Donald Trump with winners and contestants of the 2013 Miss Teen, Miss USA, and Miss Universe pageants. TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/Getty Images

Donald Trump, who owned Miss Teen USA, Miss USA, and Miss Universe from 1996 to 2015, waltzed through the dressing room while female contestants as young as 15 were changing, four women who competed in the 1997 Miss Teen USA beauty pageant allege.

Former Miss Vermont Teen USA Mariah Billado told BuzzFeed News that she remembered Trump walking through the dressing room at one point and saying something along the lines of, "Don't worry, ladies, I've seen it all before."

"I remember putting on my dress really quick because I was like, Oh my god, there's a man in here," Billado said. "I remember it shocking me. I barely let anybody except my sister see me getting dressed."

Three additional 1997 contestants, who wanted to stay anonymous, said they too recall Trump bursting in as girls rushed to cover themselves. BuzzFeed News managed to reach 15 of the 51 contestants who competed in that pageant. Eleven of them said they did not remember Trump being in the dressing room, and all 15 said they didn't recall Trump saying anything sexually suggestive or getting physical.

Nevertheless, Trump apparently made a habit out of frequenting his pageants' dressing rooms. Former Miss Arizona Tasha Dixon, who competed in the Trump-owned Miss USA pageant in 2001, said contestants were encouraged to greet Trump when he pranced through their changing room.

"He just came strolling right in. There was no second to put a robe on or any sort of clothing or anything. Some girls were topless. Other girls were naked," Dixon, who was 18 at the time of the pageant, told CBS Los Angeles. She added, "To have the owner come waltzing in, when we're naked, or half naked, in a very physically vulnerable position, and then to have the pressure of the people that worked for him telling us to go fawn all over him, go walk up to him, talk to him, get his attention."

Trump himself has even bragged about his occasional changing room "check-ins" on The Howard Stern Show.

"I'll go backstage before a show, and everyone's getting dressed and ready and everything else. And you know, no men are anywhere. And I'm allowed to go in because I'm the owner of the pageant. And therefore I'm inspecting it," he told the radio host in April 2005. "You know they're standing there with no clothes. And you see these incredible looking women. And so I sort of get away with things like that."

The troubling pageant allegations fall in step with the now famous comments Trump was caught saying to Billy Bush while wearing a hot mic in 2005, in which he boasted about being able to grab women "by the pussy" and his failed sexual advances on a married woman. While critics say his lewd comments glorify sexual assault, Trump continues to brush them off as just "locker room talk."

"And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything," he said on the tape. Perhaps he felt the same way at his pageants.

Read: Donald Trump and What Men Say When They Think Women Won't Hear

Jacques Rouschop. Image via police

A man accused in a sexual assault-and-choking trial reportedly offered to "whip out" his penis to a judge Tuesday, claiming his only defense is that his micro-penis was simply too small to assault somebody with.

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Hillary Clinton at a White House state dinner in 1997. Photo by Cynthia Johnson/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images

It's the year 2000, and two of the most powerful women in the world are sitting on a red couch talking about home decorating. "I got pictures of his dining room, and there were stuffed heads of animals that he had shot all over!" one of them exclaims, laughing. "And I said, 'Well, we'll bring back the mahogany, and we'll bring back something of the color scheme, and the drapes, but we're not bringing back the heads."

"I like taxidermy," the other says, "but I don't think I'd like it here!"

This is how Hillary Clinton and Martha Stewart talk about the former's decoration of the White House Red Room, which Clinton had wanted to restore to the days of the prolific hunter Teddy Roosevelt, until she realized what that would entail. It's part of a special called "A Visit to the White House," which was filmed at the end of the Bill Clinton administration as Hillary was about to take office as the junior senator of New York.

The focus of the segment is what it's like to be, in Stewart's words, "the custodian of the White House": whether Chelsea was able to have slumber parties, how former first ladies had influenced Clinton's renovation decisions, and what it was like to plan and entertain at state dinners. They also discuss Clinton's book, An Invitation to the White House, which Martha says makes her "jealous" because of Hillary's status as America's most famous hostess: "I've written a book about entertaining, but here the first lady of the United States gets to write An Invitation to the White House." Nevertheless, Martha sounds skeptical when she asks Hillary what it's like to preside over state dinners: "Did they really interest you, these dinners? Did you really enjoy going to them night after night?"

Yes, Clinton replies, though there were challenges. For example, the administration had to make choices, like when it decided to move from French service (almost-cooked food is brought out on a cart and finished in front of the guest) to plated service (food is prepared and plated completely before it's brought out to you). If I had a rich aunt, I imagine her conversations with her husband's business partners' wives would sound something like this.

Clinton had just been elected to the Senate from New York, and here she was being subjected to the usual first lady–style interview about drapes and sleepovers.

On one level, the interview seems to represent the sexism female public figures have to go through. Clinton had just been elected to the Senate from New York, and here she was being subjected to the usual first lady–style interview about drapes and sleepovers. This despite Clinton's long-standing, often controversial rebellion against the stultifying limits of being a political wife: During the 1992 campaign, in response to some questions about her work as a lawyer, she famously said, "I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was fulfill my profession." She was the epitome of the 90s career woman—if her chat about curtains with Martha Stewart at the decade's close seemed strained and ridiculous, that's because it probably was.

But the interview also highlights how Clinton embodied the tensions of the first lady job as it has transformed since the second half of the 20th century: More than any other first lady, she had to balance the idea that a woman shouldn't be confined to wallpaper decisions with the political need to avoid diminishing the "impact"—Stewart's word—of what has traditionally been known as "women's work." (Thought it wasn't like she didn't dive into the more ceremonial aspects of the job with gusto: She told Stewart that she sent her decorator, Kaki Hockersmith, to France to research 19th-century wallpaper design for the White House Blue Room.)

The first lady role began as and continues to be an unofficial one. While the wives of presidents always acted as hostesses for their husbands and sometimes—as with Dolley Madison—took on more public roles, the term didn't appear in print until 1860, when a newspaper used it to refer to Harriet Lane, who served as first lady to the only bachelor president, James Buchanan. From there, first ladies like Edith Wilson, Eleanor Roosevelt, Lady Bird Johnson, and Betty Ford expanded the job in different ways. According to Anthony Eksterowicz, a professor emeritus of political science at James Madison University who has studied first ladies, Rosalynn Carter deserves special mention for dramatically increasing integration between the first lady's office and the West Wing; she was the first to hire a chief-of-staff for herself, and she also sat in on cabinet meetings and had her staff attend daily briefings in the West Wing.

Today, first ladies oversee large staffs and spearhead specific initiatives (that often focus on families and children—Laura Bush promoted reading and education, Michelle Obama focused on fighting childhood obesity), though they are still not paid for their work. They have to straddle the line between being symbols of American womanhood and wielding the massive power their position grants them.

"There's a mistaken assumption about first ladies having to do the ceremonial when they would rather be in the political or policy area," Eksterowicz says. "The fact of the matter is, they have to do both"—even as "the ceremonial responsibilities are shifted over for other people to take care of" more than they used to be, the first lady still has to make a big deal about how much she cares about children, families, and building a home. She still has to pretend like she's doing the curtains-and-cookies stuff, even though she's probably not.

An illustrative anecdote: In 1995, Clinton participated in a short Christmas special with Martha Stewart in which the pair hang a gold wreath—with 50 acorns representing the 50 states—on the Truman Balcony to celebrate Christmas at the White House. The mood is cheerful and warm; Hillary, dressed in a bright-red coat, matching gloves, and huge gold earrings, declares, in her hokey, everywoman accent, "We'll be home for the holidays." Shortly after the cameras stopped rolling, Stewart packed up the wreath and went home.

In the wake of that "baked cookies and had teas" remark in 1992, the future first lady did an interview with Katie Couric in part to reassure skittish voters that she wasn't gunning for actual political power. "I'm not interested in any kind of paid position or cabinet position or anything formal or official," Clinton told Couric. "What I would like to do is work on that issues that I've been involved in for more than 20 years, primarily children and families issues, and public education." Later, Couric asks about Bill's comments that he wanted Hillary to be very active on the policy side. "Do you think the America people are ready for a first lady who is that involved at a policy-making level at the White House?"

Obviously, that sounds a lot like, "Is America ready for a female president?" If there's a straight line from 1992 to 2016, it's that maybe the first question had to be asked before the second. Feminism is about to gain a very nice, neat narrative: If and when Clinton is elected, the first lady who took the most shit because of the role will get to be the one to end the job as we know it. For all the jokes about Bill being "first gentleman" in the gender-swapped Clinton administration reboot, as Hillary herself has noted, he's not going to be doing "state dinners, picking out china or floral arrangements, or anything like that." Justice would demand that Bill spend some time explaining his upholstery choices on national TV, but if Hillary's presidency means that people married to the president no longer have to conform to gender stereotypes, that's a fine consolation prize.

Follow Lauren Oyler on Twitter.

What could go wrong? Photo via Netflix

Charlie Brooker's gaze into technology's hold on humanity and its inability to loosen the grip on smartphones (aka our black mirrors) is launching a new season on Netflix on Oct. 21. It's the most glossy of the three series so far, with lots of real American star power to signal its debut on the US streaming network. But despite its new home it still manages to be every bit as paranoid, cynical and cutting about our techno-present.

In these previews for two of the episodes, you'll see what happens when our rating systems go too far and when the urge to make gaming as realistic as ever pushes us into horrifying worlds.

Nosedive

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Photo by Michele Cote

Since 2011, I've been tweeting about my lack of orgasms. Sorry in advance to all my ex-boyfriends and past selfish lovers who never pleased me sexually. For the number of fuccbois who have whispered in my ear in the green room of a Travis Scott "afterparty," "Girl, I'm 'bout to give you that good dick," none of them have actually ever given me anything but regret.

But honestly, it's probably not all their fault. I literally didn't know where my clit was until I started doing my investigative journalism for this article.

I started writing this article after reading Cosmo's "9 Tips and Positions to Have an Orgasm" but realized this is going to be about way more than just the complexity of my body. Every man I have ever "dated," aka had sex with one time, has asked me to keep our relationship a secret because he was embarrassed of me and then blocked me on all social media after I inevitably found out he had a girlfriend. Their approach to sex was strictly about getting their nut in, which has never boded well for my own pleasure.

Being from an Indian family, sex isn't really a topic that was thrown around in our household. My 72-year-old (now dead) aunt told me once that she had only kissed her husband one time in their 35 years of marriage, yet they have four children together. We are from the land where the Kama Sutra, literally the bible of sex, was invented, yet I just found out where my clit is and I don't know how to cum.

But don't get me wrong people, I've definitely been adventurous with my sex life—I even had a brief fetish phase. I was living in Vancouver at the time. I'd been attended a weekly party called Glory Days, and I turned up wearing one of those sex chokers with the rings on it, mainly for aesthetic (my apologies to the fetish community for appropriating). I had no intentions to use the choker sexually, until later that night a white hipster man, who I had seen at the club earlier, slides in my DMs, with the subtle, yet effective line "I liked the choker you were wearing." Later that night around 4 AM, he called me, coked the fuck out. I was blacked out, so clearly I was ready to make more bad decisions. I took an expensive cab to his house, and we had fetish sex (is that the right term for it?) with ropes, choking, whips, lube, and other random stuff I can't remember. I had never done that before, and it didn't really get me turned on, but it was funny and I found it interesting to see how he could get off to something that seems so comical to me.

I would consider that a pretty dark time in my life, because this strange interaction went on for a lot longer than I anticipated. We met up every few nights for a few months. I literally wasn't into the actual sexual aspect of it all. Straight up, I would be honest with the entire internet if I was, but for some reason I was really interested in the way his mind worked and why he was so into it. I was sharing these, what I would consider to be, vulnerable moments with him, yet he was so detached from the moment. I was creating these stories in my head about why having fetish sex was appealing to him, but actually knew not one thing about him. I can't even recall his name, but I think he was a mailman. And who can resist a man in uniform? Am I right?

Photo by Megan Magdalena; styled by Chippy Nonstop

Although I'm not a newbie to sex, to really understand it I needed to read some facts written by some very knowledgable sexperts and doctors. After reading five unnamed sources and over 72 credible Twitter timelines, I came to the existential crisis-inducing conclusion that I am psychologically fucked up and I can no longer blame my issues on the "men" who have come in and out of my life. Sexperts say growing up with sex-negative feelings from friends, family, media, and also educators can influence your sexual experiences and pleasures. Being misinformed about sex can also lead to psychological effects. I'm not from a religious family where sex was considered "dirty" or "bad," I was just not informed at all. But it's not my parents' fault, they weren't informed either. In Indian households, sex was just something people did to pop out kids—they weren't taught about recreational sex or pleasuring yourself.

Having a destructive inner voice (I also have a destructive Twitter voice, and now, journalistic voice) has also undermined my ability to have an orgasm. Sexperts say womyn often correlate sex with love and don't want to show their partner too many emotions, because they will feel too vulnerable and then get paranoid that their partner will take advantage of that vulnerability. Having been in pretty shitty relationships with men, getting "too" close has also been a mental barrier of mine, I forget that orgasms are about our bodies and not about our hearts and minds.

By analyzing my own psyche and acting as my own therapist, I managed to identify a few mental barriers that have got me to this stage in my life. It's sad to admit this, but I honestly can't even think of one thing that turns me on. I've only had one relationship in my life. In the beginning I considered our relationship to be a pretty healthy one, but in retrospect I realize I wasn't able to share my desires or worries with my partner. I was always scared of making him feel inadequate as a man, which was never my intention, but because of his past relationships he thought I was judging him or belittling him when we talked about how I couldn't get turned on. Reflecting on it now, it was actually my own issues (being previously mistreated and abused by men; not having knowledge about sex; thinking about sex as something I just had to "get through" or "endure" to make the man happy; not being 100 percent confident in my body; being Indian and really hairy (which white and black guys just do not get) that wouldn't let me get there. But if he was more aware of them and I felt comfortable communicating these insecurities, then maybe I could have become more comfortable with him.

Previous to and following my break-up with my ex-boyfriend, whom I dated for two years, I didn't and still don't have sex if I'm not completely blacked-out and numb to everything happening around me. I don't know why I still have aimless sex, because it doesn't feel good and I feel like shit the day after. I've gotten to a point where I don't even feel horny or even an attraction to anyone around me. I would attribute past sexual abuse and lack of positive sex education growing up as key contributors to why I feel like this. One of the ultimate roots of this issue is I feel like I am not deserving, which is one of the most pervasive self-limiting thoughts I have in my subconscious mind, not only in fulfilling my sexual desires, but in my "love" relationships and career.

And since I've always had an unhealthy relationship with sex, masturbating and porn have never seemed like viable options in my mind. My friends are always preaching to me the importance of a vibrator, telling me to masturbate or watch porn, but I honestly just can't get into it. I've tried to get hot, oiled up and put something cute on and thought about masturbating, but it just doesn't feel like something I want to do. I keep reading all these self-help articles and books saying if you don't know your own body and you can't get yourself off then how do you expect to someone else to?

You are all probably wondering why I am so open about this or why I decided to write about this. I've gotten so used to hiding under the guise of Twitter irony and hedonism, aka Twitter comedy, that I've forgotten how to sincerely question myself on an emotional level beyond the layer of ironic detachment. I hope to strike a chord for you readers, my peers and fans who use irony as a defense mechanism and never really take the time to find the root of their issues.

They say the five stages of grieving a lack of an orgasm are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. So here I am sitting pretty at acceptance.

Now that I have finally come out publicly with the root of my issue I hope to persevere on this journey and take the advice Kreayshawn gave me years ago, get a vibrator and stimulate that clit, whatever that means.

Follow Chippy Nonstop on Twitter.

A guy on a pro-migrant march the day after the EU referendum (Photo: Oscar Webb)

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

Britain sometimes feels like a very different place since the EU referendum. While the country struggles to work out what it voted for on June 23, anti-immigrant rhetoric is on the rise, and there's been a spike in the number of hate crimes.

That said, xenophobic attitudes are as likely to be found in the corridors of Westminster as they are on the streets. Government ministers have taken to describing EU citizens living in the UK as bargaining chips. Companies have been warned they will be asked to produce lists of foreign workers.

Matthew Carr has had enough. He's one of the organizers of One Day Without Us—a day of action aimed at reminding the public and politicians of the positive impacts of immigration on British society.

On February 20, 2017, migrants and their supporters are being invited to walk out of work and college, to shut down restaurants, and to make clear their contribution to British society through their absence. I caught up with Carr to find out more.

VICE: What made you decide to do something about this?
Matthew Carr: For more than two decades, there's been this degenerative debate about immigration, in which it's only treated by much of the media as a negative problem—as a burden. This was bad enough before the Brexit referendum. I don't accuse those who voted for Brexit as wanting this to happen, but it has legitimized xenophobia and other racist attitudes that were once out on the fringe.

What happened at the Tory Party conference was pretty much the worst and most toxic manifestation of xenophobia I think I've ever seen. Government ministers saying employers would be named and shamed for employing foreign workers? You had minister after minister demeaning and insulting people who have done nothing more than come and work here. So the Tory Party conference made me think something needs to happen.

What do you hope will happen?
We've called it a national boycott. We recognize we are a group forming day by day, hour by hour. It's not for us to call a strike. We're inviting people to take the day off work. There are other people who will be unable or unwilling to do that because they might risk losing their jobs. We have talked about people staging demonstrations on their lunch breaks. People can have a rolling protest in which people in a particular company take part in shifts. We would also like businesses to close. We're inviting people to pull their kids out of school. But people may choose to do something within schools. Some people may choose to throw a party in their area. The more creatively people can interpret this and bring what they want to bring to it, the better.

What's the inspiration behind this?
I was familiar with these one-day protests in Italy and the US. The one in the States took place in 2006, and that was the largest mobilization of undocumented immigrant workers in US history. It had more than 1 million people participate in various forms of boycott. That was done specifically in response to a proposed law to make it easier to deport migrant workers. You had people who risked deportation by stepping out of their jobs for that day.

The one in Italy was inspired by that protest and was started by a handful of people on Facebook. It mobilized some 350,000 people at a time when the Berlusconi government was cracking down hard on undocumented immigration.

With any form of protest, it's difficult to identify the impact these events actually had. But we're talking about an event that is part of an ongoing attempt to change the narrative about immigration and challenge the xenophobic politics of previous years, and particularly this year. We hope this will give people who have not had the chance to speak, and their supporters, a day in which they can express these sentiments, and we hope it will lift people out of the despair that many have been lost in for the past year.

Who do you think is responsible for misperceptions about immigration?
Three-quarters of the British media is quite shockingly hostile to immigrants and immigration. "Immigrant" has become an insult in this country. I have traveled to lots of countries and have never seen anything like the British press and the way it talks about immigrants and immigration.

How have politicians responded to this? Not well. Not well at all. It suits some of them to have this group of outsiders they can blame. Sometimes it's been deliberate, and other times it's been cowardice. Politicians see people saying things about immigration, and they don't challenge it. They think it is a vote loser.

What do you hope this day of action will achieve?
I don't think either myself nor anybody else involved in this project believes a single day is going to turn all this around by itself. We hope that it will remind the British public of the positive contribution that immigrants have made and are making to British society. That it will remind the public that immigrants have a past, a present, and a future in British society.

We hope there will be an element of celebration in this as well. We would like it to be a demonstration of solidarity and celebration that will inspire people to resist the kind of politics that is driving us toward a very bad outcome.

Where do you think we're heading?
They are taking us toward a situation that is reminiscent of 1930s Germany. I don't mean to be melodramatic, but what we're seeing now is the legitimization of this "othering" of foreigners we have seen in the past, that we thought we had got over. We made some quite genuine steps toward becoming a different kind of society; now we're taking this massive step back.

How optimistic are you that you'll be able to change people's minds about immigration?
One can't be optimistic in the current climate. But one has to remember that until a few decades ago we had been making progress. If we can slip back, hopefully it's also possible to get out of this ditch and go forward. But, also, one has to do something.

Follow Mark Wilding on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Steve Baker

America is deep in the throes of an evil clown mania. Guys with poor senses of humor are running around like Pennywise the Clown, schools are going into lockdown, and professional clowns are losing jobs left and right.

Perhaps the most famous clown in these modern times, Ronald McDonald, is not immune to the mass clown character assassinations either—McDonald's announced on Tuesday that it'll be downplaying the mascot's role until our nation learns to love red noses and oversize shoes again.

"McDonald's and franchisees in the local markets are mindful of the current climate around clown sightings in communities," a McDonald's spokeswoman told NBC News in an email. "And, as such, are being thoughtful in respect to Ronald McDonald's participation in community events for the time being."

Ronald isn't gone forever, of course, but he'll be hiding out in the shadows like Batman at the end of The Dark Knight until the world is ready for his return.

Read: A Graduate of a Prestigious French Clown Academy Explains What People Don't Know About Clowning

All photos by author

Keep your dealer close, young stoners: another health agency is formally recommending that the minimum age to buy legal marijuana should be 25 once the Liberals' legal pot policy goes into effect.

Follow Jake Kivanc on Twitter.

Photo of a Qur'an covered in pork rinds sent to the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Washington, DC. Photo courtesy CAIR

On Friday, one of America's most prominent Muslim advocacy groups called for state and federal probes of Gurley, Alabama, police chief Barry Pendergraft in response to two of his recent Facebook posts. In a video from September 23, Pendergraft showed himself handling bullets covered in bacon grease. A few days later, he added a photo of a box of what he claimed were thousands of pork-coated rounds. Although Pendergraft's posts did not mention why he was fooling around with bullets coated in pig fat, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) interpreted them as a sign of blatant Islamophobia on part of a law enforcement official.

To some, the Council's reaction to the chief's posts might seem like a knee-jerk cry of prejudice. For his part, Pendergraft told the New York Daily News that he was baffled by their reaction, saying the video and photo had nothing to do with religion whatsoever, while declining to explain why he ordered the bullets. But interpreting these posts as potentially bigoted is hardly farfetched: Throughout history, people have deliberately used pig products to denigrate Islam and Muslims. Over the past 15 years since the 9/11 terror attacks in particular, swine-based hate crimes and intimidation have been a fixture in the West—so much so that we've seen the emergence of the (false) belief that pork is to Muslims as garlic or a crucifix is to vampires. And if the history of literally boarish Islamophobic incidents is any sign, we're poised to see more porcine hate—including the sale of pork-laced anti-Muslim bullets, which is somehow already an actual thing—in the near future.

Like strictly observant Jews, devout Muslims do not eat pork thanks to a direct scriptural prohibiton. Majority groups or oppressors have long used impure foods to intimidate or disgrace the faithful of any out group faith—the Romans, for example, reportedly forced Christians to drink wine they'd offered as a tribute to the pagan god of the vine, Bacchus, making it impure in the eyes of early believers in Jesus. But pork has been an especially common tool of hate, used frequently against Jews, and sometimes as a handy double-whammy against Jews and Muslims in Europe.

"Following the Spanish Reconquista, when Muslims and Jews were forcibly converted or expelled, those that remained as new converts to Christianity were often required to consume pork as evidence of authenticity sincerity to their new religion," explains Engy Abdelkader, a Georgetown professor and author of a May report on the rise of Islamophobic violence in 2016.

But while there have been sporadic pork-based hate crimes against Muslims for pretty much as long as Islam has existed, according to Abdelkader, rather few of these incidents popped up in America before September 11, 2001. Since then, it's been a steady stream of pork-infused hate.

"It correlates with the overall rise of Islamophobia," Ibramim Hooper, national communications director at CAIR, told me. "When Islamophobia goes up, incidents like this go up."

It shouldn't be surprising then that a spike in Islamophobic sentiment tied to the current presidential campaign in the US (and to the Brexit campaign and vote in the UK) have led to swells in pork-based attacks over the past year. In December, someone threw a pig's head at an Islamic Center in Philadelphia, while another man wrapped the door handles of a Las Vegas mosque in bacon. In January, a man broke into a mosque in Titusville, Florida, smashing it up with a machete before leaving bacon on the entrance, while an Islamic Center in Omaha had its door handles wrapped in bacon as well. CAIR also told me about an April incident in which someone put pork in a Muslim student group's room at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, a May case in which another person wrapped yet another mosque's door handles in bacon in Bossier City, Louisiana, and a June flap in which a man tried to enter a mosque in Raeford, North Carolina, with a bag of bacon.

(Similarly grotesque incidents have been reported in the United Kingdom in recent years, possibly encouraged by the Paris attacks last fall and more recent racial-religious tensions surrounding this year's Brexit vote.)

And these are just the cases that get media attention. Hooper says that almost every day, he or someone else at CAIR receives some sort of threat or insult incorporating pork. He remembers a Christmas card from a member of the American military that had been smeared with bacon grease on the inside. He added that the main CAIR office in Washington, DC, recently received a box containing a Qur'an covered in pork rinds, but didn't publicize this or many similar small-scale incidents of pork-based hate so as not to encourage increasing imitation.

"To Muslims, it's just annoying and clichéd," CAIR's director in Arizona Imraan Siddiqi said after the Las Vegas mosque porking in December, calling the tactic hackneyed.

But while these attacks seem designed to disrespect and offend Muslims, a few of the recent incidents suggest some in the West now view pork as not just a good insult, but an almost magical talisman that will somehow ward off scary Muslims who fear any contact with the stuff.

In 2011 and again in 2013, American companies sprung up selling pork-infused gun products. This May, al-Jazeera released video showing a Texas group preparing to fight a perceived Muslim insurgency, with many participants dipping their bullets in bacon grease or blood to send Muslims straight to hell when shot. There have been a number of similar incidents and inventions across the nation, but perhaps most boldly and directly, an anti-Muslim activist in Michigan told Samantha Bee in a segment on her show this June that "pig head to Muslims is like a crucifix to a vampire."

It should go without saying that this strain of pork-based Islamophobia, which supposes to use pork as a protective amulet as well as a tool of exclusion and denigration, makes no sense. While observant Muslims generally believe they are prohibited from eating pork, that isn't the same thing as coming into contact with it—and some believe they are even allowed to eat pork with no sin if it's unintentional or for survival, i.e. in cases of potential starvation or when forced to consume it. Even Muslims who do consider touching pork impure often believe you just have to wash the area to remove the impurity. And the very extremists these provocations are ostensibly supposed to deter sometimes argue their mission gives them carte blanche with impurities.

American belief in the magical protective powers of pork may stem from still-circulated (and apocryphal) tales about the American general Jack Pershing either shooting Muslim rebel prisoners with pork blood bullets or burying them with pork skins—and therefore somehow pacifying a restive Philippine province with swine magic in the early 1900s. Even if they were used (as they may have been by individual soldiers), pig-based disincentives actually did nothing to halt Islamist violence in the region, which remained significant throughout America's presence there and even to this day. Still, numerous sources, including Donald Trump at a campaign rally in February, continue to tout some version of the Pershing story and the efficacy of pork-based deterrents.

According to Stephen Sheehi, a College of William and Mary professor and author of 2011's Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign against Muslims, this belief in the protective power of pork isn't just the latest fad in trying to use pigs to oppress a minority group. Instead, it's the form intimidation and desecration take when people grow so hostile to Muslims that they see them as subhuman monsters to fight off with charms.

"They're not even dehumanized like savages" at this point, says Sheehi. "They are equated with or understood at that level of un-humanness."

Unfortunately, CAIR's Hooper acknowledges, neither being informed of the fallacy of using pork as a cure all nor seeing directly that it doesn't work to either scare off Muslims-as-vampires or insult them into submission seems to do anything to dissuade people from using pork as tool of hate.

"Bigots aren't brain surgeons," he says. "Maybe they can't think of anything better."

And with Islamophobic demagogues all the rage in the West, this means we may see even more pork-based incidents of all stripes in the coming months in the US and abroad. Hooper concedes that at least getting a bacon-greased card now and then is better than the times people have sent him letters they claim they've smeared with their own shit. And it's certainly not as dangerous as all the direct physical assaults on and even outright murders of Muslims because they were Muslims that we've seen over the years. But it's still an absurd, archaic, and bizarre form of sometimes violent bigotry, the rise of which is disgraceful and unacceptable in an ostensibly modern, post-magic society.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

These are actually Donald Trump supporters in India burning this photo of the Republican nominee in May, but plenty of Republicans would like to warm their hands by this kind of fire. Photo by Ritesh Shukla/NurPhoto. Sipa via AP Images

The Year of Trump has been a nightmare for the officials running the GOP. The party has been plunged into chaos, with many members openly rejecting a candidate who has bragged about grabbing women by the pussy. Others who nominally support Trump, like House Speaker Paul Ryan, are distancing themselves from him the way you might a high school friend who started embarrassing you at every party you invited him to. Republican National Committee (RNC) chairman Reince Priebus was reportedly losing faith in his candidate for a moment, and had to reassure everyone that Trump and the leaders of the RNC aren't fighting and "remain very much involved and together in all levels in making these decisions."

"People look at Trump and say, 'Oh, that's who you are! That's who the Republican Party is!'" Mickey Edwards, a former Oklahoma congressman who is a prominent NeverTrump Republican, lamented to me.

In Edwards's estimation, a few problems converged to create the Trump phenomenon: a crowded primary field in which "everybody in our party knew that Hillary how much the party, as a private association of likeminded individuals can say, 'You can't tell us what to do because we're a club!'"

Putnam suggested that the GOP focus less on the kinds of anti-populist efforts a future Trump-esque candidate might label "rigging the system," and more on just cleaning up some of the procedures that made the process chaotic in 2016.

Finally, there's the issue of 2016's unusually large pool of candidates, which resulted not just in a lot battles over the same constituencies, but in a chaotic and sometimes embarrassing debate stage. Putnam said that reforms here wouldn't be about party primary rules, but rather the debate committee. "The question is going to quickly become what metric or metrics best determine who will be among the six or so candidates who make the cut," Putnam said.

This smaller pool, Edwards thinks, would correct a system in which "a guy gets 20 or 25 percent, and the word is that he's on a roll, and he's earning the nomination, but he didn't get anywhere close to earning the nomination."

Edwards is optimistic about the possibility of rapid changes that could prevent another Trump, but he worries they'll come with a big downside: "One of the things that's worst for me to say as a Republican is that I think it's going to take a major disaster for this to happen." Change will probably come about, he thinks, if the GOP lost not just the White House yet again, but control of Congress.

"I think it's gonna have to be a real wipeout," he told me. And even then, he said, "just changing the rules isn't going to make everything suddenly better."

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Sure, shit's been looking pretty grim lately, but don't hump that red dress quite yet! There's good news: B-movie god Tommy Wiseau has reunited with Greg Sestero, his co-star from the undisputed best best worst movie of all time,The Room. After 15 years apart, they're finally headed back to the big screen with a new feature film called Best F(r)iends.

The movie was directed by someone named Gary Fong, and according to the Hollywood Reporter, it was shot on the DL in Los Angeles and Canada over the past two months. There are still questions about whether Best F(r)iends will get a theatrical distribution deal (I'll distribute it myself if not).

Further questions include, What the hell is going on in the trailer? What's with Tommy Wiseau's face at 2:25? How can Sestero and Wiseau possibly get along after Sestero co-wrote an insane tell-all book about Wiseau? Are you supposed to pronounce the "r" in Best F(r)iends?

But why stress over trivialities on such a glorious day?

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Cell block photo via Flickr user Travis Wise

Canada's opiate crisis has taken on many new shapes in 2016. By most accounts, British Columbia is leading the country in its response—from declaring a public health emergency and deregulating the opiate blocker naloxone, to publishing overdose data as close to real-time as the coroner's testing allows.

But BC's response to the overdose epidemic looks quite different from the inside of a nine-by-six-foot jail cell. Clean needles aren't easy to come by. Fentanyl and other drugs are widely available in unknown concentrations and purities. And six months after winning a legal challenge for access to addiction treatment, many are still waiting on medical help to arrive.

BC inmate Jeremy Baker* told VICE he's finally been clean for nearly 30 days—but it's no thanks to jail treatment programs. He says he quit cold turkey, after asking for treatment, and is still feeling symptoms of withdrawal. "I'm still unable to sleep and getting just a bit of chills and cold sweats," he told VICE.

Before April of this year, inmates had to be in jail for three months before BC Corrections would allow opiate replacement therapies like methadone. Four prisoners launched a legal challenge, and Corrections agreed to give inmates the same access to treatment as people on the outside.

Over the summer, the BC College of Physicians made it easier to prescribe the newer opioid replacement drug suboxone. Like methadone, the addiction treatment can be issued on a same-day prescription from a doctor. In theory, according to the settlement, the same should be available to prisoners.

Read More: BC Prisoners Win Battle to Access Methadone

But in BC prisons and remand centres, health care is provided by a private company called Chiron. Because drug availability is limited by Corrections' budget, wait lists to get on suboxone are long, leaving prisoners hanging for as long as three or seven months, with no indication of how patients are being prioritized.

VICE reached out to Chiron to find out how many prisoners are currently accessing treatment, and how many are waiting, but did not receive a response. According to BC Corrections stats from last year, 3,058 inmates participated in programs, out of more than 18,000 admissions.

Baker says he requested suboxone when he was admitted over a month ago, and he was told he was on a waiting list along with about 80 other inmates. Prisoner advocates say incarceration is a perfect time to intervene and treat addiction, but people like Baker aren't getting the skills, tools, and resources to get clean. "You can't come to jail and expect to get anything," he said.

Facing scarce treatment, Baker says a black market for treatment drugs has emerged, where inmates who are already on programs will stash and resell suboxone—something many dopesick inmates rely on. The drug, which comes in the form of a pill that dissolves under the tongue, can be crushed and snorted. "With suboxone, they only watch you for five minutes, it's easier to bring back from the med window," he told VICE. "It does help, it calms people down."

While waiting for treatment (or hustling one of these DIY programs), fentanyl and heroin are readily available, and tempting to a withdrawal sufferer. Baker says fentanyl gets smuggled into the cell block in fake Oxy pill form, as well as in heroin powder. He knows from experience not to do more than one tiny hit, and that the high doesn't last as long. "I could die from doing two ten papers—that's a ridiculously small amount," he said of the difference in potency between fentanyl and heroin. "That's blowing my mind."

As Baker tells it, drugs have been his main source of his trouble with law enforcement since as long as he can remember, and prison has only made his addictions worse. His first stint in jail was for selling to undercover cops. The first time in jail he stayed away from opiates, and stuck to snorting stimulants.

Once released, more than a decade ago, Baker and his friends from jail were maintaining expensive coke habits, which would later land him another sentence in a federal penitentiary in connection with a series of break and enters. That's where he started snorting heroin. "In the pen you saw people injecting with pens sharpened into needles," he recalls. "They'd melt plastic to make a plunger, and I'd just keep six and watch this go down."

Prisoner advocates have pushed for better harm reduction supplies in jails and prisons, to curb transmission of HIV, Hep C, and other blood-born disease, but corrections officials say needles are too great of a security concern.

Then there's the danger of being released. When prisoners leave, they're many times more vulnerable to overdose, because of changing potency and less restrictions. Baker says he's seen too many inmates, including himself, released after business hours on a weekend, with no chance of accessing medical treatment. "It's super common, it happens to everybody." Baker says he's lost three close friends, all of whom he met in jail, to fentanyl.

When Baker was released earlier this year, his plan was to enter a treatment program in Vancouver—one that had helped him stay clean for two years in the past. He says he spent most of his last day making calls, trying to get a prison doctor's script faxed to the centre.

But when he was released from jail at 8:30 PM on a Friday, Baker says his methadone script wasn't waiting for him at the centre, which meant he couldn't check in. With no doctors in the country available to write a new script at that hour, and no money in his pockets, Baker says he felt forced to fend for himself over the weekend. By Monday had been caught stealing from Safeway and was back on dope, which would land him back in jail serving more time.

With only a few weeks left in his sentence, Baker has cleared one of the hardest addiction hurdles—getting clean. He hopes he can keep it that way when he's released again later this month. When that happens, he'll find himself in a province with some of the country's most forward-thinking harm reduction and addiction treatment programs; a different world than the one he experienced behind bars.

Follow Sarah Berman on Twitter.

*Name has been changed to protect safety.

Check out Dame Darcy's website, Instagram, and Twitter.

The Canadian Bankers Association has donated tens of thousands of dollars to the Vancouver Police to fight crime—but the money comes with strings attached.

Publicly available documents show that since 2010, the CBA, a lobby group that works to promote the interests of Canadian member banks and foreign banks operating in Canada, has made several cash donations to Vancouver Police. These came with the stipulation that the money be used to fund the Identity Theft Unit, which focuses on crimes involving stolen personal and financial information.

The documents show a payment of $14,050 from the CBA to the Vancouver Police Department in October 2010; another payment of $10,530 in January 2013; and a third payment of $5,000 in January 2016.

The Canadian Council of Better Business Bureaus estimates that identity theft costs banks, victims, credit card companies, and merchants upwards of $2.5 billion a year in losses. But the donations raise the question of whether government bodies should be able to accept donations from corporate interests, especially when the donor has a vested interest in the matter at hand.

Dr. Theresa Miedema, a lawyer and instructor in the Ethics, Society and Law program at the University of Toronto Law School, argues it can leave the impression that a degree of influence has been earned on the part of the donor.

"The decisions about the use of resources, investigations, and charging decisions," she said. Add to that, the perception of bias. "Public agencies, especially those that exercise state-sanctioned force, must not only be free of bias, but must appear to be free of bias."

Brian Montague of the Vancouver Police Department confirmed the donations, but noted that it is the Vancouver Police Board, not the Department, that approves all private donations.

He also stressed that "donations to the VPD... are often the only way to fund programs that are not covered by the VPD budget."

Montague provided a link to the VPD policy manual that explains the process that the Department must go through to accept private donations but wouldn't provide details about what specific police activities the CBA donations paid for, saying the information would only be available through a freedom of information request.

VICE Canada sent an email to the CBA asking for the total dollar amount of donations they've made to the Vancouver Police Department and if they've given cash donations to any other municipal police services in Canada.

"As a private organization, we do not disclose this information," Maura Drew-Lytle, director of media relations and communications for CBA, said.

VICE Canada reached out to other police agencies across the country to see if similar donations are ending up in the coffers of police bodies.

A business plan produced by the Peel Regional Police in 2001 describes how the CBA provided material and operational support during an investigation into identity theft and ATM fraud in the region.

"In addition to providing corporate security officers to assist the investigation on a part-time basis, the would have to come up with the expense figures for his operation and how they are being used."

When asked about donations from the CBA, the Edmonton Police Service recommended filing a Freedom of Information request, while Winnipeg Police suggested asking CBA directly. Toronto, York Region and Regina police said they had no records of donations from the association. The Calgary Police Foundation, which accepts donations for the Calgary Police, didn't respond to questions, nor did the Ottawa Police Service.

Of the police agencies contacted, only the Halifax Regional Police reported receiving support from the CBA.

"We received sponsorship from the Canadian Bankers' Association in 2003 when we were the host agency for the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police (CACP) annual conference," said Theresa Rath, public relations manager for the HRP, in an email. "While we collected this money as the host agency, it was subsequently remitted to the CACP."

Rath explained that she couldn't reveal the specific amount of money that the CBA had donated because financial records for the city of Halifax are destroyed after seven years.

The CBA has a history of financially supporting police in British Columbia with both public and private donations. An investigation by journalist Rob Wipond into police associations in the province revealed that in 2012, the CBA donated $10,000 to the British Columbia Association of Chiefs of Police (BCACP), a group that isn't subject to public oversight. That $10k donation from the CBA represented one-fifth of the BCACP's total budget for 2012.

The CBA maintains a fairly high profile when it comes to sponsoring police galas and giving out awards for catching criminals, but these contributions seem quaint when compared with the CBA's behind-the-scenes lobbying for justice system reforms that the Association believes would be good for Canadian banks.

In 2012, the CBA published the British Columbia Justice Reform Initiative Submission, a set of policy recommendations that included a suggestion that the province hand down "tougher sentences" and "increased penalties" for drug users that rob banks. In the words of the CBA, "appropriate sentencing must occur to ensure that there is an opportunity for the drug addiction robbery cycle to be broken". The CBA also bragged that the association's lobbying "has had a positive impact with offenders being dealt with more quickly, and... receiving sentences that are more in line with the penalties given in other jurisdictions in Canada."

According to Dr. Miedema, it's this type of influence that exemplifies concerns about public bodies accepting donations from private donors, especially when the donor is deciding how the money will be spent.

"The perception that a police force is beholden to any particular interest group in society will erode its legitimacy," she says.

"This is a serious issue in a democratic society."

Photo courtesy of Rosemary Hallmark

I don't remember at what point I started reading the Dear Coquette blog. It was maybe around 2009 or 2010, back when she still went by "Coke Talk," an anonymous internet guru whose party-girl-with-a-brain persona had amassed a huge following online, currently at 30,000 Twitter followers and tens of thousands on Tumblr. A mysterious figure, Coquette is able to simultaneously make you want to get fucked up with her and also let her sort out your life.

Coquette's advice became crucial to me in a way I didn't expect. On a pretty spring day in March 2012, my then-boyfriend left for work and while using his computer, I discovered hidden camera videos of his female roommates and me. Intuitively I felt that if he knew what I had found, he would become violent.

I'm still not sure why, but I felt that Coquette was the only one who could possibly help, and desperately fired off a late-night email. Within an hour, I received a response that laid out steps: inform the roommates, get evidence to the cops, and start healing emotionally, all while pretending everything was normal in the relationship so that my ex wouldn't realize anything was up, freak out, and possibly murder all of us.

Four years later I'm a stable person with a regular job and a healthy relationship—due in a large part because of Coquette's advice kicking my ass.

But I'm not the only person Coquette has helped. Since 2009, she's answered thousands of readers' questions about life, love, and the abyss. She's offered advice on how to shove an ecstasy tab up your asshole, thoughts on why Tony Robbins is so creepy (he's " basically a charismatic cult leader"), counseled a desperate reader through her husband's suicide, and told us how to stay sane while watching the RNC ("100-percent laughter. No cowering"). Her new book, The Best of Dear Coquette: Shady Advice from a Raging Bitch Who Has No Business Answering Any of These Questions, is a 350-page compendium of her sagest wisdom, picked from thousands and thousands of entries and organized into sections by topic (relationships, sex, drugs, the universe) so that a reader can quickly find what they seek in their time of need.

I chatted with Coquette through Twitter DMs (her need for anonymity prevented a phone call) over two days about the impact she has had on her readers over the years, our shared near-death experiences, and her surprisingly simple key to happiness (a sense of scale and mindfulness in the present). Her advice for VICE readers? "VOTE."

VICE: The tagline of the book is "advice from a raging bitch who has no business answering these questions." Why do you think people are so desperate for your advice despite that caveat? What do you think compels people to fire off their issues into the ether?
Coquette: Everyone needs advice. This format is as old as recorded history. A question is posed, a response is given, and somewhere along the way maybe a little wisdom gets transmitted. Technologies advance and mediums change, but we're all still just a bunch of curious monkeys who need answers as much as we need oxygen.

And sure, I'm a raging bitch who has no business answering these questions, but the whole point is that I'm not claiming expert status. I know my place. I leave it to the scientists and philosophers to tackle the great unknowns. I'm cool with pitching in on the day-to-day stuff, and that's all my readers ask of me.

So you have "no business answering these questions," but in a way, who else is gonna?
True. Half of this shit is just showing up. I mean, I don't have to answer all these questions. I just do. Wouldn't know how to stop even if I wanted to.

"Technologies advance and mediums change, but we're all still just a bunch of curious monkeys who need answers as much as we need oxygen."

Does the sheer amount of desperate, confused people in your inbox ever overwhelm you?
Nah. It humbles me. I know that sounds like a smarmy answer, but it's the fucking truth. I feel lucky that this has become such an important part of my life.

What's been your favorite reader interaction over the years and years you've done this?
There are so many of my readers that I keep in touch with at this point, I really couldn't name a favorite. Actually, no wait. As I'm thinking about it, I just remembered the couple who asked me to write their wedding vows. Shit, that was back in 2011. They've been married a half decade now, and I still hear from them every once in a while. They include me in their anniversaries. That shit really does make me happy.

I would ask what you get out of it, but you kind of told me already.
Yeah. How could I not love it? I get all kinds of follow-up letters from people who go one way or the other with my advice. Some wished they'd taken it. Some were glad they did. Some hate my breathing guts. It's a lot of fun to see how certain stories play out, how certain pieces of advice have ripple effects through people's lives, even years later.

It seems like you have an odd place in that you don't just solve people's problems, you reframe the problem in a way that not only addresses the underlying issue but also makes them reconsider so many underlying assumptions they're working with.
I can't solve anyone's problems except my own. You're right. All I do is reframe. I smack people upside the head with a much-needed perspective. Usually it's just a sense of scale. That's all anyone needs—a sense of scale plus the ability to stay mindful in the present moment. That's the key to fucking happiness right there.

In an odd way, I feel like the questions the readers ask (and also that I am asking in the context of an interview, really) are less useful for you to respond to than the statements we make about ourselves that you go HAM on.
How do you mean?

Like, the question a reader might ask would be, "How do I dump my boyfriend?" and your response is along the lines of, "It's not difficult to leave someone—why do you feel like it's difficult to someone who is treating you badly?" Which leads to insight on how this person was even in this situation in the first place: cultural shit, self-worth shit, etc. All of which you dissemble for them.
Ah, yeah. That's exactly what I mean by reframing. I'm well aware of all the various flavors of cognitive bias that stand in the way of rational behavior and good judgment. If I'm lucky, a given piece of advice might provide the tiniest spark of critical thought or the slightest tweak to a person's moral intuition. They raise their eyebrow for a moment, say, "Huh," and then go about their day. That's all I want, just that split second of effect. That seemingly insignificant nudge is all that matters to me, because I've got years and years, and I am relentless. If you stick with me through thousands of those sparks and tweaks, the aggregate effect really does make a difference. I get letters every day from people telling me how they've grown up with my advice and how I've had a profound effect on the way they think. That's the big prize. That's what means the world to me.

I've lived this entire secret life through a computer screen. This isn't who I am day-to-day, and when I stop and realize that thousands of people are emailing me every month with questions, yes, it still surprises me. I love it. Really, I do, but it's such a bizarre position to be in. I mean, who the fuck am I? I know there are several layers of irony to that question, but still, I really am just a shady bitch who has no business answering any of these questions.

That's all anyone needs—a sense of scale plus the ability to stay mindful in the present moment. That's the key to fucking happiness right there.

You've led a lot of readers over the years to get their shit together—including myself! You're a compassionate yet no-nonsense kick-in-the-ass for many of the people who write in. Without giving too many details that might out yourself, how did you get your personal shit together?
Well, I got my shit together how most people get their shit together. Necessity combined with the will to survive. I'm not some hard ass or anything. I've lived a charmed fucking life, but I've done my fair share of staring into the abyss.

What's next for Coquette?
A new life in a new city, already well underway. In terms of projects and other exercises in self-improvement, you know I'm doing some cool shit, but I like to keep my personal goals private, lest they not come to fruition.

I will say this. The trajectory of my life has been forever and dramatically altered by this crazy little experiment called Dear Coquette. It's more than just a little thing I do for fun. I know better than to take any of it seriously, but it's a part of who I am now—then again, what else is the human condition but a string of happy accidents?

Follow Eleanor Fye on Twitter.

Morphine photo via Flickr user Eric Norris

Ontario has announced a host of measures to try to crack down on the opioid crisis that has killed hundreds across the country this year, including improved access to Suboxone, a prescription drug used to treat opioid addiction.

"Suboxone is much safer than methadone, less addictive, and has fewer side effects," said Ontario Health Minister Eric Hoskins on Wednesday at a press conference at Toronto General Hospital.

On Tuesday, Suboxone, which can relieve opioid withdrawal symptoms and has a lower risk of overdose than methadone, was changed from a "limited use" drug to a "general benefit" on the province's drug benefit formulary, making it a first-line treatment for opioid addiction.

Dr. Hakique Virani, an Edmonton-based preventative medicine and addiction medicine specialist, explained that while methadone is a "life-saving" medication, "it can be tough to work with" because it has a higher risk of toxicity when combined with other drugs.

"The other thing that challenges methadone treatment is the potency and toxicity of the current illicit opioid market, which doesn't appear to be as challenging to Suboxone, which is a partial opioid drug and binds to opioid receptors very tightly," he told VICE.

All doctors in the province are now required, when appropriate, to prescribe Suboxone over methadone, which only a few doctors can prescribe anyway, since they need special authorization from Health Canada.

The province will also be working with College of Nurses of Ontario to ensure nurses are trained in prescribing Suboxone, in hopes this will help those in rural and remote areas of the provinces, where nurses are primary care providers.

The change follows a similar move by British Columbia's government that enabled all doctors to prescribe Suboxone without an exemption.

"Our comprehensive approach to this crisis will not only help save lives, but will enhance the lives of families and whole communities," said Hoskins. "Given the urgency of this issue, taking action now will have a real impact on opioid addiction and overdose."

Ontario has been under increasing pressure to come up with a strategy that responds to the wave of opioid deaths sweeping the nation. In particular, it's been heavily criticized for not having up to date data on the number of deaths. The latest figures are from 2014, when 700 people died from opioid-related causes—a 266-percent increase from 2002.

To that end, Hoskins has appointed Dr. David Williams, Ontario's Chief Medical Officer of Health, as the province's first ever Provincial Overdose Coordinator. He's been tasked with developing a new surveillance and reporting system of overdoses and overdose deaths in Ontario.

Hoskins explained that the government receives data from most hospitals whenever an opioid-related overdose is suspected, but that suspected opioid-related deaths are referred to the coroner, who must then investigate—a time-consuming process.

Williams has been tasked with improving "upon our access to and timeliness and comprehensiveness of the information with regards to overdose and deaths," said Hoskins. "We can and will do better."

"The headings appear to be the right ones," said Virani, pointing out, however, that the new strategy comes quite late in the game. "Now it's more challenging than it would've been had we dealt with it years ago, but today is better than tomorrow, and it's encouraging."

The province is also taking aim at "high-strength opioids" by no longer covering their cost. It is also investing $17 million annually to create or enhance 17 chronic pain clinics, expanding services for patients who suffer from lower back pain and training for primary care providers in treating chronic pain, and developing a patient guide to help prescription opioid users to understand associated risks.

The province recently made naloxone, an opioid overdose antidote, available free of charge to patients and their families at pharmacies and eligible organizations, and are looking to providing naloxone nasal spray to first responders. They'll also be handing naloxone kits out to at-risk inmates when they're released from provincial prisons.

Follow Tamara on Twitter.

Protestors hold a banner reading in Catalan "Barcelona: refugee city? Hommage to those who die, a siege for those arriving." Photo by Josep Lago/AFP/Getty Images

Last fall, Barcelona named itself the "Refugee City," proudly unveiling a plan to help Spain fulfill its commitment to the European Union to resettle 9,323 refugees within two years. The plan, which expanded social programs, counseling services, education, and housing for refugees, was meant to push Spain into quick action on the global crisis.

But more than a year later, Spain has opened its doors to just 394 of those 9,323 refugees, according to the European Commission, the executive arm of the EU. The slow progress has enraged Barcelona city officials, who say they've prepared for the influx.

"Only 4 percent have entered of the number Spain must take, so we have one year to relocate 96 percent of our commitment," Ignaso Calbo, the coordinator of Barcelona's "Refugee City" plan, told me. "It's impossible. It's a disgrace."

Barcelona has coordinated a network of Spanish cities to coordinate refugee relocation, and just this month, representatives from the cities met with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) to discuss the issue, according to Calbo. And Barcelona has begun joining with other cities around Europe to put pressure on their countries to accept refugees, Calbo told me, but said the details were still confidential.

"This is a question of being on the side of human rights," Calbo asserted, adding that Barcelona had used municipal funds for refugee provisions like housing and social programs, which were typically the federal government's financial responsibility.

But as much as Barcelona fights, it can do nothing without the federal government of Spain, which is in charge of refugee intake.

"We have no political power, and we don't know how many people are going to come or how much to invest," Calbo told me. He said that a representative from Spain's government was invited to the UNHCR meeting, but did not appear. "The problem is we have no relationship with . We ask for meetings, but they don't respond."

Political analysts told me that Spain's resistance to welcoming refugees was unsurprising given the country's precarious condition: The federal government has had an interim prime minister for nearly a year since no candidate has won the majority of the vote, and the economy is clamoring to recover from a crisis.

"Spain has been very timid, not complying with the quotas that have been implanted by the EU plan, because the question of the leadership has not been resolved," Jaime Pastor, a professor of politics at the University of Madrid, told me. "The Spanish cities are uniting to coordinate for the distribution of refugees, but the problem is the only one that can authorize the intake is the state."

A representative for Spain's federal government did not respond to my questions about refugee resettlement, except to reiterate that individual states had no control over the process.

"Only the central government has the legal authority in immigration matters, because it's an international issue, and the regional governments can only act on refugees once they've been taken by the central government," Paloma Martinez Aldama, a press representative for the Embassy of Spain in the US, told me in an email.

Spain, however, does not hold the ultimate authority: It is legally bound by the European Commission to relocate 9,323 refugees by this time next year.

"The EU member states agreed on a total figure of refugees and on a method of how to distribute them, so this is legally binding legislation," commission spokeswoman Tove Ernst told me on the phone, but would not speculate what the penalties would be if Spain or other EU nations did not fulfill their commitments within the next year. "Overall, the member states have not relocated as quickly as we would have expected. We report on this every month and call on member states constantly to speed up the process."

As Spain faces pressure on all sides to open its doors, refugee advocates warn that the nation also needs to step up its support for the refugees who have already arrived. Pere Serra, secretary of Asil.cat, a network of several refugee organizations in Spain's Catalonia region (which includes Barcelona), said Spain had provided inadequate funds to the nonprofits working with the population.

"From 2012 to 2015, we went from having 2,500 refugees to 16,000," Serra told me, referring to individuals who showed up at the border asking for asylum (not those who Spain resettles from camps outside the country). "In Barcelona, there weren't enough beds. At one point, we had 28 beds for 800 or 900 people."

When I visited a refugee shelter in Barcelona, residents offered mixed reviews of their experiences in Spain. One couple from Venezuela, who had booked a flight to Barcelona when violence broke out at home, told me they came to Spain because of the language but were frustrated at the lack of opportunities and slow asylum process.

"A lawyer told us we'd have to wait three or four years for the court to decide our asylum case," said the woman, who asked to remain anonymous to protect her identity. Other asylum seekers from Ukraine and Iraq said they were not sure if they wanted to stay in Spain.

Serra also claimed that Barcelona was not as prepared as it claimed, but may be using the refugee discussion as a way to push the independence of Catalonia. Catalonia, which has long fought to be its own nation, will vote on an independence referendum next September, after growing separatist sentiment in the region.

Both Calbo and Pastor, however, said that the issue was not about Catalonia's statehood, but rather addressing human rights concerns by citizens both in Catalonia and around Spain.

"This is absolutely a rights-based policy," Calbo told me. "We have always said it's a question of a city policy, not a party policy, which is why all actions in the plan are agreed by all of the parties. And I'm constantly talking with other cities."

Pastor said the push "does not have to do with the theme of independence." Instead, he said, "the people of Spain are for a politics of welcoming refugees."

Follow Meredith Hoffman on Twitter.

On Tuesday, thanks to market fears stoked by the threat of "hard Brexit", the pound slumped to its lowest valuation on record, a low not seen since the mid-1800s. Given that the Tories are often seen as the party of the economy, of Big Business and all that, you'd think that they'd be terrified, or at least a little ashamed of themselves. But instead, their mood is bullish, braying about how it's time for all the unpatriotic liberal elitist naysayers to shut up and accept the new era of glory that Brexit is sure to deliver; outlining plans to splurge £120 million of the money they just destroyed the value of a new royal yacht.

Thatcherism, with its laissez-faire economics and its Victorian conception of morality, was often seen as an attempt to take Britain back to the 1800s. Now, almost 40 years since Thatcher was elected, with the economy appropriately re-adjusted and jingoism in full force, the Tories might finally have succeeded.

So the question is: where will this all end? What more can we expect to return from the past to haunt us this in the not-so-distant future?

Dinnertime at St Pancras Workhouse, London

THE WORKHOUSE

The current low that the pound is experiencing is only the product of fears that Britain might leave the European Single Market. So what's going to happen when we actually do leave it? The economy is going to be completely wrecked, is what. Businesses will go bankrupt, high streets will be completely boarded up, your wi-fi will constantly fluctuate in and out because they can't get enough signal or whatever into the national wi-fi grid or however it works.

In such conditions, there's going to be a huge number of people who are left completely destitute – far more than any welfare state, especially one run by the Tories, could ever possibly handle. But maybe, just maybe, this is the chance savvy Tories have been looking for: JobSeeker's Allowance won't be able to cut it, so finally this will be their chance to bring back that the original way the state had of "helping" the poor regain their fallen virtue through labour: the Victorian Workhouse. In new, privately-owned Enterprise Houses Plus, fresh masses of "undeserving poor" will find themselves homed in cold, bare dormitories segregated by gender, and put to work cracking rocks, digging and then filling in holes, manning corporate twitter feeds, writing listicles for trendy, indeterminately oppositional news websites and other sorts of pointless, mind-numbing busywork. Nineteenth century urban poverty: it's coming back, baby, and it will be grinding and horrible again.

THE PLAGUE

With poverty, of course, comes disease; and the damp, stuffy, cramped conditions of the Enterprise Houses are sure to provide the perfect hotbed. Helped by the recent evolutionary trend that bacteria have exhibited towards the resistance of antibiotics (and let's not forget the privatisation of the NHS), we're probably going to start to witness the return of some of the great diseases from the past that we'd previously assumed were gone for good. Polio! Cholera! Leprosy! Bubonic plague! On the plus side: this might help increase the value of your labour by eliminating some of the surplus population. On the negative: you will die screaming with your flesh covered in weeping sores.

Saturn Devouring His Son, by Francisco de Goya

CANNIBALISM

And it won't just be disease either. Famine will be back too: already Tesco has become embroiled in a major dispute with Unilever over the price of import goods, leading them to pull Marmite from their online stores. This state of affairs will only accelerate, to the point that there is no food available anywhere that can possibly be got at a reasonable price. The plague-stricken denizens of the Enterprise Houses will be happy enough with their generously subsidised Soylent Gruel, but in the outside world, citizens will be forced to take matters into their own (possibly leprous) hands. The most obvious source of nutrition? The very young, the very old, and the weakest among us. But watch out: once they're all gone, you yourself could be next into the stew-pot.

Image of witches being hanged, from Ralph Gardiner, England's Grievance Discovered in Relation to the Coal Trade, 1655.

WHICH HUNTS

With the total dissolution and destruction of the nation ongoing, the government and their supporters are sure to start casting their eyes about looking for someone to blame. As Wednesday's Daily Mail front page indicates, there's going to be one clear, obvious target: the Bremoaners, that 48 percent of the nation who were elitist and undemocratic enough not to desire the complete destruction of all things, and whose bad attitude is now going to be painted as the sole cause of post-Brexit Britain's dire straits.

Spiteful comment pieces will only be the first stone thrown. Once the plague is in full swing, and cannibalism is starting to become a "thing", we'll start to see mobs of angry suburban mothers and golf dads waving fire and pitchforks looking for any poor soul with vaguely cosmopolitan sensibilities to sacrifice to Winston Churchill. Once they've got you in their clutches, they will bore you for hours reading out a list of phony charges – ranging from your being a safe-space social justice warrior to your being an arrogant hater of our troops – before finally putting you out of your misery by drowning or burning you alive, raising many handled glasses of Spitfire Ale (the new recipe, that's distilled from human bonemeal and blood, of course) in a toast to the Queen as they do so.

EUGENICS

Anti-immigrant sentiment has brought racism hurtling right back into the political mainstream. In such conditions, it's only a matter of time before someone draws up a big scientific chart listing all the world's races in order of lowest to highest, with "Them Lot Flocking Over Here" at the bottom and "White English" at the top. Before long, paying lip service to the Chart will become a basic requirement of political credibility, and academics will need to perform all their research within the Chart's parameters in order to secure funding. Finally, the constraints of political correctness will have been cast off, and our glorious nation will be able to openly profess Victorian racial ideology once more.

Map of the British Empire in 1886

COLONIALISM

Of course, for High Tory Brexiters like Dan Hannan, Boris Johnson and Iain Duncan Smith, Brexit was only ever really about one thing: restoring the past glory of the British Empire, in the service of which people like them would once very definitely have been employed. In their imaginations, Europe was always the most major obstacle standing in the way of a solo Brittania once again ruling the world's waves (and conducting the world's slave trade, committing the world's most brutal massacres, etc.).

Well, here's some good news for the old boys of Empire: with Brexit, colonialism will finally become a reality for Britain once again. The only downside is that it won't be us colonising the rest of the world. Rather, a grand coalition of Chinese businessmen, Arab oil sheikhs, and maybe some weird Silicon Valley guys who want to live forever and travel around in vacuum-powered cars, will buy up everything in our freshly-impoverished, diseased, and death cult-stricken country, Premier League-style, and (with the European Convention on Human Rights no longer a problem) set us all to work fulfilling whatever evil and/or deranged purposes they see fit. Good luck, my friends: I'll see you when we're toiling alongside each other in their Sugar-Caves.

@HealthUntoDeath

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Number of times I was held tits-first on a bed and hit in turn by a series of junior soldiers armed only with long green socks and bars of soap: zero

Number of times I was shot to death with bullets from a gun for being insubordinate by bringing my at-best-unbearable brand of civilian humour onto the base and doing it right in front of a Corporal: zero

Number of times myself and the photographer Chris got kidnapped and waterboarded until we cried or wet ourselves or gave up classified information we didn't know we held until we spilled it: zero

Number of times I got told explicitly that I couldn't sit on a cannon for a really banter photo where it looked like my penis was a cannon and cannon-sized, that I had a cannon-sized penis: one

So obviously the army was disappointing.

§

We are in Harrogate, specifically the Army Foundation College, Harrogate, home to anywhere between one- and one-and-a-half thousand Junior Soldiers, the technical term for kids who fall somewhere between the 16 years old they have to be to be kicked out of the school system with a couple of GCSEs to their name and the 18 years old they have to be to join the army proper. These are the wilderness teens, ferried here with ironing boards and rucksacks full of the clothing from their old life, and given short practical haircuts and dreary-looking canteen food woken up at 5.55AM a lot until they fully embrace the new. There are two intakes a year, March and September. There are two courses available, six-month and 12-month. The method takes longer but the results are still the same: to forge in the oven of discipline a group of young people who are really good at polishing boots and don't mind getting shot in them in the name of the Queen.

You probably already have an idea about whether you think that this system is A Good Thing or A Bad Thing.

The main thing I am concerned with, though, is that I have forgotten what it is like to be 17, and now I am in a room full of camouflaged 17-year-olds, and they are staring at me. At 17 you spend a year looking so wonky that surely doctors should have to get involved, surely, bones don't grow like that, surely. At 17 you give up precious forehead space and sacrifice it to the gods of skin oil and texture and hope that in 12 months' time, when they hand it back to you, those gods have been kind. You giggle maniacally at adult people saying adult words because you only understand a language of whispered half-jokes told under the breaths of fellow 17-year-olds. You think Pot Noodles are food. You are pink and you are raw and you are not sure if you're a grown up yet or still a kid. You never know whether to cry or whether to scream.

(Photos by Christopher Bethell)

These 17-year-olds are dealing with all that within the tight loud confines of the army, an institution that teaches them marching, and boot polishing, and rifle skills, and GCSE-level maths, IT and English, and how to read maps, and how to injure an opponent in unarmed combat, and how to inflate your trousers up as a buoyancy aid if you shoot from the burning wreckage of a plane into water in the cool wet cold of the night into the depths of the sea, and also basic nutrition. These are 17-year-olds with a purpose. These are 17-year-olds with £1,000+ of disposable army income each month. These are 17-year-olds who could kill me and then run a mile about it in full kit. They are all of them really mad about soup.

The Soup Incident is on the tip of everyone's tongue for two reasons: the first is that a boy in their platoon (Waterloo Company) was busted this morning for eating a forbidden tomato and basil soup for breakfast while out on an exercise when he should have been eating rations, and the whole troop has been punished as a result of it (this, a rookie soup error, is viewed with groans and eye rolls by the assembled soldiers in front of me: after drafting in March, they are just over halfway through their training, and are completely over arbitrary punishments such as this). The second reason is that food is incredibly important to Junior Soldiers, who have otherwise been extremely reticent to talk to me – a wavy-haired journalist incapable of saluting – only exploding¹ into hurried, excited chatting when I ask them about the on-site canteen.

"It's all ," one girl, a Scottish girl, says. It's hard to know which one of them said it because the army aims to make everyone more-or-less the same and they all introduced themselves only by their surnames anyway, which just confused me. The transcript, as you can imagine, is a shitshow.

"In the Scoff House, it's not nice," another girl says (the army have Army Words for everything: the non-army world, for instance, is called 'Civvy Street'. 'Scoff House' means 'Eating Shack'). "I don't think anyone likes it, really. Like: you'll have good days. Friday's are fish and chip Fridays. So that's a good day. We love Fridays."

So is it kind of like school with a canteen?

"No," Girl #2 says. "It's worse."

The school analogy comes up a lot, mainly because they all still look like schoolkids – despite being weapons-trained and physically agile there are still a lot of Junior Soldiers milling around who you feel you could duff up against a chain link fence and do them out of their lunch money – but also because the Training Camp is a legitimate alternate option to a school system many of the recruits here felt out-of-place at. The 17-year-olds remind me of a time when I was teenaged and wonky, and sort of floated into doing A-Levels and then university because it was the only real path presented to me, a natural progression, and I was academically competent enough to follow it – a lot of you will be in the same boat. But Department of Education figures put the number of kids leaving compulsory schooling in England without at least five GCSEs at A* to C at 39.7 percent; an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) study found that more and more young people are leaving school classed as 'low skilled', meaning they struggle to get and hold down a job: an estimated 8% of 16- to 18-year-olds in the UK are NEETs (Not in Employment, Education or Training). Essentially, after compulsory education, the paths slowly dwindle to nothing. It's hard to find exactly how many 16-year-olds leave school actively dissatisfied with the previous 11 years of education (I can't find a study where anyone has ever asked them), but it's clear the one-size-fits-all approach to teaching in the UK doesn't actually fit all, and a lot of kids end up slipping through the cracks. And a lot of those kids find themselves at the Army Foundation College, breathing great huge sighs of relief to find a system geared up to accommodate them.

Anyway lets go and hold some guns:

The army is currently on a big PR push, very 'it's not just killing, you know!', reflected in everything from the Channel 5 show set at the college (Real Recruits: Squaddies at 16, which is basically Educating Essex with guns, and who, full disclosure, sent us here today) to the fact that you can sign up and receive a £10,000 golden handshake for being an army musician (are you good at drumming? Have you ever wanted to see the inside of a head? JOIN THE ARMY). Soldiers still need to know how to fire guns, though, so we are ushered past a load of doors with 'DANGER: RADIATION' stickers on them into the Indoor Range where Junior Soldiers train to fire. The tech on display here is incredible – real rifles, stripped and repurposed with parts that feed into a CO2 gas system to give the appropriate kickback, then loaded with sensors that give information on everything from how hard soldiers are pushing the weapon back into their shoulder for support to how softly they are squeezing the trigger. The advantage to this essentially building-sized Xbox is it is cheaper to train soldiers how to accurately fire – they don't have to burn through expensive ammunition, they can practice on moving, reactive digital targets, and they can do so indoors when Harrogate weather makes a day on the range a less-than-ideal prospect. Also, I don't know about you, but handing actual rifles to 16- and 17-year-olds is a prospect that fills me with dread.

No country in Europe trains soldiers from as young an age as we do in the UK, and that comes in for its own criticism. Three years ago, Child Soldiers International and ForcesWatch combined to claim that the Ministry of Defence's (MoD) thing for training soldiers from ages 16 to 18 was an outmoded practice that wasted taxpayers' money (it costs an estimated £88,985 to train a junior soldier, compared to £42,818 for adult recruits) and resulted in a higher drop-out rate (36.6 percent for minors² vs. 28.3 percent for adults) for trainees. The MoD responded by stating that those who completed under-18s training served for an average of 10 years (vs. seven-and-a-half for adult recruits) and that the figures "ignored the benefits" training has on the young people accepted, but it's still an issue that divides the army and critics alike. Looking around Harrogate Foundation College, though, and you can sort of see the MoD's point.

First up, we visit the swimming pool, which is as massive as it can be without the Olympics getting involved and is basically every swimming pool you've ever been to apart from it has a rack of 'water guns', a weighted rifle synthesis used in training exercises, and a board marked 'COMBAT SWIMMING'. The site's swimming instructors are all from Civvy Street – many of the college's teachers are chosen because they are not trained to either shout or kill, making them more approachable to the Junior Soldiers looking to learn from them – and no recruit leaves without bringing their swimming up to the above-average standard the Army expects. "A lot of kids come here and can't swim at all," Captain Holt, our guide, explains. "When they leave here they can do widths, lengths, and dive off the board." This is a recurring theme in Harrogate: taking kids with little-to-no skills in the basics and dragging them up and beyond the level of most 16-year-olds: swimming lessons soon intensify so recruits learn to inflate their trousers up like a buoy, make a raft, and swim in pitch blackness.

We move through the gym, which is massive. Massive. There are, like, six squash courts. That is an unnecessary number of squash courts. Fitness is, obviously, an important aspect of soldier life, and sport is viewed here as something close to holy. "If someone turns up with a passion for a sport – any sport – we'll do our best to accommodate it," Holt says. That's why there are indoor and outdoor football pitches, a huge hockey pitch, multiple immaculate tennis courts, an expansive gym with an eerie mural of Dame Kelly Holmes (former soldier, former Olympian) glaring intensely over it like some sort of brutal dictator obsessed with hurdling, and an enormous sports hall. "Even darts?" I ask. No. Not darts.

Back in the room of 17-year-olds, I was trying to figure out why any of them were here when one girl said, "Fitness: I like doing fitness." It didn't make sense until I saw the facilities proper, which were something akin to an adult playground: fitness – or, at least, the opportunity to tear around outside actually doing something, instead of being confined to a dull back-home menial job or some in-an-office-until-you-die deskbound thing – is a big motivator in a lot of 16- and 17-year-olds joining the army. Actually, I made a quick list: you can roughly split recruits wanting to be here into five reasons:

— Their uncle was in the army and now they want to be in the army;
— They always just wanted to be in the army, an uncle was not important;
— Want to make mum dad proud w/ a career;
— It was either this or be one of those sort of aimless kids who sets off fireworks outside a provincial branch of Londis a lot and gets into trouble and general shithousery, known by the local police on first-name terms;
— They tried civilian life – college, maybe, or a job cleaning, or for some reason there are a lot of former beauticians here – and it just Didn't Work, and that restlessness with it pushed them into the loving open arms of the Armed Forces;

There were zero instances of the motivations I most expected to see most of, which was:

— Maniac;

In fact, to say they all wake up at 5.30AM a lot to the sound of a man screaming, the Junior Soldiers I spoke to were all remarkably well-adjusted. A young Welsh recruit, Shaw, freaks me right out by speaking in an offhand way about his career plans eight or 10 years down the line – "My local regiment is actually right next to me in south Wales, so I'm hoping to get into that when I'm 20 or something, 25" – and the rest of the Junior Soldiers are similar calm about their long-term career prospects in the Army. And their attitudes to their friends back home – after six weeks, the JSs are let off-base for a week to taste the old life they used to have, and most of them come back grumbling about how immature and work-shy the kids they used to knock about with turned in the six weeks they were away. The army teaches them to be grown up in a way that I can barely comprehend: these kids know what they want to be doing at 25, and have planned for it. I don't even know what I want to be doing at 25, and I was 25 four years ago.

It's not just a career, though, because obviously not every career involves jumping out of the way of live grenades, so we start a tour of the Army's coping facilities after crossing the parade square (some things are very important in the Army that are not important in real life: parades, berets and neat wardrobes are amongst them). Harrogate is a multi-faith college, and has an on-site chapel with its own padre and prayer rooms to facilitate every god. There are Sunday services and camouflaged Bibles, but the chapel acts as more than just a place to pray: a remembrance garden gives the JSs a place to reflect, battle-centric history lessons are given out in one of the chapel's many rooms, and there are places to have a quiet cup of tea and a biscuit (cups of tea and biscuits are also very important in the army) if any of the kids are feeling under pressure.

Junior Soldiers average 12-hour days – a combination of practical lessons, theory lessons, fitness training and English, maths and IT – and after that they are allowed to change into non-tactical clothing and unwind at one of two places: Welfare, essentially a youth club where everyone is double-hard and is staffed 24/7 by counsellors there to listen to every problem the Junior Soldiers might have; or Sandes, a quasi-religious on-site serviceman's café where all the soup-obsessed canteen-hating kids can buy food they actually like and where there are a lot of leaflets about god. Harrogate has a gun range and a focus on discipline, sure, but it also has a lot of on-site dogs, pool tables and sympathetic non-army adults there to offer help and support.

Everyone's worried I'm getting a bit too pro-army – I keep asking things like, "and if you're 29, can you still join?" and "what's the biggest gun you get to fire in the shortest amount of time?" and "what's the basic wage, again? Do you need writers?" – so we mooch around to watch well-drilled Junior Soldiers do an obstacle course and get bollocked for not having shaved properly, i.e. proper army. This is the most on-steroids PE lesson I've ever seen – kids in full kit have to crawl along the ground after an instructor yells "GRENADE!" as a warm up, before getting into the session proper, which sees them climbing up over sheer walls, and I'm not really here for it. The reality of war – intense physical activity – is too much for me, a fey glorified blogger.

A quick sweep around the sleeping quarters, and then we're out: Junior Soldiers sleep in 12-person dorms, which as you can imagine is banter central. After six weeks, JSs are given certain post-initial training privileges – they can see their family again, for instance, leave the camp unaccompanied, use their own bedding – and the boys take this opportunity to buy each other My Little Pony duvet sets that they neatly fold and arrange for inspection each day. We are shown how to fold T-shirts army-style – keeping a neat locker is essential, and a number of recruits keep a toothbrush, toothpaste and shaving set in their cupboard literally for show, their spares holstered under their bed – and ironing is a vital part of Army life, too. Ask the recruits what they spend their first pay packet on and it is normally "an iron", "clothes" and "McDonald's". They are normal 17-year-olds in most senses apart from really knowing how to do a trouser crease.

As we make our way out – past the BEWARE MARCHING TROOPS signage – in my head I am making the pretty obvious comparison between the university halls life I knew and the barrack life I've just seen. Both are throw-you-in-at-the-deep-end experiences where you are forced to bond with people of a similar age and attitude who you either love or detest. Both put a lot of focus on playing pool and buying junk food from subsidised cafes. Both put you on this weird path to adulthood at a crucial point in the arc of it, setting you up as the person you are going to eventually be. I mean there are differences, obviously – I never learned how to crawl under barbed wire, Junior Soldiers don't know both the joy and horror of a £2 pint of snakebite – but there are similarities, too. When I went to university because it just felt like a logical conclusion to 13 cumulative years of education, Junior Soldiers are embarking on an Army life they see as a long-term career. When I was fucking about doing a temporary admin job because I "wanted to live in London", a lot of 21-year-old soldiers were already a few ranks up the ladder they wanted to climb.

Bloodlust aside, you can see the appeal for the people it appeals to. I assumed the army was terrible, but it would just be terrible for me: I'm soft-edged and too tall and in the field I would be shot to death by snipers within seconds, and I hate being shouted at and I cry really easily, and I like food that doesn't come vacuum-packed in a weird foil sachet that I have to cook myself over an impromptu fire. But some people love that, and thrive on it, and it makes them who they are, and the Foundation College is home to 1,500-odd very proud young soldiers as a result. It's weird: a whole world of swimming pools and berets and discipline and ironing boards, nestled at what looks like a school in the middle of our own.

The army is without its drawbacks, though. We're back on food again, and the canteen offerings that day.

"You think they're chicken nuggets and they're nice and all," says one girl, a thousand-yard army-hewn stare on her. "You're proper buzzing that it's chicken nuggets, then you go to eat them and it's... fish? Or it's actually vegetarian." War might have changed, but it's still hell.

^{1. In hindsight I realise this choice of word is borderline insensitive because, statistically, the 17-year-olds assembled in front of me today are far more likely than I am ever to explode↩}

^{2. Harrogate didn't have exact drop-out rate figures available when I asked but anecdotally it's a bit lower than that – one or two dropouts per intake of 45, in general.↩}

@joelgolby

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Along with USA, Lifetime, and other veteran cable channels not known for chasing Emmys, Syfy unveiled an unusually ambitious roster of original programming last year. The Expanse, 12 Monkeys, The Magicians, and the Childhood's End miniseries were intricate serial narratives that signified a departure from Syfy's usual lineup. Each series prioritized humanism and interpersonal drama over budget prosthetics and technobabble. As Syfy president Dave Howe put it to TheWrap last year, the goal was "fewer, bigger, better"—and, presumably, to extend the channel's regular viewership beyond the ranks of one-time Babylon 5 enthusiasts and lovers of Sharknado-caliber kitsch.

The network's newest original series, Channel Zero , is evidence that, despite the modest-to-disappointing ratings of its ambitious 2015 offerings, "Peak TV"-era Syfy is still in its honeymoon phase. Channel Zero is Syfy's contribution to the still-burgeoning anthology series trend inspired by FX's American Horror Story . Each season (a second is already in development ) will be inspired by a different piece of "creepypasta"—that is, a web-circulated, usually-open-source horror short story or meme.

The series, produced by Chronicle and Victor Frankenstein writer Max Landis, requires nowhere near the "premium network scale" investment of interplanetary dramas like The Expanse or Childhood's End. Still, it remains to be seen whether such an esoterically-branded show can be a viable commodity for Syfy—especially in a year in which the number of broadcast series is set to soar somewhere beyond 2015's all-time record of 409. The show's creative project is a difficult one as well: spinning five-and-a-half-hour narratives out of sketchy, thousand-word yarns.

The first season's inspiration—the story "Candle Cove", posted in 2009 by established internet horror writer and cartoonist Kris Straub—makes for particularly tricky source material, since its form contributes so heavily to its eerie appeal. In the tradition of stories by H. P. Lovecraft, M. R. James, and other seminal gothic horror writers, "Candle Cove" is written as a found document: a thread on a fictional message board about a mysterious public-access show. The commenters share memories of grotesque pirate puppets yammering cryptically while sailing toward a haunted cave, but there is an ongoing disagreement about whether they are remembering dreams or actual TV episodes. "And the camera would push in on Laughingstock's face with each pause. YOU HAVE... TO GO... INSIDE," user "Skyshale033" recalls in Straub's story. "With his two eyes askew and that flopping foam jaw and the fishing line that opened and closed it. Ugh. It just looked so cheap and awful."

The first few times viewers see the definitely-cheap Laughingstock and his terrible cohort on Channel Zero: Candle Cove, the petrifying impact of Straub's description feels lost in translation. Quick glimpses of the show-within-a-show trigger melodramatic surges of string dissonance. During moments like these (including a would-be chilling description of dragging children's bodies out of the wood—"Minus their teeth, that is!"—that falls flat), it becomes relevant that Channel Zero director Craig William Macneill's previous claim to fame was last year's unintentionally funny the-doll-did-it imbroglio The Boy.

But when Candle Cove's literal skeleton crew (watch out for that screaming, jaw-waggling Jawbone!) begins to seep into reality in the rural, geographically nondescript town of Iron Hill, the dread becomes more palpable. It's lucky that writer and creator Nick Antosca ( Hannibal) snagged a lead actor who can convincingly depict being constantly mortified. Paul Schneider stars as Mike Painter, a depressive child psychologist who is haunted by the 28-year-old murder of five boys in his middle-school class, and the simultaneous disappearance of his twin brother Eddie, due to Candle Cove-related complications. Schneider shades his portrayal of fear in unusual ways, sometimes grinning faintly at unholy decades-old memories as if greeting an old friend instead of just recoiling in abject terror. Like Hannibal's Will Graham or The Leftovers ' Kevin Garvey, Painter is an unreliable, contradictory protagonist par excellence: a lightning rod for waking nightmares that threaten to swallow his whole reality—but he's also the person closest to understanding the series' central mystery. (His mother Marla—a surprising, convincingly American Fiona Shaw—isn't far behind him.)

Either despite of or because of its imperfections, Channel Zero succeeds as both Syfy's first attempt at horror television since its revitalization and as the first high-profile, corporate-funded creepypasta screen adaptation (the second, a Sony Screen Gems-produced "Slenderman" film, is due out next year). Antosca's protracted take on Straub's story feels pleasantly out-of-time, never basking in referentiality or overt nostalgia (read: Ryan Murphy). It makes clear that selling the apropos-of-nothing, absurdist chills of creepypasta requires pokerfaced commitment. A demented one-eyed first mate with a squirrel tail of a handlebar mustache and tall, pointy teeth named Horace Horrible? Sure! Channel Zero, once it settles, manages to let stupid-but-scary things be scary, depriving them of just enough logic and context without sabotaging the overall six-part story.

Its lopsided charm, though, reveals itself only when its shadowy storyline begins to peel off in weird, untoward directions. Who would have expected a show based on flash fiction, and Syfy in general—better known for fast-paced, episodic fantasias modeled after The Next Generation or The X-Files—to play the long game better than the short one? But similar to the channel's recent creative high-water mark The Expanse, promoting long-term investment through intricate storytelling is the order of the day, along with demonstrating knowledge of the human soul. Channel Zero does both, but only if cable-viewers with too many cerebral dramas to choose from deign to wait around for Pirate Percy to edge Laughingstock slowly into the cove.