Toronto police have taken a notoriously tough stance on weed dispensaries, but according to multiple media reports, two officers got high on the job Sunday and had to call for help after seizing and eating edibles in a raid.
NEWSTALK 1010 is reporting that two officers from 13 Division raided a dispensary Saturday night and then early Sunday morning, ate some of the raided edibles while still on the job. When they didn’t get high fast enough, the cops allegedly made the rookie mistake of consuming more edibles, according to NEWSTALK 1010’s police source. The weed eventually did kick in at which point the officers were allegedly so high they had to call their colleagues for help.
CBC has identified the officers as Const. Vittorio Dominelli and his partner.
Toronto Police Service has not yet responded to VICE’s request for comment. Mike McCormack, president of the Toronto Police Association, which represents officers, confirmed that two cops from 13 Division are being investigated by the professional standards unit but said he could not confirm the specifics of the investigation. In the meantime, CBC reports the cops have been suspended.
According to NEWSTALK 1010, the stoned officers got freaked out when they began to hallucinate and called fellow cops and an ambulance from a police car. But when backup arrived, one of them allegedly ran off in a panic and a cop following on foot slipped and injured his head on ice.
CBC Toronto said the alleged edible-thieves were also taken to the hospital for treatment.
McCormack could not say whether or not the officers will be subject to a criminal investigation, but the idea that cops can’t handle their drugs doesn’t seem surprising.
David Frum thinks I should smoke less weed. “If you start it early, it will have an effect on your IQ, and it does seem to have strong effects on motivations and ambition,” he told me. We were sitting in a Georgetown Starbucks on an unseasonably beautiful Saturday morning in January, the federal government had been shut down mere hours ago, and Frum was happily chattering away about his favorite topic—the slow demise of the American republic.
Though Frum spends his days decrying Donald Trump and working as an editor for the liberal Atlantic, he’s still a sort of stereotypical Bush-era Republican, a pundit who has pennedmultiplearticles on the dangers on legalizing pot. So naturally, I thought it would be fun to split a joint with him to convince him weed wasn’t actually that bad. I’d tweeted at him a bunch of times about the prospect of getting high together, but he (sensibly) ignored my smug trolling. So when his book editor reached out to me about covering Trumpocracy: The Corruption of an American Republic, his latest polemic on the country’s slow collapse, I once again found myself begging Frum to get high with me.
Instead, he proposed an alternative that was effectively the opposite of smoking weed—would I care to join him for a workout? Exercising with a former Bush administration speechwriter who helped coin the now-iconic term “axis of evil” was an offer that was simply too weird for me to refuse.
We met atop Washington DC’s Exorcist Steps, one of the steepest and scariest staircases in America, famed for its appearance in the iconic horror film that it’s named for. Immediately I was in trouble: I feared if I attempted to do Frum’s biweekly routine—three sets of five flights with a two-minute rest in between—I would actually die. “I’m not joking when I advise not to be a hero about it if you haven’t done something like it before,” Frum had ominously warned me before we met.
Trying to keep up with David Frum.
Frum is a fundamentally serious man, and his particular brand of seriousness manifested itself as he briefed me on the rules of the Exorcist Steps, which are usually crowded both with tourists looking to get the perfect picture at the cinematic landmark and athletes who simply want to work out. Frum compared the conflict between two types of visitors the narrow stairway attracts to the Israel/Palestine conflict, in that both groups were entirely unwilling to even recognize, never mind accommodate, each other’s interests. He emphasized that when we got to the bottom of the steps, I was not to immediately turn around to climb back up, but instead walk a couple feet forward before turning around. This was important for safety reasons, he explained.
“I’ve seen accidents here. I’ve gotten into altercations once or twice,” he told me, explaining a feud he got into with a personal trainer who frequents the Exorcist Steps with his clients, and often blocks the way of others. Frum, clearly, is a man who believes in and enforces the rules.
My anxiety about death on the Exorcist Steps proved entirely rational. As we descended down the stairs for the first set, I psyched myself into thinking I could do it. Even though I’m not in peak physical condition, I live on a third-floor walkup and generally use stairs in my daily life. But on the steep, steep journey back to the top—after walking a couple feet forward, of course—my breath grew heavier and louder, and I knew I was going to heed Frum’s advice and drop out. “I should really quit smoking,” I said insincerely.
As I tried to regain my breath at the top of the steps, unable to wrap my mind around anything aside from taking my next breath, a worry gnawed at me. Am I being too chummy with David Frum? I wondered. In the Trumpian political scene, condemnation is always in the air, and the left is quick to judge anyone deemed problematic. And from a leftist perspective, Frum is certifiably problematic.
Although he has consistently been an anti-Trump conservative voice, lefties despise him for fairly understandable reasons. He’s an Iraq War-defending Zionist who is “sad” about the trend of legal cannabis in the US; a George W. Bush–lovin’ Republican who isn’t so sure we should be letting more Syrian refugees into the country. He’s also been welcomed on NPR, CNN, and MSNBC; Trumpocracy has elicited praise from the anti-Trump right but also at least one former Hillary Clinton advisor, the actor Robert de Niro, and Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. In other words, he’s exactly the sort of establishment figure who drives the revolutionary-minded insane.
“Frum is nothing more than a mediocre man with bad opinions, which makes it all the more puzzling how much personal history his benefactors are willing to overlook,” wrote Alex Nichols on the reliably leftist website, The Outline. “Listen to your conscience and not David Frum,” Judd Legum of ThinkProgress suggested on Twitter in September. “There's a particular grotesquerie to welcoming David Frum into the Resistance but the worst part might be that the ‘normal’ right fueled the alt-right,” a Twitter leftist mused.
Frum is unconcerned with this sort of criticism, and doesn’t think that his status as a right-winger has much to do with his opposition to Trump. “People sometimes say, ‘Well I don’t like your view on the Iraq War, why should I listen to you?’ I say, ‘You don’t have to listen to me.’ I put it on the internet, I put it between covers. Read it or don’t. Don’t ask me why you should,” he told me after our workout.
Frum’s critiques of the president echo alarms sounded by political veterans on the center, center-left, and center-right. “Trump is much more of a constitutional problem than he is a political problem,” Frum told me. “It’s about American leadership in the world. The problem with Trump is not just that he has bad manners. The fact that he’s so terribly cruel is obviously a huge disgrace, and makes him a bad person and a bad leader. American institutions were in trouble anyway. This was a moment of vulnerability that would’ve taken a lot of effort by a very wise president to prevent those problems from getting worse.”
But despite his strange new existence as a conservative voice of reason among the anti-Trump Resistance, Frum is not a fan of the term, telling me, “I don’t think you get to call yourself ‘the resistance’ unless you’re risking torture [if] you get caught.”
What sets Frum apart from many anti-Trump conservatives is that he’s been speaking out against his party’s descent into extremism since long before Donald Trump appeared on the political scene. After leaving the Bush administration in 2002—he says he never much liked the work of being a speechwriter—Frum became a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. In 2010, he left that gig after writing a blog post in which he criticized the Republican Party for not compromising on the Affordable Care Act, a remarkable bit of heresy widely covered at the time in both the mainstream media and blogs.
“Through the debate over Obamacare, I thought the principle of universal coverage was welcome and that Republicans should work on that and offer their own proposals and counter-proposals through the process,” Frum told me. “I’ve written an article [about that] that's caused an outcry. The next morning, I get summoned by the president of AEI, and two days later, I’m out on the street. So I tell people about this, I was just sacked by AEI. And AEI tells people that’s not true, he’s lying, he wasn’t fired. I think I was! 'No you weren’t, we just took away your office and salary. But you weren’t fired.'” (“David Frum resigned,” an AEI spokesperson told the Daily Beast in 2010. The think tank did not immediately respond to my request for comment.)
That post about the ACA marked a major break from his conservative allies, and since then Frum, though still a Republican, has come to believe that much of the policies his party champion are obsolete. In Trumpocracy, he wonders, “By August 2017, what was left of the philosophy formerly known as conservatism beyond ‘fuck you, leftists?’”
His main insight is that “the philosophy formerly known as conservatism” was in trouble long before Trump entered the scene. In 2011, he railed against the Tea Party in a post on his now defunct blog, Frum Forum, which he poured his energy into after leaving AEI. “[The Tea Party is] looking for an explanation of the [economic] catastrophe—and a villain to blame,” he argued. “They are finding it in the same place that [Michele] Bachmann and her co-religionists located it 30 years ago: a deeply hostile national government controlled by alien and suspect forces, with Barack Obama as their leader and symbol.”
Liberals may have cheered his bashing of the Tea Party just as they cheer his anti-Trumpism now, but he remains deeply concerned with rescuing, not defeating, the GOP. Over coffee, Frum told me, “I’m very angry with the Republican rule right now, but it remains my world. It’s my world in that I helped to make it the way it is, or at least, I was there, so I feel some obligation to clean up. I’m very worried that the Republican Party has become a party that has lost faith that it can achieve its policy goals by democratic means.”
The anti-Trump right, he maintained, doesn’t “have to give up their politics” to oppose the president. But he talks about politics in a way that sounds divorced from the rhetoric pushed by both Trumpists and more traditional Republicans. “I have had enough conservatives tell me I’m not a conservative. I think conservatism, it’s really obsolete,” he explained. “Conservatism stopped describing the world we live in. It stopped having answers to the problems of the world that we live in. It’s devolved into anti-leftism, tribal antipathy… For a long time [I’ve been talking about] how the Republican Party had to modernize, that incomes were stagnating, that the lack of health coverage was a real problem, climate’s a real problem.”
Tax cuts are “not the answer to everything,” he emphasized, although he can’t deny that he’s happy to see the corporate tax rate drop from 35 to 21 percent thanks to the GOP tax bill Trump signed into law late last year.
Obviously, if you're skeptical of tax cuts and admit that healthcare access and climate change are actual problems, you'll be arguing against not just Trump but all of the candidates Trump torched in the 2016 primaries. And at one point, Frum’s unorthodox views led him to be hopeful Trump would “liberate the party from Paul Ryanism.”
“He would talk about how he wasn’t going to cut Medicare, and that’s illiterate, but if what he meant was, we’re not gonna be the party that constantly is trying to take away people’s health coverage,” he told me. “Although he lied horrifically about his own background with this, I thought the party had to talk about Iraq… because it never talked about it, it was either in danger of perpetuating this trauma, and empowering those who wanted to step out of America’s role in the world.”
Right, so let’s talk about the Iraq War, the point at which the NPR crowd sharply diverges from Frum. “US-UK intervention offered Iraq a better future. Whatever West's mistakes: sectarian war was a choice Iraqis made for themselves,” he tweeted in 2016. The way Frum understands it, the mistake wasn’t necessarily going into Iraq to begin with, but rather, as he told me, America's failure to achieve “the larger objective stabilizing Iraq.” Because the US failed, Frum maintained, “You’re left only with the carnage... the reality of that is so overwhelming.”
Where does a tax cut–agnostic Trump-hating Iraq War-defending Republican rejected by his own party and the left even belong on the political spectrum these days? His position on marijuana legalization, as it turns out, is actually illuminating.
“By and large, what we have done is we’ve remade society so that, for the typical person, it [is] easier to get into trouble… We need to think harder about writing the rules of society in such a way that they are less likely to put the average person into a destructive situation,” he told me. “[In] American society now, on the left and on the right, we’re very hostile to the idea that sometimes rules have to be written with predictable human weakness in mind.”
“Americans just don’t like being told what to do,” I replied.
“Americans don’t like being told what to do. People don’t like being told what to do, but they also don’t like the consequences of not being told what to do,” he remarked.
“That’s the problem with politics,” I said with a sigh.
“That’s the problem with politics,” he repeated in agreement.
Marilyn Hartman, 66, has been stopped by cops numerous times at airports across the country trying to sneak onto flights without a ticket. The so-called "serial stowaway" has reportedly hitched rides to LA, Jacksonville, Florida, and earlier this month, London, which got her banned from both of her local airports last Thursday, Chicago's Midway and O'Hare International.
But it looks like Hartman just couldn't stay away. According to the Chicago Tribune, she was arrested on Sunday at O'Hare's Terminal 3 trying to hop on yet another flight just days after a judge ordered her to steer clear of the travel hub. She's currently being held without bond and charged with criminal trespassing and violating the terms of her bail.
According to the Tribune, Hartman claimed back in 2015 that she's boarded at least eight flights without a ticket. That year she was arrested at LAX after allegedly sneaking past a TSA agent in San Jose, California, and weaseling her way onto a Southwest flight. Prosecutors say she managed to get past British Airways ticket staff and a Customs and Border Patrol officer earlier this month and onto a flight to London for free in an empty seat that would have cost $2,400.
"She said: 'I’m an old white lady. Nobody stops me,'" Cara Smith, a policy adviser for the Cook County Sheriff's Office told the Chicago Sun Times. "She is in great need of mental health services and support," she added.
According to the New York Times, the 66-year-old has a history of mental health issues and has spent time in homeless shelters and mental health facilities. On Sunday, she appeared before another judge who ordered her to stay in jail until her next hearing, scheduled for Wednesday.
For its part, the TSA says it's "working closely" with "law enforcement and airline partners" to figure out just how Hartman keeps sneaking past agents and onto airplanes unnoticed. Though it's really not that surprising, given how bad the agency is at detecting potential threats.
Filmmaker Steven Soderbergh really loves his phone, apparently. Last fall, the Ocean's Eleven and Magic Mike director released Mosaic, an HBO miniseries and experimental curio told through a choose-your-own-adventure-style smartphone app. And now, right on the heels of Mosaic's short HBO run, Bleecker Street dropped a trailer for Soderbergh's new film, Unsane—a horror movie he shot entirely on an iPhone.
From the look of the trailer, Unsane is a psychological gaslight-y horror film along the lines of Shutter Island or Flightplan. It stars The Crown's Claire Foy as a woman who is convinced she's being followed by a stalker. When she tries to report the guy, though, she winds up locked in a mental institution against her will, and begins to lose her grasp on what's real. The script was penned by Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer, with a cast rounded out by Joshua Leonard, Jay Pharoah, Juno Temple, Aimee Mullins, and Amy Irving.
This obviously isn't the first time someone has shot a movie on a phone—Sean Baker's brilliant debut Tangerine was famously filmed on an iPhone 5S to keep things cheap—but it's still a pretty bold move coming from such a big-name director. Soderbergh talked about his decision to shoot it on a phone during this month's Sundance Film Festival, praising the iPhone's video capabilities as a "game changer."
"I think this is the future," he told a crowd at Sundance, according to Indiewire. "Anybody going to see this movie who has no idea of the backstory to the production will have no idea this was shot on the phone. That’s not part of the conceit."
From the look of the trailer, he's right—the digital iPhone footage seems to complement the film's mood nicely, adding a hard, lifeless edge to the institution's harsh fluorescents, but it doesn't look low-budget.
Unsane will make its debut next month at the Berlin Film Festival and is set to hit theaters on March 23. Until then, give the trailer a watch above.
Drag queens put in work to show their audience a good time—donning multiple layers of tights, clothing, and makeup to create an over-the-top persona. But with the elaborate musical numbers, dance performances, and sharp-tongued jokes comes a whole host of misconceptions about what drag is and how queens ought to be treated.
On this episode of How to Treat X, we talk to Aja, Chi Chi DeVayne, and Thorgy Thor from RuPaul's Drag Race about the biggest dos and don'ts when it comes to drag, like keeping your hands to yourself, tipping well, staying the hell off your phone, and asking first before snapping a selfie. And the biggest misconception? No, not all drag queens have to be nice.
On January 18, the US Department of Health and Human Services proposed new regulations and announced the creation of a “Conscience and Religious Freedom Division,” both focused on supporting healthcare providers who refuse to perform certain healthcare services on religious or moral grounds.
"Not more of this shit," thought Marian, the mother of a transmasculine teen named Julian who lives in rural Georgia. (Marian chose to withhold her and Julian’s full names due to safety concerns.)
In 2016, Marian said a nurse practitioner in a local supermarket's walk-in health care clinic had repeatedly and intentionally misgendered Julian while administering his testosterone injection, asking, "What kind of a doctor would prescribe this to a girl?" As far as Marian could see, the provider’s disgust was evident—and a week later, the provider called to inform her there would be no staff available to perform the procedure in the clinic for Julian's next injection, suggesting they instead try a different clinic in a nearby town.
While the nurse practitioner’s reasons for refusing Julian care were ambiguous, her actions were legal; according to Georgia state law, a pharmacist may “refuse to fill any prescription based on professional judgment or ethical or moral beliefs.”
Marian wasn't taking any chances; instead of risking another refusal, she opted for the 200-mile round trip to Julian’s doctor's office in Atlanta.
To those who have been denied health care on religious or moral grounds, the HHS announcement may have felt like the reopening of an old wound. But healthcare workers refusing to provide care to sexual minorities—and transgender people in particular—are nothing new, and neither are the laws allowing them.
In the 1970s, Congress passed a series of laws to protect conscientious objections in healthcare. Among them are the Church Amendments, which prevent members of the healthcare workforce from being required to provide or participate in providing services that are contrary to their moral or religious beliefs. In 2008, in the final days of the George W. Bush administration, the US Department of Health and Human Services issued regulations intended to help enforce protection of these healthcare refusals by, for example, requiring health facilities to certify compliance with the law in writing in order to receive federal health care funds.
Some saw the regulations as confusing and insufficiently protective of patients, and they were largely rescinded under President Barack Obama's administration in 2011. However, the laws undergirding them remained in place, so while institutional burdens were lifted, employees were still protected by federal law if they refused to participate in certain procedures.
Both the law and ethical rules published by the American Medical Association permit healthcare workers to refuse to provide certain services that are beyond their abilities, not medically necessary, or incompatible with their personal, religious, or moral beliefs. However, discrimination against patients based on race, color, national origin, and disability is forbidden by federal civil rights law, and many states have passed statutes protecting additional classes of people.
"There's a difference between [not] being willing to provide a service and [not] being willing to provide a service to a certain person," said Mark Wicclair, bioethicist and author of the 2011 book Conscientious Objection in Health Care: An Ethical Analysis. But the recently proposed HHS regulations don’t distinguish between the two, opening the door to provider discrimination against patients on the basis of a variety of classes not protected by federal law, including gender identity and sexual orientation. And because the regulations allow for federal law to trump state laws, the resolution of conflicts between federal and state laws would fall to the courts, potentially threatening state laws that protect sexual minorities from discrimination.
Also worrisome, said Wicclair, is the broader definition of activities a provider can refuse to do under a claim of conscience—newly defined as activities with an “articulable” connection to a procedure, a change from the previous “reasonable.” This paves the way for more refusals from more categories of healthcare workers without fear of being disciplined by their employers.
Discrimination against sexual minorities by healthcare providers is a common problem, but is magnified further among transgender people. In a 2017 survey conducted by the Center for American Progress (CAP), an independent nonpartisan policy institute, eight percent of 857 LGBTQ respondents said a doctor or other healthcare provider had refused to see them because of their actual or perceived sexual orientation, while 29 percent of the 101 transgender respondents—more than three times as many—reported this type of refusal. (These findings are similar to those in the 2015 US Transgender Survey, in which 23 percent of respondents reported abstaining from necessary healthcare over the past year due to fear of being mistreated by providers.)
Transgender respondents to the CAP survey also reported high rates of discriminatory or abusive language or behavior in healthcare settings: 21 percent said a provider had used harsh or abusive language during their treatment, and 29 percent experienced unwanted physical contact from a provider.
Watch VICE on HBO explore how doctors and parents of transgender children are supporting their transitions:
Not all transgender people are at equal risk for being excluded from or poorly treated in a healthcare environment. An analysis of responses to a 2008-9 survey of transgender people nationwide, found that people were at higher risk of being refused healthcare if they were transfeminine (i.e. assigned male gender at birth, but identifying and often presenting on the female side of the gender spectrum), identified as Native American or multiracial, or had low incomes.
Respondents living in southern and western states were more likely to report healthcare refusals, which might have been explained by regional variations in state politics: the more strongly Republican a state is, the more likely it was that their transgender residents had experienced healthcare refusal.
Not all healthcare providers who refuse care to transgender people do so on the basis of religious or moral conviction—many say they simply feel uneducatedonthesubject, and are afraid of doing harm by providing care in which they have little expertise. But to the patient, those specific reasons often don’t resonate, said Jackie White Hughto, who led the study on risk factors for transgender healthcare refusals.
"If you're a trans person trying to find a doctor," she said, "are you really distinguishing between a doctor who denies you based on bias and one who denies you based on uncertainty of their skillset?"
People who have been refused healthcare due to discrimination often refuse to seek healthcare in the future. According to the CAP survey, 14 percent of LGBTQ people and 22 percent of transgender people who experienced discrimination on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity avoided or delayed medical care as a result, resulting in delayed preventive care screening.
The stigma experienced by sexual minorities who have been refused health care can contribute to worsened physical and mental health. "The act of being denied—having your identity challenged in that way, your dignity challenged in that way—that in and of itself is harmful," said Laura Durso, who leads LGBT policy at CAP.
As with the Masterpiece Cake Shop Supreme Court case, wherein a Colorado baker refused to sell a wedding cake to a same-sex couple on the basis of his religious beliefs about marriage, opponents of equality often argue that a person who has been refused healthcare can "go down the street" to find an alternative provider, said Durso. But the CAP survey shows otherwise: 30 percent of transgender respondents living outside a metropolitan area said that if their nearest hospital or clinic refused them care, it would be very difficult or impossible to find the same service at a different facility. Other studies have also shown that rural sexual minorities, including transgender people, have a harder time accessing healthcare than do those who live in urban areas. And not everyone has the resources to take a day off work or school to get to the nearest welcoming provider in the case of a healthcare refusal, as Marian did.
Although patients report being refused care or treated poorly by all sorts of healthcare workers, including doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and others, it's unclear whether certain professions are implicated more often in these reports than others. And it's a difficult thing to study, said Durso, both because providers may not want to admit refusal of care or mistreatment of patients and because they themselves may sometimes fail to recognize it.
But Marian takes a dimmer view of the motivation behind health care refusals, and is apprehensive about the proposed regulations’ effects. “It was already hard enough to get treated with respect by the average pharmacist/doctor/nurse,” she wrote in an email, “but now they'll have a policy they can point to [in order to] justify their bigotry."
Keren Landman is a practicing physician who specializes in infectious diseases and public health. Follow her on Twitter.
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous doinks, or to take arms against a sea of doinks, and by opposing end them? To die, to doink, no more; and by a sleep to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural doinks that flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to doink.
Basically what I’m trying to say here is, smoking weed is good, but smoking weed is also bad. For every good high there’s a bad one; a green kush nug for each dimebag of reginald.
We’ve rounded up 9 stories from our archive of weed-related calamities that might give you pause the next time you prepare to spark that big ‘ol blunt.
In September 2017, four men had to be rescued from England's highest mountain after "becoming incapable of walking due to cannabis use," according the local police force. No one was arrested, but a local police sergeant did say substance use “has no place on a mountain.”
Back in 2015, we talked to a bunch of former stoners who had to give up the ganja for one reason or another. In a story titled “Strange Bedfellows,” an anonymous contributor told a story of how he quit smoking weed after an evening spent busking with a djembe turned into getting way too high in a spooky old house with a strange old wizard man who couldn’t stop talking about cutting people open. Who among us, honestly?
Jeffrey Shaver was just a simple man with a bong. That is, until a bizarre incident with a hospital vending machine led to cops arresting him for possession of marijuana, seizing his bong in the process. However, the 31-year-old man wouldn’t let this aggression stand, man, and began protesting outside an Ontario courthouse wearing a green speedo and carrying a “RETURN MY BONG” sign. Miraculously, Shaver’s protest worked, and he actually got his bong back.
Our friends at VICE UK asked people about the experiences that made them stop smoking weed last year, and one particular answer stands out. Semi-anonymous person Daniel told VICE’s Nilu Zia that he was a casual smoker when he visited Amsterdam with some seasoned stoners. They decided to inhale some "vaporized isolate" from a bag and, “to this day, the only way I can describe what happened to me in words is that I got locked inside my own mind.” Daniel described what followed as like being “thrown all of the world's most challenging philosophical conundrums to deal with all at once, and I couldn't even word to my friend what was happening as he walked me around the area to calm me down.” Damn.
VICE UK’s Nilu Zia also collected six stories of people embarrassing themselves after getting too high. All of these tales of weed woe end in copious puking, except one from this dude Billy who said he once got so high that he spent “two hours trying to feed the crocodile on my Lacoste polo shirt.” Shout out to you, Billy. You seem chill.
Last winter, a Christmas/lingerie-themed birthday party near Atlanta was shut down by police. The cops allegedly found a small amount of weed and, when no one fessed up, they arrested at least 63 partygoers between the ages of 15 and 31.
Everyone who lives to be older than 100 is a trove of precious wisdom. Cracking a century with your wits intact is doing 30 years of victory laps around your golden years. So when the truly venerable speak—disproportionately Italian and Japanese, wine and fish and fascism, hint hint—it’s always good to listen.
At his 108th birthday party this week, Esmond Allcock of Kerrobert, Saskatchewan disclosed his personal secret to living so danged long: the love of a good woman.
“I didn’t behave myself for a few years there,” he told the CBC. “But then I got a really good wife.”
Amen, brother Esmond. God knows I wouldn’t amount to much without the better half of my home team. Nothing will kill you faster than a truly bad romance, but life without the beloved is like a flower without the sun. This isn’t just waxing poetic: a Harvard study in 2010 found that happily-married men tend to live longer and healthier lives than their single, divorced, or widowed counterparts.
Women get considerably less out of this heterosexist Grand Bargain. The purported health benefits of a happy marriage are only observable in men. One 2015 study in the American Journal of Public Health found that there was no significant difference between the health of middle-aged women who had divorced or never married when compared with their wifely sisters.
That it’s a better deal for men is a feature of straight marriage, not a bug. It’s been baked into the institution since the opening of the Bible where God declares two genders and then immediately gets punked by a snake. In retrospect it’s less likely that Eve was created to be Adam’s helpful companion so much as she was charged with domesticating a literate ape with a dick for a brain. The only thing standing between the so-called average man having his heart explode at 42 while halfway through a 2AM supper of tinned ravioli and rye is 20 years of a woman’s emotional labour.
Some people will shrug that’s Gender for you, folks: men will be boys and girls will be women and the chasm between them is bottomless. Marriage is a wife trying to beat her husband’s sword into a plowshare before he fucks himself to death with it. History is 10,000 years of Married... With Children gags dressed in period costume. There can be no peace or cooperation in the battle between the sexes. The best we can hope is to establish a little domestic demilitarized zone here halfway between Mars and Venus.
Masculinity is rigid and explosive; femininity is pliable and smothering. This gender binary is a cosmic principle, the unalterable bipolar dynamic of all biological life. The motor of the universe only fires between 0 and 1. Defy this order at your peril. Everybody is one thing or the other and any attempt to colour outside the lines will end in social catastrophe.
Vom. What an exhausting crock. The best thing to happen to marriage was its desacralization. Marriage rates in Canada have been on the decline since the 1960s, while common-law arrangements—“living in sin,” as Nan still calls it—are on the up. Common-law these days will net you nearly all the pros and cons of marriage, but with none of the symbolic baggage or the bloodsucking parasites that make up the Wedding-Industrial Complex.
There are few things less romantic than a social and religious obligation to couple off and procreate, except maybe the standard division of household labour that comes with it. In the long view, same-sex marriage has probably done more to revitalize the institution than undermine it, because it places a radical love between two people and their desire to build a life together back at the centre of the whole affair. (Does same-sex marriage undermine queerness more than heterosexism by bringing LGBT couples into the great walled garden of bourgeois family values? Don’t think about this too much.)
I got married in 2016, so I can’t shoot my mouth off too much about the long-term mechanics of all this. And if you follow it this far down the rabbit hole, it does get hard to disentangle exactly where, in desiring matrimony, your genuine feelings of love end and a lifetime of social conditioning begins. Ultimately it’s foolish even to try, if only because all desire (and the language and symbols we use to articulate it to ourselves, let alone others) is never totally our own. Human beings are neither closed systems or meat-filled calculators - another feature that sometimes seems like a bug. Relationships are hard for this reason and it’s harder still to forge a union that works without reproducing all the bullshit background bigotry you breathe in every day of your life. In the meantime, split the housework and drive your own dumb ass to the doctor.
All I do know for sure is that together my wife and I make one another into better, happier versions of ourselves. If every path through life ends in the same destination then we want to walk it with our hands clasped together for as far as fate will allow. Getting married let us throw an amazing party with all our friends and family.Esmond Allcock found the golden key in the arms of his late wife Helen and they shared seven decades of happiness. All you need is love indeed.
So yes, my dudes: find a good wife and odds are you will live very long and prosper.
Women are another story. According those in the know, the best bet for a lady looking to crack 100 is just avoiding men altogether. But really - can you disagree?
Most of the time, the red carpet is a place where celebrities offer up repetitive-ass banter on what they're wearing, explain why they're excited to be up for an award, and sometimes, fall down. But at the Grammys on Sunday, two of the night's biggest stars lit up the red carpet with interviews that were anything but boring, leaving E!'s Giuliana Rancic at a loss for words.
First, Cardi B came by to tell Rancic that she had butterflies in both her "stomach and vagina." Then, Lil Uzi Vert, who seemed completely underwhelmed by music'sbiggestnight, explained that when it comes to "what's next" for him, all he's focused on is waking up and making a good breakfast.
Here's hoping Lil Uzi got his fill of Pop Tarts on Monday.
You can watch the latest episode of Desus & Mero for free online now, and be sure to catch new episodes weeknights at 11 PM on VICELAND.
Toronto police found a young man tied to alleged serial killer Bruce McArthur’s bed when they arrested him, according to media reports.
Citing police sources, the Toronto Sun reported that cops had been surveilling McArthur, 66, when they saw a young man enter his Thorncliffe Park building. At that point, they decided they had to act, and kicked in his door. Once inside, they found a young man tied up on McArthur’s bed and set him free. He was not hurt.
Toronto police did not immediately respond to VICE’s request for comment.
McArthur is accused of murdering five men, who went missing from Toronto’s gay village. The victims are: Selim Esen, 44, Andrew Kinsman, 49, Majeed Kayah, 58, Soroush Mahmudi, 50, and Dean Lisowick, 47. Police believe there are more victims and said Monday that they discovered remains belonging to three individuals in planters at job sites McArthur worked on as a landscaper. The disappearances amongst the five victims named so far stretch back as far as 2012.
According to Global News, when police arrested McArthur, they found photographs of his victims on his computer.
Homicide Det. Sgt. Hank Idsinga told reporters police have “no idea” what the final victim tally will be.
“The City of Toronto has never seen anything like this.”
Investigators are asking anyone who has hired McArthur as a landscaper to get in touch so police can search their property.
Everything you need to know about the world this morning, curated by VICE.
US News
US Drops New List of Russian ‘Oligarchs’ and Putin Cronies The US Treasury Department shared the names of 210 leading Russian business and political figures who have lived it up under President Vladimir Putin, including 96 individuals described as “oligarchs.” The publication was assembled under a sanctions law passed last year in response to Russian election interference. Even though the Trump administration will impose no new sanctions on the people named—to the consternation of Democrats—Russian lawmaker Konstantin Kosachev said the consequences of the naming and shaming “will be toxic.”—AP
CIA Director: Yes, Russia Will Try to Mess with America's Midterm Elections Mike Pompeo said he had “every expectation” Russia would attempt to interfere with and subvert congressional elections this year. He also said he was “confident” US authorities could “push back in a way that is sufficiently robust that the impact they have on our election won’t be great.”—VICE News
House Intelligence Committee Votes to Release FBI Memo The Republican majority on the committee voted to make public a memo outlining alleged surveillance abuses by FBI agents investigating the Trump campaign. President Trump now has up to five days to decide whether it should remain classified. Democrat Adam Schiff said the committee voted against the release of his own party’s report on the same issue.—VICE News
Team Trump Denies Pressuring Andrew McCabe to Quit The White House disputed the idea that the FBI’s deputy director had been compelled to leave his post after he announced his resignation Monday. Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, “The president wasn’t part of this decision-making process.” Two anonymous sources, however, indicated that Andrew McCabe had experienced pressure to step aside from FBI director Christopher Wray, possibly because Trump is known to not be a fan. - The New York Times
International News
Turkey Launches Airstrikes in Iraq Government military jets hit eight separate sites across northern Iraq, according to Turkish state media. The outlet said militant bases in four distinct regions were knocked out because of a threat to Turkish border outposts, without naming the group or groups targeted. Earlier this month, Turkey began a new operation against Kurdish fighters in northern Syria.—Reuters
North Korea Scraps Pre-Olympics Event with South Pyongyang has decided not to host a planned cultural event to promote cross-border ties with South Korea that had been scheduled as part of the build up to the 2018 Winter Olympics. North Korean state media blamed the cancellation on “biased” South Korean news reports.—Al Jazeera
Yemeni Separatists Seize City Separatist fighters representing the Southern Transitional Council (STC) have reportedly taken control of the key Yemeni city of Aden, with government loyalists holed up inside the presidential palace. A Southern Yemeni flag could be seen flying over a military base there on Tuesday. The International Committee of the Red Cross said two days of violence left at least 36 people dead.—Reuters
Republic of Ireland to Hold Referendum on Abortion Law The government announced that voters will get the chance to abolish a constitutional measure placing strict limits on abortions. Although the political parties have yet to agree on the wording of ballot choices, a referendum being held in late spring would likely open the door to legalizing abortions up to 12 weeks into a pregnancy, depending on the circumstances.—VICE News
Everything Else
Record Label Boss Accused of Sexual Misconduct Wellness entrepreneur Tristan Coopersmith said the president of Republic Records Group, Charlie Walk, had tarnished her music industry career by pursuing her with "relentless" sexual harassment. Universal Music Group, which owns Republic Records, said it was reviewing the allegations, believed to stem from his previous role at Sony.—Billboard
Facebook Promises More Local News in Your Feed The company said stories from local news sources would begin showing up more prominently if you follow the publisher or a story is shared by a friend. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said local news readers were “more engaged in their community.”—AP
Diane Keaton Defends Woody Allen The actress shared her continued support for the beleaguered director, accused by his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow of sexual assault when she was a child. “Woody Allen is my friend and I continue to believe him,” Keaton tweeted, pointing to a 1992 interview in which Allen addressed Farrow’s claims.—People
Cleveland Indians to Sort-of Drop Racist Logo The team will remove the Chief Wahoo image from its uniforms for the beginning of the 2019 season after talks between the team’s owner and Major League Baseball. Still, the red-faced cartoon will remain available for purchase on merchandise at the stadium, and questions were raised about why the change couldn't be done in time for this year's games.—VICE
Trailer Drops for Steven Soderbergh’s iPhone Movie Bleecker Street released the first teaser clip for Unsane, a horror film the Oscar-winning director shot on an iPhone. The movie stars The Crown actress Claire Foy as a woman placed in a mental institution after reporting a stalker.—VICE
Andrew W.K. Releases New Single The rock mainstay dropped a video for his song “Ever Again,” the first release from upcoming album You’re Not Alone. W.K. said in a statement that the song was “a fantasy in which I get to imagine what it would be like to actually know the meaning of life.”—Noisey
Make sure to check out the latest episode of VICE's daily podcast. Today we’re honouring the late science-fiction writer and literary icon Ursula K. Le Guin, who died last week at age 88.
Brook Urick approves every piece published on Let's Talk Sugar, a lifestyle site aimed at sugar babies. As a journalism graduate at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and someone with a history of dating rich men, she's uniquely qualified to suss out editorial content for the sugar dating community. A few recent examples of her unique work include "Men's Watch Guide For Sugar Babies," a roadmap of every luxury timepiece brand, and what it says about the true monetary worth of your benefactor. And "Five Phrases To Remove From Your Profile Today," which ensures women never, ever say they're looking for men who don't have huge egos. "A lot of our topics are similar to Cosmo," says Urick. "But instead of talking about subtle cosmetic procedures, it's 'subtle cosmetic procedures to ask daddy for."
Let's Talk Sugar is the media arm of SeekingArrangement.com—the hyper-specialized dating service that fosters for-profit relationships between young people and those who are richer and older. The site itself has been publishing since late 2015, and so far it's stuck to the formulas perfected by other titans in broad-stroke women's media—lots of lists, lots of self-help, and lots of personal essays, all under the necessary aesthetics and topography of sugar dating. Urick is the only person on full-time payroll. The rest of the contributors are recruited directly from the Seeking Arrangement community. Right now, the site offers $20 a post on a contract that requires at least one piece a month. (So, no, user kimberlyinlv didn't get rich writing "Why You're Attracted To Older Men.")
Urick has been working at Seeking Arrangement for four years where she serves as spokesperson, and she's got big dreams for Let's Talk Sugar, which is run by Reflex Media, the creative agency that handles marketing and PR for Seeking Arrangement. She is a community engagement and events manager at Reflex. She's already broken ground on the Let's Talk Sugar's podcast—which offers personalized dispatches on everything from the millennial dating experience to the #MeToo movement. Eventually she hopes the site will blossom into a true cultural nexus point for anyone in sugar relationships. Let's Talk Sugar just launched a coaching service, where experienced sugar babies relay information to women just getting their feet wet in the scene. "We offer profile rewrites and profile assessments," explains Urick. Right now those consultations are routed through email, but by summer she expects to have a full dashboard online, where novices can organize direct phone calls with their mentors. She also wants the site to become newsier, and more reactionary to current events. She plans to start broadcasting a talk show on Facebook Live, and produce skits for Seeking Arrangement's YouTube channel. Because sugar babies need content too.
It may sound strange that sugar dating is attempting to reshape itself into a lifestyle brand. But if you're familiar with this scene, and familiar with Seeking Arrangement's legal treatise, you're well aware of the motives at play. Prostitution is illegal in most of America. Dates that come bundled with a suggested donation? Not quite, but there are those who say it can toe the line. Anything that portrays the sugar community as a niche cultural curiosity with an entire lexicon of inscrutable customs, taboos, and salutations, helps the company's case that sugar dating is fundamentally detached from sex work.
Seeking Arrangement's refusal to genuinely engage with the rest of the adult industry has earned mixed reactions from other, self-acknowledged sex workers. Bobbi Besos, a prostitute that works at the Bunny Ranch in Las Vegas, recently penned a blog post on the brothel's website—"Sugar Dating: Let's Stop Sugar-Coating Prostitution"—arguing that the sugar scene's quasi-legal standing meant that Seeking Arrangement can recuse itself from anything dangerous, coercive, or otherwise destructive that happens over the course of the transactional encounters they help facilitate. (In the piece, Besos herself says she used to be a sugar baby.)
"When I realized and accepted the truth of exactly what I was doing, I delighted in my own self-honesty and self-discovery and admitted to myself exactly who I am: an intelligent, well-travelled, and well-educated young woman who happens to work as a prostitute," she wrote. "I decided my safety is paramount. Regarding my work, I chose to proceed in a legal and safe direction to continue to be successful. I am much happier working legally in a Nevada brothel than navigating the grey sugar world."
Dawn Lee, a prostitute in Toronto, took a softer stance when reached over email. She doesn't have any issues with the sugar dating community. She does believe, however, that Seeking Arrangement is actively trying to drive an artificial wedge in the definition of sex work with Let's Talk Sugar. "The fact that they can delude some of their users into thinking it’s not prostitution also works to their benefit thanks to all the stigma around sex work," she says. "It helps to tell these young women that 'Hey, you’re not like those girls. You’re not a hooker.'"
Lee highlights a specific passage from that aforementioned Let's Talk Sugar piece that covers phrases to scrap from your profile. It reads, "Putting sexual information or teases into your profile may seem enticing but it cheapens your entire look. You’ll look less like a Sugar Baby and more like an escort which is not encouraged on the site at all. Save the sexy stuff for your arrangement." She believes that's a textbook example of Seeking Arrangement denigrating sex work in order to keep their bottom line secure.
"The whole thing is an obvious marketing ploy by Seeking Arrangement to reassure their users they’re not just a bunch of thots selling their bodies on the market," she explains. "There’s a lot of psychological finessing going on in this whole enterprise."
Lee believes that Let's Talk Sugar promotes the regressive stance that sugar babies are more deserving of respect, autonomy, and lifestyle periodicals than other sex workers. "That is indeed damaging," she says.
"We're always trying to battle that stigma. But the truth is, sugar is a lifestyle," says Urick when asked if she sees Let's Talk Sugar as a way to fend off comparisons to prostitution. "It's not just a website, it's how you choose to live."
For those who choose to live as sugar babies there's no resource quite like Let's Talk Sugar. The site offers community support ("Why I Sugar"), aspirational testimony ("A Sugar Dream Achieved"), financial advice ("Sugar Boss Baby in Business") and just about anything else they may want to share or need help with. It's Goop for the girlfriend experience, a site that allows these young women the ability to sugar like a pro while avoiding the appearance that they might be just that.
On Monday, Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee voted to release a secret memo criticizing the FBI investigation into Donald Trump's presidential campaign, setting the stage for yet another dramatic showdown between the president and the institutions surrounding him. According to the New York Times, the document, prepared by Republican Intel Chair Devin Nunes and his staff, trains some of its fire specifically on Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general overseeing the Department of Justice investigation into Russian interference. Though the memo has been seen only by members of Congress and some administration officials, it's said to denounce investigators for obtaining a warrant while using information from a dossier financed by Democrats during the 2016 election. (That dossier and its most salacious allegations have been the focus of conservative critiques of the Russia investigation for some time now.)
Officials at the Justice Department urged the memo not be made public, but in an apparent frenzy to discredit the Russia probe, Republicans have plowed ahead anyway. Not only did the Intel Committee vote for disclosure, but according to ranking Democratic member Adam Schiff, Republicans are now investigating the DOJ and the FBI. Donald Trump can block the release of the document, but it's not clear why he would do so. And while all of this may look like a seemingly banal procedural squabble in the longer Russia saga, the Nunes memo and the attendant fallout have ominous implications for Rosenstein, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and the Trump presidency itself.
Despite nominating him for his perch in the Justice Department Trump is no fan of Rosenstein, the man Attorney General Jeff Sessions deferred to when he recused himself from the Russia investigation last year. As CNN reported Friday, the president is fairly open about wanting Rosenstein gone, having at least once grumbled, "Let's fire him, let's get rid of him." According to the Washington Post, Trump has also explicitly expressed support for releasing the memo, and is even said to have gotten angry on his flight to Davos, Switzerland, last week upon learning the Justice Department thought this was a bad idea.
Trump has also demonstrated a willingness to get rid of top law enforcement officials in the past when they prove insufficiently cooperative. Former FBI Director James Comey was fired last May after Rosenstein wrote a memo critical of him, and on Monday, Comey's deputy Andrew McCabe—a man Trump has fulminated against for months—announced his own resignation, reportedly after being pressured to leave. Even though prominent Democrats in Congress are suggesting the Russia probe is nowhere near finished, citing potentially explosive new evidence, it looks increasingly like Rosenstein could be next on the chopping block.
The real red line in all this will come if Trump fires Mueller, who took charge of the investigation after the president abruptly canned Comey and promptly went on TV to say the "Russia thing" had been on his mind. Last week, the New York Times reported Trump tried to fire Mueller last year, and prominent Republican senators soon warned him not to go down that road again, while expressing vague hope the worst was behind us. "I’m sure that there will be an investigation around whether or not President Trump did try to fire Mr. Mueller," South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, who frequently plays golf with Trump, told ABC's The Week. "We know that he didn’t fire Mr. Mueller. We know that if he tried to, it would be the end of his presidency.” Likewise, when asked about stalled bipartisan legislation that would protect Mueller's job, Maine Senator Susan Collins told CNN's State of the Union, "There are some constitutional issues with those bills, but it certainly wouldn’t hurt to put that extra safeguard in place given the latest stories. But again, I have faith in the deputy attorney general.”
Except now Rosenstein is facing his own potential head-on collision with the White House—and a president who likes his prosecutors good and loyal.
Trump firing Rosenstein would not immediately defang the Russia investigation, though it would turn DC inside-out. What we can't know is how the public might react. In 1973, when Richard Nixon infamously waged a "Saturday Night Massacre" of key Justice Department officials, he was met with broad, bipartisan scorn from across the media ecosystem. In the era of Breitbart and Sean Hannity, it's hard to imagine the outrage reaching Trump's core supporters. On Tuesday morning, House Speaker Paul Ryan said he supported both the memo's release and a "cleanse" of the FBI, an echo of a Fox News host's previous demand that FBI officials be taken out "in cuffs" and a Republican congressman's call for a "purge" at the Bureau.
In this kind of environment, the release of the Nunes memo isn't a surprise, but just another step in a long Republican effort to derail an investigation and protect a president at all costs. Will the public tolerate it when they go even further? It seems inevitable that we'll soon find out.
When we first reported that two Toronto cops had allegedly eaten weed edibles taken from a dispensary raid, some of you had a lot to say about Constable Vittorio Dominelli.
“Cop on the right can call me,” tweeted one reader in reference to Dominelli. “I want to be pulled over by the cop in the foreground,” wrote a Facebook commenter. Since then, a trove of the cop’s social media posts have surfaced, giving us a better idea of who this selfie-loving constable really is.
Most notably, in a tragic self-parody, Constable Vittorio Dominelli, appears to have posted a selfie video set to “Because I Got High” by Afroman on his Twitter, Global News reports.
According to a report by NEWSTALK 1010, the cops made a classic noob mistake by allegedly eating more edibles when they didn’t feel them kicking in initially.
While many are having a laugh over the story, Jack Lloyd, a lawyer representing employees from Community Cannabis Clinic, told VICE it’s yet another example of Toronto police’s unreasonably harsh stance on dispensaries.
“Ultimately it goes to show how normalized dispensaries are and how the rhetoric that the product is untested is all hyperbole. Cops are comfortable eating it. How dangerous could it be?” he said.
He noted that, if the allegations are true, it shows Dominelli and his partner are “inexperienced cannabis users and didn’t have the benefit of speaking to the budtenders about how much they should consume.”
Lloyd said the city and police should stop enforcement against the medical cannabis community immediately.
In addition to the video Dominelli appears to have posted to the song “Because I Got High,” it seems he also posted a video of himself set to a version of a Bruno Mars track, “Versace on the Floor.” In the latter video, Dominelli is wearing a police uniform and sunglasses while crossing his arms in front of a cop car.
Police are still investigating Dominelli and his partner’s strange Sunday antics, and it’s not yet clear if they’ll be disciplined. But if they can’t even handle edibles, they may not be able to jump ship into the legal weed business like so many of their colleagues.
President Trump is pretty proud of his golf game. Over the years, he's bragged that he's "won many club championships" and that there are "very few people that can beat me in golf." But according to a pro who's known him for more than a decade, Trump's impressive record doesn't have everything to do with skill.
"He cheats like hell," LPGA pro Suzann Pettersen told Norwegian outlet Verdens Gang. "I’m pretty sure he pays his caddie well, since no matter how far into the woods he hits the ball, it’s in the middle of the fairway when we get there."
"I don’t quite know how he is in business," she added. "They say that if you cheat at golf, you cheat at business."
Apparently that's not the only shady move Trump pulls on the links. Pettersen said he also has a habit of taking "gimmes"—a putt so close to the hole, you don't have to actually hit it—that aren't really gimmes.
"He always says he is the world’s best putter. But in all the times I’ve played him, he’s never come close to breaking 80," Pettersen said. "But what’s strange is that every time I talk to him, he says he just golfed a 69, or that he set a new course record or won a club championship some place. I just laugh."
Pettersen said she and Trump are pretty good friends and talked at least once a month before he became president, so there's no clear reason to doubt her account of Trump's creativity on the course. But the president has gone out of his way to deny he cheats every time he's accused of it.
Whether or not he's actually playing fast and loose with the rules merited an entire Washington Post investigation, in which sportswriters and celebrities said Trump takes some major shortcuts on the links. Boxer Oscar De La Hoya has spelled out just how Trump allegedly cheats, and even Samuel L. Jackson has weighed in with an accusation about his golf ethics. When asked who the "worst celebrity golf cheat" was in 2012, Alice Cooper just said, "I played with Donald Trump one time. That’s all I’m going to say."
To be fair, Trump apparently has a pretty good swing, and some pros think he's the best golfer the White House has ever seen. Given just how much he plays—we know he's visited his golf courses 94 times since the inauguration—it doesn't seem like the guy would really need to cheat. It's tough to say what he's really up to out there on the course, but as we've come to learn over the course of this presidency, the answer here may just lie in a tweet.
On January 8, 1790, President George Washington rolled up to Federal Hall on Wall Street in New York City to deliver the first-ever address to a joint session of the United States Congress. Lawmakers were convening in Manhattan because Washington, DC, wasn't even in the works yet. The speech was at turns optimistic and businesslike ("Uniformity in the currency, weights, and measures of the United States is an object of great importance, and will, I am persuaded, be duly attended to"), but most of all it was mercifully short: According to CNN, at around 1,000 words, is thought to have been delivered in just ten minutes.
Washington was right about the weights and measures thing, and he was right to keep the speech short. As Donald Trump prepares to address a joint session of Congress and the nation at large Tuesday night, we should remember that at best, these addresses announce a couple new pieces of policy that might or might not become reality and include a couple inspiring lines buried in a metric ton of rote Americana. With very few exceptions, the State of the Union tends to be, to quote Politico's Jeff Greenfield, "an annual exercise in overhyped, underwhelming significance." Even the memorable lines from past addresses, like George W. Bush's "axis of evil" or FDR's "four freedoms," are often surrounded by long stretches of blather. And though DC is currently embroiled in all kinds of scandals and outrages related to the Russia investigation, Trump likely won't address any of that in any substantive way.
In other words, you shouldn't feel too bad about doing something else tonight.
Like the US itself, the State of the Union speech (as it would become known after Washington's time) has sprawled and bloated beyond recognition since the era of the Founding Fathers. These days, the addresses typically take an hour or more, include frequent and overlong applause breaks, and center as much as anything else on lots of close-ups of the president's special guests. (This year, Trump has invited a blind double-amputee Marine and the parents of girls killed by MS-13 gang members, among others.) Such addresses are mandated in the Constitution, and over the years they've acquired traditions the way boats acquire barnacles: the applauding, the guests, the responses from the opposition party that are usually ignored.
Mostly, the State of the Union is an annual exercise in political theater. Already, the discourse around Trump's speech is centering on whether he'll be "presidential" and whether that will make a difference in the arc of his administration. But in this context, being presidential means, mostly, being dull as dishwater, and Trump will likely live up to that challenge.
For all of the anger and panic Trump tends to induce in his opposition, in speeches where's he's reading from a teleprompter—rather than playing to a crowd of fans—he tends to come off as stiff while constantly squinting, a raunchy improv comic forced to give a bar mitzvah toast for his least-favorite nephew. This was on display during last month's speech sketching out his "America First" national security strategy, where he sounded flat even when bragging about his election win.
Supposedly, Trump will be on his best behavior Tuesday night. The White House has been teasing a speech full of unifying themes, with an unnamed senior administration official telling the Washington Post it will be “a speech that resonates with our American values and unites us with patriotism.” That means that he'll talk about rebuilding America, the hardworking men and women making the country great again, his tax cuts, the defeats the military has inflicted on ISIS, and the stock market—he will probably talk a lot about the stock market. He's also expected to talk about immigration, though how exactly that will square with the whole unification thing is far from clear.
This State of the Union, like past speeches, will likely be defined not so much by the words the president says but the pageantry of the responses to it. Already, many Democrats have announced they won't be going at all, or else will be going in black as a gesture to #MeToo. The ones who do come likely won't clap all that much. Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg won't be going either, though that's hardly unusual for a justice on a court that's supposed to be above day-to-day politics. Pro-Trump pundits will declare victory while liberals will furiously tweet fact-checks and denounce the president. The speech will be graded, annotated, debated, and mostly forgotten in the subsequent 48 hours—or by the next time Trump tweets something strange.
So… I guess there are some Olympic games happening soon, like really, really soon—like 10 days soon.
For those of you out there that don’t reside in the glory of the Great White North you probably don’t know that we are much more here for the Winter Olympics than the summer ones. For the last Olympics, which took place in Russia, some provincial governments allowed for liquor to be sold at 7AM so we could get all boozed up for the gold medal men’s hockey game. (Which we won, obviously.)
I know we’re the outliers here, as TV ratings for the Summer Games vastly outperforms the Winter ones, but we like the snow and stuff—Google Trends reinforces the notion that we love the hell out of the winter games. Also, it’s the only one of the two games where we have a legit shot at winning the most medals, so take from that what you will. But, this year, it seems like all’s quiet up in Canada—it’s not the typical patriotism oozing in relation to the games but apathy.
It feels like everytime someone mentions the Olympics I, and most people I talk to, respond with “oh yeah, that’s happening soon, right?”
It’s not just mere anecdotal evidence as well, ticket sales are far down in comparison to the previous olympics, and the Korea Times reporting on a immense lack of both media and local buzz surrounding the games.
Maybe we don’t care because the National Hockey League, doing as they do, fucked up the Winter Olympics biggest draw, the men’s hockey tournament. The NHL—keeping in their grand tradition of shooting themselves repeatedly in the dick with a high powered pistol—decided they weren’t going to let the best hockey players in the world play in Olympics. I’m not going to lie here, for most Canadians, this was the main reason to turn on the Olympics (sorry snowboard fans). We’re not there for the mogul jumping or the bobsledding, we’re here for the beefy farm boys who are good at the skate-stick-ice game taking it to the beefy Slovakian farm boys who are good at the skate-stick-ice game.
That said, thank god for women’s hockey. (The most entertaining hockey game of the last ten years was the Canadian women’s insane comeback over the US at the 2014 Games. @ me, an Oilers fan.)
Women’s hockey is still going to be killer this year—although, unfortunately there’s only two teams that have a legit shot at winning the tournament (sorry Finland). Men’s hockey will be a little bit more wide open—with most non-Russia teams filled with college players, European league players and former pros who are now are destroying beer leagues. If Canada’s team is worse than the one we put together for the World Championship—which no one watches either—then there is a problem.
Or maybe it’s not just the hockey. Maybe it’s because we’re all slowly coming around to the knowledge that the Olympics are run by a gaggle of Jeepers Creepers-esque creatures who, once every four years, move into a country, force them to build a bunch of bullshit, and fuck up the local economy. Once they get their fill they then, and I’m assuming here, skedaddle away to a cave (or highrise apartment) to rest their full bellies for a few years before awakening from their slumber once more to do it yet again.
As it was 776 BC it will be again.
“You kids want to see some figure skating?” Photo via screenshot.
This year’s Games are being held in PyeongChang, South Korea, and the main topic surrounding the location is on whether North Korea’s boy king is going to nuke the games (he won’t). But even then, even with the dang threat of nuclear apocalypse the Winter Olympics just can’t get any respect.
Look, just to hammer the point home with completely anecdotal evidence, I smoke like 20 times a day with our goddamn sports editor here and we’ve barely even talked about the Olympics. There’s something going on here and if I’m going to be honest, I don’t really know the concrete reason why the lead up to these Olympics has been so subdued.
This year some analytic experts have predicted a record haul for our athletes—and, you know what, good for them—but goddamn is it ever hard to care about.
Dogs may be man's best friend, but they aren't the only animal willing to lend a helping hand or paw to people in need. Some folks adopt service cats or pigs for emotional support, and there are even a few service kangaroos, skunks, and boa constrictors out there, apparently. But having an exotic therapy pet doesn't always pay off when it comes to travel.
According to airline blog Live and Let's Fly, United Airlines refused to let a woman bring her massive service peacock onboard her Newark Airport flight recently—even though she'd gone ahead and bought the majestic, plumed beast its own seat on the plane.
"This animal did not meet guidelines for a number of reasons, including its weight and size," a United spokesperson told FOX News. "We explained this to the customers on three separate occasions before they arrived at the airport."
To be fair, peacocks aren't exactly proportioned to fit nicely in an aisle seat, since some species can grow up to ten feet long, and the birds are known to be serious jerks sometimes. Plus, there's a growing trend of people pretending to be disabled just to sneak their pets onto a plane—or claiming their animals are trained to help, only to have them lose their shit halfway through a flight—so it's tough to say exactly how critical this peacock was to its unnamed owner's health. Still, a few folks on Facebook were willing to give her the benefit of the doubt.
"Wait a minute!" one commenter wrote on Jet Set TV's photo post. "A peacock is denied but a pig can get on?? That is not right!"
Others weren't so kind.
"Ridiculous to think she could fly with an bird this size," another commenter said. "A very loud large bird."
At the end of the day, getting shut down by United might have been for the best, as far as the peacock's safety is concerned—the airline doesn't have a great track record when it comes to taking care of pets. Still, if this woman is dead set on flying with an emotional support animal, she might want consider adopting some other critter. For what it's worth, giant lobsters are cleared for takeoff.
This article originally appeared on VICE Denmark, and is part of "Safe Sesh," a VICE harm reduction campaign produced in collaboration with The Loop and the Royal Society for Public Health. Read more from the editorial series here.
Dropping acid can be a wonderful, enlightening experience, or a deeply traumatising one. The effect LSD has on users often depends on their environment, their mental state and the mood they're in when taking it. Since the results can vary so wildly from person to person, I wondered what the constants are – whether there are particulars about the experience you only start understanding after doing it in different states of mind, sporadically, for years on end.
To find out, I contacted three Danish LSD OGs to plough their decades of experience and learn how taking the drug during different stages of your life can change your outlook on the world.
Peter Ingemann, 74
Photo courtesy of Peter
VICE: Hi, Peter, what was your first trip like?
Peter: Probably not that different from most people’s first experience with LSD. It was kind of like putting on a new pair of glasses. Physical objects start to change in size and shape, and you start thinking differently about things. It’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t tried it.
How did LSD affect your life? I always tell people that LSD allows you to try out a temporary state of insanity. You can kind of compare it to how a dog’s sense of smell works. Like many other animals, dogs have a very powerful sense of smell, while humans don't. If a dog's sense of smell is the size of a football field, a human's sense of smell is the size of a stamp. With that in mind, it's impossible to fully imagine how they experience the world through smell. LSD is kind of like that, too. It allows you to see a glimpse of a world that is much larger than our own.
I think dropping acid humbles and opens you up to the fact that reality isn't always what it appears to be. At the same time, it’s important to remember that ordinary, everyday life is tough and your problems won't be fixed by taking LSD.
What would you tell a young person who's considering experimenting with psychedelic drugs? My advice is pretty simple: don’t use drugs to escape your issues. If you're thinking of doing it, only do it to enhance experiences that are already great. In fact, I think any stimulant – booze, drugs, smoking, sex – can make life more fun, but you should only indulge if you're content without them. If you find yourself in a situation where you can't enjoy your life without doing drugs, you need to get help.
Holger Christensen, 64
Photo by Amanda Hjernø
Holger had his first trip when he was 17 years old at Thylejren, popularly know as the Danish Woodstock.
VICE: The first time you dropped acid, you were at a festival? Holger: Yes, I was 17 years old and some friends and I were at Thylejren, which was then just a hippie commune on the Jutland peninsula. We knew we had to be careful, but the conditions seemed perfect, so we tried it a few times.
Do you remember specific trips you've had throughout your life? Sure, there are two experiences I'll always remember. One time, I was walking through a forest and looking up at the trees, and I noticed something in the way the wind was rustling through the leaves – it just seemed so incredibly familiar. I soon realised it reminded me of looking up at the world from my pram as a baby. That opened up some interesting channels in my mind. The other moment I'll never forget was when time appeared to cease to exist. All that remained for me was a sort of movement through space. It's hard to describe. That experience piqued my interest in physics, astronomy and cosmology, which I’ve been studying ever since.
Would you say psychedelic drugs have played a big part in your life? Yes. When I was younger, I lived with a friend in a tiny apartment in Christianshavn in Copenhagen, and we had convinced ourselves we were carrying out scientific studies into the effects of LSD. We were hoping that our little experiments would help us understand ourselves and be better equipped to deal with whatever life threw at us.
That experience turned me into a more carefree, spontaneous person. Before ever doing it, I saw myself as a very smart and together individual, ready to take on the world. But tripping makes you realise that your conscious mind is extremely limited in its scope. We are very myopic in how we see the world on a daily basis – our egos get in the way of properly perceiving reality. With LSD, all those filters disappear.
If you could impart some wisdom about LSD on your 17-year-old self, what would it be? That, at 17, you’re too young for it. You need to be sure of yourself before you start going on that trip. And you should only do it when you're surrounded by people you like in a space where you feel comfortable, because things will change dramatically once you start tripping. A lot of people think taking LSD is all about kicking back and watching cartoons, when it’s actually the exact opposite. It can change you on a fundamental level, by forcing you to perceive reality in a completely different way.
Adam, 54
Adam, who asked to remain anonymous, is a former member of the old Youth House movement in Copenhagen – an infamous commune for young people who considered themselves part of the first wave of Danish punks. He has been taking LSD on and off since the 1980s.
VICE: What role has LSD played in your life? Adam: Tripping has always felt like I was adding a missing piece of the large puzzle inside my mind. Growing up, I could never sit quietly for long – I couldn’t focus on anything for more than 20 seconds, and I didn’t really know how to socialise with other people. I kept getting kicked out of one school after another. The doctors said I was hyperactive, at a time when most people didn't really know what ADHD was. When I started experimenting with LSD, I suddenly felt like everything fell into place. I learned how to focus my attention and communicate with others.
What was your first time like? That was back in the 80s. Some of my friends were living in an old farmhouse outside the city, with a bunch of people I didn't really know. One day, someone I had gone to school with invited me to hang with them there, which was when I was introduced to LSD. The experience wasn't great at first, because all I could think about were all the horror stories I'd heard – about people jumping from rooftops because it had made them think they could fly. That was always at the back of my mind, so it was hard for me to let go, but eventually I did.
I personally don’t believe that LSD in itself has a negative impact on your mental health. But it can definitely trigger suppressed personal issues, because it opens up the floodgates to your emotions and you can’t really close them again – even if you want to. People always warn you about bad trips, but in my opinion those trips can also really teach you something about yourself.
What advice would you give young people looking to experiment with LSD? You should never drop acid on a regular basis. There have been periods in my life where I did it a lot, but also extended periods that I didn't do it at all. And when you try it for the first time, make sure you're outside, surrounded by nature. I have a lot of friends who have fucked themselves up on acid, so if you struggle with mental illness, don’t do it. If you decide to do so anyway, be prepared to be confronted with everything – there’s no mercy. That's why LSD has the kind of reputation it has – there's this ruthless honesty, on a level that very few people have ever dealt with before.
On Wednesday night between 8:51 PM and 12:28, depending on where you are, Australia will be treated to a bunch of novelty-style moons, all at once. This alignment of the celestial bodies doesn’t happen much, and hasn’t happened here since 1983—which was the year that both the internet and the mobile phone were first launched, just for some context.
Anyway, the point is this is a unique occurrence, and here’s why:
Wednesday will see the start of the new moon, which simply means that it’ll be full. But on this particular full moon, its distance to the Earth will be the least in its elliptical orbit, bringing it closer to us and making it appear some 10 percent larger in the sky. This is what we call a “supermoon.”
At the same time this supermoon is underway, Earth will swing between the moon and the sun, casting a shadow over the moon’s surface. And this is why we’re calling it a supermoon eclipse.
Now, what’s interesting is this shadow won’t appear black or grey. Instead the moon will go a dusty red colour, due to light refracting off molecules in the Earth’s atmosphere, striking the moon and turning it “blood” red.
This process is called Rayleigh Scattering and it explains why the sky is blue while sunsets and sunrises are red. What happens is that our atmosphere tends to scatter blue wavelengths of light, while allowing red to get through. This is why when you look up, you’re seeing the one part of the spectrum that’s colliding with our atmosphere.
So this is why it’s a supermoon eclipse, and it explains why the moon will be red. But what’s with the blue moon thing?
Well, a blue moon doesn't actually mean the moon turns blue. Instead, according to ye olde stargazer terminology, a “blue moon” just refers to how often it’s full. Most seasons have three moons—one per month. But every 2.7 years we’ll get four moons in the same season, and the third one gets called “a blue moon.” So we had a full moon in December, then again at the start of January, and now we’ll get another on January 31. So there you go: blue moon, blood moon, supermoon, eclipse.
But what does all of this mean for your finances and personal life?
According to astrologyking.com “a lunar eclipse focuses your attention on intimate relationships, your home, and your family.” The post goes on to suggest the event will present a good opportunity to examine the role of balance in your life, and “you will clearly see any relationship imbalances causing disharmony.”
