Pastor Charles preaching in his small Santa Felicidade church. Photos by Vinicius Ferreira

I looked on as Pastor Charles Antiochus, a Haitian chaplain, got ready for his Sunday sermon. His small Evangelical church is located in the heart of Santa Felicidade, a neighborhood in Curitiba, the capital of southeast Brazil's Paraná state. The area used to be home to Paraná's Italian community but has now been dubbed "Little Haiti," thanks to the approximately 500 Haitians living there, most of whom moved after the devastating 2010 earthquake in their home country.

Many Haitians dream of finding economic prosperity in Brazil, with the majority wanting to settle in São Paulo, a sprawling industrial center that's been absorbing migrants since the late 19th century. But for most of the newcomers, the journey there is rife with difficulties.

Just like hundreds of thousands of migrants before him, 22-year-old Amos D. left Haiti for Curitiba at the end of last year. "I went through a lot," Amos told me. His journey, which started in the northern Haitian city of Gonaïves and ended in Paraná, was extremely perilous. It's a route frequented by Haitian migrants who don't want to go through the tedious—but beneficial—process of applying for a humanitarian visa to Brazil and, instead, pay around $3,000 to be transported to the south of the country without legal authorization.

A balcony in Santa Felicidade, Curitiba’s “Little Haiti”

Amos first traveled to the Dominican Republic, before flying to Ecuador with a friend after a short stop in Panama. When he arrived in Quito, the Ecuadorian capital, he stayed with one of the trafficker's contacts before heading to Peru. This is where those taking this route face the greatest danger. The young Haitian told me that he spent several days holed up in a minivan with 11 other migrants.

"In Peru, Haitian migrants often have to hide in banana fields," Pastor Charles told me in front of his church. I was also told that smugglers bribe the Peruvian police, who will often rob Haitian migrants to make the deal worth their while. "Sometimes they take our money, our watches, and even our shoes," said another Haitian, who wanted to stay anonymous.

Most Haitian migrants seem to have the same goal: to arrive safely in Brazil, at Brasiléia (in the northern state of Acre) or Tabatinga (in the state of Amazonas), where they will be given a CPF (a taxpayer identification number) and a work permit that will allow them to settle in the country.  

A Haitian immigrant buying a bus ticket

The country's beautiful beaches and economic expansion are good fuel for fantasy, but life in Brazil rarely works out as the Haitian migrants picture it. For a start, the world's seventh largest economic power doesn't provide immigrants much financial security: "There are strong economic prejudices against immigrants,” explained Nadia Floriani, a lawyer and volunteer with the Latin America House in Curitiba, which provides free legal assistance to newcomers. "They're a cheap workforce."

As in other countries with large immigrant populations, this cheap workforce is frequently abused. Lucaindy, 27, worked for five months as a construction worker. “My boss, who was really keen on Brazilian cachaça [the local alcoholic drink], didn’t like Haitian workers at all," he said. And when his boss heard that Lucaindy wanted to quit, he immediately stopped paying him. Being mostly vulnerable and relatively uninformed, Haitians are easy targets; even when they work legally, their wages are too low to give them any viable financial security.

Jean, a Haitian immigrant, at the boarding school where he lives

Haitians sometimes find jobs in construction, but wages never exceed 1,000 Brazilian reals (about $430) a month. This isn't a lot, considering the costs of living have skyrocketed in the past decade.

"Wages in Brazil are extremely low,” explained Guiveny A., a Haitian who arrived in Brazil six months ago. "It’s very difficult to find a house," added Henrico Y., a mechanic who used to live in Port-au-Prince. The expensive rents and the immigrants' administrative problems make their situation even more difficult. As a result, most end up settling in the outskirts of Curitiba. Some houses host more than a dozen Haitians, who share every expense and a very restricted living space.

Members of the immigrant community also struggles to send money to relatives who've stayed in Haiti; the exchange rate isn't in their favor, because the value of the Brazilian real has stagnated and remains low compared to the US dollar. Jean, who lives in a boarding school owned by his boss, asked his family to send him money, as his waiter salary won't afford him a new home for his wife and daughter.

Benjamin M., 21, also decided to leave Curitiba to join his compatriots in Santa Felicidade. He moved to Brazil two years ago and works as a security officer. Interested in technology, Benjamin wants to open a cyber cafe and has already started buying computers.

"These wages are killing us," he told me in perfect Portuguese. But thanks to the financial support of relatives living in the United States, he can live a slightly freer life than other Haitians settled in Brazil.

Back at the church, Pastor Charles began his sermon. "Brazil, Brazil… this country has opened its doors to us," he said to the four Haitians quietly sitting in front of him. Carrying on, in a sermon mixing Creole, French, and Portuguese, he encouraged his congregation to stay hopeful that the country that welcomed them would eventually allow them to thrive. 

Cannabis cultivation in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley is an ancient practice that dates back to the beginning of recorded history. During the Lebanese civil war between 1975-1990, it provided funding for feuding militias and turned Lebanon into one of the world's largest hashish exporters.

Today, Lebanon's feuding militias are still using drugs as a source of income. Under international pressure, the Lebanese government is cracking down on smaller cannabis farmers while drug lords continue to act with impunity. Security forces confronting armed farmers defending their crops have led to bloody gun battles between the warring sides. VICE News hung out with some of the farmers to learn about Lebanon's ancient hashish industry and see how crooked politicians are profiting from the chaos.

Check out the VICE News beta for more: http://vicenews.com

Follow VICE News here:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/vicenews
Twitter: https://twitter.com/vicenews
Tumblr: http://vicenews.tumblr.com/

In part six, VICE News correspondent Simon Ostrovsky travels to the Kherson region of mainland Ukraine to both the Ukrainian and Russian checkpoints. At the Ukrainian checkpoint, Simon goes inside one of their tanks, and speaks to the commander, who says that despite his Russian blood he will defend all invaders. But at the Russian checkpoint, the exchange isn't quite as cordial.

Follow Simon Ostrovsky on Twitter.

Jack Lux coat, G-Star jeans, Dr. Martens boots.

PHOTOS BY JON ESTWARDS AND KEITH RACE
STYLIST: LAURA MARLIN

Stylist Assistant: Christian Flores
Makeup: Sarah Connor
Dreadlock Wigs: Lililox
Hair Horns and Natural Hair Wigs: Mia Dominique at Salon Adikt
Men’s Hair: MJ Déziel
Hair Assistant: Esteban Nault
Nails: Elfi Lemieux at Palooza Nails
Set Designer: Veronica Classen
On-Site Producer: Raf Katigbak
Models: Ariane G., Eve B., Ryon, and Simon at Dulcedo Model Management
Special thanks to Aritmetik and Simons

La Caché dress and slip, Henri Henri beret, Boutique 1861 scarf, Betsey Johnson necklace, Mielcoeur bracelet.

Jack Lux dress and slip, Mielcoeur headpiece and necklace.

Ovate shirt, Diesel T-shirt and belt, Y-3 shorts, Topman leggings, Dr. Martens boots.

Jack Lux cape and gloves, Mielcoeur headpiece.

Vintage tunic, Gloomth shirt, BGGO Boutique skirt; Ovate vest, Gloomth shirt, Y-3 shorts.

BGGO Boutique shawl and skirt, Yetts sweater.

Dolcezza top, Betsey Johnson dress, Dr. Martens boots, Mielcoeur necklace.

Jack Lux jacket, Zara T-shirt, Diesel Black Gold jeans, Dr. Martens boots; La Caché tunic, Dr. Martens boots and socks.

Kambriel gown.

Jack Lux trench coat, Diesel shirt, Kris Van Assche shorts, Topman leggings, Dr. Martens boots, Mielcoeur ring.

Betsey Johnson coat, Gloomth dress, Alice and the Pirates bloomers, Dr. Martens boots; Ovate cape, Heavy Red dress, Alice and the Pirates bloomers, Dr. Martens boots.

Writer's Block is a regular column that takes a low-brow approach to profiling various street bombers and modern-day vandals with a mixture of stories, off-the-cuff interviews, and never-before-seen pictures.

Trudging up Columbus Avenue under the stainless steel skies of a typically overcast San Francisco, PEZ and I were seeking decent coffee in a city rapidly becoming unwelcoming to its native sons. We finally hunkered down in a Happy Donuts populated by asian gangsters laying waste to stacks of lotto scratch-offs.

You see, trudging is tradition in Frisco, especially for the vandal lot. The city itself is barely 50 square miles, so naturally any graffiti writer worth his weight in Rustoleum flat has effortlessly loitered on every block. The only time vandals aren’t trudging is when they're running. And PEZ (or PEZO) has his fair share of running stories, which he usually tells while trudging.

“SF is small enough that you can walk all city—you can't walk all over New York. I mean you technically can, but not in one day. You can walk through twenty different neighborhoods in SF over the course of an evening. And it’s all beautiful and grimy at the same time.”

“Like graffiti itself, and graffiti writers,” I offered.

“Yeah. There's all these great contradictions. Open space and no space. It’s like a dystopia.”

It’s a paradox, and in its place, a valid one. But that grime beneath the surface can also be found in PEZ’s graffiti. It's candy-coated gloom and the ugly truth about traveling carnivals.

As we talk, he ball-point-desecrates a handful of napkins in a matter of minutes with different variations of his nome de plume, adding a multitude of doodads that are familiar to anyone who knows his work—astericks, dots, swirls, stars, and arrows claim almost all the negative space. Much of this iconography goes back to his parents, who were always highly encouraging of his artistic leanings.

"I always got sketchbooks, markers, and pencil sets for Christmas. When my dad was an active artist back in the 70s, his style was very Native American and really loose. I've always tried to mimic that." 

There's an obvious kinship between the obscure tokens that PEZ litters his graffiti with and the rudimentary rock drawings of our nation’s earliest peoples. And though PEZ pawns most of it off as artistic detritus, he admits to some touchstones of symbolism, such as his arrows signifying motion and direction, and even more arcane, crossed arrows symbolizing friendship.

When pressed for other early influences on his own work, PEZ’s answer is Ren & Stimpy, and the illustrator behind it, John Kricfalusi. His work today is still heavily informed by cartoons and commics. Things like Conan The Barbarian and pop album covers of the 70s and 80s are staple motifs in some of his more serious pieces.

PEZ is one of those weirdo vandals. He's part of a sub-sect of the greater graffiti subculture that combines the dogged criminal dawn determination of a true street bomber with a style more akin to kindergarten acid trips and notebook doodles. Essentially, graffiti writers who forgot to color within the lines—writers like ORFN, SWAMPY, NECKFACE, REVS, TWIST, and ESPO have definitely influenced PEZO.

While colorful, lively, and often childishly jejune, PEZ’s work also toys with a certain mystique, that when paired with his pedigree as a seasoned street runner, keeps him from slipping into the quagmire of the mainstream "street art." His work is on par—both in aesthetic and skill—as with any celebrated street artist, but unlike those poor souls now suffering the decline of the Banksy zeitgeist, PEZ remains a steadfast vandal.

He claims he was set in this direction by SECT BTM (a.k.a. VIC20), an early mentor who stressed above all else that PEZ be original. He made a conscious decision not to copy the styles of others as he developed his hand, especially when it came to letters. In order to be original, especially in a milieu as intra-puritanical as graffiti, he had to fully embrace the weird—and the life, for better or worse. Speaking on the recent deaths of VOTE 1810 and JADE BTM, and the inordinate amount of writers who have died from causes outside the usual dangers of vandalism, our time at Happy Donuts ended on a somber note. "Graffiti writers tend to live very dangerous lives,” PEZ mused, “They tend to do a lot of drugs and drink a lot and be out at all hours of the night. Let me put myself in this really sketchy situation, come out of it and be that much stronger for it."

Being friends, PEZ and I were both a little uncomfortable kicking it under the guise of serious journalism, and with an idle and grey afternoon still ahead of us, we decided to forgo the formal interview process to go kill some scrap cans. Spotting a copy shop on the way to the car, PEZ is drawn in as if by tractor beam, and in no time, his battered backpack becomes a sweatshop of stickers and zines and the materials needed to make both. 

Trudging still, we made our way down a muddy path to a freeway soundwall as rush hour traffic began to clot.

“I’m a lifer," Pez proclaimed. “This isn’t a fad or hobby. It’s like eating or masturbating, or acting on any other primal impulse. It’s ingrained in my DNA. I think about graff everyday.”

“So you’re saying you’re a junkie.”

“I’m the guy from Point Break. I went into the ocean and never came back.”

Watching PEZ work is watching somebody amuse themselves. He doesn’t approach a spot like an assassin, all grit-teeth intensity and arched-brow concentration the way most vandals do, but rather like a child given permission to draw on his bedroom walls. He rarely bothers to register what he’s painted as he fills in all available spaces with tags and doodles, and at one point, a giant cock with a dollop of cum bearing his crew's name, "D.F.W."

"I think vandalism, above all should just be about anarchy and destruction... I prefer quantity over quality in the sense that I would rather have a thousand minimal tags, like little simple white out tags, than one crazy piece on a rooftop." 

As we traded hugs and stickers before parting, I concluded our day together with the most typical of questions for a vandal, but one that is perhaps more telling than any other.

“What’s your favorite tool?”

With a grin that could be either sly or wise, he replied, “Mop. Filled with Marsh. T-Grade. Not K-Grade. T-Grade. That’s what I prefer.”

And being a weirdo is, by definition, doing what one prefers. And graffiti writers are no different.

For PEZ, it clearly is the joy of the action that propels him, and commits him to the vandal lifestyle, rather than the street fame or gallery fortunes, or even a regard for the grand and storied history of graffiti in San Francisco, in America, and the world at large. It’s just fun to draw on things. Too much fun to ever stop. You go into the ocean and never come back.

A screenshot from one of the internet's various phony passport vendors.

The sudden, mysterious, and tragic disappearance of a China-bound Malaysian Airlines flight (a story that turned into a full-on Twilight Zone episode yesterday when news broke that the cellphones of some missing passengers are still ringing) has exposed a crucial security flaw in air travel. While the proliferation of airport security has created plenty of jobs for people who love operating x-ray machines and needlessly patting down the elderly, it is now apparent that the tiny detail of making sure people aren’t using fraudulent passports has fallen by the wayside.

You have likely already heard that two of the passengers on the vanished Malaysian Airlines plane were using stolen passports. This does not necessarily mean that these men were terrorists, as everything from mechanical failure to a failed emergency landing is still on the table for possible causes of the plane’s disappearance. These stolen passports have, however, brought the issue of fraudulent documents into the mainstream.

According to Interpol, there are already 40 million lost or stolen passports registered in their Stolen and Lost Travel Documents Database (SLTD), and as Robert Noble, Interpol’s Secretary General, has said, despite this massive database existing: “A billion passengers every year board planes without having their passports screened.”

Clearly Interpol has been concerned with this lack of integration between airlines, governments, and the SLTD for a quite a while—as it’s leading to people with fake or stolen passports hopping onto planes worldwide. In a February 2014 post on Interpol’s website, entitled “Preventing use of stolen passports by terrorists and criminals key to global security, says INTERPOL Chief,” Ronald Noble’s international guilt trip against countries who aren’t using his fancy passport database was laid on thick: “despite being incredibly cost effective and deployable to virtually anywhere in the world, only a handful of countries are systematically using SLTD to screen travellers. The result is a major gap in our global security apparatus that is left vulnerable to exploitation by criminals and terrorists.”  

I contacted Transport Canada to find out how our government’s aviation security authorities work with the SLTD. Earlier this week, I was told by a media relations rep that she would have to “speak with their experts” about my inquiries, and hasn’t returned my calls since. There isn’t much open source information available about the Interpol database on the Transport Canada website, save for a 2010 promise to “strengthen and promote… the commitment to report, on a regular basis, lost and stolen passports, to the extent possible, to the INTERPOL Lost and Stolen Travel Document Database.” If Transport Canada’s compliance with air safety is anything like their widely criticized rail safety woes, we shouldn’t expect significant changes to be rolling out anytime soon.

Unsecured trains barreling through populated areas full of crude oil aside, with such flimsy security surrounding passport checks at airports, it’s not entirely surprising that the web is littered with vendors hocking fraudulent travel documents—especially on the deep web. Turns out, if you’re at all savvy with the deep, dark web or Bitcoin, there are plenty of vendors out there looking for your hard-earned cryptocurrency, to help you fake your way through airport security.

While I don’t advise anyone to ever, under any circumstances, attempt to purchase a fake passport, it’s surprising how easy they are to find. On Silk Road 2, the apparent sequel to the illegal contraband market that made huge headlines last year when it was seized and shut down, numerous vendors sell “passport scans” to beat the online verification processes of airlines or travel agencies. For $129 USD or ฿0.21 BTC, you can get a forged passport scan, in a hi-res digital file, featuring your own face, name, place of birth, birthday, and signature. These digital passport scans are advertised as being able to: “PASS Verification” with the added features of being, “complete with holograms, custom matched fonts, and machine readable passport codes.”

Commenters brag that these passport scans are worth the money: “fast turn around and the docs look good. thanks!! would buy from again,” “The scans are amazing way beyond what I expected,” “Awesome docs (UK)! A true master!”

Surprisingly, you don’t even need to venture into the deep web to find sketchy online sellers peddling fake passports. Over at the brazenly named website BuyPassportsFake.cc, which couches its services by saying their products are “for entertainment only” adding that their wares are “not a government document,” you can order up fake Australian, Canadian, German, Finnish, and several other phony passports to use at your own foolish risk.

Normally I would dismiss these sites, and deep web vendors, as being completely ludicrous scams, that couldn’t possibly help anybody sneak around the world’s airports undetected—but the news of Malaysia Airlines’s missing airplane and its stolen passport using passengers, certainly makes this forgeries market seem very effective for terrorists and con artists alike.

With such a stupefying lack of information sharing between the world’s aviation authorities when it comes to stolen passports at the forefront of the news right now, it’s clearer than ever that true security is an illusion. Despite the massive infrastructure we’ve built to keep “the terrorists” away from commercial airliners, there’s a huge gap in airline security that is ostensibly being exploited regularly. Add that to the underground market of fake travel documents being openly traded online, and it now appears to be far too easy to evade the security systems meant to protect us.

Sadly, if recent history tells us anything, once governments actually start to comply with Interpol’s passport database, this will likely result in stricter and more uncomfortable security measures—for only slightly more safety.

@patrickmcguire

Breakfast time in South Korea. All photos by the author.

When you grow up in England, breakfast is an event. Not in the, “Let’s do breakfast!” way that I imagine West Coast movie types emptily holler at one another across busy studio lots, but as a deep-rooted part of our cultural makeup. Take, for example, the ‘Full English,’ a centuries-old national obsession with a symbolic breakfast table heaving with bacon, sausage, and smoked fish. It’s the reason I’ve become so embroiled with the London Review of Breakfasts. Over the years, I’ve devilled kidneys, stuffed my own sausages, made laverbread, and even forged black pudding from congealing pots of pig’s blood all in an effort to redefine the breakfast foods that make the English breakfast identity such a specific event. But traveling around the world has put this obsession even further under the spotlight for me; other people don’t do it the way us Brits do. You can wake up in any foreign town and wander sleepily down the stairs of your hotel, only to find that breakfast means a coffee and a cigarette or, even worse, some underloved pastries or reheated powdered eggs; northern Albania is in the Jim Jarmusch camp, and Equatorial Guinea is big on the lukewarm fishcakes. But those places were nothing compared to the shock of realizing that breakfast doesn't exist as a concept in South Korea.

After some 12 hours on a plane from London last spring, I arrived in South Korea to meet my future mother-in-law for the first time. Cue some cultural misunderstandings, lots of smiling, and a hearty Korean feast of rice in hot stone bowls, doenjang jjigae (fermented soybean soup), godeungeo gui (grilled mackerel), kimchi, and a mind-boggling number of namul (vegetable side dishes). I quickly learned that Korean food has some powerful flavors at its core. Kimchi, Korea’s trademark spicy pickled cabbage condiment eaten with every meal, has such a pervasive smell that many people have an entirely separate refrigerator just for kimchi alone. Opening a pot of the fermented vegetable is more like a punch in the face than a gentle wafting bouquet of aroma.

A bowl of kimchi

The next morning, kicked in the head with jetlag, I got a knock at my door, signaling that it was time to get up and eat what I assumed was breakfast. I walked downstairs to an eerie scene of déjà vu: a set of dishes was laid out on the breakfast table in an almost identical format to those that we ate for dinner. That first breakfast bite of kimchi made for a wild shock to my system. And so it went on: rice, soup, pickles, a steaming bowl of guksu noodles, and beansprout soup. It wasn’t really clear what was or wasn’t permitted on the Korean breakfast table, or whether it was any different than dinner around here.

I did some digging and learned about Korea’s food customs—especially its breakfast routine—which dates as far back as the the 14th century, when the king and queen of the Joseon dynasty ate two large almost identical meals known as sura per day at 10 AM and at 5 PM. There are records of an ox blood and vegetable soup called haejangguk—eaten now as a hangover cure—that noblemen consumed at the first bell of each day. I began to wonder whether this was part of a global process, that as societies have evolved and become more economically equitable, the flamboyant traditions of the upper classes—like extravagant meals in the morning—became adopted in some way by the growing middle classes. Just like the popular English plate of bacon and eggs is a descendant from the opulent breakfast menus of the Victorian country houses, perhaps the morning eating traditions of the ancient Korean nobility came to define this country’s modern culinary traditions.

Ladies making kimbap

Surely in the twenty-first century, if people could make a living selling pickled, fermented cabbage and oxblood soups at ungodly hours in the morning, then this must be the true face of Korean breakfast. I decided to head out in the morning to a greasy spoon restaurant, or what we’d consider an open-at-all-hours breakfast joint: a small kimbap shop, which was already full of businessmen and school kids alike. “Kimbap” literally means seaweed and rice, and it’s the twin brother of the sushi roll except that none of the ingredients are raw fish. Typically there’ll be some ham, egg, pickled radish, cooked spinach, and a bit of processed fish cake all rolled in the seaweed with freshly cooked rice and brushed with some sesame oil; it’s then served with some more kimchi and a few crisp slices of yellow pickled radish. These places are usually open 24 hours, which means kimbap is fine for breakfast. Although you needn’t limit yourself: there are also hot spicy broths made from kimchi and soft tofu, sundubu jjigae, or doenjang (Korean miso) as well as tteokguk, a soup laden with chewy Korean rice cakes. 

Hadongkwan is a two-story wood fronted restaurant in the busy shopping district of Myeongdong where they’ve been serving one dish, a clear beef stew called gomtang, for over 70 years. Even in the mornings, the lines are vast. Korean oxtail is boiled and boiled, and the resulting clear broth is served in brass bowls with cooked rice on the bottom and thin slices of brisket and tripe piled on top. You garnish with liberal handfuls of chopped spring onions and salt, and then throw it back with kkakdugi kimchi (made of diced radish rather than cabbage) on the side. It’s a bit like a Vietnamese pho, but without the fragrant herbs, the warm taste of beef fat lingering for the rest of the day. 

Across town in Korea’s oldest traditional market, the eateries are slammed with people in the morning. Amongst the tightly packed aisles of fabrics, over 100 food stalls are arranged like spokes on a bicycle wheel, each with a different flavor. Down one it’s all bindaetteok, which are stone-ground mung bean pancakes the size of a dinner plate and about a centimeter thick; they’re crispy, garlicky, and served with a spicy dipping sauce. Down another aisle, each stall is festooned with limpid curls of sundae, a thick blood sausage stuffed with noodles, and pools of bright red chilli sauce studded with chewy rice cakes that is the schoolboy favorite tteokbokki. There are piles of pigs feet and ears, liver and lungs, ready to be sliced up and served with salt, towers of mini kimbap, and bowls of steaming guksu, handmade wheat noodles in a fishy soup with kimchi-filled dumplings.

The more I ate, the more I realized that as long as you can buy it in the morning—be it beef stew, rice cakes, blood sausage or noodle soup—in Korea, you can call it breakfast. On my last day in town, I stumbled across the one fusion street food that would fit an English view of breakfast. Tost-u is the Korean version of all those Western egg-plus-bread morning staples. On a mobile hotplate, an egg is scrambled with bits of carrot, then wrapped in a slice of fried bread with some brown sugar and ketchup. It had a certain peculiar breakfast appeal, but after two weeks of nonstop eating, it paled in comparison to the wealth of other, pungent, spicy, gutsy food that you can consume in South Korean daybreak, the land where breakfast is more a time of day than a specific type of cuisine.

Peter Meanwell is the co-author of The Breakfast Bible. 

The last location of Flight MH370, as tracked by FlightRadar24.com (image via)

This article is a follow-up to another published yesterday, debunking the myths perpetuated by the media in the wake of the tragic disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370. Read the original here.

It didn’t take long for us to get used to being watched. From the CCTV lining our streets to the GPS receivers in our phones, from targeted web ads to the NSA agents sifting through our metadata, we’ve grown accustomed to the idea that wherever we are, and whatever we’re doing, we can be found and seen. For all the criticisms of mass surveillance, we almost seem to want it to be true—to believe that somewhere up in the heavens, a distant spy satellite is watching over us with its beady little lens, giving a shit.

Just how far we’ve travelled down that path can be seen in the public responses to two recent stories. When it was revealed that American and British intelligence agencies were collecting bulk data from communication networks, many people were indifferent—Of course they can, we thought. In contrast, Malaysian Airlines flight MH370’s abrupt disappearance from the grid is much harder to comprehend. How is it possible that over 200 people, on an airliner stuffed with modern communications technology, can just disappear?

People seemed to believe, fairly reasonably, that the wellbeing and position of any aircraft in the sky is being streamed back to a base somewhere pretty much in real time. But this wasn't true in the case of MH370—the Rolls-Royce engines powering the aircraft transmit data packets back to the company’s UK headquarters via satellite, but this only happens a few times in any given flight. It’s not a live feed as some have suggested. In the case of MH370, two packets of data were sent—one on take off and one during the 777’s climb to cruising altitude.

That's not a great deal to go on, but sending a constant stream of data would soon become prohibitively expensive—BusinessWeek’s Justin Bachman dug out a report from 2002, estimating that such a system would cost hundreds of millions in satellite bandwidth fees. Things are cheaper now than they were in 2002, but modern planes can accumulate a lot of data and streaming all that back is still going to be pretty expensive.

Would this kind of live monitoring be worth it? For a manufacturer like Rolls-Royce, the bursts of data they receive from each flight give them vital information that they can use to improve the reliability and performance of their engines, and deliver better value to their customers. For a modern, safe airline and its passengers, the benefits aren’t so clear. The extra data would be unlikely to prevent deaths, just provide slightly quicker information in their aftermath. Would you rather airlines paid for that, or would you rather they spent the money improving safety in the first place?

What about RADAR? The truth is, once you pass outside the range of a shore-based radar you’re largely on your own. Most airliners carry an ADS-B transponder, which broadcasts the plane’s location every half a second—that’s the information used to plot aircraft trajectories on websites like FlightRadar24.com, which published a map of MH370’s last known position recently. If the transponder fails, then the plane could end up pretty much anywhere. In theory, a stricken Boeing 777 could glide for ten or 20 minutes before finally hitting the water, which could easily translate to a hundred miles of travel. Draw a circle with a radius of say, 150 miles around the last known position, and you have something like 70,000 square miles of ocean to search. Tough.

A number of people have pointed out that flight data recorders and cockpit voice recorders—a plane's "black box" system—are equipped with underwater locator beacons, which is true. The devices emit an ultrasonic scream that can be picked up by sonar systems within a range of a couple of miles. ULBs have a survival rate in aircraft crashes at sea of around 90 percent, which is the good news. The bad news is that you’re only going to detect them if you have a sonar system within two nautical miles of them. If the search area covers tens of thousands of square miles, the odds of finding them quickly are pretty low.

Of course, there was one other class of communications device on the plane—the mobile phones carried by most of the passengers. These have been the source of some of the most stupid reporting in the last few days, when newspapers were amazed to report that some of the passengers’ phones were still ringing when dialled, four days—sorry, FOUR DAYS—after the crash.

The solution to this mystery is that there’s actually no mystery to solve. People assume that when they dial a number and hear a phone ringing, that means the phone is actually ringing at the other end. In reality, that assumption is completely bogus—it hasn’t been true for years—and as soon as you realize that, it’s obvious that there’s actually no mystery to solve. The only puzzle is why so many journalists reported this story without bothering to call a phone company and check it out first.

It isn’t just information from the plane that’s patchy. Many people, myself included, have learned in the last five days that dodgy passports are actually far more common than we realized. Given that Interpol maintains a database of lost and stolen passports, accessible to any airline in the world that chooses to use it, why are a billion passengers each year able to board aircraft without having their passports checked?

Once again, the question rests on a big assumption: that checking whether passports are lost or stolen is going to make much difference to security in the first place. Only two of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 carried dodgy passports—to give one example—and it’s not immediately obvious why any would-be bomber would need to. After all, suicide bombers rarely pull the same stunt twice. Recent history has shown, too, that there are no shortage of fresh recruits to the cause. Extremists have shown a terrifying willingness to attach bombs to partners, children, or even babies in the past. While passport checking might have a role in curbing illegal immigration, its use against terrorism seems limited at best, and easily circumvented.

Ultimately, lots more information about flight MH370 could have been available, or been available faster. Even if that were the case though, our understanding of what happened would still rely on an effective organization on the ground, piecing together all the parts into a coherent story. Unfortunately, it seems that one of the biggest factors hampering the search is the confused and garbled information coming out of various arms of the Malaysian government.

Amid all the conspiracy theories emerging in the last few days, it’s ironic that it may well be a government that prevents the plane from being found, but through incompetence rather than design. There’s an important lesson in here somewhere: that for all the focus on technological and data-driven solutions to the mysteries of the world—and for all our faith in the powers of surveillance—in the end, it all comes down to people.

Follow Martin Robbins on Twitter.

Last summer, my dad was in the hospital while he was being treated for pancreatic cancer. Because this is Romania, that meant that a doctor gave me a list of supplies I would need to buy for him: drugs, syringes, IV equipment, cannulas, catheters, bandages, and plasters. All this stuff cost me between $140 to $280, and in a country where the annual per-capita GDP is hovering around $13,000, that's a lot of money. Many families in that situation would have to choose between buying medical care for a loved one or feeding themselves.

Over the last five years, nearly 14,000 doctors have left Romania, a trend that shows no sign of stopping. The patience of resident doctors was tested to its limit last month when Prime Minister Victor Ponta promised them an extra monthly allowance of about $200 on top of their salaries, only to hold off giving it to them (not that it would have been of much use anyway, given how low their salaries were in the first place). Along with low pay comes corruption—employers sometimes solicit bribes from people who want to work in their hospitals.

To get a better idea of what’s going on, I joined about 300 doctors—who were holding a protest outside the prefect’s office in the city of Cluj—and asked them why the health care system is in such a state.

Delia and Darius Tăchilă are both residents. She works in the orthodontic and orthopedic section, and he works as an oral and maxillofacial surgeon. After I took their picture, they told me, “We're smiling, but we are desperate.”

VICE: What are you protesting?
Delia: The first thing is the lack of money. There are things we're missing, and we can't afford to buy good books. My residential course involves continuous practice, but how can we buy everything we need to do that?
Darius: We're living on a university campus. The rent and the utilities take up one of our salaries, and we use the other—which is €250 [about $350]—to live. We have low salaries, and sometimes we work unpaid shifts on the weekends. But people should realize that it's not just about us—doctors will leave and citizens will suffer from the lack of medical assistance.

Are you planning to leave yourselves?
Yes. We have some options, like Germany, England, Australia...

Maria, another resident, holding a sign protesting the low salaries of doctors

What difficulties are you having as a resident physician?
Maria: The salary is alarmingly low, the families of the people we're treating—and the rest of society—show us no respect, and we're always frustrated because we're unable to do our jobs at the highest level.

Why did you become a doctor?
To help people. And for this I need to practice during my residential course. If the state doesn't help me, what can I do? I will leave the country.

VICE: Why are you here today?
Andreea, resident physician: Let me tell you a story. One time, I needed gloves to do something, so I asked the nurse to hand me a pair. She gave me one glove. "Do you think I can pull this off properly with one hand?" I asked her.

"You have to—these cost money," she told me.

So you can't even buy the equipment that allows you to do your job properly?
No. I'm young, and I need help being convinced not to leave this country. I want decent work conditions in the hospital—my own toilet, space, equipment, a normal schedule. It's not OK to have 24-hour shifts... when the next day you have to start a new shift and be fresh. You can't make any mistakes, like having shaky hands. You have to pay a lot of attention to what you're saying, to what you're writing down, and to the diagnoses you give. The responsibilities are very high when you're working with people's lives.

What's your salary like?
It went up from €222 to €244 [from about $310 to $340] a month. Half of the students in my generation left the country before their residency exam, and the other half are starting to leave now. I don't know how long I'll be stubborn enough to remain here for—to fulfill my moral duty to people here. But if they keep on putting the stops on us, I'll think about moving on to more promising horizons.

VICE: How do you see your future as a resident physician?
Silviu, medical assistant: I'm not optimistic. The word that best describes my future prospects is terror. As students in Romania, we're pretty unlucky—we have to choose between putting up with the situation or leaving. Both choices are bad.

Why do you want to leave?
The health care system is neglected, but staff just have to deal with it and suck up all their frustration. Patients and their families don't understand that we're not guilty, and they're blaming us for all the problems. It’s hard to bear.

VICE: What's the most difficult thing about working in the Romanian health care system?
Andreea, medical student: Thinking about the welfare of your patient when you know your electricity at home might be turned off, that you might be pregnant and that you need to eat more, but that you don't have the time or money to do so. I'm a student, and I want to stay in this country, which is why I joined the protest.

What are you hoping to change?
I want decent work conditions. It seems humiliating for me to take money from my parents at the age of 30. When you can't be financially independent and responsible for your own life, how can one be responsible for another's?

VICE: Why are you protesting?
Vlad, resident physician: There are many reasons: We're not given food, and we have to bring it from home; the extra shifts aren't paid; we're working overtime, and some doctors don't respect the residents. We all get help from our parents. We can't dream of going on vacation. We need to buy our own expensive manuals. Another thing is the scholarship—besides the fact it hasn’t been paid yet, we don't know how long we'll get it for.

How are patients affected by the system’s shortcomings?
They have to buy the medicine themselves, and the food isn't so good. There are hospitals that, when you enter, you have a mental breakdown. The beds are old, the walls aren't painted, and the toilets look awful. The patients need rest and better conditions. And for us, no matter how committed we are, it's hard to keep a positive attitude.

Matthew Power climbs through a tunnel beneath the catacombs in Paris.

Years ago, an acquaintance of mine named Brad Will was murdered in Mexico, and the best and funniest and most humane tribute to him was written by a journalist named Matt Power. Matt and Brad had hopped freight trains together, lived in squats together, been arrested together. Matt detailed their friendship in a eulogy he published in Virginia Quarterly Review. In a goofy attempt at free love, he said, they'd even kissed.  

"Even to write that in the past tense seems strange," Matt wrote, "almost laughable, and nobody would laugh about it more than [Brad] would, with his conspiratorial raised-eyebrow chuckle, a laugh that let you in on a secret joke. To write it in the past tense negates the immortality that we often felt around each other."

On Monday, at the age of 39—barely five years since he bid farewell to his friend Brad—Matt Power died in Uganda. He was on assignment for Men's Journal, walking the Nile with a British explorer named Levison Wood. A brief notice is already up on the Men's Journal site, and it explains how Matt fell ill in the middle of the desert. There was no way to get him medical attention. He lost consciousness. He died several hours later. "Matt was only dropping in and walking with [Wood] for a week," the Men's Journal editors wrote, "but you got the sense that he'd trudge on as long as it took to get the story and to understand the man he was walking with."

Though I met Matt a few times around New York, I knew him not so much as a friend but as a reader of his work. His reporting sent him trekking to Amazonian jungles, digging through Philippine garbage dumps, and motorcycling across the Andes. One of his best passages, from a Harper's essay about rafting down the Mississippi River, describes a childhood fantasy of becoming a hobo.

Among my dearest group of friends—restless kids turned writers and editors and fathers in our adulthood—Matt's juggling of adventure and responsibility, his skill at turning his diversions in the Territory into a career, made him a role model. Unlike many succesful people, he was generous with his time and advice, quick to answer an email or grab a drink with an intern or young writer who could offer him nothing more than conversation. He was a regular guy, in other words, traveling the world on assignment for Harper's, National Geographic, and GQ, succeeding without trading his integrity for a paycheck. He lived the life many of us still aspire to live.

His friends and family, no doubt, must be devastated by news of his death. My Facebook feed—which includes lots of folks who knew Matt far better than I did—has featured restrained eulogies all morning. A friend of mine sadly recalled an unpaid debt: "I still owe him a drink."

Yet, as with any death, the most heart-wrenching tributes will take place in private. I can't but imagine that, so soon after the unexpected tragedy, his family might feel the way Matt did when our mutual friend Brad died: "I still half-expect him," Matt wrote in that VQR piece, "to come rolling around the corner on his bike, dirty from traveling...recounting his latest adventures in Brazil or the South Bronx."

Matthew Leifheit is photo editor of VICE. He is also editor-in-chief of MATTE magazine.

Desperation is mostly inseparable from masculinity. Men strain for fame, for female attention, for sad, trivial triumphs over one another. We are a people perpetually trying to figure it all out—flexing in the mirror, using lines we've heard before, trying to seem bold and dignified. We're not cowboys or poets. If we are, we wear it as a disguise. Mostly, we are vulnerable and self-conscious and probably masturbating for the third time on a Tuesday afternoon, because we're off and that Lea Thompson scene in All the Right Moves just came on. We are not men, but almost. Note: Columns may also contain William Holden hero worship and meditations on cured meats.

Mike Francesa is alone in a room in New York, and he is yelling.

That’s not quite accurate. People chasing trains yell. People who spot a dorsal fin in the ocean yell. People in the adjacent motel room yell. Mike Francesa is not yelling—Mike Francesa is making a noise like geysers of phlegm and blood are about to come spewing from his eyelids and every pore of his body.

It is June 26, 2009. Alex from Bedminster, New York, has called to tell Francesa that Joba Chamberlain—an occasionally commendable anthropomorphic bag of wet chicken fat—belongs in the New York Yankees’ starting rotation and not their bullpen. Mike Francesa needs Alex to understand that he is wrong. Mike Francesa does not “disagree.” He does not have “beliefs" or “opinions” or any desire to “see what you’re saying.” To say that he is capable of these things would imply that he is capable of doubt. It would imply that there is an alternative to Mike Francesa, and that is impossible. He doesn’t discuss or consider or decide. He recites the indisputable principles of his universe, of which he is the sole architect, from the constellations to the blades of grass, from the insignificance of the Big East Tawnuhment to the infinite supremacy of Sandy Koufax. Joba is a relief pitcher just as two plus two equals four. You don’t believe in four. It is just four.

Alex from Bedminster does not believe in four.

It is medically impossible to asphyxiate an electronic device, but here is Francesa, trying his best anyway. He is lurching and rolling in his chair and shaking a swiveling radio microphone as if the mic itself were Alex’s face. Francesa is sitting in his chair as upright as he is capable of, which means he is just sort of piled in it, like a bowl of melting ice cream, on the verge of sinking in every direction at once. Francesa’s ability and desire to stand remains theoretical. 

Alex is yelling now, and Francesa is still yelling, but louder, until all you can hear is "ALEX ALEX WAIT A SECOND," and then "AX AX WAI’A SECON'," and then Francesa waves his hand to the producers on the other side of a plexiglass window.

“GET—GET RID OF HIM!” The guillotine slams, and then there is only Francesa. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. The Lawd o' New Yawk, ladies and gentlemen.

***

As of January 31, Francesa’s show was no longer simulcast on the YES Network. (Today at 1:00 PM he will announce which network he is moving to.) For a month and a half his callers speculated on his next destination, and Francesa reveled in their curiosity because it meant he is a commodity, something desirable, and he is a man who measures things only in terms of want and need and value. In early February, someone asked if he might reach an agreement with SNY. He dismissed the idea unequivocally.

“I GOTTA TELL YOU SOMETHIN' ELSE ABOUT SNY! I WOULD QUICKLY EXCEED THEIR BUDGET! I CAN PROMISE YOU THAT! IN A HURRY, I WOULD EXCEED THEIR BUDGET!”

It was as perceptible a smile as radio has ever transmitted—a gigantic, slow-motion, suspenders-snapping, you-betta-fuckin'-believe-it smile. Mike Francesa is on this planet to exceed things. Mike Francesa is not too big for his britches; Mike Francesa doesn’t even wear britches. His cock is there blowing over his shoulder as he rides through your questions in a convertible.

His every action can be presented as this sort of mythology because he is someone obsessed with spectacular things, with ENAWMOUSNESS and grand gestures, with kings and gods and presidents. His hair is an immovable lacquered mass, combed meticulously backward, every strand in place. His teeth are so pristine and countless and geometrically perfect, it’s as if he saw a sign in a store window for BIG WHITE TEETH and walked in and bought everything they had. He is all hyperbole and anecdotes about titanic homeruns; colorful windbreakers, unapologetic interruptions; THE BEST SHAWTSTOP WHO EVA LIVED. His show’s theme song sounds like Toto scoring a Mountain Dew commercial.

There is perhaps no one who has ever been so casually definitive, tossing out pronouncements about Pete Rose or John F. Kennedy conspiracy theories like chicken bones picked clean. No one has ever turned more half-considered opinions into absolute truths. This is a man who lives for heroic moments, for lists and rankings, hierarchies and morals, right ways and wrong ways; for gavel-slamming, mic-dropping, bell-ringing finality. Things have a beginning and an end; in between, we squint and prophesy, and when it's all over we shrug or nod or build monuments. These are toilet seat ruminations elevated to scripture by the solemn authority of a large man sitting in a chair breathing audibly out of his nose, pausing and thinking, waiting, making you wait, because he can, because he is numbah one, and he’s not goin’ anywhere, OK?

From 1989 to 2008, when he and Chris “Mad Dog” Russo co-hosted Mike and the Mad Dog, he sat and pontificated when necessary. Then Russo left, and almost immediately it became impossible to imagine that Francesa ever had a partner at all, that there was another conception of reality that could coexist with his. His personality expanded to consume all empty space. Mike Francesa is a devourer—of arguments, of Diet Coke, of ice cream.

He seems bothered by everything. Bothered that sub-Francesa humans exist and get to have opinions that have not been approved by him first. Bothered by every single event that led you to you think the thing you just thought. No one has ever answered phones so begrudgingly. Not your father on a weeknight, not anyone. Mike Francesa swallows after hanging up on callers like he is digesting food. When you watch him on television, it appears to bring him an almost biological satisfaction, as if rejection provides nourishment. He is a man who can in moments seem bothered by both ignorance and intelligence. Everything besides hagiography and dominance seems tedious to him.

And yet you must stand in awe of someone willing to make such a wager: He is a man who believes profoundly in laying your balls on the line, without hesitation, and in exposing yourself to critical bankruptcy in exchange for the chance to demonstrate how miniscule and wrong the opposition is. He has liquidated all assets and sold the lawn furniture to go all-in on this philosophy. Most of what Francesa says could be punctuated with multiple exclamation points or foreboding ellipses. Question marks are used only to ask ARE YOU STUPID AW WHAT? And then he touches an icon on a screen to get rid of you. People exist to him only so he can eliminate them. He sees things through a prism of bombastic theatrics. He is a man certain to his bone fibers that he is right. He speaks with the inexplicable self-confidence of a Yahoo! Answers responder in a “What does this lump mean?” query.  

He is impervious to criticism and fear, to a degree that is almost inspiring. He doesn’t hypothesize. Mike Francesa seems positive of every fraction of every thought he has ever had. You can imagine him driving home from picking up take-out, congratulating himself on his purchase the entire way. Had ta get the Kung Pao. Had ta do it. Fawmidable choice. He is invincible. When Dave in Red Bank, New Jersey called to ask him about relief pitcher Al Albuquerque, Francesa hung up in 14 seconds. Francesa had never heard of him, and therefore Al Albuquerque is not an actual human being, and Dave in Red Bank is wasting his time. When asked about the Colonial Mike Francesa parody, Francesa denied ever seeing it—denied any awareness of its existence, basically. There is no such thing as dialogue, just his blunt declarations, and the timid noises coming from the other end of the line. There is you, and there is him, and any attempt to imitate is effrontery, not a tribute. You could nevah BE me, OK? If you told Mike Francesa that there was a Mount Rushmore of radio hosts but that his face was not carved into it, he would reject superlatives as a concept. He would deny the existence of rocks.

Francesa is so delusional that he provides a beautifully escapist lack of context. He is a man who seems insulated from the world, from responsibilities, from pop culture and technology, by a matrix of on-base percentages and championships, thoroughbred odds, big dumb tabloid puns. This is his language. Sports to him are an Apollo mission, something crucial to our survival. Sweaty men taking heavy, milkshake-straw drags from a cigarette, looking over March Madness brackets and Super Bowl prop bets—this is the most essential conversation one could possibly have. For five and a half hours a day, arcana and insignificant hypotheticals are worth contemplating. Not as a parable but for their literal value. They are a component in an unending narrative. He maintains a meticulous, religious concentration on bullpens and salary data and television revenue, year after year. Mike Francesa cares about sports as people care about the weather; they are an anchor, a pulsing energy we orbit around as a matter of scientific obligation. We measure time with them; we catalogue memories with them. This is a power that Francesa believes in. To him, it is undeniable.

I grew up in the Connecticut suburbs, driving from the high school parking lot to the 7-11 and the mall in a dented, rusty Volkswagen, involuntarily accelerating under bridges, trying to get through the static to hear the rest of what he was saying, the rest of his completely arbitrary top-10 lists, one-sentence reductions of people and entire organizations. For him there has never been an urgent need to fill silence. There are never sound effects or cued-up quotes from press conferences. There has always been just a man, alone in a room, sitting there, sometimes not saying anything at all, making PONDEROUS NOISES, waiting to claim something, basking in the emptiness so that he can then occupy it. Beyond him there is only the intermittent drone and hiss of AM radio waves in motion. He sighs and keeps thinking. None of it matters; except all of it matters. You are there, in a metal box with wheels, and he is there, in a rectangle in the dashboard. You are waiting; the car is idling in the driveway now, and you cannot believe that you care so much. Backaftahthis.

Follow John Saward on Twitter

A scene from Passion - We Shall Behold Him Play, courtesy of Holy Land Experience.

The daily Passion of the Christ play at the Holy Land Experience is clearly the meal ticket for the Christian theme park. You don’t have much of a choice; all the other attractions close for the 80-minute play. To ram the point home even more, the narrator declares beforehand: “This is the most important play you will ever see.”

Before it starts though, there’s another notification. Please, everybody, don’t hit the devil. “His name is Eric. He’s just an actor,” says our folksy emcee. “I say this because a couple of weeks ago we had a woman slap the devil and one of his minions.” There’s another disclaimer. “Also, it’s an actor playing Jesus,” he says. “His name is Les, and he’s done tremendous service to the Lord. And God hears him, hears his prayers and does wonderful things through him. A little while ago someone came in here wearing a hearing aid and left without it.”

This was to be the final moment of our experience at the Holy Land Experience in Orlando, Florida, probably the oddest theme park in a city of theme parks.

The Jesus biography, officially known as The Passion—We Shall Behold Him, or “the most important play you’ll ever see,” is the centrepiece of the revamped park. It was founded by a converted Jew, Marvin Rosenthal and opened in 2001. Marv clearly wasn’t a great businessman and sold the park six years later to concentrate full-time on his Zion’s Hope ministries, which ironically seems to be about reminding everyone (especially Jews) that we’re going to hell because Jesus is coming soon.
 

The Church of All Nations, with baptism bool. Photo courtesy of the author.

Now the park is run by Trinity Broadcasting Network, whose founder, Paul Crouch, died a couple of months ago. The headquarters of TBN are located right next door. As part of admission package, a pleasant woman said “Shalom,” and thrust a handful of dedicatory pamphlets to him into our hands.

Crouch was nothing if not a shrewd businessman, though. It costs $45 for one-day pass, $70 if you need the two days to get the full experience. When my girlfriend, Pascale, and I started walking through the park, it was tough to see where our hard-earned cash had gone. The “gleaming, six-story replica of Herod’s Temple” we’d been promised was typical Florida construction (cheap). The “authentic Jerusalem marketplace” was about the size of three parking spots, and was cordoned off and inaccessible anyway. There’s no rides either; and some of the attractions were a tad underwhelming. “18. Whipping Post” was a wooden post with a cardboard cutout of a bloodied Jesus being whipped, red paint liberally smeared all over it. We walked to “24. The Jesus Boat,” which appeared to be a car-sized vaguely boat-shaped plastic object. More cutouts, this time of fishing disciples.

A cardboard cutout of the actor playing Jesus at Holy Land Experience. Photo courtesy of the author.

The workers offered a friendly “Shalom” when we approached them. Hundreds of Roman soldier statues are scattered throughout the park, as are at least five nativity scenes, a Garden of Eden loaded with almost-lifesize animals, and always, from everywhere, godawful Christian rock blasting through the speakers. Cheesy presentations about how the Bible was the perfect written word of God, passed down flawlessly throughout the ages, are easily found.

Jesus was cropping up everywhere. He was baptizing people at noon in the wading pool in front of the Church of All Nations auditorium, where we watched the plays, giving park-goers communion at five points in the day, in a “setting reminiscent of the last supper.” The play we saw before the Passion was called Forgiven, centring around the lives of King David and Bathsheba, Gomer and Hosea, and Saul/Paul. At the end, they all stood on stage together, and the surprise entrant was Jesus, who walked up to the stage, hugging and forgiving them all. “I forgive you David,” he said, wrapping his arms around the person who’d died in 1000 B.C.

Jesus is omnipotent in the gift shop. This one was the real Jesus, though. His flock packed the store, too. The gift shop does great business, selling all things Holy Land Experience on the cheap. We brought back an iPhone case ($3), three resurrection nightlights ($2 each), and a Holy Land Experience pint glass ($6). People were loading up their carts. They also like proselytizing to Jews; we picked up a “messianic prayer shawl,” or tallit ($15), which was embroidered with a Jesus fish, a cross, and passages from the New Testament. “That’s really offensive,” my girlfriend whispered to me. So we bought one. Then we spotted Christ in the flesh to the left of the register; this version of Christ, a few feet from the cashier, wasn’t quite so interested in purging the moneylenders from the temple. Folks were lining up to have their photos taken with him. I was all set to do the same, but then I realized Jesus was praying with everybody he had his photo taken, so we skipped it.

Photo by the author.

The next gift shop we visited is where we picked up a monk teddy bear, “Bearnardo” ($9) as a gift for my 30-year-old sister. We narrowly avoided being prayed for. The man ahead of us, a pastor, engaged in a lengthy prayer session with the cashier before passing over his Visa. We got to the cash.

“How’s it going?” I asked.

“I am well,” said our cashier, “because I am blessed by the light of our Lord. Yourself?”

“I’m good,” and quickly thrust the cash at him.

So, back to the play. The last part of our day, we were half-dizzy and half-disappointed when we got into the theatre.  

It was about halfway through the play that something really odd started happening. Jesus started healing people. At first in the play, as they ran through a greatest hits of Jesus. He healed a leper, whom we had seen manning the gift shop cash earlier, and a blind man, and finally made the actor playing Lazarus rise from the dead. The crowd cheered.

But then Jesus started moving into the crowd. “Does anybody have back pain? Stand up!” And people, (many or most of them elderly) starting standing up. Not the actors though, the people who had paid to see the show. And they started holding out their hands to actor Jesus, calling for him to come and help them. Except he wasn’t really actor Jesus anymore; I don’t think it occurred to most people that this wasn’t actually the corporeal incarnation of their God, but actually an actor named Les. And Les kept improvising. “Back pain be loosened!” he screamed. “Herniated discs sliding back inwards. Vertebrae realigning. Torn muscles healing!”

And he moved on from affliction to affliction, healing bum knees (“Meniscus healing!), nerve damage (“Nerves regenerating!”) and more, different waves of the crowd springing to their feet with each promised miracle. And I don’t know if Michael knew of his own limitations after a bit, because he started telling people which chronic back pain that they should lean and bend their backs so they’d know how the pain was gone.

We were feeling mildly uncomfortable at this point. “I’m a little scared,” I said to Pascale, because there was a palpable energy in the room and we didn’t know how far it would go. Had it been a Saturday, when all 2,000 seats would have been filled, it might have been chaos, hundreds of grannies with knees popping as they stood up to receive the healing of God, through the conduit of actor Jesus.

Eventually Jesus stopped healing crowd members. But the play itself was strange beyond just the healing bit. Christian music was blasting at full volume the whole time, and the characters, played by the friendly ticket agents and guides who’d been greeting us with “Shalom!” throughout the day, were scattered all about the auditorium. The devil, inevitably trailed by crawling demons wearing skin-tight full body black suits, spoke through a kind of voicebox, a little like what Darth Vader sounds like (he looked a bit like him too) and was almost always on stage. When Jesus was crucified, he screamed “Victory is mine!” a few times, cackling maniacally to the dismay of the audience.

On the other hand, when Jesus was born, there were at least eight people wearing full-on white angel robes and wings spinning and dancing on stage, while on the giant wraparound projection screen behind it they broadcast a gigantic close-up of a newborn baby’s face, a 20-foot approximation of what the Saviour’s visage might have looked like if he was born in the 21^stcentury, and was white.

The crucifixion scene. Photo courtesy of the author.

The final scene was a depiction of the book of Revelation, which most churches try their best to ignore because it’s the craziest book of the Bible, and no one can make sense of it. This one started with pulsating 1980s style rock, and the Devil driving a motorcycle. With Jesus’s crucifixion, the message was that the Devil had won. (“Victory is miiiiiinnnnneeee!”he screamed again) Then Jesus came out, and starting pumping his fist to the crowd. And the crowd went nuts, aided by the speakers pumping in pre-recorded audience cheering and whistles, getting their entry-fee’s worth of entertainment.  

Les/Jesus eventually defeated Devil/Erik, making him kneel, and then exited, only to come back wearing a crown, a golden robe with a train around 30 metres long and sparkly, like we’d seen in the mock-ups of the play’s characters in the Chrestus Gardens wax museum earlier. All of the cast members came to be with Jesus in heaven, more random crazy shit flashed on the screen behind, and finally the curtains closed. Pascale and I breathed sighs of relief.

“Well,” I said, “I think that was worth $45.”

“Yes,” she said, looking slightly shell-shocked.

The emcee came out to lead prayers for the audience, but we got the hell out of there first.

The Velveteria, the world's largest repository of velvet paintings, became something of a counterculture tourist attraction when it opened in Portland in 2005. The museum, which has relocated to Los Angeles, celebrates a garish aesthetic of bright paint on dark velvet that is as synonymous with 60s-era rebellion as Easy Rider and weed.

The populist appeal of this cheap art form—with subjects that range from Captain Kirk and John F. Kennedy to Jesus and Timothy Leary—continues to inspire those who live outside the bounds of "good taste," and the Velveteria is one of the few places dedicated to this pop phenomenon.

Owners and operators Caren Anderson and Carl Baldwin created their shrine to the art form as a means of combating what they saw as the conformity of the Pacific Northwest.

Carl, a Los Angeles native and gangly jumble of hippie profundity, said he felt stifled by things that a different type of person might find charming about Portland.

"Nobody gets up and does anything before two in the afternoon. So it’s very frustrating if you’re a Californian, you know, upsetter or go-getter, trendsetter, revolutionary, outlaw, whatever the hell we are. There’s kind of that spirit in Portland, but it’s very dull and muted," he said during my recent visit to the new Los Angeles location.

From left: Store clerk Jacqueline Baird, Carl Baldwin, Caren Anderson

Finally sick of the Portland scene, Carl and Caren packed up six trucks full of paintings, drove everything down to California, and spent four years preparing to open their new location, in Chinatown, which has been up and running since December.

Before we could begin my tour, Carl had to change into a very noticeable, very snug pair of red pants he purchased from a Palm Springs thrift store so that I could get the full experience of his monument to kitsch. The museum is divided into discrete sections that include a Kennedy shrine, a Black Power area, and the requisite naked-lady room.

VICE: I assume all six trucks worth of paintings are not in here?
Caren Anderson: There are about 500 paintings here. We have about 2,000 in total. It’s insane.

There’s something more natural about it because it’s not high art, because it’s not lofty and unapproachable or inaccessible. It’s right there, and anyone can have this stuff.
Caren: It’s really poignant, you’ll see.
Carl Baldwin: This is our newest section. We call it the California Kings and Queens, the people that framed our mentality here in California and continue to do so today. We have Dallas Raines from Channel 7 with his Live Mega Doppler 7000.

Excellent. 
Carl: And we have Harvey Levin from TMZ and Sam Rubin from Channel 5.

I hopefully one day will make it up on this wall. If I’m lucky.
Caren: If you get on velvet, it’s a big deal.

So I’m sure that there's a lot of Kennedy velvets. What is the market for a Kennedy velvet? Specifically an old one from the 1960s?
Caren: The problem is, there is too much of a market. He was done a lot in velvet because he died tragically. People that die tragically, like Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, they get on velvet. 
Caren: And also Martin Luther King and Malcolm X got on velvet a lot.
Carl: So there’s a lot of the Black Power culture of the 60s. Like the Black Panthers. 

Any Kanye?
Carl: Haven’t seen Kanye, haven’t seen him yet.
Caren: You know it’s funny what gets on velvet. These guys who produce the stuff in Mexico figure out what’s going to sell.
Carl: You had to be very compelling and intelligent to get on velvet too. It had to be somebody who was compelling enough to make a difference that people noticed.

It seems that the figure had to be in some way countercultural or tragic.
Carl: Well, it was underground art that the younger people were buying, and the older people just did not like this stuff. Like Caren's parents, they hated it.
Caren: I couldn’t have a Hendrix poster in my bedroom. I wanted one so bad. I mean, I had my little record player quietly playing Bob Dylan.
Carl: A strong Black man’s the most scary thing in America.

Why are there so many velvets depicting the Vietnam War?
Carl: Soldiers in Vietnam and Korea would buy these paintings that described army life or life in the war, the miseries of it, backed on balsa wood, and they’d send them back to their parents or their wives.

So were there people making them in Southeast Asia?
Carl: They'd get these painted in the Philippines or Korea, roll them up, put them in their duffel bags, and bring them back home from the war. You’ll see in the naked-lady room that they often painted the Playboy centerfolds and brought those home too. Young men in their late teens and early 20s, they're buying naked ladies. 

I imagine there isn't a large market for Nixon paintings.
Caren: You know, we found that in Tijuana and we said that we got to get it. It was a one-time commitment.
Carl: We found Nixon. We found Reagan. We found the Hale-Bopp cult leader, Marhsall Applewhite, and Jack Kevorkian all together.

That should be its own section.
Carl: That’s a foursome if you’ve ever had one, you know. 

OK, what's this?
Carl: This is our unicorn birthing center, featuring the unicorn comb-over and various versions of unicorns and their frolicking ways.

And is this the infamous naked-lady room. I've got to check it out, just for, you know, research purposes.
Caren: Sure, just like you read the articles, right?

So is this maybe one of the more popular styles?
Carl: This is a show-stopping room, heart-stopping room, and people come out happy. I just kind of leave them in here.
Caren: Usually we're out in the front. We used to be able to see them watch it, but you know we like to let them have their private time and look at them.

Oh, the black-light room. I hope I don’t have any stains on my clothes.
Carl: Yeah, see how your detergent’s doing. See how your dentist is doing too.

I’m not opening my mouth.
Carl: The devils are great on black light; they really pop out. Everything just comes to life.

We made our way back into the lobby and said our goodbyes.

It’s interesting that it runs the gamut from stuff like dogs playing poker to something as bleak as a soldier shooting heroin.
Carl: Well, the whole experience, human experience, is on velvet, and that’s what makes it so compelling to us and, really, the greatest art in the world.
Caren: We’ve had visitors from all over the world, and they’re like, "You know, I’ve never seen anything like it."
Carl: We’ve had blind people come in.

They touch them?
Carl: They get to feel the paintings and, you know, really have a good time. We had a guy who came in from Japan, didn’t speak a word of English, but all of a sudden we started talking about stuff. And then we had paintings of wrestlers, so all the sudden we’re talking about wrestling.
Caren: Gesticulating, yeah.
Carl: Hulk Hogan brought us together.

Follow Dave Schilling on Twitter.

Star Wars characters promoting a book about taxes at CPAC, naturally

Another Conservative Political Action Conference has come again, leaving us another straw-poll win for Rand Paul and a fresh set of scenarios for the end of America. The three-day conservative confab, which took place in National Harbor, Maryland, last week, is sort of like taking a trip into the dark id of the Republican Party, offering a glimpse of America through the eyes of the Tea Party. It’s a world where Steve Stockman dares college kids to jump into hotel-room hot tubs, where Rick Santorum is relevant, and where the final crash is always just around the corner.

In that sense, CPAC is the closest I’ve come to attending a party before the apocalypse, except that no one is quite sure when the end is going to come. Behind all of the Tea Party pageantry and College Republican cockteasing lurks a vague, but palpable, dread—the sense that America as red-state Americans know it is on the brink of a disastrous collapse that will leave us with only the guns in our basements and the gold buried in our backyards. It doesn’t help that this year’s CPAC took place at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center, a bizarre and palatial complex in National Harbor. Located across the Potomac from Washington, National Harbor is sort of like Downtown Disney, except there are no people and no one is quite sure why it exists. You can see the Washington Monument from the windows of the Gaylord, but just barely.

The sense of fear was everywhere, however: in the main speeches, in T-shirt slogans, and in panel discussions like "When the Fed Stops Building and the Mint Stops Printing” and "The Hopelessness of EVER Curtailing Government Spending.” Guys dressed like Storm Troopers and Darth Vader wandered the halls, hawking grim but vague anti-tax bumper stickers. On Friday, social conservatives screened the movie Persecuted, a DIY Evangelical film about the government trampling religious freedoms. Another film, about the sinister machinations of the IRS, played Saturday morning.

While there didn’t seem to be much consensus among CPAC attendees about how exactly America as we know it will end, there was some agreement that it will have to do with ObamaCare. On Thursday, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas kicked off the conference with an “Off with ObamaCare’s head!” battle cry, and the bashing of the president’s signature health-care law continued in the same vein until Sarah Palin closed the conference with a butchered ObamaCare-themed rendition of Green Eggs and Ham. In a discussion titled "A Practical Guide to Living When No One Has Insurance and America Runs Out of Doctors,” conservatives offered ideas for how to effectively live off the government’s health-care grid once Democrats finally succeed in establishing a socialist state. “There aren’t enough doctors to take care of patients, and this is just making things worse,” whined Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming.

Just down the road from the Gaylord, fringe conservatives mapped out a more frightening doomsday scenario on Thursday at Breitbart’s Uninvited conference, a parallel CPAC for all of the Sharia alarmists, White nationalists, and others considered too extreme for the main event. This year’s event was co-hosted by EMPAct, which claims to be the country’s largest bipartisan organization devoted to protecting Americans from an electromagnetic pulse catastrophe. If you aren’t familiar, EMPs are outbursts of atmospheric electricity producing intense magnetic fields that can disable the power lines and electrical grids essential to modern life. The phenomenon can occur naturally, through a geomagnetic storm. But the nightmare scenario—and one that Newt Gingrich and some other conservatives are obsessed with—is an EMP triggered by a terrorist nuclear attack. The Muslim Brotherhood and Benghazi were also covered at Uninvited, as was immigration, in a panel titled “Amnesty and Open Borders: The End of America—and the GOP.”

Nathan Learner, left, and Jeremy Edlind, take a break from their War on Youth campaign.

Of course, fears about America’s social and financial deterioration have been a hallmark of conservatism for years, and the paranoia has only worsened since the advent of the Tea Party. But what makes this year’s dour vigilance curious is that Republicans should see a light at the end of the tunnel. Republicans have a strong chance of winning majorities in both the House and the Senate this year, which would effectively make Barack Obama a lame duck for his final two years in office. After that, the GOP will be free to remake the country in its image, provided they run someone even marginally palatable in 2016.

But conservatives, even the young ones who dominate CPAC, seem to see America’s collapse as a fait accompli. As I was leaving the Gaylord, I ran into Nathan Learner, a 20-something Republican operative dressed in costume battle fatigues to promote CPAC’s “War on Youth” booth. As he purchased Halls and Powerade at the hotel gift shop, I asked Learner if he thinks that there is any hope for the country’s future. He paused. “I think there is,” he said slowly. But perhaps not much. “Our generation is under attack, from big-government cronyism, the ObamaCare law, entitlement spending, the national debt,” he said. “Basically the political status quo has stacked the deck against our generation.”

Illustration by Kyle Norris

Rain in Los Angeles means more than impending mudslides. People tend to view even minor showers either as biblical disasters or as an excuse to stay in, get high, and Instagram the storm viewed from a bedroom window. So it tends only to be tourists, crazy people, or both, whom you meet out walking, even in the intervals between showers.

I was out walking because I think rain—in a place where there's so little weather of any kind other than sunshine—is exciting. Also, I was out of cigarettes. The closest place for me to get them is a bourgie liquor store right down the street from the Sunset Strip. The rain was holding, so I kept walking. The Chateau Marmont is always sort of interesting to see early on a Saturday, when all the valets and security guys and bartenders are getting ready for whatever shitshow is about to develop. I stopped and spoke with the bartender. I asked him if he saw a lot of characters, working the Bar Marmont on weekends. "You have no idea," he said.

And then I ran into Rob Ford. I had crossed the street, walked to the Standard, totally lost in my own thoughts, oblivious because I'd done this walk a million times before. Somehow, seeing Rob Ford was like seeing an old friend—this little gumdrop of a man carrying a bag of Chinese food. "Oh, my God. Hey!" I said, before processing that this was the mayor of Toronto, not an old friend. "Rob Ford!"

"Yeah! Hey!" he said, and without the faintest hint of a politician's pretense, he gave me hug. It felt totally comfortable. What else are you supposed to do when you're a girl meeting Rob Ford? Shake his hand? Keep your distance? It was a nice hug.

I told him that I was from Rosedale, in Toronto.

"No way!" he said. "What are you doing here?"

I told him that I lived down the street and asked him what he was doing here. "Are you doing the Oscars?"

"Yeah," he said.

"You're a big celebrity now!"

"Yeah," he said. "They set me up doing Kimmel. I just did it—I'm coming back now." He held up his Chinese food.

"How was Kimmel?"

"I think it went well," he said, seeming a little drained by the appearance.

He asked if I worked in Hollywood. I told him I did, and he said, "Wow, cool." He wasn't exactly wordy, but in person he's astonishingly charismatic. I was already won over. A small crowd had formed at this point. A mom and her daughter were hovering. A tall, older, well-dressed Black guy—far too good-looking and sophisticated to seem like he would want to interrupt a girl talking to Rob Ford—kept edging in. "Hey, man," the mayor said to him; "you want a picture?" He was totally in his element, happy. He threw his arm around the Black guy, who looked like a happy baby—he could have been getting his photo taken with Brad Pitt. I took the picture. I handed the camera back to him. He looked at it. "Can you take another one?"

I took it, he left, and the mayor asked me about what I did for work. We talked about that. I asked if he was excited about the Oscars. I'm not exactly sure how it even came about that he was invited. "Yeah!" he said. "I love LA." We chatted about LA.

The mom who'd been watching finally shouldered herself in. She wanted a picture too. Her daughters were too nervous. They stayed out on the edge of the circle, which had been growing by the minute and by this point had become a genuine crowd surrounding the mayor of Toronto standing outside the Standard with his Chinese food, minutes after having done Kimmel, obviously wanting to hang out in his hotel room and rest up for the Oscars. He threw his arm around her. She was enraptured.

It's almost impossible to explain what a delight Rob Ford is in person—he has an incredible confidence in his body. Nothing that you see on the internet really captures what a presence he is. You see these pictures of a fat blowhard, you know he smoked crack, and you know that the only reason he's on Kimmel now is that he smoked crack. But he's very appealing. You want to be around him. I took the picture. "Do I look good?" the mom asked. I said that she did. The mom looked skeptical. "You should believe her," the mayor said. "She's a rich girl from Rosedale—they know how to take iPhone pictures."

I gave her phone back and said that bit about Rosedale was unfair. He gave me his card. "Get in touch," he said. I told him I would. We hugged again. I called him an hour later and asked him to dinner. He didn't call back. I think I called his office number. My ex-boyfriend accused me of wanting to have sex with Rob Ford. He's not entirely wrong. You have to see him in person. He's one of the most charismatic men I've ever met. It would be fun. He would laugh. It wouldn't be stressful, and it wouldn't be about getting off. It would be about having a fun, sassy time. I would vote for him.

This story came from Motherboard, our tech website. Read more at Motherboard.tv. Ringwoodite was found within this tiny brown diamond. Image: Richard Siemens/University of Alberta

In what sounds like a chapter from Journey to the Center of the Earth, the chemical makeup of a tiny, extremely rare gemstone has made researchers think there's a massive water reservoir hundreds of miles under the earth.

The gemstone in question is called ringwoodite, which is created when olivine, a material that is extremely common in the mantle, is highly pressurized; when it’s exposed to less pressurized environments, it reverts into olivine. It has previously been seen in meteorites and created in a laboratory, but until now it had never been found in a sample of the earth’s mantle. 

Diamond expert Graham Pearson of the University of Alberta came across a seemingly worthless, three-millimeter piece of brown diamond that had been found in Mato Grosso, Brazil, while he was researching another type of mineral. Within that diamond, he and his team found ringwoodite—and they found that roughly 1.5 percent of the ringwoodite’s weight was made up of trapped water. The findings are published in Nature.

That water had to get in there somehow, and using analyses of its depth and its water makeup, Pearson suggests that there's water deep under the earth's surface—a lot of it. 

The finding “confirms predictions from high-pressure laboratory experiments that a water reservoir comparable in size to all the oceans combined is hidden deep in Earth’s mantle,” according to an analysis of Pearson’s findings by Hans Keppler of the University of Bayreuth in Germany. 

The earth’s crust, including the deepest parts of the oceans, reach depths of roughly 100 kilometers. From there, the upper mantle takes up about another 300 kilometers. Between there and the lower mantle is where this piece of ringwoodite was originally from—an area between 410 and 660 kilometers beneath the earth’s surface known as the “transition zone.” 

Scientists have long been divided about what, exactly, is in the transition zone. We’ve known that much of the upper mantle is made up of olivine, and as Keppler said, scientists have long thought that Earth contained reservoirs of water deep beneath the crust. But they weren’t sure whether the water existed as low as the transition zone—the area between the upper and lower mantles. While some say that much of the oceans’ water may have originated there, others have said it is likely completely dry.

Image via University of Alberta

Pearson’s finding changes that. In the paper, he says that there are two possible explanations for water within the ringwoodite.

“In one, water within the ringwoodite reflects inheritance from a hydrous, diamond-forming fluid, from which the inclusion grew as a syngenetic phase. In this model, the hydrous fluid must originate locally, from the transition zone, because there is no evidence that the lower mantle contains a significant amount of water,” he wrote. Essentially, the extreme pressure and chemical makeup at those depths spontaneously creates water. 

“Alternatively, the ringwoodite is ‘protogenetic,’ that is, it was present before encapsulation by the diamond and its water content reflects that of the ambient transition zone," Pearson wrote. In that model, the water and the ringwoodite are already there, and the ringwoodite absorbs some of the water. Either way you slice it, there is a lot of water in the transition zone: “Both models implicate a transition zone that is at least locally water-rich,” he wrote.

So how does a piece of ringwoodite that’s from at least 410 miles beneath the surface get up to a riverbed in Brazil? According to Keppler—and the fact that Pearson was looking for volcanic rocks—suggests that something, probably a volcanic eruption, quickly pushed it up to the surface. It was just a coincidence that Pearson was able to analyze it before the ringwoodite turned back into its non pressurized form. 

“It was a piece of luck, this discovery, as are many scientific discoveries,” Pearson said. 

And now we can imagine oceans beneath the oceans, where fantasy beings could exist.

Screencap via Deadraiser trailer

An Evangelical group called the Dead Raising Team (DRT) wants to resurrect your dead. They claim responsibility for 11 successful resurrections through the power of prayer. Their group showed up in a recent BBC story, which triggered some interest in a documentary about the group called Deadrasier, directed by someone named Johnny Clark. Curiously, they've received no attention from the medical community, who would probably want to know if this strategy were working.

Still, they certainly want publicity, and their movement seems to have growth in mind. They're hoping to train new agents in the art of dead-raising at one of their seminars throughout the US. You just missed the one last week in Redding, California, but there are more coming up in the next couple months in Pepperell, Massachusetts, and Cullman, Alabama. Hurry if you want a spot.

Screencap via Deadraiser trailer

The group is run by a guy named Tyler Johnson, who believes that Matthew 10:8—"Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons"—amounts to a "Christian job description" and should be taken literally. If you actually read Matthew 10, it's about Jesus empowering the 12 Apostles, and only the 12 Apostles, to perform these tasks. He also orders them to walk around Judea couch-surfing, and tells them not to bring money or clean clothes with them. The Dead Raising Team brings luggage and travels on planes. 

It looks to me as if these guys have been idolizing Zak Bagans and want to put a Christian spin on his spiky-haired-idiots-go-to-a-spooky-place-and-drink-a-lot-of-energy-drinks formula, but I don't really claim to know what's going on in these guys' heads. The "About Us" section on their site lists the following under "What we do":

Love Jesus, raise the dead, speak at churches and conferences, spread revelation of God's love and goodness, heal the sick, play with our children, enjoy marriage, write books, start other DRTs, love the poor, and light fire in the nations.

I assume "enjoy marriage" is a Christian euphemism for "have sex," but the list stops short of including their turn-ons and turn-offs. That's too bad. I was wondering what gets a necromancer's motor running.

Zak Bagans and his crew, you know, for reference. Creative Commons photo by qimuktis on Flickr

But the proof is in the pudding. If you're raising corpses from the dead by closing your eyes and concentrating really hard, you pretty clearly have some kind of wizard powers, and I have no business questioning your theology, or your lifestyle, frankly. Who are these 11 people who have been resurrected by the DRT? 

The trailer offers some clues. Eight of those resurrections were apparently carried out by an EMT. A news story on a militant atheist site called Freethinker says a heart-attack victim was "resurrected" through the power of prayer and a set of defibrillator paddles. In short, it sounds like the trademarked prayers of the DRT operate at peak efficiency when combined with modern medicine.

From my uninformed point of view, this seemed like a novel approach among faith healers and TV preachers, so I asked Samantha Carrick, a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California who focuses on "bodies stuck between sleeping and waking," if this sort of thing was new. "I'm going to say it's been around forever," she said bluntly, pointing me to the work of some other academics who work in this field. 

Carrick led me to philosophy professor Christopher M. Moreman of Cal State East Bay, the author of Beyond the Threshold: Afterlife Beliefs and Experiences in World Religions. When I spoke to him, he was really only surprised by one of the DRT's claims, and it involved theology. "I noticed in the trailer that one of the guys said he’d seen three versions of the Bible that completely removed raising the dead. I have no idea what kind of Bibles those would be.”

Christopher suggested that this is some old-time religion, and not just Western religion either. "There are examples of people having similar kinds of experiences in Buddhist texts," he said. "But to call it resurrection, that part seems a bit weird. Calling it resurrection is kind of a Judeo-Christian and Islamic thing."

He said the DRT's approach is flavored by the way death is treated by contemporary media. ABC's new show Resurrection suggests that cheating death is gaining popularity as a pop-culture motif, but it goes back a couple of decades.

He referred me to the later work of George Romero, the inventor of the zombie film genre. "George Romero has a sub-genre in which the zombie is gaining intelligence and is an underclass of people," he says. There's also, Warm Bodies, a film that seems intended for people who identify with the zombies themselves. "It's as if what people want is to just not die," Moreman said, "without the mindless part or the cannibalistic part." 

Ving Rhames waking the dead via Youtube user ryy79

As for the Dead Raising Team's technique, I was reminded of those hangover cures that work because the instructions on the pill containers say to take them with no less than 12 ounces of water. Dr. Moreman was reminded of something else. "There was a movie that came out a few years ago with Nicolas Cage called Bringing Out the Dead," he said. "There’s a scene in which [a paramedic played by] Ving Rhames knows the guy is gonna be OK, and he gets everybody to pray around the body, and the guy wakes up, and everybody thinks it was a miracle. It reminded me of that."

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.