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The VICE Morning Bulletin

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Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Erdoğan during a meeting in Baku, 13 June 2015 (Photo: kremlin.ru via)

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

US News

  • Republicans Want Control of TV Debates
    The GOP's presidential candidates are preparing a list of demands for the television networks. Angry at the format and questioning, advisers from at least 11 campaigns met to deliberate about how to gain sway over the process. —The Washington Post
  • FBI Program Condemned
    An online FBI program aimed at preventing young people from becoming radicalized has been condemned by religious leaders and legal experts. They say the tool—called "Don't Be a Puppet"—stigmatizes Arab and Muslim students. —The New York Times
  • Tots Start Tech Really Early
    Researchers were surprised to find "almost universal exposure" of mobile devices among young children, with 28 percent of two-year-olds navigating mobile devices with no help. By the age of four, three-fourths of children own their own tablet or cellphone. —USA Today
  • The $43 Million Gas Station
    A government watchdog has discovered $43 million of US taxpayers' money was spent building a gas station in Afghanistan. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction has struggled to work out exactly how the "gratuitous" amount was spent. —NBC News

International News

  • Bodies Flown Home to Russia
    The bodies of 144 Russians killed in an air crash in Egypt have been flown back to St Petersburg. Russian media outlets have begun speculating about whether the passenger plane crash could have been caused by terrorists. —BBC News
  • Erdogan Wins in Turkey
    Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has regained its parliamentary majority after a big election win. However, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's party fell short of the "super majority" needed to change the constitution. —VICE News
  • No More Knights and Dames
    Australia's Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has scrapped knights and dames from the nation's honors system, signaling a different relationship with the British monarchy. The titles were "not appropriate in 2015," Turnbull told reporters. —CNN
  • Chinese Newspaper Editor Removed
    The editor of the state-run Xinjiang Daily was removed from his job and expelled from the Communist party after opposing a "people's war on terror". Zhao Xinwei was sacked for criticizing how the government deals with extremists. —Reuters

Taylor Swift (Photo by Eva Rinaldi via)

Everything Else

  • Halloween Rave Turns Into Riot
    A huge illegal Halloween rave turned into a mini riot on the streets of London. For six hours the police clashed with crowds trying to get to the "Scumoween" event in the centre of the city. —The Guardian
  • Sanders' First TV Spot
    Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders has unveiled the first television ad, framing him as a man "speaking truth to power". His campaign will spend more than $2 million broadcasting it over the next 10 days. —Slate
  • Ripped It Off?
    Taylor Swift is being sued for $42 million for allegedly stealing the lyrics to "Shake It Off". Jesse Braham has claimed in legal papers that Swift stole from one of his songs, "Haters Gone Hate". —TIME
  • Bubonic Plague Not Coming for You
    With the sole teenage victim of the Bubonic Plague recovering in Oregon, people are still freaking out about a potential outbreak. Here's why you don't need to worry. —Motherboard

Done with reading for today? Why not watch this instead, the first episode of "VICE Talks Games", with HALO developer Frank O'Connor.


VICE Vs Video Games: I’ll Never Love a Console Like I Loved My Original Xbox

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A screenshot from 'Halo: Combat Evolved'

I turned 11 in 2002. Eleven. I didn't even know how money worked then, but my parents had forked out a relatively small fortune to get me the console I wanted for my birthday.

I'd already had a PC, technically my dad's, and it had introduced me to games—mostly racing ones, because guns are bad. Dad had given me a copy of Duke Nukem 3D pretty early on, in one of those needlessly large PC game boxes that they used to release, but when he realized it was full of tits he took it away. I'd also inherited a PSone from someone I can't remember—the dinky little white one that Sony put out in 2000. I didn't have the attachable 5" screen for it, though, because I'm not a twat. I played yet more racing games on it, and also the first Harry Potter game. It was fantastic, wasn't it? Tough at the end, though—and when you think about it, JK Rowling hiding a bad guy underneath a turban was very 2001.

At that point, ten years old, I was in my prime. I had my entire life ahead of me—hopes and dreams. It wasn't until I turned 11 that I started to fall in love with games. All downhill from there, but my parents being staunch restrictors of what I could and couldn't play—a good thing, by the way—made the scope of what my imagination was exposed to pretty limited. Cars and racial stereotyping.

The original Xbox controller

The original Xbox was a beast, bigger than me. I remember opening the box and, even back then, with no understanding of product design, knowing the controller was an abomination. Thirteen years later I quite regularly, more often than I would like to admit, think about the designer who came up with the original Xbox controller. Did they hate children? Were they some kind of Jony Ive-wannabe pedophobic sadist whose hateful solution was to make it difficult but not quite impossible, unpleasant but not wholly awful, for those under the age of 15 to play games by wickedly making the pad too damn big? Struggling to hold the thing, I was nevertheless pretty stoked to play with it. The first console I'd ever owned from new, straight out of the box. Struggling. Stoked.

Now, do you remember The Thing? It was a 2002 video game that served as a sequel to the John Carpenter horror classic of 20 years earlier. My parents bought me The Thing with my massive original Xbox. They'd failed to notice it was strictly not for kids, so had inadvertently bought me—an 11-year-old with chronic asthma, a walking cliché bound to fail at any career he attempted—a 15-rated movie tie-in with blood and aliens and scares that was absolutely going to give me instinctive urges to harass people on the Internet in later life. Struggling.

A screenshot from 'The Thing'

My 11th birthday fell on a Sunday. In those days, the only place I could physically get to, aside from begging my mum to drive to the nearest large town—a sort of home counties Mecca where there was a GAME, a GameStation and a Virgin Megastore—was the Woolworths (RIP) about a ten-minute walk from my house. It was closed on a Sunday, like most other things in 2002. It was a different time, you see. Everything is open on Sundays now. Sundays are the day to go shopping, now. I went today. Stoked.

My parents' inexcusable fuck-up meant I had to spend 24 hours without a game, just holding that fuck-off controller. I still remember them realizing what they'd done, and instead of letting me even look at the cellophane-wrapped case of The Thing for the next 1,440 minutes, they just put it in the cupboard. I don't know whether them allowing me to buy Halo: Combat Evolved, a 15-rated sci-fi shooter, the next day, was a microcosm of my growing up—overnight I had become a man who could, for the first time in his life, shoot aliens in his bedroom, like a man. Alternatively: parental guilt.

With parental oversights of video game age ratings being so rare, I hoovered Halo for a long time. I mean, I really know that game. I Rainmanned Halo. I must've replayed it constantly for a whole year, partly out of love because the game was seminal, and partly because I had nothing else to play. I lived in fear of my parents belatedly realizing it was probably a little bad for me to be playing it. That bit where the flashback shows you how the infected zombies, the Flood, murder all the human soldiers, never got played when my parents were around, in case they took it back and put it in the cupboard. Or in my mum's knicker drawer, which is where she had hidden a confiscated copy of the original Grand Theft Auto given to me by my overly friendly hairdresser at the time, who I shit you not worked in a football-themed hairdressers, where all the kids went in and asked for their favorite football player's haircuts. Obviously I asked to look like seven-time Formula One World Champion and childhood hero, Michael Schumacher. Don't do that anymore.

New on Motherboard: The Lead Designer of 'Alien: Isolation' Reinvents His Other Favourite Monsters

A screenshot from 'Halo 2'

Fast-forward to 2005 and I'd rinsed many more games over and over. Halo 2 (I actually wrote to Bungie, like an actual Tory, saying I thought the ending was crap), Fable (would never do a sex scene when my parents were nearby, though) and Star Wars: Battlefront II (no sex scenes in that one, five out of ten) were some of the highlights. I was older now, so the amount of games I could play had expanded pretty dramatically, but I was only 14 and my income was sweet piss-all, so getting a new game was a birthdays and Christmas occasion I had to eke out for six months at a time. My parents would still never let me play an 18-rated game; Grand Theft Auto remained in their bedroom and it had begun to dawn on me how weird it was that it was being kept there, but at least I could still shoot guns, providing there wasn't tons of blood or killing prostitutes. My parents hadn't reneged on Halo. I had won the war.

Four years of playing the same games over and over hadn't been kind to my Xbox, though. Microsoft had at least gotten wise and created a controller I could use without dislocating my elegant thumbs to do so, but the disc drive on my console had begun acting up. At first it was a minor thing – a few blips that frustratingly meant putting a game in the console and it not doing anything for a little bit. But over time it got worse. The original Xbox had begun to forget me.

Article continues after the video below

Watch: VICE Talks Games with Halo franchise development director Frank O'Connor

The hardware issues worsened dramatically a few months after getting Burnout Revenge, a game I loved and was very good at. I was so good at it, in fact, that at one point I was one of the top three players in the world. And I never dropped below the top 20. In the world. I made sure of that. This became a serious problem for my GCSE years—a time I should've spent studying the merits of modern literature, but instead raced around White Mountain, Sunshine Keys, and Lone Peak so repeatedly that I could've done them blindfolded and probably did do that at one point to show off to a "girl" online.

The more I played, the more the Xbox forgot how to do the only thing it was designed to do—entertain me. Looking back, I should've contacted customer support. At the peak of my "problems" it often took over an hour for the original Xbox's drive to read the game and boot it up, but I'd do it, daily, for almost two years. Put the disc in. Wait. Take it out. Move the disc drive a bit, probably exacerbating the whole problem. Put the disc in. Wait, take it out, put it in again. Wait. Wait. Wait. Yell. Think about dusting off the PSone, stealing Grand Theft Auto from my mum's drawer and fucking it all off for a cheap thrill. Reconsider immediately. Take it out, put it in. SUCCESS.

A screenshot from 'Burnout Revenge'

I got straight fail grades in my GCSE mock exams, which was a slight wake-up call: I needed a new console. In 2006 I got an Xbox 360, again, for my birthday, but I had no time for any nonsense now. I was one of the millions of people who got one of the faulty Xbox 360s, which broke due to a very famous hardware problem that cost Microsoft a billion dollars. Straight off to customer service. Fixed for free.

I never reached the top of leader boards again, in any game since, but I think I'm happier now. I wouldn't have spent my childhood years any differently – I seriously loved the original Xbox. But I'm 24 now, I wear outside clothes, occasionally, and I have something resembling a career. I also have a complex where I'm subconsciously afraid of my parents confiscating my things, despite not living with them anymore. The original Xbox taught me several important things about life, you see. Above all, it taught me that taking part, sometimes, isn't worth it.

Follow Sam on Twitter.

A Brief History of Actual Sex in Movies

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'Love' by Gaspar Noé. Photo by Benoît Debie

As you've probably heard by now, the new Gaspar Noé movie, Love, features a bevy of unsimulated sex scenes. Many who don't consider themselves prudish in the slightest have dismissed the film as pornography masquerading as art-house fare. What they don't necessarily realize is that although explicit onscreen sex tends to give stateside audiences pause, it is not out of the norm on the festival circuit—whose most prestigious stops are concentrated, not coincidentally, in Europe.

Call it selection bias, but, to these eyes, it seems that an unusually high number of well-regarded films have utilized this graphic technique over the last few years—Nymphomaniac, Starlet, and Stranger by the Lake, to name a few. The lion's share of these have, of course, been produced abroad and only received a limited domestic release, which isn't as affected by an NC-17 rating. (If anything, the status of Nymphomaniac and now Love as willfully niche products has allowed their marketing teams to play up their subversive content via suggestive and/or beyond-NSFW posters.)

Love may be the latest to throw its hat in this particular ring, but it's very far from the first. To better prepare yourself for Noé's 3D provocation—which, I'm duty-bound to report, isn't as worthy of your hard-earned dollars as something like The Wonders, which also opened last week—consider taking a brief tour of cinematic history's most transgressive sex scenes.

An early example is A Song of Love, a 26-minute French film (original title: Un chant d'amour) made in 1950. Notable for its voyeuristic plot, Jean Genet's movie concerns a prison guard who gets his rocks off by watching an inmate masturbate and, after a minor tiff with said self-abuser, makes the prisoner suck his gun. It was banned not only for its explicit scenes of pud-pulling but also for its overtly homosexual overtones, which was the most problematic aspect for many. In part because of that controversy, Genet never directed again.

Over the next few decades, several other European films followed suit, whether it be in Denmark (Gift, 1966), West Germany (Hotel by the Hour, 1970), or Sweden (They Call Us Misfits, 1968). Misfits came close to being censored until the minister of education stepped in. Scandinavia really had the market cornered for a while there, with many such films (most notably the seven-part Zodiac series) essentially receiving normal treatment: reviews in national newspapers and only a few cases of censorship and/or banning. Jens Jørgen Thorsen, whose 1970 adaptation of Henry Miller's Quiet Days in Clichy lived up to its source material by featuring hardcore sex, nearly received official support from the Danish Film Institute on his next project until Pope Paul VI protested its blasphemous religious content.

We haven't been so accepting here in America, though. As with many other things, we have John Waters to thank for bringing scenes of unsimulated fellatio to domestic screens. Pink Flamingos, in addition to making Divine a cult hero for generations, was also banned in such usually open-minded locales as Australia, Norway, and Canada. When it was re-released stateside in 1997 to celebrate its 25th anniversary, the MPAA gave it the NC-17 stamp of disapproval. Other than the whole eating dog-shit thing, they weren't too pleased with the close-up of Divine giving an actual blowjob. Go figure.

Perhaps the most respected purveyor of real-life sex is In the Realm of the Senses, a Japanese movie that only got made because it was officially recognized as a French production. Nagisa Oshima courted acclaim and controversy in roughly equal measure throughout his career, nowhere more so than here. The movie's explicit nature gave it trouble with censors and banners in America, England, Canada, Portugal, and its home country, among others. It also has a distinction of being in the Criterion Collection, whose website features the disclaimer "WARNING: THIS FILM IS SEXUALLY EXPLICIT."

Not nearly as well thought of is Caligula, whose excesses remain memorable for all the wrong reasons. Probably the most expensive production on this list ($17.5 million in 1979), it features an extended orgy in addition to numerous other bouts of full-on sex. Al Pacino and William Friedkin entered the fray a year later with Cruising, with Pacino as an undercover cop investigating a series of murders in New York's gay club scene. Most of the real action took place in the background, but wasn't exactly difficult to notice. Friedkin had done an excellent job of demolishing the goodwill he built up with The French Connection (which won him an Oscar) and The Exorcist by directing Sorcerer, his underrated movie from 1977 about a motley crew of drifters transporting highly volatile nitroglycerin through South America in big rigs. Cruising didn't do him any favors, either.

None of these directors made as questionable a decision as Vincent Gallo, whose controversial The Brown Bunny climaxes with a scene in which his character receives a blowjob from Chloë Sevigny (who happens to be Gallo's real-life ex-girlfriend). The film was pilloried upon its world premiere at Cannes in 2003, leading to an escalating back-and-forth between Gallo and Roger Ebert, who deemed the filmmaker's pet project the worst film ever to screen at Cannes. Gallo responded by calling the critic fat; Ebert retorted by paraphrasing Churchill; Gallo put a hex on Ebert's colon; and Ebert claimed that watching a video of his own colonoscopy was more entertaining than The Brown Bunny. Point: Ebert.

Not everyone was as unkind (and even Ebert responded favorably to a shorter, re-edited version), but the film has continued to be defined by this one scene—which may be the biggest argument against featuring explicit sex in movies. It can become a distraction, a way of pigeonholing something. The real challenge, then, may lie in not letting this aspect alone shape a movie's legacy

As for whether explicit sex adds to cinema, it's like anything else: It depends on the film itself. Starlet fares best among recent examples; Sean Baker's low-key story of a porn actress living and working in the San Fernando Valley benefited from its cleverly edited shots of the eponymous star in the act. (As Lars von Trier did in Nymphomaniac, Baker also opted for body doubles in these sequences.) When it works, it fells incidental to the plot, yet essential to the overall tone. There is never any question of shock value or exploitation, which to say: The sex serves the narrative, not the director.

Follow Michael on Twitter.

JK Rowling's Weird, Nonsensical Claim That Dumbledore Would Have Been Against a Boycott of Israel

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How would Harry Potter respond to the Israel-Palestine conflict? What would Spock say about the rational markets hypothesis? Does Luke Skywalker think that David Cameron really fucked that pig, and who is Yoda backing in the Republican primaries? This isn't just a wacky thought experiment; this is the real-life 2015, in which it's impossible to formulate any kind of political thought without the intervention of some fictional wizards; a world teetering on the edge of nonexistence, where it's impossible to tell whether pregnant women dying in airstrikes is a good or bad thing unless we can find out what Dumbledore thinks of it first.

Last week, JK Rowling defended her public opposition to an academic boycott of Israel by writing a bizarre and insufferably quaint essay in which she explains why Dumbledore—who is, let's not forget, a character that she made up herself—would have agreed with her. To be fair, she admits that "the Harry of six and a half books might not understand" why the Israel boycott is illegitimate, but insists that by the end of the series, Harry Potter—again, an imaginary person, who does not exist—would enthusiastically support the political program of his creator.

Making up people who conveniently agree with you isn't a strategy unique to Rowling—after all, only this year the UK's Department of Work and Pensions created a whole cast of phantasmic scroungers who were mysteriously grateful to the government for cutting off their only source of income. But if nothing else, it's a pretty dire indictment of the current state of literature that one of our most popular authors has reduced her entire literary output to a friendly hand puppet that concurs with everything she says.

According to Dumbledore, as ventriloquized by Rowling, "severing contact with Israel's cultural and academic community means refusing to engage with some of the Israelis who are most pro-Palestinian, and most critical of Israel's government." Some background: The movement for an academic boycott of Israel is in response to a 2005 call from 171 organizations representing Palestinian civil society—including labour unions, social, and feminist movements, and teachers' associations—for worldwide boycott, divestment, and sanctions against the State of Israel, with the goal of ending the occupation in Gaza and the West Bank. It's similar to, and consciously modeled on, the anti-apartheid boycott that played a significant role in ending white minority rule in South Africa.

As was the case in South Africa, the boycott movement has gained the support of many Israelis who oppose their government's occupation of the Palestinian Territories, many of whom would be directly affected, such as Kobi Snitz, an academic mathematician at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot near Tel Aviv. Rowling writes that the voices of pro-Palestinian citizens of Israel should be "amplified, not silenced"—but it's the Israeli state, not the boycott movement, that's silencing them. In 2011, Israel passed a law preventing its citizens from supporting the boycott; originally, speaking out in favor of the movement would have been a criminal offense punished by fines, now it just exposes anyone who dares to disagree with Dumbledore to potentially ruinous lawsuits and the withdrawal of state benefits (no wonder the British and Israeli governments are so closely aligned).

Rowling writes that we should ignore the Palestinian call for boycotts because Dumbledore managed to change Snape's mind when they met on a hill, and if that hadn't happened, Harry would never have managed to return the last Horcrux to the planet Mordor and stop the Manalore invasion. (My understanding of the books is a little shaky.) Of course, it's not entirely illegitimate to base our real-life decisions on heavily fictionalized moral fables; the Bible works pretty well in this regard, and you could do worse than trying to emulate Prince Myshkin or Leopold Bloom. On the other hand, people who try to build the good life on the example of Walter White or Christopher Nolan's Batman are both intensely annoying and disturbingly everywhere. If Harry Potter can be marshaled into service as a piece of Zionist hasbara, what kind of a fable is it?

Related: Watch 'Unicorns,' VICE's documentary about a hedonistic free-love cult

The Potter books are of course a fantasy series, but the fantasy they encode has less to do with the overt content about flying around on broomsticks and more to do with the British class system. It's the story of a boy at a turreted Gormenghastian version of Eton, someone who at first finds themselves alienated in an intimidating boarding school (incidentally, one that operates through the house elves' literal slave-labor), but who eventually becomes the savior of its wizarding aristocracy, and ends the series firmly at ease with his place among the natural ruling classes. It's a profoundly conservative fantasy: the problem, at the start of the first book, is that Harry is despised and downtrodden; his salvation doesn't come from the elimination of injustice but his elevation to the ranks of the privileged.

Dumbledore is a liberal Zionist. Substitute "Israelis" for "wizards" and "Palestinians" for "Muggles" and Rowling's weird lecture on the Middle East starts to make a lot more sense. There are the bad wizards, like Voldemort, Meir Kohane, or Baruch Goldstein, who believe that theirs is the superior tribe and want to dominate or exterminate the Mugglestinians. Then there are the good wizards, who want to implement a two-state solution, who set up a bureaucratic Ministry of Magic to keep wizards and Muggles separate, who are good because they believe in strictly defined ethnic enclaves rather than any kind of actual coexistence.

Jews (like, for instance, Kobi Snitz, or myself) who want to tear down the barriers and create some kind of properly equal settlement hardly warrant a mention. JK Rowling seems to think that her stories about the Wizarding War have a lot to teach us about the situation in the Occupied Territories, that their intrinsic moral values can help everyone arrive at a lasting peace. But really, it's the other way round: actual oppression shows how necessary it is for the revolutionary Muggles to storm the ramparts of Hogwarts.

Follow Sam Kriss on Twitter.

I Sell Drugs to Tourists at Croatian Music Festivals

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Collage by Marta Parszeniew

Summer is properly over. It's dark when you get up and dark when you get home, the John Lewis Christmas advertisement is being premiered this week, and all the summer music festivals have released their round-up mini-movies to make us all feel a bit shit about our lives, bringing back memories of smiling and sweating quite a lot on a boat party somewhere off the Adriatic Coast.

It's those videos and the chemically contorted faces people are pulling in them that got me thinking about the guys (and it is pretty much exclusively guys) who provide overseas festivals with drugs. More often than not, they're British, meaning there's every chance they've smuggled a lot of very illegal narcotics across Europe. Considering that dealing drugs, by all accounts, is a stressful, time-consuming endeavor, I don't really get the attraction in subjecting yourself to it in a foreign country when you could instead just be enjoying yourself at a festival.

To work out these dealers' motivations, I got in touch with one of them—a guy in his mid 20s who we'll call Adrian, because obviously we can't publish his real name—and went to meet him for a chat in his hometown of Birmingham. Below are his thoughts, edited for length and clarity:

The first time I ever went to Croatia, it was for the party. I always bring drugs with me everywhere I go anyway, so I had stuff for my mates and me. This was in 2010. When I got out there, I realized there were literally no drugs. People were going crazy, clawing at me, paying silly money. I'd sell a gram of MDMA I bought for £15 . That's when I thought, OK, I can make a lot of money out of this.

First few years, I didn't deal professionally. I'd sell to mates, but people kept asking me and I felt bad. I felt noble, bringing drugs out. Everyone just wants to have a good time. It doesn't matter what class you are, what education you have—everyone does drugs.

I started dealing professionally three years ago. I'm available for six hours a day, and I'll text people and tell them times and where I'll be. I have a different hotline for each festival, but I never deal in the festival site. When it starts to get dark I put my phone on silent and get fucked up and enjoy the party. I'm not like those dealers who are only about making money. There are some dealers who go out there and make millions.

I limit how many people I deal to. I keep it to bulk orders and see four or five people a day. A bulk order would be about 40 pills, at £20 a pill. I don't do discounts. I never bother with people who order one or two pills—unless it's a cute girl.

Read: Inside the Secret World of a British Undercover Drugs Cop

Word spreads quickly at a festival, which is good and bad. It means people want to buy your stuff, but you end up on the police radar. You get these idiots shouting your name at a party, waving their arms around, saying they bought their drugs from you.

It's always the pretty girls who'll flutter their eyelashes and rip you off. I check the money with those girls. If a girl thinks she can get free stuff for nothing, she's wrong. But if she wants to sleep with you for coke, that's cool. I'll share a gram with her. I always have a different festival girlfriend. It's not like she's only getting drugs out of it, anyway.

Italians and Spanish are the worst people to deal to. They don't want to pay for anything, they ask loads of questions, they mug you off. I don't bother dealing to them unless they can prove they're sound. My favorite people have experience with drugs. Posh kids are good, because they're sensible. Or gay guys are on point, because they've done loads of drugs and know the score.

You get the idiots. People who've bought pills and called me up, shouting, "This stuff doesn't work!" I go back to give their money back, and they're off their heads, like, "We love you man." Or the people who buy ket, but complain when they get it. They're spinning out; they're like, "What the fuck did you give me?" I tell them, "This is the best ket you can get, it's direct from India."

Photo by Matt Desouza

It's the Wild West out there. This is Croatia, it's not like England. Croatians don't fuck about. There was a war out there in the 90s and guns are common. Everything runs on money. It doesn't matter whether you're a police officer or the mafia—it's all the same. The police are the biggest mafia.

The police know who the dealers are. They'll wait to arrest you until you have a lot of stuff on you, and extort you for money. They'll catch festival-goers, too. They use pretty girls as bait—they offer the guy a spliff, and if he accepts the police will fine him £300 . You need to watch out for the undercover officers out there. Never buy drugs from Croatians you don't know.

You've got to be smart if you don't want to get caught. Don't be an idiot. Sometimes you have to watch out for the other dealers, too. Mostly it's fine as long as you don't try to dominate the market. But I've had friends who've had their stashes raided by other dealers who sell their drugs on.

I got caught once. It was my fault—I was off my head. I'd been up for three days, was high on coke, drunk, done a couple of pills. I should have stashed my stuff, but went to meet a girl instead. I got away with a huge fine. You know how in the UK the police don't check in your boxers? Well, they do in Croatia.

When you have good drugs, you get access to all sorts of places. I ended up getting in with the mafia, and it was good at first. I became friends with this guy, and we'd enjoy good food, good drugs, go nice places. Then he introduced me to his friends and it got serious. They started to ask a lot of questions—it made me paranoid. When you see people with guns, mad things, you think, OK, I don't want to be involved in this. It's too much.

Related: Watch our new film 'Unicorns,' about the polyamorous London club kids who identify as unicorns.

You can normally pay security off. I was the only person dealing on this boat party once; I made silly money—about £2,500 . Then I met this girl. I got fucked and a bit silly. She gave me ket and the security guard clocked it.

I had all this money, so I shoved it down my pants, under my balls. I went to get a drink from the bar back at the shore, and that's when the security guards grabbed me. I tried to leg it, but they searched me. My dick's not that big, so you could really see the money bulging out. I pleaded with them and eventually they gave me a wad of cash back and kept the rest. The same guard let me back into the festival the next day. He was laughing as he let me in.

If I could give the next generation of dealers one piece of advice, it would be don't do ket on the job. I love ket, but you can't do it while you're working.

For example, this one time, I'd been working a whole festival, and to celebrate I did a fat spoon of K. It must have been two or three grams I sniffed in one go. Later, I went back to my apartment, and I'd forgotten I'd meant to check out. It was a drugs den in there, and the landlady had gone in to move all our stuff out. And she'd cleared me out, stolen all my money, even my amethyst crystals. But I couldn't say anything because she hadn't called the police. She took a couple of grand.

The highlight of my drug-dealing career is falling in love multiple times with different girls from different places. But, if you like a girl, you shouldn't give her free drugs. You want to be sure she's with you for you, not the drugs.

It's Hard to Run for President When Nobody Likes You: The Jeb Bush Story

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In the media, we often write the obit before the person dies. It's not as macabre as it sounds. We all know when someone is near the end, and reporters just want to make sure they have a proper tribute ready when that end inevitably comes.

At this point, I think it's fair to starting writing obits for Jeb! Bush's presidential campaign, which is not dead yet but is surely on it's on its way out the door. I can't predict the exact time of death, but with his polling numbers stubbornly stuck in the single-digits and Republican voters looking for outsiders like Donald Trump and Ben Carson, it looks like death is the only avenue available for Jeb's 2016 campaign. His donation stream is slowing to a trickle. Jeb is still insisting that his campaign is not on life support—but if it's not on the respirator yet, that's because the respirator is out in the hallway, being pushed to his room.

If this were actually an obit, I might start it like this: "The Jeb! Bush campaign was the early frontrunner in the 2016 presidential campaign but it was pushed aside by an electorate hungry for an outsider, and a nation uninterested in a third Bush presidency. His campaign lacked focus, and was plagued by a candidate who never earned the "adult in the room" title he tried so hard to create." That might sound a little harsh for an obit, but I can edit it later. The next sentence is easy: "The Jeb! campaign died on at a hastily-called press conference in Miami. The campaign was surrounded by family and friends but Jeb!'s father and brother, who both served as president, were not present. A cause of death was not given. The campaign was 28 years old."

I say "28 years old" because the Jeb! campaign began, for better and worse, with the election of Poppy Bush back in 1988. Jeb!'s campaign has been made possible by his last name, but that has also been one of its fatal flaws. Like Eddie Murphy's African prince in Coming To America, Jeb! is trying hard to live like a regular dude but failing. He has defined his 2016 bid around the idea that he is his "own man," and not just the scion of the Republican Party's royal family—but of course, his royal blood is why he is in the position to run at all.

The specific cause of death will be financial failure—at some point there won't be enough money to run a campaign that's competitive. But that's like a doctor saying the patient died because his heart stopped. What made his heart stop?

In Jeb!'s case, part of the problem is a sort of political climate change. I'm not talking about the climate change Jeb isn't sure exists, but about the zeitgeist. It's hard to be American political royalty in an election where the Republican base is so fed up with Washington that they've turned to people with no political resumes. And while the right's anger is primarily directed at President Obama, they also rose up in opposition to George W. Bush, whose administration bailed out banks and drove up the deficit. Now Jeb! trails a pair of Tea Party darlings and seems out of place in a party that has moved so far to his right. So in a sense, Jeb! is suffering from the revenge of Republicans who disliked his brother.

READ: Toure on the Struggle to Understand the Rise of Ben Carson

Some people will claim that Jeb!'s campaign failed because Donald Trump sucked up his thunder. But I'm not sure "thunder" is the right word to use when referring to the awkward, somnolent Jeb!. Trump roared and bloviated and sucked up the media's attention—but Jeb! didn't do much to remind people that he was still in the race. He never countered Trump's stranglehold on the race with big ideas or pronouncements compelling enough to take the spotlight back from the reality TV billionaire. Jeb!'s candidacy has had no big, central idea, no great passion for any cause.

What is his campaign really about? Jeb! tried to get us to see him as the adult in the room, but he never really delivered on that. Instead, he's looked small, talking about how good he is at fantasy football. At the most recent GOP debate, Jeb! snatched an opportunity to attack Marco Rubio, his old friend, but it made him look so lilliputian, that was the moment I started writing this obit.

All of this—his ever-shrinking stature, the horrendous historical timing of this campaign, the lack of an intellectual rudder for his candidacy—is now affecting the money. A look at Jeb's fundraising numbers reveal the heart of his campaign slowing down and struggling to beat.

In terms of total money raised, Jeb! remains the runaway leader on the GOP side, with $133 million in donations, according to the New York Times. Ted Cruz, the field's second biggest fundraiser, has raised just half of Jeb's total, with $65 million. Rubio is third with $47 million. But asking about total money raised is kinda like asking how much money someone has made in his lifetime. The more significant question is how much money the candidates have right now. The Cruz campaign tops that list with $13 million, followed by Carson and Rubio with $11 million each. Jeb! comes in fourth, with just $10 million in cash on hand. That means his burn rate is 86 percent—his campaign is going through money faster than Richard Pryor in Brewster's Millions. A campaign with that high of a burn rate and a dwindling donor stream is a campaign sliding toward death.

Part of Jeb's fundraising problem is that he hasn't been able to attract the small donations that have fueled many of his rival campaigns. Eighty percent of the people who have donated to Jeb's campaign gave the maximum $2,700. He's attracted more elite donors than any other candidate, but hasn't been able to make a connection with middle- and working-class voters.

RELATED: Toure Explains Why Donald Trump Will Never Be President

As donations dry up, Jeb's campaign has had to downsize. His team has made deep and wide spending cuts, including shrinking the payroll by 40 percent. The campaign has also started to shift its focus from large fundraisers to town hall-style campaign events, designed to improve the candidate's standing with average voters. But it's probably too little, too late.

At the end of an obituary, there's usually some line or quote that sums up the departed hero. But the Jeb! campaign doesn't deserve that. This was not an heroic effort. It's been effete and pathetic, squandering every possible advantage in terms of money, connections, and household name recognition. The Jeb! campaign died an untimely death that was, in large part, the fault of Jeb! It may be because the candidate, having watched his father and brother ascend the presidency, felt ordained, or entitled to the same success. But the result was that Goliath was slayed—the Republican royalty has been turned away at the door.

So at the end of the obituary, I'll borrow from another recent tribute, written by the New York Times for former CBS chief John Backe. That obit closed with a quote from a Snoopy statue that stood in Backe's office: "What did I do to deserve all this?" I bet Jeb! is wondering just that.

Follow Toure on Twitter.

Halloween's Hangover: Pictures From the Post-Party Un-Apocalypse

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Few dichotomies are as physically apparent as the difference between the night of Halloween and the messy aftermath of the morning after. (To simplify: Halloween > November 1, 9 AM) We asked one of our favourite photographers, Rebecca Storm, to document what the day after Halloween is like in her world. Here's what she sent us.

See more of Rebecca's work here.

The Death Toll from Friday's Romanian Club Fire Could Rise 'Significantly'

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A photo moments before the fire by Vlad Bușcă

This article originally appeared on VICE Romania

A fire at a metal show in Bucharest's Colectiv Club on Friday night injured upwards of 150 people and left at least 31 dead, according to Romanian news outlets. As the band Goodbye to Gravity played in front of a crowd of nearly 400 attendees, pyrotechnics set some large sheets of soundproofing sponge ablaze and the fire spread within seconds. Yesterday, the Associated Press published an update saying the death toll is expected to rise "significantly," due to the severity of victims' injuries.

The venue had advertised the show's pyrotechnic effects on Facebook prior to the set, despite not having authorization from a fire marshal, according to state secretary Raed Arafat.

Several witnesses claim that the emergency rescue teams were sluggish. "The firemen were late and they only came after about ten calls," said concert-attendee and photographer Vlad Bușcă. "At first, they just used portable extinguishers. None of them were using hoses."

A young woman who had showed up to the scene of the accident just as it happened posted on Facebook that there were not enough ambulances for all the wounded. "A single ambulance came after about 15 minutes. I kept calling the emergency number; I asked everyone to call more emergency teams," she wrote in a post that's since been removed.

Photo by Mircea Topoleanu

Two hours after the fire, Bucharest's hospitals ran out of room for the injured, even though extra doctors and staff were called in. The Ministry of Defense announced that two planes and two helicopters were prepared, in case some of the wounded needed to be transported to other hospitals.

Later that night, the Ministry of Internal Affairs issued a press release, claiming that professional intervention was swift and that 11 fire trucks, 21 ambulances, 28 first-aid vehicles, and two intensive care vans arrived to help. The case is now being investigated.

Photo by Mircea Topoleanu

I reached the venue approximately one hour after the fire started. The air was stifling. The wounded had already been transported to the hospitals and the area was barricaded by rescue teams. Behind them, hoards of people watched ambulances come and go as they sat and looked on helplessly.

"Those fireworks seemed harmless, but once they hit the acoustic foam covering a pole in front of the stage the roof caught fire and the flames extended rapidly," said Bușcă. "That is all I could remember. After that, I wasn't paying attention anymore; I just wanted to get out of there."

A witness, quoted by Hotnews, explained that people could not get out of the club because it had only one exit. "It was like there was a giant cork in the doorway," he said.

Another survivor told Adevărul, "We had no air. It smelled of burnt flesh. I had to climb on corpses to try to get out."

Romanian President Klaus Iohannis asked for compassion and solidarity in a Facebook post and the Minister for Healthcare, Nicolae Bănicioiu, encouraged people to donate blood for the wounded. The government is planning on covering the cost of victims' medical expenses, too. Romanian leaders have even proposed a new law that would increase fines for clubs that break rules that could injure the public, according to a Romanian news source.

On the morning after the fire, the country's government declared three days of national mourning.


All The Things You Feel When You Watch a Variety Show Starring Your Nemesis, Chris Hadfield

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Wow, what a dork. Photo via Facebook/Col. Chris Hadfield

Commander Chris Hadfield, the most famous Canadian astronaut of all time (non-William Shatner division), hosted a science-themed variety show in Toronto last week.

Having covered David Bowie's "Space Oddity" aboard the International Space Station in a YouTube video that's been viewed more than 26 million times and tweeted prolifically throughout his mission, Hadfield appears to have reached Space God-like status. He's written books, hosted global sing-alongs, and recorded an album—Space Sessions: Songs From a Tin Can, which was marketed as the first-ever "off the planet" record, though at least one review said otherwise. There's even talk of a sitcom based on Hadfield's life. He is so omnipresent, he's our Kim Kardashian of space. And frankly, that's why I can't stand him.

I had been wanting to write a takedown on Hadfield for months but my editor kept saying things like; "Have you been to space?," "Have you recorded a music video?," and "Have you recorded a music video in space?"

But with a variety show, here on Earth, it started to feel like Hadfield was getting closer to being Mr. Dressup for millennials, rather than a scientist of the final frontier.

Before I even got to the event, my friends' responses to news that I was covering it hinted that I wasn't the only one feeling like we'd reached Peak Hadfield. "He's such a media whore," several remarked, while one complained, "so sick of that guy."

Still, I wanted to figure out whether or not I was mad at the man himself or his portrayal in the media. Or was the problem that I'm just a hater. As it turns out, it's a mix of all three.

Generator, billed as a chance to take a "glimpse into the adventures of a real life Space Commander," included presentations from Hadfield, a data expert, a YouTube science star, a spoken-word poet, a comedian, a sketch duo, a bionic suit company, and Toronto indie band TWRP. It was emceed by BBC host Robin Ince. I am probably missing something, but my god, at the time even all that felt like more than enough.

Hadfield gave the opening remarks, walking us through his intro to space and peppering his speech with a few dad jokes—the B.F. Goodrich spacesuit stands for "bad fit," etc. Despite myself, I felt compelled by his descriptions of space.

"The raw, unstoppable completely optimistic and effortless beauty is what's filling your mind the whole time you're out there," he said. "You're not of the world, you're with the world."

The theme for the event, he noted, was inspiration.

What followed felt like the longest session of show-and-tell I'd ever sat through (three hours from start to finish). There was a painfully awkward sketch comedy scene in which two 20-something women pretend to be senior citizens drinking chamomile tea, and a poet who beatboxed and inexplicably rapped about iPods. Sprinkled into the night were a handful of presentations that were more or less TED Talks delivered with varying degrees of charisma. There were power points and graphs and an experiment with a trippy bike. And of course, Hadfield revived his role as Bowie lite, jumping on the guitar to play with TWRP during the intermission.

About two-thirds in, a baby let out a wail. A few audience members started giggling but I felt something much stronger: solidarity. That infant's screams were an audible manifestation of everything I was feeling inside, namely, boredom. Still, the show was sold out. And I had to wonder why, two years after Hadfield's greatest contribution—his space mission—we continue to obsess over him.

Last week, on Reddit, Hadfield said he'd recently received a media request about a science-related story that wasn't in his area of expertise (he's an engineer by training). Because he declined to do the interview, the story didn't run.

"That bit of science didn't make it to your ears, because they didn't have someone they trusted to explain it to their audience," he wrote.

The anecdote made me realize I'm just as annoyed at Hadfield for being a shameless self-promoter as I am with the media for eating it up. When you remove the literal song-and-dance element, the man is supposed to be a scientist, not a celebrity. It's OK to be both, but his fame shouldn't be coming at the expense of underreported, scientific stories. Maybe it speaks to a lack of unmuzzled Canadian science heroes, but it seems like Hadfield could mow his lawn and that would be bigger science news than say, the fact that bugs might soon destroy all of our trees.

In spite of all this, I realized I didn't hate Hadfield as much as I thought I would. I get that he's trying to make science fun for kids, an admirable goal, and I admit he's a pretty good public speaker. But it would be great if he used that voice to speak on more serious issues, as opposed to just singing Songs From a Tin Can.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

The Company That Made the Runaway Spy Blimp Wants a $1M Apology From Canada

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Photo via Flickr user Jason Knight

Raytheon had a bad week. First, its multi-billion dollar blimp project rapidly deflated (what else can I say) when it crash-landed in Pennsylvania. Now, it's crying foul over being cut out of a lucrative Canadian military procurement project.

The Massachusetts-based company is accusing the Canadian government of botching the procurement process for its next generation of high-tech wearable technology, designed to help soldiers communicate and operate more effectively in-theatre—basically, like a really sturdy iPhone that lets you know where friendly and enemy troops are.

In documents obtained by VICE News, the defence contractor—one of the largest in the world—is accusing the government of failing to follow its own procurement procedures and giving Raytheon's competitors an unfair advantage.

Raytheon has been in the news over the past few weeks because one of their multi-billion dollar surveillance blimps became untethered over Maryland and crashed a short while later. Another blimp, in Afghanistan, crashed at the end of October.

They're demanding that an independent board intervene and force the Canadian government to scrap the successful bid and start all over again. And they want at least $939,054 CAD in compensation.

The contract is a highly sought-after project.

On paper, the pair of contracts are worth $7 million CAD. Yet Rheinmetall—the German company that beat out Raytheon for the job—estimates that the project could be worth upwards of $250 million CAD over the next several years. Other estimates put the lifetime cost of the upgrades at around $310 million.

The project, dubbed the Integrated Soldier Support Project (ISSP), will outfit Canadian Armed Forces with high-tech gear that will give soldiers a secure communications channel, let them collaboratively update their map with friendly and enemy positions, and opens the potential to call in geo-targeted firepower and support. The information could be sent and received through a unit—basically, a heavy-duty cell phone—on the soldier's arm, or in their helmet.

The gear should be able to update soldiers on everything from a "friendly nuclear strike"—and the fallout zone, which is totally comforting—to the position and direction of enemy aircraft overhead.

But the procurement process was troubled from the beginning. The contract was supposed to have been announced in 2012, but was rebooted in 2013.

"Industry sources say some of the bids were rejected because they did not meet technical specifications, and others were deemed non-compliant because companies failed to provide adequate information about their products," wrote David Pugliese, a journalist specializing in defence and procurement, in March of this year.

Industry sources who spoke with Pugliese said the upfront investment required to even participate in the bidding process—between $1 million and $2 million—was exorbitant, and that "equipment could be potentially obsolete even before it is delivered." Again, like an iPhone.

Now that Raytheon is asking to restart the process, again, the whole procurement process appears imperiled.

The complaint was lodged in September before the Canadian International Trade Tribunal, a quasi-judicial board tasked with hearing complaints about unfair trade practises.

The process that Raytheon went through involved a full test of the equipment by a team of Canadian Forces soldiers.

After testing the gear, soldiers would rank the equipment—"1 - :( - completely unacceptable; 4 - :| - borderline; :) - completely acceptable," according to Raytheon's submission. (Emoji scale is theirs, for reals.)

Public Works and Government Services Canada (PWGSC), the department in charge of the procurement, was tasked with taking all the bids that earned an acceptable level of performance in the tests, balancing it with other metrics, then selecting the cheapest. It completed that report in November, 2013.

In July 2015, PWGSC announced that Rheinmetall had won the contract, and informed Raytheon that its submission fell behind on the emoji test and had been disqualified.

That's where Raytheon's main grievance lies: it says that, in the nearly two-year period between the time that its bid had been eliminated and the government chose its competitor, Raytheon thought it was still in the running—and spent $939,054 CAD to continue improving the product.

Raytheon complained and asked for a meeting, only to have the government schedule and then cancel it.

On top of taking issue with the ramshackle communications policy, it writes that one of Rheinmetall's affiliated companies "agreed to a $45 million settlement with German prosecutors to resolve allegations of bribery related to arms sales in Greece" and argues that the company, under PWGSC's rules, "ought to have been declared ineligible" for the contract.

Raytheon's complaint also says that Rheinmetall and Thales, a French firm, may have had inside knowledge of the procurement process because of their other contracts with the Canadian Forces.

The whole affair could force Ottawa to reboot the procurement once again and further delay the upgrade, which will no doubt run up the overall price tag and push the equipment further towards obsolescence.

The ISSP procurement is just one file that will be sitting on the new government's desk when it formally takes office on Wednesday.

Prime Minister-designate Justin Trudeau has already promised to scrap the troubled process to help build and acquire Lockheed Martin's F35 fighter jets. A massive $40 billion shipbuilding program is still stalled at the starting gate. A program to replace Canada's 50 year-old Sea King helicopters is still frustratingly slow, as the behind-schedule acquisition of the CH-148 Cyclones has not gone smoothly.

Given that the government was, right up until this summer, seemingly giddy over the ISSP project—lauding the "leading-edge technology to support our troops"—another procurement blunder bodes ill for the Canadian Forces.

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.

Habits: The Punk Animals Discuss a Conspiracy Theory in This Week's 'Habits' Comic

What Does It Say About Me That I Prefer Dog Halloween Parties to Ones Involving Humans?

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Photos by Kristel Jax

The first time I heard about parties for animals was when I got into fostering pugs—those huffy little inbred dogs who look like space aliens and are, genetically, often barely breathing abominations in the face of god. I found out the rescue I'd been fostering for had "meetups," and I could see photos of past events on their Facebook page. Back then I was fostering an extremely overweight cocker-pug who needed to lose something like 20 lbs so she could move around comfortably and live to a ripe old age (for pugs that's like 13), and I was overcome with desire to watch her muddle around a park with happy tiny pugs and blind pugs and pugs with three legs. She was adopted before we ever made it to a meetup together, but I'd found an opening to a new subcultural world.

Now, a quasi-connoisseur of animal events (I do have a life that keeps me from every dachshund race and bring-your-pet movie screening), Pugoween is a highlight of my year. There are Pugoweens worldwide: Toronto's is run by and for Pugalug pug rescue. The concept is harder to explain to my friends than I feel it should be: small dogs with bulging eyes bred to possess an unlimited capacity for cuddles wearing dog-sized Halloween costumes because it's Halloween, or the day after or the week before Halloween or whatever.

While the event is effectively a fundraiser for the rescue, Pugoween is kinda, sorta for the dogs in a non-fundraising way too: most are stoked to be in a room where they can run around with other short, whimsical, four-legged creatures. But unlike Halloween-for-kids, which I hear is still going on, Halloween-for-dogs is implicitly for adult humans: if dogs enjoy wearing costumes it's only because it earns them attention.

But as I make my way to an enclosed space where there will definitely be pee on the floor, I have to ask my adult self: What's the deal? Is there something wrong with me if a dog party is my most exciting Halloween plan amid all the weekend's FOMO and debauchery?

As my shy pug follows in tow, I meander like a ghost through the crowd of urbanites who have come to observe a bunch of dogs running around in a room with florescent lighting and no booze. Short of the event's laissez faire costume contest for the pugs, there's no hierarchy of cool here. I realize I'm here for more than the squees: I'm relishing the feeling of not giving a fuck.

At Pugoween, nothing you do matters. All eyes are on the dogs running around the room sniffing butts while pieces of their ice cream sundae / devil / pirate / bumblebee costumes fall off: I don't notice two different humans are wearing the same oversized-pug-face shirt until the party is almost over, and trust, I normally notice if someone is wearing a cool shirt with a dog on it. The freedom I believe I'm supposed to feel but rarely find at concerts or on nights out, that unshackled sensation of being wholly at ease with myself and the present moment, is here in this room where furry creatures with a toddler's understanding of language and social decorum mill about occasionally pausing to accept neck scratches or climb into a lap. And I know the vibe in the room isn't just from the dogs: other people are experiencing their own form of mega-level happy, even if they might play it off like they only dragged themselves here for their curly tailed bff.

The big secret to dog parties is you don't really need a dog. Often there are so many running around that everyone assumes you have one in the mix. And beyond that, people who bring their dogs to dog parties are the types of people who will stop on the street to let strangers greet their pets even when they're running late for work—the type of people who know how much comfort a brief interaction with an animal can offer.

For a couple of years (before I became a new pet owner and did all of the above), I was petlessly attending pet events from adoptathons to Woofstock to one 99-dog Bernese Mountain Dog walk-and-swim. It was around my first Pugoween that I started saying stuff like "animal parties are better than people parties" or tweeting jokes like " needs more dogs," because I thought it was funny and because it was true. I pitched ideas for pet-friendly festival productions and stalked the internet for word of impromptu pug runs knowing it was like, weird.

As an adult I've found I'm rarely into human gatherings, but it would be nice if my late twenties brought on some new social skills on par with those of my peers, maybe an affinity toward dancing at techno parties for the music or going to gallery openings for the networking. Instead I'm chatting about antler chews with condo-mortgaging normies and basics from the burbs (going on assumptions here—dog people typically only talk about dogs) or skipping live bands to pet porcupines. And loving it.

It's a challenge to describe the way I feel with animals because when I'm in the moment, I'm lost in my happy place, but in between—the rest of life—that joy dims to a flicker, just warm enough to remind me that I can get back there. Interacting with animals is a natural high for me, which will sound creepy in light of reasons, and is actually peculiar in a philosophical light: why do I want to hang out with animals more than with people? If I find the human world unstimulating and superficial, does that mean I'm too lazy or frightened to level up my human relationships beyond vapid, surface-lurking, safety-zone bullshit? Is my quirky hobby actually soul-sabotaging regression?

Maybe I just really like dogs.

You can follow my dog on Instagram: @lanadelsatan_minipug

Donate to Pugalug online: pugalug.com

Submit dog events via Twitter: @aubreyjax

VICE Vs Video Games: Remembering the Classic Games of Shiny Entertainment

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Artwork to accompany Shiny's 1994 game 'Earthworm Jim'

Shiny Entertainment was a company that lived up to its name, shining brightly and briefly for about a decade as one of the most interesting game developers in America. Taking their name from the R.E.M. song "Shiny Happy People," the studio created several standout titles in the 1990s and early 2000s, becoming well known for an offbeat sense of humor and bizarre visual styles.

Unfortunately, the latter half of the developer's life was less memorable, eventually becoming more associated with licensed games, their last release being an adaptation of The Golden Compass, which, like the film it was based on, received a tepid critical reception. Shiny ultimately closed in 2007, but it'll always be remembered for its very best releases. Here, we chat to company founder David Perry—now a boss at Sony's cloud-based streaming service Gaikai—about some of the company's best known games, and the legacy they have left behind.

Gameplay from 'Earthworm Jim,' for the SEGA Mega Drive/Genesis, via World of Longplays

Earthworm Jim (1994)

The game that launched Shiny as a brand and David's personal favorite amongst his own output, Earthworm Jim was an instant classic, and became one of the first games to successfully capture that indescribable Saturday morning kookiness of 1990s Nickelodeon. The notion of designing an earthworm as a platforming hero came off as a hilarious dig at the rife platform mascot culture of the time, which tried so hard to inject attitude into various animals, be they hedgehogs (Sonic), bobcats (Bubsy), or miscellaneous (Zool). Even the villains had an anarchic streak to them: Evil the Cat, Psy-Crow, Queen Slug-For-A-Butt, Bob the Killer Goldfish.

Jim was designed by Doug TenNapel, an animator from California who would achieve further success post-Jim with his bizarre designs for the cult 1998 claymation adventure game The Neverhood (which has recently seen the release of a spiritual successor, Armikrog) and its platforming sequel Skullmonkeys. "I didn't know Doug but he was highly recommended," says Dave. "We gave him a test to join the team. As a result he showed up with Earthworm Jim and we loved it. So Earthworm Jim not only scored him a job, but it also got us excited enough to build our first game."

Crucially, and in contrast to his platform competitors, Jim was relatively weak on his own, and reliant on a technologically advanced "super suit" that granted him strength. This was a deliberate move by David and his team at Shiny. "I think that in game design there's a great value in contrasting abilities, meaning if you're strong all the time it's not as fun as going from very strong to very weak. One moment you are kicking butt, the next you're in massive trouble. So, that's why I personally loved the super suit. When Jim was in it, he was incredibly tough; and when he was out of it, he was just a squidgy, naked worm."

In addition, David cites a somewhat obscure influence regarding the dynamic between the clumsy hero Jim and his faithful sidekick, Peter Puppy. "My favorite cartoon as a kid was something called Hong Kong Phooey, and in that you had the same relationship where the title character feels like the tough leader, but his sidekick Spot the Cat—or in our case, Peter Puppy—ended up saving the day quite often." This relationship would later continue in the Earthworm Jim cartoon, where our hero was voiced by Homer Simpson himself, Dan Castellaneta. It was followed by the fantastic Earthworm Jim 2 in 1995, and the poorly received Earthworm Jim 3D in 1999, which was not developed by Shiny, but by now-defunct Scottish developers VIS Entertainment. Interestingly enough, Shiny's next game, MDK, would also make a subtle nod to Hong Kong Phooey by casting gamers as a janitor-turned-superhero.

'MDK' gameplay, via YouTube user Nightowl2244

MDK (1997)

Earthworm Jim is probably Shiny's most famous creation, but MDK is their enduring masterpiece, standing tall as one of the greatest games of the 1990s. Translating Earthworm Jim's chaotic run and gun platforming into a 3D arena, MDK was ahead of the curve in several respects. Released in the summer of 1997 for PC and Mac, and later for the Sony PlayStation, MDK was the story of a humble space janitor named Kurt Hectic who found himself tasked with saving Earth from reptilian alien miners.

Similarly to Jim's super suit, Kurt was emboldened by an anatomic "coil suit," granting him special powers that included, among other things, a pterodactyl-like helmet with an in-built sniper rifle, becoming one of the first 3D shooters to feature such a weapon, and the ability to glide using a parachute. The sniping allowed players to zoom at incredible distances across the game's then-impressive vistas in first-person via an HR Giger-like helmet HUD that showed off Kurt's ammo feed, which could be switched on the fly with six interchangeable bullet types. It was a revelation, and even the likes of id Software's iconic Quake, released one year earlier, had nothing in its arsenal to rival it. The gliding mechanic was a novelty at the time, but later appeared in games like the classic Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver.

"Designer Nick Bruty and I were a two-person team for many years, and for MDK he finally got to lead his own team with incredible talent like Bob Stevenson (art) and Andy Astor (programming)," explains Dave. "The original pitch of shooting someone in the eye from a mile away solved a massive problem in games at that time, by offering the ability to zoom into distant objects and target them. It was the first ever sniper weapon in games. So Nick had a great hook for the game, and that's what made me really want to support MDK."

Also similar to Earthworm Jim was MDK's refusal to take itself too seriously, with a surreal sense of humor evident that was firmly becoming a Shiny staple (level four, for example, was set in Kirkcaldy). It is also notable for its score by frequent Shiny collaborator (and current Video Games Live composer) Tommy Tallarico, whose sweeping soundtrack remains highly memorable.

Shiny relinquished sequel duty to BioWare, who released MDK2 in 2000. While a great game, the change in developer led to a noticeable shift of tone, possessing a slapstick quality that was less dark than Shiny's original.

Article continues after the video below

Related: Watch VICE's new film on the cost of dying in Greece

'Wild 9' gameplay from the PlayStation, via YouTube user Artificialraven

Wild 9 (1998)

Wild 9 was Shiny's second stab at a platformer IP, but failed to replicate the popular success of Earthworm Jim, despite some gameplay innovations and another fantastic soundtrack from Tommy Tallarico. It was a long production, and used a 2.5D style of platforming made popular by contemporaries such as Pandemonium!, Bug!, and Klonoa: Door to Phantomile. It starred a coiffured bro named Wex Major, who set out to save his eight kidnapped companions, who together comprise the "Wild 9" of the title. Its levels were built around the use of Wex's weapon, a portable levitation device called the Rig, in a similar fashion to MDK's levels being built around its sniping and gliding mechanics. "Wild 9 was based on a hook I really wanted to try," explains Dave, "where you could grab an enemy and stuff it into its own trap, or hold it in clouds of smoke and hear the enemy cough and splutter, or dangle it off a building. Torture in a game? It was a new kind of power gamers hadn't experienced before, so with that hook the team had a lot of fun experimenting with ideas."

'Messiah' PC gameplay, via HDBacon Retro Gaming Official

Messiah (2000)

Some wondered how Shiny could top superhero earthworms and assassin space janitors, and Dave admits that their next venture may not have hit quite the right notes. "Making a game starring a baby was a terrible idea, and I'm completely guilty," he says. "I actually made the same mistake twice by making a game called Herbert's Dummy Run back in the 1980s." Yes, Messiah saw the player cast as Bob, an angelic putto sent to cleanse a corrupted Blade Runner-like future dystopia. What could have possibly gone wrong? "Why a baby?" asks Dave, rhetorically. "Well, it had that Earthworm Jim mechanic of weak-strong-weak. The big hook for Messiah was the real-time possession of enemies, jumping into and out of their bodies. We had endless ideas but ran out of time. The 'Play as a Baby' idea has now been proven as a really bad idea for hardcore action players. That said, we had a ton of fun making the game and were the first to generate real-time tessellation in video games."

'Sacrifice' PC gameplay, via YouTube user TwinsensBrain

Sacrifice (2000)

The game that received the best critical reception of Shiny's work, Sacrifice was another change of pace for the studio—their previous release was simulator curio R/C Stunt Copter—and was considered a radical shake-up of the real-time strategy genre at the time, with amazing 3D graphics that were shown off by companies such as Intel. "Martin Brownlow (programming) and Joby Otero (art) led our internal team on Sacrifice," explains David. "We had another team making Messiah, which was based on an absolutely ground-breaking technology. Martin took that, added his amazing code, and built Sacrifice."

Sacrifice was notable for downplaying resource gathering, which was a staple of other RTS games like StarCraft and Command & Conquer, and also made the bold move of having much of the action take place from a third-person perspective. David commented on the passion of the game's multiplayer community. "It was my favorite Shiny game during development, but after playing with gamers online they wiped the floor with me. I didn't find that amusing as I knew the game inside-out and they still played better!" The game was also notable for simplifying traditional RTS keyboard and mouse controls, which could be convoluted for beginners. Sacrifice's evolution in contextual mouse control was something that would become more commonplace over the next few years.

"I was proud of something that people never noticed in Sacrifice, and that was the control system that would become invisible the more you learned it," Dave says. "To explain, if an advanced player was playing they'd be moving their mouse around issuing instant commands in an interface that didn't even need to display any icons." Despite critical acclaim, the game did not sell particularly well, perhaps stymied by its unusual design and high system requirements, and would set Shiny Entertainment on the path of bill-paying licensed products that would define the company from then on.

New on The Creators Project: Automatons, Bigfoots, Chupacabras: The ABCs of Monster Illustrations

'Enter the Matrix' gameplay (part 1), via YouTube user Killer3LV

Enter the Matrix (2003) and The Matrix: Path of Neo (2005)

The Matrix seemed like a natural fit for a video game tie-in, and hype was high for Shiny's take on this landmark film, particularly given that its first game spin-off, Enter the Matrix, was released before the negative buzz surrounding The Matrix's sequels had really set in. But then, Shiny did seem to be an unusual fit for the franchise. "I think, like you, the Wachowskis really liked MDK, and we were huge fans of their work too," explains Dave. "As you can imagine, I was competing with every major publisher to get the rights."

Enter the Matrix was a financial success, but reviews were mixed, and fans were split over the creator's decisions to have gamers play as Ghost and Niobe, relatively minor characters in the films, rather than the more familiar Neo, Trinity, et al. Dave had run into a similar creative situation earlier in his career while working as a Mega Drive programmer for Probe Software. "I had a tough time when I made The Terminator as you couldn't play as the Terminator (you played as Kyle Reese), due to licensing reasons," he explains, "and I think we had the same challenge trying to explain to gamers why they were not Neo. That's why we followed Enter the Matrix up rapidly with Path of Neo. That said, the directors provided far more than we expected, they gave us the game design and an hour of exclusive Matrix footage that you can only see if you complete the game."

Indeed, Enter the Matrix was so interconnected with the plot of The Matrix Reloaded that it led to criticism that it took away from the film in some respects. The game still retains traces of Shiny magic, despite its problems; addictive hacking mini-games and a noble attempt to replicate the films' balletic combat were among its successes, despite a clear rush to keep the project up to speed with The Matrix Reloaded, finished to coincide with the movie opening in cinemas. It was an ambitious endeavor in the way it blended its plot with the film that inspired it in such a symbiotic fashion in a way no film-to-game tie-in has tried since, though the unloved MMO Defiance tried something similar fairly recently. The Matrix: Path of Neo was a more familiar prospect and finally put players in Keanu's shoes.

Follow Ewen on Twitter.

We Asked An Expert Why People Believe In—and Hunt—Ghosts

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Photo via Flickr user Matthias Rhomberg

When you think of ghosts, what comes to mind? Translucent floating objects with peculiarly cutout black eyeholes? Dead spirits that roam around dilapidated abandoned buildings? King Hamlet? At the University of Pennsylvania, a group of professors—all from different academic backgrounds—have come together to ask themselves this very question. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to studying ghosts, members of The Penn Ghost Project have spent the better part of the last four years using "diverse explorations into history, literature, religious studies, palliative care, and medicine" to show that ghosts can be (and often are) more than something to spook you out at night.

VICE spoke with professor Justin McDaniel, who chairs the religious studies department at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the founders of the Penn Ghost Project, to find out more about his research. We chatted about his research, the history of ghost hunting, and why people are so ashamed admit that they believe in them.

VICE: How did the Penn Ghost Project start?
Justin McDaniel: It started about four years ago when I realized that on Penn's campus we had about twelve experts from lots of different departments—psychology, nursing, art history, history of science, South Asian studies, Middle Eastern studies, religious studies, Slavic studies—that had either written books or done research on ghost phenomenons from different countries. They all had their own disciplinary perspectives. So I thought that was a little odd that we had this many people on campus, and thought that we should get together and start sharing our work, sharing our research. It kind of grew from there, and we've been holding a series of talks, researching ghost hunters, looking at the history of ghost research in the United States and abroad, and we have a film series and stuff like that.

How did you find out that you all had this mutual interest?
Well, you know, there are 2,000 professors on campus but we're actually kind of a small community even though there's that many of us. We meet each other at chair meetings, and at other events and other talks. I kept seeing the same people show up for talks at the museum or lectures in the psychology department, so, you know, one thing leads to another. And it's been really kind of a nice intellectual experience. We have so many colleagues that spend a lot of time working on this, and the conversations are good. It's really sparked an interest. We thought we would hold and like five people would show up. But, you know what? Lots of people come.

On Motherboard: Ghosts in the Roscosmos

You're the chair of the religious studies department. Do you think that a belief in ghosts can act as a sort of religion in and of itself?
Well, it's interesting. A lot of people in different cultures who believe in ghosts aren't necessarily very religious. Sometimes it seems like they go hand-in-hand, but they don't—sometimes they do, but a lot of times they don't. For example, in extremely secular countries like Japan—I think Japan is the most secular industrial country in the world—they have very low rates of people participating in institutional religion, but very high rates of ghost belief. And we find similar things even among people who don't affiliate with a particular religion in the United States that will at least acknowledge the possibility that there are ghosts.

But in my own research in religious studies, I look at ghost practices, ghost rituals, and ghost beliefs of Buddhists—primarily in Southeast Asia and a little bit in Japan. We find across the board that whether a person is Buddhist, or Christian, or Muslim living in these cultures, ghost beliefs are quite high across religions.

Right. You wrote a book called The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk that delves into the centrality of ghosts in Thai Buddhism. Would you say that ghost beliefs are common whether or not they're tied into a specific religion?
That's right. quite different daily practices, quite different beliefs, different rituals in their own tradition, they actually share a lot of similar beliefs about what ghosts are. The religious belief doesn't necessarily affect the ghost belief, and it seems to be much more a cultural phenomena than an institutionally religious belief.

Is the fact that it's such a "cultural phenomena" a primary reason why you've chosen to study ghosts from an academic standpoint?
You know, there's really no religion on earth and no culture in history that hasn't had some belief in spiritual beings that are not divine, but they exist or not, they have an impact on economics (for example in real estate sales), they have an impact on literature and movies, they affect the way people act, they affect people's day-to-day fears and how they express those fears. So they are a sociological and psychological reality for many people, and that's what we study.

Photo via Flickr user Instill Moments

You mentioned ghosts affecting real estate. Is that because real estate agents are required to disclose when someone has died in a house, and potential buyers aren't really okay with the idea of dead people roaming the halls?
Exactly. A person could say they don't believe in ghosts, but if they're given a choice between one house that has had a murder in it with rumors of ghosts and ghost stories connected to it and one that hasn't, all things being equal, they'll stay away from the ghosts.

I have one student doing research on tracking home sales throughout the city and then tracking houses that have had associations with ghost stories. They're finding that is that it doesn't matter if those are not true or not, it's that they're actually having an economic impact, regardless of their ontology.

What usually happens in one of your group's meetings?
We bring speakers in from various disciplines. So we'll talk to a psychiatrist who specializes in early childhood psychology, and we kind of study the imagination. How do children develop ideas that there are anthropomorphic entities that we can't see—a belief in the invisible world? All children have some beliefs like that. And we talk to evolutionary biologists, then we look at cultural anthropologists and their work.

And then we meet with other faculty and we discuss these issues—not in a sense to get an answer that ghost belief comes from ? Or is it mostly social pressure? Is it purely cultural? Is it related to biogenetic reasons? We're looking at a wide variety of things and discussing them.

On Munchies: Cambodian Ghosts Love Sticky Rice Cakes

What else does the Penn Ghost Project do?
A secondary part of the project: We have participated in now, I think, about four or five ghost hunts—meaning that we contact professional ghost hunters. We don't necessarily care about finding ghosts on ghost hunts, but we want to investigate why they participate in this, what is their belief, what techniques they use, what reasoning they use. We've found local historians in different places.

As part of this research, we also research ghost hunting in the past. Primarily right now we're looking into Philadelphia history. Philadelphia has these massive archives of newspapers—you know, being the oldest, and for a long time, the biggest city in the country—this massive amount of data on those hunters in the 1830s that were showing up, and in the 1870s, the 1920s. So we can see historically how this profession has changed. It's kind of a wide-ranging amorphous project at this point.

Photo via Flickr user Keoni Cabral

I'm assuming that you don't view ghosts as these malicious creatures.
In our first year we really focused on feeling and health. A lot of times when you ask , "If these things aren't working, I will also consult a person who is a medium that can contact spirits in the other world." If anybody has a sick child or sick relative, they would do anything that they can to help. And many people do multiple treatments and some of those treatments involve ghosts.

Are you trying to debunk the theory of ghosts being inherently spooky things?
Well yeah. Not necessarily debunk it, but show that there are multiple ways of thinking about ghosts in different cultures. I think one of our talks is called "Otherworldly Allies," so we're looking at other countries that see ghosts as allies—in health, or in business in terms of trying to get someone to come in and talk to the spirits of the building, talk to the spirits of the neighborhood and get them to get on your side vs. being against you. Politicians in various countries of the world have spiritual specialists who help with things—and they're not all visions of Rasputin, but actually consultants, spiritual consultants.

How does the work in Penn Ghost Project extend onto the larger campus? Are there any ghost studies courses?
Oh yeah! I'm teaching a course right now called Gods, Ghosts, and Monsters. Big class, it's about 100 or 90 students in the class—Penn has pretty large classes, I think—there's a lot of student interest. We have two professors in the History of Science and Medicine Department that talk about ghosts in the history of science; and in the psychology department we have a focus on the psychology of fear and the psychology of imagination; we have a professor of Early Christianity and Second Temple Judaism who wrote a book on angels and demons and teaches a course. So yeah, lots and lots of courses.

I teach first and second year students to get them interested in the very idea of why there are so many cultures throughout history that have beliefs in things we can't prove—gods, and ghosts, and monsters—and what are the economic reasons, sociological reasons, psychological reasons, and biological reasons for this, and how can we explore them? It's a common part of our curriculum.

Haunted House Owners Were Legally Barred from Arguing Ghosts Aren't Real

Have you ever had any direct experiences with ghosts?
Yes, many of our members have. I think almost 100 percent of them are very skeptical about their own minds—even though they probably were hallucinations or probably related to what they ate that day. Who knows the reasons? But almost everyone has had some experience. And almost every one of my students has had some experience. It's interesting—and I've done this on many different occasions—when I ask big groups of students, "Who in the room believes in ghosts," you get very few hands going up. Or "Who has had experiences with an otherworldly being. That's pretty high. But again, that's anonymous—if you ask them to raise their hands, they rarely do.

Why is that? Do you think it relates to a cultural stigma?
Exactly. They want to be seen as perfectly rational. And I think that's particular, especially when students are thinking about their careers. When you're old like me, you worry less and less about that.

Follow Michael Cuby on Twitter.

High Wire: Why Is it Still Illegal to Visit the US if You Admit to Using Drugs?

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Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Shaun Shelly was looking forward to speaking at the annual International Drug Policy Reform Conference in Washington, DC, this month. The 48-year-old is the founder of South Africa's first harm-reduction program aimed at fighting HIV in injection drug users, and he was glad to have been invited to discuss the deleterious global influence of America's harsh drug policies at a major international meeting. (Full disclosure: I am also an invited panelist).

Unfortunately, those same US policies mean that Shelly is physically barred from coming to this country to speak out against them. That's because rather than hiding his past methamphetamine problem, Shelly made the mistake of telling the truth during his visa application interview. Immediately, he was told that his drug use meant that he was ineligible for entry. "I was absolutely shocked," he tells VICE.

America's last three presidents have all explicitly or essentially admitted to marijuana use. President Barack Obama even copped to trying cocaine, and there has long been speculation that George W. Bush did the same. The psychedelic use of tech giants like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates is well known, and addiction is so common among celebrities that there was even a (awful) reality rehab show about them. In fact, more than half of adult Americans under 65 report having tried an illegal drug at least once—and this rate ranges from 23 percent to about 40 percent in most countries that send tourists and business travelers here.

Nonetheless, every foreign visitor is asked "Are you a drug abuser or addict?" before being allowed to enter, whether applying for a visa or filling out an online "waiver" form that reduces red tape for citizens of friendly regions like Europe. And a yes answer means automatic rejection, an archaic and absurd legacy of the war on drugs that encourages deceit and breeds cynicism on the world stage.

In practice, then, the people who primarily get rejected over drug use are those who are honest...

It doesn't help that the question doesn't bother to specify what is meant by "drug abuser," or what types of drugs count. Nor does it clearly distinguish between those who experimented, those who are currently addicted, and people who have recovered. "I find this absolutely ridiculous and archaic," Shelly says. "I know people who have gotten into the US who have written books about their addiction."

What's more, there is no reliable way for customs officers to check whether applicants are being honest. Many countries don't allow American border control officials instant access to their law enforcement databases; many criminal records (particularly old ones) aren't even in searchable databases. National and local laws about drug possession vary, and most drug use doesn't result in arrest, let alone conviction, anyway.

So a healthy chunk of the 74.8 million annual foreign visitors to the US are almost certainly being admitted illegally. According to information sent to VICE by the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) division, on a typical day in the most recent year available, the agency "processed 992,243 passengers and pedestrians to the United States, refused 366 inadmissible persons and arrested 22 wanted criminals at our ports of entry."

In practice, then, the people who primarily get rejected over drug use are those who are honest—and it doesn't matter whether it happened yesterday or 50 years ago, whether it was a few joints or 1,000 heroin injections, or even whether it resulted in arrest and conviction.

More rarely, a few folks are unlucky enough to get googled by a customs official who discovers an online "confession."

That's what happened to Andrew Feldmar, a 75-year-old Canadian researcher and psychotherapist who has two adult children living in the US. In 2007, he drove to the border to visit a friend in Seattle, after years of uneventful crossings. But this time, he was randomly selected for additional screening. Using Google, a border guard discovered an article he'd written for a journal that described two psychedelic experiences, which he'd had three decades earlier. After being held for several hours, he says, Feldmar was told that he was inadmissible because of his "narcotics" use and sent back to Canada.

The therapist is still incredulous about the experience, which has made it difficult and expensive for him to see his kids and speak at American conferences ever since. His article did not tout irresponsible drug use, and in fact, he's long been involved in helping addicted people recover.

That didn't matter. Although there are processes by which border rejections can be appealed, the easiest one leads to a visa that must be renewed annually. Getting the paperwork completed often takes six months or more; even Customs concedes the process that the process is "lengthy and there is a cost per application regardless of the decision on the application." Those costs come to $200–$300 each time, according to Feldmar.

And the unusual nature of his travel documents means that every border crossing comes with extra scrutiny. "Even with the visa, at every point I'm being detained and treated very slowly," Feldmar says. "I never know if I can make my connection. And it's continual harassment along the way."

Feldmar could apply for a permanent waiver of this special visa requirement, which would end the annual fees and routine. But that would entail an even more expensive legal proceeding, which could take several thousand dollars in lawyers' and application fees, regardless of whether it's successful. And it would also require him to get a letter from an addiction expert stating that he has been "rehabilitated."

"I find it extremely insulting," Feldman says. "Rehabilitated from what? Since 1968, I have been working with people, helping them to get rid of addictions. I never had any addiction. To ask my colleagues for this... It's deeply insulting."

Ironically, Feldmar often visits the US to speak at conferences about the use of psychedelic drugs in therapy, including the treatment of addiction and alcoholism, where they have shown promise. He's about to publish a study in which he gave MDMA—a.k.a. ecstasy or molly—or placebo to patients in therapy who were suffering from intractable PTSD.

The Canadian government trusts Feldmar enough to have given him its first license to legally distribute MDMA for therapeutic use. But the United States still insists that the septuagenarian shrink is a danger to the citizenry because he might not have "recovered" from his acid trips 40 years ago.

VICE asked the Office of National Drug Control Policy (better known as the drug czar's office) for comment on Shelly's case and the law in this area. Drug Czar Michael Botticelli is a recovering alcoholic: His admission to occasional marijuana and cocaine use as well would mean that he himself would not be allowed entry into the country because of his past—were he not already an American citizen.

Since he has spoken widely about fighting the stigma associated with addiction and because he advocates reducing barriers to rehabilitation, I was curious about Botticelli's views on this practice, which seems to punish both honesty and recovery. But his office declined to comment.

Which leaves me to wonder: What is the purpose of such laws, given that they can only be enforced arbitrarily and do not even distinguish between "youthful experimentation," hardcore addiction and recovery? With states and countries increasingly moving towards marijuana legalization, will changes be made, at least for that one drug?

There's no reason to believe America is safer when we exclude or harass foreigners who are honest about drug use—and that's the only thing this policy achieves. Foreign visitors spend some $221 billion annually visiting our country: Would we really want to cut that amount massively if we actually could find a way to successfully exclude anyone who ever smoked a joint?

This is one more ludicrous legacy of America's lingering drug war insanity. We should reward recovery and honesty—and stop lying to ourselves that it is possible or even desirable to get rid of drugs and the people who use them.

Follow Maia Szalavitz on Twitter.


Infographic: California Hasn't Been This Dry in a Decade

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California, our most populous and agriculturally productive state, has long struggled to keep water flowing to its residents and farms, and lately it's had a harder time than ever. Last year was its hottest and third-driest on record, and the recent drought is pushing residents to use more groundwater, which in turn is causing the San Joaquin Valley to sink (up to two inches a month in some areas). The drought is also fanning literal and figurative flames, as wildfires find more to consume and local groups fight over water rights.

For more on this, check out the rest of the November Issue of VICE and our story about how the drought has led to conflict between Native Americans and weed growers.

Cops Are Incredibly Bad at Making Jokes on Twitter

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Just a copper, having a bloody laugh. Photo via Flickr user Lee Haywood

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

On Sunday afternoon, Everton's football team scored lots of goals against Sunderland's football team. Six of them; six goals. Generally speaking: a lot of goals. How best to celebrate that? Whip your half-and-half scarf above your head while shouting "AROUNA KONE?" Full Roberto Martinez back tattoo?

You would think so. But no. Instead, a local man—returning from the game with a heart full of song—tweeted Mersey police to, lol, say he'd witnessed a rape. The response he received was one of a knowing wink because, apparently, the literal police force think that sexual assault is banter.

By 6 PM, the inevitable public outcry had led to a full statement, the launch of an investigation and the presumed dismissal of whoever was responsible. Police doing banter on social media has ended in tears. I put it to every single one of you that this is the most 2015 thing that could ever have happened.

The Kanye West Glastonbury petition was pretty 2015, and the major papers not really reporting on the Prime Minister of the UK allegedly putting his penis inside a pig was also very 2015. But as 2015 goes, the police having their we're-just-like-you-honest schtick blow up in their faces—along with giving us a stark reminder of why only 15 percent of sexual assault survivors even bother going to them—is peak 2015.

The ensuing shit-storm—on the scale, comfortably, of a bad madras sprayed up the wall of a Megabus toilet—will guarantee that we'll be spared this sort of thing in 2016. But the inevitability of this actually happening is something to be pointed and yelled at for at least the rest of the week.

So to recap: The police, the same organization that were once duty-bound to give up their hats to any pregnant women who needed the toilet, made an active decision to basically become LadBible's military wing and didn't think there would be a problem with that. You cannot borrow a pencil without having to send seven emails in a public sector job, so let's just take a moment to relive some of the social media output that will have been green-lit by actual human adults:

LEICESTER POLICE FREE IPAD BURGLAR BANTER #LADS

Leicestershire Police has nearly 1,500 employees and receives around £169 million a year in funding, yet somehow has a worse grasp of hashtags than a primary school teacher's part-time Etsy account.

SOLIHULL POLICE HUGE AMOUNT OF CANNABIS COME-AND-COLLECT IT #LADS

Twenty thousand RTs for Solihull Police here, and about twice as many replies that just say "hahaha brilliant!!!" Somewhere, in a tiny back room, a few burly policemen are standing around a computer that's still probably running Windows fucking Vista, guffawing, slapping each other on the back, and shouting, "Good one, Keith!"

NORTHUMBRIA#LAD POLICE

Notorious Killer Luka Magnotta Describes Sports, Suntanning, and Great Food in Prison

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Photo via lukamagnotta.com

Anyone hoping notorious killer Luka Magnotta is rotting in a jail cell would be sorely disappointed to read his letters to friends, which describe prison as a "university setting" complete with gourmet food, sunbathing, and sports.

Magnotta, 33, is serving a life sentence for dismembering Lin Jun, 33, in Montreal in 2012. He made a snuff film about the crime and mailed Jun's body parts around the country, including one package addressed to then-prime minister Stephen Harper.

Until recently, Magnotta was stationed at Quebec's Archambault Institution, though he reportedly recently moved to a maximum security prison. One his friends recently shared Magnotta's letters with Postmedia, in which he talks about the rehabilitation process at Archambault in fairly upbeat terms.

"The food here is really, really good and they serve a lot. The Italian is the best. I also love the ice cream," he wrote, noting he sometimes attends pizza parties. With doors at the maximum-security prison "open 90% of the time" he compared the atmosphere to school.

Magnotta says he works in the kitchen every day and chills to Celine Dion, whose tunes he listens to a portable stereo when he tans outdoors. He also claims he spends two hours a day playing sports like hockey and tennis and an hour working out in the gym. The one hardship appears to be the poor chocolate selection.

"These fucking assholes said they would add Ferrero Rocher and they didn't. They just want all their choices on the canteen. Some people are so fucking selfish it piss's me off," he writes.

"He's really putting a very nice spin on all of this," said Catherine Latimer, executive director of the John Howard Society of Canada, a charity that supports rehabilitation of offenders, when VICE asked her about the feasibility of Magnotta's descriptions.

Latimer said on the whole, prison conditions in Canada are pretty bad.

"The maximum security prisons that I know have pretty significant lockdowns. Guys are in their cells for 22 hours a day."

She said there are canteens, where you could get chocolate, but in general the food situation is "grim."

In BC, where meals are all cooked in one place and shipped out, "their food is green, it's rotten and cold," Latimer told VICE. "The inmates that I've talked to would not have seen ice cream for a very long time."

Latimer says most prisons have a gym, but in general sports programming has been cutback, something she describes as unfortunate. The same is true for academic programming, she says. (Magnotta told his friends he's learning French and was pondering what post-secondary courses to pursue.)

"I've heard a lot of complaints about the extent to which access to academic courses, particularly university level courses are available," said Latimer.

"There's really been a clampdown on that."

Considering Magnotta spent years trying to drum up attention for himself online with fake profiles, it's not unlikely he's largely full of shit. Maximum security prison is still as terrible as it sounds.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: The Guy Who Lost His Six-Figure Job Over a 'FHRITP' Incident Has Been Rehired

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Simoes, on right. Screenshot via YouTube

The Toronto man who was fired over a sexual slur directed at a TV reporter in May has been reinstated at his job at Hydro One.

Shawn Simoes went on TV to defend a man yelling "Fuck her right in the pussy" at CityNews reporter Shauna Hunt, who was reporting live from a TFC soccer game outside BMO field.

When confronted by Hunt, Simoes described the remark as "fucking hilarious." He then went on to say "You're lucky there's not a fucking vibrator near here, because in England, it happened all the time, it's fucking amazing and I respect it all the time."

The scene prompted prompted public outrage and Simoes, an engineer with a six-figure salary at Hydro One, was fired. He later apologized to Hunt and she accepted.

According to Global News, Simoes was given back his job following an arbitration process.

"We will not comment any further," said Hydro One spokesman Daffyd Roderick.

Hunt tweeted Monday that Hydro One told her Simoes had been rehired.

At the time of Simoes' dismissal, Roderick told the Toronto Star the crown corporation has "zero tolerance" for discrimination or harassment.

As far as we know, Simoes is still banned from attending Maple Leafs Sports and Entertainment events. But stranger things have happened, like him getting his job back.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

A Student Film About Small People with Hats Is the Best Animated Short of 2015

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Small People with Hats asks us to imagine a society of two groups of people: bare-headed giants, and smaller hat-wearing folks who are abused by their larger cousins. Welcome to the world of animator Sarina Nihei.

Nihei's seven-minute film is filled with such mystery and intrigue that I'm loath to try to describe it, lest I explain it all away. The short manages to be nearly unclassifiable while simultaneously extremely topical. Whether it's class, corporal punishment, or our own culture's numbness to violence, Nihei examines it with an incredibly left-of-center sensibility that awes and fascinates you.

The film is one of the most delightfully absurd animations of the year, right up there with Don Hertzfeldt's modern masterpiece World of Tomorrow. Even though it is hand-drawn in ink and painted in acrylics, Nihei employs many of the surreal, satiric, and sound-effect qualities found in legendary Czech filmmaker Jan Švankmajer's work. Like Švankmajer, Nihei crafts her distinctive style through sound, repetition, and visual non sequiturs to briskly move through story and situations. It's a technique where style enhances substance since what you're seeing feels so alien and strangely exciting.

Along with her absolutely lovely, unsmiling characters, sound is a star of the short. Using a mix of classical instruments, drones, and an array of hand-recorded effects, the film is transformed into something original and elusive. Nihei's inventive sound work was enough to catch the ears of the jury at the prestigious Ottawa International Animation Festival (OIAF), where the film won the award for best sound and, most impressively, the grand prize for best independent short animation. It marks the first time in the fest's 39-year history that the prize was awarded to a student film.

Check out the some small, androgynous people wearing hats below, and catch the interview I did with director Sarina Nihei beneath them.

VICE: I have so many questions. So, so, so many questions. I'll start with the most obvious. Why do the small people wear hats?
Sarina Nihei: Because they love hats. You can't judge people's personalities by their hats.

Too true. Now, the short is rife with metaphors, commenting on everything from marginalized people to the out-of-touch ruling class. Was there anything specific you were trying to say?
Yes and no—you can feel whatever you like. The story is based on ideas of despair and absurdity in a society. People are killed for irrational reasons, which always makes me feel despair. But when it comes to filmmaking, I make much of it entertaining and don't want to make it too serious. That's how the story ended up.

What do the numbers mean?
They are their code.

On VICE: 'LARPing Saved My Life':

There are many mysteries hidden within your film. Is it possible to unpack everything by re-watching, or did you intend to keep some things ambiguous or unsolvable?
It's OK for me if there are people hate my film or love my film. So I won't give you the answer.

OK, that's fair. So how did you develop this story?
This is a long story. I tried to make it funny and entertaining, but the story is based on absurdity and the despair of society, so I developed the story by those principles.

Your first-year film Trifling Habits seems to take place in the same world, at least aesthetically, as Small People With Hats. What does this world mean to you? Is it a place you'll revisit in future films?
I always enjoy drawing rather than sitting in front of the computer all day. And the texture of acrylic color can never be imitated by a digital technique. So I'll keep on doing my hand-drawn style. In terms of the character design, I try not to make them look happy. I just don't like happy-looking characters for some reason.

On Munchies: In Jiufen, You Can Eat Your Way Through a Miyazaki Film

How long did it take you to create this animation? Did you draw and paint it all by hand? How many drawings is the film in total?
Actual production was about eight months including animating, painting, editing, and sound. I didn't count the frames I drew, but I left them in a friend's house because I couldn't get them back to Japan because they were too heavy.

What are you working on next?
I've just started making the next film now. Looking for a producer.

Check out more of Sarina's work at her website.

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as the senior curator for Vimeo's On Demand platform. He has also programmed at Tribeca Film Festival, Rooftop Films, and the Hamptons International Film Festival. Follow him on Twitter.

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