A woman walks down the street in the area of São Paulo, Brazil, known as Crackland. Photo by Rafael Tognini

Since the 90s, downtown São Paulo, Brazil, has been home to a roving open-air drug market christened Cracolândia, or Crackland, and it’s easy to see where the name came from. Addicts smoke drugs in the streets, beg passersby for spare change, and guard parked cars for money. An estimated 400 people live within Crackland’s current boundaries, and more than 2,000 travel through the area every day looking for crack, which is easy to find and cheap—a big crack rock goes for about four dollars, though, with the high lasting only a few minutes. Some users buy and smoke more than ten rocks a day.

Over the years, the government has made several attempts to clean up the area, including a 2012 effort that involved the cops storming into the shantytown and firing rubber bullets and gas bombs. Nothing has worked—the addicts would move and reassemble their shanties, and Crackland would rise again.

In January, the city government made another attempt, this time with what’s being called “Operation Open Arms.” Instead of being imprisoned or kicked out of the neighborhood, a few hundred Crackland residents were given the chance to be resettled into modest hotel rooms, offered free food, and paid about $6.50 a day to clean the streets. Controversially, they wouldn’t be required to give up drugs to get these jobs.

“We wish we could aim for abstinence [from drugs],” said Flávio Falconi, a psychiatrist who is working with the Open Arms project. “But it doesn’t work that way. Substance-dependence treatment is always a long process… This is just one more attempt.”

It’s unclear whether this will really help these hardcore addicts transition to stable jobs and lives, but it’s certainly more humane treatment than what they usually experience.

I recently visited some of these 300 or so users in their hotel rooms, where the floors are cold, the beds are simple, and there are no televisions or fans. Couples are allowed to stay in the same room, while single people are roomed together based on gender, like college students.

Roberto Nascimento, one of the users in the hotel, wasn’t optimistic when I spoke to him. “Everything will stay the same. Nothing is going to change,” he said. “We have always slept in the streets and we didn't die. The hotel means nothing to us. Today is Friday, payday. Today is party day in Crackland.” He added that the main difference between sleeping in the shacks and in the hotel is that it doesn’t rain in the latter, though the food on the street is better than the meals offered by the program.

As the users began working their government-funded jobs, photos of them and headlines claiming “Users Smoke Crack on Their First Day on the Job” appeared on the covers of São Paulo’s newspapers, and most of the city’s residents seemed primed to believe the worst of Cracklanders. No matter how humane or effective the Open Arms program is, to many it smacks of giving away drugs to drug addicts.

If it’s hard to believe that Operation Open Arms represents a kinder, gentler drug policy in São Paulo, there’s an alternate explanation: The authorities have to clean the city up before the gringos get here for the 2014 World Cup, in June. Streets are being paved, long-abandoned green areas are being hastily fertilized, and airports are being renovated.

The police are also trying less humane methods to eliminate Crackland. A few days after the Open Arms program started, ten police cars surrounded the area and attempted to drive people away with teargas bombs. Some users later showed the press injuries that they claimed were caused by rubber bullets, while the DENARC—the Brazilian equivalent of the DEA—claims that they didn’t use any of those projectiles, that the fighting in question took place after police cars were damaged by rowdy Cracklanders, and that they will keep doing their work as usual in the area.

Whether or not Open Arms will be successful, helping people make those steps out of addiction should be something Sao Paulo does more often, and not just for the World Cup—a survey commissioned by the federal government released in September estimated that around 370,000 Brazilians smoke crack on a regular basis. Talk about Crackland.

For Blobby Boys part 1 and 2, click here and here.

Keep your eyes peeled for new installments of Blobby Boys every Wednesday from here until the end of time. Or until Alex gets sick of working with us.

Katowice is no paradise in the ordinary sense—unless you're a big fan of Polish mining towns with gray skies, crumbling walls, and abandoned buildings. Those who were born and raised here, like me, come to either love it or hate it. But for the outsiders who pass through and the precious few who come to stay, this city reveals itself as a place with an odd, surreal beauty.

As a photographer, I try to capture the rhythms of everyday life in this place from every angle—the mundane as well as the extraordinary.

See more of Weronika's work here.

Does your town or city qualify for paradise status? Feel free to send your pitches to ukphotoblog@vice.com. Don't be shy.

In our final episode of Chiraq, we discover what the Nation Of Islam thinks about the Chiraq phenomena then finally get an audience in the court of Almighty Sosa, aka. Chief Keef, aka young Keith Cozart.

Filmed at his house in the suburbs of Chicago, Keef spends his time whipping donuts around the backyard on an ATV. There, we talk to the rapper and meet fellow GBE members who show us what happens when Sosa drops $10,000 on paintball equipment.

Opening photo by Martyn Stewart. All other photos by the author.

The best way to fatally wound a wolf without killing it instantly is to shoot it in the gut, preferably with armor-piercing ammunition. Unlike soft lead-tipped bullets, which mushroom inside the body cavity and kill quickly, heavy-jacketed AP ammo pierces the target and blows out the other side.

This has two advantages: The first is that, especially with a gut shot, the animal will suffer. It will bleed out slowly, run a mile or so in terrified panic, and collapse. Then it will die. The second advantage is that, if you’re hunting illegally (out of season, at night with a spotlight, or on land where you shouldn’t), there is little forensic evidence for game wardens to gather. No bullet will be found in the cadaver. Most importantly, the animal will have traveled some distance from where it was shot, so that tracing the site of the shooting is almost impossible.

I gleaned these helpful tips from a nice old man at a saloon in Salmon, Idaho, which last December was the site of the first annual Coyote and Wolf Derby. I had come to this rural town—population 3,000—to enter as a contestant in the derby. Over the course of two days in late December, several hundred hunters would compete to kill as many wolves and coyotes as possible. There were two $1,000 prizes to be had, one for the most coyotes slain and the other for the largest single wolf carcass. Children were encouraged to enter, with special awards for youths aged 10–11 and 12–14 listed on the promotional flyer. The derby’s organizer, a nonprofit sporting group called Idaho for Wildlife, advertised that the event was to be historic: the first wolf-killing contest held in the US since 1974.

Hunting for food is one thing, and in some cases hunting helps to keep overabundant species like deer in ecological check. But the reason we have too many deer in the US in the first place is simple: the steady decline of big predators like the mountain lion and—you guessed it—the wolf. The fact is that we need wolves in ecosystems. So why a killing contest to rid the land of them?

After digging into the wolf-hate literature featured on Idaho for Wildlife’s website, I wondered whether the residents of Salmon were looking to kill wolves out of spite. They hated these creatures, and I wanted to understand why.

Besides killing wolves, one of the group’s core missions, according to its website, is to “fight against all legal and legislative attempts by the animal rights and anti-gun organizations who are attempting to take away our rights and freedoms under the Constitution of the United States of America.” The website also suggested that media coverage of the event was not welcome. The only way I’d be able to properly report on the derby, I figured, was to go undercover as a competing hunter. So I showed up in Salmon a few days before the event, paid the $20 sign-up fee, and officially became part of the slaughter.

The derby called for hunters to work in two-person teams. In the weeks leading up to the competition I recruited pro-wolf activists Brian Ertz and his sister Natalie Ertz, native Idahoans who have worked for local conservation groups. Rounding out our teams was Brian’s friend Bryan Walker, a gnarled former Marine and an Idaho lawyer who has studied shamanism and claims to have an ability to speak with animals.

At a bar in Salmon, a nice old man named Cal Black bought the four of us a round of drinks when we told him we were in town for the derby. Cal had grown up on a ranch near town, and his thoughts on wolves reflected those of most other locals we met. Salmon is livestock country—the landscape is riddled with cows and sheep—and ranchers blame wolves for huge numbers of livestock deaths. Therefore wolves needed to be dispatched with extreme prejudice. The derby was a natural extension of this sentiment.

“Gut-shoot every goddamn last one of them wolves,” Cal told us. He wished a similar fate on “tree huggers,” who, in Cal’s view, mostly live in New York City. “You know what I’d like to see? Take the wolves and plant ’em in Central Park, ’cause they impose it on us to have these goddamn wolves! Bullshit! It’s said a wolf won’t attack you. Well, goddamn, these tree huggers don’t know what. I want wolves to eat them goddamn tree huggers. Maybe they’ll learn something!”

We all raised a glass to the tree huggers’ getting their due. I fought the urge to tell Cal that I live in New York part-time, and that in college Natalie trained as an arborist and had actually hugged trees for a living. Her brother, who is 31 and studying to be a lawyer in Boise, Idaho, had warned me about the risks of going undercover when I broached the idea over the phone. As a representative for the nonprofit Western Watersheds Project, which has lobbied for wolf protections, he’d attended numerous public meetings about “wolf management” in communities like Salmon. “Salmon is the belly of the beast,” he told me. “There is not a more hostile place. It’s Mordor.”

Brian’s former boss at the Western Watersheds Project, executive director Jon Marvel, has received death threats for speaking out in favor of wolves and against the powerful livestock industry. Larry Zuckerman, a conservation biologist for the pro-wolf environmental nonprofit Wild Love Preserve, suspects that it was pro-wolf-hunting residents from Salmon who fatally poisoned his three dogs. Many pro-wolf activists across the American West, especially those who have publicly opposed the ranching industry, have reported similar threats and acts of aggression—tires slashed, homes vandalized, windows busted out with bricks in the night. Idaho for Wildlife’s opinion on the situation is made clear on its website: “Excess predator’s [sic] and environmentalists should go first!”

Prepping for the derby, we disguised ourselves according to the local style: camo pants and jackets, wool caps, balaclavas, binoculars, and heavy boots. When he wasn’t mystically communicating with elk, Walker enjoyed hunting them. He didn’t look out of place in Salmon, carrying his M4 rifle with a 30-round magazine and a Beretta .45 on his hip. He loaned me his bolt-action .300 Win Mag with a folding bipod, while Brian carried a .30-06 with a Leupold scope. Natalie, who is tall and good-looking, was armed only with a camera and played the part of a domesticated wife “here for the party,” as she put it.

At the derby registration the night before the killing was to commence, we were so convincing that the organizers didn’t even bother to ask for our hunting licenses or wolf permits. Instead they suggested spots in the surrounding mountains where we could find wolves to shoot illegally.

FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: Bryan Walker, Brian Ertz, and Natalie Ertz

In Wolves and the Wolf Myth in American Literature, S. K. Robisch presents the wolf as a “mystical force in the human mind,” one that for thousands of years has been associated with the purity of bloodlust, the unhinged cruelty of nature. The wolf as mythological super-predator brings terror and chaos, devouring our young, our old, the weak, the innocent, and the foolish, operating through trickery and deceit.

From Matthew 7:15: “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves.” Little Red Riding Hood loses her grandmother to a cross-dressing wolf, and the Three Little Pigs pay the price as well. In the late Middle Ages the Roman Catholic Church declared the wolf an agent of the Devil, or possibly the shape-shifting manifestation of Satan himself. And of course the werewolf, a human turned beast by the contagion of a bite, also lived in the imagination as a demonic figure, killing for sport under the light of the full moon, indiscriminate and lunatic.

In Anglo-Saxon and the Germanic languages, certain words for wolf—warg, warc, verag—were also used to describe bandits, outlaws, and evil spirits. In Swedish, the word varg simply meant “everything that is wrong.” Even Teddy Roosevelt, the conservationist president and lover of the wilderness, referred to wolves as “the archtype of ravin [sic], the beast of waste and desolation.”

In reality, Homo sapiens shares a long and intimate relationship with Canis lupus. The gray wolf was the first animal to be domesticated out of the wild, long before the cow, horse, or goat. Its direct descendant is classified as Canis lupus familiaris, better known as the common dog, which, despite its wide subset of breeds, is almost genetically identical to the wolf. The bear, the tiger, the lion—feared predators of the human race, even today far more dangerous to man than wolves—never came out of the dark to join the fire circles of early hominids. The wolf did, though the humans in its midst became food on some occasions.

It’s theorized that wolves and humans, some 20,000 years ago, hunted the same prey—large herbivores—and, like us, wolves worked in packs. We fed at their kills, and they fed at ours. Antagonism gave way to mutualism, symbiosis, cooperation.

Around 8,000 BC, however, humans began to domesticate livestock and gather in villages. The wolf was no longer our friend, as it stalked and devoured the sheep and cows we now kept as property. Hatred of the beast was born, and it grew in proportion to our divorce from the wild.

Western man, armed with gunpowder and greedy for land, proved from the moment he arrived in the New World to be a more capable beast of waste and desolation, as predators of all kinds—the wolf, the cougar, the coyote, the black bear, the grizzly, the lynx, the wolverine—fell before his march. Wolves were shot on sight, trapped, snared, fed carcasses laced with poison or broken glass, their pups gassed or set on fire in their dens. “Such behavior amazed Native Americans,” writes wildlife journalist Ted Williams. “Their explanation for it was that, among palefaces, it was a manifestation of insanity.”

The sprawling roads, farms, towns, and cities of the young republic completed the job by systematically razing the wolf’s habitat. By 1900, wolves had disappeared east of the Mississippi. By the 1950s, they could only be found in isolated regions of the American West, with perhaps a dozen wolves remaining in the contiguous 48 states, compared with a pre-Columbian population estimated at several hundred thousand.

The point of this slaughter was not to protect human beings, although this remains the enduring perception. Only two fatal wolf attacks on Homo sapiens in North America have been reported during the past 100 years, with perhaps a few more over the course of the 19th century (the records prior to 1900 are uncertain and the stories undocumented, often embellished and tending toward the folkloric). A 2002 study conducted by the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research reviewed the history of wolf predation on humans in Europe, Asia, and the US from 1500 to the present and found that wolf attacks were “extremely rare,” that “most attacks have been by rabid wolves,” and that “humans are not part of their normal prey.” Wolves in the United States died at our hands for the most part because of the ancient grievance: They ate our cattle and sheep, representing viscerally that which could not be tamed.

Then, in 1974, wolves in the United States got a reprieve. The passage of the Endangered Species Act the previous year had cleared the path for Congress to declare the animals endangered, making it illegal to hunt them. Wolves had survived by the thousands in the forests, mountains, and prairies of western Canada, and now, protected from widespread slaughter in the US, portions of the population began a slow march of recolonization, dispersing south from Alberta and British Columbia and into Montana. In 1995, Congress expedited this process by mandating the reintroduction of captured Canadian wolves to the mountains of Idaho and Wyoming.

Thereafter, wolves thrived as never before in our recorded history, and ecologists noted with astonishment the beneficial effects on ecosystems in the West. In Yellowstone National Park, a centerpiece of this reintroduction, wolves pared the overabundant populations of elk, which had stripped the park’s trees and grasses. With fewer elk, the flora returned, and the rejuvenated landscape created habitats for dozens of other creatures: beaver in the streams, songbirds in the understory, butterflies among the flowers.

Such was the perception of success that by 2009 the US wolf population was declared fully recovered. In 2011, when Congress rescinded the wolves’ protected status, scores of biologists, ecologists, and wildlife scientists protested the decision. Critics observed that the removal of Canis lupus from the endangered species list had been accomplished mostly due to the lobbying efforts of the livestock industry. For the first time since 1974, wolves across the Northern Rocky Mountains—in Idaho, Wyoming, Montana—were legally hunted, trapped, and shot with vengeance. The winter hunting seasons decimated whole packs. At the behest of ranchers, the US government joined in the slaughter, dispatching predator-control agents from the federal Wildlife Services.

The view of wolves as vermin bent on stealing ranchers’ livelihood has carried through to the present, though little evidence supports this stigma. The number of cattle and sheep lost to wolves and other predators each year is negligible. In 2010, just 0.23 percent of cattle in the US died from “carnivore depredations” (as wolf attacks on livestock are officially categorized).

And it didn’t matter that aggressive “predator management” has no basis in ecological science. “The myth we’ve been fed is that predators like wolves need to be hunted because otherwise they’ll grow out of control, exponentially,” said Brooks Fahy, director of the nonprofit Predator Defense, in Oregon. “But no scientific study backs this up. Wolves self-regulate if left alone.” Wolf management, Fahy said, “is a form of rationalized madness.”

Proud derby contestants displaying a pair of coyotes

“You going for wolf?” a cowboy with a big hat and a smile the size of Texas asked us when he saw our camo jackets and the truck bristling with rifles. We nodded. “Good!”

We were at a country store in the village of Old Sawmill Station, Idaho, and the walls of the store were festooned with pictures of hunters holding dead predators as trophies: handsome bears and cougars and wolves shot to tatters. In some of the pictures, petite wives gripped the slumped cadavers of wolves twice their size.

The proprietor told us that the best place to find wolves was up a dirt road along the east fork of the Salmon River. “Once you get up past Boulder Creek, look for tracks,” he said.

We drove into the mountains, tracing the river’s east fork. Brian passed the time with a joke about a cowboy and a ranch hand riding a fence line in Idaho: “They find a sheep tangled in the barbed wire, and the cowboy jumps off his horse, unzips, and has his sweet way with the creature. He pulls out, turns to the ranch hand: ‘You want some of this?’ The ranch hand says, ‘Sure, but do I have to get tangled up in the wire?’”

Brian had hunted elk and antelope in the backcountry from a young age. By his early teens he’d come to the realization that cattle and sheep dominated the landscape to the detriment of almost every other species that depends on grass to survive. In his 20s he spent five years as media director of the Western Watersheds Project, a group whose chief enemy is the ranching industry. Watersheds are ruined by the presence of too many cows. In fact, cows mess up just about everything in the ecosystems of the arid West. Wherever domesticated livestock graze, the result is less to eat for the wild ungulates—elk, moose, deer, antelope.

The road along the river led up high among jagged peaks—the loveliness of the place made us quiet. We slung our rifles and hiked up hills and little dirt roads and down gullies, looking for wolf prints in the snow.

Walker was our tracker. He’d grown up in a family of ranchers in rural Idaho, on a farm with 200 head of sheep. A hunter for most of his adult life, he told me he had shot “pretty much everything,” until one night in 2004, at the age of 40. He was sitting in a hotel room in Spokane, Washington, and a coyote sidled up directly under his window and starting howling and didn’t stop. “Right in the middle of downtown Spokane!” he said. “That was the first time I understood that animals were talking to me.”

From that point on, his view of animals changed. If he hunted, it would be honorably, deliberately, and thoughtfully. He talked about “the responsibility of the predator.” He spoke of the “ethical shot,” taking an animal down with one bullet, inflicting the least suffering. He told me how one afternoon not long ago he’d been bow hunting in Idaho, chasing down an elk high on a ridgeline. “A magpie flew up from way down in the valley,” he said. “I swear it must have been 2,000 yards he flew, and he comes up to me and perches on a branch and starts making sounds I’d never heard a magpie make. We just talked and talked.”

On day one, we found no signs of wolves, neither tracks nor scat. Back at the truck, empty-handed, we cracked beers and lit up cigarettes. Before too long, a growling pickup appeared in the distance, trawling. We tensed. As it slowed to a stop, the two young men in the cab eyed us.

“You doing the derby?” they asked, and we nodded. “Where you been today?”

There was a long, uncomfortable pause. I sucked at my beer and glanced at Brian, who was chain-smoking. We’d been lazy hunters. Walker took up the slack and lied marvelously. We’d hunted up and down the east fork of the Salmon River, he explained, and up and down this and that canyon, hungry for a kill but finding nothing. The two men stuffed tobacco into their cheeks and spat. We talked about how hard it is to track wolves and wondered why the hell they wouldn’t show themselves. The men reported the word from the local ranchers: If any of us derby folk happened to see a wolf on their property, we should shoot it on sight and forget about the legalities.

After they pulled away, Walker let out a sigh. “Those are the kinds of guys I’ve known all my life,” he said. “That’s my family right there. They like to go out and kill. They’re not evil. They’re just… unaware.”

That same day, a veteran BBC wildlife sound technician and videographer named Martyn Stewart, who had traveled to Salmon to cover the derby for his own purposes, found himself drawing unwanted attention.

The first problem was his accent—Martyn is Australian, and a foreigner in Salmon is serious business. “We stick together in this town,” a wolf hunter had told him when he arrived. “We ain’t got no niggers in this town. You see any niggers in this town?”

The second giveaway was his earring. He’d gone to a gun shop on Main Street to find out where the derby registration was to be held. Martyn told me later that the shopkeeper had looked at him as if he were deranged. “I suggest you take out the earring,” the shopkeeper said, “because you look like a fag.”

At the registration he showed up in tennis shoes and a yellow North Face jacket. I overheard a brooding hunter as he nodded in Martyn’s direction. “Ain’t got no right being here.” After registration, Martyn drove to his hotel shadowed by a pickup, which looped around in the parking lot and drove off when he emerged from his car.

The next morning he went to a local coffeehouse where the waitress told him she hadn’t heard wolves howling in at least two years. She seemed sad about it. Two hunters in camo then walked in and sat at the table opposite him, staring. Eventually, Martyn made eye contact and said hello. They didn’t reply. Instead they stared for 40 minutes, ordering neither food nor drink. When he got up, they got up. When he left, they left.

More dead coyotes

Idaho for Wildlife had arranged for a closing ceremony at sundown on the second day of the contest, beginning at 4 PM. The assumption was that dozens of wolves would be hauled in. The judging was set to take place behind the ranching supply depot where we’d registered, a place called Steel & Ranch. “It sounds like an S&M club for cows,” Brian snorted. There was a meat hook from which kills would hang as derby judges measured and weighed the cadavers to determine the winning teams.

We got in the truck and were headed north toward town when Natalie yelled out that she saw something moving across the broken snow in a field a few hundred yards away. “I don’t think it was a deer,” she said. Walker slammed the truck to a halt, and we leaped out with spotting scopes and binoculars and one rifle, the .300 Win Mag, which I carried.

“Coyote?” asked Walker, glassing the field.

“That’s no coyote,” Brian said. I caught the animal in the scope of my rifle.

“That’s a wolf,” said Natalie. “Look at the color, and the size, and that tail.” She paused and lowered her chin, smiling. “I haven’t seen a wolf in more than two years!”

We watched as the animal moseyed along some 400 yards away, sniffing the ground, easeful in the afternoon light. It stopped and raised its head and stared in our direction, its shape silhouetted against the snow. I felt like it was looking right at me, up through the scope and down through my bones to my toes.

Then it was over. In a flash, the animal slipped from our sight, vanishing into the patchwork of the sagebrush and snow. The river trilled, and the sun smiled down through the mountains.

Natalie and Brian agreed that the sighting was an anomaly. “It’s fucking incredible,” said Natalie. “In the middle of the day, by the side of the road, this close to town, this close to a place like Salmon, with all these hunters out… It’s just…” Words failed her. She looked as though she were about to cry.

Natalie had spent the past five years watching, tracking, and listening to the packs in the mountains of Idaho. She had seen at least 20 wolves in that time. She’d fallen in love for the usual reasons that wolf-lovers describe. Wolves, after all, are not unlike human beings. They’re monogamous, loyal, mate for life, and carefully raise their young in strong family units, with an alpha male and female at the top of the pack. It could be said that what we love about wolves is their similarities with humans.

Natalie had howled with the animals and heard their answers, and she had watched the alphas pair up and raise pups. She’d watched the pups play and thrive and learn from their parents, bringing her ten-year-old son out to see the wolves, listen to their talk, and try to parse the meaning. Now, after a two-year absence, she’d seen a wolf again.

“Let’s try a haze,” she said. I looked at her. The purpose of hazing wildlife—usually accomplished with a few shots fired in the air—is to dishabituate them from the presence of humans, to let them know we’re not their friends. We’d discussed this possibility. It would be a violation of Idaho state law, which mandates that citizens can shoot wolves but cannot “intentionally harass, bait, drive, or disturb any animal for the purpose of disrupting lawful pursuit or taking thereof.”

Walker, who’d been a prosecutor in Idaho, warned that the law could construe a haze during the derby as an egregious act. “Fuck it,” I said. “The state of Idaho can extradite me.” I loaded a round in the Win Mag, aimed high above the brush where we’d last seen the wolf, and fired. The report caromed off the hills, and we heard the bullet zing when it hit.

“You hit him! You fuckin’ got him!” Brian cried, peering through his scope.

I felt like I’d been shot.

“Just fucking with you, Ketcham. Look, he’s moving!” The shot had flushed the animal from cover. “Running fast, over that fence line, up the draw! Wait, there’s two! Yeah, two! And they got the message.”

The pair of wolves, lithe and beautiful and full of strength and speed, sprinted up a draw into the distant hills, up into the mountains—600 yards, 700 yards, 1,000 yards, gone.

It was the first time I had seen wolves in the wild, and given current trends, it felt like winning the lottery. The Humane Society of the United States reports that nearly 1,400 wolves have been killed since the 2011 delisting, almost half of them in Idaho alone. This is out of a population in the Northern Rocky Mountains that had risen as high as 1,700 just a few years ago. The animals are disappearing, and the packs are splintering into smaller groups, their viability compromised. Natalie told me that the two animals we’d seen were most likely the remnants of a family whose kin had already been hung from a meat hook.

Despite the contestants’ best efforts, not a single wolf was killed as a result of the Salmon derby, and the ceremony at Steel & Ranch had an air of failure.

We stood around and feigned disappointment at the lack of dead wolves. Only one other team had spotted even one of the animals during the hunt, and we bragged that we’d seen two of them. Our fellow hunters looked dubious when I lied about missing the shot at 400 yards. “Say 500 yards, goddamn it!” Walker hissed in my ear. “This is embarrassing.”

As for the coyotes, only 21 dead had been brought in, according to Idaho for Wildlife. Martyn Stewart was perched up on the loading dock, filming the proceedings. Rigor mortis had set in for most of the animals, and the judges had a hard time pulling the dead coyotes’ legs apart to check their sex. It had been announced that there would now be a lesser prize of several hundred dollars awarded to the hunter who had bagged the most female coyotes.

Martyn didn’t know I was a journalist until a few days after the derby, when I spoke with him on the phone. He told me that when he left town at 6 AM the next morning, the lights of a pickup truck flared in the winter dark as it pulled out after him. As soon as the speed limit hit 55, the truck raced up behind his bumper, the floodlights on high, the horn blasting.

“They were blinding me,” Martyn said, “and I gotta admit, my heart was in my mouth. They were literally driving me out of town.” About 15 miles north of Salmon, the truck emitted one final blast, flashed its lights, and gave up its hellish pursuit.

We avoided a similar fate, managing to hoodwink even the local sheriff, who told us he was on hand to make sure there was no trouble from pro-wolf protesters. “They said there was some kind of a threat,” he said. “But nobody showed. Guess they didn’t have the stomach for it.”

“Is that right?” Natalie said. I could see a smile playing on her lips.

Photo by Jamie Taete

Venture out into the towns and cities of the UK on any weekend, and you'll find it hard to avoid the conclusion that young British men are in the midst of a crisis. A crisis of time and purpose, of maturity and masculinity. A crisis that, in their search for meaning, has driven many of them to become completely contradictory life-forms. The sort of people who wear face masks to bed but will happily neck a pint of piss for a dare. People who train all year round for Ibiza's party season, only to suck up legal highs they bought off strangers on the internet. Their heads are too small for their bodies, their shoulders are wider than a pub television, and they have shit Robbie Williams tattoos. They look dreadful and bizarre; they are the modern British douchebag—pumped, primed, terrifyingly sexualized high-street gigolos. They have no concept of subtlety and they don't care.

You probably know this already, especially if you've seen the TV shows The Only Way Is Essex and Geordie Shore, and any other primary documents of life in the UK. We all know that a lot of young British men now look like Ken dolls dipped in tea and covered in biro. What we don't really know is how and why it happened. It's easy to dismiss them as just a more extreme strand of lad culture—the Rancid to the lads' Green Day. But there are some vital differences between these two cultural types.

Most notably, douchebags don't have friends—they have wingmen. And while the lad might have to be cajoled by those mates into approaching a girl after a few beers, the modern British douchebag already knows every line he'll be using to snare his prey before he leaves the house for another evening of Monster cocktails and creatine. He has a far more cynical view of a night out. He's in it for the posturing, the posing, and the pussy, and he'll stalk the light-paneled dancefloors of the UK's shittiest nightclubs until he's proved it.

This is where I first began to notice them, during my many encounters with the bottom rung of the UK nightlife scene for VICE's Big Night Out series. At every event I ever went to (bar a goths-only social club in north London), there seemed to be at least three or four of these gym-bunny wankers patrolling their turf in T-shirts that looked like they'd been torn down the middle by a big angry dog. Emo nights, indie nights, student nights, drum-'n'-bass nights, nights out in Milton Keynes and Magaluf—the modern British douchebag was there at every one.

It's really fucking hard to feel sorry for them, but douchebags don't exist in a vacuum. Yes, assholes have always existed, but not this particular breed of asshole, and would that be the case if social mobility hadn’t taken such a whack in recent years? Would that be the case if young men didn’t feel constantly undermined? They're the sad, lost children of the metrosexuals and the miners. They are analog men in a digital age, imported via America. A Calvin Harris remix of a Springsteen song that just doesn't really work.

Photo by Jake Lewis

But they aren't going out without a fight, or going gentle into that good night—they're gonna get swole and dress sexy. It seems to me that, in a kamikaze attempt to assert their masculinity, our young man of today has repackaged himself as an erection in a vest. A walking, preening monument to the British masculinity crisis, a sports-science Übermensch with an indecent-exposure charge to his name.

Once upon a time, they would have been the ones that society looked to first in times of need. The ones who waged shitty wars in foreign countries, defended the honors of other people's wives, and helped old ladies cross the road. They caught man flu, not herpes, and they worked on the land. They were the strongest and most fearless, beacons of Northern European masculinity. The descendants of Lord Byron, Lawrence of Arabia, and Geoff Hurst. A great bunch of lads.

Now, though, those old ideals of male attractiveness—"the charmer," "the bit of rough," "the sullen thinker"—are almost dead, which is why, when Brits like Benedict Cumberbatch and Matt Smith are exported abroad, it feels like the death rattle of a heritage industry. It's probably why they're only ever cast in things set in the past. Nobody wants to be Sean Connery anymore. With their buff, waxed bodies and stupid haircuts, the modern British douchebag looks more like a model from an Attitude chat-line ad than a potential Bond.

It's easy to laugh at the heartthrobs of times gone by. Tom Jones and his chest medallions, Rod Stewart and his leopard-skin coats, David Essex and his perm, George Best and his crap teeth. But you got the sense that beneath it all these were rough-and-tumble guys who hid a kind of raw, natural, working-class sexuality beneath their velvet jackets and ridiculous hairdos. Compare them to the Wanted or Olly Riley or Joey Essex, and they look like Mormons during wintertime.

For most men, being sexy was something that used to happen by accident. Nowadays, your modern British male dresses like he's trying to fuck the world. He is a Razzle centerfold of a man. He smells like a solvent abuser's rag and is built like a flat-pack shithouse with luxury-ply bog roll. He asks for a number one on the sides and nothing on the top, his hair reaching to the disapproving heavens like the Tower of Babel. All his clothes are designed to reveal gratuitous channels of flesh, all shaved and shined so you can see your own hateful, jealous, paunchy face in the gap between his pecs. He is, in short, a complete slut.

But this new epidemic of vanity isn't just skin-deep. It goes deeper than that—it has manifested itself in muscle tissue.

Photo by Kieran Cudlip

When did you first notice the swolification of Britain? For me, it was when I went to hang out with some old school friends, not having seen them for a year or so after we parted ways at the end of year 11. These guys, who weren't much bigger than I was in our school days, had all become enormous, seemingly overnight. At work, I realized I was spending more and more time with people who had bodies that you just didn't see once upon a time. Look through your Facebook friends, and I bet you'll find a lot of guys who seem to have swollen in the last few years—guys you'd never thought of as sporty or tough before.

The catalyst for it is, of course, creatine, or any of the various protein powders that I imagine will end up being considered my generation's thalidomide or asbestos at some point in the future. There aren't any stats that show just how many of us are using powder to get tonk, but it's one of the key products in a burgeoning sports-nutrition industry—one with an estimated value of more than $500 million in the UK alone.

Seemingly safe, its result is a strange one: guys who are big, but not hard. You can't help getting the impression that there's very little weight, bravery, or even violence lying below those nutritionally enlarged 'ceps. Really tough guys have sinew on their bodies, scabs on their face, and hate in their hearts; the modern British douchebag just has balloon-animal muscles and a waxed chest. They're pampered, meek behemoths who look good on the beach but can't fight for shit—a uniquely modern phenomenon.

Believe it or not, though, Joey Essex may have Neil Ruddock's aggy DNA swimming around in him. The most recent predecessor of the douchebag's macho vanity came in the form of metrosexuality, which was led into the mainstream by lads' mags like GQ and by Liverpool's "Spice Boys" in the mid 90s. It differed from other male beauty cultures in that it wasn't especially linked to subcultures or to looking unusual. It was just a kind of objective sexiness.

But in a fractured and uncertain time, the natural confidence of metrosexuality has been replaced by something far more flagrant. "Designer stubble" has become "alopecia from the neck down"; "open-neck shirts" are now "dick-plunge vests"; "chunky watch" has morphed into "Maori tattoo." Somewhere along the line, male sexuality went from being Jude Law on a scooter to Jodie-Marsh-with-external-reproductive-organs. And then everyone turned a shade of orange.

Photo by Jake Lewis

For my money, I think it comes down to a few factors. First, the rolling beast of the cosmetics and beauty industry, while still primarily aimed at women, has branched out to market itself to men too. The amount of powders, potions, sprays, and hot metal machines that women have been encouraged to use in the last ten years or so has massively increased, and their ease of use has probably intrigued men to the point where they want to form their own kind of beauty regime.

But while it's easy to scorn the banality—and the vanity—of the modern British douchebag, they're only products of their environment. An environment that has very little to offer them anymore, other than gym memberships, intentionally ripped clothes, alcohol, and creatine. The institutions that gave British men a sense of well-being have been ripped apart. Nobody trusts the police any more; nobody wants to join the army because no one believes in its wars; traditional industries have been decimated, and the only thing to replace them are stifling, mind-numbing positions in service and retail. 

Because of this, British men have tried to reimagine masculinity, in a hyper-realized, childish, desperate way. A new kind of machismo, built on fake bravado and vanity. British men are looking up to faux-hawked, peacocking, rich maniacs like Mario Balotelli for inspiration, because they really have nowhere else to look. Their bosses hate themselves, and their dads hate them.

I can't help looking at this emergent culture and wondering if they've basically retreated from a world that doesn't want the young British male anymore. From ancient shit like the happy-slapping debate to the right-wing furor over NekNominations, to the NUS and the Guardian's ludicrous "Lad Culture Summit," there seems to be a narrative of an cultured metropolitan class wondering what to do with its young men.

And what the modern British douchebag is doing is basically trolling everyone's sensibilities with his actions. Because when nobody wants you, you can do what you want. When people feel anxious, unloved, and bored, they start to test the boundaries of decency. You've only got to look at prison or the lower rankings of the army to realize this.  

Yes, it's easy to mock the modern British douchebag, with all his bizarre and contradictory notions of masculinity and sexuality. But let's not forget, it's the people who hate him most who birthed this weird social orphan. 

Follow Clive Martin on Twitter.

More from Clive:

A Big Night Out in... a Fetish Club Dance Cage!

The Showstopper

How to Be a Better Person in 2014

The Sad World of Adults Pretending to Be Kids for Retweets

Kyary Pamyu Pamyu. Photo courtesy Charlie Engman. All other photos by Benjamin Shapiro

J-pop is one of Japan’s major soft-power exports. Even if you haven’t heard the music, chances are you’ve got an opinion about it. At its worst, it's terrifying crypto-fascist kitsch as sung by gibbering chipmunks. At it’s best, it’s a hyper-contextualized spectacle so mind-blowingly awesome you don't care when your brains start to liquefy under the onslaught of candy-lacquered inanity. Anyone who's seen J-pop live will attest that you often come away feeling like you unwillingly led a pep rally celebrating the screaming void of our empty culture. But as anyone who's seen her knows, Kyary Pamyu Pamyu is the weird future this genre desperately needs.

If you're a fan, it's probably because of her first single, “PonPonPon.” The song became an international hit in 2011 after foreign audiences saw the psychedelic music video, which features floating bread slices and neon-checkered skulls. There's a chubby dude dancing in a dress and Martha Stewart wig, and at one point Kyary farts a rainbow.

If you haven't seen it, do yourself a favor and watch this right now:

Like all of her videos, you never see anyone else's face besides Kyary's. She's one of the biggest stars in her country (the Japanese equivalent of Lady Gaga and Katy Perry fed through a Blue Velvet meat grinder), and her image is tightly controlled for maximum effect. Her image is eerie and disconcerting, expressing the extremes of light and darkness that define life.

Kyary only recently turned 21, but she's been wildly famous for four years now. She first made waves in niche fashion circles as a Harajuku it-girl, style-blogging and modeling for street-fashion magazines. She released a line of fake eyelashes that afforded her a first taste of success, and not long after that she was approached by two major players in the Japanese creative scene, songwriter Yasutaka Nakata and art director Sebastian Masuda. The trio worked together to produce 2011’s Moshi Moshi Harajuku, Kyary's debut album. Her unique style married the distinctive Victorian-doll "Loli" look with an underlying wink to the weirdness of the whole thing, incorporating elements of body horror and surrealism that turn the sugary cuteness just the right bit of sour. 

Kyary backstage at the Best Buy Theater

Last week, I went to see her perform at a sold-out concert at New York's Best Buy Theater. Her live show was one of the most incredible spectacles I've ever seen, featuring non-stop dancing, bizarre projected visuals, and a creepy guy in a bear suit who danced around maniacally whenever Kyary changed outfits, one of which was a hot-pink dress spotted with bleeding eyeballs.

Before the show, I was lucky enough to interview her backstage. On our way to her dressing room, her managers made sure it was OK that she was being interviewed in "natural style," which apparently means looking adorable in a sweatshirt. My Japanese isn't perfect, but I was able to detect how much of a consummate professional she is. It's scary how difficult it is to pin down where Kyary ends and the machine of manufacturing and maintaining celebrity begins. But no matter what you think of her and her music, you've got to admit that she's putting boring old American pop to shame.

VICE: To start, how would you describe J-pop for audiences in America?
Kyary Pamyu Pamyu: First of all, there are many different genres within J-pop. For example, rock and punk idols are very popular. Recently, there have been very few artists who are individually known to the audience, so I’d like to do my best to be known and succeed.

Would you consider your own music J-pop?
Definitely. In J-pop, the music is meant to have a lot of personality. Many of my songs use Japan as a motif. For example, “Ninjyari Ban Ban” and “Furisodeshon” are very Japanese. I think I’m achieving my goal of giving off a “Japanese” feel in my music.

Can you tell me a little bit about your creative team?
There are several people on the Kyary team. Nakata Yasutaka is the producer; he writes the music and lyrics. I trust him with all of this work. Yet, during this process, I offer my ideas during meetings, and he often uses my ideas.

This is your second world tour. How did it come about?
Last time it was very unfortunate that we weren’t able to bring in our set to the site, like we have this time. This helps us express our world view onstage. This time around, we brought our entire set with us, and I hope that the audiences are able to experience the same images we’re able to express on YouTube.

What is the most difficult thing you’ve experienced about this tour?
The most difficult thing is the jet lag. We’re on tour all the time, and the shows are far apart. In America, we’re traveling to three-to-five cities. Then we go to Canada, and then Japan, and then Australia. We’re always jet lagged and sleepy.

What do you do to relax?
I like to go see nature. Even during the world tour, we open our concert around 8PM, so I usually have a lot of free time to go sightseeing and shopping. And I listen to music. My favorite American artists are Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, and Ariana Grande.

Can you tell me what you are most proud of among all the things you’ve done?
I think I’m most proud of the fact that people come to see me at my concerts. Even when I tour domestically in Japan, seeing the happy faces of my audience gives me so much energy. I feel the same during world tours as well. I receive a lot of motivation from my audience.

Where do you see yourself going next?
Kyary Pamyu Pamyu has a lot of childlike qualities. I’d like to include and express some adult sexiness through my music. If there is an opportunity to do so, I’d like to express this "adult-sexiness" worldview through my promotional videos and live concerts.

Kyary's new record, Nanda Collection, is out now, through Warner Music Japan. You can pick up your own copy right here.

Follow Maggie Mustard on Twitter.

Homepage image via Flickr user derek rose

Out of the frothy, weird sea of people typing stuff into Twitter, hardly anyone makes me laugh as often as, or genuinely shocks me more than, Nancy Grace. Thousands upon thousands of wannabe writers and comedians attempt to subvert Twitter’s format and play with surreal connections and black humor, but I doubt anyone has ever topped “I want answers #BoxOfInfants”—a tweet that, like “For sale: baby shoes, never worn,” is a brilliant and complete short story told in the space of a single sentence.

Nancy Grace, for the uninitiated, is a former prosecutor who hosts her self-titled show on HLN, where she becomes furious at the evils that men do four times a week and stops just short of calling for the public execution of criminals. Like any vigilante, she's got a backstory tinged with tragedy: She dreamed of becoming an English teacher until her college fiancé, Keith, was gunned down in front of a convenience store. From that moment on, she pledged that she would devote herself to fighting evil. “I would go to law school, become a prosecutor, and put people in jail who hurt victims like Keith,” she wrote of her life-changing epiphany.

She was really, really good at putting people in jail—she once told Larry King she never lost a case—though she was also later cited for pretty serious ethics violations. She went to television armed with that same zeal for watching people get thrown behind bars and the same disregard for any code of professional conduct.

Grace has attracted an audience by being perpetually outraged at a never-ending stream of nightmarish injustices, but she also essentially assumes everyone accused of a crime is guilty. Even worse, from a journalistic point of view, she occasionally says things that aren’t true, which is why she’s currently being sued for libel. She's also unafraid of dropping all pretext of objectivity in favor of a burn-the-witch passion for seeing someone punished. In 2006, she all but accused Melinda Duckett of murdering her missing son, and Duckett killed herself days later—Grace still aired the interview even after her death. (Duckett's family sued Grace over the incident, and the host settled out of court.)

All that said, if you want to relax after work with a bottle of wine and hear breaking news about trials of alleged child abusers, pedophiles, and wife-killers delivered in the breathless, can-you-believe-it-and-I-haven’t-told-you-the-worst-part-yet tone of an unhinged neighborhood gossip, well, crack open some fucking Chablis and stare into Grace’s unblinking eyes for an hour starting at 8 PM Monday through Thursday. As far as cable news programs go, it could be worse.

On Twitter, though, where Grace’s tweets are disconnected from the context of her show and left to swim in the stream of other, less murder-focused items, they stand out as nuggets of pure insanity:

A group of 3rd-graders were discovered smoking pot in a bathroom of their elementary school. How did this happen?! #PotBust

— Nancy Grace (@NancyGraceHLN) March 7, 2014

A mom-of-3 plows her minivan into the ocean w/her kids inside—2 heard screaming “mommy’s trying to kill us!” We have the video #OceanMom

— Nancy Grace (@NancyGraceHLN) March 6, 2014

Her body was found on the side of the road in a trashbag, just like garbage. Somebody knows something about #Chanel #NGM

— Nancy Grace (@NancyGraceHLN) March 1, 2014

Who would think that you bring home a pet mouse & then you die? #RatBiteFever

— Nancy Grace (@NancyGraceHLN) February 27, 2014

I can hardly cook a pot of macaroni & cheese—so how did this mom allegedly help kill & dismember her hubby’s former lover?! #DismemberedMom

— Nancy Grace (@NancyGraceHLN) January 30, 2014

“It reads like Dr. Suess meets the Zodiac Killer” is how Jeb Lund describes her feed. “I'm not sure if people necessarily even like it; it's just fascinating.” Jeb, who goes by @Mobute on Twitter, is a longtime @NancyGraceHLN devotee who retweets her regularly and used to photoshop Grace’s head onto dunking basketball players' bodies, which should tell you something about what people on the internet think of the HLN host.

I imagine that a lot of the Twitter account's "fans" are like Jeb in that they view @NancyGraceHLN like they view the sensationalized crimes on Nancy Grace, the show—so strange and abhorrent you can't look away.

.@NancyGraceHLN You masturbate to fresh corpses. Murder excites you sexually. Your pupils dilate when you hear of a kidnapping.

— rob delaney (@robdelaney) September 26, 2012

If you don’t consider the actual dead children and burned-alive mothers who form the basis for Grace’s material, her Twitter is laugh-out-loud funny in a pitch-black way. A hashtag like #MurderForPizza jerks the laughter out of you involuntarily, like Anthony Jeselnik's best lines.

It's preferable to look at @NancyGraceHLN as a joke, or more specifically the feed of a Twitter comedian who tells gruesome stories in the character of a ghoulish, paranoid, hashtag-spouting newscaster. If you can't do that—and she is talking about actual people who really were tortured or killed or kidnapped, after all—you can try viewing the account as an expression of some grotesque id lurking under the internet's collective consciousness. It suggests a world where all we want to know about is the depraved, inhuman acts our neighbors could be performing at this very second. We know that this vision of the world as a place of constant, unspeakable cruelty is insane, but we recognize it just enough to laugh at it.

“Not an orgy,” they say! Who wants to go naked to a bouncy-house party? @DrBethanyLive says: “Someone who wants to get laid” #PervyPJParty

— Nancy Grace (@NancyGraceHLN) February 7, 2014

This guy was allegedly masturbating & placing his sperm in all these vials—you know he likely did it more than once a month! #SpermSwap?

— Nancy Grace (@NancyGraceHLN) January 16, 2014

That detached way of looking at the things she tweets runs counter to the spirit they were written in, however. "There's no irony there," Jeb wrote to me in an email. "I've been reading her off and on for three years, and you never catch a wink sneaking through."

It's Nancy Grace herself who's behind the Twitter account's temperament, naturally—that kind of self-serious nuttery can't be faked. A spokesman for the Nancy Grace show (who said the host was unavailable for comment) told me, “Nancy is definitely the driving force behind all her social media accounts and is deliberate in creating content and hashtags that spark conversations for justice.”

By any metric, Grace is adept at using Twitter; she's amassed more than 400,000 followers and practically forces people to talk about her and her show. A 2012 piece on Slacktory praised Grace's Twitter strategy, saying, “The rigorous use of hashtags and pull quotes for every story, the way that social media editorial format is followed strictly with no variations, is an astounding feat in a world where most news organizations are still struggling to identify basic best practices in the social media landscape.” It also said that the account “paints a picture of Nancy Grace as a screaming schizophrenic lunatic,” but that's the price you pay for creating viral content.

Meanwhile, her actual fans—the ones who don't think she's a broken person who parades evil in front of a camera but is occasionally so deranged it's funny—no doubt appreciate her efforts to draw attention to the evil crimes being pepetrated throughout the country.

“Young and hip people like to think that they're the only ones on the internet—that their crazy aunt only sends email forwards about NOBAMA and doesn't have a social media presence. And that's wrong,” Jeb told me. “There are definitely people out there—like, the mom part of the internet—who engage her on this totally sincere level. They thank her and think she's making a difference and that, by retweeting and speaking out, they can too. These are the sorts of people who get an Amber Alert text on their iPhone and immediately look around them to see if they can see the person/car/abductee.”

A child sex predator is on the run after slicing off his ankle monitor! Join the manhunt now #PedophileAlert

— Nancy Grace (@NancyGraceHLN) February 26, 2014

#AmandaBynes was allegedly so high & so addicted to pot that she was bringing in people off the street to help her get high! #Marijuana

— Nancy Grace (@NancyGraceHLN) January 14, 2014

Cops say a 13-yr-old runs over & kills a baby girl—the dad riding shotgun next to her! Was pot to blame? #YoungAndReckless?

— Nancy Grace (@NancyGraceHLN) January 23, 2014

You can, of course, critique Nancy Grace the Twitter feed on the same grounds as Nancy Grace the TV show or Nancy Grace the person. Her insistence that she's "speaking for the victim" or whatnot is undercut by the fact that the victim is often a dead baby who was thrown in a convenience-store trash can. A lot of times, all she's doing is trying to send someone, anyone, to jail.

Sometimes the cases she talks about are famous, but more often than not she's only showing us them because they're profoundly fucked up. Arguably, we don't really need an entire show devoted to telling us that cutting your kids to pieces and throwing the remains in a Walmart bargain bin is wrong. A cynic might go further and suggest that HLN broadcasts Nancy Grace because it's a freakshow of horrific crimes that the network knows a bunch of people will watch in spite of themselves—having Grace as a voice of hectoring morality just makes the program more palatable to the older ladies who will inevitably tune in. 

This precious girl was only 5, allegedly forced to drink soda until she died of acute fluid intoxication & brain swelling! #DrinkTillYouDie

— Nancy Grace (@NancyGraceHLN) February 11, 2014

This mom was carved up like a deer in hunting season #FetusSnatcher?

— Nancy Grace (@NancyGraceHLN) January 31, 2014

How can it be that, in a nice neighborhood, there are children allegedly being put in cages? What kind of country do we live in? #CagedGirl?

— Nancy Grace (@NancyGraceHLN) February 26, 2014

A significant portion of Nancy Grace's Twitter audience exists in a state of knowing cynicism, where a hashtag like #FetusSnatcher could never accompany a serious sentiment. When they're retweeting her for shock value or the bizarrely funny quality of her stuff, they don't care that she's in deadly earnest about everything she does. And I doubt that Grace particularly cares that some of her tweets go viral because people think they're the product of a disturbed mind—in a world full of child diddlers and murderers hiding next door, every little bit of fearmongering helps. 

"If you start with the assumption that Nancy Grace views herself as this moral crusader at the ramparts of civilization, holding back barbarism with the force of her outrage, then everything makes sense," said Jeb. "The hashtags that we laugh at aren't creepily exploitive: They're what happens when a person in media realizes that short, pithy rhyming nicknames for events have a 'stickiness' in readers' minds and help to virally propagate this critical message about law and justice. When Nancy Grace writes '#RatBiteFever,' I'm certain she thinks that she's only helping, and I hope she never stops."

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter, but more importantly, follow Nancy Grace.

On March 8th, thousands gathered in the center of Caracas yet again to protest the food shortages in Venezuela, which they hold the government responsible for. Significantly, the former opposition presidential candidate Henrique Capriles Radonski was rumoured to be in attendance at the demonstration. Meanwhile, violent clashes between police and protesters in Altamira Square have become a nightly event.

@AlexGAMiller

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Vince Li, in 2008. Photo via Flickr user httpoldmaisonblogspotcom.

Anne Marie Hagan is the last person you’d expect to be advocating for the release of Vince Li—the man who decapitated his seatmate on a Greyhound bus in Winnipeg.

It was a sunny Sunday afternoon in 1979 when Ron Ryan, Anne Marie’s next-door-neighbor, barged into her family home in St John’s, Newfoundland and viciously murdered her father, Thomas, delivering 16 blows with an axe. Like Vince Li, Ryan was suffering from a schizophrenic episode, he heard the voice of his dead mother telling him to do it.

Anne Marie, who was 19 at the time, saw the whole thing: the axe marks on both floor and ceiling, and her father’s hand separating from his arm when she knelt beside him on the floor, trying to take his pulse after Ryan ran away.

Like Vince Li, Ryan was found not guilty, by reason of insanity, and he stayed locked in a psychiatric facility until Anne Marie and her family met with him in June 1996.

In spite of what she saw and lived through, Anne Marie came to want one thing for her father’s killer, and now, for Vince Li, too: a second chance. She sees in her father’s story, and now that of Tim McLean, something bright: an opportunity for Canadians to learn about mental illness and the potential for those who suffer from it to recover. Really, she’s one of few anti-hate, "let’s-not-discriminate" voices that are drowning in the company of those who want Vince Li, the greyhound bus beheader/cannibal, to stay locked up forever.   

When I wrote about Vince Li’s upcoming release, hundreds of readers’ comments poured in on the original VICE story and our post about it on VICE’s Facebook page. They ranged from “deport this fucking lunatic,” to “just shoot him in the head!” There were, of course, comments expressing that we, the public, are gravely misinformed about mental illness, but the aforementioned ‘get rid of him’ types seemed to outnumber the others. And that’s the trend when it comes to the Vince Li story on every comment section from the Winnipeg Free Press to The Huffington Post.

While politicians have not outright said we should send Vince Li back to China (probably because he’s been a citizen since 2006) or keep him locked up forever and beyond in Canada, the recent scuffle between the federal government and the province of Manitoba suggests some are not happy with the idea of reintegrating him into society. Manitoba MP Shelly Glover called the decision to allow Vince Li unescorted passes to the Selkirk, Manitoba community “wrong” in this statement.

At the heart of this polarizing issue is the idea of people with mental illness, like Vince Li, being not criminally responsible (NCR) for their actions.  Right now, the Conservative government is trying to make it tougher for people with mental illness to be released from psychiatric care through the Not Criminally Responsible Reform Act. The Harper government introduced the act in February 2013 under the name Bill C-54. It passed in the House of Commons in June, and was reinstated as Bill C-14 last November. The bill is now under review in the Senate.

Anne Marie is opposing the Bill, and the changes it will create in the Criminal Code. She says it’s a “sneaky” way for policy makers to keep the mentally-ill-turned-mentally-well locked up for as long as possible (more on that later).

I called up Anne Marie to talk about Vince Li, how she ever found it possible to forgive the man who murdered her father, and what we can learn from her experience. Here’s what she had to say.

VICE: In a column published in the King’s County Register/Advertiser, you are quoted as saying “I was absolutely determined that this man [Ron Ryan] would never, ever regain his freedom.” What did Ryan’s imprisonment mean to you when you felt that way? 
Anne Marie Hagan: In 1979, I had no concept of violence. I felt protected in the world. If he got out, to me what they were saying was that what happened to us didn’t count. My father didn’t count.

There has been a lot of resistance to the news of Vince Li getting released. One point that comes up is that Li’s been in the hospital for only six years. What are your thoughts on that, considering Ron Ryan was in hospital for almost 17 years?
You can’t compare them in terms of length of time. It depends on how the patient responds to treatment and medication. Back in 1979 when Mr. Ryan went in, the medications weren’t what they are now. Today they work far better at treating the symptoms of schizophrenia.

When the psychiatrists, in Mr. Li’s case, went to the Manitoba Board of Review and recommended more freedom, what everybody seems to forget is he’s been observed now by psychiatrists for almost six years. When a psychiatrist goes to these review boards and recommends more freedom, that doesn’t happen lightly. Think of it another way: This is a career-ender for a doctor. When you’re the psychiatrist who’s recommending that Vince Li get more freedom, you can’t afford to be wrong.

I became educated about schizophrenia and the fact that it’s a completely treatable condition; that recovery is possible and happens to all kinds of people. We all know people who suffer from schizophrenia, we just don’t know who they are. With the proper treatment and medication, they’re functioning well in society.

Another point of concern when it comes to Li’s release is possible recidivism. Did you worry about Ron Ryan hurting someone else after he was released?
Before I was educated about schizophrenia, yes.

You see, part of it, and I hear some of this through some of Tim McLean’s mother’s comments, is being concerned that the person found NCR will hurt someone else. As a victim, I felt that was my responsibility; I knew what Ron Ryan was really capable of so I had to work to make sure that he stayed locked up. That was the only way to be certain he wouldn’t do it again. The recidivism rate is less than eight percent for people who are found not criminally responsible. We can’t lock people up indefinitely on “maybe.” This is Canada.

What’s happened with the minister of public safety, Steven Blaney, who was unhappy with the decision and said it was an insult to the family and Tim McLean, well how does Blaney know? What are his qualifications? How much time did he spend interviewing Mr. Li? All these people are making this political. It’s cruel. They’re missing the opportunity to remind Canadians that mental illness is treatable. They’re missing the opportunity to point out that this happened as a result of an illness. I didn’t hear all these politicians making comments when Karla Homolka was released. I didn’t hear them saying “be careful, other young kids could be at risk.” Now I’m not saying she shouldn’t have gotten out, I’m saying you didn’t get the same reaction.

Making this issue a political football is contributing to public fear. And the way I see it, it puts Mr. Li more at risk for physical harm when he’s out.

What happened with Ron Ryan was that, in getting out, he was really concerned. He wanted to go to his doctor and take his medication because he knew what was possible if things went wrong. He’s been out for almost 18 years. He’s a model citizen, he’s rebuilt his life, he works, and he does post-secondary education. He’s a law-abiding, productive member of society.

Do you keep in touch with him?
I haven’t talked to him in about two years. Every time he would see me he would say “I’m so sorry,” and I’d always say “Ron, we forgive you. You have to forgive yourself.”

A screenshot of Anne Marie Hagan's website. 

Do you think people are right to be concerned about Vince Li reoffending? Why or why not?
Sure, it’s natural. First of all, this crime was so brutal and there were witnesses. That makes the situation more sensational. But what the concern shows is a lack of understanding about mental illness.

Take us back to how you came to the decision to forgive Ron Ryan. What was that process like?
To begin, I was absolutely furious that Mr. Ryan had the comfort of a hospital. I knew that in time, he would respond to the medication. I knew eventually they would try to release him. The thing was, I had to be ready. I was also on high alert because it’s always on your mind. It becomes the filter through which you see the world. I became a very angry, nasty, negative person. Nobody else’s pain mattered; if your suffering did not involve an axe it was inferior to mine.

I get a call that they’re going to release him. I called a family friend, a lawyer, within two days I had a letter written to the premier of Newfoundland and Labrador. Two days after that I get a call from a justice official. So in an attempt to put out a fire, if you like, the justice official asked “Would you like to meet with Ron and his doctor?” Well, I didn’t... but it was the perfect opportunity to sabotage his release.

My mother was never against Ron, by the way. In the driveway the day he killed my father, as we were waiting for the ambulance, she said, "Poor Ronnie. He’s somebody’s child.” As the years went by, I thought she was too weak to hate. My sisters were against him, but not the way I was. My intention was to incite public fear, just what’s happening out in Manitoba with the Vince Li case.

My mother, my two sisters, and I met Ron Ryan on June 7, ’96. I had become an aunt, and I had two nieces. Emily had just turned four the week before. I lived nearby Emily, and I’ve never had children, so Emily and I were close. She was an old soul.

I’m in the meeting, at the end of the table, and I’ve got the autopsy report by my left hand. I absolutely believed Mr. Ryan would not remember any of the incident because he was so psychotic. The other thing was, I never believed that my father was afraid to die. It sounds contradictory because how can you be axed to death and not frightened to die? But my reasons were my father never cried or screamed. He had enough presence of mind as he was staggering out of the kitchen, down the hallway, to stop, look over his shoulder, and call my younger sister by name, telling me to save her.

So in the meeting, the door opens, and in Ron walks. The doctor starts to talk about how new medications were released in the early 1990s, he’s been responding well. So, then Ron starts to talk. He begins by saying “I’m very sorry. What I did to your lives was terrible. I was a very sick man.”

Then Ron starts to talk about his life. He tells us he was four when his mother died, and his memory of it was her laid out on a table in the parlor, and him and his little brother, who was three, were tickling her feet, trying to wake her up. Automatically I thought of [my niece], Emily. I started to think about how much I loved Emily. How I’d never turn my back on Emily, how I’d always stand by Emily. Then I started to think about Ron Ryan: You’re four when you lose your mother. You develop mental illness when you’re 20. You become schizophrenic, you murder someone, then he’s sitting in front of me at 47 looking for a chance. Really, it’s his first chance. He hasn’t had much of a chance in life, and who am I to take it?

I said to him, “Do you remember killing my father?” “Oh yes,” he said. “But Tom wasn’t frightened to die.” I said “why do you say that?” He said “I could tell by how he was looking at me when I was chopping him.” Right away, I understood what he was living with every day.

Tell me about the point when you actually decided to forgive him.
Ron remembered how he left my father for me to find.

My father was face up, eyes open. His neck was hanging open, there were 16 axe cuts with seven to the neck and face. I picked up his left hand to take a pulse, and the hand started to separate from his arm. There were axe marks on the floor all around him, the ceiling was covered in axe marks too, and blood.

In the meeting, Ron starts to cry, saying: “I’m to blame, I’m to blame.” I couldn’t take it anymore, and I thought of Emily. So I went around the table, hugged him, told him I forgave him.

Do you think the family of Tim McLean, Vince Li’s victim, would benefit from forgiving Li the way that you forgave Ryan?
It’s not a matter of benefit, and I’m not saying that anyone should forgive. Right now, in my experience, it’s a little early for that with regards to Tim McLean’s family. But a way that might be able to give another perspective is what if the situation were reversed? What if Tim McLean had killed Vince Li? What if Tim McLean had been suffering from schizophrenia?

Do you think Vince Li deserves the same second chance as Ron Ryan?
Absolutely. We all deserve second chances, don’t we? What are we going to do, are we going to throw everybody away? Yes, public safety is paramount. I agree. But just because Mr. Li’s crime was as brutal as it was, doesn’t mean that he’s predisposed to violence. It doesn’t mean he’s any more likely to kill again than you or I. He’s getting the help he needs. With mental illness, we stigmatize, we ridicule. We see it as a character flaw, a weakness.

Why do you think the Canadian public is so resistant to the release of Vince Li? What do you think they could learn from your experience?
I think the graphic nature of the crime and the fact that there were witnesses [contributes to the outcry]. This was like a Halloween movie, when you get a beheading and cannibalism. People need to calm down, and slow down and say, “Hang on, he’s gotten help.”

People like me have incredible power in these stories, and as we go, usually so goes the world. If I’ve forgiven Ron, and I don’t have one thing against him, it’s pretty hard for others to have it.

The McLean family, maybe with time, has a fantastic opportunity to help educate Canadians about mental illness. There’s an opportunity here for good to come of this. When I forgave Ron, I realized nothing had changed. All the time I’d been consumed with hate and revenge, my father was still dead. I see Ron as this beautiful bright spot in a midst of devastation. He’s a testament to the strength of the human spirit, having rebuilt his life. If he had continued to be detained because of my need for revenge and hatred, who was that helping?He’s proof that when a person with schizophrenia is getting the proper medication, the proper help, they can lead a productive life.

What was the public’s reaction to the release of Ron Ryan?
Very little. I don’t remember any negative reaction. In 1996, we didn’t have the mass media. I doubt it was even noted anywhere else in the country.

If Bill C-14 passes, those found by the court to be high-risk NCR could potentially have their review periods extended up to three years. Additionally, those designated high-risk NCR would be held in custody and not considered for release by a review board until that designation is revoked by the court. Why are you opposing this?
It’s a really sneaky way to delay the possible release [of those found NCR for a crime]. If you’re making progress, things are well, and you’re stable, but you’re being reviewed every three years, that means you’re going to be kept longer, even if you’re well. It’s an underhanded way that policy makers are using to do it through the back door.

Also, the designation of high-risk NCR seems to be something that will be attached to someone who is not criminally responsible for a crime of a brutal nature. Right away, they seem to be saying that if you commit a crime of a brutal nature you’re more likely to commit another crime of a brutal nature. They’re connecting the nature of the crime to the likelihood of brutal crime and that’s discrimination. They’re reinforcing the stigma of mental illness by making people unnecessarily afraid of the mentally ill. Mental illness itself is being treated as a crime.

How do you explain mental illness to those who think the Selkirk Mental Health Centre should lock Li up and throw away the key?
What we need here is education. When a person develops psychosis and their actions are affected, it doesn’t mean their brain is damaged. The [mentality that Vince Li should never get out] is an exaggeration of the way mental illness is perceived by most people in society. Vince Li needs help. He needs understanding and acceptance.

Also, the Crown, [Susan Helenchilde], did not oppose Mr. Li getting extra freedom because she was satisfied with the medical evidence that Mr. Li will not pose a risk. There was no ambiguity; the team of psychiatrists and the Crown were unanimous in their decision.

What part of mental illness do you think the public has trouble grasping?
I think they have trouble grasping a lot. The biggest problem for the public is what if Mr. Li was their brother, son, or nephew? Mental illness takes us out of our comfort zone and causes fear because the only requirement to become mentally ill is to have a brain. If you suddenly become mentally sick, unless I blame it on you, unless it’s a character flaw—that means suddenly I could become mentally sick, too.

@kristy__hoffamn

In part four, Ed finds himself out of work and in the depths of an uninspired era for skateboarding. But out of the dregs of the 90s came Ed's ambition to strike out on his own and found a scrappy company called Toy Machine.

He ended up producing Welcome to Hell, the video that would cement his legacy. Check it out.

The Igreja Cristã Contemporânea (Contemporary Christian Church), Rio de Janeiro

What do a young gay Brazilians do when they’re devoted to God but told by their church that enjoying physical intimacy with people of the same sex is an express ticket to hell? If they’re Marcos Gladstone, they fight back against the bigotry by founding their own, homophobia-free, congregation.

Today, Marcos’s Igreja Cristã Contemporânea (Contemporary Christian Church) is firmly established in Rio de Janeiro, taking a “Bible-without-prejudice” approach to sermons and advocating old-timey family values to a growing group of Brazilian gays.

My first encounter with Marcos’s house of worship was an ad on the inside of Rio’s premier gay magazine, nestled next to rent boy ads and phone numbers that supposedly offered home deliveries of Viagra. “That’s our gay church,” said my friend. “They’re really pissing off mainstream Christians.”

A few days later, I'm surrounded by an ecstatic crowd belting out religious anthems at one of Marcos’s services. So far, everything is as it should be at a celebration of God. There are the rousing anthems about mastering life with the aid of the Almighty, lots of clapping, tears and quivering lips, sermons about traditional holy stuff like gratitude, various interjections (“Amen!” “That’s what I’m talking about!” “Oh yeah, baby!”), and credit-card machines on the literature table.

All of this surely pleases the Creator, but what would He make of the two men singing arm in arm? Or the distinctly butch female lead singer? Or Marcos himself, who shares his bed with a partner of the same gender?

"God loves all of us equally—he holds no prejudice,” Marcos told me in his office. Dressed in a smart suit, the 37-year-old looks every inch the successful lawyer, which he is. "What the Bible condemns is sinful behavior, such as drunkenness, drug-taking, and promiscuity. But for a man to love another man and be faithful to him—or a woman to love another woman and be faithful to her—is not a sin in the eyes of the Lord. You can read all about it in our pamphlet, 'The Bible Without Prejudice.'"

“But isn't it a bit deluded to bend the good book to your will?” I ask. “Why not just admit that more or less all religions are homophobic?”

Pastor Marcos has his answer ready. "The Bible isn't homophobic, in the same way that it isn't racist or misogynistic," he says. "In the past, the Bible was used to justify slavery and the oppression of women—but we don't read the Bible that way anymore. And when it comes to gays and lesbians, it's time to stop pretending that the Bible is homophobic, because it isn't—it only condemns promiscuity, regardless of sexual orientation."

Pastor Marcos

If that's the truth, it seems that a great many of Marcos’s brothers and sisters in Christ haven’t realized it yet. While the Vatican might have softened its line slightly since Pope Francis was elected last year, most Evangelical churches still take an uncompromising stance.

"Other Evangelical churches say that we are of the devil,” says Marcos. “They’re so worked up about us that we had to start hiring security at some of our services. But this won't deflect me [from my mission]; it's a pleasure suffering for this cause."

Pastor Marcos speaks quietly and gently, always with a little smile around his lips. "Lots of gay people have been hurt—hurt by their families, hurt by society, hurt by the church,” he says. “We are here to heal them with the love of God. Too often, gay people have no values—they only think of hedonism. Here, we offer an alternative vision. We advocate family values: gay marriage and gay adoption."

I ask if that means no sex before marriage.

"Of course not,” he replies, smiling, hardly letting me finish the question. "Sex outside marriage is totally fine. You can't expect to marry someone with whom you haven't got that intimate bond."

And what about open relationships—are they legit?

"For us," he answers, "what isn't condemned by God is a relationship of love and fidelity between only two people, whether they are of the same sex or not."

Pastor Marcos has married his husband four times already, re-tying the knot as soon as any upgraded gay marriage legislature is passed in Brazil. Together, they’ve adopted two sons, Felipe, ten, and Daveson, 11.

"It's easy for gay people to adopt in Brazil, but people only want White babies,” he says. “Kids of color, and even White kids older than two, stay on the shelf. So we gay people have a lot to give."

Aside from promoting adoption and giving parenting advice, the church also works with an orphanage for HIV-positive kids, a nursing home, and a local favela. But the pastor and his followers still have a long way to go before Brazilian society fully accepts lesbians and gays. This January, for example, 17-year-old Kaique Batista dos Santos was murdered for being gay. Despite the fact he’d had his teeth pulled out with pliers, authorities allegedly first recorded the incident as a suicide.

Meanwhile, in Brazilian parliament, an Evangelical congressman is advocating a "gay cure" paid for by the government. His reasoning is that being gay is an illness, and that everybody should have a right to treatment—to become healthy and straight.

"We too have a gay cure,” says Alberto Dias Lemos, a worshipper at Marcos's church.. "It's called love."

As I leave the congregation and head for the local gay bar, I can't help thinking how much I'd hate it if Pastor Marcos's vision of conventional Christian morality for homosexuals took over completely. But in a world of gay-hating skinheads with pliers and homophobic preachers calling for gays to be “cured,” I thank the Lord that he's around.

The MiningWatchCanada logo, via Facebook.

The Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC), which represents the exploration side of the mining industry, invited MiningWatch Canada, a mining activism network, to speak at its biggest event of the year. The PDAC convention, which wrapped up in Toronto last week, is the self-proclaimed largest mineral event in the world and draws executives from the world's biggest mining companies, not to mention Prime Minister Stephen Harper. And while the invitation may seem like a small gesture in the larger scheme of things, it's a sign of an industry that has been licking its wounds.

Money is tight in the exploration sector right now, and any hiccup in a new project—like local opposition—could spell disaster for a junior mining company. That's putting local community groups on mining executives' radar, right alongside fund managers and bankers, and it’s forcing some mining companies to show how much value they bring to communities.

The Canadian mining industry is using two tactics to prove its economic worth. First, it's asking the Canadian government to make it mandatory for companies to disclose how much they pay foreign governments for mining rights. And second, more companies say they are buying goods and services locally, thus keeping a greater share of mining profits inside the country.

Their efforts to be seen as the good guys probably won't affect how mines operate on the ground. But it does signal a massive turning of the tables: After two decades of activists crying out against the shitty behaviour of mining companies, many in the industry now realize that the onus is on them to prove that they deserve to have access to the world's minerals. It turns out, publishing a glossy reports on their environmental standards just isn't cutting it anymore.

VICE reported last week that a Canadian junior exploration company called Radius Gold Inc.,a Canadian company based in Vancouver, and Kappes, Cassiday & Associates, a larger extraction company based in Reno, Nevada, have been trying and failing to get gold out from under a Guatemalan community since 2000.

Last November, the Chilean government suspended the El Morro mine owned by GoldCorp Inc. for not adequately consulting with indigenous groups. A few weeks later, Barrick Gold voluntarily suspended its $8.5 billion (US) mine, which stretches across the Chilean Andes and into Argentina after it was fined $16 million by the Chilean government for not building a water management system that was needed to prevent water contamination around the mine.

And for the first time, a mining company HudBay Minerals Inc. will be tried before a Canadian court for their alleged involvement in gang-rapes, injuries and deaths committed in a foreign country, again in Guatemala.

So it's not surprising that the Canadian mining industry is doing everything it can to create stability and improve the public's perception of mines, even if that means (god forbid) working with civil society. The Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) teamed up with the Mining Association of Canada and two non-profits—Publish What You Pay Canada and the Revenue Watch Institute—earlier this year to publish a set of recommendations that would make it mandatory for mining companies listed on Canadian stock exchanges to disclose how much they pay foreign governments.

The industry thinks that if people can see how much money they give to foreign governments for mining rights, then communities will be more likely to ask their governments for a greater share of the profits rather than the companies themselves.

Joe Oliver, Canada's natural resources minister, told mining executives at the PDAC convention last week that the federal government will encourage the provincial securities regulators to make a rule that will require Canadian mining companies to publish how much they pay all levels of governments for each of their projects on their company websites.  The regulators will have until April 1, 2015 to come up with a rule, otherwise the federal government will move forward with its own legislation.

Another way that the Canadian mining industry is trying to show its economic worth is by keeping as much of their spending inside the host country as possible. The number of Canadian mining companies that reported an official plan to buy goods and services from local vendors tripled from three in 2011 to 12 the following year, says a report by Engineers Without Borders published last month. 

The report says this sudden interest in buying local shows that corporate social responsibility may be moving away from basic harm prevention towards harnessing the potential for business to improve society (what else were business supposed to be doing this whole time?). While that may be the case, it is also a way to “dampen hostility” to new mining projects, as the Financial Post put it last week.

The success of the junior exploration sector depends on three things: access to capital, access to land and the social license to operate, says Ross Gallinger, Executive Director of PDAC.

Initiatives like disclosing payments and buying locally are obviously intended to address the third one, but Gallinger says, all three are interconnected. “If you're not operating ethically, legally, it's going to be another [factor] in terms of minimizing your access to capital.”

And according to Gallinger, the junior sector's inability to access capital is their biggest concern right now. Everything else is secondary to finding money for exploration, he says.

According to Ken Green, author of the Fraser Institute's 2013 Survey of Mining Companies, which measures which parts of the world are the most hospitable to mining, there just isn't as much money floating around for new mining projects these days. This is partly due to the downturn of the global economy, the softness of commodity prices and slow economic growth in the United States, he says.

“When the sector was booming, we didn't worry about the access to capital, it just came,” says Gallinger.

Now that money is tight, investors want more certainty. But that's hard to do in a business that has such a long wait time between finding a mineral deposit and actually getting that deposit out of the ground—a lot can go wrong in between, says Green.

“Investors are far more savvy these days...They're going to look for a variety of things, not just that you have this fabulous ore body, but who you are as a company and your track record with executing projects and interacting with communities because that can affect what happens next,” says Gallinger.


@iamrenders

Editor's note: Earlier this week, we ran a story about social clubs that hang out in Disneyland. We continue to find the phenomenon fascinating, and so when photographer Joshua Cobos sent us some photos he took while documenting the posses, gangs, and packs over the past couple months, we felt compelled to post them.

It would be a stretch to call them gangs. With names like Main Street Elite, Disney's Villains, Disney's Resort Imbeciles, Turbo Jugend Disneyland, and Mickey's Pink Ladies, I'm pretty sure no one sees them as a threat. After all, they're just friends (mostly adults) who want to hang out with like-minded people at a theme park a couple times a month.

I'm all for doing whatever you damn please in our great country, especially at an American institution like Disneyland. I just can't shake the feeling that some of these people—the ones who hand-crafted their jackets, carefully sewed on their patches, and meticulously curated their lapel flair—are merely poor souls who just want to belong to something. 

It's probably safe to assume they got recruited the same way little homies get down with MS-13. But I guess, instead of jumping its initiates and coercing them into first-degree murder, Main Street Elite probably just tickles the shit out of them and makes them ride Space Mountain (or whatever) until they blow chunks.

But hey, good for you, man. You're your star player, and you should do whatever makes you happy. Even if you have to drown out the voice inside your head that keeps asking, What the fuck has my life become?

Voguing is an urban dance inspired by model poses in the pages of Vogue, where dancers gather to compete in Voguing "battles." Following its creation in 1980s New York, the movement has spread to France, thanks to the success of singers like Madonna, Lady Gaga, and Beyonce.

Paris-based Lasseindra is one of the main drag queen leaders of the movement. She started competing in dance battles and organizing competitions at a young age. She was quickly recruited by House of Ninja, one of the most famous Voguing collectives.

VICE met with Lasseindra to talk about being black, a drag queen, and a Voguing superstar.