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

Kalief Browder's Family to Sue New York City for $20 Million

0
0
Kalief Browder's Family to Sue New York City for $20 Million

Anarchists Smashed the Windows of East London's Crappy New Jack the Ripper Museum

0
0

Last week VICE reported that a new museum that promised to celebrate the Suffragete movement and the women of East London had opened—but turned out to be a museum about Jack the Ripper, a man who is famous for mutilating and murdering women.

This week the understandable outrage has boiled over into public protest. On Tuesday the Greens, Lib Dems, Communist Party, and other left-wing groups held a demo outside the proposed museum. On Wednesday night it was the turn of anarchist rabble-rousers Class War and a bunch of their rowdy friends to voice their hostilities.

The site was protected by private security, all ironically wearing stab proof vests. That included this guy—the privatized equivalent of the famous "hipster cop."

The presence of the bearded man and his colleagues didn't manage to stop a few rocks being thrown and a window being smashed before one of the hired goons finally remembered the padlock combination to lower the shutters and protect the piles of "Keep Calm. I'm a Ripperologist" T-shirts within.

I chatted with a few of the protestors to find out why they were there and why they are determined the museum won't be allowed to open.

Martin Lux, author of the street-fighting memoir Anti-Fascist and a long-time resident of Cable Street told me,"The East End isn't just the Kray Twins and Jack the Ripper. It's the battle of Cable Street, the siege of Sidney Street, and countless other examples of working class resistance against the ruling class and their agents.

"If there should be any museum on Cable Street, it should be an anti-fascist museum commemorating the resistance of local people to Mosley's blackshirts in 1936. The Ripper murders weren't even associated with this area, they were all in Whitechapel and Spitalfields! Believe me, the campaign against this insult to the memory of East End women is going to be the second Battle of Cable Street and, again—we won't be letting this pass."

Tim from Hackney joined in: "The East End has a rich history. What this yuppie prick is serving up now is a cheap, sleazy, and fictionalized cash-in. Since the rich, the bankers and the property developers have moved into the East End they've done their best to gentrify the present, it seems now they're not satisfied with that and they're trying to gentrify the past."

Patrick

Patrick, a local actor with a role in Dave Courtney's Full English Breakfast gangster flick under his belt was also pissed off. Almost spitting, he said: "More than the sickening affront to working-class women in the East End, past and present, it's all just really snidey. Whatever you think of the ripper tours there are a lot of local working class actors who work on them between jobs and this museum would just take away their bread and butter, as well as mugging off tourists that it's even in some way authentic. The Ripper never had anything to do with Cable Street. 'Come and see Jack The Ripper's living room' it advertises. No one knows who Jack the Ripper fucking was let alone what his living room looked like."


Related: VICE spoke to the wife of the Saudi blogger sentenced to 1,000 lashes


Overhearing this exchange, a guy named Kevin came up to me and announced he was a former Whitechapel Ripper tour guide, explaining his change in perspective and what had prompted him to attend tonight: "I decided Ripper idolization simply wasn't entertainment two years ago after I found out more about the victims and their lives while conducting Ripper tours in Whitechapel. Originally I thought their stories might have been able to enrich my tours but what I grew to realize was that these people, reduced and objectified to being simply 'Ripper victims' were real people with real stories other than just being butchered by some misogynistic creep. Needless to say when I introduced this dimension to my tours people weren't interested and just wanted the prurient guts and gore angle."

Katie, another local brandishing a placard reading "What would Sylvia do?"—referring to Sylvia Pankhurst, the communist, anti-fascist, and campaigner for women's suffrage—was incandescent. "Out of all the history of courageous women in East London, it's disgusting they have chosen to glorify women as victims, and in particular victims of sexual violence at a time when unconvicted incidents of rape are at a high," she said.

Jane remonstrates with a cop

Jane took a breather from brandishing the Class War Women's Death Brigade banner and haranguing the cops, security guards, and anyone else deserving of a spleen-venting to add, "This is the beginning of the end for this temple to misogyny. Women are fucking angry about this and they aren't going to tolerate bullshit like this any more."

The museum's owner, Mark Palmer-Edgecumbe, insists that he's an advocate of women's rights, and that the museum will be educational, rather than a "gorefest." Unfortunately for him, nobody at the protest seemed to be buying that.

Later, nursing a pint in the pub, veteran anarchist and Class War founder, Ian Bone was in a reflective mood: "Tonight was a missed opportunity. We could have taken the place over, squatted it, and turn it into the museum celebrating the history of the East End's women it was originally supposed to be. But don't think this will be the end of it."

So we can all look forward to scenes of confused tourists turning up to a Jack the Ripper Museum that should have been about the struggle for suffrage, only to find demonstrations against it outside. At least that way they'll see an authentic example of the power of an angry protest, which was supposed to be the plan in the first place.


The VICE Guide to Right Now: A British Man Tried to Blame His Child Porn Collection on His Children

0
0

Photo via Coventry Telegraph

Read: How I Catfished a Pedophile Who Was Posing as a Pro-Anorexia Coach

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

A guy from the city of Coventry in England tried to blame the large stash of child porn in his possession on his own children, who, at the time, would have been under the age of six.

According to the Coventry Telegraph, 43-year-old Andrew Martin allegedly downloaded the images between 2001 and 2003, some of which include a girl as young as five being raped. When he was arrested in December after a search warrant was executed, Martin attempted to blame his two sons who would have been younger than six years old at the time.

At Martin's trial at Coventry Crown Court, Judge Philip Gregory said, "What is shameful is that when caught, he sought to blame his 17-year-old son, who would have been three or four at the time."

Martin was given a three-year community sentence, as the Judge deferred to the opinion of his probation officer regarding the large amount of time he has already spent in custody. He is, obviously, now on the sex offenders register, unable to have unsupervised contact with children, banned from living at an address where there are children in the house, and prohibited from working with children.

We Spoke to the San Francisco Crew Throwing a 'Fuck Burning Man' Party

0
0
We Spoke to the San Francisco Crew Throwing a 'Fuck Burning Man' Party

Cry-Baby of the Week: A Woman Allegedly Committed a Hate Crime in an Argument Over Dog Poop

0
0

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

Cry-Baby #1: Judy Lorraine Syrek

Screencap via Google Maps

The incident: Some people were, allegedly, allowing their dog to shit on their neighbor's lawn.

The appropriate response: Yelling at them.

The actual response: The neighbor allegedly committed a hate crime against the dog owners.

According to a statement she later gave to police police, 56-year-old Judy Lorraine Syrek of Grand Rapids, Michigan (pictured above), has been having a problem with her neighbors allowing their dogs to poop in her front yard.

Last Monday, this apparently became too much for Judy, and she confronted the neighbors. Obviously, confronting her neighbors was the right thing to do, as allowing your dog to shit in someone else's yard is super unacceptable.

However, according to police, Judy reacted a little strongly. She reportedly pointed a pellet gun at her neighbors and threatened to shoot them with it, before "letting loose with a stream of racial epithets." It is unclear whether or not the neighbors were aware the gun was only a pellet gun.

"She was upset over the neighbor's dog and feces in their yard," said Terry Dixon of Grand Rapids Police to the local ABC affiliate. "Apparently those neighbors were not addressing that particular problem. She got upset and felt the need to bring out a long gun and then point it at several subjects."

Police arrested Judy and charged her with felonious assault and ethnic intimidation, according to the Detroit Free Press.

Cry-Baby #2: An officer from the Rohnert Park Police Department

The incident: A man filmed a cop.

The appropriate response: Nothing. Comes with the job.

The actual response: The cop pulled a gun on the guy filming.

Earlier this week, Don McComas, a resident of Rohnert Park, California, uploaded a video to his Facebook page showing a run-in he'd had with an officer from the Rohnert Park Police Department.

The video starts with the officer driving towards Don as Don films from his driveway. After sitting in his car and filming Don through the window, the officer exits the vehicle and asks Don to take his hand out of his pocket. Don refuses, saying he has done nothing wrong.

The officer then takes out his gun and begins to approach Don, who backs away, telling the officer repeatedly to go away.

When Don asks why the officer got out of his vehicle, he responds, "You're taking a picture of me, I'm taking a picture of you."

The exchange lasts several minutes. During the conversation, the officer confirms that he does not suspect Don of a crime. At one point, the officer asks, "Are you some kind of a constitutionalist crazy guy or something like that?"

The video ends with Don telling the officer he is going to put the video on YouTube. "Go ahead and have a nice day, put it on YouTube, I don't really care," the officer says. He then gets back in his vehicle and drives away.

According to the Los Angeles Times,Los Angeles Times, the police department has launched an internal investigation into the incident.

"We've been made aware of this matter, and we are taking it seriously," Rohnert Park mayor Amy Ahanotu and city manager Darrin Jenkins said in a statement to the paper. "We understand the concerns that have been raised by our community and others and we want the public to know that your trust in law enforcement in our city is a top priority."

Who here is the bigger cry-baby? Let us know just here, please:

Previously: A guy who called the cops because his girlfriend fed his bacon to a cat vs. a Starbucks manager who banned a guy for sticking up for drivers with disabilities.

Winner: The Starbucks manager!!!

Follow Jamie Lee Curtis Taete on Twitter.

How to Deal with Hangovers

0
0

(Unless otherwise stated, all photos by Tumblr darling Bob Foster)

And so you wake, another day closer to death, your head stuffed like a pillow, your eyes pink and matte, your lips dry and stuck. Smell the air; smell your sour breath. These are those perfect, quiet seconds before the pain hits: before the bright light blares through the curtains, before the quiet ringing pain jolts through your skull, before you wake up and turn over and find yourself next to a scattered kebab. This is peace time. This won't last long. You are hungover.

This is you, tomorrow, or the next day, or Saturday, after that thing – you know, Rob's thing, that pub thing he's doing? You're not really up for it but he says it's going to be a big one – and this will be every Saturday like it until you hit middle-age and decide drinking isn't worth it any more, and stuff like "intricately prepared cups of herbal tea" and "watching Grand Designs" are better instead, a slow form of self-death, a quiet sigh of giving up.

But until then: tequila? Haha, yes please mate: four. Brandy? Don't even like it pal but I'll gulp it down. What's that you say: eight more lagers, drunk in rapid succession before having a sort of blurry-eyed fight with a bouncer, swinging both weak fists but failing entirely to connect, the bouncer taking such pity on me that instead of fracturing my skull he calls me a taxi? Don't mind if I do! And then you wake up the next day, rigid and agonised, a physical embodiment of regret.

Fun, right! Here's a guide to surviving it:

GETTING UP

Hup, hup, buddy, come the fuck on. Ho now. Easy now. Come on: close up your eyes and brace your stiff legs, and press your tender palms against the bed. This is it, you are rising. You are up. You are basically Jesus after Easter. And then it hits you: the blood rush to your head, the headache that always threatened but never took hold, and your spirit wanes, and you flop back onto the duvet. Give it 15 and try again in a minute. Check Twitter for a bit, sideways with one eye open, the way that Twitter was always meant to be consumed, and hope the big roving whatever Greek god of pain there is will pass their ire over you as you lurk quietly in the shadows. Maybe just lie on the bed for an hour-and-a-half and order Domino's using the app.

DEALING WITH THOSE QUICKFIRE lIGHTNING SHOCKS OF EMBARRASSED MEMORY THAT SNIPE THROUGH YOUR HEAD, PTSD FROM THE NIGHT BEFORE, YOU ARE A VETERAN AND A WALKABOUT PUB IS YOUR 'NAM, ONLY INSTEAD OF HORROR-STREWN MEMORIES OF YOU PULLING HUMAN LIMBS OUT OF THE SWAMP IT IS A FLASHBACK TO YOU AT THE BAR SAYING 'ACTUALLY, I KNOW KARATE' AND THEN THAT GIRL AND OH GOD THE BLOOD OH GOD OH GOD THE BL—

At some crucial point in your hangover your evening splays itself in front of you like a Prodigy video as you fit, lavishly, into stasis, rendered unworkable by the reality of The Shit You Do When You Are Drunk. This is how you die: a 2001: A Space Odyssey journey through a space inhabited by your worst drunken behaviours and most terrible spat sentences, flashing before you as a single tear winds its way out of your face, as you replay yourself trying to air kiss someone hello and headbutting them instead, as you suddenly judderingly remember vomiting into your hands inside a taxi and then just sitting there, like, holding it?

This is when the fear hits you, and it is fear – a cold clench in the middle of your chest, a dread so heavy you can feel it – because it's not just a fear of embarrassment: it's a fear that the drunk you is the real you.

We are all monsters scrapping against our own skin. We are all terrible people imprisoned by societal norms. We are all secretly Hydes, disguised by Jekylls. Memories of the night before are truly the most uncomfortable reality that there is: that these drunk people are ourselves, unbidden from our normal person prison, left to run wild, to snog and vomit with abandon, to call three consecutive taxi drivers a "cunt". The truth of drunk flashbacks is just that: they are us, and we are them, and no matter how hard you deny it, we are all, secretly, just base and filthy little animals who like shouting and fucking. Anyway: that's all very real for a hangover, so just close your eyes, don't check your sent texts folder, and try to forget it.

Trending on MOTHERBOARD: Music Begs BitTorrent To Help Fight Piracy

YOUR SENT TEXTS FOLDER

The sent texts folder after a night out is actual Room 101. It is horrors and it is promises of horrors. It is the worst nightmare you can imagine, only instead of a rat in a cage strapped to your face it's "empirical proof that you text your ex again, you idiot". I would rather have to murder an innocent man with a shovel than check my sent texts folder. Do not check your sent texts folder until you are sure – until you are absolutely sure – that you are emotionally ready for it.

HANGOVER ENVY

There's always one person you went out with the night before who posts a photo on Facebook at 11AM the next day like, "Just in Bristol!" – as though popping to Bristol is a viable activity after what you did to your body in Bootle or Glasgow or London last night, as though standing upright while wearing a waterproof and instagramming a photo of some orienteering gear is somehow anything less than a miracle. Who are these people, and how do they clear their heads? They are aliens and monsters, disguised as ruddy-faced and wholesome human people. They are not real. They cannot be real. Their existence is a smug mirage. Do not be envious of them: pity them, for they do not know, through regular visits to the bathroom over the course of a lazy Sunday, the simple joy of watching your piss slowly turning an acceptable colour.

BEING SICK AS AN ART FORM

With enough practice it is possible to be an artful sick-doer, an elegant vomitter, arcs of sick gracefully crossing the room and dinging with pinpoint accuracy into a pint glass, sicking in a toilet so carefully there isn't any splashback, that there isn't any cleanup. It's possible. But more likely it will be you, pulling your own hair back, dampening the knees of your jogging bottoms, weeping and crying at the same time, doing that thing when you're gasping for air because you're crying – "Ah–huagh! Ah–huagh! Ah!" – but also gasping because you're vomiting – "A–roo! Ah–ah–ah–roo!" – and making both sounds at once, a sort of compound gurgling, that of a tortuously dying animal. That's you, that is. You're disgusting.

(Photo via Amelia Abraham)

BLANKETS

I don't know quite when it was in my life that I got such a thing for soft furnishings – pre-25, I truly would have slept under a shat-on tarpaulin on a big corrugated bit of tin if I had to – but now I am So Into Blankets And Cushions That It Is Unreal. And that goes double, triple, one hundred fold when I am on a hangover. Get some blankets in. Build a little fort. Keeping your bedding fresh and tite. Have some pillows and cushions about. Swaddle yourself in decadence. Spend £60 on a blanket and hold it over your body when you're feeling poorly, and thank me for it later. SOFT FURNISHING CRUNK CREW 4 LYFE.

THE CURE

Fundamentally, you need a cheap painkiller, a sugary drink and something that has the smell of food and comes in the shape of food. So that's two Ibuprofen, one big Lucozade and a McMuffin. Or the dregs of a bottle of squash filled with water and shaken, taken with some Paracetamol and a takeaway pizza. Sweet tea and someone else going to the shops for doughnuts also helps. That's the hangover cure you deserve, but not the one you need. What you need is a massive punch of protein and to get over it. I once cured a hangover in six minutes flat by eating grilled bacon and some scrambled eggs, no toast. Have I done it since? No, I like toast and I like wallowing. But the option is there. If you resist the urge to gorge on carbohydrates, you can hurdle over the meat of a hangover before you've even charged your phone.

BLOODY MARYS

Bloody Marys are very bad and, sidebar, for Tories. Do not drink Bloody Marys.

HAIR OF THE DOG

Hair of the Dog works, technically, in that way that a cold can suddenly wakes the top of your brain up, and the liquid seems so refreshing, and your blood is pumping again, and the pain is dulled a little, but then you find yourself at 2PM on it again, you skin feeling tight on your body, your limbs aching and so tired, and someone puts their arm around you and says "Wahey!" and you just go "FUCK OFF, MATE" you push them and go "NO JUST FUCK OFF I'M NOT IN THE MOOD", and you're upright and functioning – yes – but you're also a grouchy little fucker now, you're the guy in the pub questioning if people really want a pint when it's your round, you've got two-thirds of a pint anyway mate, I'm not buying them to stack them up, I'm not made of money. When you get like that, you need to make your excuses and split, grabbing a pizza on the way home, getting in bed and watching cheery Netflix cartoons until you fall asleep in a pit of your own filth.

CANCELLING PLANS

If you have ever made plans with someone the day after you made plans to have a big one, you need to know that you are an idiot, and legal authorities should be able to make the decision that you are unsafe to live your own life. That said: we've all done it, haven't we, and then had to turn up for some activity – "Climbing?" you said, nine days ago, you idiot. "On a Sunday morning at 8AM? Sound fun!" – and now you are both sweating and shivering while wearing a cagoule as an Australian dude with arms bigger than your flat is telling you that "chalk dust is pretty fucking important, mate" and "make sure the harness doesn't get all tangled in your gooch". You've fucked this. You've fucked this right up.

Trending on VICE Sports: Basejumping With Hooks In Your Skin: Insane, Or Totally Fucking

The sooner you get over the squeamishness you have about cancelling plans, the better. I always go by this rule: 90 percent of the time, the other person wants you to cancel the plans anyway. Does anyone, truly, ever want to do anything? Does anyone want to spend their Sunday catching two buses and one train to see you be sick off the top of a climbing wall? Does everyone not really just want to be in bed watching TV? Send the text. Apologise profusely. Cancel the plans. Never leave the house again.

WORK

Phoning in sick to work with a hangover is the worst waste of a sick day ever, because if you can mount the commute and get to your desk then you can have your hangover there and get paid for it. Think about that: you are being paid to be the husk-like shell of a human person. Nobody minds if you don't really do much that day: you're hungover. Whatever small amount of work you do will be treated as though a wounded soldier has somehow battled through the Somme. You can go for at least two 40-minute shits during the day and nobody will even blink. Sleep on the toilet. Drink full fat Coke at your desk. Hour-and-a-half lunch break to go get a burrito. The last hour of the day you can outwardly play Solitaire and nobody will bother you about it. Then slink off home at 5PM on the dot, wishing everyone well on the way out, and maybe go home to doss about in jogging bottoms. Done. To be honest, Britain's employers should be grateful for every day we don't turn up hanging out of our own arseholes.

(Photo via Amelia Abraham)

WAKING UP ON A SOFA WITH A DICK DRAWN ON YOUR FACE

Listen, I know gender is fluid now and the binary has been flipped on its head and none of us are men or women but rather inhabitants in various junk-having bodies that may or may not correspond to our own complex and internal feelings and identities, human beings containing gender multitudes, human beings containing genders infinite, and so the following is actually very politically incorrect to say now, but I have a theory: given a surface and something to etch with, men will draw penises and girls will draw either hearts or very basic smilies. Do the science on this, it's real. Give me the PhD funding and I will do it for you.

This is why you woke up at a house party with a dick drawn on your face: men, with access to Sharpies and a face, will always draw a dick with the Sharpie on the face. The bell of the dick is etched towards your mouth, the balls towards your ears. A man did this. Unerring pubic detailing. A man did this. This is the albatross you have to endure, now, because vigorously washing your face with whatever liquid soap you can find is only going to make it worse. Go home, dickface, slink home and hide your shame upon a pillow.

DESPAIR

There will be a cloudy grey moment of this, when you turn on the TV and Tim Lovejoy stares back at you – with his grin, with his newly shaved head – and you will look into the abyss of Tim Lovejoy's laddy pally face and go: never again. You will renounce alcohol in all its forms. You will tell everyone you are doing one of those dry months, you know the ones. "Just a Coke for me," you say at the bar. They ask you if Pepsi is OK. "No." Don't you feel good? Don't you feel... brighter, somehow, less exhausted? All of your mates are on the lagers and you are drinking an orange juice and jogging. Have you finally kicked it? You notice how you're better at work, that getting up in the mornings isn't a chore now, you feel like all the blood in your body has been cycled out and renewed, that all your cells have been updated and rebooted. God, you're so ALIVE, aren't you? You're just so – well, I guess it's Friday. A Corona won't hurt. Haha, you're buying? Alright: one, but then I really have to go to the gym. Di–did you put vodka in this lime and soda? You fucker. And then scene deleted you wake up, and roll over, and put the TV on, and stare despairingly once more into Tim Lovejoy's face. "Do not try and resist me," Lovejoy whispers. "Never betray me again." Lovejoy is the guard and this hangover is your prison. Six days, you lasted. Six.

Trending on NOISEY: Could Dre's New Album Herald The New Snoop or Eminem?

WEARING SUNGLASSES

On a hangover is the only time you are allowed to wear sunglasses indoors unless you wake up one day and are actually Lenny Kravitz.

TIDYING UP

The loudest noise in the world is the sound of knocking eight empty tins of Fosters into a metal sink while enduring a hangover. Don't do it. Don't tidy up. You always do it in that weird, tight-backed pose anyway, tiptoeing around the house, occasionally pausing to pick up a single yoghurt carton and ferrying it to the bin and turning around and finding the mess has multiplied behind you. It can wait until tomorrow. Stop this nonsense now.

FORGETTING IT ALL AND GOING OUT ON THE PISS AGAIN

And so as surely as the moon follows the sun and the sea returns lovingly to the shore, so you will follow the worst hangover of your life by thinking yeah actually, maybe a Cheeky Vimto would be alright now, wouldn't it? Because forgetting the agony of a hangover is like the flood of hormones into the brain that make new mums forget about the agony of childbirth, only instead of holding a baby and cooing you are cradling a bottle of wine and making two-fifths of an orgasm noise. Go on, brave little soldier. Go forth and spread good cheer. See you again tomorrow morning for a Domino's and a quiet little scream into a pillow.

@joelgolby

More guides to help you live your life:

How to Drink Like a Brit

How to Have One-Night Stands in Your Twenties

How Not to Be a Dick on the Tube

The Lesbian Queen of the Sausage Castle Is Reinventing Beauty Standards

0
0
The Lesbian Queen of the Sausage Castle Is Reinventing Beauty Standards

The Complicated Business of Selling Smart Drugs

0
0

Gordon Filemu Cady in front of Crystal Clear Supplements, his Portland store that sells nootropic substances. Photo by the author.

I'm sitting with a man named Gordon Cady and getting ready to swallow 700 milligrams of polyrhachis ants.

"They can lift 60 times their body weight, drag 100 times their body weight, and it used to be only available to Chinese emperors and whatnot," he says. "It was the cream of the crop." He tells me they'll provide us ginseng, protein, vitamin B, and a shitload of zinc. They taste like warm, spicy dirt.

Cady is in the business of selling nootropics, an amorphous classification of pills and powders that users say improve memory, focus, coordination, and spatial awareness. Still unregulated by the FDA, these products supposedly stimulate the production of the neurotransmitters choline and acetylcholine. Some products Cady sells, like phenibut, promise to reduce anxiety in users. Others, such as piracetem, noopept, and synephrine, are supposed to boost your mental capacity. Others still, such as adrafinil, are analogs of prescription drugs (in adrafinil's case, the wakefulness-promoting agent modafinil, sold in the US as Alertec), meaning that they have the same or nearly the same effects as their prescription equivalent.

Legally, these "smart drugs" are sold as "nutritional supplements" and can't claim to provide the same benefits as FDA-approved medicine. But, from personal experience, nootropics can definitely max you out. The ants, technically a "natural vitamin complex," give me the macho feeling of a fresh pump at the gym.

Many nootropic users are meticulous about the contents and qualities of the things they put into their bodies—they treat these substances like power-ups that can push their existence to some higher plane. Nootropic blends are called "stacks" and users on the nootropics Reddit forum are obsessive about cataloging stacks, down to the milligram.

The FDA's official stance on unregulated "supplements" is this: "Manufacturers and distributors of dietary supplements and dietary ingredients are prohibited from marketing products that are adulterated or misbranded. That means that these firms are responsible for evaluating the safety and labeling of their products before marketing to ensure that they meet all the requirements of DSHEA and FDA regulations." In other words, when it comes to supplements, buyer beware. (On Crystal Clear Supplements' online shop, many products carry the disclaimer that they're "for research purposes only.")

Cady sells nootropics online and out of his alternative-medicine storefront in Portland, Oregon. He calls his business Crystal Clear Supplements. He works from a small lab behind the kitchen, scooping and weighing and measuring and packaging. On a recent Tuesday, an old­-school LG flip phone pings on his desk constantly with inquiries. Two impeccably clean fishtanks—­­one saltwater, one fresh—add a bubble of comfort. There's a red-footed tortoise named Obi walking around the house. Cady lives in an adjoining room, as does his roommate/employee, a 31-year-old named Austin Cook who goes by "Skwerel."

"I don't care about the hippie woo-woo shit," says Cook, referring to the immense network of mythology, pseudoscience, anecdotes, and the rare peer-reviewed trial, all of which make up the bulk of readily accessible nootropics information. "I'm not going to say something that can't be factually proven." He tells me this as he's barefoot, parting the tie-dye curtains that separate the house from the shop.

Over my three days with Cady, I take monster quantities of nootropics and botanical supplements off him: hundreds of milligrams of adrafinil and phenylpiracetam and noopept (for increased spatial awareness, mental acuity, focus, and anxiety); powdered deer antler (to improve eyesight and relieve stress); kratom (an organic opiate substitute).

Cady's journey to peddling alternative medicine began with an addiction to Adderall. At 13, the now-29-year-old was diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed 40 milligrams of the stimulant a day. Ten years later, he found himself about to "successfully drop out of college" for the first of four times, unable to get out of bed if he didn't get a dose. "I found myself having to medicate to go to sleep: I would just drink excessively. From that fostered an alcohol addiction, alcoholism surfaces, and it's not funny, man," he says. "I was pretty well resigned to do that for the rest of my life, because I couldn't find any alternative or way to switch off it."

To quit Adderall while keeping his mental health under control, he decided to seek alternative treatment. But, lacking guidance on how to wean off the ADHD medicine, and now wary of the pharmaceutical world, he turned to the internet. After a tip from a friend and some research, he decided to replace his Adderall intake with adrafinil. Once ingested, the drug metabolizes into its chemical analog, the similarly named modafinil. Unlike Adderall, which messes with your dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin neurotransmitters to allow you to achieve a sense of focus (not to mention very possibly putting you in a euphoric state), adrafinil/modafinil stimulates several areas of the brain, leading, Cady says, to a more balanced sense of focus and wakefulness.

"It was only when I could slow down the rate of my lifestyle to a more healthy pace I realized that I'd been jumped up on speed all the time," he says.

I should note here that outside of the nootropic community itself, there are a lot of doubters. A psychiatrist who did not want to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subjects told me he was skeptical of the entire endeavor, and doesn't see Cady's story as particularly revolutionary. "In the case of addiction replacement, it's certainly not a departure from technology. It's just substituting one compound for another."

Though hard data and reputable trials are hard to come by, if you look around the web you'll find nootropic users documenting their courses. Despite Cady's reassurances that nootropics aren't addictive, some users on Reddit say they've developed dependencies to piracetam, a nootropic said to improve memory and help with depression. Others claim that while piracetam helped them feel happier, those feelings of well-being came with "brain fog" and exhaustion. Furthermore, no one knows exactly how these substances interact with FDA-approved prescription drugs.

The products that Crystal Clear Supplements and other nootropic merchants discussed in this piece sell are generally proprietary blends of different compounds. If you put enough stuff in your blends, you can get away with selling substances that might be illegal under other circumstances.

When I try the nootropics Cady gives me, however, I feel great. It's late afternoon and the world seems brighter, the air sharper, colors and sounds more distinct. I find that my thoughts are coming quicker, my social neuroses have oozed off, and I feel as confident as I can recall being as of late. Is this how Cady feels all the time? To what end can I push my potential?

"Substances, whether it be food that we eat or medications that we take, are tools for self-enlightenment," is how Monday Tammi puts it. Tammi is 38, lives in Cady's basement, and occasionally helps in the shop. She's a former electrical engineer for Intel's R&D department and her preferred nootropic is phenibut, which, she says, helps alleviate her fibromyalgia, as well as PTSD she incurred from an abusive relationship.

Photo by the author

Throughout the week, I connect with at least a half-­dozen additional nootropics users who say their use of the stuff has only led to positive results. One uses phenibut and adrafinil to keep focused. Another uses adrafinil to stay away from alcohol. One uses phenibut to stave anxiety and the desire for other illicit substances.

Later, while researching this article, I talk to dozens more nootropic users, from civil engineers in Denver to project managers in Seattle to writers in New York. Every time I met a nootropic fan, I'd ask how they heard about these things, and nearly every one of their answers (including Cady's) led back to the same place: a Feburary, 2012 episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast.

Rogan, of course, is the standup comedian, martial artist, and former Fear Factor host who has become famous as one of the most successful podcasters in the country. He's also a "big fan" of nootropics. "I went down the rabbit hole a bit and became really fascinated by the subject," Rogan tells me. "Basically," he says, nootropics are "nutrients that supply the building blocks for human neurotransmitters."

Along with friend Aubrey Marcus, Rogan is an investor in the supplement company Onnit, which manufacturers the nootropic-heavy dietary supplement Alpha Brain. It contains nootropics such as vinpocetine, choline, and the herb bacopa.

When I asked Marcus about Alpha Brain, and how it might help people with certain medical conditions, he says: "You can't talk about any substance like that until it's approved for use by the FDA. A pharmaceutical drug is not a nutritional supplement."

Onnit went to the lengths of funding a clinical trial meant to show their product was not snake oil. The lead author of the study, Todd Solomon, is a neural investigator at the Boston School of Medicine, as well as a clinical neuropsychologist at the Boston Center for Memory. He says his team conducted the same sort of trial the FDA requires to approve a drug, a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study. Alpha Brain was found to give a "mild" benefit to verbal memory, executive function, decision making, and impulsivity.

"This is really on the cutting edge," Solomon says of the field. "I've not been aware of any drug that's been developed for cognitive enhancement and approved by the FDA. The supplement world, because it's much less regulated, they can make claims and they aren't required to back it up."

But how did Rogan catch the body-hacking bug? When I ask, he points me to DJ No Name, a.k.a. Mike Nelson, a Bay Area radio personality currently at KFOG and previously of LIVE 105 and AC KLLC. And Nelson, in turn, told me about his nootropic evangelist: Bill Romanowski, the four-time Super Bowl champion and former NFL linebacker who was tied to the illegal steroid ring run by BALCO CEO Victor Conte.

"About the time Bill was promoting his book [ Romo: My Life on the Edge: Living Dreams and Slaying Dragons]," Nelson tells me, "he came into the studio with a signed copy and a Raiders jersey for my 30th birthday, about 12 years ago. We hit it off and he offered to start training me, which is when he started giving me the supplements. I talked to Joe about it, and, being Joe, [and being] into all things brain enhancement, he started getting into it."

But the former NFLer wasn't just a fan of nootropics, he was also apparently an amateur chemist himself: "Romanowski created his formula to help himself with the effects of concussions," Rogan says.

"I had 20 concussions documented, and another, you can probably say, 200 that were undocumented," Romanowski tells me. Nootropics, he said, "have literally been a lifesaver for me."

Romanowski couldn't find a supplement that helped his deteriorating mental condition resulting from those concussions, so he decided to concoct his own. He went to pharmaceutical scientists in Arizona to guide him. And that's where he heard about nootropics.

In 2003, right after his last year in the NFL, Romanowski moved to commercialize a combination of supplements that resulted in Neuro1, his commercially available product that claims to "support better memory, longer concentration, improved mood and sharper focus for physical energy and long-term brain health."

Sure enough, the ingredients of Neuro1 include a handful of nootropics, including piracetam and choline, significant substances in Cady's own stacks.

Romanowski also saw the burgeoning market for anything that could give people a mental edge. "I knew executives were taking ADD medication," he says, referring to the cabal of tech bros who take Adderall to get ahead of the competition. "I marketed Neuro1 for executives. I built it for myself."

Bill Romanowski (center) with fans. Photo via Flickr user Allen Lew.

"I wish I had this my last year (in the NFL)," Romanowski says. "Because I could have probably squeezed out another two seasons. I really do believe it does that much for the brain." Though he claims to know a handful of NFL players who currently use nootropics (he declined to name them) he says it is not a common practice. "It should be, but it's not."

"I'm just sharper, more on, more with it when I take them," Romanowski, who regularly appears on Bay Area radio programs, tells me. "When I don't, I feel lethargic, I feel punch-drunk." He says it would be disastrous for his broadcast career if he didn't take them: "If I don't take my stuff, it's literally like going into a football game taking downers—you're not going to play very well. For me, I'm not going to sound very good, I'm not going to come across with energy. I need to project the message that I want to get out there."

He also claims his supplement helped Tiger Woods on the golf course. "When he was winning in golf, he was taking Neuro1," he tells me. "That was after his dad passed. He was going through a real bad slump. I then started sending him Neuro1, a big supply every month, and literally he started taking off and winning every tournament for about two years."

(VICE attempted to verify this claim. In an email, Tiger's agent, Mark Sternberg, said: "Regarding your inquiry on Tiger, we are unaware of what you are asking." When I followed up with more specific details, Sternberg did not respond.)

Cady's wares. Photo by the author

Romanowski is into modafinil, too, though he can't remember who introduced him to the stuff. "Believe it or not, I'm not sure if it was Victor [Conte]," Romanowski says. "I may have been the one that turned Victor onto it. Because they used to give it fighter pilots, to keep them up. I was like, This is not on the NFL ban list, I think I'm gonna try it. I used it for at least two years." (Though the prescription drug wasn't on the NFL's banned substances list at the time, it is now.)


Related: The Real Nancy Botwin


On my way out of Portland, I'm eating a capsule of phenibut every hour. Phenibut is commonly used in Russia, and was once used to help Soviet cosmonauts stay calm in space. Since nootropics aren't FDA-approved, there's no real guidance on how much—or even what—to take and when. So I'm experimenting.

What I feel is nothing like a high. I don't grind my teeth. I don't crave food, nor am I repulsed by it. It is a feeling that could only be described as close to precognition.

Hours later, I felt nauseous but couldn't keep my eyes open. I texted Cady: "Can you overdose on phenibut?" No, he reassured me, it won't harm you, you'll just fall asleep. And then I did fall asleep, but awoke in the middle of the night—14 hours later—to horrible stomach pain. All at the same moment, I dictated a nonsense email of absence to Siri, vomited full-force into the toilet, and told my girlfriend the cause of this was raw salmon I ate, not the mounds of nootropics I'd swallowed.

Then there was the clarity I'd been promised: To me, getting fucked up no longer seems responsible, sexy, fun, productive, or revolutionary. But neither does pushing yourself towards acuity to the point you end up covered in puke. But still, who wouldn't be entranced by the prospect of a permanently lucid existence? Why not try to move through life at our most effective, even if that involves taking chemicals of uncertain provenance? It is, in the most literal sense, the American Dream realized: a great experiment, a technocratic walking reverie. There is no great secret, no technological hurdle to overcome. It starts with a handful of ants.

Follow Dale Eisinger on Twitter.


Why Do So Many Of Canada’s Women Columnists Write Like They Hate Women?

0
0

Christie Blatchford and Barbara Kay, proud anti-feminists. Headshots Via the Globe and Mail and CAFE

The mainstream media landscape in Canada is wrought with a major disease, and its women columnists aren't doing anything to help cure it.

Some of the country's most high-profile columnists—Christie Blatchford, Margaret Wente, Barbara Kay—are women, and they are reinforcing misogynist narratives each week. Any hint that a man has committed sexualized crime against a woman and these women columnists are victimizing him, apologizing for him, and uncovering any and all reasons why it may not have been his fault. Rather than supporting the choices of other women and challenging the structures that oppress them, they use their platforms in Canada's national newspapers to reinforce harmful narratives.

Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente and National Post columnists Christie Blatchford and Barbara Kay have long claimed that rape culture is not a thing. Wente says young women should avoid getting drunk if they don't want to be raped. Blatchford uses her court reporting to discredit women: a short skirt becomes a veritable acquittal. Regrettably, attitudes like these seem to be a rule rather than an exception amongst the country's women columnists.

Given the chance, they will say anything to convince their audiences that rape and violence against women are rare occurrences. There's Blatchford's column in which she speaks to the "brave," "courageous" boy who appeared in a photograph, penetrating Rehteah Parsons from behind and giving the thumbs up while she vomited out a window. There's Wente's classist and sexist assertion that "talented, highly educated women from privileged backgrounds (Lena Dunham also comes to mind) are celebrated as feminists and behave like trailer trash." Or Kay's musings on just about anything, but as a choice example, the "slow, tentative, fragile return of women's lost sense of sexual honour." These women are among the most prominent voices in Canadian media, and they are also obedient mascots of the patriarchy, ever-nodding bobbleheads dashing to the rescue of men who harm women.

Two weeks ago, as closing submissions were made in what's believed to be Canada's first-ever Twitter harassment trial, the Post allowed its anti-woman rants to go too far yet again.

A brief recap of the case to make sure you're with me:

Gregory Alan Elliott was charged with criminal harassment in November, 2012 after his tweets at Toronto feminists Stephanie Guthrie and Heather Reilly allegedly became stalkerish in nature. He was taken to court after the Crown decided his behaviour did resemble harassment, and both Guthrie and Reilly testified that they were afraid of Elliott based on his tweets, and that it was clear he knew what they were doing and who they were talking to online.

Full disclosure: Guthrie and I have been friendly acquaintances for years. We attend some of the same rallies and events, and I admire Guthrie and her advocacy work.

But that's not to say I can't point out the rabid mistakes journalists are making in their coverage of this case. Friendship doesn't change facts, and the fact is that the internet goes out of its way to silence women who dare to speak up for themselves. Guthrie has received countless rape threats and death threats, and that's partially because some mainstream media are not even trying to report on this case in an accurate or balanced way.

As a columnist for Postmedia, Canada's largest newspaper chain, Blatchford is published in papers across the country, and she is likely among the most-read journalists in Canada. Instead of using her journalistic skills to help women, though, she is choosing to stoke this unsafe environment. In a "poor men" themed sob story, she claims Elliott's only real "sin" is disagreeing with Reilly and Guthrie. She also blames the fact that he lost his job on Guthrie, rather than his own miserable actions.

"The graphic artist and father of four lost his job shortly after his arrest, which was well-publicized online, and if convicted, could go to jail for six months," she writes. She calls those repercussions "astonishing" "given that it's not alleged he ever threatened either woman."

So it's not threatening for a man who appears to be following you on the internet even though you've blocked him to also make a show of knowing what you're doing and who you're talking to? Cool. And now, Blatchford's words are being used to fuel a Kickstarter Elliott's son created to raise money for his legal fees.

As Anne Thériault writes in a Canadaland piece you should read:

"The fact that Blatchford used her platform to go after two women who are unable to defend themselves is what makes her piece especially unethical. She is basically offering internet trolls a free shot." (The verdict is due Oct. 6, and Guthrie and Reilly have been advised not to speak publicly about it til then).

After Blatchford's column was posted, Alheli Picazo published another piece for the Post which, while not wholly unsympathetic to Guthrie's side of the story, contained further errors.

"Under attack from the MRAs," it reads, "Guthrie fought back, suggesting a 'doxing' campaign against Spurr—Internet slang for publishing his personal information and contacting his employers to make them aware of his online behaviour. It was this step that would form the crux of the fight between Guthrie and Gregory Allen [sic] Elliott."

But dox Guthrie did not. She didn't share any information about him that wasn't already publicly available. She simply tweeted:

Guthrie tweeted about Spurr's game rather than doxing him. Screenshot via Twitter.

She didn't actively try to get Spurr or Elliott fired. Guthrie just warned employers about hiring someone who seemed to condone violence against women. Based on the game, how could a person help but wonder about the extent of the creator's misogyny? Everything Guthrie did in this case happened as a matter of public record and is searchable on Twitter. (Since the most recent Blatchford column, she's locked her account. But those who follow her can still search and see exactly what was said, or check out her Storify. These journalists decided to ignore that. Why? Who are they serving?)

They also didn't bother to access Crown prosecutor Marnie Goldenberg's arguments, which she submitted in writing. She gave Metro permission to read them after the fact. Jessica Smith Cross reports some of those arguments:

"'Mr. Elliott sent copious amounts of obsessive, harassing tweets where he tweeted 'at' the complainants, mentioned their handles, mentioned the hashtags created by Ms. Guthrie, sent subtweets at the complainants, monitored their feeds, etc. He did this knowing that they blocked him and that they did not want contact with him,' Goldenberg wrote."

Goldenberg, Cross reports, "took issue with the defence position that Guthrie and Reilly must not have been truly afraid of Elliott because they called him out—even taunted him—on Twitter."

Why hasn't the Post's coverage mentioned this? Why are these writers trying to protect men instead of supporting the rights of women to feel safe in public spaces? The Guthrie case was not a one-time thing. These columnists regularly evade facts that make women seem like reasonable, intelligent beings who tell the truth, and fabricate situations that make us seem like "shrill," silly wretches hell-bent on vilifying men. Are they simply sticking to the misogynist status quo to be accepted by the old boys' club that hired them in the first place? Can it possibly be just for clickbait? Or do these women actually believe themselves?

I am troubled that our national news outlets are making errors like these. Don't get me wrong, I have made mistakes as a journalist, some of them serious. We are all only human. But the Post articles seem to be deliberately avoiding the facts.

It worries me that so few people with prominent voices have bothered to stand up for Guthrie, Rehteah, and all of the women across Canada who have been raped or otherwise sexually assaulted. The dearth of voices bothering to cover these issues illustrates how few feminist writers and editors are out there. And, if we can agree that "feminism" means "political, economic, and social equality of the sexes," this is a sick, sad state of affairs.

Follow Sarah Ratchford on Twitter.

Yes, I’m Asian, Now Please Stop Saying ‘Ni Hao’ to Me

0
0


When a white guys stops you in North America to say "ni hao" to you. Photo via Flicker user Yellow.

When I was around five, I was in a grocery store with my mom when a man also browsing the produce section stopped, squinted his eyes and half-screamed "NI HAO" at me. I could tell from his accent that he probably didn't speak Mandarin and I thought it was funny, because I didn't either.

Five-year-old me giggled and walked away.

I'm a lot less amused when that happens to me now.

"Ni hao" is a Mandarin greeting that roughly translates to, "How are you?" and sort of takes the place of "Hello." It's easy enough to remember that even people who don't speak the language still know—I guess it's like "merci," or "gracias." But unlike merci or gracias, "ni hao" has developed a sinister association in my head because I have it abruptly thrown at me by strangers who clearly do not speak Mandarin. Besides being annoying (why are you talking to me, anyway?), throwing "ni hao" at random Asians, especially in a Western setting, is rude, presumptuous and automatically marks you as kind of culturally dumb. This isn't just something that happens to me, by the way—every Asian friend I've asked has experienced this at least once.

Don't get me wrong, I don't have a problem with Mandarin or people who actually speak it. But I've never been approached by someone who actually speaks Mandarin with "ni hao," only by assholes who clearly don't—and I can't wrap my head around why they do it.

I'd understand if this happened to me somewhere where Mandarin is an official language, but every single time, it's been in the streets of a North American or European city. Is it so novel to see an Asian person in the flesh for some people that they desperately wrack their brains, think, "Fuck it dog, life's a risk," and blurt out the first Asian-language phrase they can think of? Do they think that I'll be impressed by their poorly pronounced two syllables in language spoken fluently by millions of other people? What makes you think I can't speak English?

One time, I was heading from the student paper office to the subway when a woman came up to me and said the dreaded words. I kept walking, but she followed me across campus, repeatedly saying, "Ni hao," as if I hadn't heard her the first time. I've had people say it to me as I was getting out of a train and they were getting in, a situation where there's no chance of a conservation starting in any language. The worst is when I'm out with other Asian girls and a guy comes up to us, says it, then stands there looking like he expects an award.

The way I see it, there are two possible outcomes to a non-Mandarin speaker saying "ni hao" to someone who looks East Asian, and neither is a good one:

1) The person speaks Mandarin and responds in Mandarin, at which point you're fucked because you know nothing more than a simple greeting.

2) The person doesn't speak Mandarin and now it's weird because you've just said something to them in a language they don't understand.

Saying "ni hao" to anyone who looks vaguely East Asian is a great way to show off your ignorance. East Asians, like any other group defined by geography, are a mixed bunch—our ancestors may all come from the same continent, but we're made up of a diverse number of countries, cultures and languages. Tagalog, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, Malay, and dozens of other languages native to Asian countries and regions have no overlap with Mandarin. Hell, the dozens of languages and dialects that fall under "Chinese" don't necessarily overlap with Mandarin, so even if you do manage to pick out a Chinese person, there's still no guarantee they speak it (for example, my family's native tongues are Hakka, Hainanese and Cantonese). It's sort of like going up to a random white person and saying, "Ça va?," "Wie geht's?" or "Hoe gaat het?"—sort of weird, sort of confusing, and sort of frustrating for the person the greeting is directed at.

I've had non-Asian friends tell me I'm being too sensitive about it, because what if someone was just trying to be friendly, or learning Mandarin and wanted to practice? If someone wanted to be friendly, they can just say "Hi," which shows they're not taking a wild guess at my background, implying I don't belong by greeting me differently from everyone else (some Asians are actually born and raised in Canada, surprise!) and other unfriendly things that come with throwing "ni hao" at a random Asian person. And if someone wants to practice a language, they can sign up for a class.

So please, all the random ni hao-ers of the world, explain to me why you do it. Why do you think it's cool to come up to me, or any other East Asian, and say something that automatically marks you as a presumptuous jerk? What joy or satisfaction does harassing strangers bring you? I'd love to know. And I'd love it even more, though it's not the most pressing issue in the world, if you'd just cut it the hell out.

Follow Jackie Hong on Twitter.

Five Questions I Wanted To Ask Stephen Harper Last Night, But Couldn’t

0
0

We have some questions for you, Mr. Harper. Photo via Stephen Harper's Twitter

Last night, our four national political leaders climbed onstage and had a surprisingly not-terrible series of exchanges.

The debate, organized by Maclean's and moderated by the sharp Paul Wells, featured leaders getting into a surprising amount of depth about their platforms, policies, and ideologies.

The quick analysis of the thing is this: Elizabeth May was pointed and intelligent and managed to prove herself relevant onstage. Justin Trudeau looked good on the economy but still fell back into a flowery bed of meaningless platitudes at other points. Thomas Mulcair had a case of the yips and sliced otherwise easy tee-ups (these are all golf references, I'm told) but still had strong moments, especially on energy exports. Stephen Harper stayed standing despite being clobbered about a weakening economy, and looked really strong on foreign affairs.

There, you're caught up.

The one part of last night's debate you probably missed is when the debate ended. While the opposition leaders dragged themselves to a separate stage to be subjected to a torrent of snarky questions from the assembled journalists, Harper went out the fire escape.

Harper did answer questions after the 2011 debate. But not this time. The prime minister's thoroughly annoying disdain for the media has reached a fever pitch.

And that's frustrating. Because for those of us who would rather report on what the prime minister plans to actually do — as opposed to reporting on what he tells us he's going to do — not being able to ask questions makes it quite difficult. I assume he wants it that way.

It's not that the prime minister is taking no questions. He's taking five a day. But as I wrote last week, that's only from those journalists willing to pay $3,000 for the privilege.

So here are the five questions I would have asked last night. You can call me anytime, Steve, and we'll go through them.

Why do you hate us so much?

Obviously, go-to question off the bat has got to be why the prime minister is so special that he doesn't have to talk to media. But I suppose it's a necessary one, because at a certain point it's kind of personal. Like when your friend's boyfriend just seems to really dislike you and you're all "what, like, dude, we've met twice, where is this coming from?" and your friend is all "no, no, he really likes you" but you know they're lying. It's like that.

What needs to change in the fight against the Islamic State?

Harper's best moment from the debate last night was his evisceration of the other party leaders on the fight against the Islamic State. While the opposition party leaders wrung their hands about how the United Nations didn't sanction the fight—because we all know how effect the UN can be when it gets involved in crisis, eh, Rwanda?—and how our mission is vague and wrong and something.

"What we are doing in ISIS is precisely the mission that our international allies think we should be doing. These are the priorities: hit them in the air, and help to train people, particularly the Kurds, on the ground," Harper said during the debate. Pretty simple.

But while he offered the most compelling case for intervention, while the other three waffled through platitudes, it would have been interesting to hear the prime minister's take on recent developments in the region. Evidently, those Kurds, our allies, are currently the most effective force in the fight against the so-called Islamic State. Yet our other ally, Turkey, is dropping bombs on Kurdish compounds in an effort to take out the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) which is fighting alongside the main Kurdish units. While Canada designates the PKK as a terrorist organization, it is also our de facto ally, and those Turkish operations against the group are impacting our actual allies, that we're training and equipping.

Hearing Harper walk us through his plans on what to do there would be helpful.

Thunderdome: yay or nay?

I know what you're thinking: reporters aren't supposed to ask yes-or-no questions. But I think that given the effects of the prime minister's tough-on-crime agenda, this might be a worthwhile question.

Nothing in the debate last night touched on crime and justice, so it'd be nice to hear the prime minister on this. Many of his efforts to hike penalties for genuinely dangerous offenders have been pretty laudable—while his efforts to lock up drug dealers has not been quite so great—but the problem is that he didn't seem to prepare for the results. Right now, Canadian prisons are bursting at the seams, and the costs of warehousing these offenders is growing significantly. It's actually becoming a waste of money, and it's leading to some damn well unconstitutional whoopsie-daisies, like locking up a woman in solitary confinement for seven goddamn months.

So if you want to stay tough on crime, but don't want to actually pay to lock them up, maybe it would be worthwhile to let them fight for freedom or death in the Thunderdome. Just a suggestion.

Would consider rephrasing: "how long is too long to be held in solitary confinement?"

Is our economy screwed, or not?

We didn't get to hear Harper, last night, admit that his most recent budget is on track to carry a deficit, but he did cop to the fact that we're probably in a recession. So that's a start.

But while the opposition leaders forcefully tried to suggest that Harper was secretly bad at economics, and had somehow managed to fake it for the past nine years, the prime minister still commands some respect on the file. But for the past several months, pretty much all we've heard from him is: I'm giving parents money and that is good. The other parties are going to tax you and that is bad.

It would've been nice to actually hear the big guy go on for a bit about what he actually think needs to be done to turn the listing ship to starboard and get us back to port, or some equally nautical metaphor.

Can we pave over the Senate and turn it into a Denny's?

Last night, May offered the most coherent reason to burn down the Senate and salt the earth on which it sits, so no future lifetime Senators can grow from its ashes.

"The single biggest scandal that has yet occurred in the Canadian Senate was not the misspending," May began. She was referring to the Climate Accountability Act, a bill designed to push the government to align its policy-making to the goal of reducing carbon emissions. Then the Senate voted it down. "This is the first time in the history of this country that appointed senators have killed a bill without a single day of study in the Senate of Canada."

Then there was a pause. Moderator Paul Wells rounds on Harper.

"Mr. Harper, did you ask the senators to stop that bill?"

Awkward.

"We cannot force them to do anything," said the prime minister. "What we ask them to do, Paul, is we ask them to support the party's position."

In other words: we forced them to kill the bill.

Conservatives in the Senate, by the way, did the same thing to a bill that would afford human rights protections to transgender people so, sincerely, fuck them.

The idea that a cabal of unelected, unaccountable, and unbelievably arrogant party bagmen in the Senate—who are offset slightly by genuinely good and hardworking people from both parties that are trying to make an inherently unworkable institution workable—can kill legislation passed by a majority of the House of Commons would have made 2004 Stephen Harper very mad. I want to see that 2004-vintage Stephen Harper.

I also want a Denny's in my building.

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter

The Owner of the Club Where the Deadly Drake Afterparty Shootings Occurred Has a Controversial Safety Record

0
0

Muzik nightclub in Toronto. Photo via Muzik's Facebook page

Earlier this week, two people in their 20s were shot and killed at and around Muzik nightclub at Exhibition Place in Toronto. It was the second time a shooting had occurred at the same venue on the night of an official OVO Fest afterparty hosted by Drake.

But what you might not know about Muzik is that the owner, Zlatko Starkovski, has a history of attempting to ban all-ages parties of a certain genre—electronic dance music (EDM)—in the same area the club calls home. He even got help trying to do so through his politcal connections to then-Toronto mayor Rob Ford and outspoken City Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti. But to Starkovski's critics, in both in the dance music community and in city council, he was really just staging the protest in order to remove his competition. Starkovski's argument, and one loudly repeated by Mammoliti to any camera in spitting distance, centred on the accusation that all-ages EDM parties expose teens to drug dealers and sex offenders.

"What you're saying is it's better for 13-14-year-olds to do drugs in a safe place... It's absolutely ludicrous," Starkovski said in a 2014 statement. "Allowing these events such as raves... not only damages our good work, but that of the Exhibition Place being a location for top notch entertainment and hospitality and events."

But Starkovski's events have had more than enough problems over the years and have arguably done more damage to the reputation of Exhibition Place. In addition to the official OVO Fest afterparty hosted by Drake that has ended in shootings two years in a row, there was a shooting after an event at Muzik in February 2013 that left a 19-year-old man dead outside the club. And that's not to mention the time Toronto's ex-mayor was seen doing lines of blow in Muzik's washroom.

(Starkovski is friends with Toronto's former crack-smoking mayor and current city councillor Rob Ford—though he's denied it at times. The Toronto Star reported in May 2014 "that Zlatko Starkovski has told staff at the club that 'Rob Ford is our best customer. His money is no good here.'" Muzik has also supplied Ford's FordFest parties with booze in the past.)

On April 11, 2014, the ban Mammoliti introduced was passed, albeit temporarily, and he and Starkovski had their wish granted. Much to their dismay, the ban was lifted less than a month later; Starkovski's competition and the supposed blemish on Exhibition Place would be allowed to return.

"How many more have to die before we finally accept these EDM events cannot be held on government lands or anywhere else?" Mammoliti was quoted saying in the Toronto Sun in August 2014, months after the ban had been lifted. His statement was made following the drug-related deaths of a two young people at VELD festival the first weekend of August 2014 in Downsview Park, Toronto. The two victims were 20 and 22 years old—close to the ages of those shot and killed at the most recent violent crime related to Muzik, 23 and 26.

Drake performs at Muzik. Photo via Muzik's Facebook page

But the big difference here is that those who take drugs at any sort of party have usually made the personal choice to engage in an activity that has risks—it just comes with the territory. Around 3:20 AM Tuesday of this week, 26-year-old Ariela Navarro-Fenoy did not choose to become a victim of gun violence. She was an innocent bystander who had made every effort to get into a cab to escape the gunfire-laden scene that had broken out at Muzik (a cabbie refused to give her a ride since her short-distance trip would have only made him $8).

The other victim that was killed Tuesday following Drake's afterparty at Muzik was Duvel Hibbert, 23, who had been awaiting trial on drug charges in both Toronto and Brampton, Ontario. He was set to appear in court this week for the Toronto charges, including possession and trafficking of cocaine. Three others were injured in the shooting.

When VICE contacted Muzik to get comment from Starkovski about the August 4, 2015 shootings, a spokesperson who signed his email simply as "Jeff," replied, "You're raising a number of other points, which we can address in the fullness of time, but at this point we are focused on assisting the Toronto Police Service with their investigation."

In the official press release put out on Tuesday, Muzik claimed that among other security measures, including the constant presence of police and medical responders, handheld metal detectors were used on all patrons entering the property in addition to the average patdown. The Toronto Star reported that a gun may have been sneaked into the afterparty over a security fence.

Muzik has had more than 12 lawsuits filed against it since 2007, many related to it being the site of acts of violence. One statement of claim from a lawsuit reads: "The defendants... knew or ought to have known that this after-party would cause or foster an environment of unusual danger... knowing that Muzik Nightclub has a history of violence, and failed to implement proper security measures."

Mammoliti and Ford did not respond VICE's requests for comment about the series of events that happened at Muzik and Exhibition Place this week. Drake has also yet to put out a public statement responding to the shootings.

Follow Allison on Twitter.

Blood Lady Commandos: Blood Lady Commandos: Like Cats and Dogs

The VICE Guide to Right Now: A Big New ALS Report Shows Your Ice Bucket Challenge Dollars at Work

0
0

Photo via Flickr user Anthony Quintano

Looking for in-depth coverage of medical research?

A Treatment for Alzheimer's Might Lie in the Brains of Hibernating Bears

The Cyclists Crowdfunding a Medical Cannabis Trial

New Research Offers a Bleak Perspective on Algorithmic Medicine

A new report published in Science Magazine on Thursday shows serious progress in the search for a cause of ALS, and even some hope for finding a way to stop the horrible neurodegenerative disease. On Friday, in a Reddit AMA, Johns Hopkins medical researcher Jonathan Ling, who is one of the authors of the report, credited the Ice Bucket Challenge with funding the scientific work that brought them to this point.

The Ice Bucket Challenge, was, of course, that thing from last summer where people would video themselves having ice water dumped on their heads, and then nominate other people to have ice water dumped on their heads, all in the name of fundraising for research that would hopefully cure or treat amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. ALS, is, of course, gradual weakening of all the muscles in an afflicted person's body until they become unable to function, and typically, die a torturous death after a few years.

Jumping on the pop-culture bandwagon and participating in what superficially seemed like a dumb meme was, it turns out, a pretty good idea. The ALS Association reportedly received $100 million in donations over the course of 30 days.


Related: That time VICE took the ice bucket challenge last year


So just what was discovered, and how was the Ice Bucket Challenge responsible? According to Ling, the new information could lead to clinical trials of a promising new treatment technique "2-3 years from now," a heartbreaking expanse of time for anyone who already has ALS, but still cause for cautious optimism.

Ling explained that the substance of the experiment focused on faults in TDP-43, a protein needed in the nucleus of cells—specifically neurons in the brains of ALS patients. Without TPD-43 keeping everything in order, proteins generated in the nucleus, the cell will, the experiment found, generate defective proteins known as cryptic exons. In Ling's analogy these exons are "nonsense pages" in the "book" of DNA.

In mouse stem cell experiments, after restoration of TPD-43, damaged and dying cells were shown to come "back to life," and "looked completely normal," Ling wrote.

He explained that he'd been troubled by pessimism he'd seen online, with participants in online communities complaining that all the publicity and donations appeared to have no help. He wrote that, "All of your donations have been amazingly helpful and we have been working tirelessly to find a cure."

Another user claiming to be an ALS researcher showed up in the thread to point out that the focus of the new study was somewhat narrow. There are other proteins whose "aggregation" seems to cause ALS, such as C9orf72. Stopping such proteins from aggregating, the researcher argued, would be a better approach. Ling pointed out the potential usefulness of the treatment that might result from this research, adding, "but you're absolutely right, it would be fantastic if we could stop it from aggregating in the first place."

However, Ling's overall tone was one of across-the-board positivity. "With the amount of money that the ice bucket challenge raised," he wrote, "I feel that there's a lot of hope and optimism now for real, meaningful therapies."

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Youth Lagoon: Running Away from Anxiety and Into the Light

0
0
Youth Lagoon: Running Away from Anxiety and Into the Light

A Hearse and Reptile Show Was Also the Best Party I’ve Ever Been to at a Funeral Home

0
0

All photos by the author

Over the weekend, a hearse and reptile show took place at a funeral home in Azusa, a town in Los Angeles County. Yes, you read that correctly: at long last, hearses and reptiles both being displayed at a funeral home. The whole thing seemed too weird to not attend, so I did.

People get freaked out by death for obvious reasons. When I was a kid, I would lie awake at night about once a week, considering the fact that one day, I would cease to exist. My fear of death was all-consuming. The night before my tenth birthday, I cried to my parents, the realization that I was making a tangible step towards what, even as a child, I perceived as the utter blankness of nonexistence. My parents listened, and in that loving parent-y way, told me to chill the fuck out: death was inevitable, and me cryin' about it wasn't helping.

I say that to say this: I totally get why people are into death. It's certainly the inverse of how I feel about it, but people's fascination with death and my anxiety about it come from the same essential place. Death is an unknown quantity; no one has been able to experience it and come back and tell us what it's like. It might be awesome, or it might be insanely shitty, or it might be nothing. Who knows!

As I blasted Danzig out of my Toyota Prius on the drive over to White's Funeral Home, where the event was set to take place, I was totally unaware of what I was getting myself into.

What I stumbled onto was one of the most charming events I've ever been to.


In addition to featuring an impressive collection of customized hearses and a room full of rare, impressive reptiles, the Hearse and Reptile Show strove to be a true community event. It featured a grip of booths and vendors, from macabre crafts to haunted cupcakes to the community's LGBT group. There was even an area for children called the "Kids' Coroner" that featured face-painting.

White's Funeral Home, which hosted the event, doesn't necessarily do things the same way as their big box competitors. "When people are dying," White's Funeral Home director Manny Godoy told me, "they don't want a ritual in a sad room. They want a celebration of their life. We're trying to bring people to White's for a good time and to get people out of their fears about death." Manny's a short-ish, friendly guy who looks like he's just crested the hill of 40. While we were speaking, members of the community kept approaching him to congratulate him on the turnout, which from the looks of it was well in the hundreds—not bad for an offbeat event in a small community. While he talked to well-wishers, I socialized with Manny's dog, named Lola the Bereavement Pug. (Adorable and friendly, Lola the Bereavement Pug licked my face within seconds of meeting me.)

As the sun began to set, a band called Rhythm Coffin took a stage and began playing a brand of music they called "Monster Rock." Think kitschy, zany rock from the pre-hippie era, with lyrics ripped from campy horror movies (sample chorus: "Put the FUN in FUNERAL," repeated like ten times).

I was looking forward to Rhythm Coffin's set—before they'd gone on, a guy interrupted showing me his hearse full of old toys to tell one of his fellow hearse owners that the band was one of his favorites.

On Broadly: The Goth Scene in Hawaii

The hearse and reptile show was, more than anything, a community event, offering the people of Azusa the opportunity to unite under goofy and fun circumstances. When I asked Manny what his favorite part of the Hearse and Reptile Show was, he told me, "I love the diversity. This is usually a very traditional hispanic community. You've got zombies having a good time, drag nuns having a good time, a bunch of old men that run charities are having a good time, and they're having it all together."

Death is the one thing that unites us all. We might as well reap that benefit while we're alive, too.

See more photos from the event below.

Lola the Bereavement Pug

Rhythm Coffin

One of the hearse owners

Follow Drew on Twitter.

A Laser Landscape Sears the San Andreas Fault

0
0
A Laser Landscape Sears the San Andreas Fault

This Immersive Installation Allows You to Look at Life Through Someone Else's Eyes

0
0


Part of Utopia. Al photos by David Levene

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

If you live in London, you're probably so used to social inequality that it's easy not to think about it as you give the homeless guy outside Whole Foods £1 [$1.50] change from that £9 [$14] salad you bought for lunch. Maybe that's not you. Maybe you don't buy expensive salads. Maybe you signed one of those online petitions opposing plans to evict an entire community from their homes to make way for new luxury flats already sold off-plan to foreign investors. Whoever you are, however rich or poor, if you live in London you probably don't mix with people outside your income bracket. But what if you could?

Filmmaker, writer, and artist Penny Woolcock spent months searching for stories of Londoners across the social spectrum—from gang members, former offenders, and sex workers to the elderly, housewives, and university graduates. She then teamed up with radical design duo Block9 (Gideon Berger and Stephen Gallagher) to mash up all those parallel lives and turn them into a multi-sensory installation that is taking over the Main Space at the Roundhouse this month. I chatted with Penny, Gideon, and Stephen about their vision for Utopia and whether art can change the world.

VICE: Tell me about Utopia. Where did the idea come from and how has it developed?
Penny Woolcock: One of the central ideas is that when you live in a big city like London, the same street can be really different for different people. There are lots of different stories, but we never get a chance to really step into each other's spaces. And Camden is probably one of the most unequal boroughs in the whole world, where you have billionaires living in these massive mansions and also pockets of extreme poverty. So it was about somehow trying to get those voices—generally voices you don't hear from—into the Roundhouse's Main Space.

Gideon Berger: I don't know if we're calling it a show or an installation, but it feels less like a show where you arrive and spectate and consume, and more like an installation. You actually walk through different environments and realities that we've built, based around these snippets of stories.


From left to right: Gideon, Penny, and Stephen

How do you go about finding people to interview?
Woolcock: I find people in random ways. There was a lot of wandering around streets and community centers, loads of cul-de-sacs, and then someone would catch my eye and there would be an energy between us—I don't know how else to describe it.

I also did go looking for specific people. For example, I really wanted to find a sex worker who wanted to speak for herself, because it's so dreary the way women only get talked about as hapless victims. I also wanted to look outside my usual comfort zone so I pushed myself to do that and I'm glad I did.

At what stage did Block9 come on board?
Berger: We started working on it at quite an early stage when Penny was trying to organize all of these different seeds of stories and personalities that she'd been collecting for several months. We sat down at a big round table and sort of played dot-to-dot, joining up all the different stories and snippets of personalities and lives, trying to make sense of them all.

Something that was fascinating to us was that everybody was touching on the same sort of overarching theme. A lot of people were talking about the same stuff, just using slightly different vocabulary. We found that a Primrose Hill dinner party talked about gentrification, crime, and inequality in the same way that the front line kids or someone sat in prison did. And also being pretty far out and philosophical, talking existentially about the state of mankind and humanity.

We found that a Primrose Hill dinner party talked about gentrification, crime, and inequality in the same way that the front line kids or someone sat in prison did. –Penny Woolcock

Do you feel you have a responsibility in the way you represent these people and their lives?
Woolcock: Yeah, of course you do, but I invited people in good faith and everybody was incredibly open. There's a trust there that I'm not going to stitch them up, so I was able to push things to quite an extreme. When I wasn't sure if somebody would be happy about an idea, I contacted the person and asked how they felt about it.

Berger: Penny was definitely the soldier protecting all those stories. So she would say, "We can't frame this person in this environment because there's implications and associations you'd make by putting a certain person in a certain space."

Stephen Gallagher: We were pretty careful to make sure that we're not judging anyone. I hope this comes across. We're merely presenting their voices and telling their stories and interpreting those in the way that the three of us think is most appropriate.

What do you hope the audience take from the experience?
We're quite excited by the idea of challenging perceptions and taking that into the design work as well, so all is not what it seems. We're challenging your preconceptions of the actual space that you're in, so it's different to what you might imagine the Roundhouse to feel like.

Berger: It's funny, lying in bed at night in anticipation of this installation actually happening and how it will be received. It's perfectly conceivable that we're going to fuck loads and loads of people off. At the same time, we'll probably please a bunch of people, amuse some people, wind some people up, open some people's eyes. It's got the potential to annoy the fuck out of the whole crowd in a different way. That's quite nerve-racking, but it's exciting as well.

Woolcock: If it doesn't do all of those things then really we've failed.


The poster for Utopia

I'm aware that a lot of the people you've interviewed might not be regulars at the Roundhouse. Are you hoping to attract more of a diverse audience?
The second failure will be if people like that don't come. We're actually going out of our way to give free tickets and to make sure that those people feel not just invited but encouraged to come. If you have a theatre or gallery, even if it's free, the people who will usually come are the upper middle classes who consume cultural events. So we're doing everything we can not to exclude people, because it would really be a disaster if we set something up like this and the same people come to it that always come to everything.

The title you've chosen isn't a word I'd associate with the themes of this installation. Why Utopia?
I'm an optimist and I don't think things have to be like that. We can get locked into our own bubbles that we live in and think, This is the way it has to be—there has to be extraordinarily rich people and at the same time people living on rubbish dumps. Why? It does not have to be like that. Let's actually do something about it. There are very exciting things that are happening, particularly amongst young people. I find it a really encouraging time—the first time I feel that radical revolutionary politics are being talked about and are potentially possible. We don't just want to sit there and go, "Oh no, another person's been stabbed in my neighborhood," or, "Oh no, a load of people have been blown up by a bomb."

Do you think that's something that art can change?
It's a contribution. We can do what we can, and what we do is make art. Other people do different things.

Berger: We're linking people and linking their ideas. Fundamentally, it's good to plug voices into other voices, because at the moment they're disparate voices. They're in very different parts of London—a hundred yards away from each other but worlds apart.


Part of 'Utopia'

Without giving too much away, what can the audience expect to experience?
We hope that it will feel like you're inside either a video game or a film. You're not watching it, you're actually inside that experience.

Berger: There are two journeys that each individual visitor can take. Both of those journeys lead you through very different realities, and the stories that you will encounter are giving you part of the overall picture. There'll be quite a lot of different experiences you can have in the main space and there's no shortage of things to do. If you want to spend the whole day in the main space and go really deep, you can do that. In a way, Block9's mission statement is to build an environment around audio. In our usual work it's music, but in this case, those sound bites are coming from people, from lives.

Woolcock: We won't really know until we put it up, but in a way there's no point doing something if we could predict how it was going to work. I think all of us are interested in taking risks and trying to do something that's impossible. Playing it safe is not really the game here.

What's your vision of utopia?
Woolcock: I think it's where everybody feels that the public space is theirs and that they can move freely around it without being oppressed by others.

Berger: I'm going there on Sunday. Downstairs, Berghain, Berlin, on Sunday afternoons.

Gallagher: I have to be honest, I don't know what my utopia would be. It's just so hard to imagine. I think that's the point of this piece. It isn't Utopia with a question mark, but it could be. And maybe that's the thing I'd like everyone to take away from this. Is this what you want? Is this what we want? Is this it?

Follow Rose on Twitter.

Utopia runs at the Roundhouse from August 4 through 23.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: A Florida Frat Was Evacuated Because of Protein Powder

0
0

Image via Wiki Commons

News station WKMG in Orlando is reporting that the Theta Chi fraternity house at the University of Central Florida was evacuated earlier today due to the discovery of a "cup of suspicious white powder." What was it? Cocaine?! Meth?! Smart drugs?!?!?!

Eh, how about protein powder?

A post on the frat's Facebook explains:

Earlier this afternoon a UCF representative conducted a walkthrough of the Theta Chi house. She found a cup of BCAA workout protein powder, incorrectly assumed it was an illegal substance and informed the authorities. It has since been deemed a false alarm and the chemical tests have confirmed it.

UCF's student newspaper reported on the hullabaloo, noting that at one point a hazmat crew was present at the frat house.

After two tests, the paper reported, the substance was confirmed to be protein powder.

Five In-Depth Stories About Bros

1. Ask a Bro—What's Up with Love?
2. The Bros of Fracking
3. My Hug-Filled Attempt to Learn Why Men Are Bad at Sharing Their Emotions
4. Meet the Vapers of E3
5. Male Friendship Is the Ultimate Fantasy: The Existential Mind-Games of EntourageEntourage

Follow Drew on Twitter.

James Holmes Was Just Sentenced to Life in Prison for the Aurora Colorado Theater Shooting

0
0

Mugshot via Arapahoe County Sheriff's Department

Read: Forensic Psychiatrists Weigh in on What the Ramblings in the Colorado Theater Shooter's Journal Mean

The convicted Aurora, Colorado theater shooter, James Eagan Holmes, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole on Friday afternoon. He was found guilty on July 16 on 24 counts of first-degree murder in the notorious shooting spree during a July 20, 2012 showing of The Dark Knight Rises.

Before Judge Carlos Samour read the verdicts he announced that he had "not prohibited emotional reactions," but that any verbal "outbursts," would not be allowed. Holmes, who looked straight-laced in a gray oxford shirt, and slicked back hair, didn't react as he learned that news that he had avoided death row.

For each victim, a separate life sentence was issued, with the judge reading a note explaining that the jury hadn't reached a unanimous final sentencing verdict, meaning life in prison would be imposed.

During the sentencing phase of Holmes' trial, witnesses for the prosecution included family members of the 12 victims who died. The father of a victim named Alex Sullivan described the scene as he tried in vain to find his son, who died while celebrating his birthday and first wedding anniversary.

Holmes' own family testified in his defense, attempting to spare him from the death penalty. The defendant's sister, Chris, arguing that he was insane when he pulled to trigger, a quality she saw firsthand when she visited him, and found that "his eyes were almost bulging out of his head in a way."

Deliberations lasted six and a half hours over the course of two days. This was the same jury that dismissed Holme's insanity plea, when they convicted him. According to a Colorado law, the "not guilty by reason of insanity," plea requires the prosecution to prove a suspect is sane, instead of the defense having to prove that they're insane. The requirement sets a higher bar for conviction, which this jury felt the prosecution had cleared.

Upon his arrest, Holmes identified himself to the authorities as "the Joker." During court proceedings back in May Holmes's bizarre personal journal was an exhibit in the trial. It told the story in detail of planning the murder spree in order to cause the greatest possible number of fatalities, as noted by the prosecution. But for the defense, the book's content–for instance, repetitions of the word "why"–was intended as evidence of his insanity.

On the day of the crime three years ago, then 24-year-old Holmed burst into the theater with four legally obtained guns: an AR-15 assault rifle, a shotgun, and two Glocks. He was dressed in tactical gear including body armor and special equipment that let him reload more quickly during his attack.

According to The Associated Press, during deliberations on Friday morning, the jury asked to see the gruesome, 45 minute crime scene video. The defense argued that the video would be prejudicial, but the judge allowed it anyway.


Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Viewing all 38002 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images