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White People Talk About Their White Privilege

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It started as so many great ideas do: on a Saturday morning, lying in bed watching SportsCenter, and talking to strangers on Twitter. I don't think any of this would've happened if Twitter hadn't been invented. So I'm on Twitter and some white person asked something like, "Why do black people always make it about race?" These are the kinds of moments that threaten to ruin my day, enraging me with a sentiment that is as grossly inaccurate as it is clueless: Black people don't make situations about racemost situations are racialized whether or not someone points it out. And the real point is not whether we choose to acknowledge or ignore the impact of race, but how white privilege defines all aspects of American life.

So I tweeted back: "The problem is not that blacks make everything about race. The problem is that white privilege shapes America." That, of course, led to people demanding that I define white privilege, which is also infuriating because it basically means I'm being asked to prove it exists.

I could have just told them to read Peggy McIntosh's famous 1988 essay "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack," which remains one of the clearest texts on the subject. In it, McIntosh, a white women's studies professor, lists 50 daily instances in which white privilege impacts her life, including: "I can talk with my mouth full and not have people put this down to my color;" "I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group," and "If I declare there is a racial issue at hand, or there isn't a racial issue at hand, my race will lend me more credibility for either position than a person of color will have." But I didn't want to send a link only to get back the dreaded tl:dr.

Plus, I felt like being more confrontational. I kept thinking, Shouldn't these people be explaining this to me? For me to tell white tweeters about their white privilege would be the equivalent of blacksplaining their racial experience. Surely white people must be aware of the ways in which their whiteness helps them, ways that I couldn't possibly understand unless I painted my face white like Eddie Murphy in that old SNL skit.

On Motherboard: Nathan Drake's Superpower? White Privilege

Now, I know that part of having privilege is not having to question, or even be aware of that privilegein that sense, asking a white person to define white privilege is like asking a fish to tell you about water. But I wanted to do it. I wanted to make things awkward, to talk about a subject you're not supposed to talk about in public forums. I wanted to make people uncomfortable because I wanted them to be real with me, and real with themselves.

So, knowing that I was about to start a shitstorm, I tweeted: "If you're a white person who's aware of how white privilege has helped you, can you tweet me about that? Tell us how it's helped you."

The first several responses I got were positive, and pretty constructive.


Getting Schooled on ‘Caginess’ by a Nicolas Cage Expert

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Is this the face of a man with terrible acting skills and a nightmarish haircut? Or is it the face of a man ahead of his time... with a nightmarish haircut? Photo via Flickr user The Conmunity

It's easy to not really give a shit about Nicolas Cage as an actor. Other than enjoying his performance in Adaptation, to me he was always just that weird guy in moderately entertaining action movies. I mean, the easiest way to to summarize his cultural significance is to just yell "NOT THE BEEEEES!"

But I first realized Cage's radical brilliance a few years ago during a screening of Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans at the Toronto International Film Fest. His freaked-out take on the notorious Harvey Keitel character in German director Werner Herzog's remake of Bad Lieutenant was beyond bizarreCage hallucinates seeing lizards and breakdancing ghosts and smokes from a magic crack pipe while going completely off the rails as a corrupt cop. But as outlandish as his performance was, it's actually more realistic than the generically scummy Keitel version. It presented me with a weird paradox: was Cage's seemingly terrible over-acting actually a truer performance than Keitel with his dick out?

The realization sent me off on an extended trip down the Nic Cage rabbit hole, where I've not only discovered the pure genius of films like Vampire's Kiss and Snake Eyes, but completely reassessed things like Face/Off, Gone in 60 Seconds, and 8mm. It's also made me unnaturally excited for any new addition to the Cage canon (even if it's to figure out what went wrong with a legitimately terrible film like Trespass).

So I was stoked to find out that the latest edition to ECW's "Pop Classics" series (which already features the impressively argued It Doesn't Suck: Showgirls) was a book about Cage called National Treasure: Nicolas Cage. In the book-length essay, fellow traveller (and fellow Torontonian) Lindsay Gibb endured around 70 of his films to lay out an extended defence of Cage's brilliance, explaining that he's essentially an experimental actor, who treats all of his roleseven ones in generic Hollywood failuresas opportunities to push the boundaries of the art of acting. VICE talked to Gibb about Cage the genius, Cage the meme, and the misconceptions of around Cage's capital-C "Caginess."

Watch more: Daily VICE, October 22 - Parliament Attack Anniversary, Exiled from Tal Abyad, Nicolas Cage

VICE: What promoted to you to want to watch all of Nic Cage's films and write the book?
Lindsay Gibb: I guess it started because I liked his work, but I didn't think of it as a whole, or that I was a huge fan. I just would sort of see random films and think that I liked him. And then I would hear people saying that Nicolas Cage was a terrible actor and all of his movies are bad, and then I kind of became a defender of him because I'd seen a lot of movies he was in where he was good. When TIFF did the retrospective of his films, I got more hyped on him. From there I started my own Nicolas Cage club with some friends where we started watching one of his films a month. We've been doing that for three years now, but when I pitched the book we'd only been doing that for a year.

But you've watched all of his films now, yes?
When I started writing the book I broke off and was like, "Sorry guys, I have to start watching some of them by myself." I've seen pretty much everything, except some of his newer films. I haven't seen Left Behind yet.

Were there any that are really difficult to track down in hard copy?
Guarding Tess was really hard to get. Zandalee was not the easiest to find. It's him and Judge Reinhold. He covers himself in black paint.

What's the biggest misconception about Nic Cage?
I think the biggest misconception about Nicolas Cage is that he can't act. That's a criticism that he gets all the time.

Why do you think he doesn't have a good reputation as an actor?
I think it's because he's a character actor who happens to be really famous. If someone else did it, they would be that guy in that film who you keep seeing. And people might enjoy him more. But because he is the top-billed guy in movies, they expect a certain type of actor, or someone who's cultivated a career that is one thing. But because he does so many different things, it's hard to make sense of him.

What's your overall theory?
I guess the book is about both his style of acting and his choices. Those are the things that he's most criticized forthat he only chooses films because he's got to pay down his back taxes. But I'm arguing that he actually has a reason for doing the films that he does. The reason is usually that he's trying to something new with acting. Like, he did Sorcerer's Apprentice because it was sort of sci-fi but for kids, because he has a young kid. Some of the sci-fi stuff, he was doing it so he could feel otherworldly in .

What's your favourite Nic Cage scene?
For the launch party, I was trying to pick out a little montage of scenes, and I felt like all my favourite but are things where you have to watch the whole movie to enjoy them. Like, there's a part in Bad Lieutenant where he's in a house with a drug dealer, and he tricks them into giving themselves up, and he walks out of the house and turns all the other cops and says, "I love it. I just love it." So I put that in the montage, but I know that no one will know what it's about. And then everything in Vampire's Kiss is pretty much amazing.

Have you started attracting Nic Cage fanatics now?
I got contacted by someone who runs a Spanish Nicolas Cage fan site, and says he's doing a documentary about Nicolas Cage and wants to interview me. So that's something.

Follow Chris Bilton on Twitter.

A Brief History of Meth

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Illustrations by Michael Dockery

This post originally appeared on VICE Australia

The Australian Federal Police intercepted $10 million worth of methamphetamineor ice, as we in Australia like to call iton Sunday, stashed inside three rather tacky fish statues from China. Investigators intercepted the statues, replaced their contents with filler, and delivered the packages to their intended address in Canberra. A Nigerian national was later arrested after the contents were removed.

This all happened because ice is evil, right? Well, yes andno. Like every other illicit drug on the planet, ice was born out of the legal pharmaceutical industryand only developed its all-pervading stigma in recent years. So for the sake of some record-straightening let's look at how this happened.

Americans more accurately refer to the drug asmeth. Speed is also meth, just in a powder format. It should also be noted thatcrack is an adulterated form of cocaine and has nothing to do withmethamphetamine. For the sake of consistency we'll call ice meth for the remainder of this article.

It all began at the Humboldt University of Berlin. In 1871the Japanese Government sent their country's first pharmaceutical doctor, 25-year-old Nagai Nagayoshi, to study in Berlin. This was a time when the pursuit ofchemistry was still shaking off the last whiffs of alchemy, and researchers were makingquiet discoveries that would become plastics, fertilizers, pharmaceuticals,explosives, and a billion other household products. Nagayoshi was sent to studyunder a teacher named August Wilhelm von Hofmann, who was gaining some international status for lecturing hisstudents in a working lab, as well as for his unusual enthusiasm for plantcompounds. Under Hofmann's tuition, Humboldt University gave us modern dyes,petrochemical distillation, and methamphetamines.

Nagai Nagayoshi was interested in identifying the constituents of traditional Asian herbs, which is how he came to isolate thestimulant ephedrine fromthe Chinese plant, Ephedra sinica. It's been theorized Nagayoshi was trying to create a drug similar to cocaine, whichhad been championed by Sigmund Freud in his book Uber Cocainein 1884. But when ephedrine was isolated in 1885 it was seen as a noveldiscovery, albeit one without a practical use. Despite Nagayoshi's hope thatephedrine would assist asthma sufferers, the German pharmaceutical company E.Merck knocked the drug back, saying it offered no improvement over adrenaline.This may have motivated Nagayoshi to bolster its effects, which ended in himusing ephedrine to synthesize methamphetamine in 1893. But again, Nagayoshicouldn't find a practical application and meth was forgotten.

In 1919, another Japanese chemist studying in Berlin, a guynamed Akira Ogata,discovered a simpler, faster process for synthesizing crystal meth. He adaptedNagayoshi's recipe for ephedrine but added red phosphorus and iodine, producingthe same result in a convenient crystalline form. He released the recipe to theBritish-based Burroughs Wellcome & Co, who first introduced the drug to Europeas a psychiatric treatment.

Methamphetamine graduated from an esoteric novelty to adrugs scourge via World War II. In 1934 the German pharmaceutical companyTemmler began exploring the drug's potential for the consumer market. Afterfiling a patent titled Process for the Preparation of Amines, a tabletform of meth called Pervitinwas introduced in 1939. Pervitin was sold in a cylinder containing 30digestible pills, and like a sort of extreme Red Bull, it was sold to the general public as a way toincrease concentration and wakefulness. It soon found a market with German soldiers, and among Luftwaffe pilots, it came tobe known colloquially as the Herman-Gring Pill.

A very similar thing happened in Japan. But whereas theGermans informally adopted meth, the Japanese embraced the drug withempire-building fervor. They called it Philopon,which translates roughly to "love of work," and funneled it into all armsof the military, as well as into government factories. Particularly high doses were alsogiven to Kamikaze pilots before missions, for reasons that are probably obvious. Incidences ofstimulant-fueled psychosis exploded but as in Germany, these cases weredownplayed at the behest of the pharmaceutical companies.

Over in the US, the 1950s were a golden age for meth-based dietpills. Several companies patented consumer methamphetamines under a range ofnames including Obetrol.According to the 1972 Physicians' Desk Reference, each 10 milligram tablet ofObertol contained 2.5 milligrams of methamphetamine saccharate. If you've seen Requiemfor a Dream, you'll know what that does. Products like these were slowlyphased out through the 1960s, and were completely outlawed by the ControlledSubstances Act in 1970.

Japan, however, banned meth much faster. In the late 40ssurplus military stimulants were rebranded Hiropon and sold to the hungry,miserable post-war population. What was already rampant use among Japan'sex-military turned into an all-out epidemic and the Stimulant Control Law wasintroduced in 1951, banning all use of meth and its production. By 1954 it'sestimated the country still had about 550,000 chronic users, with another 2 million former usersaround 3.8 percent ofthe population.

As Japan and the US cracked down on meth, Australiafollowed. We've long entertained a pragmatic attitude towards drugs, and neverpermitted in the same range of shonky pharmaceuticals as the US. MostAustralian drug arrests prior to the 1960s targeted international victors, andit wasn't until the Vietnam War that the notion of "recreational drug use" wasintroduced by returning servicemen. But in the 1970s, as the US began to drivea war-on-drugs agenda through the UN, Australia shifted from a harmminimization approach favored by the British, to a more American-stylepolicy of criminal justice.

Prior to the 1970s, Australian drugs were regulated by statePoisons Acts. Then, one by one, these laws were adapted to account for peopleactively trafficking. Sentences were also upped for possession and the media turnedagainst the scourge of drugs. It was also about the time that media coveragebegan forcing drugs into two sides of a moralistic dichotomy. This said thatdrugs such as aspirin were good, whereas drugs like meth were intrinsicallyevil, despite the fact that each are just chemicals, incapable of leaning one way or theother. That's to say that it's culture that dictates a drug's vibe. Aspirinisn't any more natural than meth, despite the way users might look.

This takes us to the present day, where the issue of drugs is impossible to bring up without the mention of meth. With reports of ballooning addiction in rural communities, and celebrities such as Ben Cousins forcing meth into the spotlight, former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott announced a task force to tackle the problem. The word "epidemic" also gets thrown around a lot, which is an issue because usagehas actually fallen. In 1998 3.9 percent of people aged 14 and older admitted to using the drug, whereas by 2013 that number had fallen to 2.1 percent. The main difference is that mostpeople are now smoking the crystal form instead of snorting the powder.

As Monday's seizure made clear, people are afraid of meth and want it off thestreets. That's reasonable, but fear mongering leaves a lot out of the picture.Meth is a chemical just like any other. Its effect on society says just as muchabout society as it does the drug.

Follow Julian on Twitter.


Yeah Baby: Babies Stay Woke

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The author with his wife and baby

Rightafter the baby pops out it takes hella naps, cause being in the realworld with actual gravity is wild tiring compared to floating around in amniotic fluid. But once the baby gets theswing of that post-utero life and starts seeing all the fun tobe had in the waking world it's like"fuck sleep."

As we all know, sleep is the cousin of death.And nobody knows this more than a baby. It'sbrand new at life and has a lot to take in, hella stimuli. There's too much going on and they don't want to miss anything. Nobody gets FOMO harder than a baby.They were cooped up in a uterus for ninemonths and now that they're out they're trying to turn the fuck up. It'll be last call and the baby will betexting its baby friends like "Slidethru it's lit."

And you know what? I hella feel that. I'vespent large amounts of time I could have spentsleeping working on becoming the world famous D-list indie rapper/male model/parenting columnist/"popartist"/commercial illustrator/perhaps forever unpublished novelist you see glistening and fully formed beforeyou today. So at first I was like, "Yeah, f'sho. Just sleep whenever you'retired. Do whatever, it's your world." I wasdigging the whole Leonardo da Vinci sleeptheory: no real sleep, just naps, burning the midnight oil, moving through the world in a trippy dreamstateinventing the helicopter 500 years beforeit's built and making great strides in perspective,chiaroscuro, and other aspects of realistic oil painting. I felt like the baby was really onto something.There's only so many hours in the day,what are we waiting for, carpe diem/noctem, etc.

But there are a lot of problems with keepingthat reality tethered to a more objectivesidereal one, where fools wake up in the morning and go to bed at night and hold regular jobs. I guess itmakes sense that my baby, containing muchof the genetic make-up that makes me me, shares my feelings that the so-called objective reality where people haveschedules and real jobs is kinda wack, so Ican't fault her for not wanting to go tobed at 8 PM. I know I don't. And I mean, aren't we at the precipice of an age where robots do all our workfor us? But hey, I ain't the ref, just aplayer. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. And I guess scientists insist that without enough sleep you don'tfunction well, and babies in particular needhellof sleep to grow, and who am I totell scientists they're wrong? Scientists have fragile egos. You gotta let them win a couple battles whilethey catch up to you spiritually.

So yeah, we started enforcing a set bedtime. Ifwe had just done that from the get-go weprobably would have had a way easier time, but we were sad to see her stuffed away in the crib and even moresad to hear her cry. We wanted to kick itwith her just as much as she wanted to kickit with us.

There's a book called the Continuum Concept by this chick Jean Liedloff who chilled in the jungles of Venezuela with some indigenoustypes living in a society that relied ontechnology from the Stone Age. The babies in those communities pretty much stayattached to the parents at all times, breastfeedand sleep in the same beds as the parentsuntil they're like three or four years old. Being close to the baby is a totally natural inclination, very much a part ofour biological makeup and worth payingattention to and thinking about. I definitely agree with the breastfeeding as long as possible aspect. We even shared the bed with our baby in the early months andwe snuggle and nap with her when she'stired enough to let us, but that "All Day" baby theory doesn't really take into account that your boyneeds some private time with his wife to"do thangs." We also found the baby wakes up less when she sleeps alone so we didn't end up goingfull Amazon. Still, I wouldn't discouragethe use of any of the advice in that book, it's just a matter of personalpreference and doing what works best for youand your environment and whatnot.

As far as tactics go, you got your stand uprocking and shushing; your sit down rock'n' shush; your lean-over-into-the-crib R&S (not a good look for your back, tbh); your white noise machines; soft music(Sketches of Spain and TroisGymnopedies go hard); no music; night lights; no night lights; "cluster feeding" (hella milkleading up to bedtime); "twilight feeding"(waking the baby up to feed it before you go to sleep so it doesn't wake up hungry like an hour later);bedtime baths, bedtime stories, the supposedlycontroversial but very effective"Cry-It-Out" method (leaving the baby in the crib and letting it cry until it gets tired and fallsasleep); and the hella effective, but nottotally sustainable "Throw 'em-in-the-Car-and-Drive-Around"method.

We've tried them all in various combinationswith mixed success, and while there's no one right way to do it, here's theregimen we landed on: Around 7 or 7:30 PM thebaby takes a bath with her mom and breastfeeds in the bath. After that, pajamas, read a book or two orthree, let her roll around on the bed orthe rug with the lights down low until her eyes get droopy, no music or maybe low mellow music in theother room. Then put her in the crib,maybe rock and shush a bit if she whines. More often than not, though, lingering in there keeps her up so we usuallyjust turn the light off and close the door.

Sometimes she yelps a couple times and fallsasleep. Sometimes she cries for a coupleminutes. Sometimes she cries for longer. At first it was hard to let her cry, but we found throughexperience it really is the quickest wayto get her to sleep. The more you stick to your guns, the less they think there's a chance you're comingback and the quicker they give up oncrying. That said, if she's been crying for like 30 minutes or more we might go back in there, take her out the crib, let her kick it a little longer, maybegive her some more milk. That usuallydoes the trick. If she wakes up whining lateat night, sometimes we just let her whine a bit and she falls back asleep. If the whining goes on hella long andturns into full on urgent crying we go inand make sure it's not like a diaper leak or whatever, give her some water or milk.

If the baby's still wilding out after all that,I've found that sometimes just steppingoutside and looking at the moon and starsand such will calm her down. The moon is a powerful cosmic force not to be underestimated. Babies are hella in tunewith that. On that last crazy big SuperBlood Moon the baby was flipping out, absolutely refused to go to sleep till we took her out to see it. Then when shesaw the moon she was like "Daaamn!" Soyeah, keep that in mind. Babies love themoon.

But probably the most important thing is justmaking sure the baby's days are superactive, filled with movement and thinking, stimuli, new stuff, learning, etc. I find if we just take thebaby somewhere she's never been before, or if she hangs outwith somebody new, that the amount ofprocessing she does is so much that she sleeps hella well. If she's bored kicking it at the house all dayshe'll have a harder time falling asleep.

Like literally all aspects of raising a kid,there's no one right way to put a baby to sleep. Sometimes you apply learnedtactics from books or whatever, sometimesyou freeball it. Or some combination of those things. Always try to do what comes naturally to you. Don't overthinkit. Consistency and sticking to schedulesare good, but sometimes the baby wants tostay up past its bed time and see what the grown folk are up to and sometimes if you let them do that they're like"Oh, just the same old boring shit,OK," and they get tired and want to go to bed. Sometimes they sleep easy and sometimes they don't.When they don't it's a matter of payingattention to the baby and its wants and needs, learning how to distinguish when it simply and honestly needs moretime with you from when it's just being a baby.

Follow Kool A.D. on Twitter.

A Fond Farewell to Trade, London’s First After-Hours Gay Club

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Every gay club to have come on the scene since Trade opened its doors in 1990 has tried to emulate its impact. As illegal rave culture redefined British nightlife, Trade's home, Turnmills in Clerkenwell, became the first venue in the UK to be granted a 24-hour license, marking a new dawn of the London scene.

Trade was a weekly haven for post 3 AM party boys. Named by promoter Laurence Malice as a safe place for queers to get some safe after-hours "trade" away from London's parks and illegal basements, it was the first legitimate after-hours club in London. This weekend, after 25 years, it will close its doors for good in one final, flamboyant swan song.

I first went to Trade in 1995. As a teenager in the 1990s I'd leave my parents' house on Saturday night for another "sleepover" at the home of whatever fake girlfriend I'd invented that month. In reality, my weekends were spent in Soho bars and clubs like Heaven and G-A-Y, before ending up at Turnmills on the Sunday morning.

The first time I went, I waited over two hours in the pissing rain to get in, watching the smoke from the main dance room they called "Dante's Inferno" billow under the doorway onto the street. The door policy was simple: "You don't have to be gay or a member to get in, but your attitude and look will count." The door bitch Tom was infamous, but after a few weeks he became my friend. I never did find out why he started letting me skip the queue every Sunday, but since his side-eye could fuck with even the hardest queer, I never asked.

Through the door and down an elaborate metal staircase, we spilled out onto the heaving mess: blokes, bears, lesbians, transsexuals, not-sure-yets, and their straight mates. The path to the dance floor was known as "Muscle Alley," and I'd slip and grind between the biceps and hard-ons of the ripped men side-stepping out of time to music that was always too fast for them to dance in time to and still look composed. I took my first pill there (technically, it was just half, but it was enough). We'd queue patiently under the arches that surrounded the dance floor in line for dealers serving up cocaine under one, ketamine under the next, pills in arch three. (Maybe it wasn't exactly in that order.)

I'd never dare tell my parents where I was going at weekends. Section 28 was still in force at the time, and the mainstream mediapropelled by righteous moralizers like Mary Whitehousesaw us as freaks, spitting disgust at our life "choices." Trade was a sanctuarya paradise of inclusion, unity, and belonging. The leather heads and butch dykes from monthly fetish night Fist mixed with Soho's drag queens and twinks. In the outside world, I was shy and repressed, but in Trade's dark abyss, I screamed and danced with all the city's other misfits and freaks. Under those lasers we celebrated life away from a judgmental British culture that was yet to accept us.

Trade was part Berghain, part Studio 54. Visually, like its organizer Laurence Malice, it was camp and flamboyant and outrageous, everything presented with a sardonic sexualized humor. This was, after all, the man who, in 1995, dropped his trousers and flashed his pants on stage at Trade in Le Palace, Paris, in protest at the French government testing nuclear weapons on islands in the South Pacific.

"Trade will not return to Paris while Chirac is in power, but thank you for having us this time," Malice said on stage to a packed-out club. David Guetta, who was running Le Palace at the time, never invited him back.

For Trade's first 12 years it was a behemoth. Madonna famously visited, as did Jean Paul Gaultier. Bjork crowd-surfed, and even Posh and Becks popped in. Did Grace Jones go once? Apparently yes. And no, depending who you ask. We do know that Malice took glee in having a Princess Diana lookalike swan across the dance floor and give a short wave before disappearing. "She was there," swear so many to this day. What we do know for sure is that Cher was turned away. Her entourage and demands for a VIP area could not be met. There were no VIPs at Trade, Malice told her management, who scuttled back to the waiting limo. Axl Rose got told to fuck off too when he came to the door not long after making some homophobic comments in the press.

A poster for Trade

I remember the tall black drag queen with the balloon tits, whose legs were so long I'd have to speak to her crotch until she'd lean over to kiss my cheek to say "hi." I remember the boy with the angel wings I fell in "love" with when he snogged me in the toilet queue. I remember the one-night stands, 15-minute toilet romances, dickheads, and divas. It was at Trade I kissed the boy who would later become my soulmate, and a girl who is still my best friend. I even snogged two straight women in their 40s because they gave me my first line of coke. The place is the venue for my own personal highlights reel, soundtracked by Tony de Vit's peerless mixing.

Trade earned a kind of respect from the mainstream dance music industry that other British gay events had never quite commanded. By the mid-90s, it had begun to host events across Europe, notably in Ibiza with Manumission. But it's a tough grind staying ahead in London's fickle night-time economy. Trade inevitably became a victim of its success as other venues petitioned to open later too. Rival after-hours nights opened, and the shift to Vauxhall and a funkier house sound made Trade's banging industrial techno feel outmoded. It re-imagined itself staging special events, with the birthday parties becoming annual reunions for old friends as new scene faces went elsewhere.

Turnmills would become victim to gentrification when the lease was declined for renewal in 2008. But even 13 years after its weekly events ended, Trade's power still resonates on London's evolving gay scene. Trade defined an era and ruled unrelentingly, and nothing can ever take its crown away.

Cliff Joannou is Deputy Editor at Attitude magazine.

Follow Cliff on Twitter.

TRADE: THE FINAL will take place on Sunday, October 25 from 2PM to 9AM the following day at EGG London.

The "Trade: Often Copied, Never Equalled" Exhibition is at the Islington Museum, London.

The Brutal Legacy of Frank Rizzo, the Most Notorious Cop in Philadelphia History

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Frank Rizzo as mayor in 1977. Photo courtesy Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries

Say the name Frank Rizzo at any old-school dive bar in Philadelphia and you're liable to start a conversation. The former mayor and police commissioner who reigned through most of the 70s might be described as a "tough guy"or maybe a "racist asshole."

Immediatelyrecognizable from his hulking figure and spiffy threads, Rizzo traded on white working-class fears of the city's rising violent crime rate, and made no bones about his penchant for cracking heads.

"Just wait after November, you'll have a front row seat because I'm going to make Attila the Hun look like a faggot," he said of his enemies during his 1975 re-election bid.

On Wednesday, a two-hour recounting of his life (simplycalled Rizzo), based on a mostly friendly 1993 biography from ESPN writer SalPaolantonio, opened after a run of sold-out previews. In the era of theBlack Lives Matter movement and the April conflagration on the streets ofBaltimore, a reexamination of the life of Philadelphia's most notorious former mayorand top cop makes sense. And even though Rizzo died in the early 90s, the city is still working its way out of the man's shadow when it comes to local policing.

The police of his dayknew Rizzo as "The General,"and he certainly cut a commanding figure: 6'2, 250 pounds, a 19-and-a-halfinch neck (MikeTyson, for comparison, is a 20-and-a-half). You might say his appeal was a bit like that of Donald Trump: Rizzo fashionedhimself as a tough decision-maker who said what he meant, tact be damned. " should be strung up," he once said after ordering raids on thegroup's offices throughout Philly. "I mean, within the law. This is actualwarfare." Rizzo seemed to lean on cops as an instrument for heading off social change in a city being seismically altered by capitalflight, and rising poverty. His imposing frame and brash aphorisms symbolized security.

"When Frank Rizzo walked into a neighborhood, people feltsafe," remembers MichaelChitwood, a former Philly cop who served throughout Rizzo's years in powerand is now Superintendent of Police in neighboring Upper Darby, Pennsylvania. "If there wasan incident, Frank Rizzo was out front leading the charge. He was a combinationof John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. If he told you to go through a door, youwouldn't hesitate."

"Take Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, the guy in Staten Island, and you put all that shit in one city."Michael Simmons

Rizzo joined the Philadelphia Police Department in 1943 and would go on to embrace hard-charging tactics, like raiding beatnikand gay hangouts in the 1950s. Nearly anything was justified to get a suspect in cuffs, no matter their race. But African-Americans were some of the poorest residents of the city, and that grim reality set the groundwork for Rizzo's turbulentrelations with people of color, which were locked in place by a series of high-profile incidents in the 1960s.

Like plenty of American lawmen in that era, Rizzo didn't seem able, or willing, to differentiate between activism and criminality. In 1966, he organized four squads of shotgun-toutingcops to raid offices and an apartment associated with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Philly, turning up two and a half sticks of dynamite. (SNCC activists claimed then, and reiteratetoday, that the explosives were planted by an informant.) In 1967, afterbeing appointed police commissioner, Rizzo led a phalanx of officers to a school administration building where a crowd of students was protesting infavor of a black history curriculum. What happened next is in dispute, or at least the precise wording is: Local newspapers reported that Rizzo told cops, whom he suggested were being attacked, to "get their black asses."

The results were brutal, with dozens of students beaten in what observers describedas a police riot. "A cop chased two black girls right outside ofthe window of the administration building where we were looking out," theschool district's then-public relations manager rememberedyears later, "and just proceeded to beat the crap out of them with anightstick." These incidents solidified Rizzo's reputation, along with a 1970 raid against the Black Panther offices that endedwith the men being strip-searched before newspaper photographers. In 1967, his approval ratingstood at 84 percent, suggesting both blacks and whites were OK with him; after the showdown at the school, letters to the Philadelphia Inquirer were two to one in favor of Rizzo, whileletters to the African-American paper, the Tribune,were three to one against. Still, his popularity among white voters secured thepolice department plenty of resources: The number of city cops went from 7,000 to9,000 during his commissionership and the budget jumped from $60 million to $100 million.

Asboth a police official and mayor, Rizzo traded in the kind of tough-on-crimepolitics that evoked a vision of society beset by shadowy figures of monstrouscriminality and radicalismconcepts that often bled together in his narratives.In the face of these existential threats, the forces of law and order werejustified in responding with extreme prejudice: More officers, scarier guns,bigger prisons, and stiffer sentences. "If the prisons are crowded,if we need more prisons, let's build them," Rizzo said in 1968, 20 years beforeGeorge HW Bush used awfully similar language as he ramped up mass incarceration. "Most of these hardened criminals are beyondrehabilitation... They are being pampered," Rizzo added. A decade later, he bragged on nationaltelevision that the department's armory had grown from a mere six shotguns when hetook over as commissioner: "Now we're equipped to fight wars. We could invade Cubaand win."

After he became mayor in 1972, the Philly police department'sbudget climbed steadily, and in negotiations, Rizzo granted cops pay hikes andextremely generous pension plans that allowed many to retirewith full benefits after 25 years. Such benefits might be easier to bear with alarger tax pool, but in a city with a shrinking population and tax base, allowingthousands of officers to retire at early at age 45 proved a heavy burden. A fewyears ago, PhiladelphiaMagazine estimated that thanks to pension requirements negotiated under Rizzoand his predecessor, James Tate, 12,000 retired officers and theirbeneficiaries are owed today between $1.2 and $1.7 million each.

"Rizzo kidnapped the fucking city, that's what he really did." Larry Krasner

Meanwhile, Rizzo retained absolute control over the policedepartment. He appointed a new commissioner, but officers who needed favors orhelp with a problem still knew who to go to. "When I was in trouble, Icircumvented the whole world and went right to the Mayor's Office," remembersChitwood, who was among the subjects of a PhiladelphiaInquirer investigation into pervasive brutality in the department. "It was still Rizzo's police department. Iwent to Rizzo, and said, 'Look, I don't want to lose my job.' And Rizzo said tome, his exact words were, 'As long as I'm mayor, you'll have a job.'"

Critics are still fuming about how the police department under Rizzo was deeply politicized. "Rizzo was responsible for a lot of police frame-ups," allegesHakim Anderson, a former SNCC activist, who recalls being arrested 17 times ina three-month period. "About every other week I was being picked up forsomething. They were frame-ups, never any convictions for any of the charges." Radicalactivists weren't the only targets: Philly police were used to intimidate Rizzo'sestablishment political opponents too, according to the 1977 book TheCop Who Would Be King, including the president ofcity council, the head of the local Democratic Party, and the superintendent ofthe school district.

As violent crime continued to rise,the police department reacted in kind. In 1979, the Department of Justice, in afirst-of-its-kind lawsuit, charged Rizzo and other city officials withallowing pervasive police abuse. They foundthat from 1970 to 1978, the police shot and killed 162 people. "The cops werejust totally out of control," remembers Michael Simmons, an organizer with SNCCand a variety of other leftist groups who sat in at Rizzo's office to protestpolice brutality. "They were really beating and shooting African Americans andPuerto Ricans. It's like what's going on now, but it was all taking place inone city. Take Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, the guy in Staten Island, and you put allthat shit in one city."

Check out the episode of 'Truckers in the Wild' about local Philly food customs.

Rizzo's clout never stretched beyond Philadelphia, though: Hishigher aspirations were tarnished by a seriesof scandals, many linked to patronage or police brutality, and an enormous taxhike to pay for his largesse. He barely survived a recall effort and, evenas his political base shrunk, tried a blatant racial appeal, encouraging residents tovote for a change in the city charter to let him serve a third consecutive term. "I'm asking white people, andblacks who think like me, to vote Frank Rizzo," he said. "I say votewhite." (He lost the vote to change the term limit two to one.)

In many ways, Philadelphia is still living with Frank Rizzo's police force. Data from Governing shows that the city has the fifth highest police-officer-to-citizen ratio in the nation, and the pensions he negotiated with the police andfiremen's unions remain a weight on the city's shaky finances. A report from the Department of Justice released this year found that between 2007 and 2013, the Philly policeforce killed people at a rate six times greater thantheir counterparts in New York; 81 percent of those killed were black. Scandalsrock the department with disturbing regularity, but even if the commissionerwants to fire an officer, the arbitration system makes it all but impossible. The police department remains a hidebound and hugely powerful institution apart from the rest of Philadelphia, one that seems stuck in the 1970s.

"Rizzo kidnapped the fucking city, that's what he reallydid," says Larry Krasner, a civil rights attorney who frequently sues thepolice department over issues of brutality and corruption. "He said, 'We're copsand we're in charge of the money, the pensions, race relations,' and he took usto the bottom of the fucking ocean. He was the strong man who dispenses withniceties like laws and constitutional protections and just gets the job done.And we still have a police department that feels they can do pretty muchwhatever they want. And they're right about that."

Jake Blumgart is a reporter and editor based in Philadelphia. Follow him on Twitter.

Comics: An Artist Revisits Her Goals in Today's Comic by Anna Haifisch

Australia's Mistreatment of a Pregnant, Allegedly Raped Refugee

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Mark Isaacs is a former Salvation Army employee at the Nauru Regional Processing Centre. He later wrote about the experience in his widely-acclaimed book, The Undesirables: Inside Nauru. Here Mark evaluates the government's handling of Abyan.

The case of a 23-year-old Somali refugee named Abyan, who became pregnant after she was allegedly raped by an unknown assailant on Nauru, should be extremely concerning for Australians. Not only has the Australian government treated a vulnerable woman callously, but we have once again seen "bigger picture" government asylum seeker policy fail the individual.

Read: The Number of Ways in Which Australia Has Failed Female Refugees Is Staggering

To recap the events of the past months: After being allegedly raped in July 2015, Abyan told health professionals in Nauru in September that she was pregnant as a result of the rape. Abyan spent several weeks requesting the Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DIBP) transfer her to Australia to terminate her pregnancy. During that time, it is reported that Abyan was not eating or drinking, and had lost more than 22 pounds.

While DIBP deliberated on her fate it became clear she could not have the procedure completed while remaining in the offshore processing system. Termination of pregnancy is illegal on Nauru except in circumstances to save the life or preserve the health of the mother. There is no clause for the termination of a pregnancy resulting from rape. According to leaked documents from the health services contractor on Nauruthe International Health and Medical Servicesrefugees needing advanced medical care will no longer be flown to Australia for treatment but instead be flown to Papua New Guinea. However, in this particular case, Abyan had already surpassed the legal time threshold of 12 weeks for terminations of pregnancies in Papua New Guinea. This meant that her only option for a termination would be in Australia.

As her health deteriorated and as public pressure mounted, the government transferred her to Australia for treatment. Then, in a strange turn of events, less than a week after arriving in Australia, Abyan was secretly flown to the Solomon Islands and then on to Nauru, having not received a termination.

Minister for Immigration Dutton claims she received counseling and extensive healthcare during her five day stay in Villawood and claims she, "decided not to proceed with the termination." The decision was then made to fly her back to Nauru.

The crux of the decision to remove her from the country is a collection of contradictory hearsay.

Abyan's lawyer, George Newhouse, refutes these assertions by Minister Dutton.

"Our client has not decided to refuse a termination and you have completely misunderstood or misconstrued her position which is as set out in my letter... of 14 October 2015," he wrote in an email to senior officials at DIBP.

DIBP have been accused of chartering an RAAF jet for $130,000 to whisk Abyan out of the country secretly to avoid a pending court injunction that would attempt to keep her in Australia.

Newhouse said the government's strategy in forcibly removing Abyan was aimed "at avoiding due process and any scrutiny."

What makes the events surrounding the deportation of Abyan so difficult to follow is that at the crux of the decision to remove her from the country is a collection of contradictory hearsay. Two disparate cases are demanding we trust them. One is requesting protection from harm. The other is purposefully sidestepping the courts to try and return a traumatized woman to harm. It's a hard case to argue for Minister Dutton. If Dutton and his department want the Australian people to believe them, they have to prove they're trustworthy and that involves being open and transparent with their treatment of refugees.

The ambiguity of the facts in this case is indicative of our offshore detention system. It is clear that we need a politically independent statutory authority in Nauru and Papua New Guinea. However, considering the government's recent lambasting of Gillian Triggs and the Australian Human Rights Commission, this seems like a distant reality at best.

The government is determined not to be emotionally manipulated into giving asylum seekers an avenue of escape.

The greater, overarching theme to this story is the government's 'the ends justify the means' approach to border control. Days prior to Abyan's deportation back to Nauru, Minister Dutton referenced a "racket" of 200 asylum seekers who had been brought from offshore processing centers to Australia on medical grounds and then sought injunctions to prevent them being returned to Nauru. The government is determined not to be emotionally manipulated into giving asylum seekers an avenue of escape from Nauru and Abyan has become the political shuttlecock in this struggle.

In this particular case, Dutton has made a mistake. Abyan is a poor choice to make an example of and Dutton's implication that asylum seekers who try whatever means they can to escape the hellhole of Nauru are acting illegally or dishonestly is distasteful. If we continue to believe that cruel treatment in offshore processing is the only way to manage our borders then Dutton may have a point. However, the notion that "we are saving lives at sea" is being lost in the countless horrifying stories of abuse that leak into Australian living rooms via the mouths of Australian whistleblowers despite the government's best efforts to threaten them with jail terms. During my time in Nauru I learned to distrust the government's philosophy that the greater good overrides the individual. I'm glad to see that more and more Australians are learning the same lesson.

Related: Watch VICE News' film 'Refugees' Dead End in Italy'

Hidden amongst this trial by media is the one person who should matter most. Abyan. A 23-year-old woman. A refugee. A rape victim. A woman requesting a termination of a pregnancy she claims was caused by her rapist. When you push aside all the political power games you are left with a desperate and vulnerable woman who is not receiving the treatment she needs. We have a duty of care to protect her and while in Nauru the government cannot guarantee her safety.

Follow Mark on Twitter.


The NDP Should Quit Trying to Win and Get Back to Having Principles

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He looks so excited! Sorry, bud. Photo via Facebook/Official NDP

What the hell does the NDP do now?

On Monday they suffered arguably their greatest defeat ever, not least because this was the first time there was actually any chance of them forming government. And instead of doing that, the party lost 59 seats as well as its status as Official Opposition. What a rout!

Read more: The Definitive Explanation for Why You Voted in Justin Trudeau

As I've written before, I think the NDP's strategy of sloughing off its more radical left-wing politics in a bid to convince moderate voters it's a solid, centrist alternative to the Liberals and Conservatives was a huge mistake. Aside from my personal preference for a legitimate progressive party, the Liberals are a centre-of-the-spectrum party, so how are you going to be an alternative when you're remaking yourself in the same image? The move failed to win over the voters it was targeted at, and it drove progressive voters away (we love to cast off a sell-out).

But would running a solidly leftist campaign have led the NDP to victory? That's hard to say: at least part of the Liberals' success surely stems from the party's decision to adopt progressive policies and rhetoric (for now), but the Liberals, as a traditionally centrist party running left, didn't have the baggage of a leftist party doing the same. When Justin Trudeau says the Liberals will run three deficit budgets in order to encourage economic growth by investing in things like infrastructure, he can claim to be making a reasoned decision based on the facts. Had Tom Mulcair made the same pledge, though, it would have been easy to paint him as a crazed socialist just waiting to run amok imprisoning the wealthy and taking all their money, doling out free prescription drugs to aborted babies wearing niqabs.

But today's Liberals are in many respects no more progressive than they used to be. Former Toronto police chief and staunch carding advocate Bill Blair was a star candidate for the party, at a time when police brutality and racist police tactics are receiving more scrutiny than they have in decades, and the party still supports using pipelines to get Alberta's tar sands oil to buyers. And of course, we should never forget the Liberals' bizarre support for Bill C-51, which the party still doesn't plan to scrap.

So no, a progressive campaign that adhered to the NDP's historical principles might not have been a "winning strategy." But what is the point of winning if the only way to do it is to give up your principles? The point of forming government, of entering politics at all, is to enact the values and policies you and your party stand for; but if the party has forsaken all of the aforementioned in order to win, that victory is hollow. It's meaningless. There is no point whatsoever in running just to win, with no principles. What are you going to fight for when you get to office? The policies that are polling best? It's a popular strategy among the well-heeled elite that likes to join politics these days, but it's ridiculous, and it can lead to slow-motion train wrecks like the Conservative Party's strategy in this most recent election.

So if the NDP shouldn't run as an unprincipled middle ground party, and it (maybe) can't win with a dedicated progressive platform, what's there to do?

Well, there's always what the party was doing before Jack Layton came along with his bewitching moustache and deceptive centrism. When you participate in the political process without trying to win big, you're far freer to advance policies and discussions the mainstream political process isn't quite ready for. Ask Elizabeth Warren, a darling of American progressives who refused many calls to run for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. When it comes to radical politics, a lower profile arguably gives you more power to get your message out and not fear alienating everyone who's behind the times. You can't enact a policy on your own, of course, but you can push other politicians and ~the national conversation~ (more later on how opposition parties might soon gain even more power in Parliament).

Gerald Kaplan, an academic and longtime NDP organizer, wrote this week in the Globe and Mail: "For decades the NDP were policy pioneers, promoting social policies especially until the governing party was forced to accept themold-age pensions, medicare, unemployment insurance, and much more. Where are the equivalent NDP policies of today? Where are the tough but realistic policies that would address Canada's scandalous inequality?"

Those policies were all put forward by a smaller, more rambunctious NDP that could push the larger parties without catering to skittish voters. Imagine an NDP fighting to expand medicare to cover both dental care and prescription drugs! Or for a guaranteed minimum income! Or, god forbid, for supporting Palestinians in their fight against the Israeli occupation! That's the NDP we need, especially with a majority government in place.

This strategy could become an even more viable one very soon: Justin Trudeau made a campaign-trail promise that Oct. 19, 2015 would be the last federal election that used the first-past-the-post system. He reiterated that promise during his first press conference as prime minister-designate. With some form of proportional representation in place, even a more radical NDP could make gains in Parliament.

Admittedly, it's highly unlikely any of this will actually happen. Mulcair, who has spearheaded the campaign to make the NDP a middle-ground party since taking the reigns from Layton, wants to stay on as leader, and the party doesn't appear to be clamouring for his head. If he does step down, whoever replaces him as party leader will likely be another Third Way acolyte, but on the off chance that a real lefty takes the helm, they would have their work cut out for them. If they were really serious about rejuvenating the party as a left-wing opposition party, they'd need to start a grassroots effort to get lefties excited about both the party and the movement, the project of leftwing politics. They'd need to build up a membership dedicated to fighting aggressively for the left, which the NDP hasn't done in years.

So, all in all, it's looking rather bleak. But it's not impossible, and even a modicum of movement here would be promising. Maybe a start, good for both morale and appearance, would be to put "socialism" back in the party's constitution and start making some noise about police brutality, especially by working with black and Indigenous groups across the country who are already fighting racist police.

Follow Tannara Yelland on Twitter.

Bad Religion’s Frontman Says Everyone Should Stop Trying to Be Better Than Everyone Else

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Greg Graffin is actually the perfect synthesis of professor and lifelong punk, which is convenient! Photo via Flickr user digboston

Each fall, mild-mannered Greg Graffin, Ph.D. in zoology, lectures about evolution at Cornell. And then for the rest of the year, he stirs up mosh pits as the frontman of SoCal punk legends Bad Religion. Last month, he combined his ego and alter-ego for the first time, by playing acoustic Bad Religion songs as he toured his second book (after 2010's Anarchy Evolution)Population Wars: A New Perspective on Competition and Coexistence.

No question it's a learned book, stuffed with endnotes and references, but it has a punk attitude toward such traditional American values as the idea of a winnable war and competition itself. Where political scientists and philosophers normally tackle these issues, Graffin brings a geological and zoological perspective, taking us back through time and human evolution to show how we can never destroy our enemies: intermingling and assimilation are inescapable. After all, he tells us, much of our DNA comes from viruses, and each of us hosts a population of microbes that's ten times the number of cells in our body. If you can't beat 'em, join 'emit's your only option.

Graffin argues that, when viewed historically, the ideology of competition falls flat. Life has no higher purpose, and free will is largely an illusion: Our decisions may be affected, say, by the way the bacteria in our gut make us feel on a given day. And yet, he says, "in the evolutionary grand scheme, we are freer than any other vertebrate out there because we have this incredible capacity to reason." Humans can still make informed choices, and we should be good stewards of the planet we've inherited.

On the phone from his sustainable farmhouse in Ithaca, Graffin took a break from rehearsing to discuss these issues, and to reveal he's not such a confrontational punk after all.

VICE: How is it touring a book different from touring an album?
Greg Graffin: This is a new model for book touring. There are so few bookstores left in the US that the traditional conventional author tour is kinda dead. If you've got an author who's got any semblance of public recognitionand I consider myself a minor public figureeven with that minuscule reputation, they're very keen to send you out and do something more creative. , is a rare commodity, so they're willing to try and find that, and leave their homes to do so. Warfare is elemental; it's been going on forever, and our role as stewards of the planet is to ameliorate that conflict. One way of doing that is by treating refugees in as humanitarian a way as possible, keeping in mind that if the war ended, they'd probably go back to where they want to be, which is their homes. If there's one thing you take with you from the book, please take that populations are constantly in flux, and they are constantly intermingling, and sometimes that intermingling is violent. You can't candy-coat any of that, but certainly you need to have the tools to ameliorate the violence; you have to have the ideological and moral foundation from which you can argue to end war. If competition is the main argument for coexistence, I don't think you can end the cycle of warfare.

Do you believe we need to rethink the way that we, as people or populations, think of ourselves as the centre of the universe, in order to be able to be good stewards of the planet?
Well, there is a hopeful tone to the book. If you take a population approach to something, you can have the long view and recognize that how you act now has an effect on the future. If you use that as your starting point, instead of, "What is this going to gain for myself? What is this action going to do for me in a constant ongoing battle of competition and struggle for existence?"if you say, instead, "What is this going to do to my loved ones when I inherit it, and by extension my community that has to go forward on this planet?" I think we would have a radically different complexion to our society.

Follow Mike Doherty on Twitter.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: New Emojis Coming to iOS 9.1 Will Finally Allow People to Tell Squirrels to Go Fuck Themselves

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Photo via Emojipedia

Read: Help! I Can't Stop Thinking in Emoji!

After introducing racial harmony to their text message-based emoticon empire, emojis are now releasing even more treats to help you express yourself, or to use when you can't be bothered to reply to a text properly.

On the way in are middle fingers of all races, the devil-horns hand symbol, a synagogue, a mosque complete with minaret, a taco, champagne, cheese, and many more inconsequential pixel pics. It's all part of iOS 9.1, which also includes big fixes and improved Live Photos, to go with the 184 new emojis.

The Unicode Consortium, the group that basically vets all usable characters across Apple's operating system, already had these emojis on their list. The new iOS will be the first to support all of them.

I think I speak for all of us when I say that, while I'm not "excited" in the conventional sense of the word, I welcome the expansion of the already large emoji family, because at least it gives people more ways to express themselves when they're manually RTing "Hotline Bling" parodies.

CTV Inexplicably Invited a Squinty Potato on Air to Talk About Economic Policy

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It's been a quiet, relatively blissful 14 months since Kevin O'Leary left the CBC's Lang and O'Leary Exchange and Dragon's Den in search of fame and even more fortune in the United States, where he's doing the exact same thing on ABC's DD rip-off Shark Tank that he did on the original. Actually, he's done the same thing on both those shows that he does every time he's in public: bloviate about economics as if he's an expert because of his business success (there's good evidence that success itself is a bit of a lie), and enthusiastically espouse the values of the most vile iterations of capitalism.

Read more: Kevin O'Leary Was Embarrassing on TV Again

But, as we all know, Kevin O'Leary rarely has any idea what he's talking about, frequently with hilarious results. Time and again he has embarrassed himself by not reading material he's discussing, claiming that half the world living in poverty is "fantastic," and generally being a buffoon. With that in mind, we have to ask: why would CTV News allow this man to sit in front of a camera and discuss economic policy?*

It boggles the mind, to be sure, and yet that's what they did. Yesterday, O'Leary was on CTV News Channeldiscussing the "grave concerns" he has about the impending reign of Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party. He's there to speak for the Canadian business community, despite the fact that he doesn't work or live in Canada. (Summer cottage weekends don't count as living here.)

In a scant four minutes, K-money makes a number of egregiously wrong claims about Trudeau's fiscal policy, starting with the idea that the Liberals plan to raise taxes on people earning $90,000 per year (it's $200,000). O'Leary then says people begin looking for other countries to live and work "when you get to a point where you're taking more than half a person's income," which might be true, but that's really neither here nor there since the Liberals plan to raise taxes by just four percent, to a total of 33 percent, on the highest-earning Canadians. I'm no math whiz, but to me, 33 percent is not the same as 50 percent. (When you add in provincial taxes on the highest earners, taxation does jump above 50 percent in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec, and Manitoba; but from the context of the interview it seems clear O'Leary is discussing federal policy.)

The cherry on top of this whole interview, though, has to be that CTV anchor Sandie Rinaldo allows O'Leary to make so many plainly incorrect statements on her show without correcting him. Unlike in some interviews, the ever-humble self-nicknamed Mr. Wonderful didn't talk over her until the end of the segment. She had plenty of time to correct his wildly inaccurate assertions, but she chose instead to ask him about energy policy and nod, brow slightly furrowed, as if she was listening to a serious thinker with some intellectual heft.

Anyway, Kevin O'Leary is still around, still unaware of basic facts, and still very much in love with capitalism.

*It turns out they had him on air because last year they hired him as a pundit, at which point you can say pretty much whatever you want.

Follow Tannara Yelland on Twitter.

​Prosecutors Served Up Their Smoking Gun in the 'Goodfellas' Trial Today

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The Brooklyn federal courthouse where Vincent Asaro is on trial. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

"We never got our right money, what we were supposed to get. We got fucked all around."

Vincent Asaro could be heard in Brooklyn federal court on Thursday mouthing off to his cousin-turned-rat, Gaspare Valenti, about what prosecutors allege to be the two men's role in the 1978 Lufthansa heist at John F. Kennedy airport in New York City. According to the feds, a coterie of mobstersAsaro and Valenti among themrobbed the airline of $6 million in cash and jewelry, pulling off the largest cash theft in American history at the time.

Referring to the late James "Jimmy the Gent" Burkethe man the feds say spearheaded the heist and who was played by Robert De Niro in GoodfellasAsaro continues, "That fucking Jimmy kept everything."

On the fourth day of his trial, as 80-year-old Asaro sat silently in the courtroom with his family watching, federal prosecutors offered jurors what is probably their most significant piece of evidence against the washed-up mobster. Out of hours worth of tape, the three-second sentence was key: Valenti, who was wearing a wire for the feds, seemed to have coaxed his cousin into admitting they did the deed.

"What a shame," Valenti says to Asaro earlier in their conversation. "Look what we came down to, eh?"

At this pointin February of 2011Asaro was struggling to stay afloat financially, but that was the least of his problems. Unbeknownst to him, Valenti had approached the FBI three years before with incriminating information on a wide range of wise guys from his decades as a Bonanno crime family associate. He agreed to wear the recording device and, in exchange, the FBI kept his lights on. Valenti would later plead guilty to racketeering conspiracy without being charged.

But Asaro was deep in debt, with no end in sight. "What are we gonna do?" he repeatedly asks his cousin on the tape. Valenti suggests hijacking trucks filled with cigarette cartons and selling them on the streets, an old-school move if ever there was one. The duo are later heard bringing up aging debts they might hassle people for. (On Wednesday, an audio recording of a shakedown with a mutual cousin, Carmine Muscarella, was played to the court.)

Shortly before Asaro curses out Burke, Valenti instructs Asaro on how to properly ask a case worker for food stamps. "You have to say, 'Listen, I've got nothing in the house to eat,'" he explains.

It's clear the old mobster, who prosecutors say blew his cut from the heist with gambling, was desperate.

"It's life," Asaro says, before cursing Burke for his financial situation. "We did it to ourselves. It's a curse with this fucking gambling."

"We had ours," Valenti responds. "We gambled it. It's sick in the fucking brain. That's what: a sickness!"

In their upcoming cross-examination, the defense would do well to note that Vincent Asaro never actually utters the word "Lufthansa" in this profanity-laced tape. Perhaps he's talking about his life in the Mafia generally, and how it never paid off. Or about another score that Jimmy Burke, Asaro and Valenti were involved in years ago.

But not explicitly referring to the crime makes sense for seasoned mafiososin this world, vagaries are essential to avoid detection. You would expect a major crime like Lufthansa to have an unofficial gag order, just like the one Burke is said to have imposed on gaudy purchases after the heist. "Jimmy and Vinny said, 'Don't spend anything,'" Valenti told the court earlier this week. "'Don't catch any heat.'"

If Valenti had asked Asaro, "So what about Lufthansa?" point-blank, it might have aroused suspicion. And Valenti, to his credit, realizes this: When the Lufthansa heist apparently comes up in an earlier tape, he just says, "What about the money from... you know?"

When asked by lead federal prosecutor Nicole Argentieri on Thursday about the biggest crime they ever pulled off together, Valenti had his answer ready: "Lufthansa."

Asaro, who's also charged with the 1969 murder of a suspected snitch (prosecutors say he choked the guy with a dog chain), faces life in prison if convicted.

Follow John Surico on Twitter.

How Scared Should I Be?: How Scared Should I Be of El Niño?

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A flood in Australia, via Wikimedia Commons user Beao

There are usually only two types of weather in Los Angeles: It's either "nice," or "one degree off of nice and everyone's freaking out about it." For the most part, that's all you need to know. But then Angelenos found out that the normally icy Pacific Ocean had become a roiling jacuzzi. West Coast natives knew that could only mean one thing: El Nio!

In short, El Nio is a name for a wet winter weather along the Pacific Coast of the Americas every few years. In my experience, each severe El Nio comes with some warnings from the National Weather Service (NWS), and a lot of fruitless conversations about sandbags. I thought the biggest hazard I was in for would be my own inability to get through one lousy day without losing my umbrella.

But that changed when a friend of mine who just moved temporarily to Los Angeles from the East Coast told me he had to reassure his mom that he'd be safe from the horrors of an El Nio winter. I thought El Nio was a little bit of a joke, but after reading some of the scarier coverage, her fears seemed at least a little justified.

It seemed like a good time to settle the matter: How worried should I actually be about the nasty weather phenomenon that strikes my city every couple of years, and is named after Baby Jesus?

The 2015-2016 pattern, dubbed "Godzilla El Nio" by the Los Angeles Times, has been hyped as more powerful than previous El Nio seasons. According to Mike Halpert, director of the NWS Climate Prediction Center, "there will be a number of significant storms that will bring heavy rains." What that brings, Halpert told the LA Times, "will be floods and mudslides," which means I might actually have to check Yelp for good sandbag retailers this winter.

Here in LA, it's normal to cross the entire sprawling metro area in a single morning commuteso if there are hazards, the city's fair-weather drivers will often be forced to navigate them. But flooding and mudslides in neighboring cities appear to have already claimed the life of one Californian on the road this year. And the cash-strapped City of LA isn't particularly great at installing and maintaining useful little infrastructure things like culverts (ask a friend from Southern California if they even know what the word "culvert" means). Bearing in mind that the Great El Nio of 1997-1998 killed 17 people in California, it seems like there's cause for concern.



Any given El Nio winter starts off innocently enough, with warmer than average waters off the coast of Peru. If you imagine the shape of northwestern South America as a butt, the telltale El Nio warming pattern looks like someone lit its fart on fire. Stanford meteorologist and influential weather blogger Daniel Swain told me that waters as far north as Alaska are weirdly warm this year. "The Pacific's on fire right now," Swain said. So far, though, the effect has just been a shit ton of humidity.

"There is not a one-to-one correlation between tropical warming and California precipitation. The reality is much more complicated than that," Swain said, explaining that heavy rain is not guaranteed. Although he conceded that "California's wettest winters have typically co-occurred with its strongest El Nio events," adding that rainfall for those years was nearly twice the average.

In other words, it's safe to assume a hard rain is comingbut science works in probabilities not certainties. The question is, what should we be doing about it?

"We have plans in LA for pretty much anything that can happen, from flooding to mudslides," Chris Ipsen, a public information officer the city's Emergency Management Department assured me when we talked this week. I pressed him about whether my Silverlake street might be prone to mudslides. "That area's soil has pretty solid rock under there," Ipsen said. "From what I understand, I haven't heard of those kinds of issues. That's not to say it won't happen."

Malibu mudslide from a non-El Nio year. Image via FEMA / Wikimedia Commons

The neighborhood does get the occasional mudslide, but its generally just the kind that causes property damage, rather than horrific mud drownings. Even in areas like Malibu, which has seen at least two mudslide-related deaths, and houses were seemingly designed to slide into the sea, residents like Whoopi Goldberg still typically make it out alive.

A major priority Ipsen brought up was "keeping the storm drains clear of anything that might obstruct our flood control." The storm drain system can apparently be of life-or-death significancebut mostly for people who aren't me. The people who will be affected, Ipsen said, are the ones living in homeless encampments along the LA River. The wet season has barely started, and already we've begun to see a familiar piece of El Nino imagery: footage of people in the LA River, that concrete trench from Terminator 2,struggling to stay afloat in fast-moving floodwaters, and being airlifted out by fire department rescue crews.

"What we're hoping to do now is to identify exactly where they're at, and map it," Ipsen said. And he's got his work cut out for him. Recently, Los Angeles declared a state of emergency because of the record numbers of homeless people living in the city.

"We'd actually like to be proactive, and have a process in place so that we're able to notify these populations, and hopefully find somewhere to go, and provide services that they require," Ipsen added. A plan for putting the homeless in rain shelters has been announced, but Los Angeles County officials have criticized the outreach componentfor requiring homeless people to check a website. Also, the $100 million city officials have loudly promised to spend on addressing the homelessness crisishasn't yet been officially approvedby the city council.

Check out our documentary about the horrors that a flood can dislodge:

Of course, El Nio is mostly good news for California. "Obviously," Ipsen said, "we want to see the water." After four years of devastating drought, California is so thirsty, it can't wait to gorge itself on rain. Here in Los Angeles, though, I'll realistically just be inconvenienced by a couple of flooded intersectionswhich I'm pretty sure I'll survive.

But as Swain points out that I'm not being mindful of El Nio's effects globally. It seems mine isn't even the real story when it comes to El Nio. The weather pattern comes with a much higher body count in other parts of the world. After all, it was Latin Americaprobably Peruthat gave the weather pattern its name, and with good reason: The storms there are more intense, and the effects can be downright tragic.

In 1998, flooding in the border town of Tijuana, Mexico during an El Nio winter killed 14 people; a local police officerdescribedit as being "like an avalanche that came at us from all sides." That was after an El-Nio-related hurricanefurther south in Acapulcokilled 118 people. Storms in Peru that same winterkilled 300 people, and left about230,000 more homeless.

Swain also pointed out that "El Nio-related warming of the ocean surface can actually influence the large-scale storm track over the Pacific," which means its effects can be felt beyond North and South America, and are usually more unpleasant than some heavy rain. In Australia, for instance, El Nio is associated with harsh droughts. And in Pakistan, 1,150 people died this past summer in a record-breaking heatwave tied to the atmospheric effects of El Nio. Some areas there have seen temperatures rise up to 113 degrees, and the resulting power shortages have led to civil unrest.

So am I personally scared? Not really. My time might be better spent fearing the mosquitoes that result from all that extra standing water, or worrying about the way the heavy rains might interrupt the food supplies of local species. it seems like mine isn't even the real story when it comes to El Nio. Or, I might look into charities in Pakistan.

But there is still that potential for flooding and mudslides, which does scare me a little since I live on a hill. Ipsen advised me to sign up for location-specific emergency updates from NotifyLA.org. "That's for, let's say, imminent danger. We only pull the trigger when it's something really imminent," he said. It's a pat on the head, but one that actually does ease my fears a little.

Final Verdict: How Scared Should I Be of El Nio?

2/5: Taking Normal Precautions

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

VICE Vs Video Games: The Strange Story of the Video Game That’s ‘GTA with Dogs’

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All screens provided by Behdad Sami

I get a lot of emails. You probably do, too. A great percentage of mine come from people asking if I'll look at this game, that game, some game. Comes with the territory. But this email was completely unique.

"My name is Behdad Sami, and I wanted to tell you a little about myself, and my game, in the hope that you could write about it."

OK, so far, so ordinary. It's not unusual for me to open my inbox of a morning and find a message or two from independent developers running the whole show themselves, making the game and reaching out for coverage. But then, an unprecedented twist:

"I was the world's first professional Iranian basketball player to ever play in the USA. I have been a pro basketball player since 2008, and I have played all over the world. In 2011, I broke my shin, and had to go through a lot of rehab and have a couple of operations. In my down time, I figured I would tackle another dream of mine, and that was to create a video game."

Being the thorough journalist I am, I immediately got onto Google to check out the man behind the missive. Sure enough, Behdad Sami has played in the ABA in the US, for the Georgia Grizzlies and the San Diego Surf. Not quite the NBA, but who am I to talk? I can't throw a basketball in a straight line, let alone play a whole match at point guard. Sami's also turned out for professional teams in Portugal, Qatar and Iran. He didn't play for two years after damaging his shin playing for Guifoes Sport Club in Portugal's ProLiga in 2011, at which point his attention shifted to more digital pursuits. Checks out.

So what's this game about, then? A sports title, probably; almost certainly involving balls. Right? Yeah, no. Not quite.

"During my season in Portugal, I had this idea for a dog video game..."

A dog video game?

"My game will be a first of its kind. There's literally nothing like it. I wanted to make something that not only is different, but something that doesn't exist that all ages would love. My game is an open-world 3D cel-shaded third-person game for mobile, about vigilante crime fighting dogs that have their friend stolen by the city's most ruthless gangster. They come together to not only take down Don Vino, but also go from a gang of vigilantes to an official police K9 unit dog.

"I made my game inspired by Need for Speed and Grand Theft Auto. I love how in Need for Speed you can choose from a few cars, and as you accomplish missions and sub-missions, you get more money to purchase different cars and pimp them out. In my game, you can start by picking one of three dogs, and as you win, you unlock more dogs, accessories, and powers."

A dog video game. I asked for screenshots, and you can see from what I received, published here: a dog video game. A game called Get 'Em, to be precise. Which Sami isn't just the ideas man behind he's gone out and learned to code to make his dream a reality.

"I have done everything for this game. I've written the game from scratch, produced, directed, and even designed the entire world. I had never used game engines before, and we used Unity for this game. I made the entire world, from all the terrain, to laying each street tile and so on. Since my (two, hired) developers have their hands full, I figured I would learn world-building and spent three weeks pretty much sleeping about ten hours total to put together everything, which I am very proud of.

"It's taken me over three years to get to where I am. My goal is to make history with this game. I want the world to know that a guy who jumped into a polar-opposite industry, with no experience, can make an indie game that looks, feels, and plays like something EA or other big-time companies would release."

Sami wrote a whole lot more in his initial email, about the size of the game (1.5 square miles at launch), plans for environment expansion, and the various abilities of the selectable dog characters. The release plan right now is a free download with optional in-app purchases"I see the future of gaming as being strictly mobile," he writes. But it's the hardship that Sami's been through that leapt off the screen at me, that made me want to highlight Get 'Em herea game I haven't played and that doesn't immediately appeal on a personal level, but one that has such an unusual story behind it.

Article continues after the video below

Watch VICE's new film on Mobile Love Industries

Sami took his idea to Jimmy Smith, the father of a friend who's also one of the best-known advertising executives in the States having worked with Motorola, Gatorade and Nike. Smith set him up a meeting with EA, whoso Sami saysloved it, but things did not work out. Sami lost a lot of money: "I was around a year in, I'd lost $30k, and still had nothing to show for my game. I was beyond depressed."

Further failed collaborations followed, before a breakthrough. Sami got in touch with Oregon studio SuperGenius, a team whose art has been seen in Marvel: Contest of Champions, Broken Age, Skylanders: Trap Team, and a whole bunch of Telltale Games releasesno doubt you can see the stylistic similarities between those adventures and the screens on this page.

New on VICE Sports: Shaq's Next Act: Behind the Turntables

"I decided that I would stay in Oregon until I put a team together. I couldn't afford to spend any money from my budget, so for the next two months I lived in my car. Literally. I would shower at 24 Hour Fitness, eat samples from grocery stores, watch movies on my phone, and lay my back seats down to sleep in my car every night." SuperGenius set Sami up with some contacts and he was ultimately able to test out a couple of student coders: "The amount they made in a week surpassed what other freelancers had achieved in over a year. I hired both guys, rented an apartment in Portland, bought two iMacs, and for the last year and half I have been finishing my game here.

"I don't believe anything is impossible, and right now I'm only a couple months away from release."

I wish Sami the best with his game. He's clearly an incredibly determined person, and when Get 'Em does come out, even if it's not the most fantastic time you'll ever have with your hands on a smartphone, it's certainly come from a place that no other title of its kind, of any kind, has. I hope he emailed some other people, too, and that word spreads about this strange story of the Iranian basketball player who busted his leg and became a game developer instead, just because that's the direction his dreams decided to go in.

Follow Mike on Twitter.


The VICE Guide to Finance: Is the Junk I Collected as a 90s Kid Actually Worth Money Today?

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Illustration by Wren McDonald

Because I'm an only child, my parents have kept my old room exactly as I left it when I was a very uncool teenager. The evidence of my formative years is still tragically intact: A complete set of 1993 Topps baseball cards that I got at a silent auction is still under my bed, and the Pokmon cards I used to trade on Saturdays at Books-A-Million are all perfectly arranged in binders set on bookshelves. Tubs of Beanie Babies and LEGOs line the attic, and tubes of POGs are tucked away in various closets between the linens and towels. My walls are lined with movie posters from the movies I thought were good when I was 13, like The Ring and Forrest Gump; I got my first PayPal account when I was in middle school to buy an autographed picture of the friends from Friends because I thought it would be a "good investment."

My collecting habit came with me when I moved out, and every time I take a trip to my folks' house I schlep a ton of crap back with me. I take old clothing to resell at Beacon's Closet, stash snacks in my suitcase, load up on weird shit only parents buy, etc. I've already made a list of what books I want to transfer from the bookshelf there to my bookshelf here in New York, and later to the bookshelves at the Strand. Basically I'm a pack rat, although I prefer to think of myself as part of the mercantile class. Normally I just resell my clothes and books, but I got to thinking: What those toys from my childhood could be traded for cash, too? What if I could retroactively justify the fact that I never went to a high school party by, I don't know, selling that picture of Monica and Ross and using it buy alcohol that I could drink with the cool New York friends I'm supposed to have?

Previously: A Travel Hacker Explains How to Fly Around the World for Free

With the goal of smiting people from high school who probably don't remember I exist, I set out to see exactly how much my stuff was worth. As it turns out, it was "more than nothing," which is legitimately shocking.

POGS

Pogs originated in Depression-era Hawaii, where kids had nothing to play with other than juice caps. In the 90s, a schoolteacher there named Blossom Galbiso introduced the old pastime to her students, and then people went insane and started putting everything from cartoon characters to politicians on them. Suddenly, pogs were massiveon The Simpsons, Milhouse once traded Bart's soul for one with Alf on itthen, just as suddenly, no one cared about them. (Well, except for some soldiers on overseas military bases where they became useful as currency, but that's another story.)

That's still true today, the no one caring part. I couldn't find a single person on the internet who claimed to be a pog aficionado or collector. All I found was some crazy person trying to get $10,000 for a set on Etsy, and he or she did not respond to my professional journalistic inquiry (an Etsy message that just said "why").

In search of someone who could tell me how much pogs were worth, I called up Dr. Lori Verderame, the appraiser on the Discovery Channel show Auction Kings. She told me that the collectibles market is alive and well, and that some of the things I've contemplated throwing out can be traded for pieces of paper, which can in turn be traded for things like groceries and continuing to have a roof over my head. Great!

But with any heartening news, there's always a setback. Pogs are pretty much the least valuable collectibles on the planet, and it's arguable that one should even call them "collectibles"having a bunch of pogs is only marginally better than having a bunch of blank cardboard circles.

Watch: Inside the Hedonistic, Polyamorous Unicorn Movement

There are just too many pogs for any of them to be worth anything. On eBay, you can buy sets of hundreds of pogs for less than $10. And if you want to build a collection of rare pogs, Verderame explained, you'd be spending an incredible amount of time getting each one, and you likely wouldn't be able to sell that collection to anyone.

But was there any single pog that might be lurking in my closet that was worth money? Are there individual pogs that are better than others?

"Which ones?" Verderame replied. "There are bajillion of them."

She literally suggested that I poke holes in them and make necklaces. If that's a million-dollar Etsy idea and you steal it, I will find you and kill you.

Related: I Entered Over 1,000 Online Contests in One Month and This Is What I Won

Beanie Babies

Where pogs were a trend that materialized out of nowhere, Beanie Babies were the product of a single mind: Ty Warner. In the 90s, the notoriously reclusive toymaker managed to convince a ton of people that generic plush animals were a sound investment. Thanks pretty much entirely to their collectible nature and clever marketing, Beanie Babies sales reached $1 billion a year at one point, and Zac Bissonette, the author of The Great Beanie Baby Bubble, estimates that 70 percent of sales came from people who were convinced the plastic-pellet-filled critters would later go up in value.

Sadly for soccer moms everywhere, a quick glance at eBay suggests that Quackers the Duck isn't funding anyone's retirement any time soon; most of the Beanie Babies are going for around five bucks a pop. Dig a little deeper, though, and it seems that some people are at least entertaining the idea of dropping a couple grand on the Princess Diana bear.

In 2013, some basic-ass bear with a heart on it sold for $10,000which, to be clear, is the price of a car.

Verderame, the professional appraiser with a PhD in art history, was adamant when I spoke to her that people are still willing to pay money for Beanie Babies.

For instance, she says, if you have any first- or second-generation Beanie Babies with their tags on, they can be sold for anywhere between a couple hundred dollars to a couple thousand. In 2013, some basic-ass bear with a heart on it sold for $10,000which, to be clear, is the price of a car.

Actually, some joker on Etsy with the same Valentino beanie baby is trying to sell it for more than $25,000, which is the price of even nicer car. But that doesn't mean the bear is actually worth that much, Verdergame had to remind me.

Remember that story about the couple who ended up with a Princess Di first-edition bear that was supposedly worth $90,000? That number was completely made up, Verdergame said, because no one has ever paid that much money for it. That's merely what someone had triedand failedto get for such a bear in the past. Collectibles are only worth what someone is willing to pay for them, after all, which means that while there are some Beanie Babies that can buy you a car, there are none that can get you a house. Still, not bad.

Verdergame said that one of the reasons so many people have Beanie Babies is because they were cheap and could be bought with paper-route money. That suggests people have emotional attachments to them, and when millennials turn 60 or 70, they might be willing to buy Beanie Babies again out of nostalgia. At that point, allegedly, the hoarders of the world will be able to cash in.

"Some Beanie Babies are worth money," Verdergame told me. "Saying, 'Ugh, I'll just throw them out' means you're just throwing away money. For that person who doesn't throw them all away like you and your friends are going to, they're probably going to be sitting on something."

Pokmon Cards

While I learned more than I could have possibly ever wanted to know about Beanie Babies when talking with Verderame, I also learned that all the time I spent stalking Central Florida craft stores with mom as a child was wasted. I don't think we had any first-editions, and I would definitely know if I had the Princess Diana one people seem to jizz their pants about. But was all my time at Books-A-Million trading Pokmon cards any better spent?

I remember them being worth money was I was in elementary schoolin fact, I have a very distinct memory of selling a Japanese holographic card for $200 to another kid in a darkened classroom. (He was a professional golfer's son, which explains why he has that money, but looking back it seems kind of disturbing that a pre-teen would have ready access to that sort of cash. I hope he didn't develop a drug problem or anything later.)

To see what present-day value my cards might have, I called up Kristopher Bucher, who runs a YouTube channel dedicated to the trading card game. He said that Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh cards (!) were more valuable, but that Pokmon saw a resurgence in popularity around 2011, and that the game's world championship for is more popular than ever. So my dusty old cards could actually be worth something?

Japanese cards are slightly more valuable, Bucher explained, because they are higher quality and more aesthetically pleasing. But only slightly more so. As one might predict, the only Pokmon cards that are actually valuable are the ones that are extremely hard to find and were printed in limited quantities.

"The most valuable error card I can think of was a Pikachu that was printed in the Jungle set accidentally. It was called the Ivy Pikachu, and it was actually supposed to be a promo card, and it was printed as a first-edition and slipped into the Jungle set. It's the most sought-after forever, and goes for about $1,000."

At this point my eyes started to glaze over. I have a full Base set, and maybe even a full Fossil set, but I don't think I ever collected any of the error cards. What the fuck? I sensed my newfound hope slipping away.

"By far the most valuable cards from the early era are the first-edition shadowless cards from the original base set, especially Charizard," Bucher continued. "I've seen them go from $500 to $1,000."

I just had a regular Charizard; this interview was garbage. As the Pokmon expert went on and on about cards I didn't have, I started scraping my mind, trying to think of anything I might have that was of value. I remembered sitting in the Books-A-Million and trading some kid a run-of-the-mill Japanese card I got at an anime store for something. What was it? I could see the green cover of my Pokmon binder, but what was inside?

A first-edition Blastoise and a first-edition Venusaur. Cards that Bucher told me were worth between $100 and $200 apiece.

"I think in general the cards will increase in value again, and I would say the same card that's worth a thousand now, will be worth anywhere from $1,200 to $1,500 in ten years," he explained.

But I didn't need to wait that long. I had two cards that were worth up to $400 now, and that was good enough for me. So, anyone want to buy them?

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Post Mortem: 'Save the Planet, Kill Yourself': The Contentious History of the Church of Euthanasia

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On September 13, 1993, motorists driving on the Massachusetts Turnpike witnessed an unusual sight: A highway billboard for the Museum of Science in Boston had been covered by a ten-foot-by-ten-foot black banner with the words "Save the PlanetKill Yourself" painted in white.

It would be the first high-profile action by the newly formed Church of Euthanasia, featuring the group's most enduring slogan. Throughout the 1990s the church orchestrated several similarly outrageous public actionsincluding an appearance on the Jerry Springer Showseeking to draw attention to the environmental dangers of overpopulation.

Today the Church of Euthanasia website is still up and serves as an archive, although the church itself is gone. Its aggressive campaign against the existence of humanity never caught on, but you can say this for the group: In falling apart, at least they practiced what they preached.

Filmmaker Stephen Onderick is currently chronicling the church's mostly forgotten history in a new documentary, which he is funding via Kickstarter. "To some, the Church of Euthanasia was a heroic organization calling attention to important ecological issues,to others it was an elaborate series of pranks," Onderick said, "to still others it was a genuinely dangerous cult."

While the documentary is still in the initial stages, it promises to be a compelling retrospective on a movement that was likely the most controversial pseudo-religion of the 1990s. Onderick has obtained access to several hours of never-before-seen footage, as well as 12 hours of interviews with the key players.

The Church of Euthanasia was founded in 1992 by software developer and DJ Chris Korda. Korda was inspired by the ideals of Dadaism, an artistic movement that emerged during Word War I out of a desire to, as one artist put it, "to destroy the hoaxes of reason and to discover an unreasoned order." According to poet Tristan Tzara, the beginnings of Dada "were not the beginnings of art, but of disgust."

On the church's site, Korda says this inspiration came to her in a dream, during which she was "confronted proceeded to use it to draw real pro-life protesters out to a completely invented protest of fetal trafficking at a sperm bank in Boston. They also put up posters around town claiming that Courtney Love would be at the Sperm Bank to be inseminated on the day of the protest, and they showed up to find nuns fingering rosary beads and teens waiting around to see Courtney Love outside of the building, at which point they unveiled a two-story tall penis puppet that ran through traffic toward the building and ejaculated pseudo-sperm in front of the building."

"We went toe-to-toe with some very dangerous people," Korda said. "We were on the Operation Rescue list of official enemies. We discovered that when we did the Walk for Life and they had a book full of their official enemies. They had a whole page devoted to the Church of Euthanasia, with pictures. They hated us. They wanted us dead, and these were not guys to be messed around with."

The same year, Korda and other church members were on the Jerry Springer Show in what is their most widely-viewed media appearance. The episode, called "I Want to Join a Suicide Cult" (video here, transcript here), was framed in typical Jerry Springer fashion as a plea to "Grace Petro" (actually church member Nina Paley) to not join the Church of Euthanasia. She appeared alongside an alleged ex-boyfriend, who broke up with her due to her desire to not have children, and radical anti-abortion activist Neal Horsley. At the time, Horsley was preparing a website called the "Nuremberg Files," which would list the names and personal information of abortion doctors. Doctors that had been killed would remain on the list with a line drawn through their name.

While agreeing with much of the church's platform, Springer took Korda to task for statements suggesting that a depressed teenager contemplating suicide should be offered assistance, rather than talked out of it. He also repeatedly expressed disgust at the calls for cannibalism and brought attention to the church's literature that provides explicit instructions on "butchering a human carcass."

Korda spent much of the following year making appearances in Europe in support of her techno album Six Billion Humans Can't Be Wrong. In 1999, the church turned its sights on the environmental movement with a homemade raft that traversed the Charles River during Boston's WBOS Earthfest festival. The raft had an 18-by-five-foot "Save the Planet, Kill Yourself" banner and struggled to stay afloat, but managed to play music from Korda's CD loudly enough to draw crowds. Eventually the police escorted the raft to shore and told the activists to turn the music off.

The next year, the church attempted to join the environmentalists outside Boston's Bio 2000 conference. While most protesters were there to oppose genetic engineering and other activities that were part of the conference, the church wanted to show its support for the conference, on the grounds that destroying mankind was a desirable outcome. They carried a banner that said "Human Extinction While We Still Can." According to Korda, the protest organizers cut the cables to the group's sound system and then proceeded to beat them up. It would be the last of the group's public demonstrations.

"What we were doing was extremely dangerous," Korda said. "I got tired not just of the hate and the death threats, of which I have boxes, but I got tired of nearly being beaten to death. A lot of these actions took place in the street, and by the time the police showed up we were happy to see them. Usually by that point we were just about to go to the hospital. It's fair to say that most of the most formidable opposition didn't come from Christians, whether of the Catholic or Baptist variety, but from leftists, because they believe in 'direct action.' They don't like the police. They'd much rather beat us up. You can imagine why we might get tired of that."

Read: A Roller Coaster Designed to Kill People

In December 2001, Korda would court controversy one last time, by releasing a music video called "I Like to Watch." The video was a mashup of amateurish techno with clips of porn, sports, and the 9/11 attacks. Korda told me that it accurately captured her "perverse fascination and sexual arousal" at watching the attacks on television.

"Politically, it felt good to see Americans dying for a change. There was a sense of justice, of the 'chickens coming home to roost,'" she said. "In gender terms, the huge gash made by the plane was obviously female. I had witnessed a Freudian drama on a national scale: America's penis had been turned into a vagina."

Comments like that, coupled with the church's penchant for big, over-the-top displays of crude, vicious misanthropy, might make some wonder if the Church of Euthanasia was, wholly or partially, a huge performance art piece, or a decade-long prank.

If so, neither Korda nor her disciples ever broke kayfabe, and even todaythe group is dormant, its 501(c)(3) status lapsed because it's not bringing in any moneyshe seems deadly earnest, eager to discuss the church and in particular her "Antihumanism" manifesto.

In the 6,000-plus-word documentthe last bits of which are just bullet-pointsKorda says that "humans are making a conscious choice to place their interests above the well-being of life, and this is not merely foolish or misguided, it is shameful and criminal. If humans are unablefor whatever reasonto exist in a way that supports life, then humans are unfit, and must be eliminated." She points out that "unlike mere misanthropy, anti-humanism is distinguished by reverence for nonhuman life." A section called "Solutions" outlines ideas for how human elimination might play out, as well as thoughts on "behavior modification" strategies that might avert mass human extinction. (That bit contains a disclaimer in the end stating these are all hypotheticals and not calls for violence.)

Korda's manifesto is filled with scientific concepts like the Fermi paradox and the ideas of thinkers like E.O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins. It makes for an odd juxtaposition against the "church-approved" list of resources on HIV/AIDS denialism, for which there is no scientific justification whatsoever. If not completely nihilisticKorda expresses some sympathy for nonhuman animalsher worldview is bleak to the point of absurdity, and the philosophy behind it is a hodgepodge of strands of radical thought seemingly snatched at random. If the church is a joke, it's not a very funny one.

At bottom, though, her demand is very simple: "Don't procreate." I told her that my wife and I had no plans to do so. At the end of the interview, when I asked if she had any final questions or comments, she asked: "Do you want to join the church?"

If you'd like to contribute to Stephen Onderick's documentary on the Church of Euthanasia, his Kickstarter campaign is here.

Follow Simon Davis on Twitter.

The VICE Morning Bulletin

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A joint USIraqi Army training exercise near Ramadi, Iraq (Photo by Staff Sgt. Daniel St. Pierre via)

Here is everything you need to know to know about the world this morning, curated by VICE.

US News

  • Dice Game Shooting in Tennessee
    One person has been fatally shot and two others wounded in a dispute over a dice game at Tennessee State University in Nashville. It comes just over a week after three people were wounded by gunfire at an off-campus party in Nashville. USA Today
  • Clinton Endures 11 Hour Grilling
    Hillary Clinton survived a day-long hearing at the House committee unscathed, with little new information emerging about events in Benghazi in 2012. "I really don't care what you say about me," said a defiant Clinton. The Washington Post
  • The $1 HIV Pill
    Martin Shkreli caused outrage by planning to charge $750 for a HIV treatment pill. One San Diego-based company now plans to compete with Shkreli by making a customized version of the drug for $1 a pill. NBC News
  • American Killed in Hostage Raid
    A US service member has died following a commando raid which freed around 70 hostages held by the Islamic State in northern Iraq. According to the Pentagon, the hostages faced imminent execution. CNN

International News

  • Deadly Bus Crash in France
    At least 42 people, mostly elderly tourists, were killed when a coach collided with a truck in the Gironde region of France. The high death toll is result of the coach bursting into flames upon impact. AFP
  • Islamic State's Oil Wealth Revealed
    The Islamic State makes $50 million a month from from oilfields under its control in Iraq and Syria, according to latest intelligence. The militants are selling crude oil to smugglers at discounted prices. AP
  • Sweden Mourns School Killings
    A masked man wielding a sword killed a teacher and a student at a school in Trollhttan before police shot him dead. Police believe the 21-year-old attacker had "racists motives" and are investigating his far-right sympathies. The Guardian
  • Hurricane Headed for Mexico
    Hurricane Patricia, a monster Category 5 storm forecasters describe as a "potentially catastrophic", is expected to make landfall today. Residents of a stretch of Mexico's Pacific Coast have boarded up their homes, and all schools in the area have been closed. ABC News

Julia (centre), Sesame Street's first autistic character

Everything Else

  • Soccer Star Looks Like Nazi Doll
    Bastian Schweinsteiger, captain of the German soccer team, is not happy about a Nazi doll that looks exactly like him. He is considering suing the Hong Kong manufacturer, unconvinced by company claims that the likeness is "purely coincidental". BBC News
  • Sesame Street Gets First Autistic Character
    Julia, the first muppet with autism, has her own digital storybook. The character is an attempt to reduce the stigma associated with autism spectrum disorder. NPR
  • Airbnb's Crazy Ads
    The company has smothered San Francisco in hysterical anti-Proposition F adverts. The measure restricts short-term rentals to 75 nights a year, but Airbnb thinks it's about the government watching you in your sleep. Motherboard
  • Anti-Abortion Extremists Target Black Women
    Activists have made a disturbing attempt to co-opt the Black Lives Matter movement by saying abortion is the "number one killer" in the black community. Broadly

Can't handle any more reading this morning? That's OK, take it easy, nobody's judging you. Instead, though, why don't you watch our new film 'Unicorns', about London's movement of polyamorous party kids who identify as unicorns.

How-To: How to Make Weed Oil Extract Using a Hair Straightener

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Thanks to our (still sensible) Supreme Court, medical marijuana users now are allowed access to cannabis oil. This is pretty fantastic but there's a hiccup in the system herelicensed producers haven't started making it available to the market yet. So users have two choices: head to the grey market or make it at home, as Health Canada suggests.

Industrial production of cannabis oil usually involves chemicals like liquid nitrogen and propane, which could get a little tricky/dangerous in your kitchen. Fortunately, there's a third way.

Damian Abraham, host of the VICE series Canadian Cannabis and a medical marijuana user, is here to show you how make cannabis oil using a hair straightener.

Cash Slaves: Free Yourself from Cash Slavery

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Illustration by Tyler Boss

Read more about and watch our full length film on Cash Slaves

Chuck Petko is an addictions counselor in Western New York. He started one of the internet's first support groups for people suffering from financial domination addiction. He's currently developing a website he hopes will provide advocacy, understanding, and information on ways to overcome addiction to fin dom and other online sexual fetishes.

Financial domination has destroyed the lives of men all across this country. Although the fetish may start out small, it can lead to insurmountable, incomprehensible suffering and debt.

I first discovered the niche fetish, like many people, in the late 90s, during the nascent days of the internet. It was at this time that the foundation was laid for today's sprawling ecosystem of websites with dominatrixes who can make six-figure incomes humiliating, blackmailing, and extorting money from submissive men. These men participate willingly because they get sexual gratification from giving the women their money, and if they get ridiculed or mocked along the way, it turns them on even more.

Unfortunately, for some, this fetish can turn into an unhealthy obsession. Through my online support group, I've met with subs who have lost everything to accommodate the lifestyle of their goddesses. Their addictions have ravaged their finances, relationships, religious affiliation, and physical and emotional health with the same intensity that an addiction to drugs, alcohol, or gambling would.

Of course there are guys who become "cash slaves" and still manage to keep it under control and lead perfectly functional lives. However, those aren't the most desirable subs for fin dommes. The dommes want the addicts, the ones who would willingly allow themselves to get drained dry. Their preference makes sense after all, considering fin dom is a business, and what's better for a business than a customer who pays up like clockwork?

One of the main tools a domme will use for reeling in a sub is masturbation. In fin dom, the submissive men allow the dommes to tell them when they can and cannot come. Beating off becomes a privilege that is often only granted after tribute is paideven then, sometimes it's denied.

I've seen dommes lead subs into bankruptcy, maxing out credit cards, taking out a second mortgage on a house, stealing money, and even prostituting themselves for cash. It's these men who get trapped, because they actually enjoy the sufferingit's part of their fetishization for humiliation and degradation. And their guilt for their poor life choices can also inadvertently reinforce their desire and need to seek out more experiences with their dommes. It's is a vicious circle.

I know one man who faced this situation several years ago. He happened to come across fin dom in passing onan adult website. He messaged a domme and began regularly communicating withher. It started out with small tributes, ranging from $25 to $50 dollarsa week. She slowly encouraged him to send more. If he didn't, he was notallowed to masturbate. Due to his submissive nature, he found her control overhis masturbation schedule to be sexually arousing and stimulating.

Eventually, his PayPal tributesexceeded $100. Then, she started to ask for contributions two or three times a week,prefacing her requests with the fact that he would not be allowed to masturbateif a tribute wasn't made. He held a well-paying job, and she was aware of this.She eventually coerced him into sending specific information about his employerand kids. He signed a blackmail contract which outlined specific rules thatneeded to be followed regularly. If he failed to abide by any of her requests,he risked being exposed to his family and employer. With this information,she was able to take more of his annual earnings. When he expressed frustration with her requests, she would threaten to call his wife or email his boss. Hehated but loved her at the same time.

She had an opt-out blackmail fee in thethousands, which he eventually paid. By that time, he had spent tens ofthousands of dollars on her, taking money out of his children's college savingsand maxing out his wife's credit cards. Eventually, after some time off, he started to talk to the domme again. She would often make fun of him for his "relapse." The humiliation of his failure to cease this lifestyle only furthered hisobsession and pulled him deeper into addiction.

Watch: Our Documentary About Cash Slaves

Fin dom is a fetish that underliesdeep sexual fantasies and desires, like the need to be punished. Ironically, you find that many of the subs in fin dom possess high-powered positions in theirprofessional life. One man I know referred to it as "a temporary escape from realityand the need to be in control of everything. Instead of making decisions orbeing in charge of an outcome, I just sit back and listen." This can make theexchange even more powerful and addicting. Fin dom can be seen as a release sexually and emotionally. When there is an emotional component to every exchange,it can make it even more challenging to break the cycle.

So where should you go if you struggle with fin dom? Unfortunately, there aren't enough options out there right now. A big part of this is the lack of study and classifications done around general internet addiction. Despite a lot of debate, internet addiction isn't even a category in the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. And there are only a few accredited inpatient programs in the world.

Oftentimes, if you enter a clinical setting seeking help for fin dom, you will be treated under a category that doesn't actually represent your problems. This is because the insurance industry dictates services and has yet to widely recognize fin dom or even internet addiction in general. Because of the lack of research done on fin dom, there is also a lack of accuracy in terms of diagnosis and agreed-upon treatment.

It is important to remember that there is more to beating problems like being addicted to fin dom than just going cold turkey. You've got to tackle the issue head on and strive to understand the underlying issues behind the addiction.

However, after talking with so many men who suffer from addiction to fin dom over the years, I've found that if you have found your life being crippled by financial domination, doing the following five things can help you get on to the road to recovery:

  1. Seek out a 12-step group (Sex Addicts Anonymous) and individual counseling (psychotherapy).
  2. Avoid environments where you might encounter financial domination. If you find yourself going online and engaging in fin dom when you should be doing work or studying for school, try to complete all your internet-based tasks in a public setting or around a friend or family member in an open area of your home.
  3. Talk about your issues with fin dom. If a you feel uncomfortable discussing your urges with a partner, find a trustworthy source to share these feelings and potential guilt. Talking is important, because you don't want to be forced to cope with all of those distressing feelings on your own, which can conjure up unhealthy thought patterns.
  4. Buy a protection software that monitors search engines and blocks certain websites. NetNanny is a pretty decent option. These can be effective in preventing accessibility to commonly searched fin-dom sites and platforms. They're usually password-protected, incredibly efficient, and trustworthy. However, it may be necessary to give someone else the password to prevent you from impulsive decision-making.
  5. Only use the computer/phone for necessary tasks. A lot of unnecessary and meaningless time can be spent online, which may start as a healthy exploration of non-sexually explicit websites, but eventually lead you back to fin dom.

It is important to remember that there is more to beating problems like being addicted to fin dom than just going cold turkey. You've got to tackle the issue head on and strive to understand the underlying issues behind the addiction. What I've outlined can be helpful tools, but if you don't work to understand why you have cravings for fin dom, it will be difficult to make any lasting changes.

Another important fact to remember is that unlike drug and alcohol addiction, experts on sex addiction argue that it's less about abstinence and more about engaging in healthy sexual behaviors.

Is there a way to engage in healthy fin-dom exchanges? Eh, that's a tricky question that depends on you and the situation you're in. You must find confidence in your own actions and determine if it elicits guilt or is wreaking havoc on other aspects of your life. This type of emotional congruency can often be found through objective conversations with a therapist. It depends on the person, of course, but I would highly recommend counseling services or groups like Sex Addicts Anonymous to those struggling with fin dom so that they get the professional support they need to start rebuilding their lives.

If you are suffering from addiction to fin dom or the internet in general and looking for someone to talk to, non-profits like Mental Health America can help you find affordable counseling services.

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