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Porn Star Summer Brielle Shares Your Pervy Instagram DMs with the World

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This story appears in the December issue of VICE magazine.


ANAL PROVOCATEUR
Dir.: Jules Jordan
Rating: 10

For years my friends in the porn industry have told me of the twisted things some of their Cro-Magnon "fans" write them. Threats of rape and violence are more common than one would think. Many fans attempt to erase the line between a fantasy and a sexual occupation, causing me, on many occasions, to fear for my friends' lives, begging them to tell me they're just exaggerating the stories. I have a difficult time understanding why more girls don't tell these people to simply fuck off or at least block or, in the worst cases, report them to the authorities. I thought perhaps it might have something to do with our society's dismissive handling of sexual abuse victims that makes the girls gun-shy on exposing social media sexual terrorism, but I was rather surprised to hear one porn star tell me that "reporting them is bad for business. They're harmless fans, and fans spend money." To which I said to her, "Well, there's nowhere to spend that money when you're lying in a shallow grave."

After getting clean and sober, I realized I was in need of a new addiction, and I found it in the form of laughter. I make it a point to wake up each morning and mainline some dark comedy, and for the past six months since discovering Summer Brielle, the buxom blond Amazon bombshell in the French-maid outfit on the cover, she has been my daily supplier of hearty laughs and comedic entertainment. Unlike my other porn friends—who would reply with a thumbs-up emoji to a DM message like, "I wanna rape u in the bathroom so you can't scape. After i fucked u under shower im gonna slap u to cry then I will kiss u. and then I will FUCK U until my life comes to its end"—Brielle instead seizes power, screenshotting the message, reposting it with some witty retort, and shaming the fan's intellect while correcting typos and grammar and mocking his penis size for all 544,000 Instagram followers to see. When one creep demands her to "cum suck my dick, bitch," she responds with, "Tempting if I were a bitch, took orders, or abhorred my own mouth enough to besmirch it with your laughably inconsequential, cute, little peepee." And when another tells her, "I want u to suck that cock like u suck popsicles rawrr," she writes back, "I bite popsicles in half and deposit them into food processors before force feeding the resulting slushy to other popsicles."

Despite her daily receipt of tragically dim DMs such as, "I want to eat your farts" and "Don't be so selfish. Your going to have your body your whole life. I just want it for 1 night," she is still able to laugh at herself. When one follower told her she was made by the gods, she answered back, "Yes, the gods made this thing called peroxide. They also made my hairdresser, Botox, and whoever the hell invented MAC. Praise to the gods." Brielle has an absurd level of engagement with much of her fan base, which more than likely gets off on the abuse. For Instagram, she took a screenshot of one of her tweets, which reads, "If I ever start feeling too optimistic about the inherent goodness of humanity all I have to do is open my Instagram DMs."

READ: How to Tell Your Parents You're a Porn Star

I urge you to start following this woman immediately. Aside from the obvious perk of seeing a beautiful lady in constant states of undress, you'll get daily joy from her fielding of backhanded compliments such as, "I don't watch videos anymore because it morally makes me feel queasy but I often find myself checking your page because you're incredibly beautiful and funny," with no-bullshit comebacks like, "There's nothing morally queasy about sex, one of the most natural basic and pleasurable things in the world. Or about me choosing exactly what I do and when. You sound like you have a Madonna/Whore complex; hope you get some professional help."

I could go on quoting her for days—she's like my nude Jerrod Carmichael; I have all of her material memorized. If you aren't already sold, then allow me to present one final piece of evidence: When the mood suits her, she does some detective work, finding and tagging the messenger's girlfriend, wife, or even parent in her reposting of his DM. My hands-down personal favorite post she's ever made, the one I always use in my sales pitch to get my friends to follow her, is the time when a scruffy and stoned-looking kid named Cesar sent her a selfie with a pink arrow pointing to his mom, passed out on the couch in the background. His message read: "I'm 25 and I live at home with my parents. Can we screw. They are out of town this weekend. That's my mom on the couch." Brielle then reposted his photo, tagging his mom with the comment, "I asked your mom for permission. Lydia? What do you think?" Months later my heart still sings at the thought of how that played out for ol' Cesar...


This Is What It Looks Like When Notorious Toronto Rooftop Instagrammer Jayscale Discovers Film

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Jayscale made his name on Instagram, but now he's challenging himself to shoot on film.

The Year In Drugs or How Shatter, Fentanyl, and the Promise of Legal Weed Dominated Canada

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All the drugs. Photo via Flickr user neur0nz.

Ahh, the end of the year: a time to reflect on the progress you've made in your career, think about the parts of yourself you'd like to improve on, and, if you're like some of us, consider the amount of substances you've consumed over the past 12 months (and possibly the amount of money spent on said substances—or, maybe not). Don't worry, you still have time to make it part of your New Year's resolution to cut back. In preparation for 2k16, ready your straws and join us as we go on one last bender to present you all the ways we got fucked up over the last year. What a deranged, lovely, and sometimes outright awful 365 days it's been.

MDMA (or Whatever the Fuck Research Chemical You've Been Accidentally Doing)

2015 was the year that many, like myself, became blatantly aware that what they'd been popping to roll their faces off at festivals was not MDMA at all. Maybe it was mephedrone, maybe PMA, or, most generally, some fucked-up concoction of white crystalline powder shipped from a research chemical facility in China. Sorry to break it to you, but odds are that it was unlikely pure MDMA. If you haven't purchased a testing kit to confirm the M you've been buying is actually M by the end of 2015, then you are a certain dumbass. No one can help you.

Mmm, shatter. Photo via Flickr user SaraSmo.

Shatter

This year, we watched in horror as people freaked the fuck out over and over about a super-concentrated form of THC extract. Foregoing the fact that shatter is simply derived from weed, mainstream media and police were convincing parents everywhere that a meth-like substance had suddenly come to wreak havoc on their communities. " say it's not as addictive as methamphetamine, but still poses a high risk for overdose," an article published on CTV claimed in March when reporting on a drug bust in Stratford, Ontario. "According to police, shatter is a toxic and highly addictive drug that's 10 times more potent than a marijuana cigarette."

By November, cops in Canada still hadn't learned. "Parents!!!! Please educate your children on the dangers of 'Shatter'. We cannot lose any more young people to senseless overdoses" read a tweet from the Vancouver police force's gang unit, referring to an absolutely bogus scenario that has never happened. Vancouver police later had to apologize for the fear mongering.

Though taking a dab can really, really fuck you up to the point of spontaneously ghosting on your entire group of friends at a vapour lounge to go take a green nap, THC is still not comparable to Class A drugs.

Marijuana Legazliation

And somehow, in the same country that's going completely ape-shit about shatter, full-on cannabis legalization is looming. In October, Justin Trudeau was elected as Canada's new prime minister, and with him came a promise to start the process of legalization. Following Trudeau's win, we watched in amazement as marijuana dispensaries started multiplying like rabbits in Toronto. And in November, it became officially legal to smoke medical marijuana in public in Ontario.

However, some Canadian cops still have different ideas pending full legalization—"We will charge on a leftover roach if we can," one working in Saskatoon told VICE in October. "It's how we feel about the use of illicit drugs in this area."

Looking to next year, our latest anxiety about the soon-to-be legalized marijuana industry, in Ontario at least, is that you'll be buying your kush alongside booze in provincially run liquor stores. Please, please, please no.

Fentanyl

Never mind cops' and media's unwarranted overreaction to shatter; if there was something to be a bit freaked out about this year, it's how fentanyl has impacted the country. 2015 marked the year that more Canadians died than ever before due to the opiate.

On average, fentanyl is purportedly 50 times more potent than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine. You can imagine why, at that strength, it could be dangerous to opiate users in general—after all, it's become an issue among users that heroin can easily be tainted with fentanyl, increasing the likelihood of overdose. In November, police in Calgary declared a full-on public health crisis in response to the alarming number of fentanyl-related deaths the city, and province in general, had been experiencing. From a month's span between October and November in Calgary, police had responded to 26 fentanyl-related overdoses. And in just the first half of 2015, 145 Albertans died due to the drug.

Alberta is far from the only province experiencing a fentanyl problem. Amidst concerns over the summer that BC's fentanyl death toll was rising, cops released a video in September that showed how a machine found in a residential home in the province was able to churn out 18,000 fentanyl-laced pills in an hour. Wow, that's comforting...

Ayahuasca

It was the year your friend from art school left the city to go live in the Peruvian jungle, trip balls, and try to become a shaman. Yeahhhh, he's never going to be the same, but at least he's enlightened! As the year comes to a close, America is getting its first legal ayahuasca church—located in Elbe, Washington—where people can down the DMT-laced, sacred brew in spiritual ceremonies.

But, hey, it's not peace and love all the time at ayahuasca ceremonies, apparently. Let's not forget that time earlier this year a guy from Winnipeg fatally stabbed a British man (who was his friend, by the way) during an ayahuasca ceremony in Peru. I guess not all encounters with the spiritual world in the jungle end in a new appreciation for and connection with your fellow humans.

Psilocybin cubenis, AKA, mushrooms that make you trip balls, and apparently in some cases, treat your depression. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Microdosing and Other Health Treatments With Illicit Drugs

This year, we found out that a lot of the substances we use to get off our faces partying on the weekends could actually help with real-life health issues. Forget medical marijuana—that's pretty much a given. Psilocybin, the chemical in psychedelic mushrooms, could be used to treat depression. While we're on the subject of perpetual sadness, that weird, white powder classically used both as an animal tranquilizer and to put you in a k-hole so deep you think you are made up of polygons, ketamine could also help some people with depression.

Leaving no baggie unturned, we also found in 2015 that cocaine could temporarily help one cope with grief. In California, researchers continued to explore the possibility of MDMA as a treatment that "could alleviate social anxiety and trauma in autistic adults." And then there was this dude who's been taking nine grams of GHB, a date-rape and regular fuck-me-up-really-hard drug also known as liquid ecstasy, every night to treat his narcolepsy.

Sure makes the War on Drugs seem a little shortsighted.

Ahh, Hollywood lines. Photo via Flickr user Imagens Evangélicas.

Cocaine

2015 was the year Narcos was released on Netflix, which underlined the historical downsides to the new-aged cocaine renaissance we currently seem to be experiencing (see: the fact that we learned cocaine bars are a thing that exists in Bolivia and that there are motherfucking cocaine-making classes in Colombia).

But it's not all bumps and lines, for this year was also the one that confirmed to some that there may be very, very little cocaine in those bags they've been grabbing before heading out to the club on the weekends.

Lawrence Gibbons, Senior Operations Manager for Drugs at the National Crime Agency (NCA), told VICE UK in March: "We are regularly seizing huge quantities of substances which have zero traces of cocaine. An ounce at the moment is never more than 22 to 25 percent purity, and after that it is cut again before it hits the street."

Oh, and then the National Crime Agency tried to get young people to develop a conscience and stop blowing coke using this video:

VICE asked a few 20- and 30-somethings their thoughts on cocaine usage following the film:

VICE: Do you think you'll think twice about ordering another gram now?
Tracey, 21, Student: Realistically, I know I won't stop taking it just because I know these things a bit better now.

Apparently the NCA didn't get that doing coke can really fuck with your empathy.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Follow Allison Elkin on Twitter

Kurt Russell on ‘The Hateful Eight’ and Skateboarding with Charles Bronson

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Illustration by Elizabeth Renstrom

Let's get the disclaimer out of the way. I am not impartial on the subject of Kurt Russell. I grew up with his Disney comedies, fixated on his 1980s John Carpenter flicks, and avidly followed his career throughout adulthood. For the last 30 years, his scruffy, sweat-beaded mug has watched over me from a dozen different bedroom walls (first on the German poster for 1981's Escape from New YorkDie Klapper-Schlange —then on the slightly more fanciful Italian art for 1997: Fuga da New York). It's a one-set-of-footprints-in-the sand scenario. Kurt's always been there for me.

So I accepted my assignment on Kurt's latest press junket, to support his role in Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight, as an existential conundrum. I would get 15 minutes in a swanky hotel room with my idol. Even with self-imposed restrictions (no politics, no family matters), that still left me with a six-decade career to work with. What could I possibly ask the man in a mere 15 minutes? Friends plied me with advice.

"Make him super uncomfortable."

"Call him Kirk."

"Ask to sit on his lap."

From a lifetime of watching Russell interviews, I knew he had the ability to shift his public charm into overdrive. I hadn't, however, counted on just how much Kurt Russell enjoys discussing his career. When I introduced myself and took a seat, he was already off and running, as if we'd just returned from a commercial break.

"You gotta understand, you make movies for as long as I have, you do as many movies as I have, you work with as many people as I have, you really find yourself feeling fortunate for all of it. I mean, the life I have... just knock on wood." He knuckle-rapped the coffee table with a studied, movie-star grace. In film, there have been three Kurts: Action, Comedy, and Drama. This was a fourth Kurt, the polished, veteran interviewee. I could feel the riptide of that charm sucking me down, even as I watched precious seconds whiz by on my recorder.

"Aside from that, you have your favorites," he continued. "And right up there with anything ever, for me, is this experience of Hateful Eight, creating a character that I wanted to try to be memorable with. Getting to do that with Quentin? Yeah. But how about getting to do that with Quentin in his prime? I'll take that. How about getting to work with the other actors, and they're all in their prime? Yeah, I'll take that. I mean, I love working with any of them, but all of them at the same time? All of them in their prime? Oh, oh, I'd love to do that! 'How'd you like to do that when you feel you're in your prime?' Well, that might be a surprise, but yeah, I'd like to do that. Now it's time to just let it rip, have the most possible fun..."

"But you've been letting it rip for 50 years."

"Oh, no, you'd be surprised," he said. "You'd be really surprised. I did Bone Tomahawk before this. Loved doing it. Wasn't allowed to let it rip. That's not the way the director saw it."

"I just watched Bone Tomahawk last night," I said.

"I like Bone Tomahawk. It's just..."

"It's a hell of a movie," I blurted out, truthfully. Bone Tomahawk makes an interesting, slower companion to The Hateful Eight (and can rival any Tarantino film in brutality). In the film, Russell's cannibal-hunting sheriff sports a scruffy silver beard, looking more like Santa than ever. I flashed back to the lap question.

"Me too. And I'll take a lot of responsibility for it. But if you want to talk... 'Were you allowed to rip?' No."

"It's a quieter form of ripping," I offered.

"That's exactly right. By ripping, I don't mean bombastic. I mean the whole movie being done in a certain way, with a certain atmosphere. There are many, many things about that to really enjoy. And I loved the outcome of it. Could it have been a lot better? In my estimation, absolutely. As it was, I'll take it. Because movies like that just don't get made."

As we spoke, the clean-shaven Russell absently stroked the slackness of his neck, much the same way some men stroke their beards. At 64, he no longer resembles the firm, sweaty heroes of his youth. And yet, he seems entirely comfortable with playing (and being) his age, a contentment consistent with his whole career. There was a point, in the mid-1990s, when Russell stood poised to become an A-list action-film hero. But after the commercial failures of Escape from LA and Soldier, he veered back towards more eclectic roles. In 2015, Rocky and Han Solo (a role Kurt auditioned for) still totter along; the former Snake Plissken seems entirely at ease with the saggy dignity of older men. We had just a few minutes left. I felt I should acknowledge his status as the world's most durable child star since Mickey Rooney, a child stardom first sprung from a lost world of television westerns.

"You've done two of the four westerns that came out in 2015. Which is probably a record."

"Yeah! Right!" He cackled. "To do 50 percent of all of a genre in one year, you're right! It's like, 'Hey dude, lemme see that on your resume, Jack!'"

"As a kid, I used to hear about The Travels of Jamie McPheeters,"—Kurt's breakthrough 1961 TV show, the titular character of which I share a last name with—"but it's been years and years since I've noticed anyone mentioning it. Although there's a Sugarfoot joke in Arrested Development..."

"I didn't do Sugarfoot."

"I thought you were on Sugarfoot for an episode."

"That's just one of those internet things. My dad did. I didn't."

"So do you ever hear about Jamie McPheeters, ever, from anyone?"

"Ah, you know. Once in a while. Very rarely. I like it, because I like Dan O'Herlihy..."

"Yeah, you can't find it anywhere. So I never actually saw an episode."

"Oh, it's a cool idea. It's a 12-year old kid, his father going west from Kentucky, and the father is a drunk—he's a doctor, but he's a really bad drunk—he's a great guy, and in fact, the son is more the father to the father than the father is to the son. Very loving relationship. Great book! And the television show kind of held fast to it."

"It was one season, but it was a long season, right?" I asked.

"Yes, it was. Twenty-six ."

"And half those were with Charles Bronson."

"Thirteen of them were with Charlie," he confirmed.

"He was a scary-looking guy!" I replied. "In House of Wax, he's terrifying. And you were, what, ten?"

"I was 11 and 12. I really liked Charlie. Charlie Bronson was... he was a very disliked man in many corners. He was a guy that did mean things. But I liked Charlie. I got him a present one time. Which he received, and went straight to his trailer, and the whole crew was like, 'Aw, Kurt. He's just an unhappy guy.' And I was like, 'It's OK.' And then about a half hour later, 'Kurt, Charlie wants to see you.' Went over to Charlie's trailer, knocked on the door, I'm thinking, What the fuck did I do wrong? He opens the door, he looks at me, and he goes, 'Um, nobody's ever given me a present before, so thanks.' And he shuts the door.

"My birthday comes up about two months later. He found out, I don't know how, and bought me an awesome Makaha skateboard. He got himself one, and we used to skateboard together on the MGM lot. One day the first assistant comes to me and, he says, 'Kurt, you can't skate around here. Insurance. They don't want you to do it.' I said, 'Oh, OK, sorry.' So then Charlie says to me a couple days later, 'Where's your skateboard?' I said, 'Well, they told me I couldn't skate.' He said, 'Hey Kurt, grab your skateboard.' And we go up to the president of MGM. He walks right by the secretary, opens the door, and says, 'This is Kurt, I got him a skateboard for his birthday. We're gonna be riding them all over the lot. Just want to let you know.' Turns around, walks out. That was that."

VICE Talks Film: Sitting Down with the Director of 'Mad Max: Fury Road':

We both chuckled. I eyed my notes with futility. There were so many questions I'd never get to ask the man. Did he shock more Disney fans as Plissken, or with his soulless portrayal, six years earlier, of sniper Charles Whitman? How did he learn of Walt Disney's last written words? Has he ever met Bill Cosby? Will the Fed finally raise interest rates? Does he like the Cro-Mags? Could I, in fact, sit on his lap? The publicist stepped in and tapped her wrist. I bargained for one final question about Snake Plissken.

"There are rumors that when you were on set, at night, in East St. Louis, that you came around a corner in full costume, and—I've heard very different versions of this—that you ran into a full-on 'street gang'..."

"Four badass black guys. They weren't locals. I don't know what they were. First of all, East St. Louis, at that time of night... it was like a bombed-out area. Nobody. Zero. Empty. But I was in that gear. I had a machine gun, eyepatch, long hair—this was 1980, and long hair was very much going away then. And that gun had a laser top on it, nobody had that. And I went way down, turned to the right, I had the walkie-talkie in my hand, the rifle in my hand, wearing the gun, and I had my eyepatch on and I'm getting ready to go, getting ready to be Snake. I come around the corner, and there's four black guys. Just walking this way towards me. They can see light coming from somewhere, and they're probably curious as to what it was. I came around the corner and I just stood there and looked at them. And it was a quarter second later they looked at me and went, 'Whoa whoa, whoa. Easy, man. Easy. We're walkin', we're walkin.' And I remember thinking, This guy works."

My time was up. I eyed that inviting lap of his one last time. I'd never get another chance to whisper all my hopes and dreams into his ear like Santa. There was nothing to stop me.

But then Kurt stood to shake my hand farewell, and the moment was gone.

The Hateful Eight opens on Christmas Day in theaters nationwide.

Remembering 'Merry Motherfuckin’ Christmas,' Eazy-E’s Insane Christmas Song That Gave will.i.am His Start

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The legendary gangster rapper Eazy-E was a visionary, and his Ruthless Records was one of the strangest rap labels ever. In the late 1980s, Ruthless maintained a small roster of artists, headlined by N.W.A., the D.O.C., and Above the Law. This all changed when a near-fatal car accident in 1989 crushed the D.O.C.'s larynx, derailing a promising career, and Ice Cube left N.W.A. the same year amidst accusations of financial improprieties. In 1991, Dr. Dre defected too, which dissolved N.W.A. and forced Eazy-E to fill a creative void. Eazy-E didn't respond to the loss of his label's talent by trying to sign the next N.W.A. Instead, he responded by signing the next everything.

He and his infamously duplicitous manager/Ruthless co-runner Jerry Heller's stable of artists was almost comically diverse. It included Chicano rappers Brownside (whose member Klever recently made headlines for brandishing a gun in the vague direction of a cop on Instagram) and Kid Frost. There were the DJ Quik associates Penthouse Players Clique, a ménage à trois of female rap groups (Hoes with Attitude A.K.A. H.W.A., Gangsta Bitch Mentality, and one literally called Menajahtwa), and, absurdly, a long-haired flautist named Jimmy Z (read more about his Ruthless adventures here). Eazy-E, impressed by an impromptu backstage performance, signed a group of fast-rapping Clevelanders then known as B.O.N.E. Enterprise, and then renamed them Bone Thugs-n-Harmony. Also under the Ruthless banner were Blood of Abraham, proud Jews who released "Niggaz and Jewz," featuring Eazy-E and will.i.am (then Will 1 X). Will.i.am, along with fellow future Black Eyed Pea apl.de.ap, made up part of Eazy's Native Tongues-esque signees, the Atban Klann.

Perhaps like no other Ruthless track, Eazy-E's "Merry Muthafuckin' X-Mas," released in 1992, epitomizes the island of misfit toys that was late-era Ruthless: Eazy, Buckwheat (of group the Wascals, who were signed to Delicious Vinyl), and debutants Menajahtwa and the Atban Klann trade lines over production by Danish immigrants Dr. Jam and a duo called Madness 4 Real. If that sounds incredibly bizarre, that's because it is.

"Merry Muthafuckin' X-Mas" begins with Rudy Ray Moore (of Dolemite fame) telling the story of a three-year-old Eazy-E drinking whiskey and gin, and doesn't get any less ridiculous over the next five-and-a-half minutes. Eazy-E interpolates "Jingle Bells," substituting a candy red '64 for a one-horse open sleigh, the source of his laughter not holiday gaiety, but a woman voraciously fellating him. Menajahtwa's sack of Noel-themed sexual puns would break the back of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (or "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindick," as they call him), and the Atban Klann's botanical Christmas list extends as far as "Indo, chronic, and some hash." Toss in some fart noises, sleigh bells, and a sense of sophomoric humor that's only endearing in middle-schoolers and Christmas songs by gangster rappers. Will.i.am, after all, was only 17 at the time.

According to Will himself, he was spotted by Jerry Heller's nephew, Terry, while freestyling at a series of rap battles hosted by David Faustino, star of Married with Children. "That was the summer of 1991," will.i.am told me over the phone. "In January of 1992, I signed to Ruthless, and the winter of 1992 is when 'Merry Muthafuckin' X-Mas' came out. At the time, Run-DMC were the only ones who had a Christmas joint, so it wasn't out of the ordinary. I went back to school after we recorded it. I just turned 17... I still lived in the projects, and I would ride the yellow bus and everyone was like, 'Oh shit, you recorded with Eazy-E!'"

Though Will's verse on "Merry Muthafuckin' X-Mas" was part of Eazy-E's 5150: Home 4 tha Sick, which was certified Gold, will.i.am's role at Ruthless remained largely behind the scenes. Thanks to his prodigious freestyling abilities, will.i.am was groomed by the label as a ghostwriter. "People were like, 'Ey, nigga, freestyle! Show these niggas what you got!'" he said. "So, I would go up there and freestyle, and they'd be like... 'Damn nigga! Hey, freestyle me a verse, nigga, that's gonna be my verse.' That's how it worked. I'd go in there and freestyle, and those freestyles would turn into verses."


The initial excitement of a burgeoning rap career slowly turned into frustration for will.i.am. The release of the Atban Klann's debut album, Grass Roots, was delayed multiple times. It would ultimately go unreleased, and it took Ruthless two years to issue the group's first single, "Puddles of H2O." "Puddles of H2O," like "Merry Muthafuckin' X-Mas," was produced by the aforementioned duo of Danes Madness 4 Real.

Though Ruthless' flautist Jimmy Z was outwardly the most unlikely member of the extended Ruthless family, he'd been gigging around Los Angeles for years and was a known quantity among the city's studio rats. It makes sense that this guy would, at some point, cross paths with Eazy E and Jerry Heller. Madness 4 Real, meanwhile, were straight outta Hillerød, a sleepy town about 20 miles north of Copenhagen, where their conception of gangsters was limited to leather-clad Hell's Angels. Nicholas "Nick Coldhands" Kvaran and Rasmus Berg's production for Lifers Group, comprised of Rahway State Penitentiary prisoners, caught the ear of Eazy-E. With a post-Dre Ruthless in dire need of producers, Eazy enlisted Coldhands and Berg. They arrived in Los Angeles a week after the 1992 Rodney King riots and were shocked when, instead of G-funk, they were asked to make a Christmas song.

"We thought, You must be fucking kidding," Coldhands told me as I interviewed them via Skype.

"Doing Christmas music is the most white thing you can do. It's like rock music. The arrangements in a rock piece are so white, but that's what made it work," added Berg.

"Going into it, we found out we had to do classical, baroque arrangements. We looked at each other like, 'This might be the weirdest thing we've ever done'... We were doing white music on top of white music for a rapper."

Madness 4 Real today. Courtesy of Madness 4 Real

Berg and Coldhands regularly finish each other's sentences, the result of a life-long friendship, and are exceedingly polite. Coldhands, the more talkative of the pair, speaks English like a rapper doing an impression of a Scandinavian, not the reverse. They're forthcoming interviewees, with Berg ad-libbing Coldhands's colorful answers.

"The studio in L.A. was full of gangster rappers, strapped and everything—," Berg said.

"—strapped! You can imagine the Twilight Zone we were in. They called us Den-Marks , which we didn't learn until later."

"Merry Muthafuckin' X-Mas" was the beginning of a creatively fruitful four years in Los Angeles for Madness 4 Real. They not only produced for Ruthless' chieftain and the aforementioned Atban Klann, but Rakim, MC Ren, Mack 10, B.G. Knocc Out & Dresta, and perhaps most notably, Ice Cube. Madness 4 Real were privileged to experience—and contribute to—gangster rap during some of its best years. Berg and Coldhands understandably speak about this period of their lives with a hint of nostalgia—they were rap fanatics from a small town in Denmark who got to spend their early 20s palling around with Eazy-E. The fortunes of Madness 4 Real contrast sharply with that of Menajahtwa, whose commercial failures remain opaque.

Ruthless had experienced success with female rappers. J. J. Fad's "Supersonic" went Gold, and the white rapper Tairrie B. had a couple tracks that charted on Billboard's Hot Rap Singles. Unlike the more pop-leaning J. J. Fad and Tairrie B., Menajahtwa made unapologetic G-funk.

Like their male peers, Royal T and Spice were foul-mouthed shit-talkers, whose attitudes toward cunnilingus were liberal and encouraging. Their roles as ingenues in "Merry Muthafuckin' X-Mas" would feel exploitative if the group's attitudes toward sex were merely passive—one listen to them and it's overwhelmingly clear that they were not. Their sole full-length release, Cha-Licious, spawned a single video, "La La La," in which the lithe Compton natives invert G-funk's rampant misogyny by judging men. Literally. A panel of women with scorecards judge musclebound men in spiked collars, some of whom are caged. Menajahtwa were ahead of their time—they were young, talented, and attractive, but their baggy attire seemed to subvert certain ideas about rap and masculinity that many of their spiritual successors don't service.

The contributors to "Merry Muthafuckin' X-Mas" share more than the song itself—those who spoke to me for this story claimed they were undercompensated. In spite of this, everyone I spoke to also had almost unwaveringly positive opinions of Eazy-E. Such was the force of Eazy-E's personality that his kindness, rather than the company's duplicitous dealings, is what interviewees dwell on.

Will.i.am fondly told me about Eazy-E's gentle teasing of his thrift store-bought clothes, as well as their yearly jaunts to celebrate his birthday. "From 1992 to 1995, every birthday Eazy and Jerry would take me, on March 15th, to Monty's to celebrate. Now, looking back, it's like 'Wow, he took time to go to my birthday.'" Less fondly, he remembers the $10,000 lump sum he received when he signed with Ruthless, and the subsequent $150 per week stipends. "Now that I look at it, it was a really shitty deal. We didn't know any better, we got taken advantage of."

Coldhands and Jerry Heller. Photo courtesy of Madness 4 Real

Nick Coldhands claims that after meetings with Jerry Heller, he'd feel physically sick, and describes Heller as "icky" and "not a likeable guy." When I asked if Madness 4 Real were compensated for their work, Coldhands laughed and replied "Hell no." The duo, who contributed to multiple albums that sold millions of copies, were forced to return to Denmark because they could no longer afford to stay in the United States. Their distaste for Ruthless appears confined to Heller and a thieving manager named Carsten Willer; Berg and Coldhands remember Eazy-E as a joker and an instinctive businessman, who took a chance on two unknown Danes.

The story of Ruthless Records essentially ends with Eazy-E succumbing to AIDS-related pneumonia on March 26, 1995. Tomica Wright, Eazy's widow, attempted to continue the label, but artists who could find new deals gradually departed. Menajahtwa briefly rebranded as Twa-Zay and released a dance-rap album, Who'Z Party, which spawned a single ("Freaky Deaky") and a placement on the soundtrack for the film Fakin' da Funk. Atban Klann's Ruthless debut Grass Roots never ended up seeing a release—by the time it leaked, will.i.am and apl.de.ap were bankable pop stars as members of the Black Eyed Peas. Upon returning to Denmark, Nick Coldhands and Rasmus Berg founded Den Gale Pose ("The Mad Bag") and won numerous Danish Music Awards.

When I asked Coldhands and Berg what Eazy-E had taught them, Coldhands emphatically replied, "Do it yourself." Berg added, "Just do it yourself. Fuck 'em."

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AniMeals is Like Meals on Wheels for Pets

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Woody and his dogwalker at an AniMeals distribution center in Oceanside, California. Photo by Tori Telfer

At the senior center in Oceanside, California, a woman named Bev told me about her most nagging fear: the question of whether she or her beloved dog, Buddy, will die first. She can't bear the thought of losing him; she also can't bear the thought that, after she's gone, he'll be sent to a shelter or simply abandoned. She knows that sometimes, when pets outlive their senior owners, they're dropped off at the pound or given away carelessly by families or programs that have other things to worry about. "I think about this a lot," she said.

Bev was here to pick up a couple pounds of pet food for Buddy, a terrier mix, and for her massive cat who looked like some sort of leopard-lion hybrid. The pet food comes from AniMeals, a non-profit that serves over 7,000 pounds of pet food every month to seniors in Southern California who are low-income, homebound, or disabled. Sometimes AniMeals makes in-home deliveries, but usually the senior citizens pick up the food at distribution centers. Many of the seniors, like Bev, have no other means to find their pets' next meal.

Bev and Buddy. Photo by Tori Telfer

For decades, programs like Meals on Wheels focused on bringing food to humans who needed it, which is noble and great. But in the 80s, a volunteer with Meals on Wheels noticed that one of her clients was dividing her supply of food into two portions, whispering to her cat, "We get to eat today." With the sinking realization that this woman was sacrificing her own health for the sake of her cat's, the volunteer drove straight to San Diego's Helen Woodward Animal Center and presented the problem. AniMeals was created through the Center in 1984.

Senior citizens have specific nutritional needs, which is why certain programs—like Angels Depot in Oceanside, a charity that teams up with AniMeals—carefully structure their food packages to make sure they're hitting all the necessary nutritional benchmarks. Illnesses and an overall decline in physical health can contribute to these specific dietary needs, so if a senior manages to find a program that delivers them food, it's very important that they eat all of it. Not half; not a third.

Of course, if your pet was starving, you'd share your meals with them, too. But pets aren't supposed to eat human food—the list of commonplace foods that can harm them is long and surprising (avocados, onions, dairy)—which is why AniMeals helps the helpless who would give anything to save their even-more-helpless pets. As AniMeals Supervisor Erin Odermatt told me, "By providing pet food, we're relieving one of the stresses of pet ownership. Our goal is to keep seniors with their pets for as long as possible and to keep the pets out of shelter situations."

Photo by Tori Telfer

As anyone who's ever had a pet knows, it can be hard to quantify the value of their companionship—there's the unconditional love, the constant furry presence, the feeling that you're their favorite person in the entire world. But for seniors, this companionship has heightened implications. Pets provide a reason for lonely, homebound seniors to be active, to get out of the house (for walks, or pet food pick-ups like this one), to interact with another creature, and to invest in something other than themselves. In 1999, a study in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Societyfound that "senior citizens who own pets are less likely to be depressed, are better able to tolerate social isolation, and are more active than those who do not own pets."

Even a study last year, which lamented "the poor methodological quality of pet research," admitted that "pet ownership and animal-assisted therapy are likely to continue due to positive subjective feelings many people have toward animals." And those "subjective feelings," for AniMeals participants, are more like lifelines.

Photo by Melodee Tonti, courtesy of AniMeals

Before Bev found Buddy, she knew she needed companionship. But after her last dog—a Pomeranian—died, Bev felt like she couldn't go through the cycle again. Then one day, her neighborhood's paper printed an ad about a dog, and after a few weeks, she finally called the number. The woman who answered the phone was shocked. "Nobody wants him," she said. When Bev arrived at the woman's house, the woman opened her back door and called, "Here, Buddy! Come here, Buddy!"

Buddy jumps up to see Bev. Photo by Tori Telfer

Today, little Buddy is her constant companion, a dowsing rod for her emotions. He can get up on his hind legs and bark something that sounds vaguely like "I love you." Wink at him and he winks back. When a stranger approaches the house, he barks in a low voice that "sounds like it belongs to a German Shepherd," according to Bev, while her giant cat sits unmoving on top of the sofa and acts like a Sphinx. When Bev is sad, Buddy will drag over a toy and wave it around until she begins to laugh. When she's feeling sick, he'll stand vigil over her, whining in a sad, high-pitched cry.

"I like animals better than humans," Bev told me, laughing. Other than Buddy and her Sphinx cat, she describes herself as "completely alone."

A bag of dog and cat food from AniMeals. Photo by Tori Telfer

As people get older, they often become invisible: Their families ignore them, drift away from them, move away and can't make it home for Christmas, die off. Most of the seniors I talked to didn't have computers, either because they couldn't afford them or simply didn't know how to use them, so staying in touch with a computerized world grows harder and harder. And, of course, the housebound ones are quiet literally unseen by the rest of the world.

Even Pope Francis recently called this issue a mortal sin. "While we are young, we are tempted to ignore old age as if it were an illness to hold at bay," he said. "But when we become old, especially if we are poor, sick, and alone, we experience the failures of a society programmed for efficiency, which consequently ignores the elderly."

But that's where pets are better than humans: They love unconditionally. They don't care that you're no longer young or quick-minded. They'll share a meal with you, even if it's human food and it poisons them.

Photo by Melodee Tonti, courtesy of AniMeals

At the AniMeals pickup, I met a woman named Linda, who was cuddling the world's calmest Chihuahua, named Peanut. Linda told me her family is scattered around the country, but Peanut is constantly by her side. "I don't know what I'd do without her," said Linda. "She brings me so much comfort. She can even tell when I'm not feeling well."

As she was leaving, a man wearing a Santa hat called out to me. This guy was her dog walker, and he was holding a dachshund named Woody—Linda's companion of the past 16 years. Woody was waiting patiently in the car during the AniMeals pickup, because he's blind and doesn't like too much stimulation. "Touch the back of his head first," the dogwalker told me. "He can't see you."

Blind Woody moved his head toward the sound of our voices. His muzzle was grey with age, and his little paws were trembling, but I could tell he felt safe here with Linda and the dog walker, and that he knew he would eat tonight.

Follow Tori Telfer on Twitter.

We Got Wasted then Tested Out a Herbal Remedy that Claims to Sober You Up

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Being sober is a tough task during the Christmas season. Between work drinks, the Christmas parties and all the time spent sitting at home weeping as you cradle a bottle of Johnnie Walker, there's not a lot of time to y'know, just be sober and that.

So what if there was some way you could chokeslam your liver through a burning table from the top turnbuckle and still feel fine and dandy? Sober Up, a liquid "dietary supplement" in a small metal bottle, claims that it might just be able to help you out.

In the "About" page, it says that Sober Up can "boost mental clarity and physical health before, during and after good times", which is good because my physical health was about to take a beating.

To test it out, me and my colleague Leala decided to get drunk, then breathalyze ourselves both before and after taking the shots of Sober Up, to see if it had any effect on our blood alcohol level. As I stepped out toward the pub, I could feel the hand of a Science Nobel Prize on my shoulder.

First, we needed to test our levels before we touched any alcohol to make sure we knew what we were working with. Mine came up 0.0, which meant that I was sober enough to drive, operate heavy machinery and get really fucking drunk.

Here we are, two shots down and chugging through two pints of Kronenbourg. You can see from my face that I'm discussing something that meant quite a lot to me at the time. And you can see my from my colleague's face that she's thinking, "Man, this guy talks a lot of shit."

This is the state of us after our second round of shots, complete with a pint for the gent and a glass of house white for the lady. In the name of science I must declare that not all of the drinks on the table were ours and were in fact left by loud, angry bald men having their Christmas party. As you can see from this picture, I am merely a quiet bald man.

After all that science, it was time to get do away with childish things and crunch some numbers. We waited 30 minutes to really let the alcohol pickle in our bloodstreams, then breathalyzed ourselves to see how mashed we were. My colleague clocked in at 1.2 and I clocked in at 1.3, which, according to Wikipedia, is the stage that can cause "over-expression" and "temporary erectile dysfunction." The breathalyzer also handily made a piercing bleeping noise and flashed a big yellow sign on it with a picture of a crossed-out car. So not only can I not have sex, but I also can't drive. Thanks for rubbing it in, breathalyzer.

It made sense to take it to the streets to see if we could both perform the standard UK police field sobriety test of standing on one leg and looking like a twat for 30 seconds. As you can see, we both passed with flying colours.

Us, before drinking Sober Up.

Us, after drinking Sober Up. You may ask, what does this stuff taste like? And I could bang on for a couple of hundred words about its rich flavor, using a series of generally negative adjectives. But instead I just want you to study my face and what its doing in this picture. Really, really study it. You'll find the answers there.

According to the website blurb, there is a 60% average reduction in toxins within 30 minutes of drinking Sober Up. So that's how long we waited, while both necking a pint of tap water as per the instructions, and also as per the disgusting taste. We then breathalyzed ourselves again to see how much alcohol it had broken down in our systems. I clocked in at a lower rating of 1.1, so maybe things were on the up for me (BECAUSE OF THE ERECTILE DYSFUNCTION THING.) Alas, my colleague clocked up a quite impressive 1.4 – two points above her original score of 1.2, which doesn't really make sense, but then really I don't think anything made sense at this point.

To keep everything fair, we decided to do another test back in the office, about an hour after drinking the Sober Up. I managed to clock up a still-quite-hefty 1.0. That's a reduction of .3 from my original score, so maybe my future would be as bright and shiny as my head looks in this picture.

Here we are, sports fans: The Morning After. Having decided to go out after the experiment and carry on in a similar vein, I was feeling pretty fragile when I came into the office. So when I was told I had to do another fucking shot of this shit I wasn't too happy. But shot I did, and another breathalyzer test was administered in which I ranked a not too shabby 0.8. According to Wikipedia, this is the level at which you have "blunted feelings" and "impairment in reasoning," which made sense because I couldn't feel my face that much and I was stupid enough to do another shot of Sober Up.

What can we conclude from this top-notch scientific enquiry? Well, for one thing, if you are the kind of person stupid enough to believe in a magical sobriety cure then good luck to you in surviving in the world once you've learned to drive. Or have sex. There is no magical sobriety cure. The only cure for a hangover which truly works is a bacon and egg sandwich with a squirt of ketchup, and trust me, that tastes a whole lot better than some herbal remedy.

Follow Tom Usher on Twitter.

What's Up with Our Obsession with the Baby Jesus?

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This Christmas, roughly a third of the world's population will gather with their families to praise the virgin birth of "baby Jesus." In America, we have an especially acute case of baby Jesus mania. Here, you can get a cheap-looking cardboard standee from Wal-Mart or one with "real eyelashes" on eBay; while people leave $50,000 checks under baby Jesuses in Nativity scenes and brew "Sweet Baby Jesus" beer. It's gotten so crazy over the past decade that churches nationwide have to monitor their nativity displays because there's been a increasing number of baby Jesus thefts.

This whole obsession we have with the baby Jesus comes off a bit strange considering Jesus became a fully-grown fella who, at the very least, preached forgiveness, love, and kindness for all. (And at the most, was capital-g God and rose from the dead...) So, why are we so into an infantile savior? Well, for starters, it's because Jesus wasn't just any baby, he was a super baby.

"He's basically supernatural," said Brent Landau, professor of religion at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Revelation of the Magi: The Lost Tale of the Wise Men's Journey at Bethlehem. "He has super powers."

Landau specializes in non-canonical infancy narratives, ancient texts that reference/contribute to the "sanctioned" stories found in the Bible. Think of the Bible as we know it today as a big budget screenplay that's only been "locked in" after dozens of writers, hundreds of drafts, and thousands of studio notes. The non-canonical texts that Landau studies, then, are those rough first attempts by lone writers, tapping their plot points away in obscurity. So, while these may include vast sections that were left on the cutting room floor, occasionally they generated hints of ideas that ultimately ended up in the final box-office smash.

Among the texts Landau has researched is one known as "Infancy Gospel X," which includes a first-person account by a "magi" who examined Jesus shortly after his birth. As explained by the narrator, the baby has a "shining in his body, light to carry, and brilliant to look at." The narrator was also "greatly amazed that he was not crying, as newborn children normally do." To see how this tale of a non-crying baby continued to spread, check out the lyric from the 1884 Christmas carol "Away in a Manger," which goes: "But little lord Jesus, no crying he makes."

But, that's not all. "When comes out, he's not dirty. He's not covered in goop, all of that stuff," said Landau. "He's clean. He sort of just materializes. The text actually has Jesus as this beam of light that morphs into the form of the child."

Now, eyewitness verifications are tough enough when you're questioning a person a few hours after the fact, let alone via two-thousand-year-old stories transcribed after multi-generational games of telephone. But whether or not any of this occurred, surely, is besides the point. Instead, it's worth looking into why early Christians felt it necessary to make Jesus's birth so magical. To answer that, we turn to his death.

"The fact that died by crucifixion, a horrible, kind of shameful, humiliating death, really was not in line with expectations of what a messiah was supposed to do," said Landau. "A messiah was supposed be this huge conquering figure, kicking out the Romans, all that stuff."

To make sense of it, they refocused the narrative: Jesus was not only a prophet, but also God. It's a pretty big tweak to the story, one that required a not-insignificant amount of retrofitting. "People get curious," said Landau. "OK, if he was God from birth, then how was his birth born out as special?" Surely, God isn't going to waltz into our world in human-form without making a damn entrance. And so you get the superpowers, the establishing of "street bonafides" by having him born in a barn, the prophecies that foretold his birth.

But you also need something else: A date on the calendar so his followers can codify their celebrations.

Despite attempts by the right wing to use this time of year to stoke the fires of a false "War on Christmas" narrative, the actual birth of Jesus has little to do with the Christmas. There's no place in the Bible that states the exact date—nor the season—when Jesus was born. Rather, the Christmas holiday has roots in the same celebration that's occurred on or around December 25th since humans were aware, even subconsciously, that the sun is in the sky longer than it was yesterday: The Winter Solstice.

" is ingrained in the human psyche and cycle of life," said Landau. "We need something to celebrate in the middle of winter."

You have any number of prehistoric civilizations using this time of year to get together and throw a feast, but in the year 274, Roman emperor Aurelian focused the date a bit. He decreed that December 25th was the Feast of Sol Invictus, a cult that worshipped the "Unconquered Sun." As the Christian influence spread, they felt their "birth of the son" fit in well with the decreed "birth of the sun" and decided to co-opt it. In the year 336, then, you get the first example of Christians celebrating the birth of Jesus on that same date.

But there's still a long way to go from whatever secretive candlelit ceremonies were being undertaken back then to today's plastic nativity scenes. In between, there's a whole lot of drunken debauchery.


Pagans celebrating in the Winter Solstice. Painting by Thomas Couture.

Christmas celebrations before the 19th century were not the quaint family affairs we've come to know, but were more akin to the outdoor orgies of Mardi Gras; farmers had free time (their fields were frozen over) and needed ways to kill it (winter was when wine and beer was traditionally ready to drink). As Stephen Nissenbaum writes in his fascinating book, The Battle For Christmas, "it involved behavior that most of us would find offensive and even shocking today—rowdy public displays of excessive eating and drinking, the mockery of established authority, aggressive begging (often involving the threat of doing harm), and even the invasion of wealthy homes." More The Purge than Love, Actually.

This is also where the tradition of Christmas carols originates: "Roving bands of youthful males," as Nissenbaum puts it, would travel to the houses of the rich and regale them with songs laced with explicit threats of what'd happen if they didn't hand over booze. Here's one of the songs, known as "wassails": "We've come here to claim our right / And if you don't open your door / We will lay you flat upon the floor."

The Puritans, as they were wont to do, spoiled all of this fun by making Christmas celebrations illegal in New England for awhile. Sure, they didn't like people getting hammered and roaming the streets, but they also weren't fans of the lack of Biblical evidence that Jesus was born on a specific date. Their Lithgow-in-Footloose routine dampened Christmas. The holiday was so insignificant that the Founding Fathers didn't even bother taking it off in 1789.


Photo via Flickr user Waiting For The Word.

The whole thing didn't get reintroduced until writer Washington Irving released fictional depictions of "old English Christmas traditions" in the 1810s. This was soon followed by his pal Clement Clarke Moore's publication of "A Visit from St. Nicholas." Americans read those, felt pangs of nostalgia over things that really never took place, and the holiday was domesticated away from its earlier rancorous feast. By 1870, celebrations had expanded enough for President Ulysses S. Grant to declare Christmas a federal holiday.

Jesus gets the most recognized birthday of all because his proponents got lucky and intertwined that celebration with the real deity of the season: "There are scholars who make argument that Christmas is about worshipping a god, but the god is Santa," said Landau. "Not saying literally he exists, but in terms of the way Santa is presented, doing miraculous things like knowing when you've been sleeping, knowing when you're awake. He's basically a god-like figure."

This all coincided with another change in popular mindset. "It's only in the 19th century that people start to pay attention to children," said Landau. Before then, the feeling was more that children should be seen, not heard. "Children were almost sub-human." But that sentiment's changed: Children being the future, and so on. With the celebration becoming domesticated, what better way to symbolize it than by celebrating a family bringing a new child into the world?

So, with the continuing expansion of Christianity across America during this second wave of holiday co-option, so boomed the plastic baby Jesus dolls industry.


Birth of the Buddah. Uploaded by Wikimedia Commons user Sacca.

Christianity is not particularly unique in the realm of worshipping magical children. While the other two "big three" religions of Judaism and Islam—"big three" being a misnomer, considering "non-religious/atheist" is the third most populous belief, while Judaism is ranked way down at number 11—don't participate in baby worship, there are plenty of examples in predominantly-Indian religions.

Similar to Christianity, Buddhism celebrates the "miraculous birth" of their god, Gautama Buddha, during the feast Vesak. (The specific days are up for grabs, mostly dependent on the calendar quirks of each nation, but usually in April or May.) Like Jesus, when Buddha was born, his mother was surrounded by angels and he left the womb "clean and unsoiled." Hinduism, one of the world's oldest religions, has numerous festivals celebrating births of deities. " is one of the many preferred modes of devotion within several Hindu sects."

So, no. Christians aren't alone in their praise of babies. And it's pretty easy to see why. They're kind of magic. They're these tiny creatures that seem to have sprung from nothingness and have yet to act dumb, or form silly opinions, or perform acts of hatred. They're unsullied nature allows us to believe that, at its core, humanity is innocent and pure, too. They're a blank slate for us to pin our hopes and dreams, tiny avatars for our ever-aching and crippling bodies, back when we weren't abused and scarred by the world, when we felt wonder. And, you know, they're just fucking cute, particularly when they're not crying or crapping their pants. Not to mention, they're a whole lot more appealing to look at that an emaciated hipster hanging on a cross.

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The Miami River Is a Cocaine Trafficking Superhighway Once Again

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The captain of the Gulf Trader attempted to smuggle 59 kilos from Haiti via the Miami River in August. Photo courtesy of US Customs and Border Protection

On the night of September 15, special agents from the US Department of Homeland Security were surveilling a shipyard on the Miami River where the cargo vessel Ana Cecilia had docked after returning from Haiti. They watched an unidentified man load two cardboard boxes from the Ana Cecilia into the backseat of a white Nissan Altima driven by a man named Terry Pierre Louis, according to a federal criminal complaint in Miami.

Police vehicles, blue lights flashing and sirens wailing, blocked the Altima's path as Louis pulled out of the shipyard. The 39-year-old Haitian American jumped out of the Nissan and ran back inside the shipyard, ignoring the agents' commands for him to stop, the complaint states.

Although the Homeland Security officers, border agents, and other cops didn't catch him, they did find 136 kilograms of cocaine in brick-shaped packages inside the boxes. They also arrested Ernso Borgella, the captain and owner of the Ana Cecilia, who promptly confessed to knowing the drugs were on board, according to the feds.

The incident is one of several that that have put a spotlight on new law enforcement efforts to curb the flow of cocaine from Haiti to Miami. Taken together, recent busts suggest the port of entry that once served as a hub of violent drug activity during the 80s heyday of the "Cocaine Cowboys" is back at the center of the regional drug trade.

Robert Hutchinson, acting special agent in charge of the Homeland Security Investigations office in Miami, told VICE that he could not comment on specific cases because of ongoing investigations. However, he affirmed that there's been a dramatic increase in coke seizures on container ships coming from Haiti to the Miami River in the past year.

"There's definitely been a surge and it appears to be on the rise through the Miami River," Hutchinson said. "It's very hard to tell if we are just pushing the bubble from one area to another."

On November 10, Haitian anti-drug police officers arrested Franqui Francisco Flores de Freitas and Efrain Antonio Campo Flores, nephews of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro's wife, Cilia Flores, in a Port au Prince hotel, turning them over to special agents from the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). The Venezuelans were flown to Manhattan, where the on November 12 both were charged with one count of conspiracy to import and distribute cocaine. According to Spanish-language media reports, Flores de Freitas and Campo Flores had arrived in Haiti aboard a plane loaded with 800 kilos of cocaine that was flown by a Venezuelan military pilot.

Prior to their arrests, Homeland Security had intercepted more than 500 kilos combined on four container ships, including the Ana Cecilia, arriving at the Miami River from Haiti between March and September of this year, Hutchinson said. Those discoveries resulted in indictments against Louis, Borgella, and Hector Genaro Levy, the 65-year-old Nicaraguan captain of a cargo ship called Gulf Trader who was busted in August with 59 kilos in his shipyard office and his boat cabin. Levy and the Gulf Trader had just returned from the port city Cap Haitien in Haiti.

Borgella pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to distribute cocaine on November 19. Louis—who documented his relief missions to Haiti alongside celebrities Sean Penn and Wyclef Jean on his social media accounts—took his chances with a jury. On December 9, after a two-day trial, Louis was found guilty on one count of conspiracy with intent to distribute cocaine and one count of cocaine trafficking. (All the defendants are currently awaiting sentencing.)

However, authorities have yet to make any arrests in the March 23 discovery of 361 kilos hidden aboard the Eva, a 180-foot cargo vessel moored at a Miami River shipyard, a Homeland Security spokesman confirmed.

Hutchinson said drug traffickers are taking extraordinary measures to hide coke shipments aboard cargo vessels docking at the Miami River. "People are going the extra mile to make sure we don't find it," Hutchinson told me. "Since often these ships are coming back empty, they have to do a little more to conceal what is coming into the country."

According to a US Customs and Border Protection press release, officers broke through a layer of concrete to get to a hidden compartment in the Eva's ballast tank that contained 310 packages of cocaine worth more than $9 million.

The criminal complaint against Borgella states that he sketched out a diagram of a secret compartment inside the Ana Cecilia where Homeland Security investigators found an additional 275 bricks of cocaine.

In the 80s, the Miami River thrived as a port of call for Colombian and Cuban cocaine traffickers. So much Andean marching powder sailed down the Miami River, even cops couldn't resist taking the illegal drug shipments for themselves. In 1985, three Miami police officers were arrested and charged with first-degree murder in the drownings of three suspected drug dealers. They had jumped into the river to avoid being captured by the cops, who had shown up to rip off 300 to 400 kilos of cocaine. The bust led to a wide-ranging corruption probe that culminated in the conviction of 20 Miami officers, including the trio involved in the Miami River rip-off.

Almost two decades later, drug traffickers began using cargo ships traveling to and from Haiti to bring large coke shipments into the Miami River. Wrecked by decades of political upheaval and unrelenting poverty, Haiti lacks the police and military resources to patrol the country's coastline, let alone be able to infiltrate narco groups, according to the US Institute of Peace, a think tank once funded by the American government.

A July 2000 New York Times story detailed how US customs officials confiscated almost 7,000 pounds of cocaine inside Haitian ships docked in the Miami River during a ten month span, which was three times the amount of blow intercepted the previous year. Since then, cocaine trafficking between Haiti and the Miami River has gone through peaks and valleys.

Caribbean routes like that between Haiti and the Miami River are currently experiencing an upswing, according to US drug warriors. The 2015 National Drug Threat Assessment Report put out by the DEA says drug trafficking through the Caribbean has increased in the last three years. "By moving cocaine through the Caribbean, Colombian avoid inter-cartel violence in Mexico, increased law enforcement presence in Mexico and at the Southwest Border, and rising pressure against the Mexican drug cartels," the report states.

According to the White House's Office of National Drug Policy, Haiti is one of the major illegal drug transit nations in the world—despite efforts by the government to enhance the country's police capabilities to combat narcotics trafficking, as well as passage of a law last year that formally criminalized corruption committed by government officials.

Andre Pierre, a Haitian-American criminal defense lawyer who represents Borgella and Levy, told VICE that drug traffickers recruit captains and crew members of ships that travel from the Miami River to Haiti laden with second-hand and donated goods.

"If you need to send a mattress, a car, or any bulky items, that is how people send stuff back home," Pierre said. "But the ships come back pretty much empty. Traffickers take advantage of that."

For instance, Levy had been a captain for almost 20 years, sailing through Haiti, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic without ever breaking the law, Pierre told me. "He had an impeccable record," Pierre said. "Things fell hard for him and he made a huge mistake."

On October 21, Levy pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit cocaine trafficking. According to an affidavit filed in Miami federal court, Levy admitted to hiding 59 kilos in the ceiling of his cabin and under his bunk. When the Gulf Trader arrived at its Miami River shipyard, Levy had unloaded four of the bricks when Homeland Security agents approached him, the affidavit states.

Pierre said Levy told investigators that he did not know the real identities of the drug traffickers who hired him. "He doesn't know who the bigger people involved are," Pierre told me. "He was dealing with a middleman to a middleman."

Follow Francisco Alvarado on Twitter.

The Australian Government Just Approved Dredging the Reef, Again

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The Great Barrier Reef as seen from the air. Image via

This post originally appeared on VICE Australia.

Despite ongoing protests, new resolutions to curb climate change, and the plummeting price of coal, the Australian Government yesterday re-approved dredging of the coal port at Abbot Point. Assuming the scheme is financed, this will mean 1.1 million cubic meters of seabed will be dredged from the Great Barrier Reef and dumped in plastic-lined beds in the Caley Valley Wetland.

As you may recall Abbot Point is a coal port around two hours south of Townsville on Australia's east coast. Last year the port funneled 22.1 million tons of thermal coal into Asia, which sounds like a lot, but was only a minute fraction of Queensland's total reserves. Now, with permission to deepen the port and build a new pier at Abbot Point, the state of Queensland may become one of the world's largest coal exporters.

The reason is the Carmichael Mine. A self-made Indian billionaire named Gautam Adani is convinced India's energy future can be secured with Australian coal. In 2010 his company—aptly named Adani—announced plans to tap reserves in the Galilee Basin. If built, the resulting Carmichael coal mine will become the world's largest, producing some 60 million tons of thermal coal every year.

The plan has been enormously controversial. In February it was one of the reasons Queensland voted a more environmentally conscientious government into power, which vetoed dumping dredge spoil at sea, but refused to rule out dredging entirely. A revised plan to store the dredge spoil on-land was subsequently approved by the new state government in August.

Yesterday Federal Environment Minister Greg Hunt approved the revised expansion plan for Abbot Point. This new plan reduces a cap on dredging from 3 million cubic meters buffer zone to separate any dumped spoil from the wetlands. For the approval to be honored, the project's expansion needs to begin within five years.

This last caveat is a problem. It's well known Adani is shouldering huge amounts of debt while the price of coal continues to fall. In November a ton of coal fetched $56.25 USD, which is significantly less than what Adani needs to break even. This is the reason Rio Tinto walked from the project in 2012, followed by BHP Billiton six months later. All four major Australian banks have also refused financing.

Then there's the environment. In Paris Australia pledged a 26-28 percent reduction in CO2 emissions (from 2005 levels) by 2030. This conveniently omits emissions produced overseas using our coal, as the Carmichael Mine will annually produce 79 million tons of planet heating carbon dioxide—20 percent more than the entire yearly output of New York City. For a country tackling global warming, green-lighting the Adani project seems seriously counter-productive.

Despite this drawback it looks like things are going Adani's way, at least for the moment. First the Federal Government reapproved the Carmichael mine in April after being postponed by an environmental lawsuit. Then last week the LandCourt of Queensland overturned a bid to halt the project on the grounds it would devastate populations of a native finch. And now the lynchpin to the whole project—the dredging of a deep port at Abbot Point—has been approved.

Still, there is the small issue of money. Adani needs to find some $16.5 billion , which on Tuesday the Queensland premier vowed wouldn't come from state coffers. Given so many investors won't throw cash at a devaluing resource, funding might prove to be the most difficult obstacle yet for Adani.

Follow Julian on Twitter.

'Star Wars: The Force Awakens' Is the Last Great Monument of the Baby Boomers

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Illustration by Meaghan Garvey

I've spent the better part of 20 years being alienated by Star Wars. I don't say that out loud, of course. I mostly keep it to myself. My Skywalker aversion isn't borne out of some pretentious stand against escapist fiction, or bone-deep hatred of the movies. It's just a sense that I missed out. This series makes people feel things. It helps them find their sense of wonder. It transports them. They're having fun. It'd be nice to join them.

As a kid, I constantly made an effort to do this—since I couldn't grasp football, it seemed culturally expected of me to like Star Wars. I felt obligated to pretend. I asked for the toys at Christmas. I saw the movies with friends and relatives, over and over and over, and quoted lines, and had favorite scenes and characters, and generally whooped and hollered to get in on that warm communal experience everybody else in the world seemed to be having. But I felt nothing. I couldn't do it. And I was ashamed of myself. Part of the American character was in these movies, a universally agreed-upon definition of fun, and I was looking at it through a foggy window.

Maybe it was a problem of demographics. I was raised by a Gen X-er and babysat by two grandparents born on the cusp of WWII. I missed the whole boomer experience. I barely even had secondhand exposure to it. And the original Star Wars trilogy is decidedly a baby-boomer creation. That galaxy far far away has easily grokkable reference points for a generation who had internalized the B-movies, the Saturday afternoon serials, the kitschy old sci-fi stories about brave journeys in space. They deeply shared the movie's vocabulary, to the point that it was almost like they were seeing their own childhoods projected on the screen. The movies were essentially the high-concept science fiction of Lucas's THX 1138, combined with the headrush of nostalgia offered by American Graffiti.

That helped make it an instantly revered object: a classic, trope-packed adventure story with awe-inspiring special effects. And it came out in 1977, when someone born in 1959 was at that age where your brain expects life-defining moments to happen. That's what made it an event, a cultural touchstone that defied all your criticism. Look over here, at how much fun we're having. This is how we run away from all the world's problems.

It's more than a movie and it's more than pop culture. It's part of America. It's one of our exports. People know about Star Wars who don't watch movies or own televisions or participate in the culture at all. And that's what's fascinating about the series even if you're totally alienated by it. Monoculture events are a boomer thing. They were propelled by a homogenous population and a homogenous media.

In 1977 you could get the whole country's attention. But the internet has compartmentalized culture and turned it into a bottomless rabbit hole of niches. You can't count on anybody having a similar cultural background. So there aren't many boomer monoculture events like Star Wars left. After The Force Awakens, and boomers start to hit that age when people start to die for no reason, those events will mostly be eulogies for boomer icons. Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, they'll all die, it'll seem to happen all at once. There will be stragglers—Chevy Chase will live to be 109 somehow, just to punish us—but mostly they'll be off the radar in 20 years.

Take a Look Inside New York's Premier Jedi School:

That's how I approach The Force Awakens. That's how I make myself interested in it. It might be the last great hurrah of boomer nostalgia. And long term, way long term, a thousand years long term, it's one of the only relics of 20th-century culture that will actually survive. (And it will survive for a long time; after next year's Rogue One the plan is to come out with a new Star Wars film every year until people get tired of it.)

So if you're on the outside of one of our last cultural behemoths, just trying not to be a buzzkill, applauding to be nice, looking for something to hold on to, will you find anything at The Force Awakens?

Let me put in this way: Watching this movie is like going to an outdoor festival and wandering by a classic rock act you're not there to see. You scan the audience a little, you soak in the ambiance. You won't see Cheap Trick again, but you still appreciate that this is a rare experience. You fidget for a few songs. Then they play "Surrender," and you find goosebumps going up and down your arms despite your best efforts.

The Force Awakens is two hours of J.J. Abrams trying to make a whole Cheap Trick concert out of that "Surrender" moment. It's an undeniable thrill seeing Harrison Ford arrive on screen. Experiencing all the old iconography deployed with such enormity and elegance is objectively wonderful. The joy is all in nostalgic recognition: Here's something I recognize, and there's something else I recognize, and look how well they're doing it, and they're self-aware about all of it, isn't that nice? I never thought all these people would live long enough to be here now. It all seems so important all of a sudden. The crowd is into it, that song doesn't really wear thin, and the whole thing is pure validation.

Abrams is damn good at this. He's taken not just a sentimental object, or even a sentimental song, but a whole sentimental universe, and largely managed to avoid pissing anybody off. There were a thousand ways to drive this movie off a bridge, and he's managed to avoid each one.

But how did he do it? He did it by having all the personality of a market research analyst. The Force Awakens plays like it was made by a thousand focus groups that were all asked what their dream sequel to Return of the Jedi would be. It's callback after callback after callback in the service of what adds up to a remake of A New Hope.

As fun as that is, it's just nostalgia in a shiny studio production package. There is not one idiosyncratic moment to be found in it, and it's so busy not letting anybody down that it never pauses to breathe. It's always moving. And so it lacks the rickety humanity of the movies that came before. The Force Awakens succeeds in hitting all the marks everyone wants it to hit, in the right sequence. But in hitting those marks, it becomes merely an incredible facsimile of Star Wars, one far more accurate than anything Lucas could make.

The problem is that it's overly reverential. In pursuit of making a Star Wars film that will be instantly canonized instead of chewed up and thrown away like the last three, Abrams depends wholly on previously established beats. In any given action scene, if you replace John Williams's score with different music, and the lightsabers and X-wings with different weapons, you'd be left with a boilerplate sci-fi battle.

That's not to say I didn't have a nice time at the theater. There were tons of little kids applauding when they saw the characters they recognized. People left grinning ear to ear. I saw 50 year-old men with tears in their eyes. They had all escaped reality, which is what Star Wars is for. People got to be kids again. It's nice to see so much of a country shut up and go to the carnival at the same time.

I don't really share in that nostalgia. The ship sailed on me feeling the way others feel. I don't have the luxury of getting attached. And this movie is so desperate to make the Star Wars of an idealized childhood memory that it feels like it's managing the Star Wars estate instead of creating something new. In the process, it traps the original series in amber.

On the way home I kept thinking of the difference between the prequels and the sequel. The prequels were Paul McCartney losing his mind and making "Temporary Secretary." It was a failure, but it was an authentic failure all his own, and that's kind of wonderful. The Force Awakens felt like Jeff Lynne producing the 1996 Beatles song "Real Love." All the Beatles were on it (John Lennon from beyond the grave), and great care was taken to ensure it had every single thing a Beatles song should have. But the performative aspect of its creation takes something away from it—it had nothing to say, and no identity of its own.

That's what the next two Star Wars directors would be well served to avoid. They need to run away from the suffocating burden of legacy and create something that holds up under its own weight. But the odds will be against them: It's so much easier to shut up and play the hits.

Follow Kaleb on Twitter.

PLEASE LOOK AT ME: An Elderly Woman Tries to Get Online in This Week's Comic by Julian Glander

How to Survive Christmas with Your Parents

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Photo via Flickr

It's the most wonderful time of the year again when we merrily spend cash at the movies, buy up sequined sweaters, and ignore our stuffed Facebook events page. And then, right before the holiday, we escape our adult lives and head home for Christmas. But while home may promise you all the wrapping paper you could dream of, there is also the prospect of spending an intense period of time with your folks. To get you through Christmas unscathed, here is our guide to spending the holidays with your family.

ACT Like a GROWNup

Home is comfortingly, chronically unchanged. The only disturbance to the stillness in my house is that my step-dad has accumulated another pair of reading glasses (one on his head, one on the side, one perched precariously now on the TV guide). It's all too easy to forget that time—as it has a habit of doing—has pushed on. We're no longer angst-ridden kids. We're now angst-ridden adults, deep into our overdrafts, but with our own hairdresser.

It's easy to descend, in all that resplendent comfort, into a proto-teenager, all strops and blu-tacked posters and shouting at your mom that she used the wrong butter on the sandwich she bought you. It's easy to run ten, 15 years backwards through puberty again, furious to be woken up before 12 PM, using up all the hot water with a massive, 40-minute shower.

Just remember it's fucking gross to witness a 20-something having a meltdown, pouting their lips, and making their lower arms go floppy. If you find yourself eating all the chocolates, putting the wrappers back in the empty box, and blaming your stupid younger sister, then it's time to take control and act your age. Be a grownup, make your mom a cup of tea, and try and coax her through backing her phone up via the iCloud.

Photo via Flickr

GET USED TO BAD TELEVISION

Your parents are watching TV. They have premium cable and a DVR, but still, somehow, watch TV shows in real time. No, you can't watch Netflix in your room alone, because we're spending quality family time together and we'll be watching Inside Edition on a loop for the next week.

Luckily, you'll never be awake for more than two hours. The plush carpets, constant central heating, plentiful food, and regression back to your sleepy juvenile self means that if you don't like the show that's on just close your eyes and dream of a white Christmas. Hopefully you'll come to when something better is on, like Chopped.

Photo via Flickr

SEE YOUR OLD MATES

To break the monotony of Christmas on the sofa, head to the local bar with your old school friends. Just be warned, though: You won't have anything in common anymore. You live in the big city. You've eaten a lahmacun more times than you can even remember. They know the names of all the bartenders and still go to home games at the tiny battered football stadium! Your lives have diverted down wildly different paths.

As the night draws on, you'll slowly realize that they are all much happier than you.

Photo via Flickr

BE GRATEFUL

Last year I got seven things with Audrey Hepburn's face on them because I happened to mention I'd seen Breakfast At Tiffany's once. This year I'm hoping my dad doesn't run wild with the information that I saw the Minions film on DVD. Two years ago I got some "fancy honey" and a mug that said "SASSY" on it. Appalling, yes, but if your family doesn't have a clue who you are, it's probably your fault for not calling home enough.

The best thing to do is fake it. "Oh my god, I really loved Audrey in those Galaxy adverts, thank you so much!" You can always nip back to the store and get a gift card in exchange for the chessboard shot glasses you received. And if it's not worth the pain of lugging it back, just leave it under your bed with those adult-sized bear foot slippers and a novelty book about things cats might say if they could talk.

Photo via Flickr

NO POLITICAL CHAT

It would be a Christmas miracle if you avoided fraught chats about immigration and ISIS over turkey and sides. Look at your parents, with their USA Today-reading, Trump-voting opinions. We, the next generation, who have suffered under austerity, need to show these ignorant bigots the light, right?! But there's a problem. Don't you only read the Times headlines, not the full article? Didn't you skip the Syria march because you had brunch with friends?

Do yourself a favour: Instead of getting your parents back by saying, "I'm left... because... it's right," and, "Donald Trump really is an idiot though, because... well look at his hair!" just steer clear of politics completely.

KEEP IT BRIEF

Family parties can be stressful. You have a long-standing resentment about your godfather not getting you a Baby G that time and your cousins being more attractive than you. Your auntie, who's not technically your auntie, asks questions—"How's the city?" "D'you like it there?"—that she doesn't want to know the answer to because the truth is too depressing to endure over vol-au-vents. "Well, I live in an apartment with a 38-year-old named Peter and sometimes I think he might have put hidden cameras in my room, I haven't had sex in a year, and the only time I don't feel anxious is when I'm watching MasterChef." The kindest thing, for both of you, is to give short, generic answers like "The public transport is very efficient!" before complimenting her on her hair color, then stuffing your face with another cheese straw.

Photo via Flickr

Just remember, your parents have given up the best years of their lives to raise you and give you a better life than they had. And it's not looking good, is it? Not with your inability to stop spending 30 percent of your wages on eating out, your firm belief that you were better than the last person you were seeing, and your need for at least two holidays a year because of all the vitamin D you're lacking.

So that's why you should give your folks the magical Christmas they deserve, and stop being a dick.

Follow Phoebe on Twitter.

How Much Should You Worry About Getting Robbed Over the Holidays?

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As the holiday season kicks into high gear, so do news reports warning us about crime. While the annual coverage has emerged as a wintry, anxiety-induced ritual, these reports are often based on anecdotes from police officials, or conventional wisdom proffered by security experts who don't offer any statistical support to back up their claims.

To find out whether there's any legit evidence of holiday crime trends, VICE spoke with Dr. Janet Lauritsen, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri in St. Louis who's researched seasonal crime patterns. A report she co-authored for the Department of Justice (DOJ) last year found that property crimes were actually at their lowest during winter—apparently contradicting the annual bevy of bulletins from media outlets and police departments.

But the reality, it would appear, is a bit more complicated than that. Dr. Lauritsen dug deeper into the data to give us a fuller picture of the realities of holiday crime.

VICE: In your opinion, are news reports warning of holiday crime sprees warranted?
Dr. Janet Lauritsen: That's a good question. I'm familiar with the stories, so I the data I use from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which is an annual, ongoing survey where crime victims tell us what months their incidences occurred, regardless of whether they're reported to the police or not. If I the last ten years of data and summarize the monthly totals for all different crime types, what I see is a December increase in only two types of crime, where the rate's a little bit higher than the average monthly rate, and that's for robbery and personal larceny—which are the crime types that police warnings concern. What I can see in this in data are patterns where January and February are extraordinarily low, but that December is a bit higher than average—about 20 percent than the average of all months combined.

So there is something to the warnings. I don't think it's necessarily about desperation, but I think it's more about opportunity—there's lot of people out shopping with goods on them. Personal larcenies are the crime that's about 22 percent higher in December than on average. Larceny includes the unlawful taking of property, other than cars, from the possession of another person by stealth, without force or deceit, pick-pocketing, theft from motor vehicles, non-forcible purse snatching, and those kinds of things. Those do have a bit of a peak in December. I think it's an opportunity explanation more than a motivational explanation.

Your report also indicated that these types of property crimes are at their highest during summer. Is December's crime rate still lower than the rate of larcenies and robberies we're experiencing during summer months?
One thing that's interesting in the robbery data is that each season has something a little bit odd about it. For example, in the fall, October has a surprisingly high rate in the number of robberies compared to September and November. You can't make the motivational argument then that you can for Christmas—that people desperately want to steal Christmas presents for themselves or their families—because in October there's no holiday like that. But there is Halloween, and what Halloween does is bring a lot of people outside and partying. If there's going to be a warning, we might want to offer one in October, too—a reminder that if you're out in large crowds, drinking with lots of other people in costume, that might be a likely time for robberies to occur, as there's more opportunities.

There are little October and September spikes in robberies, so it's not exactly a clean story. The seasonality story is generally clean; I'm comfortable saying there's a summer increase in burglaries, which are primarily committed by young people out of school.

With the larceny data, I see a higher point in December, but also in June and April. I can't think of stories for those months. This is the problem: when you try to spread crime reports across months, you're spreading the data thinner than you normally would. Even though it's a large sample, because victimization is a statistically rare event, you can sometimes see spikes in data that don't really mean anything, so you have to be cautious in interpreting monthly data. That's why in the report for DOJ we didn't analyze by month. There's just too much bouncing around in the monthly data to tell a clean story that can survive statistical tests. That's why we used seasons.

Two types of crime your report doesn't examine are crimes against retailers or cybercrime, which have also been claimed to occur more frequently during the holidays. Do you know of any research suggesting those crime rates are actually higher at this time of year?
No, I don't currently. I'm working on a larger project to modernize the nation's crime statistics with the National Academy of Sciences, and we're trying to pull together all the sources of data for different types of crime. And in terms of cybercrime, we really don't have the measures we need yet to make those types of claims with much certainty. However retailers do have inventory loss details, where they can pinpoint when their losses are more likely to be greater. The only source I'm aware of that might be able to get at that issue across the seasons is from the National Retail Federation. They'll release annualized estimates of inventory loss they've experienced, but I don't believe they release information on a monthly basis.

There are so many variations of cybercrime—there are crimes that are regular, like theft and fraud, but committed with the aid of cyber tools. The NCVS now has identity theft questions added to it, so there's one effort to get national estimates of identity theft. For things like cyberattacks, there are different consortiums of people trying to amass that data—business or technology groups that talk about millions of attempted attacks per second. We only hear about the breaches, but not the attempts, which are constant. I don't think there's any publicly available data there yet.

Overall, your report is pretty reassuring, as it shows the rates for all these crimes declining over time. Are there any findings from your research that you think would surprise people, as far as unusually high likelihoods of particular crimes during any season?
From that report the most surprising thing is, and I wrote a fuller academic paper on the issue, is what's going on with kids in the fall when they go back to school. Kids' period of risk is lowest in the summer, and that's because they're not near each other simple assault, the most minor form of assault that kids are most likely to engage in. Summer is the period of least risk for kids.

When they go back to school in the fall, that's their period of highest risk, which decays over the school year. It seems there's some process of challenging each other more so in the fall when they go back to school. Perhaps they're challenging disciplinary systems of their schools to see what they can get away with. Kids are the big drivers of victimization risk; younger age is correlated with victimization risk. They're responsible for a lot of that seasonality , because kids are mostly the victims and also the offenders, too.

So ultimately for crime during the holiday season, you think all the normal tips that people receive, to draw less attention to their home and secure their belongings in public, are prudent advice to avoid becoming a victim of larceny or robbery?
Absolutely. These are just common sense reminders. There's no need to overdramatize it though. As soon as there's one horrible incident, most people would overestimate their risk.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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A Family Christmas Conversations Survival Guide

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Image via Flickr user Tom

Christmas: a time for eggnog, the perfunctory sounds of Michael Bublé, and ginger bread cookies that would be better if they were literally any other kind of cookie. 'Tis the season of small disappointments.

Sure getting together with relatives and receiving their refundable gifts has its perks, but at some point you will have to talk to them. Those conversations will be garnished with arguments about federal politics and the barren wasteland that is your body. There is no escape. Social convention has dictated we can't just spend the day eating ham in peaceful contemplative silence.

But don't worry, we've prepared a cheat sheet of conversation starters, fillers, and finishers to carry you through to December 26.

Dating Apps

This is your time to shine, token millennial. Regardless of your relationship status, prepare for an onslaught of questions about smartphones, sex, and all the evils that accompany them.

Your aunt and her new eHarmony boyfriend will nod thoughtfully as you explain the difference between Scruff and Grindr in family-friendly terms. It doesn't matter if you use sex apps or not, to anyone over 40 you're the oracle of Gen Y dating. Meanwhile, your high school-aged cousin will smirk into their Samsung phone with the knowledge they know more about this stuff than you ever will, despite being legally still a child.

If you haven't managed to drag along a romantic prospect to help survive the day, you're going to face additional questions about whether you're seeing anybody. Prepare to examine why you're so alone for the next three hours.

To avoid this situation altogether, angle the conversation to the nuances of 21st century romance and its many amusing intricacies: like how to use the internet to date older women and financially benefit from it. Middle-aged relatives love to talk about cougar culture. It reminds them of that Courteney Cox show that got canceled.

Why You Haven't Got Your Shit Together

When everyone is drunk and feeling insecure about their contribution to the festive spread (not all salads are created equal), they're going to look for someone to pick on. If you're not prepared, it could be you. Especially if you're halfway through an expensive master's degree and are still living in the same asbestos-ridden apartment that saw you through your undergrad.

When relatives ask why you're a half-formed mess, remind them that renting into your 30s doesn't make you a giant failed baby. It makes you a normal victim of circumstances beyond your control. Making rent, let alone affording mortgage repayments, was pretty difficult in 2015. The key here is to spin the conversation so it reflects badly on the baby boomers who put our generation in this situation in the first place.

Adele

By this point, things might be a little tense. You're going to need something safe to talk about—an uncontroversial topic that everybody can agree on. Let this be the comfortingly bland and universally beloved British songstress Adele.

Nobody has anything bad to say about Adele. Several people probably received her album in the family Secret Santa. She has a great voice, is funny in interviews, and a genuinely talented songwriter. Adele is an all-healing Christmas angel sent from above.

If the banter is flowing nicely, use Adele as a stepping stone to talk about the year in pop music. Did you know that Taylor Swift earned one million dollars a day this year? How does that make you feel? If the answer is "pretty shitty," then maybe focus on the achievements of slightly less irritating popstars.

Reality Television

Conversation will inevitably turn to reality TV, and you'll need to have some relevant data on hand to contribute. Fact is, at least half of the people sitting at the table haven't got a handle on Netflix yet, so you're far more likely to be talking about Masterchef than Aziz Ansari's new show.

Haven't seen anything on network television for a while? Just casually comment that X Factor is the modern equivalent of watching gladiators fight each other to the death. Or make some general statements about all the casual sex and freakouts that take place behind the scenes. You know, classic family-friendly fare.

What's with Women?

So, you've successfully indulged everyone by sticking to the tried and true topics of adult contemporary music and X Factor. By this point, you're close enough to the dessert victory line to safely start a nice family argument.

A conversation about feminism, which for better or worse was the buzzword of 2015, is the way to do it. Go on, end things with a bang. Saddle up and get on your high horse, because it's time to get morally superior.

Believing in the basic tenets of gender equality might not seem too controversial—we're even teaching it in schools now—so you need to know how to heat things up. Can men be feminists? Does Amy Schumer have to be attractive for men to find her funny? Is there an advantage to wiping out the male population?

These are the great moral questions of our time, and male relatives from around the table are guaranteed to provide various levels of distressing insight. Lean into it. Drop some references to juggalos.

By the way, your bearded brother-in-law is statistically the most likely to be a sexist.

You Made It

Another Christmas dinner is reduced to leftovers and a brand new set of resentments have been created. Go forth and enjoy the next 12 months of blissful passive aggressive family texting until you have to do it all again.

Follow Katherine on Twitter.


Is Anyone Going to Be Held Accountable for Sandra Bland's Death?

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Sandra Bland photo via Facebook

On Monday, a grand jury in Texas declined to indict any law enforcement officers in connection with the July death of Sandra Bland, a Chicago-area woman police say committed suicide by hanging herself with a trash bag in a Waller County jail cell. The decision centered solely on the actions of the jail staff, and Special Prosecutor Darrell Jordan was careful to suggest other aspects of the case remain open and that jurors were poised to reconvene about them in January, as the New York Times reported.

The decision is obviously frustrating news for family members and activists who suspect foul play in Bland's death. At the very least, they'd like to see charges brought against Texas State Trooper Brian Encinia, the man who pulled Bland over in Prairie View, northwest of Houston, after she allegedly did not signal while changing lanes. The stop became contentious, and part of it is caught in footage from Encinia's dash cam, as well as via a bystander who filmed the arrest. "Thank you for recording," Bland tells the witness as she's hauled away in handcuffs. "Thank you. He slammed my head into the ground for a traffic signal."

Bland, who was 28, had recently moved to Texas from Illinois to accept a job at her alma mater, Prairie View A&M University. She was pulled over on July 10 and found dead in her cell the morning of July 13. Her death sparked outrage and a hashtag, #WhatHappenedToSandyBland, adding fuel to the fire of public anger over how people of color get treated by police.

Almost immediately after her reported death, Bland's friends and family began publicly challenging the official police narrative that she'd taken her own life. She'd just moved to Texas to accept a job, after all. Her future was, by most accounts, looking bright.

In the footage of the traffic stop captured on state Trooper Encinia's dash cam, he orders her out of the car after she won't put out a cigarette. She refuses, and things become physical. At one point he pulls out a stun gun, and threatens her. "I will light you up!" he says. The two go out of frame, but in the captured audio Bland can be heard arguing with the officer, becoming increasingly baffled and irate about the turn the routine traffic stop has taken.

"Are you fucking kidding me?" she asks indignantly while the trooper is placing her in cuffs. "...You're full of shit—full of straight shit. That's all y'all are is some straight scared cops. South Carolina got y'all bitch asses scared. That's all it is. Fucking scared of a female."

In the video, Bland repeatedly calls Encinia a "pussy."

The trooper has been on administrative leave since Bland's death, according to the Washington Post.

Bland's palpable frustration in the video becomes more clear in context. In January, she started recording a series of her own videos, called Sandy Speaks, about police brutality, apparently in the hopes they would start a dialogue about current events with her young nephews. In one of the videos, she becomes upset that more people don't seem upset about perceived injustices in the black community. "If you're black and not posting about black unification, get the fuck off social media," read a meme-like image Bland posted on April 11. "Right now we don't care about your birthday, your club pics, your dinner plates, your ass shots, twerk videos, model shots, or any other irrelevant ass shit not mentioned."

At Bland's funeral in Illinois, her mother Geneva Reed-Veal said her daughter had hoped to spend her life stopping racial injustice.

She never had a chance to do so.

Late Monday, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders said in a statement that Bland wouldn't have died in police custody "if she were a white woman," according to CNN.

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We Spoke to One of the Few Journalists Covering the Syrian Civil War in Aleppo

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Journalist Rami Jarrah. Photo via Wikimedia.

Rami Jarrah, also known as his alias Alexander Page, is a media activist and one of the very few Syrian journalists on the ground covering the civil war. He is currently working on a series of video reports documenting the Russian airstrikes in Aleppo because he believes that Western media's presentation of the conflict is misdirected. According to Jarrah, journalists are neglecting the fact that Russian and Syrian air strikes—which he estimates are as frequent as 15 a day—are targeting residential areas not under ISIS control, killing civilians and rebels. Jarrah says this strategy benefits the Assad regime, and ultimately ISIS, and that more should be done to stop it.

We reached him earlier this month at home near a frontline in rebel-held Aleppo.

VICE: What's been happening these past few days? What have you been witnessing?
Rami Jarrah: In general, there's been an escalation in the strikes in the center of the city. About a week ago, the attacks were more so in the Northern Region and on the Southern front where there are basically clashes between the regime and the opposition groups, but it's been escalating over the past few days in the center of the city. This morning are actually fighters, and also oppose ISIS, and the majority of those are actually fighting ISIS. There are more fronts right now in Aleppo between ISIS and these rebel groups, than there are between the regime and these rebel groups.

The only thing holding back the rebels in Aleppo and in Idlib from actually fighting ISIS off, and actually accomplishing or gaining any ground back, and pushing them further out of Syria, are the airstrikes. And it's not just the Syrian and the Russian airstrikes. The Syrian and the Russian airstrikes are actually applying most of their pressure on the rebels, which is preventing them from being able to fight with ISIS. And then the international coalition's attacks are pushing ISIS further out of Iraq, towards Syria, towards Aleppo. And this is exactly what the Syrian regime wants. If Aleppo is to be taken by ISIS, then this is a victory for the Syrian regime and it's a victory for Russia because it becomes the whole world's problem.

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VICE INTL: Searching for Refugee Housing in Berlin

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Fifty thousand refugees will have arrived in Berlin by the end of the year—roughly four times as many as last year. Every day volunteers try to help the hundreds of newcomers waiting to register outside the State Office for Health and Social Affairs find a temporary place to live.

In this video, VICE Germany explores the city's hostels, which have now degenerated into a permanent housing solution for refugees. While some hostels won't accept government vouchers, others have specialized in housing refugees by overcrowding people into small rooms to profit as much as possible. VICE Germany follows refugees in their search for housing and speaks with volunteers, hostel operators, squatters, and Berlin politicians to get an uncensored look into the inept bureaucracy that's causing displaced people to sit for weeks without stable accommodation.

We Asked an Expert If You Can Die from Picking Your Nose

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Photo by the author

A nose-picking gag in a recent episode of The Big Bang Theory really stuck with me. In "The Earworm Reverberation," two characters who, for this episode, play music in an unknown band, stalk their one Facebook fan until they spot him in a coffee shop. Once there, they witness the fan picking his nose, and they bolt. For some reason, the audience then roars with appreciation. While I agree that boogers are objectively funny, it's weird that they're still judgmental about the guy's hygiene, as though picking your nose is some kind secret shame—one that's even darker than stalking someone you found on the internet.

After all, according to the Merck Manual Home Health Handbook, a diagnostic guide for non-doctors, winter weather can make you want to pick your nose bloody. And even if you don't bleed all over yourself, there's still a social stigma attached, so picking your nose can negatively affect your life by making you look gross on TV.

But can putting your finger up your nose start a chain of events with fatal consequences? And if you really get overzealous, can you just miss your boogers altogether and accidentally jab yourself in the brain?

To find out, we talked to Zara Patel a rhinologist and skull base surgeon who teaches medicine at Stanford University. Patel deals with everything from the kinds of serious nasal infections that require surgical intervention, to what can happen to your brain if something catastrophic happens to your sinuses. She seemed like the perfect person to ask about the worst case scenarios resulting from nasal prospecting.

Like gruesome shit? Watch our documentary about the woman behind 'Morgue Instagram':

VICE: Hi Dr. Patel! Is it OK for me to pick my nose?
Dr. Zara Patel: I really strongly discourage people from putting their fingers in their noses, whether it's to pick a booger or to feel something that they think is in there, because introducing bacteria from your hands into the nasal cavity—and what might therefore become bacteria in your sinus cavity—can only lead to problems and complications, whether it's just a colonization of foreign bacteria in your nose, or an actual, big infection that can become worse.

Is that because the nose is part of something called "The Danger Triangle of the Face"? People used to warn me not to pop pimples near my nose or else I might get an infection and die.
There's actually some medical literature supporting all these complications—brain infections from what we call facial furuncles—infection of the pores and follicles of the skin—in that area. But "am I going to die from popping a pimple?" That would be extremely rare—much more common before the advent of antibiotics.

What about now, after the advent of antibiotics?
You're much more likely to get an intracranial complication from a sinus infection these days than you are from picking a pimple on your face. The area that is closest to that sort of dangerous area that I'm talking about is the back of your sinuses. Your sinuses go all the way to what we call the skull base. The skull base is this very thin plate of bone that your brain sits on. In certain areas, this plate of bone is extremely thin—like an eggshell thin. People have these really bad fulminant infections in these areas, and that can lead to the infection breaking through the thin bone, and causing infection in really sensitive areas, like your , or the brain above, or the cavernous sinus, which is kind of the worst.

OK, a bad infection can spread to the brain, but has anyone ever definitely died from picking their nose?
There's no case report like: This person put their finger in their nose, and that caused it. But we do know there are the typical kinds of bacteria that live in our sinuses. We all have normal kinds of OK bacteria that live in our sinus and nasal cavities—that's called normal respiratory flora. And that's a different kind of bacteria from what is found on the surface of our skin, and very different from the types of bacteria that are in our mouths. When you introduce your finger into your nose, you're introducing a different type of bacteria that can overgrow and replace the normal bacteria, and there are reports in the medical literature about infections from these sort of rare bacteria.

Can you jab yourself in the brain when you pick your nose and die that way?
The skull base is a very thin plate of bone. In a baby it's even more thin. In adults, there are areas of our skull base that are less than a millimeter wide.

How far is it from the nostril opening to the brain?
It's a different distance depending on where along the skull base, but it can be anywhere from 6-11 centimeters . It's closer to the skull base if you go straight up. Say you're measuring from just inside your nasal cavity straight up in between your eyes, that distance is probably 6-7 centimeters. Going further back, back to all the way behind your sphenoid sinus from the nasal sill, that would be more like 11-12 centimeters (up to 5 inches).

Sounds difficult since that's just about the entire length of one of my fingers. Could I ram a blunt instrument like a chopstick into my brain if I were picking my nose with it?
If you held a chopstick into your nasal cavity, and someone pounded that chopstick up with a hammer, with enough force, then yeah, it would go into your brain. It depends how strong you are, and how motivated your are to get to your brain. It would also depend on the exact part of the skull base you were directing this to. Like I said, parts of it are naturally more thin.

1858 Illustration from Gray's Anatomy

What if I precision-aimed the chopstick at the thinnest part?
For example, you have an area that's right at the very top of your nasal cavity, where the olfactory bulb sits on top of it and sends all of its little nerve fibers down into your nasal cavity, and that's how you smell. That plate is called the cribriform plate, and it naturally has all these tiny little holes to let those nerves go through it. And there's a plate of bone just right next to it, part of the skull base, that is the thinnest part of your skull base, so if you were to aim a chopstick right at that area, it actually wouldn't take that much effort to go all the way through.

Taking this out of the realm of crazy self-destructive hypotheticals, does that thin section of skull pose real hazards?
Sometimes when people come in, and they have a really bad sinus infection, you can see on imaging that sometimes when people have had infections in their sinuses for long enough, the bone is actually already eroded, and the inflammation surrounding the infection can erode through bone. So sometimes you see them come in, and they already have a loss of the bone between their sinuses and their eyes or their sinuses and their brain above. In those patients, I really encourage them to get surgery done quickly before it becomes something worse.

When the bone erodes from infection, is the brain just hanging out, naked?
There's a mucosal surface remaining. The inside of the sinus has what's called mucosa—like what's inside your mouth. And the sinuses are lined with mucosa. Then there's the lining of your brain, called the dura, which in and of itself is really good at preventing infections from really getting into the brain above, but again, there are areas where important nerves come in and out of your skull base, and that's where the dura is most thin.

If the infection really spreads like crazy, what happens to your brain?
It depends on what part of your brain the infection has spread to. For example: the cavernous sinus is kind of the most dreaded area that an infection or tumor would spread to, because it's an area where a lot of really important structures run through. Through the cavernous sinus runs the carotid artery. The carotid artery is the main artery that brings blood to your brain. If you had enough infection, or an embolism in that area from an infection, and that affected the blood supply to your brain, you could have a stroke. That's one thing.

Yikes. But if it didn't cause a stroke, would it have an effect on your senses?
In that area are multiple cranial nerves—most of the ones running through that area control movements of your eye, and vision. If you had an infection in one of those nerves, after treating it aggressively you would be able to bring that function back, but that doesn't always happen. And then the optic nerve runs just above that area we're talking about, so that's very susceptible also. You could completely lose vision actually.

Just in the one affected eye?
The scariest part about the cavernous sinus is that it's this complex of veins that actually is a bilateral system. Say you have an infection in the right sigmoid sinus—the sinus that's all the way in the back of all your sinuses—and that eroded into the cavernous sinus on that side. Well, that's a free-flowing space to the other side. You can get bilateral—or complete—blindness because of that.

Is that really the scariest thing?
You've probably seen cavernous sinus thrombosis. If you Google it you can see some pretty gruesome images of what happens if it goes to both eyes.

If you're a big-time nose picker and you think you've given yourself a horrible infection, what are the early warning signs?
Sometimes all you'll see at the very beginning is some redness and swelling around one eye. Signs that you're getting an intracranial infection directly are usually the same kinds of signs that we see with meningitis. Meningitis is kind of the earliest sign of infection—inflammation of the meninges, the layering around the brain. Those are things like lethargy, confusion, certain positions make your head hurt more than others.

Is it always so obvious?
Interestingly there are parts of your brain that you can have an infection in, and you don't actually have that many signs outwardly. People usually will say something like 'I had a headache,' but a headache is so nonspecific that a lot of the time people don't go in. People get headaches for all sorts of reasons. I don't want you to publish something that says 'if you have a headache you might have a frontal lobe infection,' but that's unfortunately sometimes the only really small warning sign.

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Quebec Police Pepper Sprayed a Driver While His Kids Were in the Back Seat

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An eye-washing station would have been really helpful after this particular traffic stop. Photo via Flickr user Iqbal Osman.

A black Montreal-area man is questioning how police are trained after he was pepper-sprayed in his car, with his two young children in the back, apparently because he refused to identify himself during a traffic stop last Monday.

According to the Montreal Gazette, John Chilcott, a 43-year-old man from Châteauguay, Quebec, was driving down St-François Blvd. on his way back home to pick up his daughters, age six and ten, and then drop them off at school.

He briefly used his hazard lights while stopping by a bus stop to tell one of his daughters' friends that he could drive her to school later. Around the same time, a police cruiser did a U-turn and drove behind him while flashing its lights, but Chilcott wasn't sure if it was following him and drove back to his apartment. It was then that the officer turned on the lights and sirens, stopping Chilcott outside his apartment.

During the stop, Chilcott's daughters got into the back of his car.

The officer asked Chilcott to identify himself, but Chilcott, who told the Gazettehe assumed it was a case of "driving while black" (he's been pulled over three times in the past few years for no apparent reason), and refused, saying he was driving his kids to school and wanted to know why he was being stopped.

The officer asked Chilchott to identify himself again. Chilcott again refused, at which point the officer took out his pepper spray at sprayed Chilcott in the face.

"My kids were screaming in the back: 'Daddy, what is going on? My throat is sore!'" Chilcott told the Gazette.

Chilcott's wife, Rosemarie Edwards, was watching from their apartment balcony and rushed downstairs, then began filming with her phone. At that point, Chilcott was in the driver's seat using a water bottle to rinse his eyes as the officer, who Edwards identified as Const. Mathew Vill, was ordering him out of the truck to arrest him.

In the video, Vill tells Edwards her husband tried to run away. More officers arrive and Chilcott is handcuffed, placed in a police cruiser and taken to a police station, where he said he had to rinse his eyes while still handcuffed.

Chilcott was released later that day, and on Friday, received three tickets in the mail—one for obstructing a police officer, one for failing to turn off his vehicle when pulled over, and one for using his hazard lights unnecessarily, which add up to a total of $1,068 in fines.

The 6- and 10-year-olds were treated at a local community service centre after coming into contact with the pepper spray, then sent to a hospital for observation, missing two days of school.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the Châteauguay police department confirmed to the Gazette that pepper spray was used but couldn't provide more details.

Chilcott, who has no criminal record, told the Gazette he suspects he's targeted by police because he's black and wears a hoodie. If he's right about being targeted because of his race, he definitely isn't the first—police in Quebec have apparently built quite the reputation for racial profiling and a complaint system skewed in favour of the cops.

"I wonder about the training of these young officers," Chilcott told the Gazette. "Why are they sent out there alone? They should be with a senior officer who can properly train them. I'm fed up being targeted because of my skin colour or the way I dress."

Follow Jackie Hong on Twitter.

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