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Drake's Meek Mill Diss Was a Sign of Hip-Hop's New Political Correctness

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Image via Drake's Instagram

"Woooow," Drake drawls in "Charged Up," and I can almost see the accompanying eye-roll, "I'm honored that you think this is staged." The track serves as his first response to a series of tweets from fellow rapper Meek Mill, who publicly accused Drake of relying on ghostwriters. Featuring a ethereal beat and an intro consisting of a nameless woman voice, the song barely registers as a diss upon first blush.

"Back to Back," Drake's second reply, gets more blatant, with Drake dropping multiple references to Meek's hometown of Philadelphia and mocking his relationship with rapper Nicki Minaj. It feels extra, like when you have an argument with your ex and end it with "OK, I'm done talking to you," and then call back five minutes later because you can't help yourself. Drake acknowledges the corniness, saying, "I might be mad that I gave this attention." But "fuck," he says, "you left a boy no options." If he's corny, it's still all Meek's fault.

When Drake clowns you, it's less of a diss and more of an act of chastising, loaded with the same psychological firebomb as responding to a hostile, multiple-scroll text with the nail-painting emoji: I'm above this, but I'll deign you a response.

Drake's acceptance of his "soft" reputation gives him space to perform masculinity with less vitriol. But women still get the short end of the stick. To chastise is to diss with a certain degree of political correctness, where there aren't any slurs being thrown around, and women aren't being insulted for the grave crime of being women. Overall it's a much stronger indictment of Meek, since the takedown hinges on the two rappers' respective merit as artists.


All of us fans know what's going on. We saw Meek's tweet, the ensuing internet-media frenzy, and then waited with bated breath for Drake to respond. When "Charged Up" dropped, Drake didn't need to open it with an "Ether"-esque "FUCK MEEK MILL" because (1) Drake's character would never say, "FUCK MEEK MILL," and (2) he doesn't have to name Meek explicitly. Instead he raps, "Easter-egg huntin' / they gotta look for somethin'." Drake knows listeners mine his lyrics for clues as to what he's talking about because it makes us feel special and included. His mission is not only to chastise Meek, but to engage with Meek's own fanbase, using his innately Canadian wit and charm to turn them against the guy.

Compare this to some of hip-hop's classic diss tracks, which are peppered with instances of blatant homophobia (Nas claiming that "This Gay-Z and Cock-a-Fella Records wanted beef" in "Ether") and outright sexism (Tupac's prostitution-referencing "Hit Em Up," in which is raps, "Little Kim, don't fuck around with real G's / Quick to snatch your ugly ass off the streets"). When writing from a place of rage, the first thing to do is insult your enemy in the most vicious way you can, pissing them off as much as you yourself are pissed off. Calling a man gay or a woman a slut is easy code for I'm better than you for reasons that go beyond your talent as an artist. And the public repercussions don't matter as much as your target's reaction.

Drake alone, staring at the ocean. Image via Drake's Instagram

On Noisey: Did Drake Pull His Rap-Beef Game Plan from a Self-Help Book?

Drake doesn't pose himself as a hard-ass. Rather, the tone is both dismissive and slightly aloof, as if to say, I can't believe you made me drop this effortless, skillful rap. Instead of squaring up against Meek Mill, Drake comes off more like a head-shaking older brother, informing Meek that dealing with one's emotions "could be one of our realest moments," and they shouldn't be fighting each other when "cops are killing people with they arms up." It's a little crass to invoke "Hands Up Don't Shoot" in a diss track, but hey, the tactic suits the holier-than-thou tone.

The references to Nicki Minaj, Meek's girlfriend, are where it gets personal, and the diss becomes ice cold. "Rumor has it, I either fucked her or never could," Drake intones, reducing Nicki to her fuckability, like KRS-One spitting, "Roxanne Shante is only good for steady fucking" on "The Bridge Is Over." We don't know what went on between Drake and Nicki. But it's possible Meek does, and the fact that he now knows that we know that he knows must be a special kind of psychological torture.

But it's the bit in the middle that really sums up Drake's rap beef game. The first move is to emasculate the guy by suggesting that he's less successful than his girlfriend. Deftly, he sandwiches it between emotional statements, "You gotta give the world to her" and "She told you to open up more," drawing attention away from his casual sexism by appearing to be emotionally open and understanding—performing "soft" masculinity. He then shifts his focus to Nicki, telling her that since she makes more money, she is the real masculine one in the relationship: "Make sure you hit him with the prenup / Then tell that man to ease up."

Things are getting better for women in music these days. In 2013, when Rick Ross rapped about using MDMA to rape a woman, he was shamed into publicly apologizing. But women in music aren't allowed to run with the boys unless they make it clear that they're sexually unavailable to all their competitors. When Nicki raps, "I never fucked Wayne, I never fucked Drake," that's her saying her success is from her skills alone.

But because she's with Meek, Drake uses it as an opportunity to use her as an altar on which to emasculate Meek. "Is that a world tour," he asks, "or your girl's tour?" Touted as the "cruelest barbs" in the rap, these lines reveal just how culturally embedded our understanding of masculinity is: The best way to insult a man is to compare him to a woman.

Follow Kate on Twitter.


Jerusalem Gay Pride Parade Stabbing Suspect Identified as 2005 Attacker

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Jerusalem Gay Pride Parade Stabbing Suspect Identified as 2005 Attacker

Britain Is a Weird Place: The Most Affordable Town for London’s Commuters Is Full of Snakes and Despair

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Photos by Chris Bethell

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

According to the Guardian, the town of Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, is now the cheapest place for London's legions of commuters to live. A study of commuter towns by Lloyds Bank showed that the average home price in Wellingborough was £160,245 [$250,000], compared to £722,000 [$1,127,000] in central London.

The town is an hour's commute from King's Cross station, and beats nearby Kettering, Peterborough, Swindon, and Luton when it comes to offering relatively cheap places to crawl back to on a stinking train in order to get six torturous hours of sleep each night.

But is it only the low prices that make Wellingborough an attractive proposition to metropolitan ex-pats, or does the town have something else up its sleeve? What else can this place, an apparent haven for exiled desk heads, offer to new denizens? And, more importantly, what can those new denizens offer Wellingborough?

After following a short, tree-lined street to the town center, I came across a shopping mall where a "Roaming Reptile Show" was taking place, crowded with kids excited by snakes and spiders and the like. One of the children crudely asked the handler if he ever kills any of the snakes. As you can probably tell from the photo above, he looked quite confused and upset by this.

Adjacent to the reptile show was a face-painting stall. This small corner of the mall was quite sweet, filled with children clapping and smiling and laughing. But the rest of the L-shaped alley of empty shops was—to me, a newcomer unaware of any of their potentially endearing traits—incredibly depressing.

I'd thought that, seeing as it's summer, the mall might be full of teens mucking about; skateboarding, smoking, spitting balled up bits of paper through McDonald's straws at the elderly. Instead, it was grey and depressing, like Albert Fish.

There are an inordinate amount of tattoo shops in Wellingborough, including this one. It was the busiest shop on the high street other than Bargain Booze.

I'm not trying to paint Wellingborough as some kind of nightmarish hole here, a lifeless town where good people are trying their very best to be happy in the face of the crushing bleakness of their surroundings; it just genuinely appeared—the day I visited, at least—to be quite a lot like that.

Amy

I walked up the street from Bargain Booze and spotted a shop called Creepy Crawlies. It was an exotic pet shop, and inside was the proprietor, Amy, and yet more snakes. I asked Amy if she'd noticed a recent influx of commuters to the area.

"The roads are certainly busy with people coming in from wherever they've been working," she said. "They live here because it's cheaper."

They must go out a bit at night, though, right? They don't just hole up in their rooms straight after work? "To be honest, there's not a huge amount to do in Wellingborough," said Amy. "That's why you find a lot of people leave here to go to different [areas of] nightlife. For example, in Northampton, after 10 PM you can still buy fruit and vegetables in certain places. But this place just shuts down."

There was another man in the store who agreed about the lack of nightlife. I asked him what he did; he said he didn't work and that he just hung out in Creepy Crawlies a lot of the time.

Up the road we came across a pub called The Rising Sun, so I decided to whet my whistle. The pub, in all honesty, was excellent. It was a real sports pub, a place you could imagine future darts pros cutting their teeth. It was quiet, which I later found out was because they have a stricter door policy than Berghain.

After a game of pool, I got talking to two men called Nicky and Richard. Richard was a cab driver in London, and Nicky was a cab driver in Wellingborough. They both lived locally and considered The Rising Sun to be their local.

Richard (left) and Nicky

While Nicky manages to keep his head above water locally, the trade and distance for Richard as a black cab driver has been devastating.

"I moved up here eight or nine years ago," he said. "I'm a London cab driver, and I've gone backwards and forwards trying to commute, trying to do nights, trying to do days. It's just that little bit too far. I would work at Heathrow, sleep in the cab for a few days, then come back here. And that very fact, that I had to commute—specifically because the train's far too expensive as well—destroyed my family, destroyed my marriage, destroyed everything. So if there was work you could do round here, or if there was any alternative, I would be doing it by now, I promise you that. But I still have to drive the cab in London because there's no alternative."

READ ON MUNCHIES: Shoppers at a Northampton Supermarket Started a Fight Over Cheap Meat

He told me that the disappearance of industry in the area has torn a hole in the community: "All the textiles have gone, all the shoe-making factories have gone. Have a look round—you'll see more closed factories in this town than any other."

The commuters, of course, aren't bringing anything to the area. If anything, they just raise the prices of rented accommodation, then fuck off somewhere else when they're done sleeping. They don't go out, they don't use the area's facilities and they don't eat in its restaurants.

"They're moving into the area, and some of the houses they're in—you know, bless them—but they're nice houses, and it's not Wellingborough money buying it," said Nicky. "I'm not saying everything's being taken up by commuters, but a large amount of it is. You can see them."

Places like Wellingborough are becoming London's bunkhouses. As more and more people are priced out of the capital, these towns—quiet rows of houses devoid of industry or entertainment—are being bought up and used by people who just want a place to sleep. Not a luxury, by any means, but a phenomenon that isn't really affecting Wellingborough adversely or positively.

Wellingborough has been a dead town for longer than the London housing crisis has existed. The last cinema in the area shut down ten years ago, Nicky told me. Restaurants are closing, reopening, closing, and reopening again. It's an endless, morose cycle that the people of the area are expected to emancipate themselves from, but of course can't, because it's nigh on impossible. They are stuck there—some of them by choice, of course, but others out of economic necessity.

"I'm looking forward to the summer so much, just for the fact that when the beautiful weather's out, you just drive round the streets and you see more and more people smiling, for no reason at all," said Nicky. "They just are. They're smiling 'cos of the weather—probably don't even know they're smiling. That's not to say they ain't got no problems, or they ain't the same person they was in the winter. See, there's not a lot that goes on in this town."


Wellingborough is less of a town, more of a question: How do you solve a problem like this? These places – places with no industry, no jobs, no nothing – how do you fix these rusty, leaking pipes?

Pricing existing residents out of their area, bringing nothing with you when you come and leaving nothing but inflated rent prices behind, doesn't really seem to be the answer. But when has that ever made any difference?

Follow Joe and Chris on Twitter.

Is #100Days100Nights Just a Threatening Hashtag or a Full-Blown LA Gang War?

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Century Boulevard runs through some of the most reportedly violently areas of South LA. Photo via Flickr user Ken Lund

A social media threat has put the Los Angeles gang landscape on blast as news agencies around the world report on the catchy, terrifying slogan percolating on Twitter and Instagram: #100Days100Nights. It may sound more like a movie title than a reality on the street, but a spate of shootings in South LA since the emergence of the slogan—which refers to alleged plans by rival gangs to see who can rack up 100 kills first—has residents on edge, to say the least.

The Daily Beast reported earlier this week that the twisted murder challenge is essentially a retaliatory war for vengeance after the murder of 27-year-old Kenneth Peevy—known as "KP"—on Friday, July 17. That killing followed a film of a fight KP was involved in being posted on his Instagram page. Another local former gangbanger, Del Dog—a Main Street Mafia OG who had become an anti-gang advocate—was killed on July 8.

But conversations with locals, gang experts, and law enforcement suggest that, so far at least, the social media threat is just that—a mostly internet-based phenomenon, albeit one that is having some ripple effects on the street.

"Social media takes a big toll on the community when everybody is seeing it and everybody is paying attention to it," Reynaldo Reaser, executive director of Reclaiming America's Communities through Empowerment (RACE), a South LA–based gang intervention organization, tells VICE. "Law enforcement is paying attention to it to where they have a level of concern for violence in the area, so they put out a tactical alert on this."

Rightly so. But is the online game actually resulting in an increased body count? The LA Times reports that a series of shootings in South LA left one dead and 12 wounded this past weekend, but also that the bloodshed was largely confined to the city's most traditionally dangerous neighborhoods and did not represent a departure from the normal amount of gang violence.

Related: How the Gangs of 1970s New York Came Together to End Their Wars

"To be honest, I haven't seen a lot of violence in the community lately," Freeway Rick Ross, the former drug trafficker and south LA native, tells VICE. "I'm hoping that it doesn't pick up. I've heard about some people getting killed... Del Dog, who is a person that I know very well from childhood... I don't know if they figured out who actually killed him, but there was a lot of speculation behind that, (to see if) that would cause an all-out war between rival gangs."

The feud represents tribalism at its most macabre—pitting a Crips crew, the Rollin 100s—against the 52 (or 5-Deuce) Hoover Gangster Crips. Unless you're involved in the gang culture and live in South LA, it can be difficult to understand the ever-shifting and swirling alliances that change under the slightest provocation, but the Rollin 100s are a conglomerate of Crip street gangs based north of Century Boulevard in South LA. The 5-Deuce Hoover Gangster Crips are a set from the prominent Hoover gang that has historically been major on the west side of South LA. Finally, the Main Street Mafia Crips are said to be based on the Eastside of South LA.

"Most of all the violence is happening north of Imperial," Reynaldo tells VICE. "Several different other neighborhoods have been going at it for over 30 years of war, and just this summer, one individual got killed on 109th and that sparked a retaliation for that death. And during that time, somebody in a tweet or Instagram put a map of the neighborhood where it was located and put Rollin 100s and then somebody used that same map and put a title on top of it that said, 100 Days, 100 Nights of Killing. Did that neighborhood sanction that? No, they didn't. I'm one of the gang interventionists in that area, and no one sanctioned that."

The Los Angeles Police Department shares Reynaldo's assessment that this is likely the work of a few mischief-makers rather than a true gang war.

"We don't have any credible information that these threats are viable except through social media," Officer Liliana Preciado from the LAPD media relations office tells VICE. "Although in South LA there have been several killings, we have no evidence they are related." Still, the sheer magnitude and visibility of the threat has it on everyone's radar.

"It's the 21st century, and this is what it has come to," Kev Mac, an LA native and founder of Allhood magazine—which profiles gangs from the city—tells VICE. "Social media makes it simple for someone insecure about his or her reputation to put a ten on it."


Watch: The Subway Gangs of Mexico City


Speaking as a former convict, it's well established that you don't put a crime out out there if you're actually going to do it. Why would you put a rival on notice? Old school gangbangers don't report or blast out their crimes. But advertising on Twitter and Instagram is all the rage now, with this generation detailing all their fights for their friends to see, brandishing guns and doing drugs or counting money. It's a voyeuristic world where you're nobody until you have you clips on social media validating your street cred.

"Kids, when they don't get attention, they lash out, and hopefully that's what it is right now," Freeway Rick Ross tells VICE. "Kids lashing out, and hopefully some of our politicians will step up to the plate, some of our celebrities will step up to the plate and see that our kids are desperately needing it and crying out. I do the best I can, but there's other people who have much more influence than I do and I am hoping that we can all come together. I asked the rap community a couple of months ago if we could all come together and try to heal the wounds from our community."

In essence, that's what this is all about—a wounded community. At the heart of this is the poverty and degradation and lack of opportunities that the people of South LA have to deal with on a daily basis. "The black families are hurting in South Los Angeles right now," Kev Mac says.

Other locals genuinely fear the social media campaign is already playing out in the worst way.

"I when I first heard about this 100 days 100 bodies going on in LA, I became sick to my stomach," Clifford "Spud" Johnson, author of Gangsta Twist 3 and a former Blood member, tells VICE. "I mean, come on black men! To hear that innocent people have become targets in that madness makes it even worse. I know the beef with the neighborhood Crips and the Hoovers is serious, but that's just insane! By being a Damu [member of the Bloods] for a real long time, I understand the mindset of the beef in them LA streets, but with time comes wisdom. Especially after doing fed[eral prison] time, my eyes [have] opened to how useless we were to not only ourselves, but to our families and communities."

But Ross is out in the streets everyday, and insists most locals aren't acting on the hashtag, even if it's a source of concern.

"I'm hoping...that it's just some media hype," Ross says. "Because we have enough street violence going on in LA everyday, just the normal everyday street violence. There's enough to shock people already. To have an all-out war—we already have a few wars going on in the streets—but to have one as well organized and targeted as they are saying... would really be dangerous."

While Street Bible Don Diva has weighed in on the matter, calling the #100Days100Nights posts a credible threat—by citing Facebook posts from the community as evidence—law enforcement is publicly downplaying it. As the LA Times reports, LAPD Chief Charlie Beck waved off the idea that social media was driving a surge in gang violence on Wednesday. "Certainly this is a story as old as gang activity in Los Angeles, and had nothing to do with Facebook," he told reporters.

Meanwhile, gang intervention specialists have been hard at work in LA over the last week trying to build trust that will lead to a fresh truce. Reynaldo has been right in the thick of it, and even lives just south of Imperial, where the violence has been more tangible.

"To find out if the threat has any credibility to it, gang interventionists have to go out into the area and find out was that a real threat to the public," Reynaldo explains, adding that he's "come to find out that wasn't a real threat to the public. No gang in this area actually put that out as a threat to the community to harm anybody."

Follow Seth Ferranti on Twitter.

Bucharest's Poolside Tattoos

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This article originally appeared on VICE Romania

During the communist era, public pools were one of the few places where the people of Bucharest could afford to spend their summer weekends. After the fall of communism in 1989, a wider range of activities emerged for those who wanted to cool off during the hot summer days but most were only accessible to the wealthy, like private pools. By contrast, public pools fell into a state of disrepair. These days, they are mainly frequented by low-income, working class Romanians who cannot afford to spend their summers elsewhere.

The photos seen here are a part of P'afară, an urban exploration and anthropology project focused on Bucharest's public pools and carried out by local artists and photographers. I chose to look at the tattoos of the people frequenting the pools, because I feel they are a very personal form of expression. Summer, by the poolside, is perhaps the only time when a lot of my subjects get to expose their tattoos in public.

Some of the tattoos presented here were done in the early 1990s, while others are more recent – each and every one of them exhibiting signs of period-specific inking techniques. Some of them represent crosses, others take the form of relatives' names or portraits of loved ones. Those carrying them were for the most part eager to tell me the story behind their ink, as well as their plans for future designs.

Words by Mihnea Mihalache-Fiastru

When Jack the Ripper Trumps Women's History

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Picture via Twitter

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

A new museum that originally promised to pay tribute to the Suffragette movement and the women of east London has opened. But it turns out it's no longer going to be a museum that pays tribute to women. It is, in fact, opening as a Jack the Ripper museum; memorializing the work of a man who is famous for raping and killing women.

The Elizabeth Fry Centre on Hackney Road stands empty and windowless. The founder of the East London Federation of Suffragettes, Sylvia Pankhurst, is memorialized by a sexual health centre on the third floor of Mile End Hospital. Josephine Butler, the woman who campaigned against the "surgical rape" of prostitutes under the Contagious Diseases Act, had her house knocked down to make way for a car park. There is no statue to the 1,400 matchstick girls who went on strike in 1888 and revolutionized the trade union movement. Countless female campaigners and politicians, including Annie Besant, Millicent Fawcett, Nellie Cressall, Annie Kenney, and Julia Scurr, who worked or visited the East End of London, are largely ignored, unknown, or forgotten, even on their own doorstep.

And yet Jack the Ripper, an anonymous rapist and murderer, is getting his own museum on Cable Street. That's right: Cable Street. An area where Jack the Ripper was never known to have lived or committed any crimes, but that was the site of some of modern social history's most important pitched moments; the anti-fascist Battle of Cable Street in 1936, the London Dock Strike of 1889, and the birth of the Pankhursts' Suffragette movement.

Of course, that the women who shaped history are tucked up in a blanket of ignorance and silence while the men who built on their successes are memorialized, celebrated, and poured into bronze statues is nothing new. But there is a particularly unpleasant kick, a salty, sulphurous tang, about the fact that a proposed "Museum of Women's History" has, in fact, turned out to be a gory theme park to an unprosecuted rapist. Especially when, across the rest of London, there is so little public recognition of women's history.

When I first moved to London, I worked as a receptionist in The Women's Library in Whitechapel. It was here that I once stumbled upon a jug full of Victorian sex toys, an artifact taken from a brothel around the corner. It was here that I stood in a cold, starkly-lit basement and held Emily Wilding Davison's return train ticket from Epsom, proving that she'd never intended to kill herself when she ran under the King's horse at the Derby. It was here that I handled bathing costumes knitted by loving husbands for their politician wives, listened to the last known recordings of women who won me the vote, stood before the original suffragette banners carried to the Houses of Parliament, and, once, had to clean up a lift full of piss after a woman who smelt of ham sandwiches lost control of her bladder between floors.

During those hours spent on reception I lost count of the number of people who wandered in to ask about Jack the Ripper. One Spanish tourist, carrying his small son, memorably asked in front of a meeting of feminist historians where he could find the "places of Jack the Rapist." Around the corner was the jauntily-named Jack the Clipper (because, of course, who doesn't want to have their neck shaved under a sex crimes pun) and just over the river, drama school graduates strode around outside the London Bridge Tesco dressed as Jack the Ripper in nylon capes, handing out flyers for The London Dungeon. The Women's Library is now closed—the collection absorbed by the London School of Economics. We may have had four floors full of women's history, exhibitions, events, and books but it was no match for the glamor, the intrigue, and the uncomfortable titillation of an unpunished Victorian murderer and sexual offender.


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"Down in Stepney there's a statue to Charles Booth who started the Salvation Army; there are plaques to sailor and murderer of Asian natives Captain Cook; there are lots of plaques to men but there aren't really any statues to women," says community campaigner and East End resident Jemima Broadbridge. "Tourists coming to this museum aren't necessarily going to know the real history of Cable Street," she adds. "They're going to walk down here after the Tower of London, probably led by a Jack the Ripper tour guide, so they'll start to think this is Jack the Ripper territory and it's not; his nearest murder was on Berner Street." This real Cable Street history not only includes the anti-fascist protests in the 1930s but also the Ratcliffe Highway Murders—a series of attacks so horrific that once the murderer was apprehended and killed the police put a stake through his heart and buried it at a crossroads. Cable Street was visited by Charles Dickens, who based the character of Fagin on a real pickpocket who operated on Petticoat Lane, near Spitalfields Market. East London is, according to Broadbridge, the birthplace of the striptease. "The striptease didn't come from Paris—it came from the East End of London. It was something that working-class women used to do to mock the upper classes for wearing so many layers of clothing."

Broadbridge's argument isn't necessarily against there being a museum to Jack the Ripper, simply that the man behind it, Mark Palmer-Edgecumbe, should have admitted that was what he was planning: "He's going to make a lot of money but he just needed to be straight about what he was doing," says Broadbridge, "so we could have had this debate before it opened."

The Emmeline Pankhurst statue in London (photo via)

When it comes to East End history, it can all-too often seem that unless women were sex workers or murdered, we're simply not interested. Although there is a statue to Emmeline Pankhurst hidden in the shadows of the Houses of Parliament, away from the bustle and noise of Parliament Square, there is no similar statue to her radical daughter Sylvia, who broke with the WSPU in 1914 to set up the East London Federation of Suffragettes, took over the Gunmaker's Arms pub in Bow, changed the name to the Mother's Arms, used it as a clinic and creche for mothers and babies so working women could go out and earn money, set up a free toy exchange,, and opened a soup kitchen to feed her struggling neighbors. There is no London statue to Annie Kenney, the former mill-worker and one of the only working-class women to lead the WSPU, who was sent to prison and went on hunger strike to protest against the disenfranchisement of women. There is no statue to the thousands of girls as young as 12, employed by Bryant and May, who went on strike to protest that the red phosphorous they worked with was making the bones in their jaw glow green, all their hair fall out and blinding them with headaches. There isn't a statue to the campaigning journalist Annie Besant who brought the story of the Matchstick Girls to public attention, calling their working conditions "white slavery." There isn't a blue plaque to the suffragette and former mayor of Poplar, Nellie Cressall.

Across town, at the Foundling Museum, a new exhibition called The Fallen Woman is due to open in September. Although, once again, this exhibition marks women out as the victims of men, rather than the agents of change, it at least speaks to a wider social experience than the Jack the Ripper Museum probably will. "We've wanted to do this exhibition for a while," says curator Stephanie Chapman. "We realized that here at the Foundling Museum we've got physical evidence of all the male governors; portrait after portrait on the walls. But the women are much harder to bring to life. So part of the exhibition is a sound installation that will bring their voices to the fore—visitors can actually hear the sort of testimonies that these women would have given. Some of them are quite shocking. They use the word 'seduction' but today we understand that to mean rape." Why, I ask, do we seem so fascinated by the victims of male sexual violence but so reluctant to memorialise them as individuals? "It's difficult because we don't know what happened to lots of these women afterwards," explains Chapman. "Do you want to memorialize someone who is essentially a victim of their circumstances? It's a horrific thing that these women went through but do we want to define them entirely by that one experience?"

G F Watts, Found Drowned. A painting from the Fallen Women exhibition

The Fallen Woman exhibition not only speaks to Victorian ideas of the "deserving" and "undeserving" poor but draws parallels to the current government's attitude to welfare. Chancellor George Osborne recently announced that tax credits and universal credit will no longer be awarded to families with more than two children unless "women... have a third child as a result of rape, or other exceptional circumstances." How exactly are we going to enforce that? How, indeed, can anyone judge who has and has not been the victim of a sexual offense? Will women be, once again, standing in front of panels of male judges pleading their fallen status like their Foundling forebears? Will we be subjecting women to the sorts of physical examinations campaigned against by Josephine Butler back in the 1860s? As welfare payments are taken away from young families deemed "undeserving" by the state, will food banks and charitable donations become as vital as the free toy exchanges and soup kitchens set up by Sylvia Pankhurst in 1915?

As the government drag us back to the Victorian state of poverty, female oppression, social injustice, and moral evangelism, perhaps we should forget the sideshow of Jack the Ripper and focus instead on the East End women who turned the tides of social history. We should resist the tourist titillation and instead remember the words of campaigner Julia Scurr, born in Limehouse in 1873, that "Any rise in the price of rents, foods, and other household commodities affects us women vitally."

We should forget about a museum to a secret murderer and remember what's important.

Follow Nell on Twitter.

These Swedish Reporters Spent 438 Days in an Ethiopian Prison for Their 'Terrorist' Journalism

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A still from Abdullahi Werar's propaganda video. Martin Schibbye and Johan Persson

In 2011, two Swedish journalists came face to face with the shady reality of geopolitics in a series of terrifying events. Reporter Martin Schibbye and photographer Johan Persson traveled to Ethiopia, where they ended up being shot, kidnapped, mock executed, and then imprisoned for over a year by the Ethiopian authorities. Their book, 438 Days, a bestseller in Swedish, has just been translated into English.

From their shared office in Stockholm, Martin and Johan tell me that they traveled to the Ogaden region of eastern Ethiopia hoping to investigate the presence there of Africa Oil, a Swedish company heavily connected to Lundin Petroleum. Lundin has, in Johan's words, a "dirty record when it comes to getting oil in these environments... the trip was a big risk but it was important because it was a Swedish company and we wanted to know what affect they were having there."

For years, a conflict has dragged mercilessly on in the vast desert scrub of Ogaden. A rebel group, the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF), fights assorted Ethiopian forces in the hope of achieving self-determination for Ogaden. Ethiopia views the ONLF as terrorists.

Soldiers of the ONLF. Photo by Johan Persson

"The Ogaden is closed and that means all foreign journalists are kicked out of the region," Johan says. "There are two ways to enter the region as a journalist," Johan told me. "You can go with the Ethiopian army for a propaganda tour or you can go in with rebels fighting for independence." Out of these two "bad options," the journalists went for entering Ogaden with the ONLF, who would take them to the oil fields.

They crossed the border with a smuggler and were almost immediately detected by the Liyu police, a notoriously unpredictable regional security force. There followed a car chase through the desert but, says Martin, when it looked as if they'd got away, "the smuggler overturned the car and ran off into the night. We met a group from the ONLF and started to run."

The group walked for three days, barely sleeping or eating, attempting to escape their hunters. And then, on the next day, they heard shots. Ethiopian soldiers were attacking their group, which scattered. Johan was shot in the arm and Martin was shot through the shoulder. They shouted that they were journalists and as they watched the ONLF fighters disappear into the bush, they were seized by the Ethiopian soldiers. Martin's first thought was, Damn, we lost the story.

The Swedes talked soccer with their captors to try and establish a rapport. Martin's big nose drew comparisons to Zlatan Ibrahimovic. But the Zlatan-LOLs soon ran dry. Martin and Johan were given no medical attention. Johan's gunshot wound got worse and worse. They weren't allowed to call their family. They weren't allowed to call the embassy.

Instead, Abdullahi Werar, the vice president of the Ogaden region and a government loyalist, flew down to meet them and told them that they had to participate in a film in which the Swedes were to recreate their "liberation" by Ethiopian forces. "Basically, he was fabricating evidence to use in court to show us as terrorists," Johan says.

If the journalists didn't cooperate, they'd be shot and the shooting would be blamed on the ONLF. "These people are crazy," Johan tells me. "They are psychopaths, and foreign companies are using them for protection."

They demanded a doctor and a lawyer but none came. At one point, Martin was forced down on his knees and a gun was put to his head. He thought he was going to be executed. But the shots that were fired were into the air, not into his head. While this elaborate piece of propaganda was taking place, Abdullai Hussein, a member of the film crew, had come to the conclusion that what he was seeing was wrong. He would go on to escape to Kenya and then Sweden with the staged footage, which was later shown on Swedish TV.

Johan and Martin spent two and a half months in an anti-terrorist prison before being transferred to the notorious Kaliti Prison in Addis Ababa. They had been charged on a number of counts of terrorism. By embedding with the ONLF Martin and Johan became, in the eyes of the Ethiopian authorities, terrorists themselves.

Kaliti was dusty and overcrowded, full of rats and fleas. Disease was rife, with many of the inmates suffering from tuberculosis and HIV. A brief scene in 438 Days illustrates the dire conditions. A Rastafarian prisoner from Trinidad looks helplessly around him and screams that the prison resembles the cramped bowels of the slave ships. He asks his guards how they could do this to fellow Africans. The guard tells him that he doesn't give a shit because, he says, Ethiopians were the slave traders, not the slaves.


Related: Watch the latest VICE News dispatch from Burundi on the brink


"We heard other prisoners being tortured," Martin recalls. "We heard the screams and also realized there was a pattern to them: at the beginning they were very loud and then you could hear body-on-body contact and in the end they were silent... Had we been Ethiopian journalists, we would have been tortured or shot in the desert."

For Martin though, "The worst thing was not the lack of food, or the violence or that people died and were carried out feet-first, the worst thing was that you were afraid to speak. Every night we had to watch Ethiopian state television and people who talked politics were taken away. Our conversations became more and more rudimentary. It got under your skin. You would wake up in the middle of the night, covered in sweat, wondering if you'd said something bad about the government."

This internalizing of totalitarianism has not left them. "Even speaking to you, I'm thinking about how you might use it against me," Johan says.

A few months into their ordeal, Johan and Martin were taken to court. "Everyone knew that the trial was a play—that it was a piece of theater. And we had to play it as good actors because if we didn't, they'd give us a higher sentence and would find it harder to get a pardon," remembers Johan. Still, they were sentenced to 11 years in prison.

After their sentencing, the journalists met more frequently with Swedish ambassador Jens Odlander. "He was very frank about the realpolitik of the case," Martin says. "After we were sentenced, he said we had two options: either appeal or ask for a pardon. And he said that if we appealed, we should know that there was no country in the world, not even Sweden, that will risk its relationship with Ethiopia because of us, and that we would be sacrificed on the geopolitical altar."

Over on Noisey: These Are the Worst Ever Performances from Radio 1's Live Lounge

Martin and Johan were eventually given a pardon when, as Martin says, "Ethiopia realized that it was beginning to cost more than it takes to have two international journalists locked up in the Kaliti prison." On their release, they gave an interview to Ethiopian state television in which they laid it on thick, thanking the government and admitting to being terribly wrong about what they'd done. "To be honest, the Ethiopian government played us really good," Johan says.

When they got back to Sweden, Martin began seeing a therapist. Johan didn't. He checked into a hotel for the first three days he was back and then moved in with Martin and his wife Linnea. Johan slept on the sofa. After 438 days together in prison, the two journalists needed to be with one another.


On Sunday, Barack Obama flew into Ethiopia. It's the first time a sitting US president has visited the country. At a press conference with the Ethiopian prime minister, Hailemariam Desalegn, Obama said that, "continued growth in Ethiopia depends on the free flow of information" and that the US would "continually bring up" human rights concerns. But the American president also praised the "democratic" nature of Ethiopia's much criticized recent elections, in which the ruling party won every single one of the country's 546 parliamentary seats. First of all, his government would keep working to "continue Ethiopia's economic progress" and "further open US markets to Ethiopian products."

With Ethiopia still a key ally in the War on Terror, Obama's "concerns" about human rights and the freedom of the press may amount to nothing more than diplomatic posturing. Martin and Johan are out of prison but the free, honest reporting they tried to engage in remains illegal.

438 Days is published by Offside Press

Follow Oscar Rickett on Twitter.


Environmentalist Prince Charles Flies 70 Miles to Attend a Polo Match

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Read: Is the Royal Family's Nazi Salute Really a Surprise?: The Pre-War British Aristocracy's Love Affair with Fascism

Environmentalist and heir to the throne Prince Charles has become the subject of public ire after flying 70 miles to a polo match—burning around 200 gallons of aviation fuel in the process.

Displaying the sort of rank opulence that you'd expect from someone poised to inherit a crown full of giant diamonds, Charles has been branded a "hypocrite" after instructing the royal helicopter in Hampshire to fly to Highgrove, his Gloucestershire home, and then on to Windsor Great Park, 68 miles away, the location of Guards Polo Club. He reportedly reached his final destination in a Jaguar.

The polo match he attended was the final of the Coronation Cup between England and South America. England was victorious. After watching Blighty beat Johnny Foreigner he was taken back to Highgrove in the chopper, which was then flown back to its base.

Graham Smith, head of Republic, an anti-monarchy pressure group, said, "Charles is a serial hypocrite. There is no justification for flying around in helicopters. You're not going to convince a family of four to cut down on car use when a prince is flying around the country by helicopter."

Clarence House released a statement stating: "The charitable engagement at Guards Polo Club was fitted into a packed diary at relatively short notice. The Prince had a number of personal commitments after a heavy week of public engagements and his mode of transport was chosen so that no one was let down and limited time available could be maximized."


In Defence of the Senate, House of Scum and Villainy

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The Canadian Senate is awful. It's full of crooks and sycophants and presently serves no function other than to let a bunch of bargain-bin aristocrats thumb their noses at the rest of us scrubs. On a good day, it's a retirement home for partisan hacks who rubber-stamp anything done in the House of Commons. On a bad day, a bunch of senators will steal money from you and then kill legislation (like the "trans rights," Bill C-279) passed by our legitimately elected officials. Worse than being merely useless, it's actively harmful to the exercise of democratic self-government in Canada.

To put it in highly technical political science-y terms, the Senate fucking sucks.

Part of the problem is that the Senate is doing exactly what it's designed to do. Parliament's Upper Chamber is part of the devil's bargain that was Confederation in 1867. The Senate exists because the Founders never intended for Canada to be a democracy. The colonial ruling class was only OK with giving ordinary (white, male) people a democratically-elected House of Commons on the condition that they could appoint their friends and cronies to a higher legislative body that would check any laws passed by uppity peasants. That, and "sober second thought" in lawmaking was a really big deal back when the country was literally run by impressively raging drunks.

In 2015, this translates into a constitutional clusterfuck where a bunch of pompous plutocrats gorge themselves at the public trough with zero democratic accountability. So it's totally understandable that a big chunk of Canadians—including Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall, federal NDP Leader Tom Mulcair, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper—would just rather see it burned to the ground than deal with any more bullshit. Unfortunately for those of us outside Ontario, the only thing arguably worse than having a Senate would be abolishing it altogether.

Yeah, yeah. Sticking up for anything Senate-related right now is roughly on par with throwing out "Hitler had some good ideas" in a conversation about World War II, but hear me out. There are a few good reasons to be skeptical of calls for outright abolition, and none of them are because I'm on #teamduffy.

THROUGH GOD, ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE (EXCEPT AMENDING THE CANADIAN CONSTITUTION)
For starters, it's impossible.

Not literally impossible, obviously. But it's at least discovering-Stephen-Harper-and-Justin-Trudeau-are-secret-best-friends-and-go-to-many-punk-shows-together–level improbable. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled last year that abolishing the Senate would require the unanimous consent of every single province in Canada, and that will never happen. As Saint Andrew Coyne so lovingly put it, "uniquely among the democracies, our constitution is regarded not as an instrument of the people's will, but an obstacle to it; not as the expression of their highest democratic ideals, but the guarantor that they will never be realized." Fuckin' A, buddy!

You'll never get all the provinces on board. Any of the Atlantic provinces would vastly prefer sending 1,000 more Mike Duffys to Ottawa than lose even a fraction of their negligible federal clout. Alberta will be six feet into its cold, tar-flooded grave before it'll give the eastern bastards dominating the Commons a smidgen more power to meddle in its oil industry. And you're out to lunch if you think Québec is ever going to part with some of its presence in Ottawa, no matter how useless or expensive. Every provincial government in this country would gladly cut off their nose to spite the federal face, even if it means the rest of us are stuck filing tax returns to subsidize senatorial charcuterie.

Props to Stephen Harper for attempting to be really clever in trying to get around this deadlock, even if the end result will fall somewhere between a full-blown constitutional crisis or yet another kick in the balls from the Supreme Court. His line about how "it'll save money" is a totally bullshit justification that will only appeal to the sort of people who get their political opinions from Don Cherry. It's also hard to take the prime minister seriously in his attempt to force the provinces into getting serious about Senate reform discussions because the man has never once in the last nine years negotiated in good faith with the provinces about anything, let alone reforming Parliament. Trust me on this: I'm from Newfoundland, and we're more than familiar with Stephen Harper being full of shit. And anyway, a good deal of the Senate's current crisis can actually be laid at the prime minister's feet, so his attempt to run down the constitutional doomsday clock on this is more than a little pathetic.

But all this aside, it's not going to work. It's flagrantly unconstitutional. The prime minister is obligated to appoint senators (or, technically, they tell the Governor General who to appoint, because Canada loves its pretentious and baroque constitutional monarchy). Harper's play will immediately collapse as soon as it's inevitably brought before the Supreme Court, either by some constitutional rights crusader or (more likely) a pissed-off provincial government demanding its Senate seats.

Unfortunately for both Harper and Mulcair, there's no way to cheat our way to Senate reform. We have to actually buckle down and do the work or else we're stuck with the dysfunctional trash compactor as-is. And because this is Canada, petty federal infighting leading to inaction is the most likely outcome.

RAGIN' REGIONS
Even if it were possible to scrap the Senate, it's not all that great of an idea. The hard truth of it is that the Senate is one of the only reasons we even got Confederation in the first place. The smaller Maritime provinces never would have consented to the union without being guaranteed a space for equitable federal representation vis-à-vis the vastly more populous and economically powerful United Canadas.

Because the Senate was appointed instead of elected, it was effectively disconnected from popular representation and could create a more equal playing field for the demographically divergent provinces. It was also meant to provide a space for truly "national" deliberation, freed from short-term electoral pandering. Even the Supreme Court of Canada admitted in its 2014 Senate reform reference that the institution "lies at the heart of the agreements that gave birth to the Canadian federation." The only reason the provinces ever consented to Confederation was on the understanding that there would be a regionally-balanced upper house.

And that's the crux of the matter. The Senate is the only site at the federal level where we can set aside guaranteed representation of regional and other minority interests. Without it—in a system where there is only a House of Commons—all representation boils down to population size. Smaller provinces will be further squeezed out from meaningful participation in national decision-making. Maybe this sounds fine from the downtown Toronto loft apartment you share with Margaret Wente, but it's a pretty fucking alienating proposition to the east, west, and north coasts of the country.

Short of some kind of balanced upper chamber, the only recourse most provinces have to get their voices heard in Ottawa is through having their premiers directly haggling with the Prime Minister's Office. This is at least as unaccountable as unelected senators, if not more so. Voters in each province elect their respective governments, but unlike in the Senate—where debates, committee hearings, and other deliberative practices are publicly recorded for public scrutiny—these elite meetings between provincial and federal heads of government happen in secret. Think about all the problems with the Meech Lake Accord being negotiated by "11 men in suits behind closed doors" and multiply it by every intergovernmental decision ever made in the federation.

And this still isn't particularly effective for smaller provincial governments. If you think regional tensions are a problem now, just imagine if we turned federalism into a no-holds-barred lobbying free-for-all. I mean, if your kids keep beating the shit out of each other, you put them in sports so they have a more productive outlet for their violent competitive urges. This is basically the same logic behind channeling regionalism through the Senate.

WE COULD MAKE IT SUCK LESS
Again: none of this is to excuse the Senate in its present form. It's a piece of shit. But we're stuck with it in some form or another, so maybe we should start exercising our political imagination and figure out how to make it suck a little less. Electing senators is a good start. We could cap them at eight- or ten-year terms so that they can still sit outside the normal electoral cycle and foster a little long-term national perspective, while still letting some fresh air circulate through the Red Chamber every now and then. And while making any changes to the constitution is an enormous pain in the ass, you only need the approval of seven provinces that also make up 50 percent of the population. Not that this is a walk in the park, but it's a hell of a lot more doable than unanimous consent.

My personal wonk dream is that we overhaul all of Parliament into a mixed-member proportional voting system where we send our local MPs to the Commons and choose senators every other election from a regional-based list of candidates balanced by gender and race. While we're at it, we could also add the third chamber—the House of First Peoples—recommended by the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples in 1996. The immediate Bolshevization of the means of production would be nice too, but I'm pretty flexible on that.

Or, I dunno, fuck it. If we can't elect our senators, maybe we can turn it into a Hunger Games-type situation. Make the premiers appoint senators, who then have to fight each other to the death, and the winner can automatically craft and pass any one law of their choosing before they're given an immediate Viking funeral—and we do this once every decade. I think you'd really raise the calibre of senate appointees.

I mean, if we're stuck with the fucking thing, we can at least make it fun. Right?

Follow Drew Brown on Twitter.

VICE Vs Video Games: Gamers Today Don't Realize How Good They've Got It

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If you're seeing the loading screen of 'Bloodborne' a lot, after dying at the cruel hands of this bastard, don't get stressed—believe us, it could be a lot worse.

The games industry is a wonderful place that constantly pushes boundaries, delivers fresh new ideas and innovates wildly on a yearly basis. So it's always confused me to see a clutch of gamers mouthing off about the hobby, constantly, as if it were some burnt-out car by the side of a forgotten road—a wreck beyond repair, of little use to anyone, and quickly losing relevance. I don't get it.

Sure, in today's industry we're susceptible to broken game launches like Batman: Arkham Knight on PC, DDoS attacks by dickhead kids who mistakenly think they're heroes, annual franchises dictated by focus group, and a glut of DLC rammed daily down the throats of consumers from day one.

It could be better, sure, but it's not exactly the Third World, is it? "Oh no, Bloodborne load times are slightly longer than the norm—quick friends, make haste to the forums and social networks to complain about how Sony owes us something more!" Give me a break. Now, I know what some of you must be thinking, so no: I'm not saying all gamers are like this. Repeat: Not. All. Gamers. Are. Like. This.

But let's rewind and put things into perspective a little here. On one hand you have players who love putting this industry to the sword for no justifiable reason, and on the other you have the retro fanatics who harp on about how modern games are terrible when compared to what they played as kids. Opinions are personal of course, but if you really want to make a case for how damn good you all have it today, you only need to go back to the 1980s and early 90s.

Back in the 1990s we would have literally emptied our bowels into our Umbros if you told us that, one day, games were going to look as good as Bloodborne and only take a minute or two to load for the privilege. It was common in the 80s to whack a game cassette into your ZX Spectrum (or Commodore 64, if your parents loved you) and wait a full half-hour for the bastard to load.

Yes, half an hour. I'm dead serious. You'd press play and mute the television to avoid the hideous sound of the data processing—it sounded like someone scrubbing a cheese grater over an already irritable cat's nutsack—and then you'd go off and do something to fritter away the time.

Remember when games looked like this? No, I suppose you probably don't.

I have fond, yet hazy memories of loading games on Sunday nights after my homework was done, and filling that time by watching TV over dinner. I'd wolf down some meat and veg and shotgun my Sunny D while watching a weeknight gameshow—all in the time it took Fantasy Land Dizzy to load up.

Or did it load? Sometimes you'd return to the computer to find that the hardware had mangled up your tape, or it had failed at around the 29-minute mark just to really fuck with you. It was enough to bring your piss to a boil, and all you could do was either try again or admit defeat. Waiting two minutes for more Bloodborne is nothing when you've danced with cassette games. Trust me on this one.

But at least games weren't online, so that meant there was no chance of your network of choice getting hacked or being hit by server failures. That's definitely a good thing. I mean, can you imagine playing the 1983 Spectrum hit Chuckie Egg online with other people? The chat box would be all like, "U COLLECT EGGS LIKE SH1T M8. UR LADDER GAME IS W4NK LOL." Kill them. With fire.

Article continues after the following video


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Take a second to think about how revolutionary online gaming is: you have millions of gamers all connected who are able to play together, regardless of proximity, at any time they choose. We'd have burned you at the stake for suggesting this just a few decades ago, and thanks to that shell suit you were rocking in 1988 you'd roast up nicely.

Fine, online gaming goes wrong sometimes, and yes you may feel cheated out of your subscription fee, but it's all too easy—especially if you're a digital native—to overlook just how wondrous today's technology is. Some of you reading this won't know the misery of loading up a match of Command & Conquer or ChuChu Rocket! on a 56k line, and that wasn't even that long ago, relatively speaking.

It was awe-inspiring enough that we overlooked the tedium of it all, but today, when a game runs at 30 frames per second instead of 60, it's enough to make some gamers lose their minds and come out with foamy-mouthed tirades against the developers. I remember the time when games used to suffer crippling slow-down because there were four characters on the screen instead of three.

Did the ending of 'Mass Effect 3' get you down? Fuck it, man, at least the story that came before it was amazing.

But those old games—as cumbersome and trying as they could be—had a simplistic magic about them. Did you feel betrayed by the original Mass Effect 3 ending, the one that asked you to use your imagination for once and make up your own mind about what happened? The one that cleverly left it open so that you could put your own, personal spin on the finale?

Try playing a retro game with no story or narrative at all, where the only additional depth given is that which you make up in your own head. Did Alex Kidd have reams of exposition and cutscenes explaining every single insufferable detail of his world and backstory? No, but it was insane fun creating those stories for yourself as a kid.

Now we have tome-worthy games that display sheer narrative mastery and penmanship that heightens the play experience into the stratosphere. The Last of Us and The Walking Dead are two examples of games by studios that hired real writers to sculpt actual worlds, believable characters, and emotion-grabbing turns. In the 1980s some developers gave the writing job to coders who cobbled together a story in a spare five minutes on their lunch break in exchange for a few cigarettes.

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The craft of making games has improved dramatically in such a short space of time, but something is still often missing from the soul of today's industry—call it heart, call it a lost sense of wonder or magic. Whatever it was, it's gone now in extremis, given way to short tempers and even shorter attention spans—where games look stunning, yet the masses pick up on every minor flaw and demand their money back with real hatred in their voices.

I was a gamer in the late-80s and, while those fond memories will follow me to the grave, I feel lucky to have witnessed the passing of time to get to this point, to see just how truly incredible things have become. When I was ten years old, reading the latest issue of Sega Power before school, with the Super Mario Bros. Super Show on the TV, I used to wonder how amazing games would be when I was a grown-up.

I used to draw my own Super Mario Bros. 3 levels on graph paper stolen from school, and wished that I could play them in real life. Super Mario Maker comes out soon, which will let me do just that, and that's an incredible thing indeed. As dumb as it may sound, that makes me feel like a kid again. Equally, anyone can download creation tools like Unity, GameMaker or Garry's Mod today, right now, and make whatever sort of game they want assuming they've got enough time, patience, and practice.

If you're not excited about 'Super Mario Maker,' you've probably never played a 2D Mario game.

The present we live in now was hard to predict back then. I simply couldn't comprehend the photo-real worlds, slick gameplay, and immersing narratives we have in 2015—it felt space age when Mario was still rendered in 8bit pixels, something I would never see before I died of old age. But most importantly, I imagined just how happy and blown away I, and all the other gamers I knew (and the many millions more that I didn't), would be by those experiences.

I'm older and wiser now, and it's disappointing to see that many gamers aren't happy at all. This industry gives its audience the chance to go anywhere, be anyone, and achieve the impossible, if only for a few hours a day, and it still isn't enough.

Oh, what I wouldn't give to let you see through that ten year old's eyes and show you what I used to think this point in time would look like. Then you'd realize just how good you really have it.

Follow Dave Cook on Twitter.

Why Are Lie Detectors Still a Thing?

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Why Are Lie Detectors Still a Thing?

Decades After Europe and the US, Canada Approves the Abortion Pill

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Decades After Europe and the US, Canada Approves the Abortion Pill

A Texas Inmate Dreams of Walking to Canada

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This story was co-published with the Marshall Project.

Steven Ray Epperson lived in D-pod, but all the pods looked the same, so it could have been A, B, C or E. Same squeaky grey concrete floors; same brew of body odors; same slapping dominoes and arguments over the TV; same polished metal tables, those octagons bolted to the floor, like a fleet of little spaceships permanently docked.

Epperson saw all of this on his daily walks, though he didn't pay much attention as he closed his eyes, adjusted his headphones, and trudged in endless circles. Sometimes he would pray. "Every pod's got one," he would say, meaning a full-time walker. The younger guys would try to talk to him, but he mostly ignored them, preferring the images in his head: He had realized that all this walking probably added up to miles, so he started picturing how far he might be getting. D-pod at the Travis County Correctional Complex, on the outskirts of Austin, Texas, is about 270 miles from the border of Oklahoma, which is about 230 miles from the border of Kansas. And so on.

Walking was Epperson's way of coping with the jittery boredom of being in a county jail. Late last year, he was arrested for dealing methamphetamine ("I like to make stuff, with my hands," was his coy explanation), and it wasn't the first time. Or the second. He had a grab bag of a record going back to at least 1989, and had served many of his 57 years in state prisons in East Texas, a lifer in the broad sense of having spent a lot of his life locked up. His son has been alive for 23 years, and Epperson has missed 15 of them. "It's friggin' sad man," he once wrote.

Now, it was May 2015, and Epperson was waiting to see whether prosecutors might cut him a break. Austin is one of the few places in Texas with a Democrat in the district attorney's seat, and drugs are no longer the target of a nationwide "War." You never know, though; Epperson would have a hard time arguing that this was his last run-in with the law.

Draping a leg over his chair on a recent afternoon, with his big grin and thinning hair and olive skin—Latina mother, white father—Epperson did not appear worried. Even prison was better than this purgatory. In prison, at least you know how long your sentence is going to be. Plus you can get a job. But here in the jail, the jobs are more scarce; what's the point of training someone who could get called back to court and disappear?

With little to do, restlessness seeps through the bodies in this place—imagine living at the DMV, with terrible food and even less comfortable seats. There are the usual activities: reading, writing, push-ups, sit-ups. Some detox or stew alone with their mental illnesses. Others study for their GED or go to AA.

A lot of guys, including Epperson's three cellmates, slept all day and then chatted all night. This annoyed the hell out of Epperson. "I can't abide that shit," he'd say of the young men's habits. Back in prison, after long days trucking around to different units and laying concrete foundations for new buildings, Epperson used to sleep hard and easy. Now, in order to survive the jail, he needed a new way to tire himself out. Hence the walking.

Epperson's mood during his walks was not so different from his days of freedom, when he would spend hours painting buildings as a contractor, listening to the radio, and getting into his own head. Throughout the years, he had cultivated himself into the kind of person perhaps only Austin—the blue dot in the red state—can produce, with both a Limbaugh-esque distrust of liberals ("Obama-nation" is a favorite pun) and a nostalgia for his youth, when "I personally discovered weed, peace, and love, and it seemed like everyone did."

In and out of so many institutions, Epperson has had a lot of time to think and time to read, and he likes to talk about his faith. The jail is a good place to preach to his fellow man—he points out that "the Apostle Paul did his greatest work in prison."

Much of Paul's work was writing, and Epperson decided to do the same. Once a week for two months this past spring, Epperson climbed the stairs at the education wing of the jail, said hello to Officer Long at the front desk, and plopped down in a classroom. The jail provided golf pencils, the kind without erasers, but everyone knew that the rubber, standard-issue black clogs worked just as well if you scrubbed them against the notebook paper. The number of students varied wildly, since there was no telling if a certain pod would go on lockdown or if half the class would have a court date. For eight consecutive Mondays, Epperson did not miss a class, and on the final day of class, he was the only student there.

One of his homework assignments was to write about a typical day at the jail, so Epperson sat down and penned an essay about his walking. On the fronts and backs of several sheets of notebook paper, he strolls north out of Austin, noting how "walking through Texas was sorta uneventful since I've been through it so many times in my life."

But soon he becomes a foreigner. He is wearing a t-shirt with the University of Texas Longhorn logo ("my blood is pretty much burnt orange"), and this leads to some mysterious minor martyrdom once he crosses into Oklahoma, home of the Longhorns' sworn rivals, the University of Oklahoma Sooners. He is cat-called and jeered, but he keeps walking up Interstate Highway 35, through Kansas and then Nebraska, splitting the country in two. "The cornfields slowly disappear as I leave Nebraska," Epperson writes, "entering the Dakotas and the terrain turns rocky and desolate. Still, though, the beauty of the different colors and shapes of the huge rocks is mind-blowing. The earth tones shimmering in the sunset and sunrises go on forever.

"Speaking of forever so does this long, lonely highway!"

Perhaps it is the cold or the fact that he misses Texas or the lack of a passport, but Epperson turns around when he hits Canada. "I'm so tired of walking," he writes. "I never want to do this again!"

A month later, he would get a lucky break from the DA: a maximum of five years with a chance at parole almost immediately. According to the mysterious algorithms of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, his "projected release date" is in May 2017. But before he left on a prison bus for the state intake facility, three hours east of Austin in Huntsville, he had some advice for the unceasing stream of younger guys replacing him every day at the county jail: "The mind is a terrible thing to waste! So walk it off!"

Steven Epperson was a student of staff writer Maurice Chammah in a class offered by the Freehand Arts Project, a nonprofit organization that teaches writing at the Travis County Correctional Complex.

This article was originally published by The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that covers the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletter, or follow The Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter.

Photos of Australia's Most Fashionable Gang

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Sharpies, or sharps, are the darlings of Australian gang fashion. They started out in the 1960s when groups of working-class teenagers in Melbourne, and to a lesser extent, Sydney, came together over cars, tattoos, fights, and "dressing sharp." While US-style motorcycle clubs evolved around leather jackets, Australian sharpies defined themselves by Conny tops, Staggers jeans, and chiseled shoes. But like bikers, sharpies placed a similar value on loyalty asserted with violence.

Nick Tolewski was in his early teens in the late 1970s when he started taking photos of the Thomastown Sharps, one of Melbourne's largest sharpie groups in the city's north. A few years ago Tolewski self-published the photos he took during that time in a book titled Once Were Sharps. Now, with a second book on the way, we sat down for a chat.

VICE: Hi, Nick. Tell me about growing up with these guys.
Nick Tolewski: A lot of them lived on the same street. As a young kid I would see them at Andy's Pinball Parlour, the roller disco on Settlement Road, the swimming pool, the youth center on a Friday night, or at the Main Street Recreation Reserve. Then I got to know some of them through my love of pigeons. I used to breed pigeons when I was five and so did a bunch of the Thomastown Sharps. So we used to go to each other's houses and check out what we each had. But see, I was eight years younger than a lot of them. I used to run around like a little mascot to them. When I was 13 I started boxing with Squirt, who was similar in age and part of the sharpies because his brother was Thomastown's main guy.

Apparently sharpies were like Australian skinheads. Were they racists?
Nah, they weren't. The Thomastown Sharps were all different nationalities. They had all religions, races... it was all mixed. A lot of the ethnics had been in Thomastown for 20 years. The rest of the city was still getting used to the influx of migrants that arrived in the 50s and 60s, but Thomastown had racial harmony.

But they were definitely violent?
Oh, sure. The Thomastown Sharps had five big names: Big Louie, Blacky, Mitcho, Big Ears, and Wayne. They were all the big blokes and got in a lot of brawls, but Big Louie was definitely the toughest. He didn't fear anyone. He knew Chopper Read the best out of Thomo boys and they spent some time together in Pentridge Prison.

There are a lot of tattoos in these photos. Tell me about what tattoos meant?
To get inked back then made a statement. Some of the boys got the names of the core members tattooed on them. It was like a badge of honor and a distinctive statement that showed you didn't care what others thought. The boys couldn't always afford to get them done properly, so they'd jerry-rig a tattoo gun with pen ink, wire, and a small motor. Snatch tattooed "fuck off" on Pee Wee's lip. The Pink Panther and a bluebird were also iconic tattoos among the sharps.

That takes me to my next observation: There's not a lot of girls in these photos. Did anyone ever have a girlfriend?
Yeah, there weren't too many girls in Thomastown, but there were a few scattered across different sharpie gangs. They were tough and held their own. No one did them any favors because they could do it for themselves. But a lot of the guys had girlfriends. Snatch had a fair few. He was seen as the ladies man among the Thomo sharps. He used to pull in the sheilas.

What happened to the Thomastown Sharps?
In the early 80s, they started using guns. Places started getting shot up and the whole gang thing was taken to another level. Also drugs got in the way. Blokes were getting on heroin. They were ten years older and everything changed.

So what are these guys doing now?
One of them works for the local council of Whittlesea. One is a schoolteacher in Daylesford. Another is a builder in Bundoora. A lot of them became panel beaters. But the majority of them don't work these days. And a lot of them have passed away from overdoses or car accidents.

What do you think of modern gangs?
No good, mate. Too much violence with knives and guns, which leads to killings. The Lebanese Tigers and Black Dragons used to do their karate, but most of the fights back in the day were fists and feet. Also, gangs now take all types of drugs that make them go mad. It's not good.

So what do you still find appealing about the sharpies?
The look of them. With their hair, tattoos, clothes, and how they hung out as a gang. They were tough, you know. And as a little kid, coming from a working class family, you looked up to those guys. They gave me a sense of belonging and purpose.

Interview by Dan Nulley. Follow him on Twitter

Hacker Sends Toronto Woman Creepy Pictures of Herself Taken Through Her Own Webcam

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Faces have been blurred. Screenshot via Facebook

It was the end of a long day, and Chelsea Clark and her boyfriend had settled in for a Netflix marathon on his laptop. "We were for sure watching Adventure Time," says the 27-year-old bartender. "Pretty normal Wednesday night stuff."

Yet the couple's rather unremarkable, rather intimate evening soon became anything but.

Logging into Facebook after work the next day, Clark says her blood ran cold. An anonymous account had sent her a series of photos of the couple's evening, seemingly taken from the laptop's camera. "They were so freakishly intimate," she says.

"Realy,cute couple [sic]" was the only message.

Terrified, Clark immediately called the Toronto police. "It felt so invasive, like someone was in my house with me."

While this type of incident is not unheard of, Clark's case is especially peculiar.

The images were taken using her boyfriend's PC laptop, a computer Clark says she never uses. "It's just for video games and occasionally we'll use Netflix on it," she explains. From there, the perpetrator managed to make the link to Clark, hacking into her Facebook account and adding himself to her contacts to send the images.

"I have my privacy setting set so that no one can message me except friends," she says of her Facebook account. "So when I got an unknown [message] I thought it seemed weird," she says. "I went into history to see when [the user] was added and it was just before the messages were sent."

Cyber security expert Eric Parent says the context suggests the perpetrator knows the couple. "Or we're dealing with someone who took the time to understand the relationship between these two people," says Parent. "And that takes digging, since it's not because I saw you on a webcam that I know who you are."

The (now-deleted) Facebook profile used to send the photos offers little insight into the perpetrator's identity (Mahmoud Abdo seems to be an incredibly common name, and is likely a fake). Alongside profile pictures featuring Heath Ledger as the Joker or strange motivational sayings, the person followed a variety of soccer club pages and belonged to a group called "Spammers and Hackers." The user's location is listed as Cairo, Egypt.

mahmoud.jpg

Screenshot via Facebook

Parent believes this detail could be a red herring. "You'd have to be kind of crazy to be sitting in Egypt and say 'I'm going to traumatize a couple on the other side of the planet'," he says, adding this type of long-distance harassment would then typically be accompanied by some form of extortion. "It's much more likely someone they know."

Motivation aside, Parent warns that hacking a webcam is relatively easy. "If you have access to the physical computer, all you need is some tech knowledge and a USB key and you're done," he says. Remote access, he explains, requires some form of user involvement. "Something has to be clicked, a doc has to be opened," he says. But all in all, it's a relatively simple hack that can be hard to detect. "It's very difficult to protect yourself from this type of attack because the stuff that we do normally, like opening email, is stuff that just happens," says Parent. "The best thing you can do is to have security software, keep everything up to date, and cross your fingers."

The couple still has no idea how the computer was accessed. "My boyfriend has nothing outstanding in his browser history, there's no security alert, no virus," Clark says. "He ran a scan and it came back normal."

According to Clark, the police's initial intervention offered little assistance. "They came over and took a statement, and they were very nice and polite and completely useless."

She says the officers told her they didn't have the resources to deal with kind of offence. "They were like, 'Maybe just block this person and hope they don't contact you again,'" she says. "Great, sure."

VICE contacted the Toronto police and was referred to one department after another, a Kafkaesque series of phone calls that illustrates how complicated navigating this type of offence can be.

When we finally reached the detective in charge of Clark's case, Constable Garth Naidoo said he was unable to share much information. "At this point it's very early in the investigation."

Naidoo told VICE his team needed more details from Clark in order to move forward, but had been unable to reach her. He then inquired as to how we had managed to reach her and asked if we could provide them with the name of Clark's employer or another phone number.

The detective said the first responders' initial comments, about the force's lack of cybercrime resources, had been misconstrued. "That is not the case, we do have an entire unit devoted to this kind of thing," Naidoo said, advising VICE to contact the tech crimes department directly.

Yet calls to both the Toronto police switchboard and duty desk yielded confused responses from staff who seemingly had no idea the force even had a tech or cybercrime force.

When VICE's call was transferred to Toronto Police Operations Centre, the woman at the end of the line said members of the tech crimes team did not speak directly to reporters, and that the particulars of Clark's case could only be obtained through an access to information request.

She said Clark was likely withholding details. "Obviously he got her information somehow, she had put it out there," she said of the hacker. "She's either missing something or not being forthcoming with you about what happened."

When asked if she could comment on this type of investigation in general, the woman told VICE they did not "police the internet," and that it was up to people to "censor themselves."

"We can't walk over to Egypt and tell him what to do," she added, hanging up when VICE requested her name.

Parent says this type of crime is tricky for law enforcement. If the offender is located, police could potentially lay identity fraud, harassment and voyeurism charges.But tracking down the perpetrator can be a challenge. In Clark's case, Parent says police have the legal power to retrieve the user's details, including the IP address, directly from Facebook's administrators. "You have a context where you know there is a false account, so they shouldn't have any trouble getting that information," he says.

The possible international angle adds a layer of complication. "If you're dealing with a country that's a member of Interpol, then it's feasible," he says. "But if the Toronto police calls Interpol and says, 'Someone hacked a laptop and took pictures,' well, they have worse issues to deal with."

He says the frequency and volume of cyber offences, combined with a perceived lack of 'real' threat, means the files often linger. "There are so many stories like this one," Parent says. "It's only when someone's life is at stake or when someone has died that the files get floated to the top."

Clark contacted both Facebook and Netflix to flag the problem. While Facebook told her that the account did not violate their terms of service, a media relations representative told VICE the account had since been removed. Netflix did not respond to VICE's request for comments, nor to Clark's concerns.

After VICE's phone calls, Clark says the police finally got in touch and were soon coming to pick up the laptop and router. "I would just like some peace of mind to know that it's not going to go any further," she says.

"If this is just something that happens and we need to be more careful using our computers, that's fine," she says, adding she's now put a band-aid over her webcam. "But I want to know where this person is from, that it's not someone who knows where I live."

Follow Brigitte Noël on Twitter.


From Gary to Molly: The Feminization of Ecstasy in Popular Culture

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From Gary to Molly: The Feminization of Ecstasy in Popular Culture

Photos from Miss Amazing, the Pageant of the Special Olympics

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When Jordan Somer started the Miss Amazing Pageant in 2007, she envisioned an event where women and girls with disabilities could walk onstage and carry themselves with confidence. Now, the two-day event is staged alongside the Special Olympics and includes over 100 contestants from across the country, some of whom look forward to the event all year.

But this is not your standard beauty pageant. There is no swimsuit portion, not a whiff of competitiveness. Instead, Miss Amazing is all about self-confidence, celebrating individuality, and giving girls and women with disabilities the change to shine. The event is divided into eight different age groups, who each participate in a talent showcase (including things like singing, dancing, gymnastics, hockey maneuvers, and magic) and an evening-wear portion, where they are escorted by dates and hunky men from the local fire department.

Photographer Michelle Groskopf took a backstage look at the pageant, where she watched the girls primp, practice their talents, and eventually parade onstage beaming with confidence. At the end, every contestant received a crown—and yes, these pageant queens cry too.

See more of Michelle Groskopf's photography on her website and on Instagram.


Cry-Baby of the Week: A Guy Called the Cops Because a Cat Ate His Bacon

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It's time, once again, to marvel at some idiots who don't know how to handle the world:

Cry-Baby #1: An unnamed man in Yorkshire, England

Photos via Pixabay and Wikimedia Commons

The incident: A man discovered his girlfriend had fed his bacon to a cat.

The appropriate response: Asking her not to do that, if it bothers you.

The actual response: He called the emergency services.

Earlier this week, West Yorkshire Police in England released several of the most ridiculous calls they've received to their 999 emergency number.

The most ridiculous of these ridiculous calls (which you can listen to here) is a man who is calling to report his girlfriend for feeding his bacon to a cat.

The call opens with the caller saying, "Er, me girlfriend has let the cat eat my bacon."

"What would you like the police to do with regards to that, sir?" the operator asks. The man tells the operator that he wants to press charges. "Against who," the operator asks. "Your girlfriend, or the cat?"

After telling the operator that he wants to press charges against both his girlfriend and the cat, the man is told that it's not an arrestable offense to let a cat eat bacon, and also that the West Yorkshire Police does not arrest cats. The man then ends the call.

Other 999 calls released by the West Yorkshire force include a woman calling to report a pigeon in her house, someone calling to report that food they'd ordered wasn't very good, and a woman complaining that her neighbor's washing machine was too loud.

Speaking to the Yorkshire Evening Post, Tom Donahoe, who heads up West Yorkshire Police's team of 999 operators, said, "The serious point is that, a lot of the time, we're talking about a matter of seconds between us being able to get to a genuine emergency effectively and not being able to, and therefore having people's lives put at risk."

Tom also described a call they'd received in which a man asked for help figuring out who played the lead role in Magnum P.I. He did not specify whether or not the 999 operator had been able to help the guy out.

Cry-Baby #2: A Starbucks manager in Tampa, Florida

Screencap via Google Maps

The incident: A man made a habit of confronting people who illegally park in the handicapped parking space outside his local Starbucks.

The appropriate response: Congratulating him.

The actual response: He was banned from Starbucks for life.

For the last few years, St. Petersburg, Florida, resident Rob Rowen (pictured above) has been confronting people who illegally park in the handicapped spot at the Starbucks he visits daily.

This is important to Rob, as his son-in-law has muscular dystrophy and, Rob says, often has difficulty finding parking. He told ABC News that while some customers he confronted would move politely, others complained to Starbucks staff.

Speaking to Tampa's WTSP 10 News, Rob described his confrontations with customers unhappy about being asked to move their cars. One man accused Rob of harassment after Rob took a photo of him and his car. In another incident, a woman called the police after Rob took a photo of her car parked in the handicapped space; according to Rob, she ended up getting a ticket for illegal parking, which he said "felt really good."

Then, a few months ago, another customer complained about being confronted Rob to the manager of the Starbucks. According to Rob, after this incident, the manager approached him and said, "I don't want you harassing my customers. I don't want you to come back in this store ever."

A few days later, Rob received a letter from Starbucks. Initially, he thought the company was writing to apologize, but actually, the letter informed Rob that the ban had been extended to every single Starbucks in the world.

It reads, in part: "Starbucks requires that you leave its locations immediately and do not return. This expulsion notice is permanent and applies to all Starbucks locations."

After Rob's story started getting national media attention, though, a representative for Starbucks announced they were overturning the ban. "Mr. Rowen is welcome at any of our stores and we will work with him to improve the parking situation at this store and create better awareness and understanding of of the parking issue," a spokesman for the company said in an email to ABC News.

Who here is the bigger cry-baby? Let us know in this little poll down here:

Previously: A company who fired a toll booth operator for paying a customer's toll vs. some cops who arrested a woman for leaving her children unattended 30 feet away while she was being interviewed for a job.

Winner: The toll booth company!!!

Follow Jamie on Twitter.

Narcomania: The Case for Legalizing Weed This Year in the UK

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Photo by Flickr user daddyboskeazy

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Thanks to a young economics student, it looks like Parliament is going to be debating the legalization of cannabis in the UK before the end of the year. An online petition started by James Owen, a 25-year-old on his final year at Aberystwyth University, urging MPs to make the "production, sale and use of cannabis legal" picked up way over the 100,000 signatures (183,868 at the time of writing) it needed for MPs to consider debating the issue.

Politicians will be cursing pesky James, because they notoriously hate having to talk about drugs. Taking a more lenient approach towards narcotics is not a vote winner, and discussion around the topic is a minefield in which anyone who dares suggest anything other than the status quo is usually shot down in flames by the media, the opposition and their own party.

On Motherboard: The Texas Republican Grandma Who Wants to Legalize Weed

Whatever they may think privately, breaching the unofficial parliamentary law of omerta on the thorny issue of drugs is a gamble few politicians (with anything to lose) are willing to take. And anyway, why bother devoting valuable parliamentary time on a little issue linked to nearly 3,000 deaths a year, huge swathes of taxpayers' money, physical addiction, mental health and incarceration when you can instead resurrect the debate about man's inalienable right to chase and kill foxes for sport, and then spend hours arguing about that?

When I spoke to Owen—a member of the youth wing of the Tories, as it turns out—he told me he lodged his petition last Tuesday for three reasons, all of which neatly sum up the various motivations of Britain's diverse bag of cannabis legalization enthusiasts.

First, he says, Britain is backward. Why is it that cannabis legalization is gaining credence across America, a land that started the war on drugs, yet in Britain the mere notion of someone buying and smoking weed in the privacy of their own home—an act that affects no one but them—is still illegal?

Second, on purely economic grounds, Owen says that government intervention into the market (the act of prohibition) has caused it to fail—so consumers are getting ripped off and exposed to huge risks.

Finally, it's a human rights issue. It is crazy, he says, that some of his friends who had promising careers now have black marks on their name just because they have convictions for cannabis possession. He also thinks people should be free to grow their own weed.

Objectively, this all makes a lot of sense. But if it the parliamentary debate is given the go ahead at a Petitions Committee meeting in September, will it even touch the sides?

The last time our MPs were railroaded into talking about drugs was in October of 2014, when Green MP Caroline Lucas secured over 130,000 signatures on a petition calling for MPs to support an impact assessment and cost benefit analysis of the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act.

Hardly any MPs turned up. The debating chamber was deserted. On the same day, the doomed government drug minister, Lib Dem Norman Baker, revealed an international fact-finding trip undertaken by his party had found no evidence that making drugs illegal actually deterred drug use. "The Lib Dems have blown £40,000 [$63,000] of taxpayers' money on a magical mystery tour around the world looking at countries with soft drugs laws," a Home Office minister snarled to the Daily Mail.

And that was that. The biggest chance MPs had to discuss drugs openly, armed with evidence from around the world, was a false dawn, a damp squib, hyped by the left wing media, which changed virtually nothing.



WATCH: We Watched London's Weed Fanatics Getting Arrested in Hyde Park On 4/20:


So has anything happened from last October to now that will make Owen's debate any less of a let down? Will a meaningful democratic debate involving more than ten MPs actually occur?

Because the general election in May was mainly about immigration, the NHS and Ed Miliband being a pillock, drugs didn't get a look in. The only time they did was an attempt by the Labour party to curry favor with curtain twitchers by sending out postcards accusing the Lib Dems of being SOFT ON CRIME for suggesting low-level drug possession should be decriminalized.

The upshot of the election was that parliament's already half-assed ability to debate drugs was curtailed even further.

The only parties with any detailed, ground breaking stuff about drugs in their manifestos either got obliterated to just eight MPs (the Lib Dems) or continued to bumble along with just the one MP (the Greens). Despite their nation's serious drug problem, the Scottish National Party were the only political party to have nothing at all about drugs in their manifesto, so any contribution from them is likely to be based around political bitching rather than informed debate.

Next up was the Psychoactive Substances Bill, the government's attempt at tackling legal highs. While it was based on sound advice from drug experts—to clamp down on the sale of powerful synthetic cannabinoids and cathinones to vulnerable kids—its fine print was labelled a shambles in the Lords because it effectively banned everything. What this glitch exposed was not that the government was actually trying to ban every mood altering substance, but that its whole approach to drug policy is amateurish and lazy.

Even in the face of a second consecutive year of rising drug use among young people, the gormless mantra from the Home Office remained: "Drug use is falling, our policy is working."

READ ON MUNCHIES: A Recipe for Cannabis-Infused Bulletproof Coffee

It was money, in the form of taxed cannabis, that proved so influential in the rise of America's revolution in weed laws (a VICE investigation last year found that legalizing cannabis would save the UK billions). Money, or the lack of it, could prove influential in Britain. In July, four police forces, initiated by Durham constabulary, declared that, because they needed to focus dwindling resources on more pressing problems, they would be turning a blind eye to small-scale cannabis possession and cultivation.

There may well be rising, de facto cannabis decriminalization on the ground, yet government policy is a different matter. So I asked Harry Shapiro, of the drug charity DrugScope, what the prospects are for cannabis legalization in the short to medium term.

"Highly unlikely," he said. "There may well be enough signatures to trigger a debate, but I see no signs of any serious political 'drivers' for reform. Not from campaign groups who obviously want reform, nor the occasional comment by a Police and Crime Commissioner or Chief Constable, but, for instance, a consensus across the media, or the National Police Chiefs' Council, or the British Medical Association. Certainly this won't past muster in parliament: drug use is still a toxic area—ask a certain peer."

To pretend that government drug policy has been a total disaster would be fraudulent. But while huge leaps have been made in drug treatment over the last 30 years, the status quo—namely the day-in, day-out criminalization of the addicted, the poor, and of young people, accompanied by the increasing and inevitable risks of an unregulated market—is scandalous. Politicians don't care because the people most likely to be trampled by our drug laws are neither a large part of the electorate nor buy the Daily Mail. They can be safely ignored.

Some cannabis planted in London by Feed the Birds

However, there is a growing movement for reform, reflected in opinion polls and by a cluster of very well organized NGOs, such as Transform, LEAP and Release, which are pushing for debate. They are doing so alongside a rapidly expanding network of cannabis clubs and a lengthening queue of former ministers and police chiefs who, jettisoned from the constraints of power, feel able to say what they really think on drugs.

What is required in this upcoming debate is a sea change from within, the "political driver" that Shapiro talks about. Maybe the ticking time bomb underneath prohibition is the man at the center of power.

Before he was leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron was a member of a home affairs select committee inquiry into drug policy in 2002. It recommended that the government initiated a discussion of "alternative ways—including the possibility of legalization and regulation—to tackle the global drugs dilemma." At the time, he told the drug users pamphlet, User's Voice: "We found some of the arguments of the legalizers quite persuasive; we are acknowledging that there may be a day when the balance may tip in favor of legalization..."

The political metaphor "only Nixon goes to China" refers to when the US president met with Chairman Mao in 1972. It was seen as an act that, in fiercely anti-Communist America, only a staunch Republican could pull off without getting hammered by the media and fellow politicians. It may be the case that, even with the drug war-savvy Jeremy Corbyn waiting in the wings, the most likely cannabis legaliser, if it happens at all, could be the Prime Minister himself.

Follow Max on Twitter.

VICE Special: The Wolfpack Goes to Hollywood

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The Wolfpack is a documentary about six brothers who grew up in isolation in New York City. Locked away in their Manhattan apartment, their only connection to the outside world was through the movies they loved and elaborately recreated. It's a superb documentary, which is why we initially partnered on the film with Magnolia Pictures. Now, thanks to the success of the film, the brothers were able to head to Los Angeles for their first time ever. They saw the sights and met the people who inspire their creativity, like David O. Russell (American Hustle, The Fighter) and William Friedkin, director of The Exorcist and The French Connection. Here is their travelogue.

The Wolfpack is available to watch on iTunes here. You can learn more on Facebook and Twitter.

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