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The VICE Guide to the 2016 Election: Why Some Gun Lovers Still Aren’t Sold on Donald Trump

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This post originally appeared on the Trace.

In his bid for the Republican presidential nomination, Donald Trump has bucked party orthodoxy on everything from corporate taxes to nuclear proliferation. But on gun rights, the billionaire businessman sought from the early days of his campaign to establish his conservative credentials. In September, Trump pledged in a policy paper to stand up for the rights of "law-abiding gun owners" and expand concealed carry to all 50 states.

He has continued to speak out about gun rights while on the stump. "We're going to cherish the Second Amendment," Trump said during a May 7 campaign stop in Washington state. "We're going to take care of the Second Amendment."

But several prominent gun rights advocates say they aren't convinced that Trump is one of their own. As evidence, they cite comments he made before this election cycle: He expressed support for an assault-rifles ban, longer waiting periods to purchase a gun, and a ban on gun ownership for members of the terror watch list.

" now says he's a big supporter of people owning guns and supporting Second Amendment," Larry Pratt, the executive director emeritus of Gun Owners of America, told the Trace. "In tone that sounds like improvement, but we're withholding our endorsement until we get the specifics."

Bob Owens, editor of the website Bearing Arms, made his mind up months ago. In February, Owens declared that a Trump presidency would mean "the death of the Second Amendment." He has continued to blast Trump on Twitter:

Owens said in an email that he won't vote for Trump: " be leaving the presidential ballot blank, or attempting to find a third party candidate with values I can support."

Robert Farago is the publisher of the Truth About Guns, another popular gun rights site. In a post published Monday, he flagged Trump's comments in an interview with ABC's This Week,in which the real estate mogul told George Stephanopoulos that he "must stay true to his principles." Trump added that he is a conservative, but continued: "Don't forget this is called the Republican Party, not the Conservative Party."

Farago, who mused in early March about whether Trump was "an anti-gun rights dictator," posed a question to his readers: "As someone who values your Second Amendment protections, does that make you nervous?"

Not everyone in the gun rights community is as skeptical of Trump's Second Amendment credentials. On May 8, the Washington Times quoted several gun advocates who said they were ready to declare their support for the businessman. "Surely, since at least the campaign and maybe a little bit before, he's been very consistent on the gun issue," said John R. Lott Jr., a widely discredited gun researcher.

"I have not seen anything on the issue of guns that's caused me to hesitate with him," said Philip Van Cleave, president of the Virginia Citizens Defense League, a gun rights organization.

Gun Owners of America claims to represent 300,000 members, and in September, the controversial group threw its support behind Ted Cruz, an endorsement that the Texas senator flaunted during Republican primary debates. With Cruz out of the race, Pratt says he needs assurances from Trump before he would consider pledging his support. "I would like to frankly see him say that he's opposed to any ban on semi-automatic rifles and that he's at a minimum opposed to any expansion of the background check system," he said.

The most prominent gun rights organization in the US, the National Rifle Association, hasn't yet said whether or not it will endorse Trump, though the candidate will be speaking at the NRA-ILA Leadership Forum in two weeks, as part of the gun group's annual convention. The event is presented by Bearing Arms.


It's Not Just You, Most Millennials Are Bored at Work

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Haha Mondays, right? Or whatever. Fuck. Stock photo via Getty

Oh, millennials! What will you do next? How will we ever understand you? You are "emotional" about buying coffee, yet "bored with life." You love talking about polyamory, yet refuse to have sex with one another. You have become the most numerous generation in America, and companies are bending over backward to hire you, to sell to you, to catch your eye for just a fraction of a second before you resume scrolling mindlessly through the Instagram feed of someone you neither know nor like. How do you want to work and live? Everyone wants to know.

Fortunately, a new Gallup report, "How Millennials Want to Work and Live," should shed light on that question. There have been other reports and surveys like this before, and there will undoubtedly be more in the future, but for the moment, let us bask in the comforting glow of yet another poll purporting to tell us something new about millennials. And that new thing is: Millennials are bored at work.

There are other findings, including that millennials are less likely to be religious and more likely to get news from the internet, but everyone already knew that. The big takeaway is that 55 percent of millennials are "not engaged at work," with 16 percent being "actively disengaged," that presumably being the technical survey term for the kind of feeling you have where you just want to walk away from the cash register out into the street and see what happens.

These numbers aren't crazy different from those of other generations—more Gen Xers and baby boomers are actively disengaged from their jobs—but millennials have the lead when it comes to non-engagement at work. That's a big deal because for many millennials, those crazy kids, "work must have meaning. They want to work for organizations with a mission and purpose," according to the report's introduction. Fewer millennials tend to belong to churches or other religious bodies. We are less likely to marry young and burrow ourselves into family life, and we are even wary of declaring allegiance to a political party. Maybe it's because we've moved away from these traditional institutions that we are willing to give ourselves over to our jobs. Or maybe it's that a single man or woman must be in want of something that makes them feel like they are bettering the world. The world, after all, is pretty fucked, and it stands to reason that those who are going to inherit it want to attempt to fix it.

The report is mostly meant as a guide for employers looking to attract and retain millennials, who presumably are desirable because of their tech savvy, their supple young minds, and their small hands that can be used to help unjam machinery. Gallup's recommendations are that workplaces adapt their cultures to cater to millennials and their values, meaning that bosses should focus on clarifying the purpose of the work being done, give their young employees constant feedback, and—this is actually a refreshing suggestion—stop handing out infantilizing perks like pingpong tables in favor of making sure people are happy about their work.

But seen from the perspective of a millennial who is at work right now and pretty fucking disengaged, the picture is different. It's maybe nice in a way to know that it's not just you who toggles from Facebook to job listings to random Vines for hours on end, that there are millions of people like you who are feeling their youth slip away from them slowly to the soundtrack of a humming air conditioner. It's less nice to know that around 50 percent of Gen Xers and boomers are also not engaged, that your boredom is not actually just a symptom of a childish angst you'll grow out of. This is just the way the world is. Office Space is 17 years old, but if you updated the software and slang the characters used, that black, ennui-tinged workplace comedy could have come out yesterday. Jobs are grinding, they are dull, they are absurd, and they always have been, ever since some Mesopotamian paid another Mesopotamian to watch his sheep for a while.

Gallup found that most millennials are looking for, or at least open to, new job opportunities—and it's easy to see why. If you're young and unhappy, you imagine a better gig over the next hill that will make you a fulfilled, fresh, new person with a wardrobe of clothes that fit and a group of friends you universally like and admire. Instead of changing themselves, in other words, a lot of people think they can solve their problems by changing jobs. "For millennials, a job is no longer just a job—it's their life as well," writes Gallup CEO Jim Clifton in his intro to the report.

Maybe that's kinda the problem? A job isn't a life, after all—when millennials go home from work, engaged or not, they're still millennials, with all the problems that come from being young and wanting things. It's actually pretty OK to be disengaged from your job, to smirk at its illogic rather than being crushed by it. That's the whole idea behind the term day job, something that you can do in order to keep yourself under a roof without it defining you. That's not a bad thing! Not all jobs have a purpose, not all jobs should demand 100 percent of our energies. The sooner we all recognize that, the better.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

Comics: 'Ralphie and Jeanie's Home Brewery,' Today's Comic by Alabaster Pizzo

Meet the Innovators Challenging China's Fashion World on This Episode of 'STATES OF UNDRESS'

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Watch the entire sixth episode here or head to VICELAND.com to watch for free.

If you haven't already heard, we recently launched our very own TV channel called VICELAND, packed with shows that tell exciting stories from all over the world. Today we're excited to bring you the season finale of our fashion and travel series, STATES OF UNDRESS, streaming for free on the VICELAND website now.

The series follows host Hailey Gates as she explores fashion scenes from all over the world, addressing the issues that the industry often ignores and investigating what the rest of the world is wearing, and why.

On the season finale, Gates visits China, the world's manufacturing capital, to find out how the country is transitioning from making the world's goods to designing them. She heads to Beijing's elaborate government-run fashion week, meets modern designers who are using traditional Chinese craftsmanship, and finds out what it's like to work in one of China's factories.

Watch the episode above and watch free episodes of more VICELAND shows like WEEDIQUETTE,BALLS DEEP, and GAYCATION online now.

What Does It Mean to Be an Indigenous Man in 2016?

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Image via'Indigenous Men and Masculinities: Legacies, Identities, Regeneration'

What does it mean to be an Indigenous man? What seems like a simple question is really a complex and sensitive issue for Indigenous and non-Indigenous people across North America.

In the new book Indigenous Men and Masculinities: Legacies, Identities, Regeneration editors Robert Innes and Kim Anderson show the social attitudes and issues related to the complex idea of being an Indigenous man. In Canada, Indigenous men have shorter life spans, are less likely to graduate from high school, are more likely to be incarcerated, and are murdered at a higher rate compared to non-Indigenous Canadians.

It's not an easy topic for people both within and outside of Indigenous communities to talk about. It's not an easy topic to do an interview about either.

Innes is a Plains Cree member of Cowessess First Nation and an assistant professor in the Department of Native Studies at the University of Saskatchewan. He explained that he was teaching a class last year when former Aboriginal Affairs (now called Indigenous and Northern Affairs) Minister Bernard Valcourt told a gathering of First Nations chiefs that they knew who was killing Indigenous women: Indigenous men. Innes said he brought the issue up to his class, and the students, all Indigenous, said they had also faced violence in their lives but they were afraid to talk about the implications of the statistic.

"They said we don't want to talk about this because it will reinforce negative stereotypes of Native men. So there's this real reluctance to wanting to deal with this because the reality is, especially in Western Canada, white people are afraid of Native men," Innes said.

To find out why exploring Indigenous masculinity is such a difficult task, VICE spoke with Innes and contributor Robert Henry (in separate interviews). Henry is Métis, and while working on his PhD research explored the relationship between Indigenous male youth and street gangs, which is also the topic he explores in the book.

VICE: There is not a lot of research or conversation about what it means to be an Indigenous man or identify with Indigenous masculinities. Why is that?
Innes: This is a sensitive issue because it can perpetuate stereotypes. So how do you have these discussions about Indigenous masculinity without reinforcing ideas in the general population? One of the things we have to do as a society is recognize that Indigenous men are not inherently violent, right. If we don't come to accept that basic premise then it's going to be a real challenge to try and deal with people's fears. If we don't accept the fact that Indigenous men are not inherently violent then we can never deal with white people's fear and we can never deal with the fact that a big Native guy walking down the street is not dangerous, right.
Henry: I think that, in Canada, it's easier to look at it from a gendered perspective rather than a colonial perspective. It's for different reasons but it's that colonial notion of "it's in the past" and by focusing on Indigenous women, a lot of the emphasis can be on saying "it's Indigenous men causing the impacts" rather than connecting it to the formation of colonialism and colonization of Indigenous bodies as a whole. So what it does is it helps to absolve the settler-colonial history by just focusing on women, Indigenous women, rather than looking at Indigenous peoples.

This is not to say that we shouldn't look at Indigenous women or they shouldn't have a focus, because their experiences are different... It needs to be analyzed through a decolonizing perspective to understand how men contribute to that violence... It can't take movement away from the women. It needs to come in and they have to support one another at the same time.

Why is it an important time to discuss this?
Innes: We can see how issues of masculinity, the language around how we think men should act, is detrimental to the whole community—from children to elders to women to Two Spirit people.

For at least the last 40 years, Indigenous people have been really focusing on Indigenous rights and really if we can't get our house in order—issues with our social relations—it's going to be hard to assert our political relations in a meaningful way, in an effective way. I think that by having a much broader view of maleness, it can mean a lot more than we think it means. Femaleness can mean a lot more than we think it means. By setting that premise we start to open ourselves up to accepting each person as an individual and how we accept our identities.

Also we have to accept our shame. Shame is a big thing that we have to be able to deal with as Indigenous communities. We have to be able to talk about things that we have done and what has been done to us. We don't talk about it and we carry it around with us and it's weighing us down. Talking about masculinities and in terms of multiple ways of being masculine, now I think will hopefully add to the momentum that many people are experiencing in terms of trying to turn our communities around and trying to deal with dysfunction.
Henry: We construct spaces where kids in one part of a city, depending on their socio-economic status and their racial status, where two boys are fighting on the playground they are considered "boys being boys" because that's what boys do, they roughhouse.... When you look at another side of the city and you add that they are Aboriginal and they live in a marginalized, low socio-economic space then when the two boys are fighting they are not "boys being boys" they are boys becoming criminals or learning to become criminals. So right there, they are youths being labelled different. So how does understanding Indigenous masculinity help to change the way in which we view behaviours? But also how do we use this knowledge to shift policy.

What can the larger Canadian society take away from the book and the conversation?
Henry: I think to just question why is that? Why do we see individuals who are from ethnic minorities or lower socioeconomic status and assume that their behaviours are criminal? Why are they the ones that we are afraid of? We can look at this and how colonization and colonialism has come to impact relationships. We look at cultures of terror, cultures of fear, what is it that we are actually fearing? What has been created in which individuals have been prejudiced as evil monsters when we are acting the same way but we can validate our actions as being good.

Looking at it as individuals from outside, sit back and reflect on what are those notions of what it actually means to be a man, what does masculinity actually mean, and how does that begin to shift? Then we need to infuse that with the idea of patriarchy and understanding that masculinity and patriarchy are not the same thing but rather help inform one another at the same time.

create a space for these discussions to occur and to work from there so that we can start looking at why is it that Indigenous male youth are over-incarcerated? Why is it that Indigenous men have such a high incarceration rate? Start looking at the violence and why Indigenous men are more impacted by violence than any other group. Then ask how do we begin to address this. So it's not just about Indigenous males trying to figure out who they are but also non-Indigenous people in Canada and globally trying to understand how is it that I've come to be so fearful of Indigenous men and how do we begin to work together. Isn't that what reconciliation is all about—working together?

This interview has been edited for style and length.

Follow Geraldine Malone on Twitter.

What’s with These Video Game Sequels That Nobody Wanted?

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'Homefront: The Revolution' image via homefront-game.com

This article originally appears in VICE magazine, Volume 23, issue 3 (May 2016). Find more information here.

The Deep Silver-published, Dambuster Studios-developed first-person shooter Homefront: The Revolution will imminently be on shelves and in digital stores, releasing on May the 20th. The sequel to 2011's Homefront has been in varying states of development hell for most of its gestation, finally landing on Dambuster's doorstep in the summer of 2014, having been sold by Crytek to Deep Silver's parent company Koch Media and subsequently hit by release delays. Its background is the kind that's killed hundreds of projects before it, so credit where it's due for just getting something out.

I've not played the finished version of The Revolution, but my preview at Gamescom 2015 was so much hot garbage that I cancelled a pre-arranged interview with its team on account of not knowing what to ask that wasn't: seriously, now, this is it? It was one cliché of "open-world" FPS design after another, cribbing unashamedly from better games before it and painting the entire experience in several depressing shades of grey. It might be that Nottingham's Dambuster has executed an amazing turnaround and it will go down as one of 2016's bet-you-didn't-see-that-coming surprises. I sort of hope it does. But at the same time, the whole situation with this game coming out, and others not, makes me very sad indeed.

See, The Revolution doesn't feel anything like a wanted sequel. I've not sensed the slightest excitement for it. The first Homefront was met by mixed critiques, but its first-day sales were a healthy 375,000 in North America. Its synopsis, of unified Korean forces invading and occupying the US just a decade from now, struck a chord with stateside gamers. Less so those in South Korea, where it was banned, but publisher THQ still reported 2.6 million units shipped globally after two months. Now, if it was a Capcom production, that might just about qualify it for sequel consideration. In 2014, Street Fighter V producer Yoshinori Ono commented: "If a game doesn't sell over two million copies, then we'd have to put the brakes on a sequel. All that means is that we weren't capable enough."

Apply Capcom's business model to the makers of Homefront , the long-dead Kaos Studios, and we can conclude that they were barely capable. And barely capable experiences aren't something we should be welcoming more of. Ubisoft's Watch Dogs, released in May 2014 after its hype had reached a deafening peak, was another such game. A soulless virtual version of Chicago was the joyless playground for an investigation into human trafficking and computer hackers, the player controlling the growling drone of Aiden "The Vigilante" Pearce. Imagine taking the colourful chaos of a modern GTA title, stripping all the fabulous fun from it, and then presenting it as the future of video gaming: that was Watch Dogs. And at this summer's E3 conference in Los Angeles, it's widely anticipated that Ubisoft will confirm development of the game's much-rumoured sequel, another that slots straight into my bracket of follow-ups that nobody truly wanted (surely).

Article continues after the video below

We discuss the making of 'The Jungle Book' with filmmaker Jon Favreau

With no main series Assassin's Creed title coming this fourth quarter – there's a movie, though – slipping Watch Dogs 2 out this side of Christmas makes financial sense for Ubisoft, and they'll look to the sales of the first game – ten million copies shipped by the end of 2014 – as evidence of demand. But Watch Dogs enjoyed a fantastic pre-release promotional period, without precedent – the game looked great in early, pre-order-encouraging footage; its hack-everything mechanic seemed hugely innovative; and the demand was there, after the sun-kissed shenanigans of the 2013-released Grand Theft Auto V, for another realistic-enough open world. But moods soured when the retail Watch Dogs appeared to have downgraded visuals, and the whole thing was about as much fun as practising keepie-uppies with a shit-smeared brick. Its sequel does not have the advantage of being a brand-new IP with player expectations undetermined.

There are more sequels coming, to games that hardly set the landscape alight with their commercial performance, player appeal or critical response. Does the world really need the already troubled Dead Island 2? Does it fuck, given the first game, of 2011, was another summarised as Great On Paper, Shite In Practice. The jury's even out on Mirror's Edge Catalyst, the imminent sequel-cum-reboot after 2008's EA DICE-developed original, which was beautiful in motion but hard to love, with its first-person parkour never allowing any true environmental freedom. Sales of "just" 2.5 million for its predecessor positions Catalyst as a risk for its publisher, Electronic Arts – it could be the most gorgeous flop of 2016. (The beta wasn't exactly encouraging.)

Related: Dear Criterion, Can We Have a New Burnout, Please?

A better-reviewed game of 2008, from the same publisher, was open-world racer Burnout Paradise, the at-present final (main series) entry in Criterion Games' carnage-encouraging franchise. So, why isn't that line of games, with 15 million copies sold, making a comeback? The demand is there – yet Criterion is adamant that it's moving away from the cars-and-crashes market, so the IP remains in limbo. The same can be said of a handful of other greatly anticipated but (as yet) unconfirmed successors to wildly revered titles – Half-Life 3 has been jokingly "confirmed" countless times, but never officially, and Beyond Good & Evil 2 has apparently been in development, with no end in sight, since 2008.

There's hope for one massively anticipated but entirely speculative to date sequel, though. Ever since it was taken to the hearts of gamers globally, a follow-up proper to Rockstar's epic Western Red Dead Redemption has been dearly wished for. And a map of what is allegedly its playable world, leaked to NeoGAF in April, appears to be the first tangible proof that the GTA-makers are going to reveal Red Dead 2. That could be as soon as E3, which would really piss on Ubisoft's already rather muted parade. A cowboy spinning six-shooters on the back of a steed, or a trenchcoat-clad bore with an unhealthy attachment to his smartphone? I know which role I'd rather play for a tens-of-hours new adventure.

@MikeDiver

More Video Games Killed the Radio Star columns:

Why It Pays to Keep the Video Gaming Trolls at Bay

Discussing the Benefits of Video Gaming Behind Bars with an Ex-Con

What's a Man Got to Do to Get a Decent Resident Evil These Days?

The VICE Morning Bulletin

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Barack Obama. Photo via Pixabay.

Everything you need to know about the world this morning, curated by VICE.

US News

Obama to Issue Directive on Transgender Bathrooms
President Obama will issue a decree to make sure public schools allow transgender students to use bathrooms and locker rooms matching their chosen gender identity. A letter will be sent to all public school districts today. "There is no room in our schools for discrimination of any kind," said Attorney General Loretta Lynch.—The New York Times

Trump's Butler Questioned By Secret Service
The US Secret Service has announced it will investigate Anthony Senecal, Donald Trump's former butler, who wrote that President Obama should be hanged for "treason!!!" Senecal's Facebook page also includes a post in which he wrote that Obama "should have been taken out by our military."—The Washington Post

Shell Investigating Massive Oil Leak in Gulf of Mexico
Around 88,200 gallons of oil leaked from a Shell flow line into the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday, according to the US Coast Guard. Chief Petty Officer Bobby Nash said the leak has now been secured and the cleanup has begun. Shell is investigating the cause of the leak, but said it was not the result of drilling.—AP

US Planning Month of Deportation Raids
Immigration officials are planning a month-long series of raids to deport hundreds of Central American mothers and children found to have entered the US illegally. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement "surge" would likely be the largest deportation sweep so far this year.—VICE News

International News

Leading Hezbollah Commander and Israeli Target Killed in Syria
Mustafa Badreddine, one of Hezbollah's most senior commanders, has been killed in Syria. The Lebanon-based Shia military organization said he died in an explosion near Damascus airport. Lebanon's al-Mayadeen TV initially blamed an Israeli air strike, but Hezbollah said it was yet to determine who was responsible.—BBC News

Shooting and Bombing Kill 16 in Iraq
Three gunmen opened fire on a cafe in the Shia town of Balad in northern Iraq, killing at least 12 and wounding 25. The attackers sprayed machine gun fire from their cars before driving away. Four security personnel died in a separate attack at a nearby market early on Friday when a suicide bomber detonated an explosive vest.—Reuters

Brazil's New President Calls for Trust After Predecessor's Impeachment
Interim President Michel Temer called on Brazilians to trust his government of "national salvation," after his predecessor Dilma Rousseff was suspended for breaking budget laws. Temer, leader of the PMDB party, has named a new, business-friendly cabinet.—The Guardian

South African Miners Sue Over Lung Disease
A decision by South Africa's high court has cleared the way for former gold miners to bring a class action lawsuit against the country's mining companies over damage to their health. The ex-miners claim they contracted silicosis, an incurable lung disease, after many years working in the gold mines.—CNN


Apple has invested in a major Uber rival in China. Photo via Flickr.

Everything Else

Apple Invests in Uber Rival
Apple has invested $1bn in Didi Chuxing, the ride-hailing service with a bigger market share than Uber in China. Chief executive Tim Cook said it would help Apple "learn more" about the Chinese market.—The Wall Street Journal

George Zimmerman Gun Removed from Auction Sites
A second firearms auction website has removed a listing for the gun George Zimmerman used to kill teenager Trayvon Martin. It was pulled from UnitedGunGroup.com, having initially being pulled by GunBroker.com.—CBS News

Chance the Rapper Drops New Mixtape
Chance the Rapper has released his third mixtape project, called Coloring Book. It features his new track "No Problem" and a host of big-name collaborators including Future, Kayne West and Justin Bieber.—Rolling Stone

Millennials Most Bored at Work
A new Gallup report shows that millennials are the generation least engaged at work and most likely to be looking for new jobs. The report says millennials grew up believing that "work must have meaning."—VICE

Done with reading today? Watch our new video 'We Go Inside Toronto's Illegal Edible Market'

Meet the Bouncers of Camgirl Chatrooms

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All photos by Luis Mora

On a Tuesday night, Toronto's most popular camgirl strolls around her downtown condo preparing her two-month-old ragdoll kitten Mozzarella's specialized raw food while wearing a tight grey dress and thigh-high socks before she goes live around 9:30. Previous to getting naked for thousands of strangers in front of a webcam, she worked at EB Games and, at one point, had a negative bank account balance. Today, she has a legion of adoring fans, a mortgage, is clearing six figures a year with no need for a side hustle, and is planning to retire at 30.

But while success stories like Cortana Blue's—whose moniker is a reference to a hologram AI character from Halo—can be credited to a sense of personal branding and business skills, there are other people working behind the scenes to help some camgirls do their jobs. These are moderators (or "mods," as they're referred to in the industry), who effectively act as the bouncers of their chatrooms.

Cortana works on Chaturbate, which is one of the most popular sites for camming. But unlike some sites where chatrooms are a free-for-all, Chaturbate allows models to grant users moderator status. When you're "modded," your responsibility is to silence and remove people who spew inappropriate comments, threats, and requests.

"As a new camgirl on Chaturbate, you are like a ripe peach waiting at the supermarket for all these creepy guys to come and grab—that's how I felt," Cortana told me as we hung out at her condo. "Right away my first night, this guy was like, 'Cortana, you need a mod.'"

But that first mod didn't work out. When Cortana started blowing up, he turned on her, claiming that since she got her boob job, she "really changed" and now only cared about money. "Tons of my mods have gone AWOL or fucking nuts," Cortana told VICE. To date, that first mod still harasses her on social media.

But on and off cam, like on Twitter, Cortana's current mods are what she calls her "white knights." And other than the closeness she has experienced with her mods outside of her room, some have become tight with each other. "It's a sense of community—imagine working with someone, you start to become friends with them because you're in there at work with them every day, you're talking about the same shit," she explained.

Cortana currently has 15 mods, including a handful she considers to be her most dedicated. As I watched her go live on cam, it became clear to me how pro Cortana's moderators were as five of them worked in tandem expertly guarding over her room. Barely a minute passed without someone saying some sus shit, but within the blink of an eye, offensive words disappeared. To find out more about why some people choose to work free of charge as bouncers of camgirl rooms, VICE reached out to some of Cortana's top mods.

_sb_

Average hours per week: 15

VICE: Why do you enjoy modding for Cortana?
_sb_: Because it's for Corty. I would do anything—within reason —to help her.

Do you mod for anyone else or would you?
I do not currently, and I have no plans to do so in the future. I didn't set out to be Cortana's mod. I was a regular, and we had been chatting for a while, so she asked me if I wanted to. While I was honoured, I actually turned her down. But then one night her regular mods couldn't make it, and she asked me to help out. Of course I was happy to do so, and I really thought it was just a one-night thing, but she left me "modded" ever since. Although my new job may limit the time I can spend in Corty's room in the future, I will continue to mod for her as long as she wants me to.

What are some things you have to silence in Cortana's chatroom?
Contrary to popular belief, I do not take enjoyment out of silencing people. I would much rather be able to sit back leisurely and just participate. I silence anything against the rules of the room, typically it's posts from spambots and anyone who is derogatory to Corty—she gets upset sometimes because she wants to confront someone who I've silenced. Unlike a lot of other top models, Corty leaves the "greys" on (a derogatory term used to describe people in the chat room who have not tipped and have no tokens, they are designated by their grey colour, and you can keep them out of the chat if you choose) primarily because she truly likes to talk to people. However, because of this, a lot of anonymous people open accounts and use them to spew some of the most vile things I've ever heard.

It's not limited to her chatroom either. I really wish I could mod her email and Twitter so she didn't have to see it. But Corty does not back down and does not allow people to mistreat her, so she responds to all the hate while most would just ignore or block. There has been a persistent troll lately who has been disrupting the room. It's disappointing that a grown man would act like that, but as with everything she doesn't let it get to her and she deals with it head on.

How would you describe your relationship with Cortana when she's not on cam?
At this point, I text with Corty on a daily basis. I truly consider Cortana a friend. When I first discovered Chaturbate, I was at a really lonely point in my life. I had perused a number of rooms, but when I saw Cortana on the front page, I was instantly drawn in. After my first visit I was fan. I always tell her, I came for your beauty but I stayed for your personality. I didn't even have a Chaturbate account at that point, I just "creeped" her room, but every time she would bring a smile to my face, and that meant a lot to me. I wanted to show my appreciation and spoil her, so I ended up clearing out her entire wish list (author's note: this included every sex toy on her list, a PS4, an expensive purse, a Roomba, and more). We started emailing each other, and our conversations were definitely not superficial.

Do you have any plans to meet Cortana IRL?
Nothing solidified at this time, but we've discussed it. Corty and may be vacationing in NYC this summer, so that would provide an opportunity. Alternatively, I may go up to Toronto for a weekend for a Jays game. It's still crazy to me that I can feel such a strong connection with someone I've never met face to face. She knows all about me, including photos I've sent her. We have joked about Facetiming, but it feels a little awkward having that be our first meeting. I'm not sure where I'll be in the years to come, but I would like to think that my friendship with Corty would continue no matter what. If you had told me that this would happen seven months ago, I would've thought you were crazy, but I'm really glad it did.

mykittycat

Average hours per week: 15

VICE: Why do you mod Cortana's room?
mykittycat: It happened as a favour, really. She had gotten to know me as a regular in her room, and one night she was on and she was shorthanded with mods to help control the relentless greys. I offered to help her out that night and have continued to help mod since. I'm her only female mod, so I think I have a different perspective and am more protective in certain aspects. I think it helps keep a good balance in chat, and she has another woman having her back. She's totally fun to hang out with, her room has a cool vibe, and she's super funny and entertaining. A lot of models are one-dimensional, but Cortana has a lot to offer. She's obviously beautiful, but also a talented singer and guitar player, is super into video games, and has a great personality as well. For most of the viewers in her room, she's the total package.

How close are you with Cortana outside of her camming?
Pretty close. We have the hometown connection, live relatively close to each other, and share a lot of the same interests outside of cam. We text daily, as well as sometimes have group text chats with another of her mods, _sb_. He and I get along well and usually enjoy some banter during chat.

Cortana mentioned that she was planning on meeting up with you soon. Can you tell me what you two plan on doing?
We are planning on going to dinner and a Blue Jays game at the end of this month, as well as going to the CNE (Canadian National Exhibition) this summer. And of course I'm sure we'll fit in an epic shopping spree at Sephora at some point!

menace626

Average hours per week: 20

VICE: Why did you choose to mod for Cortana?
menace626: I like modding for Cortana because of her sassy personality. She's the type of camgirl who doesn't take disrespect from users, and she's always honest with her viewers.

How often do you keep in touch outside of her cam sessions?
Cortana and I don't talk a lot outside of —just a few conversations randomly, they're usually about Drake. I'm a 21-year-old college student with a job, so I barely have enough time for my closest friends right now. Hopefully Cortana and I become good friends this year as I've learned we have similar interests like Drake, Lady Gaga, and the Toronto Blue Jays.

How many other models have you modded for?
I just mod in Cortana's room right now, and I've modded for approximately 20 models.

What kind of shit do you have to silence in her room?
On most nights, the usual demands like "show feet" or "show boobs." Sometimes I have to silence people who ask Cortana questions that can be answered in her bio. The worst things said in her room are insults about her body, guys asking her on dates, and haters posting her personal information in the chat.

starkofwinterfell

Average hours per week: 5-10

VICE: Why do you like modding for Cortana?
starkofwinterfell:
I'm not sure "like" is the term I would use—perhaps endure is more accurate. I enjoy spending time with Cortana and a host of the chat regulars, but moderating is more of a duty than a hobby.

Do you mod for any other models on Chaturbate?
Not currently, but I regularly get offers from other models. I've modded a few other rooms, but never for as long or as regularly.

What types of shit do you look out for in her room?
Rulebreakers, the entitled, the abusive, trolls, and random incomprehensible nonsense.

How would you describe your relationship with Cortana outside of her room?
We are buddies. We tweet and DM basically every day.

Interviews have been edited for length, clarity, and style.

Follow Allison Elkin on Twitter.

Follow Luis Mora on Instagram.


We Asked a Psychiatrist Why We’re So Obsessed with the Dog Filter

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Everyone looks cuter as a pupper! Photos by the author

Like many people my age, I'm a habitual Snapchatter. I snap myself on the bus, dancing at work, dancing at home, making flirty faces at the camera, eating food. I like to think I'm pretty funny (not sure it resonates with others, but I can hope), and I try to share that attempt at humour with the world at least five to six times a day in the form of 10-second videos.

But what would social media be without altering reality? As someone who's always had serious body image issues, I've had a very hard time posting photos or videos of myself in the raw. If they haven't been edited, they've been cropped. If they haven't been cropped, they've been edited. If they haven't had either, they're not posted, because, compared to the rest of the competition, plain old me just isn't that flattering.

It's not uncommon for a friend to say, "This isn't my angle," or see them delete 98 of the 100 selfies they took because the lighting revealed a blemish that wasn't supposed to be shown. While we all want to show ourselves off, we only want the best parts to be seen. Curious about that need for constant broadcasting, I asked Dr. Corrine Carlisle, a psychiatrist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto, about Snapchat, the beloved dog filter, and our unending thirst for likes.

VICE: I'll start off by asking the obvious. Do you use Snapchat?
Dr. Carlisle: I don't. I'm not a social media user at all.

Right. I provided you with some photos of the filters on me. Did you get a chance to look at them?
I did! They were very unique. didn't have that, and it's being thrust upon you guys abruptly.

Follow Jake Kivanc on Twitter.

Life Inside: What I’ve Learned as a Jail Doctor

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Life Inside is an ongoing collaboration between the Marshall Project and VICE that offers first-person perspectives from those who live and work in the criminal justice system.

I've never seen so many hand injuries in my life. Sprained fingers, bruised and swollen flesh—all blooming around an abundance of tattoos.

Inmates' injuries almost inevitably stem from anger: They can't make bail; their court dates are postponed; their family doesn't pick up the phone when they call. So they punch a wall, or the steel doors of their cells. Sometimes they punch one another. (Incidentally, facial injuries are pretty common, too.)

But hand injuries are easy. An x-ray, an ACE bandage, some ibuprofen, and the inmate is sent on his way.

This is what I've learned as a physician at a city jail, where I work the urgent care line: There is a lot of minor trauma. There is plenty of acid reflux wrought by the greasy foods served at the chow hall, and back pain exacerbated by the large concrete blocks that pass for beds here. There is anxiety masquerading as chest pain, uncontrolled blood sugars in Type 2 diabetics, and skin infections that evolve into abscesses.

These are common problems. They are, ultimately, easy.

I thought Jay would be easy, too.

Several days before I saw him, Jay had stumbled off the street into a local emergency room, driven to temporary madness by a cocktail of illegal uppers and downers. According to the discharge paperwork in his file, he detoxed for a few hours and was then bundled up and transferred here. And jail protocol—there's a protocol for everything—mandates a physician follow-up for any inmate who's been recently hospitalized.

I hoped for a straightforward appointment. My shift was almost over, and there were still eight other patients on my list after Jay. His file detailed dozens of brief jail stints over the previous few years; I skimmed it and then asked a nearby officer to call him down. Nonviolent inmates are permitted to wander the halls with relative freedom, so Jay would travel from his unit to the medical floor unescorted.

He entered the exam room sheepishly, and sat on the hard plastic chair facing me, arms crossed, head down. Like many of my patients, he was a young black man in a green jumpsuit and bright orange sandals. Officers in black uniforms wandered around in the hallway behind him. For some reason, the exam room was set up so the inmates sat between me and the open door—between me and the bright red panic button. But I've never felt compelled to press it.

"Hi, Jay, I'm Dr. Moore. It looks like you were at the hospital recently. How are you feeling now?"

"Not good," he responded quietly, though he looked fine. Clean and clear-eyed, with no telltale signs of withdrawal or stigmata from the various substances he'd apparently ingested and injected a few days before.

"Why's that?"

"I'm in jail."

I've dealt with plenty of smart-asses in here before. "But what happened at the hospital? How are you recovering from that?"

"You know, I was messed up. I don't even remember most of it."

Even though the hospital never performed a confirmatory drug screen, Jay had admitted to using meth and heroin to the physicians there. "I went there to get clean," he continued, looking up at me. "I've been messed up for a long time. I just wanted them to send me to rehab."

"Do you know when you get out?" Maybe this was just an overnight stay, I thought, or a minor probation violation; maybe he'd be released soon.

"Who knows. I think I'm going to prison."

If Jay had shown up on the doorstep of the ER simply disoriented and intoxicated, that would have been the end of it. Instead, he still had leftover drugs in his pocket, so the police got involved.

"I begged the cops not to search me. I begged them to just ignore the drugs. Just let me go to rehab, man." Jay didn't seem angry or sad; he had an air of contrition and resignation that was very familiar to me.

In residency, I'd spent one month shadowing physicians at the Administrative Maximum Facility in rural Colorado—an infamous federal supermax prison. I'd seen a similar expression on the face of a white supremacist there. He had "WHITE POWER" inked across his forehead, boasted a violent and prolific rap sheet, and was haunted by countless other demons he didn't believe he could escape. When I met him, he had been due for release soon, and told me through a glass partition that he planned on spending the rest of his life in a secluded cabin in the mountains. He'd simply accepted it, and would choose to live accordingly.

I wished that Jay had come in trembling from lingering heroin withdrawal. That was something I could treat: some hydroxyzine, some clonidine, a cup of Gatorade. Easy.

"You're gonna lose Medicaid while you're in here," I told him. "You have to get insured again as soon as you get out. You have to establish care with a doctor. They can help you get into rehab."

Besides my job at the jail, I moonlight as a primary-care doctor at a safety-net clinic, working alongside social workers, case managers, patient navigators, and psychologists. I've had my fair share of patients with addiction, and have guided them with varying success into community rehabilitation. But all of those resources are scarce inside, and there is no drug treatment—only detox.

I glanced at Jay's intake form, which listed his diagnoses and medications. It was blank. "Looks like you didn't give any medical history," I said. "Do you have any medical problems?"

"I'll tell you, but please, please don't just tell me to send a $7 kite to talk about it later," he said. Correctional healthcare may be constitutionally guaranteed, but every new appointment request—or "kite"—costs the inmate $7. "I've got hypertension. When I've been here before, they've put me on water pills."

I got up and checked his blood pressure, which was elevated. Most inmates have high blood pressure. Easy.

"Can I get a low-salt diet, too?" he asked. "I always get a low-salt diet when I'm in here." I scribbled the orders into his chart. Hydrochlorothiazide, daily blood pressure checks, and a low-sodium diet. He stood up and quietly thanked me as he left.

It was the least that I could do. It was literally all I could do. Easy, I guess.

Alia Moore is a primary-care doctor in Colorado. She has worked at a city jail for eight months, and also works part-time at a local "safety net" hospital. Her research focuses on healthcare continuity for men and women being released from prison.

Woody Allen’s Plush Treatment by the Media Should Be the Talk of Cannes

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For the next 12 days, the center of the cinematic universe shifts to the sunny resort town of Cannes, France, just as it has nearly every May since the Great War. There, the most famous filmmakers and daring motion picture artists will unveil what attendees and organizers, professionals and enthusiasts, all hope will be the newest addition to whatever canon the cinema has been able to cobble together during its century of existence.

The 50 or so films in the various competitive sections of the Cannes Film Festival's official selection—Main Competition, Un Certain Regard, Short Films—and its sidebars—Director's Fortnight and Semaine de la Critiques—are just the tip of the iceberg. A massive industrial infrastructure grinds underneath the glitz of red-carpet premieres and all-night yacht parties, and another 4,000 films from all over the world are on sale in the festival's massive marketplace, the marché du film, while an expected 40,000 accredited guests roam the festival buying and selling, hustling and striving—not unlike the character at the center of Woody Allen's latest film, Café Society, which premiered Wednesday at the festival's opening ceremony.

The opening was accompanied by the return of the sexual abuse allegations against the director, thanks to a damning op-ed by Allen's son, Ronan Farrow, published by the Hollywood Reporter that morning. And the claims seem unlikely to go away any time soon, making it hard to focus on the aesthetic and moral significance of Allen's newest motion picture, which has screened four times over the past 36 hours in these glamorous, darkened salles of the Palais du CinemaIt.

Opinions about the film are mixed, but there is something else in the air. That's understandable, given the gravity of the abuse claims made by Allen's daughter Dylan. As Ronan Farrow astutely points out, those claims have been largely glossed over by reporters and news outlets that remain vulnerable to PR machines determined to wash away the sins of powerful men. Allen might be the only auteur to open the Cannes Film Festival three times, but he's also a man who has been accused of sneaking into his young daughter's bed "in the middle of the night" and "forcing her to suck his thumb," according to his son's op-ed.

At a press lunch in Cannes, the 80-year-old director refused to comment on "that silly situation," saying that he has "so moved on that I never think about it," and prefers to focus on his work, which has been a staple of the prestigious French festival.

Allen's previous festival openers, the unlikely box-office behemoth Midnight in Paris and the flaccid, Cannes-set A Hollywood Ending, weren't the strongest premieres, but his newest effort finds him in his best Cannes form since 2005's Match Point debuted at the fest.

Unabashedly novelistic, Café Society tells the story of a young Jewish man's professional successes and romantic disappointments in both Los Angeles and New York during the years just before World War II. Allen's career-long concerns—the existential and romantic quandaries of Jews in a Goyish world and the plucky travails of strivers who learn to be careful what they wish for—find an elegant recapitulation in the director's first digital feature, with Jesse Eisenberg perfectly rendering the neurotic, self-effacing cadences of Allen's trademark style of speech in the film's lead role.

"I'm happy for the actors to use their own words, happy for actors to change sentences and make them their own," Allen remarked before Wednesday evening's premiere. He suggested the degree to which the actors find themselves at the mercy of his very specific writing has loosened as he's grown older.

Narrated by Allen himself in the third person, the movie centers on Bobby Dorfman (Eisenberg), the son of a struggling Bronx jeweler, who moves west to work for Phil Stern, his movie agent uncle (Steve Carrell). While moving from doing odd jobs at the agency to a studio script reader, Dorfman falls under the spell of a redheaded Nebraskan shiksa named Vonnie (Kirsten Stewart), with whom Stern has been having an affair.

After Vonnie chooses his older, well-heeled uncle over him, Bobby moves back east, where he finds success running a nightclub for his brother Ben (Corey Stoll). He marries an Oklahoma blonde (Blake Lively), has a child, and takes over ownership of the club after Ben, an unrepentantly violent gangster, is put in the electric chair at Sing Sing for pouring concrete over one too many undesirable men.

As cloistered in a nostalgic past as his other recent, less successful works, Café Society is carefully lensed by the legendary Italian cinematographer Vittorio Storaro. The film is Allen's first to be shot digitally, but it has lost none of the beauty found in his recent clunkers Magic in the Moonlight and Irrational Man. Eisenberg isn't much of a leading man, but he's rarely found a more appropriate role and, as evidenced in films like The Squid and the Whale and The End of the Tour, he can be surprisingly effective when surrounded by able supporting players.

Not so much a Hollywood satire as a remembrance of a particularly Jewish bi-coastiality of the 1930s, the film offers a portrait of a family Allen has hinted at in other productions, but has rarely delivered with such panoramic aplomb. From communist academics and charming mobsters, to brash movie execs and working-class stiffs, the film oscillates wildly between comedy and melodrama, Borscht Belt humor, and gentle sentimentality.

As Allen continues to tread familiar waters in his late work, one wonders if he'll ever have the courage to tackle head on, in film, the mess he's made of his family's all-too public life.

Follow Brandon Harris on Twitter.

Ten-Year-Olds Told Us About Their Ideal Parties, and They Sound Pretty Great

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A photo from VICE Netherlands' actual ten-year anniversary party, by Raymond Van Mil

This article originally appeared on VICE Netherlands.

The parties that most adults throw are boring—whether you're a grandma celebrating your 60th or a freshman throwing a rager to celebrate the end of the semester, what most parties boil down to are some booze, some music, and at least one drunken idiot throwing up all over your favorite pair of shoes.

Our colleagues at VICE Netherlands recently celebrated their ten-year anniversary, so to get a fresh perspective on how to throw the best party ever, they decided to pick the tiny and unspoiled brains of a bunch of ten-year-olds.

Anouschka



"I want to have a party on an island, where you have snow on one side of the island and sun on the other side. So anyone who wants to sunbathe can do that, and anyone who wants to have a snowball fight can do that as well. I'll invite all my classmates, except the kids I don't like.

I think it would be fun to get a few piggy banks filled with money, and smash them to pieces and throw them against the wall. If the party is for my birthday, I'd actually like to get a lot of money. I'm saving up for a new bicycle, because the bike I have now makes a really loud squeaking noise.

I'd also like it if there were red and green cards hidden in the piggy banks. If you smash a piggy bank that has a red card inside, you have to stand against the wall, and everyone at the party gets to throw a pie in your face. And if you get the green card, you can pick out a present yourself. At night, there will be fireworks, and I'll set some off myself as well. But everyone has to wear special goggles, for safety."

Cherlindrea



"I would like to celebrate my birthday in a really big villa, and I'd invite more than two hundred people. I'd invite everyone from Year Six and also from Year Five, because I also play a lot with those kids. And I'm going to invite my whole family. The party starts at noon and doesn't end until five the next morning.

There's going to be a dance floor, and there will be a big buffet table with lots of different kinds of candy. And there will be a play area where you can climb around and stuff. I'm going to hire some makeup artists for the girls at the party, who love makeup—to make them extra pretty. For the boys, I'll hire someone that can give them boxing lessons because a lot of the boys are talking about boxing these days, so I think they'll find that interesting.

I'm also going to ask DJ Tiësto and DJ Hardwell if they have the time to come to my party as well. In the evening, my grandfather can come by to make some dinner because he used to work as a cook on a ship, and he cooks very professional things. At the end of the party, the girls will be brought back home with a pink limo and the boys in a black limo."

Jesse



"I'd like to celebrate my birthday on an island one day—the Caribbean islands, for example. I'd get all my friends and family to come, and we'd all eat French fries there or pancakes. You get to choose whatever you want to eat. And there is a bar where you can get drinks—you can order a Coke or a Sprite, but also just water. Oh, and milk!

I really like DJ Hardwell, so he can come to my party as well. There will be a disco as well where we all just let loose and party. And you can play games, like musical chairs and limbo dancing, and a race with those bouncing kangaroo balls where you have to go as fast as you can. At night, we'll have a bunch of fireworks, and after that everyone flies home again by plane."

Eden



"I want to have a slumber party at my place. There should be a lot of things to do, because otherwise the party will just be boring, and you should be having fun at a party. What I'd like to do is jump in a canal somewhere and swim with my friends. Some kids think that's gross, but I think it's nice. My birthday is during the summer, so that's perfect.

And I just thought of who else should be coming! Herman Boon, he's a comedian that makes a lot of funny jokes. And afterward, we're going to eat French fries at a restaurant. And then we're going to party until noon the next day. We can just chill a bit in the morning. And my mom can take care of the breakfast, because she's very good at setting the table."

Dennis


"My party would start at amusement park De Efteling, and I'd want to go on a roller coaster that passes under water and over and around people's houses. And at the end, the roller coaster drives straight into a pool, and then afterward it takes you to a very fancy restaurant where you can eat a lot of food. Like French fries, pizza, pancakes, and lasagne.

All my friends are invited, but everyone at VICE can come as well. How many people work there? We're going to play shuffleboard, and there will be a dartboard and a football field. Later, we'll get on a hot-air balloon and afterward there will be a disco. DJ's like Martin Garrix, Armin van Buuren, and Hardwell will play, but Robbie Williams can drop by as well. After the party, a limo takes everyone home—a black one with tinted windows, with a bar inside."

The New Anti-Vaping Rules Are Making My Life with Schizophrenia Harder

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Photo by Anadolu Agency via Getty

I was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia four years ago and have been picking myself up off the floor every day since. I was prescribed some medication that ruined my life, and then I was prescribed some medication that didn't ruin my life as much (I could see after the fourth antipsychotic I tried, at least, which was a definite plus).

I have spent the time since trying to figure out how to bridge the gap between myself, a medicated schizophrenic, and everyone else who works in my office. Yes, I'm a paranoid schizophrenic who has had a real corporate job for nearly nine years.

I smoked cigarettes long before I was diagnosed. I started carrying packs in my purse when I was around 16 years old. I didn't know at the time that the smoking had to do with a mental illness; I just assumed that I had picked up the disgusting habit because both my parents, my siblings, and all my friends smoked. As it turns out, according to studies from researchers around the world, people who have schizophrenia smoke more heavily than those who don't. Approximately 65 percent of schizophrenics in the US smoke, compared to 19 percent of the general population, according to a 2013 study.

From my experience, it was clear that nicotine lessened the sedating effects of my anti-psychotic medication; a 2005 study conducted by German researchers confirms that this isn't just true for me. "Nicotine seems to improve cognitive functions critically affected in schizophrenia, in particular sustained attention, focused attention, working memory, short-term memory, and recognition memory," the authors of the study wrote. "There is substantial evidence that nicotine could be used by patients with schizophrenia as a 'self-medication' to improve deficits in attention, cognition, and information processing and to reduce side effects of antipsychotic medication."

In other words, if schizophrenics smoke, we can get part of our existence back—the part that anti-psychotic medication covers up with its zombie-fied sanity blanket. Wouldn't you want that? I mean, we could also get lung cancer and die, but if we don't take our medication, we have a 15 percent chance of committing suicide. The meds are all we have, and nicotine is all we have to keep the meds in check.

After ten years of smoking a pack a day, plus two years without nicotine after quitting cold turkey—at which point, under major stress, I had myself committed to a mental institution—I picked up an electronic vaping device and haven't looked back. For three years, despite inflating prices and negative press about the culture of people who vape, vaping has been my most viable means of daytime survival.

Without nicotine and coffee, it is extremely difficult—near impossible—to survive a full-time day job while medicated. I would be slurring my words, struggling to focus, falling asleep at my desk, and failing to remember to do something my boss told me to do five minutes earlier. In other words, I would be fired.

There's a lot of controversy around the safety of vaping, but it can't be worse than smoking, and this way I no longer have to smell like an ashtray. So I choose it as an alternative, in an effort to achieve some semblance of normalcy. I will continue to choose it, no matter how difficult it may become to continue vaping.

Last Thursday, in response to the rising number of American teens using electronic smoking devices, or e-cigarettes, officials from the FDA announced sweeping new rules that will extend federal regulations to the entire vaping industry. Manufacturers will now be required to submit all products for FDA approval—a costly process that some suppliers say will put them out of business.

Of course, there are a handful of companies that have the means to go through the federal approval process, and perhaps prevent the total death of vaping. But it's likely that smaller vape companies—and therefore many vape shops—will fail as a result of the new regulations. In fact, that seems to be the FDA's goal: to regulate by minimizing the number of vape shops that exist; Mitch Zeller, head of the FDA's Center for Tobacco Products, told USA Today last week that he "expects consolidation in the number and type of products and vape shops."

Aside from the sheer inconvenience I'll experience if my local vape shop closes, consolidation of e-cigarette manufacturers will likely lead to an increase in prices. I also worry that the downsizing will limit the development of new products, and the improvement of available ones.

You would think that some consideration would be given to the quality of life of those who need this stimulant in order to not pass out at our desks. But no one seems to be thinking about us. No one has tried to make it easier for schizophrenics to access vaping in light of the oncoming regulations; attempts to use nicotine in pharmaceuticals have been rare, even though there's abundant evidence that it can help with a variety of illnesses.

The president, celebrities—hell, everyone in America—likes to brag about how much they care that May is Mental Health Awareness Month. But the truth is, this month the government made a decision that directly affects the schizophrenic population, without even mentioning us.

So we will sit patiently in the shadows, like we always do, waiting for someone to realize that the 2.6 million schizophrenics in the US are not the monsters they make us out to be. We are corporate professionals, scientists, doctors, musicians, writers, artists—real people contributing to society. We will wait for people to realize that the schizophrenics are entitled to a better life, just like all people suffering from depression. Or just like people, in general. We will wait until somebody cares about us, too.

Follow Allie Burke on Twitter.

If you are concerned about your mental health or that of someone you know, visit the Mental Health America website.

The VICE Guide to the 2016 Election: Why Americans Should Care That Trump Hasn't Released His Tax Returns

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No one knows how to fake out the media quite like Donald Trump. For months, the political press corps has been speculating on whether the mogul-turned-presumptive-GOP-nominee would release his tax returns to the public, a traditional gesture of transparency that presidential candidates have been making for decades. Back in 2015, Trump said he would follow that tradition. In January, he promised his team was "working on that."

"I have big returns, as you know," Trump told NBC's Chuck Todd."I have everything all approved and very beautiful, and we'll be working on that over in the next period of time."

Apparently things became less beautiful, though, and on Tuesday, Trump told the Associated Press that he doesn't expect to release the returns before the November election, because he is being audited by the IRS. On Wednesday, he tweeted that he would release them after the audit, "not after election." By Friday, he was telling aGood Morning America host that his tax rate was "none of your business." But his basic stance, which hasn't changed during a week of fairly confusing statements, can be summed up in what he told the AP: "There's nothing to learn from them."

According to tax historian Joseph Thorndike, the practice of presidential candidates disclosing their tax returns dates back to Adlai Stevenson's campaign in 1952, but didn't catch on until after Richard Nixon released his returns in 1973. Nixon was under audit at the time—a fact that torpedoes Trump's main excuse for not disclosing his returns—and it turned out that he actually did owe almost $500,000 to the IRS.

Since then, releasing tax information has become a standard part of the presidential process, even though it's not technically required. Candidates are legally required to file financial disclosure forms, but those typically reveal far less information than tax filings.

The returns rarely reveal much that voters and the media don't already know about a candidate—in 2012, for example, the revelation from Mitt Romney's long-awaited return was that his IRA was really big. Thorndike told me that this sort of disclosure is more about measuring a candidate's honesty and transparency than answering actual questions about how he or she earns money. As he explained, it's a way to say, "Hey, I'm an honest guy, and my life's an open book. Take a look."

In Trump's case, however, a closer look at his finances could actually clear up a lot that we still don't know about the likely Republican nominee.

The journalist Timothy O'Brien—who actually saw Trump's tax returns a few years ago, after the real estate tycoon went after him in a deeply silly lawsuit that concerned how wealthy Trump actually was—has spelled out some of the more pertinent information that the filings might reveal.

For example, the returns could shed light on how big the candidate's business interests are, as well as how much money he gives to charity. While his declared taxable income won't definitively prove how much Trump is worth—a number he has said changes based on his own feelings—but it might reveal that he's one of the many wealthy New Yorkers who reports a very small or even negative income, thanks to various accounting tricks.

"Trump has available a lot of tax advantages because he's in the real estate industry," said Roberton Williams, a fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. "He's a smart guy, he has smart people working for him, and he says he doesn't want to pay more taxes than he has to, so I'm sure he's using smart tax lawyers to minimize his tax bill—which is perfectly legitimate."

Some people think there's something sinister and impossible to spin nestled in Trump's returns: Mitt Romney, who's become a particularly vocal Trump critic, has repeatedly said that there is probably a "bombshell" in the real estate mogul's returns; the economist Justin Wolfers wrote in the New York Times that the only reason Trump would conceal his returns if he had something to hide. Naturally, Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee have piled on as well.

"There could be a huge bombshell, or there could be absolutely nothing," said Thorndike. "The point here should not be that we're looking for a gotcha moment," he added.

The truth is, even if Trump did release his returns, most voters probably don't care enough to go through them, or to be outraged by whatever methods Trump and his lawyers may have used to cut his tax bill. But concealing his returns shows a certain amount of contempt for the ordinary vetting process of a presidential campaign; since the 1970s, no major party nominee has declined to release his tax returns—what makes Trump so special?

"Trump's refusal to release his tax returns raises serious questions about what he's hiding," Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz said in a statement Friday. But the real question isn't so much what he's hiding—it's why he feels entitled to conceal something that everyone else in his position is expected to reveal.

" don't have a legal right to see these tax returns," Thorndike said, "but they do have a political right and a moral right to see them."

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: A Colorado City Is Using Tax Money from Weed to Help the Homeless

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Photo of a legal grow operation in Colorado via Flickr user Brett Levin

Read: A 'Budtender' Gives Us a Potent Look Inside a Colorado Weed Dispensary

Overall, marijuana legalization has been a huge success for Colorado. Legal weed has been bringing the state big bucks since 2014, and it's even helped keep the parks clean.

Now, the city of Aurora, Colorado, has found a positive way to put some of its new pot cash to good use by channeling $1.5 million of tax revenue from cannabis sales toward helping the homeless, Huffington Post reports.

Earlier this month, the Aurora City Council announced a series of nonprofit organizations that would receive portions of the $1.5 million—a third of the $4.5 million the city expects to receive from marijuana sales taxes over the next two years.

Colfax Community Network, an organization that works with low-income and homeless families temporarily living in motels, will receive $200,000. Other chunks of the money will be used to supply nonprofits with vans to assist in "metro-wide homeless outreach" and more.

"We wanted to be able to show citizens that we are having a positive impact on the community," Bob Roth—city councilman and former chairman of Aurora's legal weed committee—told the Denver Post last October, back when the idea to funnel marijuana tax revenue toward combatting homelessness was originally presented.


What Inmates Think of Piers Morgan's Interviews with 'Killer Women'

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Trailer for 'Killer Women with Piers Morgan' (ITV)

Names and identifying details have been changed to protect privacy.

I teach at a prison. Before I started, a friend of mine warned me that it would mostly be little more than babysitting the prisoners. Today I am covering a class and ask the deputy head of education whether the course teacher has left any teaching materials or lesson plans for me. The deputy head smiles sympathetically, shrugs her shoulders, and walks off down the corridor.

This week, the first episode of Piers Morgan's ITV documentary series Killer Women aired on ITV. The premise is fairly straightforward and ticks several primetime documentary requirements in one go: Piers Morgan visits high-security American prisons and speaks to killers or accused killers who are women. At one point, Morgan appears to go full-Partridge, saying to a killer, "I haven't interviewed many monsters! But I wish you the best for the future."

Prisoners, despite being in prison 24 hours a day for the duration of their sentences, are guaranteed to enthusiastically watch any and all prison related TV content; the fact that the premise of this series is centered on American women who are in jail for murder is only likely to boost their enthusiasm. This week's episode centered on Erin Caffey, who at 16 was found guilty of organizing the murder of her mother and two younger brothers, and the attempted murder of her father. I asked my class what they made of it.

"Piers Morgan is an absolute wanker"

Simon, 30, has four months left on his sentence for assaulting his former employer in a nightclub. It's his fourth time in prison but it's his first time inside for nearly seven years.

I ask Simon for his initial impressions of Erin. "Clearly a fucking head case, no doubting that, bro. When she was getting upset, she was making all the crying noises but no tears. All in the eyes, she was like a fucking politician, trying to manipulate Piers Morgan. Standard, bro."

Simon starts talking about the accomplices in the murder, particularly Erin's boyfriend. "Now why the fuck did he think killing her family was a good idea? I'm not saying he's not responsible for his own actions, but he must have been a bit soft in the fucking head. He can't have done it just to get in her?"

Simon is referring to the point in the program where the audience is shown a still image of a used condom on the floor of Erin's boyfriend's trailer just hours after the murders had been committed. There is admittedly a lot of laughter in the room at this point, but to me it seemed quite a creepy moment in the program, further compounded when Piers Morgan later asks Erin about having sex with her boyfriend in the immediate aftermath of killing her family. I ask Simon what he thinks of Morgan after watching the program. "Absolute wanker."

Craig, 19, is waiting to go to trial for his part in a small drug operation that ran for six months in the seaside town he grew up in. He is very loud, seemingly struggles to sit in his chair for longer than ten minutes, and every time I tell him to settle down tells me he has "beast-mode ADHD."

It's difficult to get Craig to answer a single question about Erin or the crime itself without him referring back to her rendition of "Amazing Grace" within the first two minutes of the program. He appears genuinely moved by it, and seems to be making a completely earnest reference to Britain's Got Talent when he says, "Piers Morgan knows what a good voice is—she would have got through to the final easy." OK, but she killed her family. I don't think she's what they're looking for, I say. "Swear down I think she's innocent. Well maybe not innocent innocent, but definitely not one hundred percent guilty. It's next level shit killing your family, mind."

Craig launches into the first line of "Amazing Grace" for what must be the 20th time since the group started this discussion. Other prisoners are getting openly irritated with him by this point, but it reminds me of the queasy feeling I had watching Piers Morgan coax Erin into singing. I ask Craig why he thinks Morgan did this. "He had a stonk on for her, simples. I definitely did!"

Related: Watch 'Walking Heavy—Britain's Most Notorious Reformed Criminal'formed Criminal'

Gary, 41, has been sent back to regular jail after breaking the rules while in a Category D open prison. "Half an hour late back to my room, you can't make it up!" he says. I later ask an officer about Gary, and he tells me that as well as being half an hour late, Gary was also caught attempting to sneak in a crate of cider. Since being back at this jail, Gary has also been caught stealing food and teabags. I'm almost certain he's taken a marker pen from my desk, but I let it slide.

The state prosecutor, Lisa Tanner, was given a lot of screen time in the program and made it clear that she had initially wished to peruse the death penalty in this case, describing the murders as, "the most disturbing thing I've ever seen. It didn't jive at all." Whether or not it "jived" for Lisa, I want to know what Gary thinks about the length of the sentence for Erin. As a 16-year-old, she was sentenced to a minimum of 42 years before she would even be eligible for parole. "Death penalty for me, all the way. I've met lifers who are never getting out, exactly like her, complete waste of time keeping them alive when everyone knows full well she's never being released."

"Piers is just a massive shit-house"


Jake, 39, has recently been sentenced to 18 months in prison after an argument over some defective batteries he bought from his neighbor escalated to the point of him breaking the guy's nose and cracking a couple of his ribs. Despite this, Jake is one of the calmer members of the group. Seeing as he has a daughter roughly Erin's age when she committed the crime, I'm interested to hear what he thinks of Erin's father, Terry, the only survivor of the attack and now apparently having forgiven his daughter for killing his wife and two sons.

"I was watching him saying he'd forgiven her, and I couldn't believe it. He must be tapped in the head. Halfway through, though, you realize they were proper Jesus freaks. Say no more really. Guns and God, innit."

It's true that religion seemed to hang pretty heavily over the family; Erin was ordered to break up with her boyfriend (and did so) after church. One aspect of the program that disappointed me was how little attempt Piers Morgan made to get inside the head of a fascinating and unique interviewee. I put this to Craig, and he recalls the moment where a voiceover from Erin's psychologist describes her as the "most dangerous" person she has ever worked with. "Piers is just a massive shit-house, mate, that's why," Craig laughs.

These Short Films Will Self-Destruct After You Watch Them

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All images courtesy of Guy Maddin

Fans of celebrated Canadian auteur Guy Maddin, whose work spans more than 50 short- and feature-length films, including The Saddest Music in the World and My Winnipeg, might be surprised to hear his latest project is a web-based, algorithm-driven assemblage, one that literally recombines itself newly for each viewer in a never-to-be-repeated incarnation. Visit the site for Séances, and you will see a continuously mutating title card, one that cycles second by second through word combinations like Demigods of the Savage Crutches, Forces of the Savage Crutches, Forces of the Savage Liquids, Forces of the Strange Liquids, and on and on. By clicking on any title, you initiate a new short film under its name, made up of countless smaller parts conceived in Maddin's attempt at recreating dozens of historically "lost" films—that is, films that were either created and destroyed or rumored to exist but never actually seen—with new actors performing under Maddin's direction. You can't pause the film, and you can't fast-forward or record. Once it's over, that version of the Séance is then listed as "destroyed," never to be seen again. It's a refreshing, enchanting, and eerie phenomenon, one that signifies a new way of experiencing both cinema and the internet.

I spoke with Maddin on the phone about his conception and execution of the project during an era of the shrinking attention span.

VICE: The scope of Séances is pretty massive. How long have you been working on it?
Guy Maddin: I've kind of lost track. I've been daydreaming about it for about ten years actually. But I didn't seriously get it going until around 2010, and then I aborted it. I wasn't ready and then started again in writing stuff in 2011. It's been a while. There's a lot of writing, and the financing of it wasn't easy because it's really as much money gobbling as film shooting. The state-funding bodies that really do want to engender internet art just aren't as stockpiled with cash as the film funds, so it was hard to get money going.

So the body of each of these films is actually made up of component parts spanning a number of different projects over quite a long time.
We wrote about a hundred scripts, each based on lost films from all over the world and from all different eras. There's Cambodian lost films from directors murdered by the Khmer Rouge and American underground films that just weren't looked after properly, that might be sitting in some trailer park somewhere. There's stuff made by Islamic women that stood in the face of religious tradition that were destroyed for religious reasons. There are all sorts of politically destroyed films. The vast majority of them are things that were either destroyed by the studios in the earlier days to clear shelf space for next year's product or just lost to poor storage and time.

How did you go about digging up the source materials?
At first, as with previous films, I insisted on conducting all my research in my unreliable memory and in my heart. I made an initial list of movies, lost movies I was aware of, that I wanted to see. By the end of it, there was a bunch of FW Murnau and a lost Hitchcock and some lost Fritz Lang stuff. Basically, I had a bunch of white male European immigrants working in Hollywood on the roster, and that didn't seem very exciting to me. So I just started light research online and found stuff by women filmmakers, by Islamic filmmakers, by Commie filmmakers, by racist filmmakers, by, you know, underground, by the Japanese, by the Philippines, by the Bolivians. There's even an Antarctic film that's lost. A lot of them are lost for different reasons. When you look back at history, you start looking at all the films that were made and lost by marginalized people, by African Americans like Oscar Micheaux and Spencer Williams and Tressie Souders, perhaps the first African American woman to make a film. These people faced such long odds getting a film made, let alone storing it and preserving it later. It's all fascinating, and to me, movies have always helped me make sense of history because you can see real people moving around like real people in their images, and to me, the history that happened before I was born really starts to make palpable sense once the motion picture camera was invented.

The concept of having each iteration of the films as seen online by a viewer, never repeating, is a nice inversion of that longing to recreate an experience, one that transcends the usual "everything online lives forever" feeling.
It was my partner, Evan Johnson, that came up with the idea of destroying these films as they were shown, which really makes the site. If the non sequitur addled collisions actually create something that's charming, which occasionally they do, then that's out of lost matter, then it's lost immediately again. There will be a real sense of loss experienced by the viewer. That was the hope, anyway. And by being gone, the way things collided just would have to exist as a memory and maybe by word of mouth, some sort of report. Then finally there's a sadness that you can't recreate it. On the internet,a there's a feeling that everything is up there for good. Just to be about destroying things, not for the sheer pleasure of destroying them but just to return some sense of loss to the digital world.

So how does it work, exactly? What is dictating the timeline of each unique iteration of a film?
It's not randomly done, but it might as well have been randomly done. Where the movies break off, a lot of time, we built into the scripts little points where someone has a dream or where someone starts telling a story or someone gets a telegram. But at other points, it just happens.

I heard that before filming, you would hold an actual séance with the actors, encouraging them to become connected to the spirit of the lost film. What do you think the effect of that had on their performances?
I think it loosened them up quite a bit. It was fun to put them into trances and then invite a lost film spirit to come down and possess these actors and compel them to act out its long forgotten plots. It loosened them up as an acting exercise. At first, they were encouraged to act more, then they were encouraged to more sleepwalk than act, and we shot them over and over again. I would stop them every now and then and ask them to drowsily repeat something, and the camera improvised. I think it created a kind of a flimsy Charlatanism, a séance-y fraudulence but one built around real hauntings. A séance just means a seating and a paranormal séance and a movie seating are the same thing, just a bunch of people sitting down in the dark hoping to believe in or be enchanted by something that's not really there, by ghostly images, either photographed images or by otherwise projected or acoustically projected whatnots that aren't really there. At the end, when the lights go on, everyone gets to discuss among themselves how enchanted they were by the supposed ghosts or the supposed movie. In both cases, the medium or director is a charlatan.

Follow Blake Butler on Twitter.

This Guy Convinced the Internet Kylie Jenner Was Holding an Event in a Montreal Poutine Joint

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Capture d'écran 2016-05-13 à 10.23.58.png
Screenshot via Facebook

When I woke up Wednesday morning the first thing on my Facebook newsfeed was an invitation to Kylie Jenner meet-and-greet at Montreal poutine joint La Belle Province. The event promised a guest appearance by Blac Chyna, a Tyga DJ set, and free Kylie lip kits to the first 200 attendees.

Obviously, I clicked "Interested" and carried on getting ready for work.

By the time I was done breakfast, my inbox had been flooded with messages from worried friends inquiring about this very off-brand new interest in everyone's fourth-favourite Kardashian.

By lunch, the event had snowballed into a maelstrom of photoshopped Kylie pictures and fake celebrity tweets along with a tirade of comments about whether or not this was really happening.

Screenshot via Facebook

Amused at the stir this was creating, I reached out to organizer Devin Gibbs, an Alberta-born, Quebec-based student who told me he'd spent the entire day laughing at the internet monster he'd created.

Gibbs explained he'd been inspired by a friend's fake event which featured Enya performing at an Ohio Petsmart.

"Honestly, I'm fascinated by Kylie Jenner and have no idea why," he said. "I was thinking of when she came to Beach Club last year for her eighteenth birthday and just how random that was."

At first, Gibbs says he didn't even invite anyone. "I tried to invite my whole friend list, and Facebook blocked me, so I shared it, and other people started inviting friends."

In true Kardashian-Jenner internet-breaking fashion, the page spread like wildfire and now has thousands of attendees, much to the amusement of its creator.

"I think the idea of Kylie Jenner at a decrepit Belle Pro' is amazing in and of itself," Gibbs says. "People only set foot in that place when they're wasted."

Gibbs says people have become incredibly committed to trolling the event, but between cleverly photoshopped Kylie Snapchats and fake event posters are earnest posts from Kylie fans hoping to meet with the reality star.

kylie poutine shirt.jpgImage via Tam Dan Vu

fake kylie poster.jpg
Image via Mark Balboa

An afterparty, held at Montreal fast-food landmark Orange Julep, was also created, though Gibbs isn't sure who's behind it. "We know nothing about that. We're not affiliated with that afterparty, and I don't know where they got 'official' from."

As for La Belle Province, Gibbs says the company hasn't reached out, though one confused staff member did chime in. "I had a girl comment that she works at the location and that she could confirm it wasn't happening, but that's pretty much all I've heard from them.

At press time, nearly 5,000 people had expressed interest in the event. A far cry from the teenager's 60+ million Instagram subscribers, but still a heck of a lot of people for an imaginary autograph session at a greasy restaurant.

The fact that some of these potential attendees believed or wished this event to be real is a testament to the Kardashian-Jenner's uncanny ability to turn even the most banal of events (real or imaginary) into a high-profit, high-visibility affair, for reasons that continue to baffle so so many of us.

Follow Brigitte Noël on Twitter.

This Climate Change Doomsayer Has Some Really Easy Math for Justin Trudeau

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A wave of climate protest is about to hit Vancouver Saturday. Photo via Flickr user Break Free

Bill McKibben is a guy who's made a career out of delivering bad news, and this week, he's got some for Canada's prime minister.

The author of a dozen books on climate change has an old habit of using"terrifying new math" to connect fossil fuel megaprojects to the record-breaking wildfires, Arctic ice melt, and out-of-season temperatures we experience. The latest fires in Fort McMurray are no exception.

But for Justin Trudeau, McKibben is keeping his numbers simple: zero is the only one our photogenic PM has to remember. That's how many pipelines out of Alberta he says we can build and stay within our UN-mandated climate targets. He says we've passed the point where it's helpful to debate about "better" or "less harmful" fossil fuel projects—let alone entertain the idea a pipeline could fund a "green transition."

Of course, that's going to cost us in economic growth. By one recent calculation, sticking to our (still unremarkable) climate targets could cost about $100 per tonne of carbon not emitted, bringing down average Canadian incomes about $1,800 a year until renewable sources scale up and replace fossil fuels.

McKibben's certain even financial slowdown is a lot better than climate catastrophe, which is why he's backing climate protesters headed for a Kinder Morgan terminal in Burnaby on Saturday. VICE caught up with him earlier this week to find out which of Canada's energy battles he's watching closely.

VICE: You've said that Justin Trudeau's actions on climate seem to be falling short of his words. If Canada is going to hit its climate targets—reducing emissions 30 percent by 2030—what kind of actions do you want to see from our PM?
Bill McKibben: Canada's biggest problem with meeting its climate targets is the tar sands. Much of Canadian politics was centred around that development in Alberta for the last decade, which made it impossible for Canada to be a real participant in the global fight on climate change. It really had become by the end of the Harper years a rogue nation—maybe the most prominent one in the developed world.

Rhetorically that's changed. Mr. Trudeau said in Paris it was extremely important that we solve this climate crisis. He knows as well as anyone knows the math of global warming simply doesn't allow us to keep building new pipelines, to keep expanding the tar sands, to keep digging out more and more coal and oil and gas. So we're grateful for his rhetorical commitment to fight climate change, but we're dismayed that the rhetoric seems not yet to have moved to the point of real change.

What about investment in alternative energy? How do you see Trudeau performing on that front?
I think it's still early days to get a sense how serious the commitment is going to be. We have no choice around the world but to radically ramp up the pace at which we're building out renewable energy. Look at what's happened this winter: we've had the warmest months by far ever recorded on this planet. In the far north we've had month after month of temperatures ten, 15 degrees above average leading to record Arctic ice melt. Early thaw melts across the Boreal forest mean we're now seeing horrific forest fires. In the tropics over the last few weeks we lost huge swaths of the world's coral reefs—one of the most important ecosystems on the planet.

The question about renewable energy is not: Are we going to do it? It's going to be how fast we're going to do it. Are we going to take advantage of the low price on solar panels and put them on every south-facing surface we can find? Are we going to keep building windmills at a pace that allows Canada or the US to catch up with, say, the Danes who generated half their power from wind last year.

Bill McKibben feelin' the Bern. Photo via Flickr user Gage Skidmore

You've described the momentum behind fossil fuel projects as "zombie-like" and said our review process is on autopilot. Can you tell me about that?
Many of these companies simply have no other impulse. They made a lot of money in the past doing this, so they want to keep trying to do it even though the world no longer needs this fossil fuel nor can it possibly afford to burn it. But there's a lot of momentum so people are still trying to build new coal ports, and new oil train terminals and things. The fossil fuel industry understands they've only got a few more years before people say, "No more. We're done." So they're doing their best to get it all in while they can.

Have you really got that signal? What are your indications the oil companies think they've only got a few years?
Heck, even the Saudis, the biggest oil guys on Earth said earlier this winter they're envisioning moving beyond oil. They're going to try to sell off some of Saudi Aramco and invest in other things so Saudi Arabia won't be dependent on oil. If the Saudis have figured it out, that's a pretty good sign.

This week you're focusing on the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline expansion here in BC, which could be approved later this year. With dozens of other projects on your radar—all at different stages—do you feel pressure to go after the really immediate, carbon-intense ones?
One wishes that we had the margin to pick easy battles and the ones that are easiest to win. Physics isn't allowing us that margin. We've got to stop the expansion of the fossil fuel industry everywhere we can. People are fighting battles all over the place. This week there have been huge demonstrations in the Philippines and Australia about coal, in Nigeria about oil. All this BreakFree action moves to the US and Canada this weekend.

People told us we'd never beat the Keystone pipeline, and people who were in favour of the Keystone pipeline told us we'll just build new pipelines to the west coast of Canada. That's not happened. Northern Gateway is dead, there's been incredible resistance to the Kinder Morgan pipelines as you know, in Vancouver. I don't think the Energy East pipeline across Ontario and Quebec is going to be built anytime soon. People have risen up and risen up everywhere. All over the world there's this wave of civil disobedience and agitation because people are understanding just what a deep hole we're in. The first rule of holes is when you're in one, stop digging. In this case that's to be taken literally.

Those three projects you mention are the big ones in Canada, but there are also lesser known energy battlegrounds in this country. Are you following those?
There are battles going on everywhere, and the good news is there's no central direction of the movement, it's more of a sprawling resistance. There's not some great central leader who's telling people what to do. People are rising up in opposition everywhere, fighting in their local places, and we need to be coordinating those actions on a national, continental and global scale. Now we have a political movement that looks the way we want the energy movement to look: not a few big centralized operations, but a million solar panels on a million roofs, all interconnected.

What about liquefied natural gas in BC specifically? It's been branded as a cleaner alternative to coal in Asia, should people be blocking that too?
If you're worried at all about global climate change, and you should be, we've come to understand that natural gas is at least as dangerous as coal, that the leakage from methane at every stage of the operation fills the atmosphere with a greenhouse gas even more potent than carbon dioxide. We don't need a world that runs on natural gas any more than we can manage a world that runs on coal. What we need is sun and the wind. And the engineers are doing a good job there. They've brought down the price of a solar panel 80 percent in the last decade. It's time to take advantage of that. Everyone for years has said, "Oh, it's the bridge to renewable energy," whatever. That was a much better argument before we knew as much as we know about methane chemistry now. It turns out it's just another grave fossil fuel danger.

So then, is there such thing as a good megaproject? Here in BC we have debate over a massive hydroelectric dam, also branded clean energy.
I think building big solar farms and things is defensible in some locations, but I think the place the world really wants to go is what the engineers call distributed generation—lots and lots of small facilities, rooftops, five-acre farms, so on and so forth. These have the virtue of not only providing energy, but providing it locally, allowing people to keep their money close to home, supporting their neighbours. Watching farmers grow electrons is just as useful as watching them grow calories.

Follow Sarah Berman on Twitter.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: Listen to Trump Talk About How Great He Is While Posing as His Own Spokesman

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Read: Remembering John Barron, Donald Trump's 'Spokesman' Alter Ego

The Washington Post has obtained audio that makes a convincing case that Donald Trump used to pull some low-rent Ben Franklin shit, adopting fictional personas to brag about his own greatness.

In the 1980s and 90s, during times when things were looking pretty bad for Trump's business, the real estate mogul would periodically pose as a "publicist" or "spokesman," ringing up members of the New York City press under a pseudonym to say that actually, Trump was doing just fine, and is beautiful and just the best. The name he used most often was "John Barron" (sometimes spelled "Baron"), but he also went by the name "John Miller."

As VICE wrote last year in an article remembering Trump's alter-ego, the businessman admitted in court in 1990 that "he and one of his assistants had used the name 'John Barron' in business matters." But the audio from the Washington Post is the first time the general public has been able to hear the fictional persona in action.

In the clip, "John Miller" is caught speaking with People magazine reporter Sue Carswell. As he drones on and on about how Trump is a man with many options, who receives multiple calls a day from actresses and models begging for dates—including Madonna—it certainly sounds like the Big Orange Menace himself, in both subject matter and speech patterns.

In an appearance on the Today show Friday, Trump claimed that the voice in the recording is not him—but the guy's relationship with truth is tenuous at best. Give it a listen above and judge for yourself.

Thumbnail by Evan Guest via Flickr.

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