Remember that movie in which Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill pressured a 17-year-old into buying a dub sack then arrested him?

On December 11, 2012, 17-year-old Jesse Snodgrass and a few of his fellow students were sitting in their classes in Chaparral High School in Riverside County, California, when they were arrested by armed cops. That raid, dubbed “Operation Glasshouse,” also extended to other schools in the district. At the end of that day, police had arrested 22 students and seized undisclosed amounts of weed, cocaine, pills, heroin, and LSD. The police considered it a great success. Snodgrass’s parents were horrified.

The March 14 issue of Rolling Stone has a detailed, disturbing account of how Sheriff’s Deputy Daniel Zipperstein went undercover at Chaparral and subsequently pretended to befriend Snodgrass (who suffers from autism, bipolar disorder, Tourette’s, and anxiety) and insisted he sell him $20 of weed on two occasions. It only took the 22-year-old cop 60 text messages and weeks of pestering to bend the vulnerable and largely friendless teenager to his will, but when Zipperstein failed to convince Snodgrass to sell him some of his anti-anxiety medication, the deputy stopped pretending to be his friend.

Snodgrass’s parents weren't informed of his December 11 arrest until the school mentioned he wasn’t there. He spent three days in juvenile lockup, where it had to be explained to him what was going on. Once a judge realized Snodgrass’s health issues, the teen got off with 20 hours of community service and a commitment to stay out of further trouble for six months. But he became withdrawn, blank, and depressed after his arrest and confinement, and Chaparral expelled him. The Temecula Valley Unified School District spent six days at an appeal hearing in February 2013 trying to make sure Jesse stayed gone. An actual human with the actual title of director of Child Welfare and Attendance, Michael Hubbard (one of the few people in the school administration who had known about Operation Glasshouse before the arrests) testified that Jesse knew right from wrong. Hubbard added that he didn't think the stings were “coercion or entrapment for any of the kids." That is, an undercover cop begging an autistic teen (who hadn't ever sold weed before) for drugs was acceptable activity in a high school.

A judge thankfully disagreed, ruling Jesse should be readmitted to the school that had left him "to fend for himself, anxious and alone, against an undercover police officer.” The school fought the appeal even as Jesse returned to class.

Now Snodgrass’s parents are suing the school district for failing to protect their son. According to the Rolling Stone article, Jesse developed PTSD from the experience. You could argue that he wasn’t the unluckiest victim of Operation Glasshouse, however—one kid had turned 18 before he sold pot to the cops and got sentenced to two years in prison.

Using undercover cops in schools like that is awful—they don’t seize large quantities of drugs or arrest major wholesalers, all they do is terrify high school kids while making it seem like the cops are protecting our children from a life of addiction or ruin. There are some signs the authorities realize this. The LAPD, which was the first department to use those made-for-TV-movie undercover tactics, discontinued them about eight years ago after a wave of negative publicity, and a 2007 Justice Department study found that these types of operations are expensive and don’t do anyone much long-term good. Nevertheless, police departments all over the country do this shit. In 2011 in Palm Beach County, Florida, an 18-year-old boy developed a crush on a girl who wanted to smoke some weed—and turned out to be a 25-year-old cop (he got arrested for selling her weed). Hell, in England, several undercover cops fathered children with political activists they were watching.

Riverside County's sheriff’s department has made additional busts since the one that caught Snodgrass—they’re still teaching kids not to trust anyone and that the police will lie to children. Good lessons, guys.

On to the rest of this week’s bad cops:

-–Some new details have emerged, thanks to the Dallas Observer, about the case of Clinton Petersen, a 28-year-old who was shot to death by police in Duncanville, Texas, in October under odd circumstances—namely, that three witnesses say he was running away from the cops when he was shot in the head. All three agree that the 28-year-old was first Tasered, then shot while fleeing from police after they were called because he was messing with his sometimes-girlfriend’s car lights. They also say that Peterson was handcuffed and left to die by the police, who didn’t attempt to help him. Now the recently released coroner’s report says that there likely wasn’t any effort to resuscitate Petersen. The officers who shot at him were on paid leave for a week before they returned to street duty. As of now, it looks like Petersen died for absolutely no reason.

–Specifics from the February 14 death of 17-year-old Christopher Roupe are still hazy, in that we still don’t know what the teen was holding when Euharlee, Georgia, police officer Beth Gatny shot him in the chest. Depending on whom you ask, Roupe either opened the door holding a pistol, a BB gun, or a Wii controller. Yet new information about Gatny’s rocky past in policing make her presence on a police force—even a teeny one like Euharlee’s—disturbing. According to documents obtained by an Atlanta news station (who also revealed her identity for the first time), Gatney was repeatedly written up by her former supervisors at the Acworth Police Department after ten years of repeated disciplinary infractions. She got into four car accidents, once left her gun belt with a civilian, and even fired her weapon at a suspect who was just taking his backpack off. Eventually, they let her go because she didn't show up to work, after which she filed for disability—a claim that was denied. Sounds like a winner.

–In testimony publicly released on Friday, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden told European Parliament he tried to tell at least ten different officials about his concerns over the agency’s spying on Americans before he took it upon himself to steal and then leak documents. Snowden testified that he was repeatedly told either that the issues were not his concern or that he shouldn’t make too much of a fuss, for fear of reprisals.

–A hair-raising March 6 Techdirt article described the creepy treatment that American Christine Von Der Haar received from Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) officers in 2012 after she went to Indianapolis International Airport with a friend so he could pick up some computer equipment. According to Von Der Haar’s lawsuit—filed on her behalf by the American Civil Liberties Union—she and her friend Dimitris Papatheodoropoulos, a Greek national, were taken to separate rooms. She was kept there for 25 minutes while she was interrogated about the nature of her and Papatheodoropoulos’s relationship, including their sex life. They were evidently trying to sniff out whether Papatheodoropoulos was planning to marry her for a visa—though he already had one that let him travel in and out of the US for ten years. What’s worse, the questions Der Haar and Papatheodoropoulos were asked suggests that their email exchanges had been read, and one CBP agent reportedly even admitted to that. How did the CBP get access to those emails? From the NSA? Der Haar is suing the government for violating the Fourth Amendment (i.e., the part of the Constitution that deals with unreasonable search and seizure).

–Last Monday, a New York City Port Authority cop caught a suicidal woman who suffered from bipolar disorder and depression before she jumped off the George Washington Bridge. Security guard Johnny Vasquez spotted the woman leaning over the bridge and radioed for help, and passing PA officer Christopher Outhouse grabbed the woman as she tried to run to the other side of the bridge when he came near. She was taken to a hospital for treatment, and both Vasquez and Outhouse are very deserving of our Good Cop of the Week Award.

Lucy Steigerwald is a freelance writer and photographer. Read her blog here and follow her on Twitter.

If you are a woman, chances are you’re not also a creative director at an advertising agency. Good for you! It is one of the most useless corporate jobs ever created.

Women make up just 3 percent of the world’s advertising creative directors. Three fucking percent. And while creative directors are about as useful as taint hair (very few of them, at least at the bigger agencies, actually create ads), they do hold power by “directing” what advertising gets presented to clients, what work gets produced, and how women are portrayed in those ads.

It should be obvious to anyone who has sat through a commercial break in 2014 that the glass ceiling of the ad world, erected in the Mad Men-era, is still in place. I know this from firsthand experience. While freelancing as a copywriter I once overheard two heavy-hitter creative directors say—during late night pitch sessions that featured zero women—that they didn’t like female creatives because they didn’t think they had the fortitude to hack it. That is bullshit. The two most driven art directors I ever worked with—and I worked with scores—were both women.

But today’s advertising directed at and/or featuring women can’t be as bad as it was back in the day-drinking 1960s, right?

Dannon Light & Fit Greek Yogurt

Yogurt commercials are a special advertising Hell for the women of today. Here’s a recent one targeting the, dun-dun-dun, dieting female. She already feels like shit, but we can make her feel even shittier—by having a man with a fucking bullhorn yell names of junk food in her face.

The marketing gonads at Dannon who approved this thing have since realized what a woman-hating heap of crap it is and scrubbed all evidence of it from YouTube. Luckily you can still find it at ispot.tv.

Clark Bites

This is one ad from a series of ads that ran in the US starring beautiful women wearing minimal clothing speaking foreign languages. This Russian woman with her tits blasting out of her mini-dress says:

“You guys have no idea what I’m saying, but you’re still watching me, probably because I’m so unbelievably hot. Cup, cup, cup, cup, cup! I just said the same thing 5 times in a row, and you’re still glued. Clark Bites: Are you Clark enough?”

Here’s the website (“a land of bearskin rugs, barbed wire, and rocket fuel”), where you can get all the translations, and take a “man test” to see if you’re Clark enough.

Man enough. For fucking bite-size pieces of candy.

(Note: The ad agency here is Hill Holiday, and the creative team is all male.)

T-FAL irons

Scenario: Two women communicate via “steam signals” from across a yard/alleyway while ironing clothes. One wears pearls and a low-cut top. The other is reporting on a “steamy” date she had the previous night, when she went out with a rich guy who “whipped out his member…ship” and let her hop on his private…jet.

If you’re gonna do dick double entendres, male copywriter guy, they should be funny, original, subtle, and smart enough that an eight-year-old couldn’t have thought of them. These do not meet any of those criteria.

Still, bitches be ironing, amirite?

(Note: Again, the creative team responsible for this spot, from Toronto ad agency Farenº, is all men.)

TrueCar.com

True Car is an automotive pricing and information website. Judging from this ad, which first aired last summer, they do not believe women are capable of buying a car IRL. The social media backlash on this one was immediate and angry. Their CEO, Scott Painter, responded with a sorry/not sorry non-apology, stating that the internal creative director on the ad was a woman.

This Goodyear commercial from 1964 is considered one of the most sexist ads of all time.

You’ve come come a long way, baby?

5. Jamaica Tourism

Via Coloribus

Now let’s take a quick look at a couple of recent print ads. This is one execution from a new campaign launched last month, via the New City office of DraftFCB. The hard-to-read (art directors are assholes) headline reads: “If You Knew Your Wedding Was Going to Be Here, You’d Say Yes to the First Guy Who Asked.”

What an unbelievably crass, stupid ad. “You’d say yes,” because you’re that stupid and shallow, honey. Even Doyle Dane Bernbach’s brilliant, beautiful mid-1960s Jamaican tourism print ads weren’t this sexist (though they were sexy as fuck, scroll down).

Dcash hair dye

Via Ads Of The World

This Thai print ad won a Lion—the most prestigious ad award—at last summer’s Cannes Advertising Festival. The judging panels at Cannes are made up of the “top” creative directors in the world. Headline: “Your Wife: One of the Grey Hair Planters. Dye!

Yes, “dye” as in “die.” As in dead wife. And yes, the wife is carrying a bunch of gray hairs, which she is planting in her husband’s head. This is what is known as a “see-say” ad, something any ad student knows always makes for a bad ad.

Maybe it plays better in Thailand.

I didn’t bother writing about any Carl’s Jr. or Hardee’s ads, because they and their ad agencies just plain don’t give a shit what you think about the fact that they’ve reduced women to pieces of meat. Par-putt golf clap for them.

Just like in the tech world, the top level of the ad industry is still a boys’ club. That isn’t going to change probably ever.

Follow Mark "Copyranter" Duffy on Twitter.

Very quietly, the federal government has begun approving—and even subsidizing—what they are calling the Investigational New Drug Program, a series of studies of cannabidiol (CBD) for children with treatment-resistant epilepsy. CBD is a completely non-psychoactive and non-toxic natural compound found only in the marijuana plant. It has shown tremendous efficacy in controlling seizures. There is no lethal dose of CBD and only a few, mild side effects.

Last August, thanks to Dr. Sanjay Gupta's groundbreaking CNN documentary Weed, millions of viewers worldwide saw the way a high-CBD “whole-plant cannabis extract” proved over 99 percent effective in stopping a six-year-old girl's seizures, after all other treatments failed. Many in the medical marijuana community had been pointing to such “miraculous” cases for years, often facing ridicule in response, but after Dr. Gupta's special aired, everything changed.

Emboldened, more and more parents came forward, either to share their own dramatic success stories, or to demand legal access for their kids. In Weed 2, which premieres tonight, Gupta follows one of these families, the Wilsons, during their high-profile public feud with New Jersey governor Chris Christie—including a face-to-face confrontation at a diner where Brian Wilson accuses Christie of dragging his feet on implementing the state's medical marijuana law.

“Please don't let my daughter die,” he pleaded.

“These are complicated issues,” Christie responded.

“Very simple issue,” Wilson replied.
           
Perhaps watching his two-year-old daughter Vivian suffer horrific, life-threatening seizures every day of her life helped clarify his thinking. In any case, the Wilsons, like hundreds of other families, ended up traveling to Colorado Springs to legally acquire a concentrated extract of Charlotte's Web—a high-CBD strain of marijuana developed by growers at a local dispensary. Unfortunately, while the all-natural, “no-high” medicine helped Vivian immensely, federal law prevented bringing any home with them to New Jersey.
           
Meanwhile, in February, doctors at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital and NYU Langone Medical Center began supplying an almost identical product to pediatric epilepsy patients, with the express knowledge and consent of the federal government. If fully implemented, this FDA-approved trial will eventually enroll 150 children at six different locations. According to the UCSF Pediatric Epilepsy Center, which will lead the study, “for one year the patients will be carefully monitored with seizure diaries and blood tests to measure the levels of the patients’ other seizure medications in order to learn about safety, dosage, effectiveness, and drug interactions.”
           
GW Pharmaceuticals, a British corporation with ties to the world's largest drug companies, will supply “purified” CBD for the trials via its trademarked, patent-pending product, Epidiolex. In Weed 2, Dr. Gupta visits the heavily secured greenhouse in Southern England where GW grows thousands of cannabis plants in order to extract not just CBD but also THC and other beneficial cannabinoids for use in prescription medicines like Sativex—a 1:1 blend of THC and CBD that's already used to treat pain related to MS in 11 countries.
           
Gupta spoke with me about the pharmaceuticalization of marijuana, and about his ongoing journey to fully investigate the plant's true medical potential.

VICE: What's changed—and what hasn't—since your first Weed documentary aired last August?
Dr. Sanjay Gupta: You've now got 15 more states seriously considering medical marijuana. In Georgia, it just passed the House 171-4. And I don't think anybody could have predicted that at the beginning of the legislative session. So we're seeing a momentum that's much different from a year ago, certainly.

I also think there's been so much more education about medical marijuana. It's come out of the fringe—not just for the lay person but for the scientific community as well. We still face all the challenges of cannabis being a Schedule I substance in this country, like trying to get funding for research, and trying to get approval from all the various government agencies, but I think the overall level of discourse is much higher.

The tough thing for patients is that you still have a serious conflict between the states and federal law. As you'll see in the new documentary, families are uprooting their lives and moving to Colorado to get this treatment for their children. Typically, they try everything else, nothing works, and then they have success with cannabis. But if they try to take it out of state, they could be arrested for drug trafficking. So they're stuck.           

You might think, “Are the authorities really going to arrest these parents for transporting their epileptic kid's medicine, which by the way for a child might be a non-psychoactive oil?”

And yet it seems to be a very legitimate worry for these families.

In the first special, you said we've been “systematically misled” about marijuana and outlined the history of that, but who's doing the misleading now?
It's been going on for so long, I don't know if there's anyone now who's doing the misleading, so much as they're not doing anything to make things better. It's comical, almost, when you have the President of the United States, in his New Yorker interview, saying that marijuana is “no more dangerous than alcohol,” and yet alcohol is a legal substance that's completely unscheduled, and marijuana is a Schedule 1 substance, alongside heroin.

On the other hand, you have Nora Volkow, head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, actually starting to soften her stance a little on this. So I don't think I can point to anybody who's continuously responsible for systemically misleading. There's a lot of that still going on, but a big part of the problem is just poor education. As you know, I fell into that camp. If you look at the United States medical research on this subject, for all the reasons I just mentioned, all of the studies are designed to find harm. Which means, on a macro level, based solely on that criteria, the case for medical marijuana doesn't look impressive at all.

It goes like this: Harm paper, harm paper, harm paper, harm paper, harm paper, benefit paper, harm, harm, harm, harm, harm, harm, harm... It's 9-to-1, in terms of distortion in the literature. So only when you look outside that framework can you start to see a different picture.

And you don't find it disingenuous for Nora Volkow to suddenly position herself as championing this research when she and NIDA have been such a big part of the campaign to systematically mislead people about the dangers of marijuana?
I think Nora is a true scientist who genuinely wants to be a smart person on this. Frankly, she may have fallen into the same trap that I previously fell into. When I interviewed her for this new documentary, she told me she watched the first one and thought, There's no question this is something we need to better research. And that's a big step. That's not just a throwaway statement.

Because even condoning some of this research was not on her agenda a year ago. And now we've got an FDA-sponsored trial in the United States for Epidiolex, the cannabis-based epilepsy drug for kids. That's a really big deal.

Do you believe we've reached a sort of "Emperor's New Clothes" moment?
[Laughs.] Yeah, probably. When we shot the Weed documentaries, we wanted to set up segments where I have a kind of debate with someone who doesn't share my point of view, and it's almost unfair in some ways. Because science trumps politics. At least it should. Obviously, in the real world that doesn't always happen. But as a cogent, practical, level-headed person who just sticks to the facts, I haven't had a single instance where I thought, Oh, my God, I just completely missed something. I'm barking up the wrong tree!

In fact, part of the reason I say I'm “doubling down” on medical cannabis is that the more I look into it, the clearer it all becomes. It all makes sense. Meanwhile, I've got a guy like Raphael Mechoulam [the Israeli scientist who discovered THC] looking me in the face, and he's 83, and he says, “I've been telling people about this for 50 years!”

So yeah, "The Emperor's New Clothes" is a good way to describe it.

In a land far, far away, love flourishes in a kingdom quite unlike any other. In mushroom-shaped homes and old dormitories, a community of dwarfs—all less than 51 inches tall—can be found singing, dancing, and performing on a daily basis for visiting tourists.

In this episode of The VICE Guide to Travel, we send VICE magazine's creative director, Annette Lamothe-Ramos, to visit the controversial theme park, Kingdom of the Little People.

Paul Mooney is easily one of the most trenchant political satirists in the history of comedy. Best known as Richard Pryor's writing partner and best friend, and a regular guest on the iconic Chappelle's Show, his biting critiques of how America deals with race has made him one of the most intriguing and confrontational comics in the business. Recently, Paul visited Toronto for his "Last Stand" tour and stopped by the VICE office to shoot the shit about a bunch of things, including media coverage of Barack Obama's presidency, the killings of Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis, and Toronto's crack-smoking mayor. He also told us about a sexual conspiracy in the White House. Then he made our cameramen feel weird.

This week on the VICE Podcast, Reihan Salam sits down with Melissa Gira Grant, an independent journalist who has been writing and reporting on the sex industry for the past ten years. Grant recently wrote a book, Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work, in which she calls for an overhaul in the way we think about sex work.

Today, she chats with us about the history, myths, and criticisms of the sex industry. She shares her perspective on how sex work is primarily about economic activity—those who perform sexual labor shouldn't be criminalized or treated any differently from any other laborers trying to survive in our treacherous economic system. 

Steve Brigham

“Welcome to the zoo,” a man snarls as I walk down a dirt track in Lakewood, New Jersey, into an encampment in the forest known simply as Tent City. It’s two in the afternoon, and he’s drunk on cheap beer, standing outside a tarp-covered tent, shouting at me. Before he can be led away by other residents, he offers an editorial suggestion: “Write this: This place should be fucking eradicated. Drop a bomb on it.”

Lakewood’s leadership couldn’t agree more.

This hardscrabble encampment 60 miles south of Manhattan—the suburban version of rock bottom—is now hobbling through its final, frigid winter. Over the past few years, the town has been embroiled in a legal battle to shut down Tent City.

Tent City was founded seven years ago, by a Libertarian minister under the notion that all you need to end homelessness is a patch of land, a lot of faith, and some old-fashioned, all-American gumption. Last year, the town and its homeless reached a deal to close the camp, in return for giving each current resident one year’s free housing. Already, the camp’s disintegration is taking a toll.

By February 1, the community was down to 60 residents from a peak of 122, last May. Steve Brigham—the 53-year-old pastor who has been ministering to the region’s homeless for 14 years—expects that by spring, this settlement could be dismantled altogether. This winter's brutal stretch of snowstorms, polar vortices, and record-setting cold days could be the last winter Tent City sees. What will happen after that, nobody knows.

Some residents don’t want to leave. After all, there’s still no homeless shelter in the entire county. Others now in Tent City arrived too late to qualify for resettlement (the camp is technically closed to new residents, though they keep showing up anyway).

Pastor Steve says he didn’t set out to build Tent City like some frontiersman embarking into the Pine Barrens. It just kind of happened.

“This is not so much a living protest as a living demonstration of a need for shelter, a need for affordable housing,” he says.

He was working for a high-voltage electrical contractor on New York Port Authority bridges 14 years ago when he began doing outreach and met a man who couldn’t make his rent. Brigham got him a tent and a sleeping bag and sent him into the woods. There, the man ran across more homeless people, who knew of still more homeless people. Steve brought them tents too.

Other homeless were living in abandoned cars, so Steve brought blankets around. But that first winter, a man died of pneumonia sleeping in his car. “I thought to myself, Something more has to be done to help the homeless than just blankets,” Steve says. “The next year, I started supplying propane and relocated the people from cars to tents. And it made a big difference as to how the homeless fared through the wintertime.” By 2007, he was serving nine encampments around Ocean County. Eventually, he consolidated his work in Lakewood.

Over time, Steve quit his job. His marriage fell apart as he spent more and more time outdoors. But one thing never stopped: the flow of desperate people into Tent City. Steve himself moved in six years ago. “I just minimized my overhead—minimized it to almost zero,” he says. “Food, clothing, shelter... That’s all you really need.”

He lived in a donated school bus until the town towed and scrapped it, in one of many escalating events leading up to the encampment’s dissolution. There’ve been tickets issued, threats of fines, police raids, and what residents describe as ongoing harassment. Still, one of the more remarkable things about Tent City is that it wasn’t bulldozed summarily, as so many others around the country have been. "They didn’t dare," Brigham says. He credits a friendly local newspaper columnist, the Asbury Park Press’s late Bill Handelman, with stirring public sentiment in his favor.

Today in Tent City, there are two types of people left: those trying their hardest to get the hell out, and those who can’t seem to bring themselves to leave.

Jerry Galante, 43, first came to Tent City four years ago, after the encampment he was living in—behind a Target in Brick Township—was cleared out by police. In his wallet, he carries a photo of a toddler wearing a clean red dress and a broad grin: his two-year-old daughter. She stays with guardians, and he’s hoping they’ll adopt.

“I move around a lot. I don’t want to put her through that,” Jerry says. He’s moved out of Tent City before, he says. “I keep coming back. I don’t know why. I don’t know if it’s the people or the animals.”

Right now, he’s caring for a friend’s pit bull, a sweet monster named Chantelle who hogs his bed at night. His tent is mid-range real estate for Tent City, large and tarp covered, on a wooden platform, with a wood stove inside and a chimney peaking out. Some others have picket fences, even lawn ornaments.

“It kind of sucks they’re closing us down, because where’s the next person gonna go?” he says.

Robert, 47, who declined to give his last name, has been at Tent City a year with his wife. He’s a landscaper; she gets disability payments. They’re getting an apartment this week, and Robert cannot wait.

“This place used to have unity. Now, it’s every man and woman for himself. This place takes a wear and a tear on you,” he says. “Me and my wife go out a lot. We try to stay away from here as much as possible, go to the laundromat, out to eat, anything to get out of here. Staying here all day, all night, will drive you crazy. It’s like prison, this place. You’re on Gilligan’s Island without a boat. “

His wife used to clean the showers every morning, he says. She got sick of doing it on her own. She hates that she can’t have her morning cigarette without someone asking her for a drag.

While cigarettes and good spirits may be in short supply, many other things are in abundance. Steve's phone buzzes nonstop with people dropping off donations. Bagels. Clothing by the trashbag. Tent City has a dozen hens and roosters, wandering around, free-range. Jerry says no one bothers to collect the eggs. “We get eggs in here all the time,” he shrugs. No one goes hungry in Tent City. They just get sick of pizza, burgers, and hot dogs.

DuraFlame logs, bottles of water, candles, toilet paper, and other necessities are meted out at the supply tent. It’s manned by Alex Libman, who is also the webmaster, answering 20 emails a day offering donations and updating a Facebook page with 4,000 likes.

Alex was a computer programmer until the stress burned him out. “To what degree I’m here by choice, that’s a difficult question to answer,” he says. After he quit his job, his savings lasted five years. Then he moved to Tent City.

He finds it preferable to his previous housing even despite Tent City’s troubled history—including fires, stabbings, a propane explosion, deaths from exposure, and, by several accounts, a steady flow of heroin. He says he rejected the township’s housing deal.

“When they evict me by force, I’ll start another Tent City, somewhere else,” he says. He says he has a libertarian manifesto that would explain his reasoning better, but he tells me the abridged version: He thinks zoning rules, property taxes, and other government interventions are making the cost of living unreasonably high—especially in places like Lakewood.

The trouble with Lakewood especially, according to Steve, is that the ultra-Orthodox Jews that control the town and its services—such as public schools and affordable housing—aren’t looking after the needs of those outside their own sect.

It’s true that life outside Tent City isn’t much easier.

Angelo Villanueva, 50, was one of the first to move out. After almost three years, he left last September and now lives in Toms River, about 10 miles away. For $550 per month, he rents a basement bedroom. He’s been laid off from his job since he moved, but he’s hopeful. “Nothing in life is long-term,” but he thinks he can afford this place going forward.

Angelo, who lost his job during the recession, estimates that 85 percent of the residents of Tent City have drug-addiction or mental-health issues. He was one of the 15 percent who had suffered a mere financial calamity. Back at Tent City, he was a leader. He’d keep order by fighting (he practices kung fu daily), or bribing people with cigarettes. He’d volunteer for chores and then nag others to do the same. Now that he’s left, he misses it.

“We had a little community,” he says. “We all would pull together there, and I miss that aspect.” Everyone was on equal footing in Tent City. Outside, it’s all social standing and privacy fences. “People don’t know each other like that.”

But what he misses may no longer exist. “The sense I’m getting is, things aren’t the same,” he admits.

Jerry Galante

When Tent City does finally get packed up, it’s clear that the need will remain. Three days a week, Steve rolls his last working school bus into the town square and dumps whatever clothing, food, toiletries, or electronics he doesn’t need for Tent City onto a set of long folding tables. A hundred or more people crowd in hungrily.

Marco Contreras, 25, originally from Veracruz, Mexico, visited Tent City one Saturday to see if he could get a bite. He lives in a house with seven other people—a typical arrangement for immigrants in Lakewood, one of New Jersey’s fastest-growing towns. Sometimes, he goes to Tent City to eat.

A day laborer, Marco says as many as 500 people can crowd the town square each morning waiting for a day’s work. Sometimes he waits all day and can’t get a job. Whether he can make his rent or not, half of everything he earns goes home, to his family and his 5-year-old son, Carlos.

Marco lived for a while in one of those overcrowded houses packed with day laborers. He opted to move into Tent City. At least in Tent City, he had his privacy. “It was like a piece of the American dream,” he says.

Brigham wants to build a permanent shelter that will offer those same dignities: a village of tiny houses, fueled by solar power, sustainable farming, fishing, and maybe even tourism. He’d like to have it up and running before the year of free housing ends, but he has a long way to go.

So, once all the residents are housed according to the consent order, those who don’t qualify for free housing will, Brigham expects, be asked to leave.

“Hopefully they’ll have a place to go,” he says. If not, “I can get them a tent and tell them to find a piece of woods someplace to set up in, and hopefully they won’t be found out.”

A bloodied Billy Roper. Photo courtesy of Southern Poverty Law Center 

Residents of Harrison, in Boone County, Arkansas, want to move beyond the town's racist history. The trouble is, the Knights of the Klu Klux Klan have settled in the area and made it their national headquarters. On March 15, the Klan and other racist groups are planning to convene in Harrison for a  “White Man's March,” part of a national day of rallies mustered by the white supremacist website StormFront.org. 

Flyers for the event, set to occur two days before St. Patrick's Day, advertise that marchers will be “piping up about white pride.” 

"Harrison is a really nice place to live,” said Pastor Thomas Robb, national director of the Knights—a role formerly known as Grand Wizard. “I suspect that's because it's majority white.” 

Race riots in 1905 and 1909 drove out most of the black population from Harrison, establishing it as a “sundown town”—a term applied to thousands of municipalities in the Deep South during the days of Jim Crow where it was unsafe to walk the streets at night if your skin was the wrong color. The number of minorities living in Harrison has remained low ever since. According to census figures, blacks make up just .3 percent of Harrison's 13,000 citizens.

“We are not the only former sundown town in the world,” said Harrison mayor Jeff Crocket, who is designating March 15 as Love Your Neighbor Day. “There are tons of ex-sundowns around; some were much worse than we were. The problem Harrison has is that ever since the Robb family decided to migrate here, every time something appears in the news media about them it says Harrison, Arkansas.”

The town is also home to a storefront for “Kingdom Identity Ministries,” whose adherents believe that Eve had sex with Satan in the Garden of Eden and gave birth to Jews. In 2010, a Kingdom Identity follower shot and killed his friend and then set the man's corpse on fire for having a Mexican girlfriend. The head of the group, Mike Hallimore, is known for publishing classified ads in several small town papers across the country back, starting in 2008, looking for a "Christian white lady" to be his wife and secretary and join him in matrimony in Arkansas. Mike's ad is still up on Christian Identity's website, in case you're interested in bagging a psycho racist. 

There isn't much Mayor Crocket can do to rid Harrison of the racists who have gravitated to the community, but he has established a diversity task force comprising himself and local citizenry in the hope of making the town more welcoming to minorities. On April 2, they will be hosting a youth nonviolence summit together with the Arkansas Martin Luther King Jr. Commission. Children from across the state will arrive in Harrison to learn about the civil-rights movement and the peaceful struggle for racial equality. 

Tom Robb is worried the event will eventually lead to “white genocide” in Harrison. Some of the children attending will be coming from Little Rock, and he tried to make clear to me that Little Rock spells urban, urban spells black, and black spells crime. 

“We should judge people not by the color of their skin but by the character of their heart,” he said, drawing on the words of Martin Luther King. “And I know that the character in the heart of black communities in Detroit and Cleveland and Kansas City, Missouri, is not a good one.” 

When I asked about Floyd Melton Lewis—a Klansman currently in Boone County jail for taking naked pictures of a 13-year-old girl, growing pot, and selling pills—Tom said he hardly knew the man and threatened to end the interview. 

The Knights trace their lineage back to original opponents of Reconstruction who murdered, lynched, and otherwise terrorized black families throughout the South. These days, however, the group has adopted a subtler approach to racism. 

“I love all God's creations,” Tom said. “I'm a believer in diversity. Diversity is a wonderful thing. I like Louis Armstrong. I like his music. I like the blind guy, Ray Charles. I like his music.” The Klan doesn't hate black people, he wanted me to understand. They just really love white people. 

Tom's two granddaughters, Shelby and Charity Pendergraft, have formed a musical outfit of their own, called Heritage Connection. 

“He's an Aryan Warrior. / He's an eagle taking flight,” the white power duo sing in flat, nasally voices on one of their tracks I found on the internet. “We shall reign in victory / after the final fight.” 

The Robb family settled in Zinc, a town even smaller than Harrison to its north, in the early 70s and established what many locals described to me as a “compound.” Pastor Tom prefers to call it a “church.” He wouldn't provide membership numbers, but he did claim there is support for his ideas in Harrison, where the group maintains a PO Box. 

“I can hardly walk into Walmart without people shaking my hand,” he said. “We've got members of the Klan that Jeff Crockett and his diversity task force rub shoulders with everyday.”

Mayor Jeff was doubtful. “The Klan is not the organization it used to be,” he said. “Most of what they focus around today on that compound 15 miles out of town is selling their brand of hate memorabilia—T-shirts, that sort of thing—in order to support their families.” 

The majority of people in Harrison that I spoke with said they think the Klan's presence more of an embarrassment than anything else.

“They've been considered to be a joke,” Nate Jordan, a member of the mayor's task force explained, “a kind of stain on our community.”  

Nate, who writes a literary blog documenting life in the Ozarks, moved back to Arkansas from Denver about a year ago to be near his folks. He had no idea of Harrison's reputation when he took up residence there. It wasn't until a friend emailed him a clipping on the Knights that Nate realized he had just moved into the heart of Klan country. 

“I was like, What the fuck?” he said. “I talked to a lot of folks who didn't think racism was a problem here. I said, 'Well, of course you don't; you're white.' The community at large really hadn't seen the need to address the issue. People were hoping that if they just ignored the Klan, it would wither away.” 

In October, an anonymous donor paid for a billboard on Bypass 62-65 in Harrison that forced the town to confront the funk of racism brewing beneath its surface. “Anti-Racist is a Code Word for Anti-White” it read. 

I asked Tom Robb to imagine being black. What would he make of that sign if he were driving through Harrison with his family and spotted it? Would he feel safe?

“No, I probably would not,” he conceded. “I would probably move on.” 

Mayor Jeff's diversity task force started posting signs with the message “Love your neighbor” around town. Others worried that with the opposing views standing beside each other, an observer might feel that both sides had equal merit.

Photo courtesy of the Woodsman Project

In the dead of night on November 29, someone painted over the billboard so that it instead proclaimed, “Anti-Racist is a Code Word for Love.” Chad Watkins, a local interior designer, was charged with the act of vandalism. He still hasn't gone to court yet and plans to plead not guilty, but he said he approves of the billboard's new message. 

“I would pat the fellow on the back who did this act,” Chad said. “It was an elephant-in-the-room kind of thing with that billboard, and someone finally did something about it.”  

It took Chad a while to warm up to me when we spoke on the phone. The last call he'd taken had turned out to be from a Klansman. He wasn't threatened by the fellow on the other line. The guy asked a lot of questions, just like a reporter would, but then launched into a racist diatribe. Pretending to be a reporter is an old trick among white supremacists. In 1984 Tom Robb showed up at the headquarters of the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that monitors the activity of hate groups in the US, with what he claimed was a documentary film crew. He was recognized and denied entry to the building. 

“I'm cautious,” Chad told me. “These are unscrupulous fellows we're dealing with.” 

On February 11, about a dozen members of the Klan turned up at a Black History Month event at the Boone County Library in Harrison. They sat and listened to National Public Radio reporter Jacqueline Froelich give a presentation on the history of racism in Arkansas. During the Q and A portion, a few of them stood up and said they wanted to keep Harrison safe. Though they didn't create a disruption, many were rattled by the Klan's presence, startled that they would possess the brazenness to turn up at all.

“They're pushing buttons,” said Nate. “They're getting riled up. There's been some blowback from the community, and it is making Tom Robb angry. That's what's making people scared.” 

What Nate finds most frightening is that Tom has joined forces with Billy Roper, whom the Souther Poverty Law Center describes as “the uncensored voice of violent neo-Nazism.” 

“Roper is a real hardliner,” the Law Center's Mark Potok told me. “He has gotten into street battles and fist fights with anti-racists. I have a photo of him with blood pouring out of his head because some anarchist smashed him with a steal pipe.”

When I spoke to Billy he seemed to be following Tom's lead, attempting to project a kinder, gentler version of racism. “I wish that slavery had never happened,” he said. Sounding almost like a Tea Partier, he emphasized that he wants to “return to the ideals that this country was founded on”—circular logic considering the founding fathers were slaveholders. 

But for now, those challenging racism in Harrison can at least take some comfort that the Klan appears far more paranoid and fearful of them then they are of the Klan. In the same conversation, Billy worried that Mayor Jeff is working with a reality TV program to move “1,200 blacks into Harrison” and said he believes Oprah Winfrey wants to kill off the white race. 

Follow Peter Rugh on Twitter. 

Amid all the new-wave molly rappers and swag babies, it's a rare treat to come across something reminiscent of rap's golden era, i.e., early-90s New York. Luckily, Mobb Deep practically pioneered (or at the very least refined) the rugged or "gully" aesthetic that rap music adopted after posi hip-hop died out in the 80s. Employing the same formula that granted them worldwide acclaim, the duo is back together (after a brief hiatus) with their latest single, "Say Something," from their upcoming album, The Infamous Mobb Deep.

Mobb Deep's management reached out to us with the single because they felt we'd love it so much that we'd drop everything we were doing to premiere it exclusively to our audience. Well, they were right.

Oh, and don't forget to buy their new album on April 1. (Yeah, we realized that's April Fool's Day, but this album is nothing to laugh at.)

During one of my recent, daily adventures inside the internet’s ever-growing catalog of viral YouTube videos (I live a hard life), I stumbled across a montage of a chef named Keith, who clearly had no idea what he was doing, demonstrating his utter lack of cooking skills on a variety of daytime TV shows. It’s clear from watching Chef Keith at work that the man is a troll of the most masterful magnitude. After watching his cavalcade of pranks a dozen times in a row, while laughing to the point of nearly throwing up, I hunted down the culprit behind Chef Keith—who turned out to be a friendly New Yorker, by way of Wisconsin, who goes by the name of Nick Prueher. I had to know first-hand how a guy like Nick was able to go on so many talk shows, and not crack a smile, while the hosts rolled with the punches, and consumed his culinary abominations.

VICE: How did the whole character of Chef Keith come about? Was there any inspiration behind it?
Nick/Chef Keith: I guess the main thing was that my friend Joel and I were really bored, so we were trying to think of something fun to do when we were back visiting our parents in Wisconsin over Thanksgiving and Christmas. Joel and I run a found footage festival, and occasionally when we’re promoting it in a new city, we’ll go do a morning TV show. They’re always just the worst. Basically, we find old VHS tapes at thrift stores and garage sales—things like exercise and training videos and home movies—and we watch them all, and pick out the parts that make us laugh. We put them into digestible chunks and the show is a live 90-minute comedy show of a guided tour through our video collection. This is the ten-year anniversary of the show, actually.

Anyway, we hate doing these morning shows. They’re always filmed before the sun comes up, and who knows who the hell is watching these shows. I don’t know anyone who does. It really makes you question the value of it.

The other thing is, no matter what you’re talking about, nobody is listening. They get the name of the show wrong, they don’t even understand what it is. We realized how easy it is to get on these shows. They all have 90 minutes to fill every morning, so we thought what a slam dunk it would be to get booked while we're home over the holidays. Often, when we’d do morning shows there was a chef on before us making some seasonal treat, so we figured we’d make up this chef who had written a book on how to spruce up your boring holiday leftovers. We just thought how could they say no to that? Then we mocked up a book cover called Leftovers Right: Making A Winner of Last Night’s Dinner. We also made up some fun facts about Chef Keith that he’s a rock n’ roll chef, he owns a place called the Milk House Cafe, he owns a French bulldog named Rawlins, his motto is “Live, Rock, Eat,” and he has a tattoo that says it, too. We just made up this stupid character. I drew the short straw and had to play this guy once stations started saying yes. 

Isn’t it kind of weird the network’s producers didn’t do a background check on you at all?
I guess it is. A quick Google search would’ve shown there’s no such thing as the Milk House Café, or that I’ve never been on the Marie Osmond Show, or a regular guest on Queen Latifah. They probably should’ve asked for video or a web link or something. There’s no book on Amazon, either. It’s hard to blame them too much, because these small market stations are probably run by recent college graduates, and there’s, like, three people running the station—so, why not? It’s an easy ten-minute segment for them.

Three years ago, we had our friend Mark play a yo-yo expert named Kenny Strasser, who was promoting environmentalism through yo-yoing at various schools. We told them he would give them a demonstration and how he could yo-yo like no other, with a positive message, and whatever city we would be in for our festival we would tell the station that’s where he’s from. So, we had this local hero angle. How could they say no to that? We got booked on seven morning stations as this yo-yo guy, but the thing about it is Mark can’t yo-yo at all. Actually, I don’t think he can even make it come back up. We made up this dark past for him to talk about, like that he was living in the gutter on drugs, and other ways for him to avoid actually doing a yo-yo trick on TV, like cutting the string so that when he did [try and yo-yo] it would just fly off. He showed up in a sling one time and said he forgot to bring his yo-yo. We couldn’t believe how well it worked out. So we made a website for him and took some promotional photos and made up all these awards that he won. At least we made the effort of making a website so if people checked into it they could see he had a presence. With Chef Keith, we were like, screw it they’re not going to check.

How do you even get on these shows? Do you just cold call them and they book you?
We would just go on their website and find their email address, then we would contact the show with a pitch saying ‘Chef Keith has a signing for his new book at Barnes and Noble, he would love to come on and make some delicious holiday treats for you.’ I think it was difficult for them to say no to that.

Wow. How many shows have you been on as Chef Keith? 
Out of the ten requests we sent, seven said yes, so that’s a pretty good batting average. Two of them were conflicting, so we had to pick and choose—but we could’ve done seven if they were spaced out differently. 

So, do you actually have any experience with cooking?
No. Not at all. I mostly eat out. I live in New York, so I’m pretty spoiled with restaurant options. I can make pasta, but that’s about it.

Shout outs to Chef Boyardee.
Yeah, that’s basically the extent of it. I know how to boil noodles and pour stuff on it.

Did the hosts say anything to you after the show? They seemed pretty confused what was happening.
They just had to roll with the punches. You kind of have to admire it. I would make up fake facts; like that there’s statistics that say because of meat consumption, Americans eat over a pound and a half of feces a year, and they would just be like: “Wow, that is really shocking.” I think it’s that whole attitude of, you’re on TV, and you don’t want to ruffle any feathers, because people are watching and drinking their morning coffee. So, a total weirdo comes on their show, and they have to soften the sharp edges as best as they can and not draw attention to it. They just plowed forward, and four out of five hosts would eat the gross food I prepared. The same food that we were gagging making in my parents’ kitchen, just pouring gravy into a milk jug; and an hour later someone’s eating it on air. 

Do you ever second-guess yourself going on these shows? Like do you ever feel like they’re on to you, and they know what they’re in for?
No, that never entered into my mind. I’ve second guessed myself. Like, I’d be in the car before the sun came up in the parking lot outside the station preparing a dish using the light next to my rear view mirror to line up cranberries on a turkey leg and think, man I gotta go in there and ruin somebody’s day, or know that I have to go in and knock over a table. In terms of them catching on, I was nervous for a little bit, but the second I was on and confident. I was okay. Even the most outrageous stuff, like knocking over the table, they were apologizing to me and saying like: “Hey, if anything, more people will come out to your book signing because they’ll want to see what you’re all about, and thanks for coming on!”

Now that the video has gone viral, is this the unfortunate end of Chef Keith because everyone knows what he’s up to?
Yeah, it would probably have to evolve and do something else. When we did the yo-yo guy a few years ago, we thought we would never be able to do another news prank again because people will have their radar up. There’s a pretty short memory in daytime TV circles. I think we just got in at a time where there’s very little scrutiny about chef segments and we have big ideas for next year. We just have to let it die down a little bit. We’re continuously surprised at how much we can get away with. 

Looking forward to that. What was your favourite moment on a show as Chef Keith?
The funniest thing to me was (and it was the only time I ever came close to laughing during a show) was when I was in my car preparing what I call a ‘hand turkey sandwich,’ which is one of those hand turkeys you make in grade school where you trace your hand. So, I had two pieces of flatbread, and I got the anchor to trace her hand on the bread using sharpies. Then I said to her, ‘Make sure to cut in the lines because this marker is toxic. You just kind of have to line it up with turkey and gravy and you’ve got yourself a hand turkey sandwich.’ In the car, I prepared this extra sloppy one where you could see a ton of marker all over the flatbread with this pathetic display of turkey in between, just competely falling apart, and we stabbed it with a bunch of toothpicks saying it was eyes and feathers. After I show her how to make it, I’m like, “OK, let’s see the finished product!” And I pull out the pre-made sandwich I made in the car and it just looked pitiful, but they had this nice beauty shot of it from overhead. I looked over at the monitor and saw how sad that sandwich looked—compared to other chefs who come on, and have this beautiful spread of their finished meal with some mint garnish on the side. I forgot to get her to try the sandwich, but it would’ve fallen apart instantly if she tried to eat it. 

That’s incredible. Are there any recipes Chef Keith can give the readers of VICE to try at home?
Yeah, sure. You can try to make your own turbo gravy. Take all your leftovers from your big holiday meal—ham, turkey, mashed potatoes, pumpkin pie, cranberries, 2 percent milk, or for a heart healthy recipe you can try skim, and put it all in a blender. Blend it, then pour it on your leftovers so you’re kind of cannibalizing your leftovers. The best part about this is you can put six-eight meals in a single milk jug and have that sitting in your fridge. Put the date on with a magic marker and have that to spruce up any of your leftovers.

Can’t wait to give that a try. Thanks, Nick.

You can learn more about Nick’s Found Footage Festival on the internet. It rolls through Toronto, Montreal, and Calgary this year.

A Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 similar to the one that disappeared with 239 people on board. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Sometimes, though not very often, planes crash. But in a post-9/11 world, that story isn’t quite interesting enough. We can't just report that Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 crashed and we don’t know where or why yet; instead, we have to be able to relay the plot of exactly what happened, using whatever scraps of information we can find.

Sprawling news organizations struggle to feed 24-hour news channels and constantly updated blogs with the meager rations available—each morsel is sniffed and inspected and toyed with hour after hour until every last drop of flavor has been extracted. And when the facts run out, you can always rely on the efforts of experts cum storytellers, who will be happy to spin yarns from the thinnest and most fragile of threads in exchange for a bit of exposure.

The Boeing 777 is the nearest thing to real magic that most of us will experience in our lifetimes. It's made of 3 million parts from 500 suppliers; it works in perfect harmony for millions upon millions of miles while maintaining a safety record any car manufacturer would kill for. To call it a miracle would be an insult to the skill and effort of the thousands of engineers responsible for the design and construction of the planes, but each time one of these contraptions makes a successful flight, it should be hailed as an extraordinary achievement.

It’s a testament to how safe modern planes are—and how skewed our sense of risk is—that a single crash has generated more headlines than the tens of thousands of people who die of car accidents in the US every year. The loss of Flight MH370 is undoubtedly a tragedy and an utterly horrible thing for the passengers and their families to go through. But how many lives are lost and how many families are affected each day by accidents involving cars, motorbikes, and bicycles?

That’s not the only thing the press have failed to comprehend in its race to build narratives and attract readers. Probably the most damaging misunderstanding has concerned the stolen passport story, which has been used in the last three days to build an absurd "terrorism" narrative around the disaster on the basis of basically zero evidence whatsoever.

In case you haven't heard, two passports used on the flight were discovered to have been lost or stolen, suggesting the passengers were travelling under false IDs. That, along with the large Muslim population in the region, was enough to prompt theories about the disappearance being related to terrorism. The Telegraph wrote a headline about a "terror fear"—the ultimate combination of fear and terror—over "mystery passengers."

Even as Interpol confirmed that two passports used on the flight matched records in its Stolen and Lost Travel Documents database, it also noted that up to 40 million IDs could be in circulation, and that checks in most countries were so lax that “passengers were able to board planes more than a billion times without having their passports screened against Interpol's databases.”

It turns out that bogus passports are surprisingly common, but even if they weren’t, do terrorists generally even use stolen passports? The 9/11 hijackers didn’t.

Yet none of that stopped the media from clinging doggedly to their narrative. By Tuesday, "air security expert" Philip Baum, appearing in the Daily Mail, had pieced together—albeit hypothetically—a scheme that had the East Turkestan Islamic Movement at the heart of a militant plot to down the aircraft. “Could it be that ETIM, having failed to gain international publicity through its domestic attacks, has decided to go international?” Baum wrote. If so, they’re keeping pretty fucking quiet about it.

One of the more ludicrous theories was the accusation, promoted by the Mail, that 20 employees from the semiconductor firm Freescale lost on the flight were involved in some kind of electronic warfare experiment. “This could include ‘cloaking’ technology that uses a hexagonal array of glasslike panels to bend light around an object, such as a plane, according to a report in Beforeitsnews.com,” the paper speculated, neglecting to mention that other stories on Beforeitsnews.com include gems like “Alien Technology Discovered in Man’s Tooth?!”

At the farthest end of the making-shit-up spectrum sits Mike “Health Ranger” Adams, the author of Natural News—a site that specializes in peddling bullshit quackery to anyone dumb enough to take the link bait plastered up on Facebook. Slate’s Brian Palmer observed recently that Adams has become adept at exploiting the social network, with “an uncanny ability to move sophisticated readers from harmless dietary balderdash to medical quackery to anti-government zealotry.” Natural News has its own take on Facebook: “Worse than meth: Facebook is altering your mind and turning you into a slave.” Natural News posts on Facebook probably won’t enslave you, but they may make you an idiot.

Adams has his own theory about Flight 370, if you can call six brain farts and a non sequitur a "theory." As with most conspiracy theories, it takes a series of barely connected, context-deprived "facts"—drawn largely from the observer’s own ignorance—and adds a strong dose of paranoid accusations, but fails to draw any sort of cohesive framework together to hang a plausible story on.

To the pseudo-religious mind of the conspiracy theorist, the failure to find the black box or floating debris after four days isn’t simply a sign of how difficult it is to find a tiny box in a vast ocean (the flight recorder on Air France flight 447 took two years to locate), but evidence of dark, mysterious forces at work.

“If we never find the debris, it means some entirely new, mysterious and powerful force is at work on our planet, which can pluck airplanes out of the sky without leaving behind even a shred of evidence,” Adams postulated. “If there does exist a weapon with such capabilities, whoever controls it already has the ability to dominate all of Earth's nations with a fearsome military weapon of unimaginable power."

It’s easy to mock internet conspiracy theorists, but what they’re doing isn’t that far removed from the psychology at play in the mainstream media. They’re all filling the vacuum with their own stories; it’s just that some restrict their stories to slightly more plausible territory. There’s just as little evidence for a terrorist attack as there is for a missile strike, and both stories have been built around the idea of a monster under a bed. For conspiracy theorists, it’s the US government or the New World Order; for the Daily Mail, it’s Muslim extremists with scary-sounding names.

The whole scenario sounds almost religious, and perhaps, in a way, it is. It all seems to come back to a deep-seated need for somebody—some unseen hand—to be in control of events. As David Aaronovitch pointed out in his book on conspiracy theories, Voodoo Histories, the alternative is, in many ways, more frightening: The universe doesn’t really care whether we live or die, it has no respect for the narratives we build around our lives, and death can simply just happen, randomly and unplanned.

The irony is that buried in this avalanche of speculation there are some really interesting stories that have been largely ignored. How is it, for example, that for all the supposed increases in airline security in the wake of 9/11, checkpoints at airports are so bad that people with stolen passports can apparently travel at will? And why is it that in an era of high-speed 4G broadband, when 40-year-old technology can transmit data back from beyond the edge of the solar system, we still have to send ships and divers to retrieve data from a plane, rather than simply transmitting it in real time?

To me, these questions—and others—are far more interesting than invisible Muslim militant groups or government laser beams.

Follow Martin Robbins on Twitter.

Temp labor is one of the fastest growing industries in the US. Increasingly, temp workers are part of a business strategy to keep costs down and profits high. From mega-retailers to mom-and-pop shops, temps are hired to do some of the hardest and most dangerous jobs. While more and more of the American workforce comprises temporary workers, they're largely hidden from public view. Many of these workers stay silent, often having their livelihoods threatened if they speak out.

Wanting to get a glimpse of this invisible workforce, VICE News traveled across the country, scouring warehouses, temp agencies, and temp towns in search of the people who make our world of same-day delivery possible.

For more on the plight of the temp laborer in the US, read "A Modern Day Harvest of Shame" and"Permanently Temporary."

This story was developed in collaboration with reporting by Propublica.

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Illustration by Luke Routledge

You know "hanger," that raging storm cloud of grumpiness that rolls over you when you haven’t eaten in a long time? The word—a portmanteau of hunger and anger—is now defined in the British Collins Dictionary as an adjective, hangry, meaning "irritable as a result of feeling hungry.”

Being hangry is like stepping into an awful second-skin version of ourselves. It makes us look and act like dicks, and it’s shitty for everyone involved. But how aware are we of it before it’s too late? Before we end up disgracing ourselves because we don't have immediate access to a burger or a stack of cookies?

Picture the last few days of your life in breakfasts, lunches, and dinners. How many of those meals were eaten after your stomach had already started purring? And how many times did you have to rush to eat because you were so hungry that you were no longer capable of holding a rational conversation? We’re all busy, and because of that our appetites get sidelined—just one more phone call, one more email, one quick meeting, then we can eat. According to Susie Orbach, an author and psychologist who's been writing about the human appetite for 40 years, being out of sync with hunger like this is "a very modern phenomenon."

Maybe this is why we’re not fully aware of just how connected our guts and brains are. How can hunger so radically alter our mood? Paul Currie, a professor of psychology at Reed College, says it’s mostly because of one hormone called ghrelin. “When we’re hungry, there’s an increased release of ghrelin from the stomach, which increases our motivation to consume food,” he told me. “Elevated levels of ghrelin might also activate the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, otherwise known as the stress axis.”

Ghrelin receptors are also present elsewhere in the body, namely in the Spaghetti Junction of our metabolism, the hypothalamus. The more this hormone circulates, the more churned up the brain gets. “Animal studies show that direct ghrelin injections into the hypothalamus increase anxiety-like behavior, suggesting there’s overlapping brain circuits mediating food intake and emotional behavior,” said Paul. The gut and brain, then, essentially have a hormonal highway running between them.

Our senses go into overdrive when we’re hungry: Noises seem louder, lights brighter, smells smellier. It could be why your neighbor listening to motherfucking "Thrift Shop" again might be more annoying when you’re hungry. But while being hungry may not stand up in court as justification for your smashing a hole through a wall with a broom, it might ease your conscience knowing that it’s chemical—that it kind of isn’t your fault.

Hanger can literally put people in prison. In 2011, a paper examining 1,000 rulings by Israeli judges in parole hearings was released in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Over ten months, the authors found, more lenient verdicts were given in the mornings and immediately after scheduled breaks, i.e. lunch. Favorable rulings for parole candidates peaked in the morning at around 65 percent, then declined over the course of the day. After a meal break favorable rulings rose again to around 65 percent. The old adage that justice is what the judge ate for breakfast is clearly more than just an adage.

Hunger is, along with the need to shit and sleep, a base impulse. Needing food and then getting it are one of the first experiences of fear and satisfaction babies ever encounter. But while an infant can scream its tiny pink lungs out until a nipple or bottle is put into its mouth, grown-ups don’t really have the same luxury. We rely on physical prompts—the sad, squelchy sounds of our empty gut wrestling with itself. So when hunger tips over into mental discomfort, is our body trying to get our attention a different way?

“This is exactly what we think might be going on,” said Paul Currie. “The increases in arousal [anxiety, for example] elicit the appropriate behavioral response—to satisfy our need for food or energy. The brain circuits mediating intake, motivation, arousal, and emotion are overlapping.”

Would these overlapping circuits explain why eating can provide such an immediate calming effect after feeling hangry? Why even a few mouthfuls of a sandwich can settle our mood? “Yes,” Paul told me. “Once you actually start to eat, ghrelin levels in the brain decline rapidly, reducing the arousal and continued signalling associated with seeking out food.”

This information makes the surge in popularity of certain diets—like juice fasting, a.k.a. "cleansing"—worrying. When you're getting your nutrients purely through liquid, it practically guarantees hanger and some degree of mental upset, and that can “compromise our physical, emotional, and cognitive function,” according to Paul. Fasting is as old as time and still practiced, carefully, in certain religions, but the juice cleanse boom in the Western world has something sad and complex at its heart. Any doctor will tell you that (A) any weight lost will return when you eat normally again and (B) the “cleansing” part of it is bullshit.

Still, smart, high-functioning people still keep falling for the Gwyneth Paltrow approach to sustenance. Why? “We’re in placebo territory,” said nutritionist Claudia Louch, who runs London's Harley Street Nutrition Clinic. “The human body is the perfect machine. Our liver, kidneys, digestive system, and skin remove toxins very effectively. Anyone with a sound understanding of the body will know that [cleansing] isn’t the healthy option people are duped into believing it is.”

Does the popularity of this kind of dieting suggest not only that certain people have an otherworldly resistance to hunger but that some of us actually thrive on hanger? It's significant that juice cleanses are more popular with women, which Susie Orbach suggests could be because of “our constant bombardment with weight-consciousness” and the fact that “we are addicted to the idea of a quick fix.”

Nearly 40 years after breaking ground with her book Fat Is a Feminist Issue, which urged women to return to eating within the rhythm of their appetites, Susie believes that “appetite, and therefore satisfaction, is tainted with fear.” So it seems that feeling hangry, for some peoplne, means feeling in control—of desire, their impulses, and, most of all, weight.

If we’re constantly stuck in a spin cycle of dieting, it's a given that we’ll be hungry more. Lisa Sasson, a professor in NYU’s department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, told the New York Times in 2005 that weight-consciousness may explain why women might report “hunger-related moodiness” more. “Women sometimes feel that, if they are satiated—if their bellies bulge the tiniest bit beyond flatness—then they may have overeaten,” the Times article reported.

This makes me want to drown my sorrow in a pint of lard, but there must be a way to feel good about yourself without starving to the point of rage. Obviously it’s impossible to shut out all the noise surrounding weight loss and food, but Susie says we should “really dare to learn to eat with our hunger.” It takes practice, she said, “but being aware of our different levels of fullness is a start.” On one day we might be hungrier than the next, and that’s fine. “Follow the hunger urge like you would the urge to pee.”

Sometimes hanger is unavoidable—we can’t always eat exactly when we need to. But pre-empting where and when we might get hungry is probably a good thing, because unlike hunger—which merely tells us when we should eat—hanger is horrible.

Follow Eleanor Morgan on Twitter.

Screencap via the author.

Since WikiLeaks first published 5 million hacked Stratfor emails in 2012 (a cybercrime clusterfuck that has already led to the imprisonment of Jeremy Hammond), the private American intelligence company which bills itself as a sort of “shadow CIA,” was left with their proverbial spy-pants down. Petty co-worker emails were under the microscope and the leaked classified information they peddled to commercial and government clients tainted their reliability. Corporate juggernauts Wal-Mart called to have a Tesco executive spied on, while Coke wanted the rundown on PETA; plus, an oil company (allegedly Suncor) got intelligence on Environmental groups, schemed with Goldman Sachs, and allegedly had access to Osama Bin Laden raid material.

Entertaining the peculiar requests of rich clientele and government departments meant Stratfor needed a web of informants in American agencies and international regimes; they even count Canadian officials among their sources. A 2011 email cites a Canadian foreign-service worker in Japan named Alan Schroeder as their "Canadian source," with an attached code number, and a credibility rating. Schroeder's brother Mark, who worked for Stratfor, was assigned as his "handler."

In the emails, Alan Schroeder, currently listed on a Department of Foreign Affairs website as a trade commissioner at Canada's Tokyo embassy, provided his brother with details about Canada's diplomatic response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster in March 2011: "From my brother who ordinarily works in Tokyo but is on (temporary duty) in Canada right now," Mark Schroeder wrote above an email from his brother, which he forwarded to other Stratfor employees.

"The Embassy has been getting its information about the nuclear situation from various sources including Environment Canada, Health Canada, the IAEA and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission… The Embassy is not business as usual now."

A Foreign Affairs spokesperson said the department doesn’t consider the leaked Stratfor emails as containing confidential information. "The communications in question do not constitute a security breach," said Jean-Bruno Villeneuve when I pointed out the numerous cables between the Schroeder brothers, which link Stratfor and DFAIT.

Mark also shared the contact information of an "Alan," who used a different email address, with another Stratfor analyst. VICE could not confirm whether the contact was Alan Schroeder, but the email was directed to an Alan living in Japan with expertise on the country.

In January 2009, Mark introduced "Alan" to a Stratfor East Asia specialist. "Sure, I'd be happy to be in touch with your colleague," replies Alan. Months later, the same East Asia analyst sent an email updating Stratfor on the Japanese auto industry using information he received from a, "trade commissioner [in the] Canadian embassy in Japan."

"Source seems optimistic about Japanese auto innovation and commercial promise," he writes. "The Mitsubishi electric car is coming out, it is extremely fast. It can be recharged three ways… by plugging into heavier electric outlet, like for a clothes dryer, which takes about 7 hours.

Source said $10,000 to set up an outlet, off the top of his head but wasn't sure about that sum."

VICE couldn’t confirm whether the information Alan provided to the analyst would constitute economic espionage. Whatever the details of the intelligence, Japan may not be pleased a “trade commissioner” they’re hosting was leaking information about their prized auto industry to a for-profit spy firm with a questionable moral track record. If this trade commissioner was sharing classified material or pooling intelligence from those who did, he could easily have broken the Security of Information Act. You may remember that an infamous Canadian Naval Officer, Jeffrey Delisle, leaked intelligence to the Russians and was found guilty under its auspices.

I requested an interview with Alan Schroeder through Foreign Affairs (and emailed his personal address), but I was turned down. Other Stratfor emails suggest he and the mysterious Alan weren't the only Canadian government employees used as a source. In August 2008, Stratfor analysts debated whether Canada was sending more than warships to Somalia to protect food supplies from pirates. "This maybe more than just a warship. Was told by a Canadian military source that Ottawa's forces may be going on a mission to the Horn of Africa," writes an analyst inferring they had secret knowledge Canadian land forces were primed for a mission.

Stratfor declined to answer questions about the recent leaks, saying in a statement it has a company policy not to comment on any of the WikiLeaks documents.

For DFAIT to accept the casual exchange of information between a private intelligence company governed by the marketplace and one of their diplomatic reps invites trouble. Stratfor analysts have demonstrated their potential to con others in the interest of information profiteering. Friedman evencoached one analyst how to pressure an Israeli informant to update the company on the health of then President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez: “If this is a source you suspect may have value, you have to take control of him… Control means financial, sexual or psychological control to the point where he would reveal his sourcing and be tasked.”

Let’s not forget Fred Burton either, Stratfor’s VP of intelligence, with a lengthy career in counter-terrorism already behind him, he pools from “CIA cronies” (as he put it in one email) and the like for things like exclusive OBL raid info and knowledge of secret indictments against WikiLeaks. It’s also worth noting our Canadian Chief of Defence Staff, General Tom Lawson, appeared friendly with Burton: One leaked email shows him congratulating the shadowy Stratfor VP on his new book.

The WikiLeaks email cache suggests Stratfor has drummed up over half a million dollars in business with Canadian government agencies like Public Safety (whose umbrella includes CSEC and CSIS), National Defence, DFAIT, and others that have taken out contracts with Stratfor to gain access to their vast information database. Evidently the War on Terror turned on a Canadian money faucet for Stratfor and other private intelligence firms, whose government shilling now blurs the line between state secrets and market commodities. 


@BMakuch

Photo courtesy of iStock

I probably don’t need to tell you this, but when you’re trying to communicate with aliens, lasers are really helpful. According to UFO chasers like Australia’s Peter Slattery, the tiny beams of intense light cause UFOs to “power up,” meaning they flash their lights on and off, like a car blinking its headlights at a nearby hitchhiker.

Unfortunately for Peter and other Aussie UFO hunters, the government frowns on those who point lasers in the sky. Since lasers could blind airplane pilots coming in for a landing, flashing these devices near flight paths can lead to as much as four years in prison. The conflict between the would-be first contactors and plain ol’ earthly pilots has been a topic du jour in the Australian media as of late, so I called Peter up to see how he was managing the attention.

VICE: So why lasers?
Peter Slattery: There are people who have been using lasers around the world for going on 15 years. We use them to point out the craft, to follow the beam up with the camera to capture the craft with the zoom [lens], and to do a one-two sequence to get a reaction from the craft.

As in powering up. Why do they do this?
We’re communicating; that’s what we’re doing with them. We can even flash them with lasers to get the crafts to change direction.

In that sense are lasers vital to what you do?
I don’t always use them—I’ve basically stopped using them because of all this uproar. I don’t need all this crap from the media when they’re not even looking at what we’re doing.

How we use the actual lasers, getting back to that, is we do group meditation, where we connect as one consciousness to these beings. Some of them do speak, but 99.99 percent of the time it’s telepathic. They’re from a higher plane, and they pick up on intent: good intent, good will. If your heart and mind are open, these things will happen. So I’ll take a few people out who’ve had experiences, and we’ll do group meditation with some energy work like yoga or tai chi.

Aren’t these lasers super dangerous for planes?
You can tell the difference between a plane and what we’re filming. Now if you look at the videos of planes next to a craft, in situations where I did not use lasers, you can see the total difference between the unidentified flying object and the plane.

Can you really be certain enough to risk the safety of planes?
We know it’s a plane or craft straightaway from the navigation lights on the plane. Plus the commercial jets fly at about 30,000 feet, so a laser won’t even touch the darn plane. The only time a laser will hit a plane is when it’s landing, because the lasers only go two kilometers [1.2 miles]. So there’s no way—unless I’m sitting at the airport waiting for the plane to come in—that I can even hit it. Now you’ve got little commercial planes that sometimes fly around 2,000 feet, but in my area that’s only during the day. At nighttime they’re either landing at the airport or are 30,000 feet in the air, where there is no way the laser can hit the plane.

Beyond staying away from the airport, do you have precautions that you take to make sure you don’t hit a low-flying plane?
You can just see it’s a plane by the green, red, and white navigation lights. I’m not interested in planes. You’d have to be dumb as dog shit to not know what’s a plane.

Do you think all this attention is totally about safety, or a reaction to what you do?
I think it’s just people wanting a story. If the people at the aviation agency looked at the facts, they’d see that a laser can’t even touch a plane in flight; a plane shouldn’t be flying low enough to be hit by a laser. There has not been one report in the area of a laser affecting an aircraft since I’ve been doing this.

Do you think you would face these obstacles if you were using lasers for a more traditional pursuit?
Well, put it this way: When they talk to the aviation agency, because they haven’t seen a UFO, they automatically think this isn’t a possibility, so straightaway they’re going to say, “He’s just flashing these at planes and helicopters.”

Is using lasers a right, considering they’re essential to your investigations?
I think it’s the right of anybody to do what they want as long as no one is getting hurt or harmed. As I said, there have been no actual reports of someone hitting an aircraft in my area; there is no way a laser can hit a plane unless it’s landing. That’s what you are all forgetting.

Photo by Flickr user Steve Jurvetson 

The Book Report is a series that promises to deliver exactly what it promises: reports on books by the people who’ve read them. Catch evenings of live, in-person Book Reports that will remind you of the third grade in the best possible way with hosts Leigh Stein and Sasha Fletcher every month at The Gallery at Le Poisson Rouge on Bleecker Street in New York. The next one is tonight at 7 PM.

There often comes a moment in a young girl’s life—somewhere between the time when you start making your Barbies bone each other, and the time when you start holding a furious vigil over your vulva looking for your first pubes—when things take a turn for the spooky. A brief, golden phase marked by an interest in Ouija boards, witchcraft, and playing Blood Mary at a sleepover until one girl cries so hard that she has to call her mom and go home. You know, girl stuff.

It makes a lot of sense that girls around this age get into ghosts, since the transition from childhood to adulthood is so fucking bizarre and nonsensical that it might as well be the transition from life to the beyond, right?

And adulthood seems so stuffed with secrets, you might as well turn to ghosts—our grand cultural ambassadors of secrets!—for some insights. Ghosts, we’re led to believe, know not only the secrets of space, time, and existence—they also know whatever secrets they’ve picked up while watching all of us cry and masturbate all the time. Ghosts know important facts, like that you should make unselfish life choices, or that your uncle killed your father, or that you shouldn’t disrespect ancient burial grounds by building mid-priced suburban homes on top of them. Ghost, much like popular girls in high school, are so far on the inside track, they don’t even have to run.

According to the many tween books I read in the early 90s, it is easier to make friends with an actual ghost than an actual popular girl, who most likely is too busy attending rainbow parties to let you in on her secrets. And in fact—according to many of those same books—it was easiest of all to make friends with a ghost of a girl your own age, one who passed from this mortal coil before she could even figure out if she was cool enough to be invited to rainbow parties. And the greatest of all these pre-teen girl-ghost friendship books was Mary Dowling Hahn’s 1986 novel, Wait Till Helen Comes.

Here is what I remembered this book being about: These kids are on some farm, and there’s this ghost. The littlest kid is obsessed with the ghost, even though everyone else sees that this ghost is bad news. This ghost is like the friend you make in high school who gets you into shoplifting and gateway drugs—she’s cool because your family hates her. But then the ghost does something weird and the older sister had to figure out how to make the ghost go away. My takeaway from the book then was that ghosts were scary and could accidentally kill you, but were also probably more fun and interesting than anyone else you knew (again, like your friend from high school).

Here is what it turns out that this book is actually about—and I am about to throw a bunch of girls names at you, so let’s just establish who’s who with some mnemonic devices up front:

-Molly is the good girl, like Molly Ringwald in any of her fine 80s films.

-Heather is angry and starts trouble, like Heather Locklear on Melrose Place.

-Helen is the beautiful, otherworldly, all-powerful one, just like Academy Award-winner Dame Helen Mirren.

Got it? OK, let’s go!

So there are these two—let’s not mince words here—total fucking self-involved artist assholes with children from previous marriages. The mother has good girl tween Molly. The dad has Heather: a seven-year-old girl who watched her mother die in a fire four years ago. No one seems to have taken Heather to a psychologist, or even talked to her about what happened, so of course she is an emotionally disturbed nightmare baby.

She becomes even more of an emotionally disturbed nightmare baby once these two asshole parents take their blended family away to start a new life way out in the countryside, at the very beginning of the summer. What the fuck are these kids supposed to do out there all alone all summer? Their semi-negligent hippie parents could give an uhhhhhhh. They’re just sooo happy to finally have the space to build a studio and throw vases that they’re gonna sell at the craft fair. And you just know these vases look like giant withered clay vulvas. You can FEEL it.

Heather, the little girl, then befriends Helen, a little girl ghost. Molly thinks the ghost is bad news, but why would these parents listen to her about a ghost? The parents think ghosts are a myth, just like Bigfoot or the need for a child suffering from PTSD to be under the care of a licensed mental health specialist. Crazy talk!

Eventually, Molly realizes that Helen is trying to lure Heather into a spooky pond, so that she will die and become a ghost, too. Helen proves her loyalty to Heather by breaking everyone’s shit, including the vases the parents were going to sell at the craft fair (Nooooo! Not the vases for the craft fair!)

So then Helen tries to lure Heather to the spooky pond, Molly saves her, and—through a lucky combination of magical intervention and microfiche research—Molly and Heather figure out that Helen accidentally started a fire that killed her mom and stepdad when she was alive, and no one ever found their bodies.

Molly and Heather then discover the charred bones of Helen’s parents and show them to Helen. Helen apologizes to the bones, and then she gets instantly raptured away, “Left Behind”-style. Heather then admits to Molly the real reason she was acting like an asshole was: she accidentally set the fire that killed her own mother. But then she confesses it to her father and everything is fine. The end.

Now, in our traditional thinking about ghosts, ghosts are powerful because we imagine death as this moment of really intense psychotherapy, where all your hang-ups just kind of glide away, leaving you able to absorb wisdom and knowledge beyond the boundaries of your previous corporeal existence.

The idea that ghosts don’t actually learn anything from being liminal beings from beyond space and time—that they’re just the same shitty, petty losers that we all are in life, stuck with the same baggage for eternity—is the most horrific premise I have encountered in a lifetime of horror fandom, and this alone makes Wait Till Helen Comes one of the scariest books that I have ever read.

And we’re not even touching on Heather. I mean, I’m pretty sure that the intended takeaway of this book is like that old recovery motto, “You’re only as sick as your secrets”—that uncovering them, gives you strength and power.

And reading this book 20 years ago, I would have believed that Heather’s quick confession to her dad would have fixed up all her problems. But as someone who’s blown a solid chunk of her own adulthood spelunking into her own family secrets, I’m not sold. Heather’s life isn’t hard because she kept a secret. It’s hard because almost everyone around her, from the man who sired her to the ghost who befriends her, is a selfish dick. They both just want her to sacrifice her whole existence to give them what they believe is their ideal lifestyle, be it that of a kooky artist or an angry ghost. What if even after her big confession, everyone Heather trusts still keeps on mismanaging her trauma anyway? What if by the time she’s an adult, it’s too late and she can’t dig her way out? Will she be the one luring people into whatever her own spooky pond is, then?

What if she doesn’t get raptured up to some heaven or another as soon as she figures out her family secrets? What if none of us do? What if we’re just stuck with our families and our secrets, stuck staring at a pile of old, scorched bones, and spending the rest of our lives trying to make sense of them, and not even spooky little dead girls in Victorian nightgowns can help us?

And I mean, this is fucked up, but we’re all thinking it, so I’m just gonna say it: Isn’t the main selling point of death that you’ll stop being so lonely and neurotic and full of shame about weird texts that you sent while you were drunk? If you carry all that shit to the other side, if you’re still as much of a needy and nervous and self-conscious wreck as you ever were, well, Christ—you might as well live.

Former sheriff Howard Wooldridge uses CPAC to evangelize against the War on Drugs. 

When the Conservative Political Action Conference came to its rapturous close this weekend, I left the Gaylord Convention Center, in National Harbor, Maryland, the same way that I left previous CPACs—with a splitting headache, a purse full of Tea Party beer koozies, and the contented reassurance that America’s culture wars will rage on for another year.

Founded in 1973 as a response to the progressive hippie movements of the 1960s, CPAC is sort of like a G8 Summit for the far right—a bacchanal of red-state jingoism where the various tribes of the Republican Party plot wars, Bible-thump, and imagine an America made in their own image. Gay Republican groups have been forbidden from sponsoring the event, and atheists were similarly disinvited this year after social conservatives threatened a boycott. Meanwhile, Rick Santorum was back this year, as were John Bolton, Sarah Palin, and Lt. Col. Oliver North, among other ghosts of culture wars past. On Saturday, Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon who has likened gay marriage to pedophilia and bestiality and thinks LGBT people shouldn’t get “extra rights,” won third place in the CPAC straw poll, a fantasy “vote” where fringe conservatives pick their dream president.

In short, this is a crowd that relishes a battle—especially a losing one. So it seemed natural to assume that this year’s CPAC discussion on marijuana legalization would be a swan song to prohibition and the War on Drugs. Even the title of the panel—"Rocky Mountain High: Does Legalized Pot Mean Society's Going Up In Smoke?"—suggested a room full of Willie Horton Republicans grumbling about gateway drugs and the country’s moral decay.

The panel started off predictably enough, pitting prohibitionist panelist Christopher Beach, an executive producer for drug-czar-turned-talk-radio-host Bill Bennett, against Fox News commenter Mary Katharine Ham. Beach spouted off the familiar arguments: that despite massive costs and overflowing prisons, the war on drugs is actually working, that weed is bad for you, and that legalization could have dire unforeseen consequences for public health and safety.

But then a surprising thing happened: No one bought it. CPAC Republicans, it turns out, really like their weed—or at least like the idea of legalizing it. One by one, the audience members turned against Beach, heckling his talking points and bombarding him with anti-drug war stats. A College Republican in Rand Paul swag demanded that Beach account for DEA surveillance. When Beach suggested that the government is responsible for public safety, the entire audience broke out in loud jeers. Any prohibition Republicans in the room were likely shamed into silence when Howard Wooldridge, an ex-sheriff in a cowboy hat and a homemade "COPS SAY LEGALIZE POT: ASK ME WHY" shirt, started yelling “Nanny State Liberal!” at Beach from the back of the room.

“The war on drugs is the most destructive, dysfunctional, and immoral policy since slavery and Jim Crow,” Howard shouted at Beach. “How do you justify morally the deaths of dozens and dozens of kids every year selling marijuana at your altar of prohibition?”

While the forcefulness of their arguments was unexpected, it makes sense that CPAC’s Republicans would support legalizing marijuana, given the party’s growing emphasis on limited government, federalism, and personal responsibility. The US government has spent upwards of $1 trillion on the War on Drugs over the past four decades with negligible results, amounting to a disastrous and racially charged boondoggle with enormous social costs. The potential unintended consequences of legalizing pot, libertarian Republicans argue, are outweighed by the danger of Big Government overreach and of wasting millions of taxpayer dollars on programs that don’t work.

“I've witnessed the government’s effort at trying to save us from ourselves, and it's still as easy for my 14-year-old to get drugs today as it was for me to get them 40 years ago,” said Ken Horst, a middle-aged Minnesota Republican who was one of the loudest hecklers at the CPAC panel. “What have [they] done with all that time and effort and money? We don't see any progress. It’s just another example of the government having 40 years to try to do something and prove it to us, and they didn't do it.”

“I don't see that the negatives are so great that if marijuana were legalized, society is going to go into the toilet and the Russians are going to take over,” he added.

Some Republican politicians have also started to soften their views, breaking with the GOP’s usual hard-line stance on drug policy and criminal justice. In a CPAC panel Friday, Governor Rick Perry of Texas followed up his recent support for decriminalizing marijuana with remarks on efforts to reform his state’s prison system. Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey has also tried to make criminal justice a signature issue, using part of his inaugural address this year to criticize the “failed war on drugs.” And Senator Rand Paul, who won this year’s CPAC straw poll, has said he thinks marijuana laws should be left to state and local governments.

The Republican shift on weed comes as more and more Americans are starting to embrace the idea of legalization. Colorado and Washington residents can already get high whenever they want, and Alaska and Oregon will vote on similar measures to legalize recreational use this year. Recent surveys show that about half of Americans—including 58 percent in this January Gallup poll—now support legalization, up from about 30 percent in 2000. Those numbers are even greater among young people: According to a new Pew Research Center study on millennials, 68 percent of people ages 18 to 33 support legalizing weed, up from 34 percent just eight years ago.

The issue has all of the makings of a culture-war blowout, pitting old-guard conservatives against a new cadre of young, more socially liberal conservatives. On one hand, the GOP is desperate to attract a younger crowd, a task the Pew report suggests is becoming increasingly difficult, as younger voters are overwhelmingly in favor of same-sex marriage, tend to support abortion rights, and think the government should provide more services. That leaves marijuana legalization as one of the few issues where Republicans actually have a shot at appealing to voters under 30. On the other hand, the dwindling opposition to weed remains concentrated among older Republicans, the party’s most reliable voter base.

What makes the marijuana issue interesting is that no real opposition has emerged from the GOP base. As the one-sided CPAC panel revealed, anti-drug conservatives—once a powerful Republican constituency—has largely disappeared. Marijuana legalization, it seems, may be the rare culture battle that the far right is willing to quietly lose.

"We don't really have any political allies," Beach told me quietly after the panel. "I think the Republican Party doesn't want to talk about it right now. They see where the tide is going, and they don't want to touch it.”

Linda King and Charles Bukowski.

Yes, she said, she is the one who taught Charles Bukowski how to perform oral sex.

Linda King still remembers the conversation; Bukowski said he'd never done that, because no one had asked him to. She wasn’t having it.

“I expect a man to do unto me as he would have done unto him,” said the 73-year-old sculptor.

I was on the phone with Linda, who dated the famed gutter poet on-and-off for several years back in the 70s. I wanted to know if the man who became famous for writing minimalist prose about getting drunk and sleeping with women was any good at the stuff he wrote so much about.

“Oh yeah,” she said. “It was good. Very good. Except when he was drinking.”

I thought he drank all the time?

“No, he wasn’t getting drunk all the time. He stopped for two months once. I thought that was great. But he didn’t stick with it.”

Bukowski wasn't the type of guy you'd call ambitious. He was, after all, the man who coaxed a literary oeuvre out of a life of hangovers, losing money at the horse track, and having unprotected sex with an army of women, among other bad decisions. He rarely cut his hair or beard and worked menial jobs for decades.

Film critic Roger Ebert once summed him up, “A million guys start out to get drunk and become great writers, and one makes it. Now a million more guys are probably getting drunk trying to figure out how Bukowski did it. He isn't a survivor. He's a statistical aberration.”

This is not the profile of a driven social climber. But Linda told me that Bukowski was ambitious. She recalled him working on his writing almost every night. “I don’t think people realize how hard he worked at it,” she said. “He used to say he was the greatest writer ever. He had no qualms about telling people who the greatest writer was; it was him.”

The man, who is now considered a poet laureate for the disaffected, died 20 years ago on Monday—March 9, 1994. Some scholars have dubbed his style “dirty realism,” which is just another way of saying his writing was marked by minimalism and vignettes of working-class life.  He was a guy with a pockmarked face, beer belly, and greasy hair who managed to sleep with women decades his junior. He wrote about that sex in brutal and detailed terms: the shape of the vaginas, descriptions of the cunnilingus, the bucking, the stroking, the pumping. The post or pre-coital bowel movements. Whether he ejaculated or not.

He has been labeled a misogynist. There are instances where Henry Chinaski, the protagonist in several of his books and a sort of literary surrogate for Bukowski, rapes women with no repercussions. But when you bring up the misogyny tag with his defenders, things get weird.  Linda rejects the idea that Bukowski was a misogynist, moments after recalling the time he hit her in the face, giving her a black eye. They were coming back from a boxing match, they were arguing—which was not unusual—and he was blackout drunk, she said. He didn't remember it the next day. It was the only time he struck her, she said. But when I asked her if Bukowski hated women, she insistented:

“No.”

John Martin, who edited Bukowski’s writing for 40 years, acknowledged that Bukowski’s work could be interpreted as misogynistic. He was quick to add, “Personally, he had a very healthy respect for women.” He then surprised me with this explanation because it undermines the whole Bukowski myth: The man who skewered all that is phoney in this world and whose fans love him for his unflinching honesty was apparently a poseur.

In the 70s, when Bukowski became more successful, the depictions of misogynistic behavior in his work “became more of a pose than a conviction. If you’re doing something and suddenly people are talking about you because of what you’re saying, you’re tempted to keep saying it,” said Martin.

Bukowski and his bust.

Bukowski’s behavior and the writing that it birthed paved a path to fame and fortune. Matt Dillon and Mickey Rourke have portrayed his alter ego, Chinaski, in film. Rock bands have feted his name in songs. Both West and East coast bars are named after him. Two decades after his death, he is still firmly engraved in cult-hero status. People continue to be drawn to him, because Bukowski wrote about love and sex in a way that they find both humorous and tragic, said David Calonne—a literature professor at Eastern Michigan University who wrote a book about Bukowski.

“He doesn’t really write characters,” said Calonne. “He writes little smidgens. Broken pieces of people that just go along in life. They aren’t fully-rounded, striving, self-actualised people on a Jungian journey to wholeness. They’re broken.”

Women is one of his works that's filled with broken people. John told me that the details of the book mirror Bukowski’s lifestyle at the time he wrote it. The protagonist is Bukowski’s alter ego, Chinaski, whose chief girlfriend through much of the book is Lydia Vance. Lydia is unstable and irrational, and based on Linda King.

Linda met Bukowski when she was sculpting faces of poets, and she was told that he was the best poet in Los Angeles. She asked to sculpt him, he agreed, and they started seeing each other. Over the phone, I wanted to know about the accuracy of specific parts of the relationship that were outlined in the book. 

John had warned me to take everything Linda says with a grain of salt. Linda, after all, could have married Bukowski, but he ended up marrying another woman named Linda.

“She would have ended up married to a millionaire,” said John. “It didn’t happen. So naturally there’s a certain amount of chagrin and jealously.”

Still, she's the only person who can really verify all the details of their relationship.

Yes, she said, they would exchange the sculpted bust of his head when they broke up and when they got back together, just like in the book. Yes, she would go over his body and pop his zits, as Bukowski details in Women. “It was a sexual thing, kinda. You know, going over someone’s body, that whole thing.”

She confirms that she tried to run him over in her car once. She also threw a beer bottle through one of his windows. Yes, he thought she was a flirt – a source of aggravation for them both. “I always thought he was lacking in confidence. If he'd been a real good looking man and had a lot of success with women, I don’t think he would have ever thought of that. I was a bit of a flirt, probably, but not taking it to the extent that he imagined.”

No, she says, she did not need to have sex five times a week. “That’s an exaggeration.”

King isn’t thrilled with her depiction in the book, and told me that Bukowski downplayed his own feelings toward her in the novel. She said he was angry with her when he wrote it. “It was almost like he wanted to trash me to the whole world, and so he did,” she said.

It’s been 36 years since Linda's relationship with Bukowski was laid bare in Women. In the two decades since his death, Bukowski’s work has been picked apart ad nauseam, and there doesn’t seem to be much left to say. So I asked King to tell me something about Bukowski that would surprise me.

“I once mentioned that he had a new shirt on and he blushed,” she said. “Most people wouldn’t think that Bukowski would blush.”

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