The polls, experts, pundits, and predictive models all got the 2016 election incredibly wrong. Few of the journalists covering Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump anticipated a Trump win, but a British woman named Selena Wisnom did. She read it in a sheep's liver.

Wisnom is an expert on ancient Mesopotamia's history and culture, and she looked at a sheep's liver shortly after the primaries because that's what people did back in those days. "You make any political decisions without consulting the entrails," she recently told interviewers on a London radio show. As to why she decided to ask the livers about Trump, she told the interviewers, "It's just the kind of question the [paranoid, politically uncertain] Mesopotamians would have asked."

Ancient Mesopotamia is famous for god-kings who ruled over what is now the Middle East with apparently absolute power three to four millennia ago. But while some of these rulers thought of themselves as gods, they knew there were other deities about, not to mention ominous natural forces that could still mess them up. They could apparently get a little paranoid about what those powerful actors had in mind for them. So they devoted an incredible amount of time to consulting soothsayers and priests about the gods, sort of the way some of us refresh Twitter, or refuse to go anywhere without checking Yelp first.

"If there's an eclipse or some other ominous signs in the sky," said Wisnom of the Mesopotamian attitude toward signs, "they want to know if it's going to affect them."

Perhaps the most famous of the many classes of priests and magicians to come out of this milieu were the astrologers, whose obsession with stars and the influence of celestial bodies on mankind we inherited. But in Mesopotamia, the top-of-the-line future-predicting gizmo was a sheep's liver, an organ so bloody and distinctive folks assumed it was the house of the soul—and because of that spiritual connection, an ideal canvas upon which the gods could write their wills. It was a form of political prediction so valued it spawned a unique class of seers, the baru, who took precedent over astrologers, and an entire genre of literature. At least 99 of the clay tablets recovered from Mesopotamian dig sites deal with the omens to be found in livers—one of them, covered in esoteric, mystical annotations, is actually shaped like a liver.

"You didn't make any political decision without consulting the entrails," said Wisnom. "It's really one of the highest branches of academia in Babylon... The sheep have the final word."

Traditionally, to learn a community or individual's fate from the livers a seer would ask the gods a simple if-then, yes-no question, then invoke a deity and sacrifice an unblemished sheep. (Perfectly clean sheep were seen as blank slates for the gods to write upon, but also likely had no illnesses, which often leave troubling marks on the liver seers would likely have loathed.) They would then open up its liver—which indeed is pretty distinctive in the animal world, with numerous lines running across it. Each section of the liver carried special meaning and the marks found there communicated clear answers, which when added together would come out to a prediction. The length of one part of the liver—the "finger"—predicted when its judgment would come to pass.

When Wisnom checked her liver, here's what it had to say about Trump's campaign:

The army of the prince will go on a terrifying campaign.
An army will attack the prince in battle.
The god Adad will flood the enemy's land, or there will be confusion amongst the enemy.
Whatever his circumstances, the gods will protect him.
The prince will not return from the campaign he embarked upon.
The king's son or brother will flee.
His army will not reach its goal.
The days of the prince will be long.
Dogs will become rabid.

Although it's tempting to read some of these lines as ominous reflections of the way the Trump campaign played out, these predictions seem vague and even contradictory. Wisnom doubts that they were meant to be taken literally, though. Instead to get your yes-or-no answer, you were meant to tally the number of good or bad omens—and in this case, the numbers came up Trump.

In all fairness to the integrity of ancient Mesopotamian auguries, Wisnom would be the first to admit that although she's one of just a handful of people alive today who understand the basics of the craft, she's not a proper baru. Liver readers basically had the equivalent of a PhD in their art back in the day. And she didn't slaughter her own sheep—she gets visuals of livers from a colleague at Cambridge who has a deal with Armenian shepherds.

For her, reading Trump's victor in the liver of a sheep was a chance to engage with the long-dead culture she studies. Liver readers in cultures where the craft is still practiced in some form—from Peru to Siberia—probably could have done a more authentic and ritually coherent job. Still, she got it right, and her prediction is at least as valid as Geda, the "king of prophets" monkey in Changsha, China, who led a cadre of magical animals in picking Trump. Clinton, on the other hand, got the backing of a Scottish goat named Boots , a YouTuber's kitten, and the New York Times's Upshot election prediction model.

In a way it's appropriate that Trump got the backing of liver auguries, a system born of the paranoia of ancient autocrats who drew what they believed were intelligent but were actually spurious and ignorant conclusions from the world and acted accordingly. Meanwhile, our version of soothsayers will have to figure out how to rejigger their own methods of prediction in time for the 2018 midterms or the 2020 presidential election—and in the meantime, it would be nice if someone could figure out which part of the sheep predicts Trump's behavior.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

As inauguration day rapidly approaches, Trump's Twitter fingers are more active than ever. Instead of "wasting" his time attending intel meetings, Trump pulled out his smart phone at 5 AM to blast Vanity Fair after it published a scathing review of Trump Tower's restaurant.

During Thursday's Desus & Mero, the hosts talked about the president-elect's reaction to this negative dining review. Let's face it, Trump is feeling just as salty as Trump Grill's overcooked fries.

Be sure to catch new episodes weeknights at 11:30 PM ET/PT on VICELAND.

On Thursday, an American research ship was retrieving two underwater drones in the South China Sea when a Chinese warship swooped in and stole one of them, Reuters reports.

According to CNN, the Chinese warship was following the USNS Bowditch off the coast of Subic Bay to ensure that it wasn't spying. When the American crew began pulling both of the unmanned, underwater vehicles (UUV) from the ocean—reportedly there to measure oceanic activity—a crew from the Chinese ship came up on a smaller boat and took one of the drones in front of the US crew.

"The UUV was lawfully conducting a military survey in the waters of the South China Sea," a US defense official told Reuters. "It's a sovereign immune vessel, clearly marked in English not to be removed from the water—that it was US property."

The alarming move raises tensions in the South China Sea, where China stakes claim over a string of islands where it has a bunch of weapons and a ramped-up military presence—a point of contention with neighboring Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines. It also comes in the wake of Donald Trump's post-election victory call to Taiwan, which angered China and violated the US's "One China policy."

Earlier this week, Admiral Harry Harris, the head of US Pacific Command, said the Navy was ready to act should China get aggressive in the region.

"We will not allow a shared domain to be closed down unilaterally no matter how many bases are built on artificial features in the South China Sea," Harris said in Australia on Wednesday. "We will cooperate when we can but we will be ready to confront when we must."

Photo of the USNS Bowditch near Fort Washington, Maryland via the National Museum of the US Navy Flickr account

This article originally appeared on VICE Sweden

After LSD became illegal in many countries in the late 1960s, scientific research into its potential benefits to mental health largely stalled. It's only recently that this topic has become subject to larger scale studies again. That is partly thanks to Professor David Nutt, who has devoted his career to researching the medical benefits of psychedelic drugs. He's published over 400 original research papers, 27 books and eight government reports on the subject, and is also working on a synthetic booze that aims to reduce hangovers.

He performs his research with the Beckley Foundation, a British NGO founded in 1998 by Amanda Fielding. The focus of his study is how LSD and psilocybin (i.e. magic mushrooms) could function as treatment for issues like depression and addiction. Unsurprisingly, Nutt has repeatedly found himself in media shit-storms because of his work. In 2009 he was sacked as the British government's chief drug adviser after publicly stating that ecstasy and LSD are less dangerous than alcohol. A few years later, Nutt suggested the cause of the financial crisis had been the coke habit of bankers.

Last month, Professor Nutt was invited by the Swedish Network for Psychedelic Science to host a lecture titled "The New Psychedelic Revolution in Psychiatric Medicine" at Karolinska Institutet in Solna. The following morning I sat down with him to discuss the future of psychedelics as medical treatments.

Professor David Nutt in Stockholm. Photo by the author

VICE: Can psychedelics trigger the creative part of the brain?
Professor David Nutt: Psychedelics change all kinds of different dimensions of your brain – the aspects that influence you visually, spiritually, and what helps you make sense of your life. I don't think that psychedelics can turn us all into Picassos, but they can make you see that there are different ways of thinking and might help you solve some issues.

What about chronic pain?
I'm trying to encourage pain researchers to study the effect of psychedelics. I think LSD could be the next revolution in pain therapy. The brain processes of chronic pain are very similar to the process of depression, so I think LSD should to be studied for its effect on chronic pain.

Watch Hamilton's Pharmacopeia with Alexander Shulgin, the grandfather of Ecstasy:

If we started treating people for addiction or depression with psychedelics, how do you think that would work, practically?
I imagine that you'd come to a clinic to get your treatment – a single dose therapy that would give you a profound change lasting for months. And if addicted people relapse, they might need to take it again. With depression, people can see how long they can go without feeling anxious and when the depression starts to creep up again, they would come back in, too.

You can use psychedelics repeatedly, but the effect wears off. You build tolerance for it, even if you increase the dosage. We're not sure why, but it's one of the reasons it's not addictive. It's not something people start craving, like cocaine.

READ: This Scientist Has Invented a Synthetic Booze That Will End Hangovers and Alcohol-Related Deaths

These drugs have been banned for so long, how difficult will it be to convince the world that they work as a medical treatment?
We're not talking about about magic here, or a bunch of hippies having some fun. We have the science behind how psychedelics work. The only reason people don't want them as a medical treatment is because they don't want to be proven wrong. People say that psychedelics fuck with your brain. I say, "No, they switch off these parts of the brain that are overactive in depression." That should be enough. What is there not to believe?

Before the ban in the 1960s, LSD was viewed and tested as a promising medical substance. Why wasn't that research continued in some form after it was banned?
That was difficult for several reasons. First of all, there's no money in it. Even if you could fund it, you need the right permissions and pass several regulations, which takes years. And the drug itself became crazy expensive. We get the LSD for our research from Germany. The Germans need a license to produce and export, we need a license to import and someone else needs a license to transport. So we end up paying £1,500 per dose of LSD. It's absurd.

On top of that, there's this perpetuated stigma from politicians and the media. The result is that there hasn't been one single study on LSD in America since the ban. There was one Swiss end-of-life study – and hopefully more to come.

What have been the biggest obstacles over the years?
The big challenges have been the regulations. It took us nearly three years to get through the regulations to even start our studies. If I was studying heroin, it would only take six months. It's crazy that psilocybin is treated as more dangerous than heroin. It makes no sense at all.

The reason the government gives for not funding this kind of research is rather clever. They say, "These drugs aren't addictive, we fund research on addiction." Or they claim that studying recreational drugs might encourage use. So it's almost impossible to fund – all of our funding comes from charities and crowdfunding.

How do you see the future?
I hope the laws and regulations change so I can work with psychedelics without it being so damn expensive. It would be great to get Scandinavia on board, since you guys have a good track record in brain research. There is no research in Sweden at the moment but that's why I'm here – to encourage people.

Do you think that your work will be more accepted in ten years?
Oh yes, in much less than ten years. I think in five years, psilocybin will be used to treat people in the United States. But I think LSD is too politically sensitive for that to happen soon.

The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

More from VICE:

I Use LSD to Help me Deal with the Trauma of Being Kidnapped By My Dad

The Trippy Life of the LSD Manufacturer Who 'Helped Create the 60s'

I Went to the Launch of the UK's Psychedelic Society

"If you can't beat 'em... fuck 'em," rapped Lloyd Banks on the G-Unit song "No Days Off." Though it's unlikely that any member of the Republican supermajority in North Carolina's state legislature has ever even heard a G-Unit song, that hasn't stopped the state house from taking Banks's advice. On Election Day, Republican incumbent Pat McCrory lost a bitterly contested governor's race to challenger Roy Cooper, and the GOP saw its 4–3 majority in the State Supreme Court was erased, leading many to hope that Democrats might have a fighting chance at reversing the far-right direction the state has steadily drifted in since 2010, when the Republican Party gained control of both houses in the General Assembly for the first time in 112 years.

Then, on December 2, Governor McCrory called for a special session of the General Assembly, ostensibly to focus on getting relief efforts to victims of Hurricane Matthew as well as "any other matters." Those who watch North Carolina politics closely speculated that McCrory's vague language was an invitation to the legislature to curtail wind energy development within the state, as well as reverse their losses in the state's judicial branch by passing legislation that would add two more seats to the state supreme court, which the lame-duck governor would have the power to appoint.

State Republicans dismissed the rumors in the build-up to the December 14 session, and on Wednesday approved McCrory's request for the disaster relief funds. Then, toward the end of the day's business, Republicans called for a second special session for Thursday. This time the purpose wasn't disaster relief, but radically reducing the power of the governorship that Cooper was about to take over. By the end of the day, Republicans had passed bills which reduced the number of potential gubernatorial appointees from 1,500 to 300 (there are currently roughly 1,400 McCrory hires working in state government), mandated that the governor's cabinet picks be approved by the state senate, and took away the governor's ability to appoint trustees to the University of North Carolina system. On Friday, the General Assembly will be voting on more measures still.

Democrats in the state legislature felt like they've been set up. "Some of these bills are 40 or 50 pages long," said Jeff Jackson, a Democratic state senator who represents Mecklenburg County. "They've clearly been working on this for months." Jackson told me he and other Democrats within the legislature felt as if the Republican supermajority had " hurricane relief as a false pretense to bring us all to Raleigh and ambush us with two dozen bills off the conservative wishlist. It's massively disrespectful to voters."

"It almost feels as if Putinism has come to North Carolina," said Rob Schofield of NC Policy Watch, a liberal think tank. "The fact that Republicans are passing lengthy new legislation to rewrite laws with no notice sets a new low in North Carolina politics. They're just doing it to show you they're in charge." He continued, "This is a pretty brazen power grab that I think would even give conservative groups pause."

Indeed, some of the state's right-wingers are upset with how the Republican Party has gone about passing its agenda. Former Republican Governor Jim Martin spoke out against the General Assembly's actions, while Mitch Kokai, a senior policy analyst at the Raleigh-based conservative think tank the John Locke Foundation, expressed dismay at the legislature's tactics. Kokai told me that while "some of the ideas that are being considered are ones we've championed for a long time, the input." By introducing a flood of legislation with little notice, the state's Republicans have all but eliminated that possibility.

The special session is indicative of the openly spiteful attitude the Republicans have demonstrated toward the Democrats in the wake of the party's loss of the Supreme Court and the governor's mansion. For instance, a bill stipulating that the party affiliation of judges up for election be listed on the ballot comes on the heels of the party losing its conservative majority in the state's Supreme Court––a loss many Republicans have blamed on a state Board of Elections error that listed a liberal justice on the ballot before the conservative incumbent, which may have caused some who voted a straight Republican ticket to blindly vote against their interests.

The bill that lowers the number of gubernatorial appointees from 1,500 to 300, meanwhile, reverses a drastic increase the legislature enacted only after McCrory took office in 2012––meaning the vast majority of McCrory's appointees would keep their jobs under Cooper.

"This is something that's been done throughout history," North Carolina GOP chair David Woodhouse told WRAL News in Raleigh, referencing such events as the so-called "Christmas Massacre" of 1976 in which Governor-Elect Jim Hunt, a Democrat, asked for the resignation of 169 Republican staffers. " are mad at what Republicans are doing, but they should remember they did it to us many times."

"Woodhouse is right," Kokai told me. "When Democrats were in charge, they pulled the exact same type of stunts." But just because this has happened before, said Kokai, doesn't mean it should remain the norm. "What you end up with is a cycle, where the party in charge will take steps to limit the input of the party that's in the minority. The next time the Democrats are in charge, they'll do the same." He added, "There has to be some sort of way to protect the minority party's ability to participate."

Right now, that's exactly what North Carolina Democrats are hoping to gain. State Senator Jackson told me that he and his colleagues are currently focused on the 2017 special election, in which he estimates that half the seats in the state legislature will be up for grabs. "If we can pick up enough seats to sustain Cooper's veto," he said, "the entire political landscape changes. It's not the beginning of the dream, but it's the end of the nightmare."

Until that happens, Governor-Elect Cooper is looking into other options to check the Republican supermajority in the state legislature. "This has got to stop," said Cooper in a statement. "Regardless of whether any of this legislation passes, I will use all of our tools, and we have a lot, to lead this state in the right direction." He intimated that this includes suing his own legislature "if I believe laws passed by hurt working families and are unconstitutional." It's not a threat to be taken lightly––before his election in November, Cooper served as the state's attorney general, and established himself as a formidable presence in the North Carolina court system, and with the State Supreme Court's newly established liberal majority, the numbers are on his side.

"It'll be a tough fight," said Schofield of NC Policy Watch. "But in the long run I think it'll be OK."

Follow Drew Millard on Twitter.

Check out more from Julian Glander at his Twitter, Instagram, and blog.

I knew I was done having sex after a couple of thrusts into the last time I had sex. It was a very deliberate farewell fuck with my ex-boyfriend a few hours before my one-way flight back home. In the middle of wondering whether or not my carry-on bag would fit in the overhead compartment, my entire sex life suddenly flashed before my eyes. It was brief.

I had met the man inside of me a year before this moment. I'd just turned 21, and after considering my friends' impressive advancements, I was panicking that I might be a virgin long enough for TLC to give me a reality TV show. I was waiting around for the perfect moment, with the perfect man, on the perfect fireside Tempurpedic mattress. Instead, there was "Tom," in late June, on a cot in the guest bedroom of my second cousin's apartment. Tom was a nice, good guy whose biggest appeal to me was that he thought my YouTube videos were funny. We met by chance in a New York City bar, he asked me to be his girlfriend two weeks later, and I gave him my virginity the next day.

We liked the same movies and made each other laugh, but the real lifeblood of our relationship was sex. We eventually moved in together with high hopes of advancing our careers in the city. Instead, we had endless disillusioned, drunken sex until we ran out of money. As I was being half-heartedly throttled by Tom for the last time, I promised myself I would never let my loins derail my life again: I was done with sex.

My friends laughed at me initially. It was still funny to them at six months, but became depressing at nine, and inconceivable at a year. By 18-months, I was expected to admit my allegiance to a secretive anti-sex cult. Now that I've passed the two-year mark, nobody knows what to do with me. I've had people send me to the demisexuality resource center, suggest I review tumblr identity indexes and take pseudo-scientific orientation quizzes, but none of them change the one big lesson I came away with after having sex: I believe it is counterproductive to success.

I found it exhausting, a time-wasting activity not worth the effort.

Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images

In her first public speech since the CIA pointed a finger at Russian President Vladimir Putin for seeking to sway the election in Donald Trump's favor, Hillary Clinton outlined what she perceives to be Putin's rationale for manipulating the American public into voting for Donald Trump.

Clinton also blamed FBI director James Comey's letter to congress for her election loss, which is nothing new. "Don't take it from me. Take it from independent analysts. Take it from the Trump campaign. Take it from Nate Silver," she said.

In a recording of her speech obtained by the New York Times, Clinton told her supporters that Putin directed hackers to dig up dirt about her campaign rather than Trump's, "apparently because he has a personal beef against me." That beef, she explained, stems from back in the days when she was secretary of state, and she intimated publicly (in fact, right in front of the Russian foreign minister) that Putin's victory in the 2011 Russian election was "so illegitimate that it was embarrassing."

"Putin publicly blamed me for the outpouring of rage by his own people, and that is the direct line between what he said back then, and what he did in this election," Clinton said Thursday night, referring to a wave of protests in Russia that lasted well into 2012.

From there, Clinton theorized that Putin's whole idea is to "undermine our democracy," as part of a strategy to make Americans doubt themselves, and "to create the circumstances in which Americans, either wittingly or unwittingly will begin to cede their freedoms to a much more powerful state."

Clinton applauded the bipartisan effort by senators—including Republicans John McCain and Lindsey Graham, and Democrats Chuck Schumer and Jack Reed—to investigate Russian interference in the election. "It should be modeled on the 9/11 commission," she suggested.

The whole Russian hacking effort is "not just an attack against me and my campaign, although that may have added fuel to it," according to Clinton. It is "an attack against our country."

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

One of the best things about Rogue One's arrival in theaters this weekend is not that Star Wars fans get more Star Wars—It's that 53-year-old Donnie Yen finally gets to show his stuff before a wide American audience.

Yen, whose portrayal of blind warrior Chirrut Imwe is already drawing fanboy plaudits, belongs to a generation of Hong Kong and Chinese action heroes —Chow Yun-fat, Jet Li, and Jackie Chan—who have long been superstars on the other side of the Pacific. But it's taken him some time (despite appearances in Shanghai Knights and Blade II) to catch up to their stateside popularity.

It's easy to see why he's had to play catch-up here. Yen doesn't have Chow's smoldering charisma, Chan's comic chops, nor Li's ball-of-intensity fury. As an actor, in his non-fight scenes, Yen can sometimes be a bit underwhelming—but he sure does have some sweet moves, and those alone are enough to warrant superstardom. In his best roles he combines, crazily enough, some of the best elements of Mel Gibson, Gene Kelly, and your favorite character actor.

In the Ip Man movies, Yen often emulates Gibson's love of martyrdom and suffering—physical and emotional—while facing the odds with incredible stoicism. Like Kelly, he's maintained grace and athleticism across decades. And like your favorite character actor, he often works best—like in Rogue One—as part of a team. He's best enjoyed when paired off with other greats of his generation, both in front of and behind the camera.

One other source of Yen's appeal: Netflix's streaming service has always had its limitations, but it's never lacked for Donnie Yen movies. He's always there. If you decided to watch a kung-fu movie on some lazy Saturday afternoon, the odds are pretty good Yen was in it. His IMDB page has 70 acting credits across 32 years. He's a relentless workman, and if you don't appreciate him at first, well, there will be plenty of other opportunities.

But if you're looking for a place to stay, here are five of the best movies you'll want to catch after watching Yen kick ass in Rogue One.

Wing Chun (1994)

This movie comes a decade into Yen's career, pairing him with Michelle Yeoh under the direction of the legendary Woo-Ping Yuen—best known to American audiences for choreographing the fight scenes in the Matrix trilogy and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. This movie doesn't have nearly the epic scope of those flicks—and it's Yeoh who's the star here, who makes a hero's journey from a brave villager who takes on the bad guys to the only martial arts master capable of taking on the big bad. Yen's role here is basically comic relief—his romance with Yeoh is basically a Shakespearean mistaken-identity farce—but he still gets a few scenes to prove that, even as a sidekick, he's a worthy hero. This movie pops up now and again on Netflix; right now you can rent it on Amazon Video for $5.

Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny (2016)

Despite the title, the worst way to watch this movie is to think of it as a sequel to Ang Lee's epic Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. Instead, it's most enjoyable if viewed as a loose, spiritual sequel to Wing Chun—bringing Yeoh, Yen, and Yuen back together for one more team-up. Yes, the story is unmemorable. And this flick tries to do a few too many things; most egregiously, it's an attempt by Netflix to cash in on one of the most popular titles in its streaming vault. Put that aside, though, to marvel at Yen and Yeoh, both fifty-somethings, as they move through set pieces with remarkable energy, grace, and beauty that the younger actors in the cast struggle to match. Available on Netflix, of course.

Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zen (2010)

It's in this flick that Yen arguably stakes his claim to the first rank of Chinese martial arts movie heroes. After all, the character of Chen Zen was originated by Bruce Lee in 1972's Fist of Fury, then revived by Jet Li in 1994's Fist of Legend. (Just in case you miss the the connection, Yen here dons a suit reminiscent of Kato, Lee's character in The Green Hornet television series.) What's great about Legend—aside from its action choreography—is its sheer style, reimagining 1930s Shanghai as a jazz-era Casablanca, with the Japanese army standing in here for the Nazis. Humphrey Bogart would feel at home on the set. Rent at Amazon Video for $2.

Ip Man trilogy (2008-present)

Ip Man is revered by martial artists as Bruce Lee's teacher, the foremost practitioner of the wing chun style of fighting: He's so famous that this is not the only movie trilogy dedicated to his biography. In this version, Yen plays Ip Man, Gary Cooper style, as a humble teacher who'd rather live peacefully with his neighbors but keeps getting called upon to defend them against villains of all stripes. There's reason to doubt the historical veracity of these movies: Ip Man 2 is basically a Chinese version of the Rocky IV's Cold War allegory, and Ip Man 3 features Yen fighting ... Mike Tyson, which is goofy and glorious all at the same time. All three movies can be found on Netflix — and a fourth is in production.

Hero (2002)

This isn't Yen's movie, really, but it's still worth watching for a couple of reasons. First, the all-star cast—Jet Li! Tony Leung! Maggie Cheung! Zhang Ziyi!—and sweeping scope make this feel a bit like China's Gone With the Wind. Second: Yen gets this fight scene with Li. It's worth the full price of admission. Also available on Netflix.

Others: Bodyguards and Assassins (Amazon) is another historical epic; Kung Fu Killer (Netflix) shows Yen in contemporary action hero mode; Flash Point (Hulu) sends Yen undercover in the Triad.

Isabelle Lagace (left) has pleaded guilty to importing coke. Photo via Facebook

One of the two Quebec women found with a massive amount of cocaine in her luggage after partying on a cruise ship for two months has pleaded guilty to importing a commercial quantity of cocaine into Australia.

Isabelle Lagace, 28, entered the guilty plea Friday, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. She will be sentenced in February and could face life in prison.

Lagace, Melina Roberts, 23, and 63-year-old Quebecer Andre Jorge Tamine were busted in Sydney, the final stop of luxury cruiseliner MS Sea Princess. Australian authorities reportedly said drug sniffing dogs helped them locate the 95-kilogram stash of cocaine, valued at more than $30 million.

Prior to being arrested, Lagace and Roberts documented themselves having a sick vacation aboard the $20,000-a-head cruise; Instragram photos show them ATVing in Peru, drinking out of coconuts in French Polynesia, and hanging out in Times Square.

Read more: Quebec Women Charged in Massive Coke Smuggling Bust Documented Whole Trip on Instagram

Roberts is set to appear in court next week while Tamine's next court date is set for next year in the Australian province of New South Wales.

The drug bust is the largest Australia has seen via boat or plane.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

On an all new episode of our VICELAND series PAYDAY, we head to Alberta, Canada's Fort McMurray to meet an oil worker, a dog sledder, an exotic dancer, and a boxer as they face the repercussions a massive wild fire has had on their lives and their jobs.

PAYDAY airs Fridays at 9 PM ET/PT on VICELAND

Want to know if you get VICELAND? Head here to find out how to tune in.

This summer, the Canadian Border Services Agency announced that it seized a kilo of the deadly opioid carfentanil destined for Calgary. "It is hard to imagine what the impact could have been if even the smallest amounts of this drug were to have made its way to the street," the RCMP said in a press release at the time.

Photo by Jamie Fullerton

We're living in an era that you might call "peak porn." You can find just about any type of porn online and access it at any time, from anywhere. People watch the stuff at work and in fast food restaurants and at national political conventions. Even the GOP has called our fine nation's obsession with pornography "a public health crisis." (No, seriously—that language was amended into the Republican Party's official platform last summer.)

What all that porn is doing to us, as human beings (and, particularly, as men) is not yet clear. That's especially true because while pornography has never been as ubiquitous as it is now, plenty of sophisticated folk still have a hard time discussing how they engage with porn.

David J. Ley, a psychologist who specializes in sexuality issues, wants to change that. His most recent book, Ethical Porn for Dicks: A Man's Guide To Responsible Viewing Pleasure, is a humorous and provocative handbook for men who want to think more rigorously, or comprehensively, about their porn consumption—and whether there's a right or wrong way to consume porn.

Ley told me he wrote the book imagining that he was "sitting and having a beer or two, taking with friends about porn." So, in that spirit, I got in touch with him to hear more about the book and what men can do to make their porn-watching habits more ethical.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

VICE: For starters, what's "ethical porn"?
David Ley: In the book, I talk about ethical porn in two ways: in terms of consumption, and production. Ethical consumption of porn is mindful, aware, responsible, and marked by sexual integrity. Ethically produced porn is porn made consensually, where the performers are engaging in acts for which they are paid a fair wage. Ethical porn production doesn't exploit people—neither the performers, nor the consumers—and it treats sexuality in a healthy way, recognizing the wide diversity of sexual interests, body types and desires. Ethical porn is about responsibly and intentionally supporting ethical sexual values.

Seeing as you aim to de-stigmatize porn consumption, I presume you won't mind me asking: What are your own porn viewing habits?
Like most men of my generation, I first saw porn when I was an adolescent. Older males gave it to me. There have been times in my life when I watched what might have been too much porn, and other times when I might not have watched enough.

I also first encountered porn when I was quite young—a neighbor showed me a stack of Hustler magazines his father had hidden in the basement. Later on, we got our hands on some X-rated VHS tapes. I don't think I was harmed by those experiences, but of course, it's a different world now. Do you think there are consequences with kids accessing porn on their computers?
There's a tremendous amount of hyperbole around adolescent and child exposure to porn. It's a favorite tactic of moral panics to cry "save the children!" Hard data and cold facts are difficult to come by.

The best research I've seen finds the average age of first exposure to porn is around 14, and that's not inconsistent with the history of pre-internet exposure. But the internet offers greater access to porn. So, people who want to see it can find it much more easily—and at greater diversity and volume—than you and I could.

So, what does that mean?
We don't know, not really. People who want to see it a lot tend to be high libido people, and porn doesn't change who or what a person is.

In the UK, they did a study, headlined: "Basically Porn Is Everywhere." They looked at 40,000 research articles on porn, trying to determine what effect porn has on kids. Out of all of those , only 237 were deemed scientifically useful in answering that question. Ninety-nine percent of what is published on porn is limited by sample bias, poor research, and researcher bias. This is an important point to keep in mind—so much of the modern debate is shaped by poor research.

So the UK research couldn't determine any effects of watching porn?
Right. But they recounted anecdotes of kids exposed to it—and it appears most kids are. Those kids are learning bad lessons about sex from porn. That's very unfortunate. Porn is not usually meant to be a teaching vehicle. The answer, though, is not to ban porn, which will never work. The answer is to teach young people what healthy sex is, so they understand that porn is just a fantasy.

Your book provides plenty of practical and hilarious advice for men, such as: Don't send dick pics to women you barely know, don't stalk porn stars, don't watch porn at work, and so on. I found a lot of that material amusing, but also kind of alarming. What does it say about us, as men, that plenty of people actually need this advice?
The thing is, we as people are made—by thousands of years of sexual selection—to be impulsive and use poor judgment when we're sexually aroused. I understand how sex can feel like a drug. When we're turned on, we lose track of time, often make bad decisions, and do things we might regret in the morning. We might have sex with the "wrong" person, fail to use protection, or engage in a sex act that we desire, but which conflicts with our morals or values. This is why I recommend that people think about their sexual values, desires and behaviors when they're not turned on. Think through how to resolve and integrate these things into who you want to be, as a person. Unfortunately, too often, sexual shame and stigma lead us to bury and deny our sexuality, except when we're horny.

"I encourage guys to treat a visit to Pornland like taking their girlfriend on a tour of dive bars: One of you has to stay sober to drive home." — David J. Ley

If a guy is furtively watching porn without mentioning it to his partner, is that cheating?
It may be surprising, but I do believe that watching porn can be considered cheating, if the couple has never talked about and negotiated what role masturbation or fantasy about other people plays in their relationship. By that same standard, if the woman ever sexually fantasizes about someone else, or uses a vibrator or sex toy in secret, that could be cheating as well. The answer is really not to view these things as "cheating" or "dirty secrets," but to have conversations about their values and beliefs about sex, including sexual privacy that an individual holds in their own mind. It's important these conversations come from a place of sexual self-knowledge and acceptance, and respect of the other. Sadly, that's difficult, and most people aren't well prepared for those conversations. A big part of my book is meant to prepare them.

What should a guy do to get his partner to watch porn with him?
The best approach, which I explore in the book, is for men to talk to their partner about what porn is for them, and what it isn't. And to approach their partner, accepting and understanding that those fears are there, and that their partner is not stupid or ignorant for having them. I encourage guys to treat a visit to Pornland like taking their girlfriend on a tour of dive bars: One of you has to stay sober to drive home. I give some guidance on how a guy can be a good, responsible and sensitive tour guide, which might lead to return trips together. Couples who watch porn together actually have better, healthier sex lives and relationships, but it takes sophisticated interpersonal skills to get there.

It's still pretty rare that men have these kinds of frank discussions about pornography. What would you say to encourage more men to open up about it?
I'd emphasize that porn is just sexual fantasy made visual, made external, where others can see it. Our fears and concerns over porn are truly our fears and concerns over sexual fantasy. There are fantasies and desires that we think are unhealthy, or that people shouldn't have, or that we wish they didn't have. But, we all have fantasies we keep secret, and which we fear others will judge. The reality is that there is currently little to no evidence that any sexual fantasies—even the scary or illegal ones—actually change peoples' behaviors. And if our society is truly interested in reducing unhealthy sex, decreasing sexual violence, and protecting children, then we should focus on the strategies such as education, that will have the greatest impact, rather than panicking over porn.

Fentanyl, like that pictured above disguised as fake OxyContin pills, has been one of the major substances at the centre of Canada's opioid crisis. Photo via Twitter

Canada's opioid crisis just experienced one of its darkest days, when nine Vancouverites died in suspected fentanyl overdoses.

BC police say the number may be as high as 13 across the country.

"Can you imagine nine people dying from any other cause in one day in our city," Vancouver Police Chief Adam Palmer said at a press conference.

The problem is a national one but ground zero for the opiod crisis is in western Canada. The Vancouver Coastal Health emergency departments alone have reported 6,016 illicit or unknown drug ODs between January 1 and November 26 of this year.

Of those, 1,679 were recorded as opioid overdoses. Many of the fentanyl overdoses occur when the user does not know they they are using the drug as it is often found in heroin or cocaine.

It is estimated that 1,300 people take opiods in the city each day, Vancouver's Mayor Gregor Robertson, also at the press conference, laid out the grim reality of the situation that the city, and province, now find themselves.

"Thirteen hundred people on any given day are playing Russian roulette with fentanyl. It's desperate times in Vancouver right now, and it's hard to see any silver lining when we don't seem to have hit rock bottom."

Toxicology reports have yet to be conducted on the victims but police say fentanyl is strongly suspected in all the deaths.

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Me and my home. All photos by the author with help from Ben Thomson and Ashley Goodall

This article originally appeared on VICE Australia

I've just spent a month building my own house for free, which actually means "built out of stuff from a garbage dump." This started because I turned 30, and thought about buying a house only to quickly realize I couldn't even slightly afford one. As you may have noticed, house prices around the developed world have detached themselves from wages and rocketed out to some fantastic land of random numbers. You earn $70K? Then a $1 million price tag is about meaningless. It might as well be a billion. Or $7 billion. Fuck it, make it infinity dollars. I'm about at the stage where if I saw an ad for a treehouse in Antarctica for infinity dollars I wouldn't even blink. I'd just be like, "Oh Antarctica has trees? I didn't know that."

So I was feeling angry and, yes, melodramatic and I decided to build a house for free. You can read the full tale of construction in part one of the article here. But then I had my parents over for dinner. They told me I should pull my head out of my ass, stop being weird, and just save some money. And they were right, of course. In the end we all just give up and start saving, bitterly.

So I decided to turn my shack into an asset, and put it on Airbnb. At first, I couldn't figure out why I wasn't getting any inquiries, but then I realized I needed to lie in the description more. After all, I'm sure real estate agent training manuals all start with a chapter titled Lying is Incredible.

I changed my listing to "Micro-Lux Outdoor Rejuvenation Hut" and wrote some crap about how it was made from "gorgeous recycled timbers" and "situated on a grassy acreage." What is an acreage anyway? Does it involve acorns?

Quickly, the inquires began rolling in. People were nice. People were polite, and their emails contained an aura of sweet optimism. They were tourists who dreamed of staying somewhere cheap and fun, with maybe a kangaroo to ride about in the morning. They'd stumbled upon my place and thought they'd hit gold.

I felt like a dick. It wasn't just that I was renting out a house made of garbage. It was also the fact I'd built a house made of garbage. A huge percentage of the world's population have to live in shantytowns and refugee camps, in cobbled together shacks like mine. Friends asked if I'd considered that my first article seemed to be smugly parodying this sad reality. That had never even crossed my mind. Now I was trying to make money off it?

But then I realized those property flipping, negatively geared millionaires aren't haunted by these thoughts. They don't make time for ethics. And I didn't want 20 investment properties, I just want one home. Stay the course Julian—make money, get house.

This is Leilah and Lucca from Germany. I still don't really understand why, but they wanted to stay. "We just like nice adventures," explained Leilah as I drove them from the airport to my house. "And this will make a funny story." But as we pulled into the shitty industrial estate where I'd built the place, the car fell noticeably silent.

We parked, I showed them over a fence and through some trees, and the two backpackers went inside. I took this photo and left, wondering what sort of a story I was trying to write.

The story I'm trying to write is that entry-level houses shouldn't cost a million dollars. Houses represent the human desire to not stand about in the rain, and it's unfair to twist this desire into a commodity.

As Leilah and Lucca stayed at the house, I spoke to Philip Soos, an economist and co-author of Bubble Economics: Australian Land Speculation 1830-2013. I wanted to know why houses were so expensive. According to Philip it's all about banking deregulation.

"What we're seeing since countries began deregulating their banking systems in the 80s, is banks lending money to anyone who wants it," he told me. "That's turning housing into a speculation game, which throughout the 90s and 2000s significantly ramped-up housing prices. In the US this obviously led to the Global Financial Crisis."

I asked Philip what evidence there is for this, as opposed to it being a result of simple supply and demand. He response was simple, "If housing prices were being driven by a lack of supply, rental prices would have risen at the same rate. You can see on this graph this just isn't the case."

"No, house prices are driven by lending, and by a reluctance by governments to stand up to banks."

I went back the next morning to collect Leilah and Lucca. They said they'd had a good sleep, even though a section of the roof blew off in the night. "When we got here last night there were candles and it was cozy," explained Leilah with that slightly funny earnestness possessed by all Germans. "Then we woke in the morning and I was like, 'Eh? What is this place?'"

I told them I was sorry and refunded their money, then drove them to an actual hostel where they could get on with their lives.

I hadn't made any money, but somehow my house had made headlines. Part one of this article had come out on VICE and other actual journalists were trying to scoop a piece of the hut. It was at this point that my Airbnb listing went bananas as weirdos everywhere clamoured to stay in a politically insensitive shack made of garbage.

I couldn't keep up with it. Have you ever posted a photo of your dog wearing a hat on Instagram? Then you'll know what it's like to get some attention on the internet. Now imagine what it's like if you have to respond to every person that likes your dog-hat photo, otherwise Airbnb will drag your status rating down to "unreliable host." The stress of this was debilitating.

It was about this point that the whole thing stopped being fun. Suddenly I realized that I hadn't built a house, I'd just built a sort of adult cubby, which are two words that look creepy together. Building a cubby was a bad way to deal with turning 30.

Adult life is hard and houses are expensive, but these are realities. I'm not going to be in a boy band. I'm not going to Hollywood. I'm not going to invent anything remotely useful or solve any big problems. This is life now, and that effortless mansion I'd always expected to be just around the corner probably isn't. Also, I'm just a guy who's treated fairly well by modern living, and maybe expensive houses are one of its very few drawbacks.

So I called my parents and told them they were right. I would just have to start saving and get on with life like a normal person. And then I went and said goodbye to my house.

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A lot of Americans believe in ghosts. Forty-two percent of us, to be exact, and 18 percent believe they've actually seen or been in the presence of one, according to a 2009 Pew Research poll. And while some studies may cast doubt on whether such phenomena are probably real, there are scientists who themselves believe in the supernatural, which speaks to the intensely personal nature of such beliefs. Just ask Shane McClelland.

McClelland says his first encounter with an apparition came to him when he was eight or nine years old. He'd glimpse it walking down the hallway of his childhood home. One night, he awoke to find an electric blue hand pressing down on him. Other encounters followed into adulthood: "Voices, music, full-bodied apparitions, things being thrown," he said. "I guess the paranormal found me."

Shane is also gay, and last September, he joined a group of fellow paranormal enthusiasts at his local LGBTQ center in Columbis, Ohio. They organized an informal ghost-hunting social group, and the band of queer spiritualists, who call themselves the Stonewall Columbus Queer Ghost-Hunting Club, have undertaken regular outings with the goal of "resisting against the often presumed heterosexuality of ghosts." And though they're not the only queer people with an interest in the paranormal, they appear to be the first group dedicated exclusively to hunting queer spirits.

After a successful year of hunts, which have taken them from lesbian convents to theaters, mansions, insane asylums, prisons, and more, the group launched a web series this October called Queer Ghost Hunters. It attempts to balance the portrayal of what admittedly sounds like kind of an odd pursuit with the seriousness of the group's efforts.

Those efforts, in part, are an attempt to resurface lost queer history in an unscientific way. "Queer history is largely unrecorded," said McClelland. "There isn't a tradition of passing down stories. If you were recording stuff, you were putting yourself and your friends at risk of being discovered."

At one prison, they played Patsy Cline in the dark, straining to hear evidence of a haunting while water dripped around them in the cold.

The techniques of the ghost hunters are, to put it mildly, inexact. Like most in their field, they carry dowsing rods (metal arms that swivel in various directions to divine presences) and radio scanners they call "spirit boxes." At one prison, they played Patsy Cline in the dark, straining to hear evidence of a haunting while water dripped around them in the cold. To an outsider, it looks bizarre—but to the participants, it's all very real.

"This is a whole other way to show the history of the LGBT community," said Joe Applebaum, who co-produces the web series. "In this case, we describe it as the lost history. These are the lost true stories of countless lost lives, lost in the afterlife because they couldn't live freely in this one. These are not the famous people who we hear about in history books. These are just ordinary people, and they have their own stories."

At one prison, McClelland talked a docent into allowing him into a room with graffiti reading "Tommy hearts Ronnie," and to a floor designated for transgender people. Applebaum also discovered evidence of a police sting that captured 50 to 60 young gay men between the ages of 17 and 21. "We have a list of these people's names," he said. "Many of them died in that prison."

But for all their work, the findings of any paranormal investigation are seldom verifiable. "With ghost hunting, it's the Wild West," said McClelland. "There are theories. There's no hard evidence to support anything. A lot of what you're working with is circumstantial and anecdotal."

Though the ghost hunters have a deep appreciation for the past, their findings tend to be limited to uncomfortable feelings and eerie noises. Without documentation, their experiences can only serve as symbols of true history. But sometimes, even true history can begin with circumstantial evidence.

Amanda Littauer is an associate professor in the Department of History at Northern Illinois University, and she recalls finding a particularly intriguing folder full of obituaries in the University of Southern California's LGBTQ-focused ONE Archive. The folder was labelled "suspicious deaths."

"It was a collection of hundreds of newspaper clippings that never mentioned sexuality," she said. But for the person who collected the obituaries, something "suggested to him that queerness could have been part of the story."

"You almost do have to have a sixth sense sometimes to sense the queerness in a story," she continued. "Because especially when you go back earlier than the 60s, the queerness really was suppressed. You do have to get creative and develop an intuition and instinct."

"It is always difficult to pin down the intimate moment of any individual's past life," said Nicholas Syrett, an associate history professor at the University of Northern Colorado. Along with Professor Littauer, Syrett chairs the Committee on LGBT History for the American Historical Association. "We can't count on having sources for any one individual person unless they happened to leave something for us."

"Often in the past, our families would disown us because we're different," said Applebaum. "It was not unusual for a gay person to grow old alone. The family then comes in to take care of responsibilities, and the whole house full of stuff would just get thrown out. Treasures and pictures and letters and home movies of their experiences. It would just get tossed out as garbage because it was unimportant, or they wanted to erase that person."

Those artifacts can turn up in unlikely settings. Professor Littauer recalls finding a study that examined venereal disease in the late 1950s. One 18-year-old participant described a sexual history that included same-sex relationships. "She very clearly said at the end of the interview, when asked, 'What do you want out of life?' she said, 'I want a home, a good job and someone to love.' This black 18-year-old telling a white researcher in a VD clinic in the late 50s that she had and enjoyed relationships with woman, and she wanted to build a home, and the way she said 'someone to love' suggested to me it might be a woman. That's all I know about her."

"Looking to the past is a way of legitimizing one's place within the body politic more generally," said Syrett. "That's been a powerful trope in civil rights campaigns—we are here, and we've always been here."

"Queer people have existed in all times and places," said Littauer, "and when we don't ask what that meant, and we don't look for the stories of people who fall outside of their culture's definitions of normality, not only are we missing these stories of those who were seen as abnormal, but we don't fully understand the people in the normal category."

Regarding the ghost hunters, she tactfully avoided passing judgment. "It's outside of my areas of expertise and familiarity," she said. "What I love about it is the impulse to connect. And it reflects an understanding that queer history is suppressed, sort of..." She trails off for a moment to search for the right word before concluding, "spectral."

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All photos by Jackie Dives

British Columbia's abandoned mining towns are full of untold stories. Sometimes you just have to dig through some racist bullshit to find them.

That's what anthropologist, historian and ghost town expert Laura Cuthbert told me—though admittedly in much politer terms—after a recent trip to Coalmont, Blakeburn and Granite City in the province's southern interior. Once mining outposts populated by thousands of people, fires, mining accidents and rail contract changes left the settlements virtually empty by 1930.

Though the official plaques say white miners "struck it rich" at Granite City in 1885, there's evidence Chinese miners were already working there for 25 years before. "The Chinese history in BC isn't properly known. It isn't in the BC Archives," she told VICE. "There were all these families we'll never really know the names of."

The mine companies aren't usually much help, Cuthbert says, as their records reflect hateful attitudes of the time. "Over the years, when I've been looking into deaths in mines, say if 40 people died, if five of them were white, it would list their full names and who their families were, and then sometimes it's just slurs for the Chinese men," she told VICE.

Cuthbert recalled coming across this at a similar abandoned open-pit mine in Quesnel Forks, where more than half the population was Chinese. "I think about that a lot—it's not just their names that are missing, it's literally nothing about them except that they're Chinese," she said. "It's kind of scary to look at."

Coalmont cemetery, where some bodies of Chinese miners have been dug out.

An example of missing grave records, lost since the 1950s

In graveyards, like in Coalmont, the bodies of Chinese miners are sometimes dug out, in some cases to send the bodies back to be buried in China. Cuthbert says Chinese mining families gave their money to scammers claiming to repatriate the bodies, only to have their relatives' remains left in a Victoria "bone shed." It takes real detective work to match unmarked graves with Vancouver benevolent society records, or if you're lucky, a newspaper obit on microfiche.

Cuthbert says not everyone is visiting these hollowed-out towns for the hidden history. Some stop in for the hunting season, or to rip around on snowmobiles, and others search for literal buried treasure. All throughout the old settlements, particularly Granite City, Cuthbert found dugout cabins. She says looters are searching for platinum, which was a discarded byproduct of gold panning at the time.

"I think every 10 or so feet is dug down a bit, you see these three and four-foot drops," says Cuthbert. "There are signs that say don't dig here, people live here." Well, not anymore.

An exclamation-heavy plaque in Granite City, a mine settlement wiped out by fire.

A one-room cabin that survived the 1923 fire.

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK

In 2005, albino British-Pakistani Imran Zeb travelled to China to carry out research for his PhD. He ended up staying in the country for good, loving the culture, the language, the people. But there was also a more unusual element to living there.

People saw his pale skin and hair, and "read" him as a white European. Although he was never actively deceptive about his ethnicity, he allowed people to carry on thinking this, and received the advantages of being perceived as white. With all the media discussion of white privilege, and some on the right denying its existence, he shares his story here.

After moving to China, I soon became aware that I passed as white. I moved to a relatively homogenous society, and still stand out as a foreigner, but it felt as though I benefitted from a few advantages. One of the main perks is that some Chinese girls seem to view pale skin as attractive. I can't say that this applies across the board, because China's obviously a vast country with a multitude of different cultures and social norms, but it's definitely something I've experienced.

As a "white guy" in Shanghai, I've tried randomly walk up to a woman and starting a conversation – I can often get her contact info, sometimes even if she's with a fella. When I've seen Chinese blokes try and do this, the girl has usually told them to get lost. I think "western-looking" guys are favoured because they dominate the celebrity world.

Although Islamophobia in China doesn't seem as blatant as it is in the UK, it's definitely still present, and the fact that I'm seen as being white (though I am Muslim) partially insulates me from it. The situation with the Uygurs, a predominantly Islamic ethnic group in the Xinjiang region, has had a significant impact on how Muslims are perceived here. An academic paper on their situation published in the Equal Rights Review in 2011 described them as being perceived as "violent, knife-carrying, pick-pocketing criminals", which sums up how many people see them. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. They suffer a lot of discrimination, and I think the criminal element in their midst arose as a response to this. Whatever the underlying cause, it's added to the negative image of Muslims, which I basically often manage to escape due to my skintone.

If I was viewed as Muslim, I would likely face some of the usual assumptions and misconceptions. In my time here, I've learned that some Chinese people say they think that Muslims don't eat pork because the pig is their ancestor. They think it's out of respect, as with sacred cows and vegetarianism in Hinduism. After repeatedly hearing people saying this, I posted a message on a group in WeChat, the Chinese equivalent of Whatsapp, asking why people think pork is forbidden in Islam. Sure enough, some responded, saying that we Muslims descended from pigs. There were a host of other misconceptions as well, including "They think the pig can bring them good luck" and "They consider pigs sacred". One person even said "Because the pig is Allah."

WATCH: Albino Activism in Tanzania, from VICE News

So it seems pale skin prevents me from being viewed as a relative of the pig. That's not to say the fact that I'm mistaken for being white has completely shielded me from Islamophobia here, though. I was once refused a teaching gig because the head teacher said: "Oh, you have a Muslim name. Maybe you'll teach the kids how to be terrorists." There's not much that you can really say to that.

Although the advantages of being pale in China far outweigh the disadvantages, some Chinese people still have prejudiced beliefs about white people. I asked some locals what their views on white westerners are, and the answers included statements such as "they have sex with lots of different girls" and "some have BO". On the plus side, one young woman did say they've got huge dicks.

Overall, my move to China has been advantageous in many different ways. I get to sort of shapeshift, gleaning the benefits that could to be gained from being perceived as white and escaping some of the prejudices that face South Asians back home in the UK. Shanghai is also massive, so I'm able to remain relatively anonymous and don't get too much attention for having albinism. I'm very happy with life here.

@Nickchesterv

More on VICE:

What It's Like to Live with One of the World's Most Painful Disorders

Why Do We Still Call People 'Mixed-Race' in the UK?

What It's Like to Be an Empath

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Plato and Aristotle

The closest we've come to real shared joy in 2016 has involved an ape being shot at the zoo.

But why has 2016 been so bad? And how can we take steps to ensure that 2017 might even be the slightest bit better? One of the most interesting things about 2016's badness is that it seems to have left us in a position where we basically understand nothing at all any more: the liberal political consensus, which viewed both Brexit and President Trump as impossibilities, has been left utterly fragmented, leading to the widespread belief that we have now entered some dark age of "post-truth" politics.

What can help us resolve this crisis of truth and understanding? Well, how about a group of people who have specifically dedicated their lives to studying the nature of truth and understanding? That's right: I'm talking about philosophers—we're not all precariously-employed losers who are forced to panhandle for freelance commissions their colleagues both hate and pity them for accepting; some of us might have something useful to say.

Problem is, there have been, like, 2,500 years of philosophy, or whatever. And in this period there have been a lot of ideas people have come up with that have been misguided, useless or bad. So which philosophies might be best to look at when trying to understand 2016? Here are some suggestions in that most philosophical of all formats, the listicle.

POSTMODERN RELATIVISM

"Post-truth" might be 2016's word of the year, but the fear that we are living through the inauguration of some sort of terrible "post-truth" era is far from a new one. In particular, accusations of having abandoned any notion of objective truth were regularly leveled, towards the tail end of the 20th century, at "postmodern" philosophers such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Richard Rorty.

The difference between then and now, of course, was that these philosophers were usually left-leaning, and the fear was that they had abandoned "truth" for trendy and Marxist rather than bigoted and racist reasons. In place of truth they proposed a sort of all-consuming "cultural relativism," threatening the validity of—among other things—the claims of natural science.

In actual fact, however, most postmodernists did not want to abandon the notion of truth per se. Their position derived from the fairly simple observation that what we consider to be "true" now has by no means been considered true since time began—and nor will it necessarily continue to be considered true forever.

Truth, then, is not eternal and absolute. It depends on general agreement within a specific social context: something that can be called into question, become fragmented, and be pulled apart. This, in fact, is pretty much what we're seeing with the phenomenon that has been labeled "post-truth politics" today: an old consensus has been eroded, and a new one is gradually being born.

The real danger for liberals comes if they stick too stubbornly to their old ideas as if they were eternal absolutes. That way, they'll never be able to define the terms of the truth now coming into existence—and as we all know this truth is, at present, looking like it's going to be a very grim one indeed.

Karl Marx

ALIENATION

But why might the liberal consensus be fragmenting? It seems pretty obvious that the current political crisis is intertwined with the ongoing effects of the post-2008 financial crisis. In whatever ways and to whatever degree, voters for Trump and Brexit have become disenfranchised from a political and economic system that once promised them prosperity but now seems to be unable to do so.

In short, what they are experiencing is something that Marx, in his early writings, characterized as "alienation." It is a trope of the German Idealist and Romantic tradition which Marx emerged from that the world ought, ideally, to constitute a "home" for us: exactly like a (happy) family home that provides us with the warms and apple pie and throw-pillows we need in order to be able to freely develop an identity for ourselves.

Alienation, basically, is the state in which the world fails to function as a home in this way: that is, where the world has become something coercive, draining of our energies and resources, and unable to provide our lives with meaning. This, of course, is the condition of the worker under capitalism, as Marx describes it in his writings. And it is precisely these alienated workers that, according to Marx, will eventually obtain class-consciousness and realize that it is both in their interests and within their powers to overthrow the capitalist system.

However, this is not quite what we are seeing at the moment. The Brexit and Trump votes both constituted great "No"s to existence, but in the Hegelian parlance that Marx might use here, these were merely "indeterminate" negations. They were inchoate eruptions of anger that had no real, obtainable goals associated with them: Leave voters are already getting ready to backlash against May when "hard Brexit" turns out not to deliver the economic prosperity they assumed their victory would secure.

Which is perhaps why these anti-establishment movements have been so readily hijacked by racists and fascists who, of course, now have great plans afoot to accelerate capitalism's monstrosities still further.

Big Mac

MACHIAVELLIAN REALPOLITIK

But perhaps—in the context of the US presidential election, at least—how the voters felt really had nothing to do with it after all. Increasingly gaining traction is the theory that Trump won as the result of tampering on behalf of his friend Vladimir Putin, whose army of hackers were busy during the election cycle obtaining and leaking information unfavorable to Hillary Clinton, and possibly also messing with electronic voting machines. President Obama has even ordered the CIA to conduct a full review into Russian involvement in the election, although weirdly for someone who apparently believes it is a genuine possibility that US democracy has been rigged by a hostile foreign power, he has also said that he will continue to respect the result.

In this interpretation, the effects of capitalism on individuals would be relegated in importance. Instead, we're thrust into the world described in Machiavelli's The Prince, where what really matters is the geopolitical power-plays of great men and the polities they lead. Certainly this would help explain the disparity, in the context of both Brexit and Trump's victory, between what the polls claimed and the actual results. Perhaps we're not just awful racists after all: perhaps this is merely part of some grand plot by Russia to undermine NATO and the EU so that they can annex the Baltics. In the now-immortal words of a mind far deeper and greater than I: "Guys. It's time for some game theory."

WALTER BENJAMIN'S THEORY OF HISTORY

The German-Jewish philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin knew all about bad years: he died in 1940, killing himself on the Franco-Spanish border while trying to flee the Nazis. Benjamin's final work, "On the Concept of History," consists of 18 aphorisms in which the idea of historical "progress" is turned, with bitter irony, on its head. History is represented by Benjamin as a single, unending catastrophe—an always-ongoing disaster that can only be halted by a Messianic moment of redemption, associated with the advent of Communism. This is not something that we know solely because of how badly things are going at present: it is something, Benjamin says, "the tradition of the oppressed" teaches us in general—at no point since the emergence of humanity as a species have things been "going well" for the majority of us on this planet.

Superficially, this all sounds rather despairing: the only sort of hope Benjamin gives us, in fact, is hope for something that—from our present position, at least—seems pretty much unobtainable. But actually I find Benjamin's theory both comforting and even potentially instructive. Everything is bad now... well, sure. But in a way, that's OK, because everything has been bad for most of human history, and still some people have managed to live relatively happy lives; still some members of the next generation will survive to breed, and maybe some of those people won't be completely, insurmountably evil. If we can't seem to achieve anything more than this, then we shouldn't lose heart—because short of the Kingdom of Heaven or Communism, no one ever has done.

On the other hand, though, this doesn't mean we should just do nothing. The world's suffering makes the urgency of the disaster apparent, and we have a duty to alleviate it. But again, because we are not the son of God, our solutions do not have to be sweeping, perfect, or eternal: they can just approximate to an image of a better world, slow the catastrophe down a little. That is what real hope consists in. The work must always go on.

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