three sisters in Kitchener, Ontario were stopped by police while enjoying a topless bike ride to cool off during the ongoing heatwave. Likewise, a police officer told a Kelowna, BC woman sunning herself on a beach to put on a shirt.

Susan Rowbottom, the Kelowna woman, did as she was asked but later looked into the legality of female shirtlessness. She checked with both the RCMP and Kelowna city staff about her suspicion that women can legally be topless in public, which is true.

"Hopefully this comes to the RCMP's attention that they can't enforce laws that don't exist," Rowbottom told CBC.

Tameera, Nadia, and Alysha Mohamed faced a similar situation in Kitchener late last week. The three sisters went for a bike ride without tops on to stay cool, but were stopped by a police officer.

"He said, 'Ladies, you need to put on some shirts,'" Tameera told CBC. "We said, 'No we don't... it's our legal right in Ontario to be topless as women.'"

Tameera added that the officer "began backtracking" when Alysha pulled out her phone to record the interaction. Once Alysha's phone was out, the officer denied their toplessness was the reason he'd pulled them over, and let them go.

Staff Sergeant Michael Haffner told CBC that the Waterloo regional police are "doing an internal review on the situation. It is a current law that if a female chooses to go topless, that is their right."

The sisters are planning to file a complaint and are holding a rally "to support the desexualizing of women's bodies" on Saturday in Kitchener.

It's been legal for women to be topless in public since the Ontario Court of Appeal overturned Gwen Jacobs' conviction for committing an indecent act in 1996. She was convicted in 1991 as a student at the University of Guelph. In 2000, the BC Supreme Court upheld the Ontario ruling in a similar case involving Linda Meyer. Meyer was charged when she showed up topless at a city pool. The judge in the case wrote there was no reason to believe that "the parks could not operate in orderly fashion if a female were to bare her breasts in a circumstance that did not offend criminal laws of nudity."

Follow Tannara Yelland on Twitter.