Rehtaeh Parsons was 17 when she committed suicide after a photo of her allegedly being sexually assaulted was circulated. Photo via Facebook.

A group of teenage boys in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia will stand trial this week for allegedly creating a "sexting ring" through which they shared nude images of their female peers using a Dropbox account.

Two 18-year-olds and four 15-year-olds have been charged with distributing intimate images without consent and possession and distribution of child pornography and will be heading to youth criminal court Wednesday. The boys, arrested following a 13-month investigation that involved the RCMP and the FBI, are accused of circulating pictures of 20 teenage girls without consent.

The law against distributing intimate images without consent was added to the Criminal Code in March 2015, giving police the ability to charge people for distributing photos or videos without consent in which the subject is partially nude, nude, or engaged in explicit sexual activity. According to a recent study, one in four sexts are shared with other people.

Read more: Canada Needs To Catch Up To The Present With Cyberbullying Laws That Work

Bridgewater Police Chief John Collyer told the Canadian Press the laws provide cops with a necessary tool in addressing cyber crimes.

"Whether it's hit the right balance or not in terms of severity, and keeping in mind we're dealing with young people ... time will tell," he said.

The legislation comes after the 2013 suicide of Rehtaeh Parsons, the Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia teen who hung herself after she was allegedly gang raped. Photos of the assault were spread around Parsons' hometown, resulting in Parsons being tormented by her peers.

Parsons' dad Glen Canning told VICE the sexting trial signifies a "very big learning curve" for the community in terms of making people realize the gravity of distributing intimate images without consent.

"This isn't boys being boys, this is beyond that. This is something that could really really hurt somebody."

He pointed out that because the boys are young offenders, a conviction won't follow them around for the rest of their lives. However, sharing these kinds of photographs could do long-lasting damage to victims, as was the case with his daughter.

"It followed her to other high schools, it followed her at night when she was at home and getting messages from people, it followed her everywhere."

In December, the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia struck down the province's cyberbullying law prompted by Parsons' death, ruling it unconstitutional and a "colossal failure." The Cyber-Safety Act, which allowed courts to stop cyberbullies from posting negative comments online, was deemed too broad; it was quashed by a case of involving a failed business partnership between grown men.

David Fraser, a Halifax-based lawyer who launched the constitutional challenge against the Cyber-Safety Act, told VICE it was a "dumpster fire" because it ran the risk of intruding on freedom of speech. (The Nova Scotia government is currently working on tabling a revised version.)

On the other hand, Fraser, who specializes in technology-based law, said the distributing intimate images without consent offence is closing a gap.

Fraser said when it comes to teens sharing sexts of other teens, the child pornography charge seems strong.

"It's a huge hammer to hit somebody with, because at least in my mind, what you think of in terms of child pornography, you're thinking about adults exploiting children." He said he's interested to hear why police in the sexting trial chose to apply child porn charges to some of the accused and not others.

Fraser also said the idea that young girls are stupid for sending nude photos in the first place amounts to "victim blaming."

"It's like abstinence-only education. You know people are going to do it whether you like it or not, it seems to be part of modern relationships," he said. "Wagging fingers and saying don't do it isn't helpful."

Canning said he thinks more education should be a bigger priority than punitive laws. He believes his daughter's story should be shared by educators as a warning of the worst-case scenario involving cyberbullying.

Carol Todd, whose daughter Amanda committed suicide at the age of 15 in 2012 after posting a YouTube video in which she said she was being extorted by a man who had partially nude images of her, told VICE schools aren't being proactive enough when it comes to preventative measures.

"I don't think we can be afraid of sharing real life stories," she said. "Maybe that's what these kids are needing because what we're doing right is not 100 percent effective."

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

No Man's Sky for PC came out a few days after it debuted on Sony's PlayStation 4—and for some who prefer to play on systems they can pick and choose their own components for, Hello Games' sci-fi explore-it-all has been a bit of a mess. The game might be the quickest-selling of any on Steam in 2016, but it has also received a slew of player criticism. Over 36,000 user reviews currently spit out a "mixed" average, with comments concerning frame rate woes and game-crashing glitches.

Luckily, I've had barely any issues with the PC No Man's Sky—a relief after already putting over a dozen bug-free hours into the PS4 version. Despite seeing my share of worlds on console, I was more than happy to start over on PC—because of the way the game is generated, I had no real worries about replaying anything I'd already experienced, beyond the initial ship repair basics. I knew that the first galaxy I explored would be different to the one I saw on PS4—and as I reached out into it, and went beyond, I grabbed these shots of my progression. Which showcase one advantage of the PC version over the PS4: You can lose the HUD for taking (glorious 4K) screens.

Read more No Man's Sky coverage on VICE, here.

My starter planet—a frozen little place that I called Christmasland.

Ever seen yellow space? No Man's Sky has yellow space.

In No Man's Sky, even dead worlds can be really pretty.

Every now and then a capital ship will warp into view and every time you'll be like, yes.

Planets like this, covered in lush grass, are a genuine treat to discover after so many balls of rock.

Like this one, where I had to wander miles from my ship to find a decent source of plutonium, in order to take off again.

It's always a case of having to decide which world to visit next. They all look beautiful, but some are really misleading from space, with their surfaces varying from what they look like here.

A big, alien mushroom. If No Man's Sky had Smell-O-Vision, this would stink.

That huge floating island is not a glitch, I promise.

See?

I named this planet Jurassic Park in honour of our lord and savior, Jeff Goldblum.

Sometimes you'll just be minding your own business, and the colours will come together and you'll just be wowed.

Alien monoliths are often bad news in sci-fi, but are they evil in No Man's Sky? So far, I can't tell you, but they're always worth checking out.

This guy, seriously, look how happy he is.

This planet was rocked by a massive storm. It reached a rather toasty 297 degrees centigrade. Needless to say, my life support alarm was making itself known.

A big red pulsing orb. No way that this can go wrong. No way.

Pro tip: Don't attack big capital ships when you're in the game's starter craft. (Though if you do, always return to your "grave" and pick up the stuff you left behind.)

These aliens have screens for heads. That, to me, is clear Saga inspiration right here.

I took a dip in this red sea, thinking it would protect me from the radiation on the surface. Nope. It was way worse underwater.

I didn't think I'd get attached to the ships in No Man's Sky, given the need to upgrade them as you go, but I actually love this little thing.

Thought I had accidentally ruined the settings on my TV but nope, this planet is actually this green.

See, not a glitch. Just lovely big rocks, floating in the sky. I ended up stranding myself on a planet by landing on one of these without the fuel to take off again.

Space combat is super simple, but it can lead to some brilliant, dramatic moments in planetary orbit where you're chasing down space pirates.

Red sky at night, no man's delight.

Getting from world to world is super easy. If you want to go somewhere, just point your ship in the right direction, engage the pulse drive and off you go.

The variation in worlds is immense, but you occasionally start to see through the cracks a bit. I've seen this kind of mushroom/plant/thing a lot now, just in different settings.

Choices, choices. Some systems only have one or two planets. Others have loads—I've been in systems with as many as seven, so far.

If there's one significant update I could wish into No Man's Sky, it's the ability to make animals your pets. I wanted this lion lizard creature to be my pal so badly.

Follow Sam Write on Twitter.

Read more articles on video games on VICE, and follow VICE Gaming on Twitter.

Photo courtesy of Showcase

In Stranger Things, the recent Duffer Brothers Netflix production, a girl named Eleven touches a monster underneath the small fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana, and shit gets incredibly fucked up. The US Government has put its hands in a cookie jar they're not supposed to touch, and what's basically the door to hell—an alternate reality called the Upside Down, a shadow world that exists beside this one—is now wide open.

The same door is wide open in Tasmania—it's been in its art for hundreds of years. "They call it the end of the world—and for vice it is truly so," wrote an exiled London engraver in the early 19th century. "Here wickedness flourishes unchecked." And here is where The Kettering Incident, which airs its season finale Wednesday on BBC Worldwide, is set. In The Kettering Incident, Tasmania itself is the Upside Down.

The plot follows Anna Macy (Elizabeth Debicki), who returns home after 15 years to the small Tasmanian coastal town of Kettering. Macy is a doctor in London. She sees inexplicable lights and wakes up in strange places with nose-bleeds. From the beginning, something's clearly weird; and not just with her. Others in Kettering see the lights and have similar nose-bleeds. People disappear. Macy originally left Kettering at the age of 14. Her friend had disappeared in the forest amidst a swarm of alien lights and moths. When Macy returns at the start of the show, another girl disappears. And with the new disappearance, the plot's in full swing.

The Kettering Incident is in large part so compelling a series because of its absolute precision of place and detail. The specificity of Tasmania makes the show at once universal and psychically terrifying.

In the 18th century, the plan was to make Australia a continent that could contain an entire criminal class—the idea being not utopia, but dystopia. In Tasmania, they founded a prison to house the worst of the convicts. Originally called Van Diemen's land, Tasmania had its name changed in part because of its haunted history. When the English arrived, Aborigines had already been living in Tasmania for 30,000 years; settlers killed them off in 75. The few convicts who could escape the island prison ate one another. Where Europeans tried to contain its unruliest citizens in asylums, Australia sent theirs to Tasmania. Foucault writes that the ideal asylum "would be so organized that the evil could vegetate there without ever spreading." But in Tasmania, the evil spread. Early travelers to the island felt nostalgia for England in the island's green valleys, but Tasmania is unsettlingly different. Christmas is celebrated in summer, not winter. The trees shed their bark instead of leaves, and swans were black instead of white. There's something uncanny about Tasmania. In The Kettering Incident, the island easily transforms into a nightmarish place, where the repressed comes to life.

What's hidden can return in strange ways. The Kettering Incident has been compared to Twin Peaks, and in both the disappearance of a teenage girl means the masks start to come off. The people in Kettering show their real identities as lies get told at every level: between environmentalists who live in the trees and loggers at the sawmill; inside the police force; between families; and inside Macy's own head. "The brain is a constant mystery," Macy says when an obtunded woman bursts to life after 15 years in a vegetative state. In The Kettering Incident, the strangeness of the human psyche gets mixed into every facet of the environment.

Written, directed, and created by Victoria Madden, The Kettering Incident is monetarily the biggest production Tasmania has ever seen. Madden grew up in northeast Tasmania, and like Macy, lived in London. In time, she wanted to return home. Being so close to Antarctica, the lights in Tasmania can do strange things. You can see the Aurora Australis there. As a child, Madden says she saw unidentifiable lights in the sky. Driving home with her mother one night, she saw them hovering in the darkness behind a cluster of trees, lower than a helicopter but higher than a car. A lot of people in Tasmania see similar lights and accept them. They report them to the local newspaper or they make a call. People go on living. There's not much you can do.

A lot of what's presented in The Kettering Incident is unknowable. Blood cells inexplicably change type. Friendly house pets turn rabid and bite. The nearby forest skulks in toward town. Puddles bubble mephitically, and moss grows inside restaurant kitchens. A girl who disappeared makes a phone call to her mother. Boats crash, and batches of oyster, when they're hauled up, have turned yellow inside with goo. Like Lynch, Madden has stylized the world to be a sinister place. What at first seems familiar over the course of the series grows stranger and stranger.

Every year 35,000 people in Australia go missing. The Kettering Incident takes emotional cues from these disappearances, and the effects they have on families. Many who go missing are mentally ill. And many are never found. Like with Stranger Things, what's interesting here isn't a 30-page booklet that the Duffer Brothers have said they wrote to explain to themselves the science of the Upside Down and the laws of its monster. What's compelling is that the characters have to figure things out for themselves. The Kettering Incident is in large part so compelling a series because of its absolute precision of place and detail. The specificity of Tasmania makes the show at once universal and psychically terrifying.

So much of Tasmania's culture is dying or dead. In 1876, the last of its Aborigines died in Oyster Cove, a settlement just north of the town of Kettering. In the 1930s, the last Tasmanian tiger died in a zoo. Tasmanian devils are now endangered due to an infectious face cancer. Loggers are cutting down the island's old-growth forests and sending them to Japan as wood-chips. The worst convict prison in Tasmania's history is also the site of Australia's worst mass shooting, 1996's Port Arthur Massacre, which led to the country's tight gun legislation. In Tasmania, the ghosts are hard to avoid. Things disappear in our lives. People die. And where we want reason, there sometimes is none. In The Kettering Incident, Victoria Madden has taken the psycho-geographical cues of the place and made an incredibly important work of art.

Hayden Bennett is the deputy editor of the Believer. Follow him on Twitter.

This post originally appeared on The Trace.

At a campaign event in North Carolina last week, Donald Trump set off another media storm by suggesting that Second Amendment activists could take action if Hillary Clinton were elected and began appointing liberal, anti-gun judges.

"Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish, the Second Amendment," he told the audience. "By the way, and if she gets to pick—if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don't know."

The insinuation seemed to be that gun activists could take up arms against a Clinton administration, or possibly the judiciary. That the Republican presidential nominee would suggest such armed revolt, even in jest, caused an immediate outcry from Democrats and some Republicans.

What Trump ultimately intended with his comment, as with so many of his remarks, is unclear. But there is a contingent of gun rights activists that believes they do have the right to act if their liberties are infringed. According to this argument, known as "insurrectionist theory," the Second Amendment gives citizens the right to rebel against a tyrannical government—a right that is rooted in the very foundation of the republic.

To find out more, The Trace spoke with Darrell Miller, a professor of constitutional law and a Second Amendment scholar at Duke Law School, about the origin of this theory, and its role in the modern gun rights movement.

What did you think of Donald Trump's comment about the Second Amendment?
I don't think he's actually asking for the assassination of Hillary Clinton. He probably thought he was joking. At the same time, he doesn't seem to understand that when you have the power of the people and the power of the government, you can't be cavalier.

Does the Second Amendment support the right to rebel against the government?
One theory of the Second Amendment does, and it's called the insurrectionist theory. We see it discussed briefly in District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court case that established an individual right to bear arms under the Second Amendment. Heller says that when the people are trained in arms, they're better able to resist tyranny.* Normally, the insurrectionist theory is discussed in terms of something way in the future. One judge called it a "doomsday provision," not something you assert to impugn the legitimacy of your political rival. It is borne of grave necessity and pressing oppression.

The framers of the Constitution thought that preserving the right to bear arms might help the populace form a militia that could fight a standing army that turned against the people. The problem with the insurrectionist theory is there is always someone who thinks that tyranny is in the present.

What role does the insurrectionist theory play in the gun rights movement?
Some gun rights advocates would say that it's always been a part of the Second Amendment and the Constitution. But the insurrectionist theory really gained traction when the National Rifle Association switched gears from hunting and marksmanship to small-government populism in the 1970s.

When we look at the longer arch of our country's history, the insurrectionist theory gets a serious black eye in the Civil War. The way Heller talks about the right to defend oneself against the government is the exact thinking that animated the secession of the southern states in the Civil War. The southern states said they were raising arms to assert a right to rebel against tyrannical government, but they did it on behalf of their power to keep slaves.

Have black Americans ever invoked the insurrectionist theory to protest government oppression?
The group that has the strongest claim on the right to rebel is comprised of people who "are seen as the bad guys with guns" by the gun rights movement. But I presume that when people think of the right to revolt, they think of Patrick Henry or Thomas Jefferson. They don't think about Malcolm X or the Black Panthers, even though the Black Panthers were quite open about the fact that they were arming themselves as a check on the police force.

I doubt Trump would be extolling the virtues of armed black citizens patrolling protests in Ferguson or Baltimore as a legitimate exercise of their right to insurrection or the right to bear arms.

Based on her positions on stronger gun regulation, does Clinton "essentially want to abolish" the Second Amendment, as Trump argues?
No, that's nonsense. I understand the political nature of trying to activate single-issue voters, but abolishing the Second Amendment has never been part of the Democratic party's platform, and it's never been something Hillary Clinton said. Now, we're going to get into a disagreement about what exactly is the scope of the Second Amendment. I'm sure Clinton would say, "Reasonable gun regulations don't violate the Second Amendment, and I'm for those." But if you're a Second Amendment absolutist, and you believe that any gun regulation is an infringement on the right to bear arms, then Trump's claim has more meaning. As far as her appointing someone who would overturn Heller, I don't see it happening. There's no political appetite for that on either side.

If Trump wasn't serious, should we still worry about what he said?
Yes. There are two viable political parties in the American democratic tradition. Donald Trump is the leader of one of them. He says that his political opposition is illegitimate, and if the Democrats win the election, it will be because of fraud in the electoral process. And then he throws in this comment about the Second Amendment as a way of overthrowing the government. I think it's worrisome.

The irony is that Trump is the law-and-order candidate. To talk about broad societal disruption and criminals' lack of submission to lawful authorities, and then say, "Maybe it's ok to profess some desire to overthrow a legitimately elected government," is inconsistent.

* In the landmark District of Columbia v. Heller decision, the US Supreme Court ruled for the first time that the Second Amendment protected an individual's right to bear arms. One line of the opinion, written by the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the court explicitly referenced the right of citizens to defend themselves against government oppression. In Scalia's words, "When the able-bodied men of a nation are trained in arms and organized, they are better able to resist tyranny."

A version of this article was originally published by the Trace, a nonprofit news organization covering guns in America. Sign up for the newsletter, or follow the Trace on Facebook or Twitter.

(Illustration: Joe Bish)

Hands up whose dick has physically shrunk after taking drugs. Not just cold-swimming-pool small, but worryingly small, to the point where it is but folds of skin bunched up and fastened awkwardly to your crotch; a thumb and little finger job; the kind of thing you don't want to tell a single soul about – bar all of Reddit when you're searching for some reassurance.

No? If not, you'll definitely be familiar with the other common effect of drugs on the male anatomy: the unresponsive flaccid penis. This is an unfortunate one, because a lot of drugs famously make you want to fuck, but also completely swipe away your ability to do so. But which substances are the worst for this, and why?

"If you think of erectile physiology, you need blood flow, so anything that restricts blood flow is a bad thing," says John P Mulhall, Director of the Male Sexual and Reproductive Medicine Program at Memorial Sloan Kettering Centre in New York. "Like adrenaline: it's a tremendous blood flow restrictor, so anything that would function similarly to adrenaline – MDMA, for instance – could be extremely bad for your erectile function."

Mulhall and I have spent the last 20 minutes discussing the science of turgidity. Brilliantly, his favourite quote is: "You're only as good as your last erection." I'm trying to find out which drugs are the worst for your dick, and he's keen to state that there's been very little research done in this area. "We're mostly working with basic principles, then anecdotal evidence from patients," he says, but adds: "But I think there are serious negative effects of drugs like ecstasy and crystal meth. I think we can make a presumptive link between the two and erectile disfunction."

MDMA and ecstasy are typical of that great paradox I mentioned. With all the serotonin – the "joy chemical" that ecstasy releases – firing from your serotonergic system, you're turned into a fawning, cuddling mess, flushed in love and lust with the world and its inhabitants. "All stimulants have a global effect on all areas of the brain to enhance function, so that would enhance the libidinal drive," says Tim Williams, Clinical Director at Bristol Specialist Drugs and Alcohol Service.

But as Mulhall explained, the MDMA that's making you all cuddly and lustful is exactly what can prevent you from taking it any further. The drug works as a vasoconstrictor, narrowing blood vessels to, among other places, your penis. Which is why it can retract or becomes almost entirely useless. You also might not have been able to urinate while on MDMA before. That has nothing to do with the penis or the narrowing of your vessels, but with MDMA releasing the hormone vasopressin, which controls the kidneys' retention of water.

Being a potent stimulant, cocaine will likely also make you want to have sex, and then potentially prevent you from doing just that for the same vasoconstrictor-y reasons. But there are also some pretty appalling theories about long-term periods of cocaine use effectively shutting down your engines permanently.

"Cocaine is a really nasty drug in the brain," says Mulhall. "It causes blood vessels to constrict, and therefore you get a lack of oxygen to regions in the brain. There's some evidence in people who have died who've had long-term cocaine habits that they've got lots of these little bits of brain death, so obviously that will affect lots of regions. If you get a bit of death that affects the libidinal system, that will absolutely cause problems there."

"I think when you speak to people about cocaine they'll often say in the short or long-term."

What of the dreaded mid-sex flop? That moment when you've managed to actually get it up and working, only for it to desert you the minute you change position or get distracted while thinking about something inane?

"Again, that's adrenalin," says Mulhall. "You see these problems in people with ADHD. They're easily distracted, they lose focus. It's the same thing with an orgasm. An orgasm occurs most readily when you're in the zone, and if you're not in the zone it's a problem. People with erectile dysfunction sometimes can also become spectators of their erection. So you're thinking, 'How am I doing. Am I doing it right?' Again, that can take them out of the zone."

Both Mulhall and Williams agree on the devastating effect that alcohol can have on your dick – "There's much better data on alcohol's effect on erectile function," says Mulhall – and when you consider that a global drug survey suggested that 80 percent of cocaine users drank while using the drug, it's not evidence to be disregarded.

"It's a social lubricant, so there's increased levels of relaxation, but every person is going to have a different threshold dose, beyond which it's going to suppress the central action of the brain," says Mulhall. "It's a central depressant, so it's going to have a negative effect at a certain dose on the brain centres that trigger erections. They're like the sparks that get everything going. You need them."

Of course, people do try to have sex on drugs other than ecstasy and cocaine. What about, for instance, ketamine? At small doses – "a small bump", according to Williams – it would enhance brain function, essentially "enhancing the libidinal drive". Any more than that, however, and the dissociative nature of it means bumping uglies is the last thing on anyone's mind.

As for weed, there's little in the way of data available, though a recent pilot study in the US suggested that the illegality of weed perhaps contributed to the facilitation of sex. "I've never seen any research to show that cannabis is associated with reduced sex drive and function," says Williams. "However, there is an a-motivational syndrome prevalent in heavy cannabis use. So you might be demotivated to go to school, leave the house, go to work or exercise. I wouldn't have thought it would help."

One question remains: is there anything we can do to help things along, beyond resorting to Viagra, which – when combined with drugs – plays a savage tug of war with your cardiovascular system?

"The best advice if you really want to have an erection?" Mulhall asks. "Don't use those drugs."

Easy.

@Gobshout

More on VICE:

Can You Reverse the Horrible Long-Term Effects of Drugs with Exercise, Food and Vitamins?

Why Cocaine Turns People Into Dickheads, a Simple Explanation

We Went Drug Testing at Secret Garden Party to See What Weird Shit Ends Up in Your Drugs

An anime fan gets caught up in a protest against Baltimore police (background) at the Hyatt Regency Hotel on Sunday. Photos by J.M. Giordano

It was a strange scene at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in downtown Baltimore on Sunday, where hordes of cosplayers crossed paths with protesters enraged at the city's troubled police force. The Otakon anime convention featured men dressed as Kevin Smith characters and Kitana from Mortal Kombat passing under a giant "Black Lives Matter" banner hanging on an overpass outside the hotel. Meanwhile, hundreds of off-duty and retired cops checked in at the front-desk for the biannual gathering of the Maryland Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), the state chapter of the largest police union in America.

Inside the hotel, a group of protestors wearing "Justice 4 Korryn Gaines" t-shirts chained themselves a set of stairs and tied their arms together through large black tubes to form a barrier. Gaines, a 23-year-old mother, was shot and killed and her young child wounded when she threatened to shoot cops serving her a warrant earlier this month, city cops claim. As protesters broke into call-and-response chants, the fire department arrived to cut them loose from their own chains and police began to put cuffs on them instead. Eventually, 12 people were arrested on trespassing charges.

At this blurred intersection of the real and the absurd, no one seemed less interested than the very people protestors were there to confront—FOP members arriving in Hawaiian shirts and flip flops for their four-day confab. Police unions have traditionally been an obstacle to reforming how cops do their jobs across the country, and with Baltimore still reeling from a scathing federal report documenting systemic racism and callousness toward sexual assault victims, the conference offered a preview of the long road ahead.

"I like the floor show," one retired sergeant remarked as he peered through the glass elevator doors to see on-duty cops scuffling with protestors.

At Bistro 300, the mezzanine bar overlooking the hotel lobby, cops were pre-gaming and enjoying bar snacks amid the echoing chants of protestors. ("This whole thing could be avoided if you just responded to our demands," shouted one protestor to cops cuffing her fellow activists.) The muted bar TV showed live CNN footage of burning cars in Milwaukee following more protests as yet another police killing rocked that city. A few tables away, two women dressed as matching Harajuku girls were munching away on cheeseburgers.

"This is the safest place in the city right now," the same retired officer joked, sipping a diet Pepsi and greeting friends. "We're all armed!"

By the time the FOP conference was in full swing, protesters had been dispersed and the BPD had issued a statement acknowledging the civil disobedience inspired by a "recent police officer involved incident in another district"—a vague reference to the killing of Gaines.

The scene offered a window into a particularly tense time in the nation's already-charged police accountability debate. And it highlighted a crucial piece of the puzzle in the months ahead: One of the biggest players in the local policing equation—the FOP, which Baltimore city officials will have to work with to implement federally-mandated reforms—is, predictably, less than thrilled with the Justice Department's conclusions about its own rank and file.

Activists tried to shut down the Maryland Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) meeting at the Hyatt-Regency hotel Sunday.

FOP lobbying has proved instrumental in defending the police officers' Bill of Rights in Maryland, a 1970s law that gives cops accused of wrongdoing a ten-day window before they have to respond to the charges. Earlier this year, the union filed a lawsuit alleging that it is illegal for the Baltimore Police Department to share police records with the city's Civilian Review Board, asking that the body be prohibited from investigating FOP members or officers "in any manner."

The FOP is poised to "play a very significant disruptive role" in the reform process, according to Jonathan Smith, the former chief of special litigation at the DOJ's civil rights division who supervised the federal probe into Ferguson, Missouri's police force. Union pushback has caused trouble in other cities that have been subject to similar federally-enforced police reforms around the country, such as Portland Oregon, where, Smith says, union negotiations "slowed things down by over a year."

For his part, Jim Pasco, executive director of the FOP, does little to dispel the sense that making reforms work for the powerful union will be a fraught process.

"They've sent the foxes to guard the henhouse here," he said of Baltimore City officials being tasked with reforming the police force. Pasco doesn't defend Baltimore PD practices wholesale, but he does point his finger firmly at the local government and Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake in particular, insisting she "let Baltimore sink into the toxic abyss that it sits in today, but is now reforming the system as though she's Joan of Arc."

Pasco argues the FOP should get credit for raising many of the city police force's management issues well before the federal probe, which was launched in the wake of Freddie Gray's death in April 2015. "They need to revamp, root out the inefficient and cynically misguided managers," he said. "95 percent of the issues in there could be fixed by changes in management techniques. Police officers do what they're told or they get fired."

With the protesters out of the way, the mood at the Hyatt Regency was pretty light—lots of fist pumps and talk of an outing to an Orioles baseball game. Some cops brought their wives and grandkids and made a weekend of it. But the protestors will almost certainly be back, and while the union can ignore them—this isn't the first time the FOP and protesters have clashed in Baltimore—ignoring the feds isn't quite that easy.

Follow Annalies Winny on Twitter.

Japanese pole vaulter Hiroki Ogita lost his chance to compete for the gold at the Rio Olympics last Saturday after his dick caught on the edge of the pole and sent both it and his dreams crashing down.

In real time, the whole scenario looked normal enough. Ogita goes up for the 5.45m leap, clips the bar, and dejectedly hits the crash mat. But played back in slow motion, the jump tells a much more tragic tale.

In the video above, Ogita looks like he's just about to clear the jump. His knees lightly scrape the pole, but it stays in place—with a little luck he'd be able to land comfortably and continue down the road toward Olympic stardom. Unfortunately, his manhood had other plans.

The pole somehow catches on the tip of his penis, which juts out from his pink lycra outfit, like Freddy Kruger busting through a bedroom wall, and everything is ruined in an instant.

It's a cruel and tragic twist of fate, but Ogita will have plenty of time to find tighter-fitting shorts before the next Summer Olympics, and he should thank the universe that the incident didn't land him in the hospital like Dennis Rodman.

Watch: Here's How Dennis Rodman Broke His Penis Three Different Times

Separatists launch an attack on Geneva, home of the United Nations Space Alliance. All screenshots courtesy of Activision.

When its developers, Infinity Ward, announced that Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare would take place (partially) in space, the reaction was kneejerk and exclamatory. With the second-most-disliked trailer on YouTube (over three million thumbs down at the time of writing), the decision to move the battle further into the future and into the depths of space was clearly risky. But as I get to see a press screening of the game, and am walked through how the game plays, moment to moment, and its basic story outline, I find it all refreshing. I don't mind the space battles, and I don't mind the ship-to-ship hopping. All I can think is: are we losing interest in a Middle Eastern theatre of war?

The story, as far as I can interpret it at this point, is an interesting "United Nations in Space" (the group is actually called the United Nations Space Alliance) yarn about class struggle and civil war. It puts the player in the role of a SATO (Solar Associated Treaty Organization) commander at the outset of a war between federations. Earth relies on resources from other planets and asteroids, and Kit Harington plays the lead villain, a member of the militant Settlement Defense Front. The SDF wishes to control these off-world resources, and launches an attack on Geneva at the outset of the game. Yes, this is a terroristic act on United Nations Space Alliance soil, but the struggle underpinning the explosions seems to be about world resources and the rights of workers.

Since the release of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare in 2007, most games in the series that take place in our current age and beyond have featured some aspect of Middle Eastern conflict. Modern Warfare features big set pieces in the region (including the detonation of a nuclear bomb in an unnamed Middle Eastern city), Modern Warfare 3 ends in a hotel in the Middle East, and Black Ops II, though it takes place in the future, involves key scenes in Yemen. But Infinite Warfare? That takes place in outer space, mostly. So are we finally, as pop culture consumers, moving away from the "Middle East as generic hostile territory" clichés? And if we're no longer worrying as much about the Middle East, what are we worrying about?

To help answer these questions I spoke with Dr. Anna Froula, a professor of media studies at East Carolina University and author of Reframing 9/11: Film, Popular Culture and the "War on Terror". I wanted to know where we currently stood, culturally, in regards to 9/11, the War on Terror, and the Middle Eastern theatre of war.

"The trauma's over," explains Dr. Froula, "but the way that we're trying to tell stories now has a lot to do with surveillance. So, we're questioning the government. We're aware of how much information is out about us, but we are still participating in it. We're questioning how the surveillance policies are keeping us safe."

And as for traditional war stories, those have been dipping in popularity across other media for years. "The American public is pretty weary of them," says Dr. Froula, adding that one of the main reasons we're losing interest is because of detachment. "We now have a population of students who don't remember 9/11. I ask my freshmen every year what they remember of it, and it's less and less. They remember what their parents told them, they remember being in kindergarten. Our students are growing away from that. It's freaky because we've been at war for as long as they can remember, and they don't seem as plugged in to why."

Space battles like this are a far cry from the ease of the classic "Middle East is evil" storyline we've been fed since the mid-2000s.

But how did popular culture react to the War on Terror while it was fresh? "With post-9/11 entertainment we dug right in and tried to do a lot of stories about the war," says Dr. Froula. "But none of them were popular until The Hurt Locker and, especially now, American Sniper, which is this kind of opportunity to rewrite why we went to Iraq in the first place."

And how did the video game industry react? I spoke to Dr. Matthew Payne, a professor at Notre Dame and author of the recently released Playing War: Military Video Games After 9/11. "What we see in the post-9/11 moment is this response by cultural industries—film, TV, video games—to the traumatic wound of 9/11," says Dr. Payne. " all kinds of narratives, many of which are these dyed-in-the-wool, American frontiersman, masculine narratives. But then, around 2004 with the Battle of Fallujah and as the war in Iraq and Afghanistan started to take the toll on our fighting men and women, it becomes less tenable and a less politically sexy operation."

Dr. Payne explains that while we've witnessed film and TV moving away from traditional war stories, the opposite has been true for video games. "We see fewer and fewer combat films and TV shows," she tells me, "and yet at the same time we see an uptick in the number of video games. What might these video games be doing, in the realm of military entertainment, which other kinds of media don't necessarily do? For me, a lot of it has to do with this notion of play. The notion that we, as the gamer, can enter into that world and affect change in a way that you cannot in fixed media like film, television and novels."

Article continues after the video below

Related: Watch VICE's short documentary about the competitive gaming world of 'SMITE'

"As powerful cultural objects, video games don't just model how ballistics work, and how techniques like clearing a room work," says Dr. Payne, "but they also perpetuate a certain kind of mythology about nationalism, about masculinity, about belief in technology."

With that in mind, where are video games headed now? "What's interesting to me with games like Infinite Warfare or Black Ops III before it, is that we see ourselves moving away from the Middle Eastern theatre," he says. "So the question becomes: is this simply about fatigue? We can also say that maybe the American buying public has a hopefully more sophisticated idea of who Middle Easterners are. So you can't simply trade in two-dimensional Middle Eastern villains in the way that might have been more immediately palatable after 9/11. You begin to see other types of crises. We see environmental crises, and we see in Advanced Warfare a concern with drone warfare."

No matter the problems of the world, wartime video games will tap into them. Dr. Payne describes them to me as "a barometer of the 'terror du jour'", a compelling thought. "War games are these vessels that continue to allow us to engage a series of questions about what we as consumers of military entertainment are anxious about," he says. "So it might move from, 'Yes we're afraid of Middle Eastern populations or Jihadi groups', onto environmental crises, or economic crises, or resource management." And if that takes the play into orbit and beyond, so be it.

As the battle for Geneva rages below, you hop into your spacecraft and punch through the atmosphere, taking the fight above the clouds.

If we're past the point of fresh trauma that was 9/11 and the War on Terror, but we're still buying up plenty of wartime video games, then where is the genre headed?

"The games will continue to reflect a whole host of cultural anxieties," says Dr. Payne. "From who or what is a terrorist, to when is it okay, if ever, to use torture to extract information, to when is it okay to fire upon non-combatants in those most awful situations." Dr. Froula thinks, as far as general pop culture is concerned, that it's all about diffusion of fears these days: "I can see the stories becoming more diffused. And our wars are more diffused. We're in Africa, we're in Syria, we're fighting all over the place and it's very loosely tied to the Overseas Contingency Operations. Are we going to see an uptick in nationalism, or white supremacy? And is that going to filter into our storytelling?" A chilling thought, but certainly one worth pursuing.

"I'm not sure where the industry is headed," Dr. Payne concludes. "But if they make games that connect, they're going to do so because of the fears that we have, whether we realize them or not."

While a new Call of Duty in space may raise the hackles of plenty of internet down-voters, the real test will is simple: Will it sell? Are we truly finished with games that tell us the baddie is a dark-skinned man in the desert? After all, Infinite Warfare is shipping alongside a updated version of 2007's Modern Warfare, which pushed the FPS genre into the contemporary era of war in the Middle East. Are we really past the trauma of 9/11? And if so, what are we going to be afraid of next?

Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare is released for Windows, Xbox One and PlayStation 4 on November the 4th, 2016.

Follow Giaco Furino on Twitter.

Read more video gaming articles on VICE, and follow VICE Gaming on Twitter..

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

Photo via THOMAS WATKINS / Getty

US News

Trump Promises Extreme Vetting of Muslim Migrants
Outlining his plans to combat "radical Islamic terrorism," Republican nominee Donald Trump said he would enact "extreme vetting" and set up a new ideological screening test for Muslim visitors and immigrants. Trump also blamed the rise of ISIS on "decisions made by President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton."—CBS News

Pentagon Releases 15 Guantanamo Detainees
The Pentagon has announced that 15 inmates from the Guantanamo prison have been transferred to the United Arab Emirates, the single largest transfer of detainees during President Obama's administration. The Pentagon said the release of 12 Yemenis and three Afghans took place with "humane treatment measures."—VICE News

Pennsylvania Attorney General Found Guilty of Leak
Kathleen Kane, the attorney general of Pennsylvania, has been convicted of nine criminal charges including perjury and conspiracy. The jury agreed Kane orchestrated a leak of grand jury documents in an attempt to embarrass her political rival, former state prosecutor Frank Fina.—USA Today

Imam Shooting Suspect Charged with Murder
New York police have charged a man with murder in connection with the killing of an imam and his assistant in Queens. Oscar Morel, 35, was charged with two counts of second-degree murder and criminal possession of a weapon. Imam Maulama Akonjee and Thara Uddin were shot in the head after prayers on Saturday.—CBS News

International News

Airstrike on Yemeni Hospital Kills 11
An airstrike hit a hospital run by Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) in northern Yemen, killing at least 11 people and wounding another 19. MSF said the Saudi-led coalition, which has been conducting airstrikes against Yemen's Houthi rebels, was responsible for the strike on the hospital in Abs.—Al Jazeera

Mexican Gang Abducts Group at Restaurant
Armed men in Mexico have abducted between ten and 12 men who were sitting in a restaurant in the tourist resort of Puerto Vallarta. Eduardo Almaguer, the attorney general of the western state of Jalisco, said the men who were abducted were believed to be members of the Sinaloa drug cartel.—VICE News

Six Killed in Car Bombing in Turkey
A car bomb killed six people, including four police officers, outside a police station in southeastern Turkey. Senior government officials blamed the attack on Kurdish militants. Monday marks the anniversary of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party taking up arms against the Turkish state 32 years ago.—Reuters

Zambian President Accused of Rigging Vote
Zambian President Edgar Lungu narrowly won reelection, but his main opponent said the vote had been rigged. Hakainde Hichilema's United Party for National Development said it would appeal the result at the constitutional court, after Lunga won 50.35 percent of the national vote.—BBC News

Everything else

Allyson Felix Makes History but Denied Gold
Winning a silver in the 400-meter, Allyson Felix became the most decorated American woman in track and field history, with seven Olympic medals. She was beaten by Shaunae Miller of the Bahamas who dove headfirst over the line.—TIME

Google Duo Launched Today
Google is rolling out its own mobile video calling app today in a bid to compete with FaceTime. Google Duo, available on rival platforms like iPhones, allows people to call app to app and preview the video of the person calling before answering.—The Verge

Larry Wilmore's Late-Night Show Has Been Canceled
Comedy Central announced that it is canceling Larry Wilmore's The Nightly Show, with the last episode airing Thursday. President Kent Alterman said he had been hoping "it would start to click with our audience, but it hasn't happened."—The New York Times

Archeologists Begin Dig for Possible Nazi Gold Train
A team of 35 archeologists will begin digging today for a hidden train thought to be filled with Nazi gold from World War II. "The train is not a needle in the haystack—if there is one, we will find it," said lead researcher Andrzej Gaik.—The Washington Post

Hackers Say They Hacked NSA-Linked Group
Hackers known as the "Shadow Brokers" claim to have hacked a group linked to the NSA and stolen a bunch of its hacking tools. The hackers are also asking for 1 million bitcoin (around $568 million) in an auction to release files.—Motherboard

Rio Organizers Want to Silence Boos
The International Olympic Committee said it would continue to warn spectators not to boo at Rio 2016 events. "We are trying to help Brazilians to understand the right moment and the right level of passion," said a spokesman.—VICE Sports

On Monday, Donald Trump took to a stage in Youngstown, Ohio, to deliver a speech that he surely hoped would make people forget about the latest wave of bad news surrounding his presidential campaign. The address, which focused on national security, came amid reports that the campaign's organization is in disarray in key states, that the Republican National Committee is apparently thinking about shifting its focus to down-ballot races instead of the presidential contest, and a damning New York Times story in which Trump staffers painted their boss as moody and impossible to control.

So this was Trump's chance to get the media talking about something other than his amateurish fight to win the White House and perhaps come across as an even-keeled future leader, rather than an insult comic. Reading large chunks of his speech off of a teleprompter, and sticking mostly to his script, Trump was less animated than his usual self.

Nevertheless, the content of his address served to reiterate the more nationalistic and belligerent aspects of Trump's campaign platform: his proposed restrictions on immigration, willingness to use brutal tactics to achieve his foreign policy goals, and a doubling down on the angry rhetoric Republicans like to level at "radical Islamic terrorism."

Trump opened the speech with a laundry list of terrorist attacks in the United States and Europe that were committed by first- or second-generation immigrants, before moving into a description of the turmoil that has roiled the Middle East during the Obama administration. "Libya is in ruins," the Republican candidate declared. "Syria is in the middle of a disastrous civil war... Iraq is in chaos, and ISIS is on the loose."

This sort of fear mongering is par for the course for Trump. "It felt like the background to his speech was like a horror film, where everything is to be feared, and he comes in as the knight in shining armor," was how Angela Kelly, an immigration expert and senior vice president at the left-wing Center for American Progress, described Monday's speech to VICE.

When Trump veered outside his apocalyptic comfort zone, his logic became a bit muddled. He decried Barack Obama's first-term "apology tour" through the Middle East (which, like the term "radical Islamic terrorism," has become a conservative trope), and he accused the president of not sufficiently criticizing human rights abuses in the Muslim world. That bit of grandstanding would have rung a little bit more true, though, if Trump didn't go on to praise the Egyptian government of General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who boasts his own atrocious human rights record.

Trump's contradictions didn't end there. He also repeated the dubious claim that he had opposed the Iraq War "from the beginning" and criticized both the war and the subsequent withdrawal of US troops, before saying that "we should have kept the oil in Iraq"—a long-standing position of his that, on its face, amounts to an endorsement of the idea that the US should engage in wars to seize foreign resources. He also praised NATO, saying that since calling the alliance "obsolete" earlier this year, the organization had created "a new division focused on terror threats"; he neglected to note, of course, that NATO has had an Emerging Security Challenges Division since 2010.

But what, other than saying "radical Islamic terrorism" a lot, would President Trump actually do to fight the evil Muslim bogeymen he conjures up? According to Monday's speech, he would "aggressively pursue joint and coalition military operations to crush and destroy ISIS," which is of course already happening. He also said he would continue drone strikes in the Middle East and keep open the prison at Guantanamo Bay, a national embarrassment that his opponent, Hillary Clinton, has said she would close.

Mostly, though, Trump's answer to terrorism goes back to immigration, the defining issue of his disastrous presidential campaign. Expanding his past calls for a ban on Muslim immigration, Trump announced Monday that he wants to implement an "extreme vetting" of potential immigrants to the US, to ensure that they support pluralistic American values.

Of course, immigration experts across the political spectrum say that the vetting of immigrants to the US is already pretty extreme. "It's hard to see what more the government could really do to weed out potential terrorists," said Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration policy analyst at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute. According to Nowrasteh, who spoke to VICE after Trump's speech Monday, immigrants commit acts of terrorism so rarely that an American's chances of being killed by a foreign-born permanent resident in a terrorist attack are one in 57 million annually.

Kelly at the Center for American Progress agreed. " should probably spend a few minutes learning the immigration code and learning that the heavy screens he's calling for already exist," she told VICE.

Late in his speech, Trump compared Clinton to German chancellor Angela Merkel, calling Merkel's handling of her country's refugee crisis a "disaster." But Europe is facing a much larger influx of refugees than the US; as Nowrasteh pointed out, migrants "can walk , or take a short boat ride."

"We're not going to have this issue with a million people showing up at our doorstep," he added.

In the end, though, what makes Trump's jumbled facts, obfuscation of his own past positions, and invention of urgent global crises so concerning is that it creates a kind of stew of fear and hate among Americans. In particular, Kelly said, Trump's linking of terrorism to immigrants and their children is "deeply disturbing." She added, "It's so divisive, and it's really tearing the country apart."

This was supposed to be a more somber, presidential side of Trump, not the unhinged id on display at his rallies—and still, he painted immigrants, especially Muslim immigrants, as enemies of America. Trump said his policies "will help heal the divisions in our country," but it's hard to see how that would happen, when his own campaign is doing just the opposite. And while Trump's current dip in the polls makes it increasingly unlikely that he'll actually win, his rhetoric could have ripple effects that go beyond the 2016 race.

"He's creating 30-second ads for ISIS," said Kelly.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

All photos by Julian Master

Rome has crumbled, and we're all shuffling around in the rubble, clawing at the hope that a bright golden age might still be ahead of us. The renaissance that I once thought we were looking forward to has turned out to just be a cheap ren faire full of fat jerks saying "thee" and "thine." What I mean to say is: The Whopperito is here. I'm VICE's art editor, but I also woke up covered in my own puke at the Delancey Street McDonald's the other morning, so I think that makes me the most qualified to discuss fast food on a real level with you.

Let me start by saying that I'm not sure why the Whopperito exists, but I don't think it was created to sate a deep desire that the United States has for burgers that are pretending to be burritos. There is no hole in the marketplace being filled here. I like Burger King's Whopper just fine. It didn't need the sandwich to reconstitute itself as international ethnic food in order to make me like it. Someone needs to tell the Whoppers, "Just be yourself."

It is my belief that this Whopperito was made to cater to the Jackass generation who want to do gross things on Instagram to show off. I don't think this was an earnest food invention. I think this is stunt-burgerism created to get press and hashtags. Friends dare one another to eat it and then photograph one another eating the stupid food. A bunch of college kids will head to Burger King to double-dog-dare one another to eat the ridiculous new Burger King food item. Online media outlets are desperate for any kind of novelty. Websites need content, and Burger King needs advertising. Dumbass millennials and dumbass Nick Gazin put on their fedoras with our press cards sticking out of the band and head down to Burger King to make jokes about the ridiculous thing, but the joke's on us—the Whopperito is the setup, and the payoff is that a bunch of drunk youths give their money to Burger King instead of some other purveyor of delicious salt, sugar, and fat.

Wake up sheeple, you're just a jester for the Burger King to laugh at!

About me: I think In-N-Out Burger is the best hamburger chain, but I'm aware that this might just be because it's a special West Coast treat and its restaurants are pristine and aesthetically perfect. I believe with everything that I am that Wendy's is either the first- or second-best hamburger franchise. (Dave Thomas was a Freemason, and I think secret societies are cool.)

Coming in at either second or third for me is Burger King. It has become comfortable with being the second-most successful burger franchise and explored this identity admirably. I would then place White Castle as the next-best hamburger fast-food shop. That place invented the modern concept of a fast-food hamburger-peddling restaurant, and it doesn't get its due respect. Give respect to White Castle. Coming in last is McDonald's, whose burgers least resemble or taste like "food," but are the most ubiquitous of this type of foodery. There are other burgerers, but they're either too regional or too beneath my palate.

Burger King created the first signature sandwich for a hamburger fast-food establishment. McDonald's and Burger Chef (RIP) imitated them with their signature burgers. The Whopper's invention preceded the Big Mac by a whole ten years. Burger King has rebranded the Whopper frequently. In Japan, there was a Windows 7-themed Whopper. I think it tasted like computers.

Long story short: I'm a human toilet, and VICE knows this, so they asked me to go eat a Whopperito. I've been dropping the ball at work lately, so in order to try to get some extra credit, I ate three to try to impress the higher-ups.

After my first bite, I was a little disappointed, because it tasted exactly like a Whopper with spicy taco meat instead of normal Whopper meat. At this point, I realized I really had nothing to say about the Whopperito, and I was going to be in a lot of trouble when I tried to write about this familiar and un-new experience. Once inside, I bought all my Whopperitos and took them to the second floor, so I could be photographed eating my first meal of the day without annoying the restaurant's waitstaff.

While worrying about this, I noticed a nearby family gawking at me. I told them I was a food critic, and they invited me to come sit with them. I figured that maybe if I asked them what the they thought of the Whopperito that they might unwittingly help me have something to say about this unremarkable publicity stunt by Burger King.

The beef is spicy. Were I an ad man I might advertise it as "spizay." I recorded myself eating these and making comments. I described the food as "beefy meat." I suppose this is a good Whopper for people who want to eat Whoppers but don't want it to be obvious that they're eating Whoppers. I support this food-in-disguise movement. I think Burger King's next major product should be the "Whoppster." It's a Whopper shaped like a lobster.

I gave one of my Whopperitos to my new friends from East Orange, New Jersey, Chantoie, Zoe, Tameeka, and the rest. They said it was good and spicier than a normal Whopper. They didn't really help write the article for me, but it was nice to dine with company. Burger King is a place for family and sharing of food.

The only boy in the family and I started talking about anime, and he told me about Prison School, which I'd never heard of before. I googled it when I got home, and it was a lot more about masochistic teenage boys and BDSM than I expected. I thought it would be like Ninja High School. Anyway.

Here's a Whopperito disassembled. I didn't like doing this. It made me think of when they dissect a Facehugger in Alien. There were no surprises. It was a tortilla, with spicy beef, lettuce, tomato, pickles, onions, ketchup, and probably thousand-island salad dressing. I haven't read Newsweek's review of the Whopperito yet. Was it more insightful than mine?

I had a nice time making friends at Burger King, but I still had one more Whopperito to eat and the VICE photographer made me wander around with him and take photos. Here I am being fat from eating three Whopperitos.

The Whopperitos were created; I have consumed and then written about them. The circle is complete. It is done. Content: created. Whopperito desire: sated.

I give the Whopperito about a C. I give the regular Whopper about a B.

Follow Nick Gazin on Instagram.

A screenshot from 'The Company of Myself', courtesy of Eli Piilonen

This article is the first entry in a new VICE Gaming series, Mental Health Bar, examining the relationship between video games and mental health.

According to mentalhealth.org, one in four people experience a mental health problem in the UK in any given year. The National Alliance on Mental Illness reports that this statistic moves to one in five in the US, but, given the size of the country, still means 43.8 million people are known to have mental health issues. That's a lot of people—approximately 18.5 percent of the country's population—yet these figures only cover those that have been professionally diagnosed.

Why someone suffering from poor mental health would abstain from seeking professional help is ultimately down to the individual. The fact that issues of mental health are often stigmatized in wider society of course doesn't help, and first acknowledging feelings of depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, or one of the other 200-plus classified forms of mental illness can be a complicated process. The false correlation that admitting you need to see a doctor equates to admitting defeat or failure serves to complicate the procedure further still; thus, in short, making the first move can be very difficult. This is something I'm pretty familiar with myself.

A screenshot from 'Fixation', courtesy of Eli Piilonen

In 2008 my uncle committed suicide, which is when I think my own depression and anxiety first began to surface. I finally visited my doctor in 2012, but didn't follow through with counseling and antidepressant medication until 2014. Why did it take me so long? I'm not entirely sure. Looking back, I think I was a bit overwhelmed and the thought of facing the unknown head-on intimidated me. I've since been told this is not only common but something the majority of people go through when seeking professional help.

While I'm keen to avoid the "here's how video games help x, y, or z" rhetoric here (don't get me wrong, I do think video games can play a huge part in helping people overcome their vices, trials or tribulations it's just that they shouldn't replace seeking actual professional help as and where appropriate), I feel the interactive and persuasive nature of the medium does give it better leverage when conveying sensitive subject matter.

To this end, I was happy to discover the work of Eli Piilonen recently—a Nebraska-based indie developer responsible for two puzzle-platformers named The Company of Myself and its prequel Fixation. Both are built around protagonists who desire to seek professional help, where physical and metaphorical obstacles are tied to the games' genres and concepts respectively. As you overcome actual tangible puzzles in tiered platform levels, you unlock parts of the protagonist's narratives, and step closer to each one's eventual resolve.

Article continues after the video below

Related: Watch VICE's film on battling Asperger's with escapist play, 'LARPing Saved My Life'

"It happened sort of organically," explains Piilonen of why he chose to centre his games around this lesser-explored theme. "There was a certain type of content in movies and in stories that I really liked that I didn't see happening in the games I was playing. I like the movie Seven, which makes you think of stuff you don't necessarily want to think about—the sort of stuff that makes you uncomfortable in service of making a point."

Before making The Company of Myself, Piilonen explains he was keen to create something half influenced by puzzle games and half by character studies. After drawing inspiration from older flash games, he came up with an interesting character-cloning mechanic where players are encouraged to fail several times in individual levels, before restarting and using their previous incarnations—represented by shadows—to reach otherwise inaccessible areas. Some levels limit your retries, whereas others offer unlimited restarts.

"I wanted to discover a mechanic where you're kind of collaborating with yourself," says Piilonen. "The lead character is someone suffering from social anxiety and tends to keep himself to himself. I felt at the time I'd come upon this naturally, but then in retrospect, I was just sitting around making flash games, doing a bunch of little things I didn't totally know how to do.

"Maybe this is confirmation bias, but I feel like if you accidentally put yourself in the story, that's the best way. If you're actively trying to tell a story about yourself, it might feel really awkward and stilted. But if you write about stuff that you feel is interesting and you write about stuff that's important to you and you realize later that it's actually extremely embarrassing, that you were divulging all of this stuff. I think that works best."

In turn, The Company of Myself ultimately suggests failure is okay—that being unsure or introverted is normal, but that sometimes coming out of yourself and facing uncertain circumstances is necessary to ensure your wellbeing. Fixation expands on its forerunner's conceit with the inclusion of more sophisticated dialogue and puzzles, and the introduction of better-developed characters.

"Making a game is a way for me to discuss stuff that I can't talk about in casual conversation, usually," adds Piilonen. "If it's something that's too uncomfortable, I find it's easier for me to put that into a game instead of gambling on whether or not someone is going to be like, 'oh this isn't dinner conversation'."

Which is ostensibly where both of these games excel: yes, they're simple in aesthetics and design, but their core sentiment is one which is not only informative but, crucially, relatable. The idea that both games mimic character studies adds a dose of realism to the message they're sending; but at the same time they engage players with intuitive platforming so as not to get bogged down with premise—in turn steering clear of sanctimonious lecturing.

"I think it really is that feeling of solidarity," says Piilonen, on what he hopes players will get from his games. "That no matter your life is like, you can feel really good about it. You can feel really bad about it, and when you feel really bad about it it's really easy to forget that a whole bunch of people have had very similar experience and there's a whole lot of people who'd agree with you about how much whatever thing is hurtful or how much it sucks or how much it's affecting you. The solidarity that someone else agrees that this particular thing is uncomfortable, I think, in turn, is very comforting."

Piilonen acknowledges video games as a medium are constantly evolving and that while he's well aware not everyone is interested in games that explore deeper, more cultured themes, the feedback he's received over the years makes it worthwhile—if for nothing else but to prove he and other players are not alone.

"There are rare cases where someone sends us a thing that's super heartfelt and gives a really clear, tangible example of a way that we really helped a person and it's this super unexpected benefit from typing on a computer and learning how to solve these technical problems. That makes it worth it."

Find more information on these games, and others by Eli Piilonen, at 2Darray.com.

Follow Joe Donnelly on Twitter.

Read more video gaming articles on VICE, and follow VICE Gaming on Twitter..

This year has been a fairly disappointing year for science-fiction films. Independence Day: Resurgence garnered a dreadful 32 percent at Rotten Tomatoes; the much-hyped Ghostbusters and Star Trek: Beyond were rated better yet have had fairly middling box-office performances; and the less said about the "dark and gritty" ongoing trash heap that is the DC cinematic universe, the better. But sci-fi cinema lovers still have at least one very promising movie to look forward to: Arrival, whose full trailer dropped Tuesday.

Unlike those dull reboots and sequels, Arrival promises to offer something new for moviegoers. The film, directed by Sicario's Denis Villeneuve and starring Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner, is based on the short story "Story of Your Life" by the science-fiction writer Ted Chiang. Until now, Chiang has been largely unknown outside of the SF world, but in that world, he is legendary.

While his career spans only a handful of short stories, Chiang has won multiple Nebulas, Hugos, and Locus Awards. Although Chiang has been publishing since the 90s, he is such a meticulous craftsman that he averages less than a short story a year. He's published one collection—Stories of Your Life and Others—yet the book has been published multiple times by multiple publishers. It was originally published by Tor Books, then reprinted by Small Beer Press, and this year will be published yet again by Vintage. And the collection deserves that unique attention. It is simply one of the greatest science-fiction story collections ever published.

Chiang's work is both very literary and very serious about science. Chiang deeply explores scientific concepts while crafting emotionally moving characters and narratives. The story Arrival is based on follows a linguistics expert (played in the film by Amy Adams) who is hired by the military to try and communicate with a race of radially symmetrical aliens who appear on Earth. As she slowly learns their truly alien form of communication, the narrative is woven with her memories of her daughter's life. Flexing spacemen shooting at green Martians with lasers this is not.

After Arrival, Villeneuve will be directing Blade Runner 2, which should give you an idea what tradition this film will be in. This is cerebral science fiction coupled with gorgeous and atmospheric cinematography. If your idea of great sci-fi is Blade Runner, Gattaca, or 2001: A Space Odyssey, then Arrival should be a treat this November.

Follow Lincoln Michel on Twitter.

David Milgaard speaks with reporters at the Calgary Courts Centre in November 2011. Photo by CP/Bill Graveland

"Twenty years for nothing, well, that's nothing new—besides, no one's interested in something you didn't do," Gord Downie sings on the Tragically Hip's Canadiana classic, "Wheat Kings," which put the issue of wrongful convictions on top 40 radio way back in 1992.

Where it all began. Photo via Flickr user Photo Giddy

You've probably been there before. In the middle of a verbal spar with someone, you're suddenly standing there, completely blanking on a comeback. You're afraid of saying something unfunny because it will thrust you further into your already deepening hole of embarrassment. So instead, you stay silent and accept that you've lost the argument. If only the fight took place on Twitter, where every comeback is perfect and essential. (This is where sarcasm font would come in handy.)

What kind of person aspires to bake extravagant and complicated cakes in the red-hot competitive heat of the Great British Bake Off marquee? I do not know. Consider the type of mind that wants to expose itself to the rigors of baking gingerbread thins in a tent while Paul Hollywood, with the flint-grey eyes of Serbia's worst serial killer, says "that's a shoddy crumb" at you. Bake Off, as a competition, seems to go against the very nature of baking as a whole: serene, placid, singular, a quiet alchemy, turning flour and eggs into cakes and smiles, and then ruined when Mary Berry comes in and makes you cook 40 meringues in an hour-and-a-half with no recipe while Mel & Sue shout at you. Still, it's back for another series.

And so to this year's contestants. There's Tom, with the pleading eyes of a thrift shop volunteer who knows the cash register is 50 cents down today but he doesn't know where the money's gone, oh god, it's five to five, oh god, where's the money gone; Kate, with the sincere vibe that she leaves poison pen letters on the other mom's windshields about doing the schoolrun in their pajamas. But who among them will win this year's Great British Bake Off, based only on the press shots provided by the BBC? Reader, I intend us to find out.

Together.

MICHAEL, 20

Nervous kid from your school who excels at art and is only ever friends with girls. "No, don't bully him," the girls are saying, prowling around Michael like a pack of lions, as he sits at the back of the art class on his lunch hour (the teacher has given Michael special dispensation to practice art on his lunch hour because he kept getting thrown in trash cans when he tried to play outside). Michael's looking at you. Michael's already flinching like you're about to punch him. All you did was come in to fetch something from your backpack, which is now blocked from your way by five folded-arms girls called Laura.

VAL, 66

Val used to be a headteacher, which can go one of two ways: she could be one of those fun and nice headteachers, the kind that helps underprivileged kids against all odds learn to read, the kind of headteacher who has a private cache of snacks in her desk for when she has a crier, the kind of headteacher who organizes fun trips away and sports days and does inspiring all-morals-no-god assemblies every morning. Looking at the way she's wielding that wooden spoon, though, Val could well have a suppressed folder deep in an old council building about all those times she hit ten-year-olds over the knuckles with a Bible.

TOM, 26

Tom comes into Bake Off fresh off the back of losing four stone, which seems to me a natural precursor to the BBC hosting a reality show next year where newly reformed heroin addicts compete in a tent to see who can cook up the best batch of crack (Pete Doherty to judge), but still: look at the sadness around those eyes. There is no way Tom is not going to cry over an unset jelly at some point in this series then get kicked out in week three. Ladbrokes have suspended betting on him being found round the back of the veranda piping icing directly into his mouth while sobbing over a burnt batch of touiles.

BENJAMINA, 23

I feel like Benjamina is the friend of a friend you've met in passing about twice, ever, yet she turns up to your open invite birthday party with like four massive Tupperwares because it turns out she's been up since 5 AM baking brownies, muffins, and an ornate and heartfelt cake, which she watches in silence as you and your drunk friends destroy by taking great fistfuls of it and just pushing it into your mouth. "What was it," you're saying, "what's the name again? Nina? Can I get you a drink?" Benjamina does not drink because it doesn't agree with her Pill. She doesn't really know anyone here so she just sits with a scarf on her lap while you all talk loudly about the college you all went to and she didn't. She slinks off at 5 PM and asks if you could collect all her Tupperware for her at the end of the party, but come on. Come on. We all know you're not going to do that.

LEE, 67

Lee is 67 which means his competitiveness on this goes one of two ways: he's just a nice old timer who Just Needs Something To Do And Bakes A Mean Scone, and his 20-year-old granddaughter told him it would be fun, so he's here, he's going to try it but he doesn't mind if he loses, it's just nice to get out the house sometimes, isn't it? Or: he's still got one final scrap of ugly, male, win-at-all-costs competition burning bright inside him that he has to work out by absolutely crushing a load of meek students and jolly women at baking, like I mean he is out here unplugging people's ovens and piping pie jelly into their trifles, he is win-at-all-costs, he is very strongly intimating he has a gun in his car, he is not going home without that trophy. Hard to tell exactly which side of Lee we'll see come out but he'll be in the final three.

LOUISE, 46

Louise is my favorite because she's a Cardiff-based hairdresser who got into making cakes when doing a series of charity bake sales (i.e. the sweetest and most pleasant life of anyone alive) but she's also just got the sincere vibe that she has a past life that she isn't forthcoming with but it very honest about if pressed. You know the type. "Talking about lesbians, are we? Tried it for a few years, in the end it wasn't for me." Or: "Take That? Toured with them, took each one of them like a bull, Mark was my favorite, in the end it wasn't for me." Louise is nice but she's hiding something. We will not find out until she bakes an interpretive retelling of it into a cake somewhere around Week 7.

ANDREW, 25

Andrew is your mom's favorite. Your mom always sits up a bit more rapt when Andrew's on the screen. Your mom always turns the volume up and shushes you whenever he speaks in his soft little voice about icing. God, poor Andrew. He doesn't have a clue the surreal and savory sexual shapes your mother is contorting him into in her head. By Week 6 she's just softly whispering to herself whenever he's on screen. "Wouldn't he make a lovely woman," she's saying. She's forgotten you're in the room. "Mom, are yo—" "Shh, shh. Shh. Shhhh. Go see what your father's doing." "But dad's here in the room." "Both... leave. Both leave."

RAV, 28

Looking at Rav I don't think he's ever been unhappy a day in his life, like I actually cannot imagine him being miserable, I feel like every time he gets even close to a negative emotion he just puts an apron on and gets down to some vegan baking, cooks all of his feelings into a zucchini and dark chocolate cake, consumes them, internalizes them, never feels them again. He's got 'cheery semi-final exit followed by a MailOnline comments thread that gets so bad the police have to get involved' written all over him.

KATE, 37

Turns out you've worked in the same office as Kate for the past four years—sitting opposite each other, sharing merry 11 AM coffee-time banter, filling out the same annual application for a parking space that she always seems to get—and you only learn she likes baking when you turn on BBC One next week. Hold on, isn't there, like, a tradition in your office where you have to bake for everyone on your birthday? Wasn't there an entire charity cake sale last year for Comic Relief? Didn't you spend an entire evening desperately trying to get a flan to behave? And yet: you've never tasted as much as a Rice Krispie cake off of this one. Oh, Kate bakes. Kate bakes alright. She just doesn't bake for you.

CANDICE, 31

Candice is just every Maggie Gyllenhaal character from every movie Maggie Gyllenhaal has ever been in. There was literally a Maggie Gyllenhaal character where she makes good cakes. That's her. That's Candice. Will Ferrell falls in love with her. You. You are Will Ferrell.

SELASI, 30

Selasi is the boyfriend of the girl you're lowkey in love with and he's better than you in every single way. "Hi," Selasi says, his handshake tight but smooth, strong but finessed. "Selasi." The girl you are lowkey in love with—your roommate, which makes this all the more uncomfortable—suggests you two will get on. "Selasi plays football too!" You invite Selasi to play with you all on Wednesday nights and he absolutely, yet modestly, outplays you. You're panting out of your ass and you're pretty convinced you're having a coronary. "Good game, dude!" he says, then jogs off the field. At the bar afterwards, Selasi gets a round in for 15 people without even blinking. "Please, guys," he says, "don't worry about it. I just got a bonus at work, they're on me." You were going to walk home because you don't have the bus fare but Selasi gets you both a cab. "I'm heading back to see Kate anyway." That night, you lay on your bed and listen as, there in the living room/kitchenette combo, he cooks a curry from scratch, bakes a cake, then plays her a subtle and beautiful saxophone solo. Later, you hear giggling and immaculate, fulfilling-sounding intercourse. You realize in the middle of the night that you are now low-key in love with Selasi as well. Your life really is a mess.

JANE, 61

I feel like this photo of Jane actually belongs on a news story titled, 'Coronation Street's longest-running uncredited extra is hanging up her acting boots... to open a B&B in Scarborough!'

WINNER

The winner, as always, will just be whoever pulls the most .gif-friendly facial expressions, which at a glance is probably going to be Andrew. Your mom will be pleased.

Follow Joel Golby on Twitter.

Brendan Dassey walks into a Wisconsin courthouse to be sentenced for murder in 2007. Last week, a judge ruled that his confession was unlawfully coerced. (Herald Times Reporter/Eric Young via AP, Pool)

On Friday, Brendan Dassey, the 26-year-old convicted murderer who became famous thanks to Netflix's documentary series Making a Murderer, learned that his conviction had been overturned, meaning he would be set free in 90 days unless prosecutors decide to retry his case.

Dassey was convicted along with his uncle, Steven Avery, of the 2005 murder of 25-year-old photographer Teresa Halbach. But the Netflix series cast doubt on the narrative of the case advanced by authorities, and last week, a judge ruled that Dasey's 2006 confession was unlawfully coerced.

The full four-hour-long interview with Dassey was uploaded to YouTube last year. It's agonizing to watch. The detectives repeatedly tell Dassey—then only 16 years old—to "be honest" and reassure him that they're on his side; the teenager seems lost. They ask Dassey to give them details, and he struggles, answering with questions, as if checking in to see if he's giving police the "correct" answer.

They try to get Dassey to say that Avery shot the victim in the head, asking, "What else did you do? Come on... something with the head..."

"He cut off her hair," Dassey offers.

In his ruling, US Magistrate William Duffin cited the interrogators' "repeated false promises , when considered in conjunction with all relevant factors, most especially Dassey's age, intellectual deficits, and the absence of a supportive adult, rendered Dassey's confession involuntary under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments."

But though those "relevant factors" make the conduct of the police in the case especially upsetting, the techniques used in Dassey's interrogation, like lying to him and assuring him he won't get into trouble if he confesses, are common, accepted, and legal practices in law enforcement.

"Police interrogation in America is fundamentally dishonest," says Richard Leo, a professor of law and psychology at the University of San Francisco and a leading researcher on police interrogation practices. "Police are allowed to lie all the time. They call lying about evidence 'ruses.' It's kind of Orwellian in the sense that it's not really a ruse. If I'm telling you I've got your fingerprints and your DNA and I have a surveillance video... and you're a kid and you don't know that police can lie about evidence, you're thinking, How would I be in a video?"

Combined with other manipulations, experts say, such tactics can drive an innocent person to confess to murder.

"Every one of us has a breaking point," says Steven Drizin, a law professor at Northwestern University and one of Dassey's appellate attorneys. "When the tactics make the suspect feel that continuing to assert innocence is futile, the suspect reaches a point of hopelessness and becomes easier to manipulate."

When the only way out is a confession, many take it.

Juveniles are especially vulnerable, says Drizin, because "they tend to make impulsive decisions that focus on short-term rewards rather than long-term consequences... A teenager might confess simply because he thinks that by confessing he can go home."

Most, if not all interrogations in this country, are some variation on the Reid Technique, which was developed in the 1940s by a man named John E. Reid as a more humane alternative to the intense and often physically violent interrogations of the previous decades, the so-called third degree.

The Reid Technique relies on a presumption of guilt based on either evidence or, as Leo says, "a gut hunch."

"You isolate somebody," is how the professor describes it, "and then you accuse them. Cut off their denials, confront them with real or made-up evidence, then present minimizing scenarios—suggest that if you confess, it's either not a crime, or it's not that serious."

The Reid Technique also emphasizes the importance of reading body language.

"Nonverbal behavior is more reliable than spoken words," according to a training article posted on the website of John E. Reid and Associates. "Facial expressions, of course, reflect the person's attitude... Eyes are windows to the soul."

But there is no evidence that's true, say critics of the method.

"They're completely wrong," says Leo. "Scientific research contradicts almost everything they say about detecting deception from cues. So they are simply wrong in how they advise interrogators to divine truth-telling or deception from body language and physical behavior."

Dassey was 16 when he was charged in 2006, and according to court papers, he was a "slow learner" with a lower than average IQ and enrolled in some special education classes in high school.

The two detectives who questioned him, Calumet County sheriff's investigator Mark Wiegert and Wisconsin Department of Justice special agent Tom Fassbender, weren't getting the answers they were looking for and pressed him further.

"We know," Fassbender said to Dassey. "We just need you to tell us."

Dassey had nothing to say.

Finally, Wiegart gave up and just said it, ""All right, I'm just gonna come out and ask you. Who shot her in the head?"

"He did," Dassey answered, referring to Avery.

When asked why he didn't say that before, Dassey responded, "'Cause I couldn't think of it."

The process, called "contamination" or "scripting," says Leo, is "the feeding of non-public details to the suspect" and getting them to parrot them back to authorities.

"The bad news is it's not against the law," says Leo. "Courts tend to look the other way."

One of the most significant protections for suspects is videotaping interrogations. Wisconsin, where Dassey was arrested, mandates recording.

"We're finally starting to win the videotaping battle," says Drizin. "When I started this work, only two states required the police to record interrogations. Now we're close to 25. Recording is critical because it is the only way to see whether the suspect provided the details of the crime that only the true perpetrator should know or whether the police fed them to the suspect."

Many other countries, like England and Germany, don't allow police to lie to suspects, according to Leo, who wonders if it might be time to reevaluate our practices here.

"It's a really big question: Do we need thoroughly dishonest police to get confessions and solve crimes?" he asks. "If we accept that, one consequence is that we will have a higher false confession rate than we need. Is it fair? Is it ethical?"

He suggests the Reid Technique, while progressive in the 1940s, could be regressive today, and that the future of questioning suspects could be a more investigative-style approach, an actual interview.

"Not guilt-presumptive," he says. "Not rush to judgment, not trying to muzzle somebody to the point where they don't talk and then to repeat your theory... But instead to encourage them to give information—and with finesse and less psychological coercion, try to get accurate information as opposed to confessions. It might be time."

Can you slang, fam? Photo via The Calgary Herald.

What up fam, it's hella lit in this piece! Even though I'm an old-ass millennial I ship this new "Generation Z" slang guide from the blessed interns at the Calgary Herald. I'm finna bust out all these on fleek words like they're bae. This could be us but you playing, am I right, lol? I know it's v. sus when old people like me try to rap with you kids, acting like it's trill but meanwhile you're speaking a totally different language and I'm like, :(.

And even tho it looks like this video was made by Da Motha fuckin Share Z0ne, I'm feeling v. v. blessed to have an authentic guide for talking to my younger colleagues, shout out, VICE fam!

As documented by the VICELAND shows Black Market and its companion Black Market: Dispatches (premiering tonight at 10 PM—check out a trailer for the show above), the illegal-business underworld has grown astoundingly myriad and complex. It's easier than ever to access illicit goods and services under the radar, and the informal economy of unlicensed and untaxed business has also ballooned. There are estimates that various forms of unofficial commerce collectively make up the second-largest economy in the world, and they employ half of the global labor force too.

Black markets have also accompanied modern governance for centuries, and there's evidence to suggest that the United States wouldn't have become the superpower it is today without its earliest citizens trading in black markets. Peter Andreas is a professor in international studies and political science at Brown University, and he's also the author of Smuggler Nation, a book about America's long relationship with black markets and how they've played an inexorable role in birthing American wealth, as well as how black markets have become economic behemoths the US government obsessively struggles to contain. VICE spoke with Andreas to get more insight on the timelessness of black markets in America.

VICE: How did black markets originate in early America?
Peter Andreas: Black markets were even more important back in the founding imported from the Caribbean was smuggled in violation of British trade laws. You can trace part of the rebellion against the Crown to disgruntled merchants who were unhappy with the crackdown on their business practices. It's particularly ironic because, today, the United States is the world's anti-smuggling policing superpower—but its founding story is partly a smuggling story. We need to be more sensitive to our own history before we become crusaders around the globe against smuggling.

Photo via Wikicommons

You also write about the "historical amnesia" that US policymakers embody when they criticize people participating in illegal trade.
In the current debate over intellectual property theft, there's a lot of finger-pointing at China that's rightly deserved, as China's deeply involved in intellectual property theft. But it's a little hypocritical, too, given our own early industrialization story. America's early industrialization, especially in the early 19th century, was based on illicitly importing technological equipment and workers from England—they'd literally go to England both to woo artisan workers with technological know-how of the equipment and to smuggle the equipment back to the United States. Samuel Slater, who's described as the father of the American industrial revolution, smuggled himself out of England in violation of British immigration laws to come work in the US. When he first arrived in Rhode Island, he cannibalized and improved upon smuggled equipment.

How broad has participation in American black markets been over time, and which classes of Americans have benefited the most?
Most of the traffickers and smugglers we talk about today are socially marginalized characters, but in early American history, the merchants involved in smuggling were the pillars of society. Boston's Hancock family—one of the richest in New England—were well known a fortune in part based on smuggling molasses. John Brown, a pillar of Providence's upper crust, made a fortune on smuggling. Moses Brown, who founded Brown University with John, hired Samuel Slater to create a textile mill in Pawtucket based on equipment that Brown illicitly acquired from England.

John Jacob Astor is considered America's first multimillionaire, but a substantial part of the sources of his wealth was based on the fur trade—itself not illegal, but he used alcohol to illegally with Native Americans for furs. There are also plenty of accounts of American merchants making money in the opium trade to China, which had criminalized the trade of opium, even though other countries thought it was a legitimate business practice.

When did the US evolve from tacitly condoning the existence of black markets to becoming one of the world's primary enforcers against illicit trade and piracy?
One way to trace this is .

Do you think it's fair to say that some of these newer black markets formed as a result of socially discriminatory policies?
The prohibition on certain drugs was driven in part by racism and socially discriminatory policies. associated with African American jazz musicians in the early 20th century. There are lots of examples of social stigmatization of drug use closely tied to race.

Have black markets always served a role in allowing the disempowered to create economic and political leverage for themselves?
In some respects, they provide an alternative mode of survival and a coping strategy for millions of people around the world. For entrepreneurs, black markets can serve as an alternative mechanism of social mobility wherein otherwise marginalized peoples in society can enrich themselves and aspire to join the ranks of the superrich. Those cases aren't as common as people think, but overall the global illicit economy is a cushion-and-survival mechanism for a substantial percentage of the globe's population.

Is there anything that distinguishes the black markets we see today from those of the past, other than scale and technological complexity?
There's a lot more continuity than people realize, but I don't want to imply nothing has changed. To paraphrase Mark Twain, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes." We see striking parallels to the past, but that doesn't mean there aren't important technological and political changes. Globalization is often blamed for the underside of various illicit activities, as well as the policing of those activities. We often emphasize the way in which technological innovations facilitate law evasion, but historically they've facilitated law enforcement as well.

Follow Bill Kilby on Twitter.

Detectives walk suspect Oscar Morel out of the NYPD 107th Precinct after he was charged in the murders of Maulana Akonjee and Thara Uddin. Photo by New York Daily News Archive/Contributor via Getty Images

Minutes after prayers ended at the Al-Furqan Jame Mosque in Ozone Park, Queens, on Saturday, a man approached Imam Maulama Alauddin Akonjee and his assistant, Thara Uddin, from behind, fatally shooting the Bangladeshi clerics in the head before speeding off in a black SUV.

Despite Akonjee having more than $1,000 cash on him, nothing was stolen.

A clear motive still hasn't been ascertained, but cops arrested a suspect named Oscar Morel in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn around 10 PM Sunday. Cops tracked the janitor's SUV, which was caught on camera around the time of the murders and involved in a hit-and-run with a bicyclist just minutes later.

After finding Morel's vehicle at his apartment, cops waited for him to come out. That's when the suspect allegedly rammed a detective's car several times in a brief escape attempt before being arrested. So far, Morel is charged with two counts of second-degree murder and two counts of criminal possession of a weapon.

Besides the vehicle, cops are counting clothes matching the description of the suspect and a revolver found in Morel's home as evidence. (The weapon was hidden in a wall in the apartment that had apparently been opened and resealed, the New York Times reports.)

The 35-year-old suspect had no connection to the Ozone Park neighborhood where the murders took place, and police are floating the idea that he might have been hired as a hitman, according to the Daily News. Because Akonjee also had the cash on him, they are also looking into whether this might have been a botched robbery attempt.

Meanwhile, members of New York's Bangladeshi community are left to wonder if the killings were motivated by hate. "I don't feel safe anymore," Mosharraft Hossain told the Times. "All of this hatred being propagated, especially by Donald Trump, it puts us at risk. People sometimes pass me on the street and call me Bin Laden. I just try to keep my head down and keep walking." In a press conference Monday, Mayor Bill de Blasio tried to allay those fears by promising police would be out in full force around mosques and in Muslim communities.

Akonjee was a married father of three who came to the United States in 2011 seeking a better education for his children; his body is being returned to his native country. Less is known about Uddin, who died about four hours being shot through the brain.

The Post reports Morel admitted being on the scene but denied committing the shooting when confronted by cops. He's due in court today. Meanwhile, his brother Alvin insists he's a decent person—while hinting at past prejudice.

"The only time we felt, everybody in New York felt, a hatred, was during 9/11," he told the paper. "Other than that, we never felt a hatred with nobody."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.