By Cheryl Roberto There’s been plenty of attention paid to the recent release of the Third National Climate Assessment report – and appropriately so. The lead paragraph of New York Times reporter Justin Gillis’ story put it rather bluntly: “The effects of human-induced climate change are being felt in every corner of [...]
You know what this day needs? A video of some squeaking baby sloths.
So thank HEAVENS for Lucy Cooke, who made this compilation of adorable orphane…
Read more: Funny Videos, UK Viral Videos, Baby Sloths, Funny Animals, Cute Animals, Sloths, Cute Animal Videos, Feelgood Videos, UK Comedy News
World leaders may be fretting over whether the NSA bugged their phones, but Canadian government officials aren't particularly worried—they bought theirs directly from the agency. A survey of procurement records kept on public government websites reveals that Canada has spent over $50 million purchasing a bevy of secure communications equipment from the largest branch of the American intelligence community.
The U.S. National Aeronautic and Space Agency wants to explore deep space and it needs next-generation energy technologies to do so. NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate announced the first phase of a program to fund research and development projects pursuing breakthroughs in energy storage technology. In other words, NASA is asking the best [...]
That Donald Rumsfeld movie, “The Unknown Known,” opens in the U.S. this weekend. Theater audiences may find the former Defense Secretary’s manner and appearance surprising, as he grinningly takes producer-director Errol Morris’ questions about his career, especially the management of the Iraq War, and reframes them into word puzzles. Unknown [...]
Life. Changed.
1. Lisa Kudrow was originally cast as Roz in Frasier, but the casting directors changed their minds and fired her shortly before it aired. Which led her to land the role of Phoebe in Friends. YAY.
2. But before Lisa landed the part, Ellen DeGeneres was offered Phoebe, although she turned it down.
3. We may now know it forever in our hearts as Friends, but it was almost called Insomnia Café, Friends like Us, Across The Hall, Once Upon A Time In The West Village or Six of One.
4. Courteney Cox was originally cast as Rachel but she insisted she should be Monica, while Two and a Half Men's Jon Cryer was offered Chandler's role.
5. Another Friends fact – Marcel the monkey is actually a female and her name is Katie.
6. Phoebe and Chandler were originally supposed to be supporting characters not part of the main six.
7. While Monica and Joey were originally supposed to be the main romance story in the show.
8. R.E.M's “Shiny Happy People” was used in the pilot and was meant to be the theme tune of the show, not the now infamous “I'll Be There For You” (which was was co-written by Friends producers David Crane and Marta Kauffman).
9. In the first couple of episodes, Monica and Rachel's apartment number was number 5. This was changed in later episodes to number 20 because the producers noted that 5 corresponded to an apartment on a lower floor. Joey and Chandler's was changed to number 19 in turn.
10. Gunther was not originally a speaking part – the actor, James Michael Tyler, bagged the role as an extra because he worked in a coffee shop and knew how to work an espresso machine.
11. During the first season of the show, each cast member earned $22,500 per episode. By the end of the series they each made a $1 million an episode.
Photo via Flickr user Ludovic Toinel
Revelations about the National Security Agency's most controversial surveillance program, which centers on the bulk collection of hundreds of billions of records of Americans' phone conversations, were quickly greeted with calls for reform by major internet powerhouses like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo last year. But all four companies, along with dozens of other major tech firms, are actively opposing an initiative to prevent NSA spying known as the Fourth Amendment Protection Act, leaning on secretive industry lobbying groups while they profess outrage in official statements.
Virtually immediate public condemnation of government spying put the industry in an uncomfortable position when the Snowden leaks began pouring out in June 2013, and in carefully written responses to news reports claiming that they'd cooperated with the now notorious PRISM apparatus, these tech companies emphasized their compliance with existing laws that require them to hand over user data under certain conditions.
"When governments ask Facebook for data, we review each request carefully to make sure they always follow the correct processes and all applicable laws, and then only provide the information if [it] is required by law," Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, wrote in a blog post last June. "We will continue fighting aggressively to keep your information safe and secure."
Statements like this suggest Zuckerberg and his industry peers would support legislative efforts to rein in surveillance, and it's true that they've called for reform in letters to the Senate Judiciary Committee applauding a bill known as the USA Freedom Act. Google, Facebook, and six other tech giants have even hired a firm that claims to fight NSA surveillance on their behalf.
The real action, however, has been much subtler, with the industry wielding its influence behind closed doors using two lobbying groups to oppose certain restrictions on internet surveillance: the IT Alliance for Public Sector (ITAPS) and the State Privacy and Security Coalition (SPSC). A look at the actions of these two groups suggests that the companies want reform, sure, but only on terms that don't affect their day-to-day business.
In particular, VICE has uncovered that ITAPS and SPSC have sent letters to politicians lobbying against the Fourth Amendment Protection Act, a wide-sweeping bill that would limit the NSA’s ability to read private electronic communications without a warrant.
Anti-surveillance bills have been introduced over the past year in more than half the states in the union, ranging from narrow laws that would require warrants for location data and email to more sweeping efforts to fight back against federal intrusions by outlawing cooperation with government agencies that engage in electronic-data collection without a warrant. The Fourth Amendment Protection Act, which has been introduced in more than a dozen states, denies state resources to federal agencies that collect electronic data without a warrant, and to companies that do the agencies’ dirty work for them. Drafted last year by a small group of nonpartisan legal activists affiliated with the Tenth Amendment Center and the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, the bill is a grassroots attempt to force the NSA to change its data-collection practices—a position that has since been endorsed by the president and members of Congress, albeit in more limited form.
"I think this bill is in the finest traditions of state governments opposing federal encroachments," said Bruce Fein, a former associate deputy attorney general and general counsel to the Federal Communications Commission at a March hearing in Maryland. "It's important to remember that the Fourth Amendment right to privacy was the spark of the American revolution."
State legislatures around the country have held a number of hearings on the bill, including one last month in Maryland. During these hearings, groups representing law enforcement and district attorneys have complained that the proposed legislation is too broad and would hamper criminal investigations and prosecutions. But corporate adversaries of the act have been conspicuously absent. They haven't engaged in a public debate about the law, such as the one Google’s Larry Page called for during his appearance at the TED 2014 conference in Seattle.
In states such as California, Tennesse, and Missouri, state legislators aren't required to discole their contacts with industry front groups under existing public records laws. When I tried to verify which government officials have been contacted by ITAPS and the SPSC, elected officials were naturally reluctant to acknowledge them. Two lawmakers—State Senator Stacey Campfield, a Republican from Tennessee, and State Senator Joel Anderson, a Republican from California—indicated they had not been contacted by the groups, though documents obtained by VICE confirmed that they had both received letters from ITAPS.
Only one lawmaker, State Senator Ted Lieu of California, voluntarily provided a copy of the letter he had received from ITAPS, a division of the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI). Founded in 1916, ITI claims to be the tech industry's oldest trade association. It describes itself as the "premier advocacy and policy organization for the world’s leading innovation companies" and prides itself on providing "creative solutions and policy advocacy that advance the development and use of technology around the world." In addition to the internet giants, the 56 members of ITI listed on its website include Apple, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, IBM, Oracle, and Samsung.
In a February 20 letter to State Senator Lieu, Carol Henton, a vice president of ITAPS, said that the anti-surveillance bill would have "negative implications for companies that are seeking to make manufacturing and business investments in the state of California." Henton specifically objected to a provision of the bill that barred state agencies, employees, and contractors from using public funds to engage in any activity that aids the federal government from collecting any individual's electronic data without a warrant. "Many California-based companies provide technology goods and analytic services which are important to the provision of national and homeland security for U.S. citizens and this would seem to unnecessarily jeopardize their ability to compete for business with the state or political subdivisions," Henton wrote.
Henton met with Lieu's office in the first week of April. In an interview responding to some questions I had about the meeting, Lieu said that Henton and others appeared to be misinterpreting the bill, but added that he has been contacted by multiple companies and stakeholders and that he was going to amend the bill to reflect their concerns.
James Halpert, general counsel for the SPSC, said in an interview that it wasn't fair that companies that complied with requests from the NSA—as is required by existing law—would be barred from state contracts. "The bill would place many of our members in an impossible, Catch-22 situation—be held in contempt of court or be disqualified from contracts with the State of Arizona or any political subdivision," he wrote in a February 10 letter to State Senator Kelli Ward of Arizona. Formed in 2008 with the goal of harmonizing state and federal legislation, the SPSC includes AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Cox Communications, and Time Warner Cable, along with Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Members discuss state legislation in a weekly call with Halpert.
In his letter, Halpert warned that the bill would have unintended consequences. "For example, if the Arizona state government or any locality uses Microsoft Outlook or Google email services, it would not be able to continue doing so under SB 1156 (Arizona's version of the Fourth Amendment Protection Act) because both companies are legally required to provide evidence to the federal government. Instead, Arizona and its subdivisions would have to cease using those services and find new—potentially more expensive—providers," he wrote.
Michael Maharrey, a spokesman for the Tenth Amendment Center, said Halpert's concerns could be addressed relatively easily with an amendment that clarifies that the bill would not apply to companies that were forced to provide user data in response to a court order. But Henton's letter indicates the tech companies’ objections run much deeper. "ITAPS is essentially opposed to the bill because it will do what the bill is intended to do," Maharrey said in an interview. "The intent of that section is to stop the companies from cooperating with the NSA and violating our civil liberties. We want companies to make a choice."
It's not a choice the companies themselves care to make. Principles such as requiring the government to obtain a search warrant based on probable cause to access a person's private communications or documents stored online sound great in the abstract, but not, apparently, at the expense of achieving traditional business goals.
“I wanna post about how great this coffee is, but I can’t think of a funny way to say it.”
State / Via youtube.com
Via youtube.com
Sheezus meets Queen B.
REX USA / Rex
REX USA / Rex
Vintage top from Beyond Retro, John Lawrence Sullivan shorts, vintage jewelry; AllSaints shorts, Calvin Klein t-shirt, vintage jewelry
Photos by Masha Mel
Styling by John William
Hair and Make-Up by Bea Sweet
Rachel Cogley coat, vintage jewelry
Page Left: John Lawrence Sullivan jacket, AllSaints shirt, John Lawrence Sullivan tie, vintage earring. Page Right: Jeremy Scott for adidas ObyO trousers, vintage jewelry
Sand coat, vintage jewelry
Vintage T-shirt from Beyond Retro,John Lawrence Sullivan shorts, vintage jewelry; vintage T-shirt from Beyond Retro, James Long trousers, vintage jewelry
Page Left: AllSaints sweater, Rose Dent shorts, vintage Buffalo shoes, UNIQLO socks; AllSaints tracksuit, adidas shoes, Stone Island hat. Page Right: Vintage Nike sweater, Lacoste t-shirt, AllSaints shorts, vintage jewelry
Click only if you want everything as you know it to change.
NBA / Via logodesignlove.com
Columbia Picturees / Via tumblr.com
Retail-cash flows for high-yield funds reversed direction for a fourth consecutive week, with a net $631 million outflow in the week ended April 30, according to Lipper. The outflow decimated the prior week’s $250 million inflow. The latest reading was light on the exchange-traded fund segment, at just 19% of the sum, [...]
Over the course of my travels, I have met with several organizations that work through partners, brokers, agents, and advisors to get their products and services into the hands of the end consumer. These business-to-business (B2B) organizations face unique challenges: They have to work hard and be creative in gathering data [...]
Shelly Sterling, who owns the team with her husband via a family trust, wants to retain control of the franchise, creating another problem in the NBA’s attempt to separate the team from her husband.
Parents were not exactly thrilled about the advice.
Lincoln Public Schools
Rule #1: Refuse to get mad.
Rule #2: Treat the person who is being mean as if they are trying to help you.
Rule #3: Do not be afraid.
Rule #4: Do not verbally defend yourself.
Rule #5: Do not attack.
Rule #6: If someone physically hurts you, just show you are hurt; do not get angry.
Rule #7: Do not tell on bullies.
Rule #8: Don't be a sore loser.
Rule #9: Learn to laugh at yourself and not get “hooked” by put-downs.
Facebook: lincolnpublicschools
The baby brother to the Galaxy S5 will feature a 1.4GHz quad-core processor
The actress yucks it up with #pretapodcasts over being the only girl in a cast of comedy bros and what she shares with her pencil-skirted character (“We have some of the same hair.”)
Because the most important requirements aren’t on any syllabus.
Via elitedaily.com
1. Staying up all night talking to someone you just met.
2. Taking a class that has nothing to do with your major.
3. Being broke and surviving it. (Thank you, Ramen.)
4. Growing to care about someone drastically different from you.
5. Sneaking onto the highest roof on campus.
6. Dramatically changing your appearance, just because you can.
7. Going a weekend without any technology.
8. Making a major life decision your parents don't approve of.
9. Becoming good friends with a professor.
10. Reading books that aren't on the curriculum.
11. Making out with someone whose name you can't remember.
12. Being on first-name basis with a bartender or bouncer.
13. Having a drunken singalong in the middle of campus.
14. Falling in love.
15. Falling out of love.
16. Losing your faith in love.
17. Falling in love again, anyway.
NBC / Via gifrific.com
18. Staying up all night to study for an exam.
19. Then falling asleep during it.
20. Understanding the meaning of privilege.
21. Understanding the meaning of oppression.
22. Identifying so strongly with a cause that it made you angry.
23. Skipping class to go to a protest.
24. Being sexiled.
25. Sexiling someone.
26. Doing community service.
27. Getting rejected for something you really, really want.
28. Going to events just for the free food.
29. Changing your major.
30. Changing your professional goals.
31. Learning when to say “yes.”
32. And learning how to say “no.”
33. Finding a favorite book that you didn't read in high school.
34. Loving a piece of art so much that it made you cry.
Viggo Mortensen searches for his runaway daughter in the wilds of South America.
Apple’s Verdict Against Samsung Is Only one Example of the Massive Wealth–and Tax Dollars–at Stake in Patent Litigation.
Iconic moment pieces, like historic home runs, are one of the hottest parts of sports collecting.
Kentucky will play Connecticut for the Division I Men’s Basketball National Championship on Monday night at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, TX. Though Kentucky is a historic basketball blue-blood from the Blue Grass state while Connecticut is relatively nouveau blue-blood thanks to the exploits of Jim Calhoun during the 1990s and 2000s, [...]
Former president George W. Bush’s two most famous artworks are self-portraits. In one, he stands naked, reflected in the bathroom mirror from the waist up with his back to us, and in another, stretched out in the tub, from his own point of view. The latter is the creepier of the two. It's as if our eyes and head correspond exactly to his—are we looking at our own knees raised in the milky bathtub, our feet and toes peeking out in the distance? Even for homespun realism, it's more than a little perverse. These are intimate moments that we would never be privy to—or particularly want to see—yet here they are, captured and put out into the world as paintings, made by the president himself.
Bush isn’t the first former head of state to take up the brush. Dwight D. Eisenhower and Winston Churchill are two of the most well known, but the practice of academic easel painting also figures improbably in the bigger picture of a frustrated art student in Germany who would go on to terrorize all of Europe. How vastly different the brutal march of history might have been had Adolf Hitler found some measure of encouragement for his efforts, however pedestrian. But as we can see from his canvases and sketches, he was an amateur, with a rudimentary grasp of perspective, a reminder that both art and war, in terms of its winners and losers, are somehow equally a matter of failure.
Photo by Frank Scherschel//Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
In his decision to become an artist, George W. Bush cited Churchill's book, Painting as a Pastime, widely published in 1965. In his essay, the former British prime minister puts forth the notion that those who take up art later in life shouldn't be concerned with the study of technique, stating, "We must not be too ambitious. We cannot aspire to masterpieces. We may content ourselves with a joy ride in a paint-box. And for this Audacity is the only ticket." When considering the painted achievements of W., it's clear just how closely to heart he takes these words, how they must convey a freeing sense of permission with which he readily identifies. After all, some people in this life are used to getting "a pass," never having to work too hard for anything, rarely having to answer for mistakes, having others clean up after them. A spill of cadmium red can be removed with turpentine and a rag, but a pool of blood?
Churchill, despite the fairly tame appearance of his paintings, likened the act of making them to battle. Yet his forays into art were not solely those of a onetime statesman. His earliest canvases predate his essay on painting by a full 50 years, while it's been noted that he exhibited work under pseudonyms both before and after the war, trading on his name most assuredly. His onetime brother-in-arms, Eisenhower, picked up the brush after leaving the White House, and for each, painting must have offered a sense of meditative relaxation following many turbulent years on the world's stage.
Dwight D Eisenhower at his easel. Photo from Dan Ghraham's Rock My Religion, MIT Press, 1993
The artist Dan Graham, in his seminal 1968 essay "Eisenhower and the Hippies," remarks on how the paintings of the former president register an indifference to his subjects. Such a statement might just as well be that of an anti-monarchist indicting the king, though it seems impossible to occupy a bejeweled throne and not be indifferent to one's subjects. The throne room is very far from the studio, with the heady odor of oil and solvent fumes, a kind of ether whose intoxicating effects serve to remind us that creation and destruction are often intimately entwined. To paint after walking the hallways of power is, in contrast, to take up a rather mundane task, and yet with a painting one can decide on something and see it through from start to finish, with little or no interference. The same cannot be said of their prior lives in public service. For these once powerful men, painting is a second act that points inevitably to the limits of those higher realms. Simply stated, to be president of the United States is to be stuck in one of the most frustrating, dead-end jobs in the country.
All installation photos by Jason Metcalf
No one could have predicted that W. would turn to painting after his White House departure. But this is precisely what he has done, and it is now officially established with an exhibition of his portraits, titled The Art of Leadership: A President's Personal Diplomacy, at his Presidential Center in Dallas. In an interview posted on the History Channel, and annoyingly incorporated into the show, Bush reveals that he took up painting because he wondered "how to kind of live life to the fullest." In the video, he assures us that his new vocation is a total commitment, going so far as to claim, "I expect I’ll be painting till I drop. And my last stroke, and I’m heading into the grave, I wonder what color it will be." As for second acts, his wife, Laura, remarks, "I think what George is teaching everybody is that it's never too late to start something new." To which W. happily adds, with a tail practically wagging, "You can teach an old dog new tricks!"
The exhibition includes numerous gifts from world leaders that were given to W. in his eight years in office, and in one there is a telling clue as to what may be the real source of his inspiration to paint: A glittering jewel of a book, displayed in a vitrine beneath a blandly scary portrait of Validmir Putin, identified thusly:
Book of original watercolor portraits of all the American Presidents through George W. Bush, given to President Bush during President Vladimir Putin's visit to Camp David on Sept. 26, 2003. The red velvet bound book is studded with precious gems including rubies, amethysts and sapphires.
It's certainly possible that Putin's gift was more influential on W.’s painting career than Churchill’s book, but why give credit to a tyrant when you can laud one of the heroes who so boldly helped save Europe in the war?
There are, of course, more than a few critics and casual observers who have said that Bush’s paintings are just plain bad. But is there really such a thing? After all, isn't there something bad about every painting? In the late 60s the artist Neil Jenney, until then an eccentric conceptualist with an obvious love of baseball and neon, began a series of representational works on canvas that came to be known as his "Bad Paintings." The term embraced a whole host of figurative or "new image" artists at the time, though Jenney's paintings were and remain the best. He is a great—and greatly underrated—artist, with a style that is smart, loose and simultaneously precise, and perfectly deadpan. His most "political" image shows an American Air Force jet and a Russian Mig flying side-by-side, with the painted caption/title, Them and Us (1969). It's worth noting that in his most recent exhibition, in March of last year, at Gagosian Gallery in New York, he hung a banner with a by now familiar picture of a young soldier that read: "Thank You Bradley Manning, America Needs the Truth."
The show of W.'s paintings in Dallas contains no such political provocation—beyond the fact of its simply being there. It most certainly doesn't include those bathroom paintings, which the former President says he made only to tease his art instructor. (Neither does it include any of his paintings of cats and dogs, which are actually some of his best efforts, as good as any brushy masterworks by the much-admired Karen Kilimnik.) Is it possible that the bathroom paintings were intentionally used to rouse interest in his new hobby, especially for the show at his Presidential Center?
Across town, and opening at the same time, coincidentally or not, is the first retrospective for the painter Richard Phillips, mounted at Dallas Contemporary. Upon entering, one is confronted with his 2001 study for a portrait of George W. Bush. This has been hung next to a painting of a porn star, her legs spread and a huge stream of liquid spraying from her crotch, aimed precisely at the smirk on the president's face. Meant to push buttons of a less corporeal nature, the pairing is perhaps meant to provoke the hometown audience.
In light of W.'s bathroom paintings, Phillips has something in common with their creator, what we might term the persistent schoolboy's need to shock, an art of arrested adolescence. And upon close inspection, Phillips isn't a much better painter than W. In another of his porn star paintings, an indistinct "mitt" is so crudely rendered that Phillips, or whoever painted it, seems to possess no sense of touch whatsoever. But wouldn't you expect a better handjob from an artist who has such a lofty estimation of his own talents? Phillips, in terms of his "values" and the limply predictable choice of subjects, is obviously as conservative as W., in the end just another "neocon" artist in a moment when they are increasing exponentially.
Across the street from the Phillips exhibition, at the San Luis Night Club, a mural is painted on the brick wall adjacent to the parking lot, with a woman seductively posed on a pool table, in high black boots and a bikini, a painting signed by the appropriately named "Woody." It's a far more honest enticement than any of the billboards in Phillips's tawdry cathouse.
Given the venue for W.'s show, it seems appropriate that its focus is on portraits of former and current world leaders he met while in office, such as Tony Blair, Hamid Karzai, and Angela Merkel. There are those exalted, like His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet, as well as those who define the depths of sleaze, such as former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. They are all painted with the same modest talent for mediocrity, and in this there will be, for his detractors at least, a certain parallel to his stretch in the White House. Of course, you don't have to attend art school to become an artist. And so to be a president or a painter might overlap after all: No prior experience required.
Only a few of W.'s portraits stand out among the rest: Václav Havel, the former president of the Czech Republic, who is weirdly animated, ruddy, and toothsome (and might have been painted by John Currin earlier in his career). Unlike W's other subjects, Havel is afforded more than a bland background. He has, fittingly enough for a playwright, poet, and dissident, a shelf full of books. The background for Manmohan Singh, the prime minister of India, actually has gestural brushwork, indicating some sign of painted life where flat monochrome tends to prevail. But there's not much point in discussing these pictures as paintings, since they are more purely a phenomenon, not unlike the recent canvases by Bob Dylan—which some believe were produced by none other than Richard Prince and turned out to be copies from pre-existing and copyrighted images. Celebrity attribution, even of a dubious nature, adds to a work's price. At the very least, W. actually made his own paintings, and he doesn't have an inflated sense of their value. As he himself admits, "I fully understand that the signature is worth more than the painting."
This is the kind of admission that you would never hear, at least not publicly, from a painter on the contemporary art scene. Any number of artists know full well that wealthy people drop a pile of change on their work for the signature alone—not for its beauty, rarity, quality, or importance. You could say that paintings of dubious aesthetic value are snapped up in a market that is vastly over-heated, and in direct proportion to how underwhelming its product has become. There are a lot of well-paid amateurs out there, whether over-the-hill or recently minted stars—shooting stars, as time will surely tell.
At least W. is offering an image. These days some of the most successful artists do little more than dip raw canvases in bleach, have studio assistants trample them with muddy sneakers, let their dogs pee on them, and then send them off to the gallery with five- and six-figure price tags. What to call it? “The Emperor's New Paintings”? As the brilliant Alissa Bennett recently remarked, we are all exhausted by "art that works so hard to show you how little it cares." When it comes to making the grade, there may be a borderline C given out at Yale, but there's no such thing in the market. Seemingly brainy underachievement is what tends to be praised. Is this our new avant-garde? Advancing absolutely nothing at all, merely weariness, avant-bored comes closer to its numbing effect.
In his own likable way, W. can be convincing about his sincerity for painting, and yet sincerity has nothing to do with whether or not a canvas should be considered a work of Art with a capital A. Today, for better or worse, and all too often it's the latter, everything claimed as art must be accepted as such. Even a scrap of canvas upon which an adorable pup relieved himself in the studio. In this skewed paradigm, W.'s portraits of dogs are infinitely superior. They make no greater claim than to be exactly what they are: a painting of a pet, competently rendered, and hung on the den wall or offered as a present to a friend. These paintings aren't lying to us, pulling the wool over our sheepish heads. While you may not care for the man who made the painting—the same man who looked us in the face and insisted there were WMDs in Iraq—he has little in common with the "respectable" artists we're meant to take seriously, and who turns out to be a complete fraud. Or does he?
Not long after The Art of Leadership opened in Dallas, the truth emerged about the sources of Bush's portraits—Google image searches, often the top hit for one of his subjects, or the official portrait on a Wiki page. Busted, it would seem. Stop the presses. Time to rewrite the day's front page. Or not. First, why on Earth is anyone in any way surprised that someone of W.'s stature would take a shortcut here or there? Hasn't he been taking them all his life? And what's the big deal? If anything, his sourcing of images online only makes him that much more of a relevant contemporary artist, more “with it,” our newest and most famous appropriationist. Isn't every painter today a copyist of one sort or another? Anyone who has ever been president in this country must be well-versed in how to appropriate or expropriate, to take as one's own. It must be second nature. After all, the apple isn't stolen very far from the tree. And the fine art of rapacity has always been conveyed in the most exclusive private schools. No future president left behind.
Anyway, what do people expect of Bush as an artist? To have painted these portraits from life? Or from memory? Now that would have been hilarious. He still could. Really, Mr. President, we dare you—paint from memory. And a new set of subjects as well, even at the risk of creating a rogue's gallery. Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney, and last but not least, the great known unknown, Donald Rumsfeld. Condoleeza Rice has already been painted memorably by the esteemed Luc Tuymans, but go ahead, "give it a whirl" as you yourself would say, see if you can do better. Put your mind to it, and with a more fluid flick of the wrist, maybe you will.
It may seem like an impossible dream to join the likes of Al Gore or Anthony Robbins as speakers at TED, the legendary ideas conference. But with the creation of TEDx, independently-organized TED-like conferences throughout the world, it’s now possible for far more people to become speakers. And there’s the [...]
Someone with a cold sore, a result of the herpes virus (Photo via)
I can't see many people bettering David Golding's break-up story. After his then-girlfriend found out that he’d given her herpes, she dumped him, reported him to the police, and watched as he was jailed for 14 months for passing on the STI. The reason the sentencing was so severe is because Golding was charged with (and pled guilty to) grievous bodily harm (GBH), which usually means stabbing or beating the shit out of someone—not giving them a virus that roughly 25 percent of the UK’s sexually active population already have.
Unsurprisingly, sexual health organizations weren’t very happy about the verdict, claiming it contributed to the wrongful stigmatization of what is really a pretty “trivial” condition. Those same organizations were just as outraged last week when the Court of Appeal rejected Golding’s appeal against his conviction. Lord Justice Treacy, sitting next to two other judges, said that even though Golding had acted “recklessly rather than deliberately” in giving his ex the virus, his original conviction was appropriate (though did reduce his sentence to three months).
I called up Marian Nicholson, director of the Herpes Virus Association, to see how this latest verdict has gone down in the herpes world.
Marian Nicholson, director of the Herpes Virus Association
VICE: What do you think about the judge’s decision to reject David Golding’s appeal?
Marian Nicholson: I find it to be absolutely shocking.
Do you think the sentence itself was disproportionate to the offence of giving someone herpes?
I don't want to comment on the length of the sentence itself, because I don't know enough about proper sentences for GBH. But I don't believe this case was in the public interest; the judge even said that Golding didn't give his girlfriend the virus deliberately.
Does the judge's decision to reject Golding's appeal pose a threat to anyone else in the future who might find themselves in a similar case?
Of course. It's a disaster for common sense. The sexual health doctors are all with us on that. We're conferring with all the top sexual health doctors from an organization called BASHH [British Association for Sexual Health and HIV]; they're all horrified at the ridiculousness of basically taking someone to court for passing on a cold sore.
[Genital herpes] is incredibly common. It's almost impossible to prove who you got it from; anyone with a cold sore on their face doing oral sex could give it to a partner on the genitals. So, basically, they're saying that anyone with a cold sore on their face could end up in the dock.
Do you think the stigma attached to herpes might have had something to do with the original sentence and the rejection of the appeal?
Medically, a cold sore is incredibly unimportant. Up until the invention of anti-viral drugs in the early-80s, there was no stigma associated to having a cold sore on any part on your body. To this day, any doctor who knows about the condition will tell you it's better to get it down below because, on your face, it's a much more serious condition.
It's better to have genital herpes?
Yes, and this isn't good news when you've spent millions developing an anti-viral drug. So the stigma was created by the drug companies while advertizing genital herpes treatment. I'll give you an example: a medical book for nurses printed in the 70s doesn't include the word herpes in the index. Once the drug companies created all the fuss, they started doing caesarean sections for mothers with genital herpes, and yet they allowed a mom with a facial cold sore to kiss her new-born baby.
Why hasn't it been de-stigmatized?
Because the condition is so medically unimportant that you don’t have a concerted effort to de-stigmatize it—such as the campaign we saw in the late-80s with HIV. It was important to de-stigmatize HIV because it kills, and you need to get people aware of it to treat it. Doctors can’t be asked to do something about de-stigmatizing a cold sore; they know it’s only a cold sore. Sadly, the judiciary are just as affected by the herpes stigma as any other layperson.
Do you think this case might make the demonization worse?
I don’t think it's going to get worse. We get people ringing us up on our helpline who are very concerned that they'll never have a partner again. And that’s been happening long before this case; it's been happening ever since the helpline was established in 1985. I don’t think it can get worse, because it’s already pretty bad.
What would you like to see happen to improve the situation?
We would like to see education. By the age of 25, seven out of ten people carry this virus, statistically. By the age of 35, it would be very hard to find a woman who does not have this virus. If you've had seven partners, statistically we would expect you to have simplex herpes type 2 [which produces most genital herpes]. The reason you don’t think you have it is that only one person in five gets it badly enough to be diagnosed. So [going by the Golding logic] this is basically going to put a fifth of the population in court.
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BuzzFeed / HBO
BuzzFeed / HBO
BuzzFeed / HBO
BuzzFeed / HBO
