​Anyone who has walked past the shirtless Adonis's posted like sentries outside a lower Manhattan Hollister store can see how the commoditized male figure is a kind of flypaper for commerce—but rarely has it found a place in the realm of civic engagement. That is, until last week, when Cosmopolitan magazine announced that they would be sending a #Cosmovotes party bus filled with "snacks, swag, and shirtless male models" to transport young voters at North Carolina State University in Raleigh to off-campus polling sites. A sophomore in the school's student government had entered and won the Cosmo competition. "This election is not a light matter here in NC," he ​wrote, "The weight is on the students of N.C. State."

The announcement was met with the requisite round of commentary and moral scolding on the Internet, mostly from the Right. The National Review ran a ​piece called "Nine Insulting Ways Cosmo Is Trying To Get Women To Vote" with lazy critiques about how the magazine was using lowest common denominator pop culture tactics to motivate female Democratic voters. Of course, using sex and bodies to sell a bankrupt system of electoral politics is sad, but no one can accuse Cosmo of not being realpolitik. Besides, women's bodies have been used to "rock the vote" at least since Madonna's 1990 PSA on MTV.

It's unclear whether Cosmopolitan knew how much their bus was genuinely needed. This year, N.C. State's on-campus voting site abruptly disappeared, along with on-campus polling at three other North Carolina universities—Duke, East Carolina University, and UNC-Charlotte—in what voting rights activists allege is a purposeful effort to diminish turnout among young voters. Early voting at historically black colleges like Winston Salem University was also eliminated. Earlier this fall, a Republican-stacked county board of elections in Boone, North Carolina, attempted to get rid of early voting at Appalachian State University, although the scheme—an apparent effort to diminish the youth vote—was overturned by a state judge just in time for the election, in late October.

[body_image width='2000' height='1446' path='images/content-images/2014/11/05/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/05/' filename='election-day-cosmo-male-models-get-out-the-vote-115-body-image-1415213903.jpg' id='1515']

Cosmo models get out the vote. 

North Carolina has become a battleground for a kind of national voting rights struggle not seen since the Civil Rights era. In 2013, the state's Republican-controlled General Assembly passed what is widely considered one of the most suppressive voting laws in the country. Among the provisions: early voting was reduced from 17 days to 10 days; same day registration was eliminated; and out-of-precinct votes could no longer be counted. In 2016, voters will be required to show state-issued identification at the polls, although that provision is currently being challenged in court.

Opponents claim that the voting law was an attempt to disenfranchise an increasingly Democratic electorate, noting that extended early voting and same-day registration had dramatically increased turnout in recent elections, before the new measures were passed. "It's clear it's a statewide effort to disenfranchise young people and people of color," said Bryan Perlmutter, the director of IGNITE NC, a student voting rights initiative founded in 2013 in response to the law's passage.​

In the meantime, there was mass confusion over the changes in the 2014 elections. Groups like IGNITE, the NAACP, the AFL-CIO, and North Carolina's Moral Monday movement spent the summer conducting voter registration and information drives, attempting to counteract the law's potential effect on turnout.​​

On Election Day, none those groups were out in N.C. State's Wolf Plaza, helping students get to their new polling precinct—a small church hidden deep in a neighborhood a mile from campus. But Cosmopolitan was there, "meeting the people where they were at," as the Communists used to say. And where they were at was trying to eat free roast beef sandwiches and take pictures of themselves nuzzled up against hunks in "Voting is Sexy" tank tops.

"There were supposed to be shirtless guys on the bus. I've heard a lot of disappointed girls saying there were supposed to be shirtless guys," Chanell Bryant, a senior, told me. Regardless, packs of coeds waited for the strobe-lit buses, which looked suspiciously like rented airport rental car shuttles, to pull up, blasting Shakira (Como se llama (si) bonita (si) mi casa (Shakira Shakira).) As one might imagine, a midday party bus without kind of kills the illusion, but the two or three male models onboard did their best to keep the vibe upbeat, dancing around with maracas and tamborines. "Voting is kind of a tedious thing sometime. But this made it really fun and engaging," one rider, a sophomore, told me.

[body_image width='2000' height='1596' path='images/content-images/2014/11/05/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/05/' filename='election-day-cosmo-male-models-get-out-the-vote-115-body-image-1415214006.jpg' id='1516']

N.C. state students performing their civic duty. 

At the Freedom Temple Church polling site, a student named Alyssa Reise told me she had heard about a lot of students who had come out on the bus only to find out that they could only vote in the precinct if they lived on campus. " I think getting rid of the campus polling place has confused a lot of people," she said. One volunteer poll monitor at the site said, "One thing that we've heard from almost everyone we've talked to is that students are disappointed they can't have a place on campus where they can vote anymore. A lot of them don't have easy transportation and so they don't come here."

Even with the party bus, student turnout at N.C. State seemed low, and Cosmo's "voting is sexy" approach seemed strained, at best. In the end, North Carolina Republican Senate candidate Thom Tillis pulled off a narrow victory Tuesday, helping the GOP gain the Senate majority, while his party maintained control of North Carolina's state legislature. Doubtless, much hand-wringing analysis of the effect of the early voting changes on turnout will come. "The effort by the state as a whole to educate the public about this new voting law and the changes has been inadequate," Perlmutter told me.

A spokesman for N.C. State University said that he wasn't sure why the Wake County board of elections had chosen to remove the on-campus polling site. Wake County Board of Elections did not return a phone call asking about the N.C. State University polling site. "The message to young voters is that they have a lot of potential to sway outcomes here. When you have a burgeoning powerful voice, people try to silence that," said Allison Riggs, senior voting rights attorney at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice.

On Sunday, rebels in eastern Ukraine held their first ever elections, voting for the incumbent leader Alexander Zakharchenko to continue to run the territory under separatist control.

With few observers present to verify the fairness of the voting, which itself was hastily organized, the election wasn't widely recognized. Russia was the only major power to recognize the vote as legitimate, while Ukraine and its allies in the West declared the poll to be a violation of a negotiated agreement reached in Minsk.

VICE News correspondent Simon Ostrovsky spoke with the rebel leader Zakharchenko as he cast his vote in Donetsk, and visited polling stations across the country's war-torn east to find out what elections look like in a breakaway republic.​

In a super creepy The Den ​kind of way, photos of a naked, strangled woman began appearing on the increasingly controversial Internet forum 4Chan Tuesday afternoon, just half an hour before her dead body was discovered by family members. The victim, who the Smoking Gun has ​identified as 30-year-old mother of four Amber Lynn Schraw, was found in her apartment in Port Orchard, Washington.

The chief suspect behind the murder, ​according to Portland, Oregon police, is 33-year-old David Kalac. According to screenshots taken of the since-removed 4Chan thread, he posted an eerily prescient message along with graphic images of the victim with red strangulation marks around her neck.

"Check the news for Port Orchard Washington in a few hours," Kalac apparently wrote. "Her son will be home from school soon. He'll find her, then call the cops. I just wanted to share the pics before they find me. I bought a BB gun that looks realistic enough. When they come, I'll pull it and it will be suicide by cop. I understand the doubts. Just check the fucking news. I have to lose my phone now."

He added, "Turns out it's way harder to strangle someone to death than it looks on the movies. She fought so damn hard."

A neighbor who lives in the same duplex was interviewed by KOMO N​ew​s, but did not hear or see anything. "You can hear everything in these apartments. You can hear people's TVs—everything—and no fighting. I mean, I didn't see her too often. I saw [her husband or boyfriend] more than I saw her. So I think she really stuck to herself." 

The victim, confirmed by cops to be in her 30s, moved in with her partner roughly a month ago. The 4Chan thread was posted just before 3 PM on Tuesday, and 9-1-1 was called about half an hour later. Port Orchard Deputy Scott Wilson confirmed to media outlets that her body was, in fact, found by family members. Wilson suggested the homicide case was not the result of a random assault, and that police are taking the case seriously, assigning extra personnel. The exact cause of death is also yet to be determined.

This latest 4Chan incident comes just a few weeks after the popular internet forum made headlines for its ​central role in that heinous spree of privacy invasion known as the Fappening. If nothing else, anonymous discussion boards like 4Chan seem to encourage desperate attempts to seize internet infamy.

Kalac reportedly fled in the victim's gold 2001 Ford Focus with license plate number 495YLY around 1 AM Wednesday. Police gave chase but lost him, and Kalac is believed to be in the Portland area.

Follow Kristen Yoonsoon Kim on Tw​it​ter​.

Illustrations by D​an Evans

This post originally appeared on VICE UK

I work in a gray concrete office block in North London. On the first floor of that office block are the gents' toilets, where three urinals stand shoulder-to-shoulder all day long, swallowing liters of caffeinated piss.

Over the past few months I've felt increasingly empathetic towards these silent ceramic soldiers, these Armitage ranks. Because I, too, am showered with piss every day. I get home and I stink of it. It's in my hair and in my nose and on my skin and beneath my fingertips and under my eyelids and... everywhere. It's just everywhere. 

But—as you may be pleased to learn (or maybe not; I can't imagine you're that emotionally invested in me at this stage)—the piss I'm showered with doesn't flow from the dicks of my colleagues, but their mouths. And it's not really piss; it's words. Office words. Words like " deliverables," "upskill," and "learnings." Bilious conjoined twins of acidic gibberish like "drill-down," "value-add," and "catch-up." Wretch-inducing parcels of email Polyfila like "moving forward," "enablers and barriers," and "quick wins."

If you've ever worked in an office, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.

But where did this bizarre language actually come from? Why didn't we banish the first sociopaths who force-fed us phrases like "boil the ocean" and "open the kimono"? And why is every office in the Western world now infested with people who use them? People who mostly seem alright—who have a sibling, or a dog, or a Sky Sports subscription: normal person stuff—but insist on talking like lobotomized middle managers?

I was reading Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct when I first thought about this. Because somewhere in there he describes the creation of pidgin languages—rough patchwork dialects that develop among peoples of different origins who've all been thrown together in one place (the multinational slaves of America's sugar plantations, for example). With that in mind, could office-speak therefore be a kind of pidgin that developed organically to fill what was once a language vacuum?

As our industrial economy gave way to the brittle knowledge economy—as the first bewildered office pioneers trekked in from the factory floor, swapping their Dickies for T.M. Lewin—they needed a means to communicate with each other. 

The vocabulary they brought with them wasn't equipped for this new environment. They couldn't negotiate the early morning rush for workspace ("hot-desking"), or describe the amount of downtime tedium ("capacity") they now had, or needlessly quantify completely abstract concepts ("operationalize"). So they cut and pasted words and phrases from other reference points—from sport ("heads up," "ballpark figure," "touch base:), from literature ("swallow the frog") and mysticism ("blue-sky thinking")—in order to make sense of their confusing new world.

Really, though, this isn't a satisfactory explanation at all. Language is the means by which the pinball thoughts we have bouncing around our heads are ordered, arranged and deposited into the minds of others. And by this definition, office-speak is not a language or even a pidgin; it's essentially an anti-language. 

Let's consider the following, which is the first paragraph from a real email I have received:

I've started thinking about our direction of travel under a number of key areas, keeping in mind that our long term ambitions could really be articulated around increasing reach, engagement, income and, importantly, impact through creative, compelling, resonant articulation of our work.

Have any thoughts formed in your head after reading that? I doubt it. I know the context of this email. I know who wrote it and why they wrote it and when they wrote it. But reading it now, over and over again, no thoughts arrive in my head. None.

So office-speak is not language. It's not even jargon, but more a verbal argon—inert strings of sounds or symbols used to confuse underlings, to deliberately bore them and keep them servile. 

I'm not the only person who hates office-speak. Most people I've sat next to in offices hate it. I'd hope you hate it, too. So if most people hate office-speak, how did it spread so quickly and so far?

To explain this, I think it helps to think of office-speak as a meme. In the true sense of the word (first described by genius biologist / idiot theologian Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene), memes are the "genes of culture", powerful concepts passed between our minds and down through generations, broadly staying the same, but subtly changing and evolving in response to the shifting sands of the cultural milieu.

Classic examples of memes are the concepts of God, or catchy songs. Pictures of Kanye looking sad in short-shorts and a red helmet that doesn't really fit him may be hilarious and everything, but they're not really memes in the strictest sense.

Richard Dawkins in 2008. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

As I've been at pains to point out, office-speak is a very bad thing. It opposes productivity and obstructs meaning. But that doesn't stop it being a powerful meme. Evolution is blind and can actually encourage the development of characteristics that appear intuitively burdensome. Dawkins describes evolution's ability to create seemingly bizarre animal characteristics in one of the most captivating sections of The Selfish Gene:

Extravagances such as the tails of male birds of paradise may have evolved by a kind of unstable, runaway process. In the early days, a slightly longer tail than usual may have been selected by females as a desirable quality in males, perhaps because it betokened a fit and healthy constitution. A short tail on a male might have been an indicator of some vitamin deficiency—evidence of poor food-getting ability. Or perhaps short-tailed males were not very good at running away from predators, and so had had their tails bitten off.

Anyway, for whatever reason, let us suppose that females in the ancestral bird of paradise species preferentially went for males with longer than average tails.

Females followed a simple rule: look all the males over, and go for the one with the longest tail. Any female who departed from this rule was penalized, even if tails had already become so long that they actually encumbered males possessing them. This was because any female who did not produce long-tailed sons had little chance of one of her sons being regarded as attractive. Like a fashion in women's clothes, or in American car design, the trend toward longer tails took off and gathered its own momentum.

Looking at it like this, I think it's reasonable to apply the principles of evolution to the rise of office-speak.

The first seeds were sown in the mid-to-late 20th century, when today's superpower companies were beginning to expand rapidly. Executives of big players like General Electric and AT&T became frightened by the pace of their competitors' progress and sought comfort in the counsel of the newly fashionable management consultancies Bain, BCG, and McKinsey.

But (and this was their genius) the consultants knew they needed to dress their advice up in order to paint themselves as superhuman business oracles. And they did this not with branding or advertising, but with insidious neology—they created the new-age-techno-babble-pseudo-scientific nonsense of office-speak. (Most directly and irrefutably, management consultants are responsible for the cowardly language of mass-sackings: " rightsizing," "streamlining," and "restructuring.") 

A painting of John D Rockefeller, who you can partly blame for office-speak. Image via Wikimedia Commons

As soon as this meme was born, managers began breathing it out upon their subjects. And as they began to adopt this anti-language, office-speakers started to look busier and more important and techy and numbersy. They thrived in meetings where there was absolutely nothing to say—and nothing that needed to be said—by powering out office words to fill the vacuum of insight. They talked about "change agents" and "landscaping the competitive environment" and began to see themselves as negotiators—people who history will remember as the architects of modern times, successors to David Lloyd George, intellectual descendants of John D Rockefeller.

And because they looked busier and looked more important and looked more techy and looked more numbersy, the early office-speakers were quickly promoted through the ranks. Because that's basically what office life was, is and will always be about. 

So despite annoying everyone and being an impediment to effective communication, the office-speaking meme became associated with power and efficiency and money in much the same way that a long tail became associated with attractiveness in birds of paradise. And once office-speak became yoked together with power and money, the ratcheting wheels of evolution took over. Because now, we're penalized for not using the anti-language of office-speak; those who don't possess the office-speaker's loose tongue get ignored, or offend people with their transparent straight-talking, or seem reserved. 

This is all deeply disconcerting for me, because I know I will never be an office-speaker. I think I missed "the golden window," or something. But if my theory holds true, there is light at the end of the tunnel. Dawkins finishes his section on the bird of paradise with the sentence:

[The trend towards longer tails] was stopped only when tails became so grotesquely long that their manifest disadvantages started to outweigh the advantage of sexual attractiveness.

So maybe—hopefully—there'll be a backlash against all this rot when office-speak goes too far and reaches a tipping point of counter-productive drivel. When more words in work conversations are nonsensical than sensical and the Western world's economies are crippled by linguistic disease.

But unfortunately, I know that evolution takes a very long time. So I also know I'll be waiting a very long time for "the hard stop."

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​I spend all day on the internet. And I mean that literally: The first thing I do every morning is roll over to check my Twitter feed; I stream music on my drive to work;  I buy movie tickets and make restaurant reservations online. I don't even own a television, because I watch all my TV on my laptop.

But in most cities in America—including Los Angeles, where I live—we're getting screwed over by our internet. Last week the ​Cost o​f Connectivity, an annual report on the state of internet speeds and cost, reported that just about everyone in America is paying top dollar for really slow broadband.

For example, the internet in Los Angeles is half the speed of the internet in Seoul, and yet we pay ten times as much for it. The only cities in America that can even hold a candle to places like Seoul are Kansas City and Chattanooga, Tennessee, where the internet is fast but still twice as expensive.

So the internet sucks—but why? Broadband , like modern art, is one of those things that I understand on a theoretical level but don't really "get," so I reached out to Chris Mitchell, who heads the nonprofit Community Broadband Networks Initiative, to learn about why my internet is so damn slow.

VICE: Why do internet speeds vary so much between places like Los Angeles and, say, Kansas City?
​Chris Mitchell: Well, it's a good question. I think the main reason is that most communities only have a choice between one or two providers in a residential area for high-speed internet access. The reason for that is that those networks were typically built with monopoly protection. Basically, if you go back 100 years, the federal government said, "Telephones are going to be a monopoly, that way we can make sure that everyone will have access at reasonable prices." There were some cities that did not give a monopoly; they gave what's called a nonexclusive franchise. We're in a situation where we still don't have competition, but we don't have any legal force protecting a given provider from competition. It's just sort of developed that way because of the economics, which is that basically once you already have a network, it's really easy for you to drive out competition. And you do that typically by lowering prices; if there's anyone that's trying to build a network, you lower your prices long enough that they go out of business, and then you raise your prices back up to monopoly levels. 

So it's an issue with economics, not with technology. Is it any different abroad?
In some other countries, you have government working hand-in-hand with businesses in ways that our governments and private companies don't. In some cases, like in Southeast Asia, you even have the government having a stake in the company. In those cases, they are able to justify higher levels of investment and better networks, because they see a public good or a competitive reason to do that. 

Is the difference in speed really all that noticeable?
Oh, yeah. ​Susan Crawford [former special assistant to President Obama for science, technology, and innovation] was ​talking about how when she was in South Korea and talking to people there, they said that coming to the United States was like going back in time for internet access. I've since heard that from someone else as well who came from Southeast Asia. 

Wow. So why can't we compete with their internet?
​A common criticism there is that United States will have trouble competing with Southeast Asia because we're so big and our geography is so immense and we have such low population density, but I would say that even if we were to just compete on the basis of New York and San Francisco, we're getting crushed there, too. So we need to do something different, and clearly relying on AT&T and Comcast to solve this problem is not a winning proposition.

But there are cities, like Seattle, that are trying to create municipal internet networks, right?
Yes. There are about 150 cities in the US that provide citywide service. Now, about half of those run fiber-optic networks to homes. The other ones are cities like Tacoma, south of Seattle, where they built a cable network before fiber to the home was feasible—so this is actually not a very recent phenomena. The cities that built the old coaxial networks, they face a bit of a challenge, because their technology is often the same as the massive companies like Comcast that the government is competing against. But there a number of cities, like Wilson, North Carolina, and Lafayette, Louisiana, where they have invested in the fiber-to-the-home networks, and they're doing very well. I think Seattle and some of the other big cities are trying to figure out what they can do, but it isn't clear if they're going to be doing fiber-to-the-home, or if they're just going to be doing fiber to business district or some areas of time, which is what about 250 other cities have done.

Are there municipal networks elsewhere?
​Most of the municipal networks in the world are either in Sweden or the United States. So in Sweden, in Stockholm, they built fiber-outs everywhere, starting 20 years ago. They just celebrated their 20 year anniversary. And because they had fiber available everywhere that the city maintained and made available at reasonable prices, when 4G LTE networks came out, Stockholm immediately had like four of them. If you wanted to deploy a wireless network and you wanted to do it in a city like London, it was hard to get fiber to all of your antenna locations. But if you wanted to do in Stockholm, it was very easy to get fiber to all of your antenna locations, so that supercharged wireless competition.

That's amazing. Another country that seems to be on their internet game is Estonia. I visited a few years ago and I was floored by how many free WiFi networks there are—they're everywhere. Is that something we'd ever see stateside?
​ ​Yes, it's definitely something that we hear from local leaders. It's a goal. A lot of people get really excited about WiFi, and WiFi is a very good technology for some things. But if you want to have it throughout an entire city, it's probably not going to pay for itself. There's an expensive operating cost, and someone has to pay for that. It's probably not going to reach people inside their homes for most people, so it's really something that people are going to be using when they're out and moving around. There's a benefit to that in cities like Boston and New York City, which are trying to figure out what they can do to get more WiFi available throughout the city, but I think that when you look at [the success of] places like Estonia, it's because their governments have made it a priority. 

I live and breathe the internet—there are very few things I do anymore without an internet connection. Do you think it's a civic responsibility to provide quality internet?
​I think that the attitude that you're putting forth is one that I've heard from conservatives and liberals alike across the country, and I think elected officials at the local level don't yet realize how many people think like that. The reason that I think that's important is that of the 150 cities that have built their own networks citywide, almost all of them have chosen to do it without using any taxpayer dollars. They usually sell bonds to the private sector, and then the bonds are repaid with the revenue from the network. But if you built the network like infrastructure like we built our streets—let's just say that your property taxes went up $10 or $20 per month, and your cable bill went down $20 per month, but you had a choice in providers, and you had much faster speeds, the question is: How many people would be interested in that approach? And I think right now elected officials are afraid of having that conversation, but I think in coming years, we're going to see more towns using that kind of an approach.​​

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"Do you see how I shoot him? You brother of a bitch. This is not fair. I don't have a sniper rifle. It's not fair." Captain Abdul Khadir hurled epithets and 7.62 rounds at a group of Islamic State snipers perched in houses across the street. "Son of a bitch! God knows I hit him!" he screamed again, taking another shot. I kept quiet, taking note of his wide-brimmed sombrero and droopy black mustache. His getup made him look more like Pancho Villa than Peshmerga.

The Peshmerga are the security forces for the Kurdish region of Northern Iraq. Their name translates to "Those Who Face Death." Captain Khadir is an intelligence officer with their Second Battalion, Third Brigade. In early July 2014, I embedded with his unit in Jalawla, a small town 80 miles northeast of Baghdad.

The battle for Jalawla was a seesaw affair. Sometimes it was the "Pesh" riding high. At other times, the fighters of the self-proclaimed Islamic State were in charge.

It was my first glimpse of combat in Iraq's newest "old" war, a long-simmering conflict built on the deep ethnic and racial animosities between Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish groups. Following the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, the instability was again brought to a full boil.

If the fight's outcome had been determined by insults alone, Khadir would've crushed his opposition. But he hadn't connected with his target—every time he fired, his quarry "answered" back, shooting into the beleaguered Sharook Middle School that served as the Second Battalion's makeshift headquarters. I felt the sniper rounds pinging the lip of the roof and leaned against the wall for cover. Some flew over my head; others lodged in the concrete behind me.

Earlier, one Peshmerga had taken a bullet through the hand. Another was nearly blinded when a ricochet chipped a shard of concrete into his eyeball.

During the firefight, I saw a 25-year-old named Anwar Saleh lying bandaged on a stretcher. A bullet had passed through his thigh, the only exposed part of his body. Had it hit his femoral artery, he would have died, bleeding out in four minutes.

When the firefight reached a fever pitch, another officer on the rooftop with me pointed to where the Islamic State's rounds were hitting. He made an "OK" sign with his hand, indicating the small diameters of the bullet holes in the wall. "Five-five-six," he said, meaning he thought the rounds were coming from a rifle that fired the NATO 5.56x45 caliber. These bullets possibly came from an American-made M16 or M4. Even the sound was different. When the sniper fired at us, it was a high-pitched crack like a whip, as opposed to the flat, low ka-ka-ka-kaaa sound of Khadir's AK-47.

If they were shooting at us with M16s, it showed both the depth and breadth of the Islamic State's superior firepower. It was an advantage gained in part from the sad fact that the American-supplied Iraqi Army had fled Mosul with their pants down, abandoning more than a full military division's worth of equipment, which was promptly seized by the Islamic State. It included big, garish weapons like tanks, artillery, and mine-resistant ambush-protected (MRAP) vehicles, but also a massive stockpile of highly accurate, American-manufactured small arms that could prove even deadlier in the hands of Islamic State fighters.

Iraq's once dominant Sunni minority has been disenfranchised ever since the US toppled dictator Saddam Hussein and set the stage for a Shia-majority government, a government many critics of the day contended was just as corrupt and heavy-handed as the former dictator's. The Sunni militant group formerly known as ISIS (or ISIL), fighting to overthrow the Shia Alawite government of Bashar al Assad in Syria, looked east and saw an opportunity with fellow disgruntled Sunnis living in Iraq.

In early January, they began crossing the border, forming alliances with some Baathist groups who'd once boasted connections to Saddam Hussein. By the end of May, ISIS controlled much of Anbar Province in western Iraq, including Fallujah. Human rights groups estimated that at least half a million Iraqis had fled their homes.

This past summer, ISIS scored its biggest victory, capturing Iraq's second-largest city, Mosul, with only 3,000 fighters. A full Iraqi Army division—up to 15,000 soldiers—fled with barely a fight, leaving Mosul, as well as the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, completely unprotected.

A blitzkrieg of other attacks followed, against towns like Sinjar and Tal Afar. The brutality of ISIS's methods was amplified by internet videos of mass executions, crucifixions, and beheadings. An air of invincibility and terror surrounded the group.

After erasing the borders between Iraq and Syria, and amassing an army of an estimated 30,000 soldiers, ISIS declared a new caliphate—a sovereign state claiming authority over all faithful Muslims. The 1 million Iraqis displaced from their homes seemed to disagree.

Emboldened, the Islamic State marched farther south toward Baghdad and east into Kurdish territories as well. The Kurds pushed back. They sent Peshmerga forces to secure the oil resources of Kirkuk, a city the Kurds have always considered part of Kurdistan and their historical birthright.

The Kurdistan Regional Government, on the other hand, had been begging all summer for US arms support to fight the common enemy of ISIS—to no avail. But that wasn't the first time. There is a long history of the US shortchanging the Kurds.

In 1975, Saddam Hussein's Iraqi troops were unable to effectively control Kurdish territory or defeat the Peshmerga, in large part because of the direct assistance the Kurds were getting from Iran, then still ruled by American ally Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. But when Hussein and the Shah made a deal with American support, Iran stopped helping the Kurds and the Iraqi dictator quickly moved in, crushing the Kurdish resistance.

At the end of the first Gulf War in 1991, President George H. W. Bush's administration urged both the Shias in the south and the Kurds in the north to rise up in rebellion against Saddam Hussein. But when they did, the US gave them no support other than enforcing no-fly zones, allowing Hussein to remain in power.

The US's third and final betrayal of the Kurds came after Hussein was overthrown in the form of a US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Instead of allowing the Kurds to form an independent state, the US pressured them to remain in their shotgun marriage with Iraq, which now had a new Shia-run government.

This summer, the US was resistant to giving the Peshmerga weapons. Officials were nervous that arming the Kurds might embolden them to finally secede from the rest of Iraq. ¹ And now that the Kurds again controlled Kirkuk and its oil after the Iraqi Army fled, there was little reason for them to stay.

Still, the US continued to pressure the Peshmerga to remain in the union as the best hope of a native resistance against the Islamic State. I'd come to Jalawla to see if this storied former guerrilla group turned Peshmerga army had what it took to stop the Caliphate of Hate from spreading across Iraq.

¹ The Islamic State's beheading of American journalist James Foley seemed to be the tipping point for the United States. With the execution, the Islamic State had not just crossed the line—they had danced on it for all the world to see. In early August, President Obama ordered airstrikes to stop the Islamic State's advance toward the Kurdistan capital of Erbil and also to help a coalition of Kurdish Peshmerga and Iraqi Army commandos take back the Mosul Dam from Islamic State fighters. The airstrikes have since expanded to other targets in Iraq and to the Islamic State headquarters in Raqqa, Syria.

I landed in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan region of Iraq, on July 4, 2014. It was America's 238th birthday, and a week into the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. The last time I had visited Iraq was in 2006, when the Erbil International Airport was a single-terminal shack. Driving through the city, I barely recognized anything. Commercial and residential construction was taking place on every block. I passed large, Western-style malls and multi-story hotels, driving along an eight-lane beltway that would soon be connected by a Los Angeles-style cloverleaf overpass. I wanted to see the stream of refugees the Islamic State had created with their advance into Iraq.

The Khazir refugee camp is 40 minutes from the city center. There, thousands of Iraqis fleeing the Islamic State's capture of Mosul, Tal Afar, Sin Jar, and other northern and western towns camped in the desert heat. Hundreds more were coming every day. The fortunate ones who arrived early occupied tents provided by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Others were living out of their cars or trucks.

I arrived in the early evening, just as the sun was dropping below the horizon, taking the desert from a boil to a simmer. Kurds in pickup trucks were hauling watermelons and blocks of ice, tossing them off the back. Boys chased after them, hoping to score a prize for their families. As we wandered around the camp, people swarmed around us, eager to tell their stories.

"My cousin was a policeman, and when everyone fled, he stayed at the station and tried to fight," said a Turkmen from Mosul named Hajib Mustafa Mohamed. "Daesh ² captured him, cut his head off, and threw his body in the street. They found his cell phone and started calling me. 'If you're man enough, come get the body,' they said." Mustafa left Mosul before he could learn if anyone retrieved his cousin's corpse.

Many we spoke to in the camp were Sunnis, who believed that the Shia-dominated Iraqi government of Nouri al Maliki was to blame for their most recent troubles. But they also weren't happy with the Islamic State.

Twenty-three-year-old Oday Saadun, also from Mosul, said he, his wife, father, and brother had been living in a tent at the refugee camp for a month. "We are afraid of both sides," he explained. "We left because of the bombing by the Iraqi Army, but Daesh was also bombing randomly." He wasn't confident the Iraqi government forces would be able to take back the city any time soon.

Abdul Hadi Mustafa, his wife, and seven children had arrived only the night before from Tal Afar, a city close to the Syrian border. "We heard the mortar shells, so my neighbor and I, a schoolteacher, went outside to watch," he said. "A mortar exploded not far from us and wounded my neighbor in the shoulder. We took him to the hospital, but most of the staff had already left. The doctor who was there said that a major blood vessel had been hit. It was beyond his ability to help."

Mustafa learned later that the schoolteacher was flown by an Iraqi Army helicopter to Baghdad and survived. But Mustafa said he had had enough. After a day of shelling, he fled the city for this refugee camp.

² "Daesh" is the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. According to Arab linguists, "Daesh" also sounds like a term meaning "one who crushes something underfoot or one who sows discord" and usually has a negative connotation for those choosing to use it.

Peshmerga soldiers pose with their weapons in an open pickup truck.

I returned to the camp again the next evening. Within 24 hours, the population seemed to have doubled. Families were camped out on the roadside, and when the Kurdish pickup trucks arrived with food and ice, there were stampedes of men and women desperate to grab anything they could.

As the number of refugees increased every day, more Peshmerga soldiers were needed to help keep order. Some of them used sections of rubber hose or electronic stun guns to keep the refugees from overrunning the trucks. Hundreds of hands reached over the sides of the truck railings, grabbing at plastic bags full of food from local restaurants, or chunks of ice meant to combat the unrelenting heat.

The situation in the tent camps was calmer. The people there had settled into a more sustainable rhythm after a month or more living as refugees. We found Oday, one of the young men we'd spoken with the day before, filling a bucket with dirt he used to spread on the outside edges of his family's tent. "A girl was stung by a scorpion in another part of the camp," he told us. Dirt was a barrier against them or snakes seeking warmth and moisture inside.

Oday invited us into his tent, which had become home to his wife, children, and parents, as well as his brother Abd and Abd's wife and children. It was not what I would have imagined. Though I'm sure it was far from the comfort of their lost home, the tent was spacious, and the floor was covered with carpets and mats to keep them off the dirt.

There was a large propane stove used for cooking, and a 20-inch television with dozens of channels piped in from a portable dish outside the tent. One of their daughters, who was developmentally disabled, watched cartoons on the screen while the rest of the family sat in a semicircle on the floor eating a dinner of rice and vegetables from Styrofoam containers they'd received from a local charity.

Oday's father, Saadun Lafta, said the family had left Mosul more than a month ago. They began walking at 1 AM and arrived in the refugee camp at 3 PM the same day.

They were Sunni Arabs. Saadun said he'd been a sergeant in the Iraqi Army under Saddam Hussein and fought in the 1980-88 war against Iran. Like his son, Saadun believed there was equal blame to go around.

"Iraq is on the verge of destruction," he said. "The Sunnis and the Shias won't negotiate, and they're both going to lose." He added that the Americans also had a key role in creating their predicament.

"They said they came here to find weapons of mass destruction. They didn't find any. Then they destroyed the army, and the country. Then they just left us alone."

Despite their current hardships, Saadun was adamant that the country should not be partitioned along religious and ethnic lines—Sunni, Shia, and Kurd. "We are one people, one country," he said. "With a new government, we can survive." At that moment, it certainly didn't seem likely.

After seeing the Khazir refugee camp, we drove southeast, winding past the Dukan River and the majestic Piramagrun Mountain, headed toward Kurdistan's second-largest city, Sulaymaniyah.

Our first stop was a former Iraqi Army post called Banmaqan. The base is located on a hilltop separating the former smuggler's village of Chamchamal from the oil-producing Kirkuk. In the 90s, Banmaqan was a constant source of fear for the locals. The Iraqi Army used it to fire artillery into Chamchamal, and residents worried that Saddam Hussein could reach out and crush them whenever he had a bad day.

In 2003, when airstrikes signaled the start of a US-led war in Iraq, I was working as a reporter for CNN. I watched from the roof of a rented house in Chamchamal as American warplanes picked away at Banmaqan with 500- and 1,000-pound bombs.

A day after those airstrikes, local Peshmerga fighters guided us to a hilltop to see the damage. Artillery emplacements were cratered into the earth, and the outpost barracks were all splintered wood and twisted metal. We saw what looked like dried blood splashed against the flat rocks and sandbags in one of the foxholes on the hilltop, but there were no bodies. I did a series of live reports from a fresh 20-foot crater.

Today, Banmaqan's hilltop is a picnic spot, overgrown with grass and weeds. I walked around the ridge and tried to remember 2003, the adrenaline rush I felt for a war just beginning. A war that now, in a different form, threatens to engulf the entire region. Something caught my eye: a small cylinder pressed into the earth. It was a spent 7.62mm shell, ammo from an AK-47 fired long ago.

I pried it loose and held it in my hand. This tiny, rusting thing connected the violence of the past to the present. The echo of this round, I knew, was still being heard.

The Khazir camp, a 40-minute drive from the Kurdish capital of Erbil, is home to thousands of refugees, like this girl, who fled Islamic State attacks.

Jalawla is one of the most strategic fronts of the fight between the Islamic State and the Kurdish Peshmerga. If controlled by the Islamic State, it could become a back door to invade Baghdad only two hours south. I felt it was imperative to see what was happening in Jalawla, but to get there, I needed the help of one of the most influential and connected men in the region: Sheik Mohamed Shakeli.

The sheik is a former Peshmerga commander and now an informal adviser to the Kurdistan Regional Government. He lives several miles from the burgeoning Kurdish town of Khalar, just north of Jalawla. Fortunately for me, he was a family friend of my interpreter, Mohamed Jalizada. It was late in the afternoon when I arrived at his home, set on the edge of a bountiful 13-acre orchard. Here, in the middle of the scorching Garmian desert, was an oasis. Thick clusters of green grapes hung heavy from their vines. Rows of fruit trees bore lemons and pomegranates and olive branches. His orchard held the promise of a bountiful harvest, if not a peaceful future.

Here, in a small but important way, Kurds and Arabs were living side by side. The sheik's man in charge was an Arab, as were the shepherds and tenant farmers allowed to live and work on his property, sharing part of what they produced.

Not so long ago, this orchard was a killing ground. Just 30 miles to the south, Jalawla still was.

The plot had been in the sheik's family for generations. In 1988, the land was taken from them, during Saddam Hussein's al Anfal campaign, a genocidal military operation aimed at wiping out Kurdish resistance to Iraqi rule. Military-aged males were rounded up, executed, and buried in mass graves. Kurdish officials believe that 182,000 Kurds were killed in the nearly yearlong operation, while Human Rights Watch puts the figures between 50 and 100,000.

"Al Anfal" means "the spoils of war." It is also the name of the eighth chapter of the Qur'an, which tells the story of the followers of the prophet Muhammad looting the lands of nonbelievers. Some analysts say the name was chosen by the regime to cloak the killing and pillaging in some kind of religious justification. Which is not unlike current claims made by the Islamic State militants in their persecution and mass executions of Shias, Christians, and Yazidis during their summer offensive.

The sheik, a leader of a Garmian unit of Peshmerga, had escaped to the mountains. In 1991, when the Kurds rose up against the regime at the urging of the United States during the first Gulf War, he returned to his home. When he arrived to reclaim his land, he found an Iraqi commander and his officers living there. Instead of taking revenge, he spared their lives, allowing them to retreat back to their home base.

When I asked him why, he simply shrugged. "What is the point? There had been enough killing."

Today the sheik is thin, almost frail. He's a mere shadow of the robust guerrilla commander we saw in framed photos on the walls of his home. Still, even slightly stooped and fingering his prayer beads while walking through his orchards at dusk, he radiated the collected confidence of a man who has lived justly and was now enjoying his earthly rewards. When he saw a ripe fruit he plucked it and put it in my hand. The heat had finally subsided, and the land was tinted in a soft, reddish hue that seemed to arrest time and helped me to imagine that I was in a much more peaceful place than Iraq in the summer of 2014.

This place was what the Bush neocons dreamed about, too, when they considered the most hopeful endgame of their 2003 invasion. It was a prosperous, peaceful Iraq, rich in both bounty and forgiveness.

But Sheik Shakeli's orchard was the exception that proved the rule. It was a mirage in an ongoing war zone that insists Iraq's three major ethnic and religious groups will likely never live together in peace. While sweet fruit may grow in this small orchard, the vast desert harvests only misery and destruction.

The sheik, like most Iraqi Kurds, had complicated feelings when it came to the United Sates. "The Kurds received America with flowers, but the Americans neglected them or even rejected them," said Sheik Shakeli. "But when there's this kind of pressure, policies can change."

The kind of pressure he was speaking of was, of course, the rise of the Islamic State. While he felt the Kurds could hold their own against ISIS, the problem wasn't going to go away. "We can't negotiate or live with them, and we shouldn't," he said. "But while we can protect ourselves for now, it's an international problem for the whole region. It's not only us who has to deal with it. Especially now with the proclamation of the caliphate, which is drawing people from all over the world—anyone who believes in this illusory concept. The regional states are also threatened by movement—Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Iran."

He also believed that the threat would quickly grow beyond the Middle East. "I think they can widen their frontiers very soon. I think the West will be the next target. They have the manpower, resources, tools, and communications to do it."

We were invited to participate in Iftar, the evening meal that breaks the Ramadan fast. There would be important men from the community attending, including an Arab sheik and his sons, who had fled the Sunni-Shia violence of Baquba years earlier for the safety of Kurdish-controlled Khalar.

The Arab sheik led the Kurdish sheik and the rest of the men in prayer before the meal. It was another small contradiction to the mantra I had heard from so many during my journey: Kurds and Arabs cannot live together in peace.

At the end of the prayers, we dined on a sumptuous feast, featuring chicken, okra, rice, and naan made from ingredients grown in the orchard. After the meal, Sheik Shakeli quietly made arrangements for us to meet the people necessary to get to Jalawla.

Former Peshmerga leader Sheik Mohamed Shakeli owns an orchard where he grows grapes, pomegranates, and other crops.

Through the sheik's contacts I met the mayor of the Garmian region, who sent his communication director, a slick operator named Haval Ibrahim. It was Ibrahim who would help me get to Jalawla.

Ibrahim's first step was to take us to a Peshmerga base in the town of Khanaqin, which was the headquarters of General Hussein Mansour, the military commander of the Kurdistan Regional Government's forces in the south. We needed his permission to get to the front lines. While we waited in a small room outside his office, we met a Sunni man from Jalawla who was waiting to see the general in hopes of finding his missing 15-year-old nephew.

"In the past I used to hate the Kurds, but this conflict has proved they don't discriminate. In general they're treating the Arabs very well," the man told me. Part of his change of heart, he said, occurred during an incident in the last year, when he was accused of a crime and cleared of any wrongdoing. He said the Kurdish police chief invited him to his house for a meal, then personally drove him home.

When we were ushered into General Mansour's office, he immediately asked what we wanted before anyone even had a chance to sit down. I told him we were trying to get to Jalawla, and he called in his deputy and told him to take us right away. The man didn't waste time. He had a war to run, and he knew an American reporter could help him get his message in front of an audience.
I jumped into the back of an open truck with six Peshmerga soldiers. During the six or so miles to the town, the Peshmerga, all young men in their 20s, sang a traditional call-and-response song. The song's gist was about their loyalty to Kurdistan, and their pledge to never leave her.

When I first arrived in Jalawla, I was surprised at how empty it was and how much damage had been done. Walls were pocked and scarred from small-arms and artillery fire, there were impact craters in the roads, and dogs roamed the empty streets.

A Peshmerga named Nasim told me that a few nights earlier he had killed an Islamic State combatant in a firefight. "When an Iraqi is killed, his friends come back and get his body," Nasim said. "But when it's a foreigner, they leave the body. No one cares for it. All the bodies that we've recovered belong to foreign nationalities. We find their passports or ID pictures."

Most residents in Jalawla had locked and boarded up their homes and shops and headed toward Khanaqin, Khalar, or places farther north if they were Kurds. Arabs had to have friends or connections with Kurdish families to get into the Kurdish-controlled areas. Otherwise they were stopped at the outskirts of Khanaqin, the first city after Jalawla. On my way to Jalawla, I'd seen many of them living in the backs of large cattle trucks, in their own family cars, or huddled under makeshift tents made of poles and tarps. They looked hot, dusty, and miserable.

Before we reached the Peshmerga outpost, our driver accelerated to 60 miles an hour on the remaining exposed 100-yard stretch—a precaution, I was told, against the snipers who routinely fired on the Kurdish vehicles coming or going from the middle school.

The principal's office of the Sharook Middle School, whose name means "sunrise" in Arabic, was now the office of the battalion commander, General Sherzad Mohamed Salah, a small, distinguished-looking man wearing the sand-colored, digital-camouflage uniform of the US Marines, but with lapels bearing black epaulets with the golden eagle and three stars signifying his brigadier-general rank. He sat behind a large wooden desk while a map of Africa decorated one wall and school athletic trophies filled the shelves on another. A group of his officers were gathered around him.

Peshmerga fighters on a barricade keep watch for Islamic State fighters.

Everyone I noticed seemed to be wearing uniforms with different styles and colors of camouflage, as if they had raided an army surplus store well stocked with fatigues from a wide spectrum of international conflicts. There were US Gulf War desert chocolate-chip-pattern outfits and a variety of woodland and blue urban-type camo. Sometimes tops and bottoms would be mixed with two of the three.

I thought it was another indication of a force that, despite its good reputation, was not well armed or funded and was informally organized. It seemed more of a militia than an army.

Like most Kurds, their loyalties were split between two political organizations, the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. And both parties maintained control of their own Peshmerga units. So while on paper the Peshmerga were under the command of Massoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdistan Regional Government, in practical terms they had no overall unified command structure.

General Sherzad confirmed that while the world was now pinning so much hope on the Kurdish Peshmerga forces, it had done little so far to arm and fortify them for the epic battle in which they now found themselves.

"We've had no help from the international community, and no support from or even contact or coordination with the Iraqi government to fight Daesh," he said. As I looked around the room I could see that even the rifles the officers carried were worn and battered AK-47s, still effective but no match for the kind of weaponry the Islamic State had been able to capture or buy.

The US had spent billions on training and equipping the post-Saddam Iraqi Army. Though massive in size at nearly a quarter million active and well-outfitted troops, it was an army reportedly mired in corruption. Officer commissions could be bought and sold and competitors thwarted or enemies dispatched with just a call or two to the Ministry of the Interior. And it had disintegrated in the face of a much smaller force of invading Islamic State fighters.

Not long after arriving at the school, my attention quickly shifted to a red SUV that pulled up in front of the building. It was surrounded by Peshmerga eager to get a glimpse of what was in the trunk. The hatch was raised, and inside was a decomposing body wrapped in a large blanket. The putrid smell of rotting flesh quickly filled the humid air with a nauseating stench. The young Peshmerga seemed undeterred and pulled out their phones and began taking pictures of the corpse.

"Who is that?" I said to my interpreter, Mohamed, who began to ask around.

A soldier told us it was a body recovered from one of the destroyed buildings, likely just a resident who had lived there.

Then the Sunni man from Jalawla I had met earlier in General Monsour's office stepped up to the vehicle and looked inside at the corpse. He showed no emotion and quickly turned away.

"Is it him?" I asked, before he walked away. His teenage nephew?

"No," he said, shaking his head, seemingly relieved, but still without an answer to the mystery of his missing family member.

A Peshmerga fighter cries tears of joy after learning that a fellow soldier was actually not killed in battle as was earlier reported. A few hours later, he would get another report-this one confirming that his friend was indeed shot in the head and killed.

After the sniper shootout on the roof, General Sherzad told us we were moving to another Peshmerga outpost in Jalawla, the location of the former courthouse, to the south and closer to the Islamic State's last stronghold in the former Iraqi Army recruiting depot of Tejneid. There we met more members of the Second Battalion, Third Brigade, and sat together on couches inside a small building surrounded by sandbags.

Through a sniper hole in one of the walls we could see the Islamic State's position, about a thousand yards away. Its now infamous black-and-white flag flew on top of one of the buildings.

The general believed something big was going to happen that night, but he wouldn't tell me what it was. So we waited, drinking tea and smoking cigarettes while the Peshmerga played with their phones.

Three things seemed to fuel the Peshmerga in this war: drinking endless cups of chai tea with fistfuls of sugar; chain-smoking long, thin, cheap Korean cigarettes; and holding mobile phones more tightly than weapons, using them to record videos of firefights, to photograph bodies of dead Islamic State combatants, and to receive situation reports and orders from commanders.

At one point, one of the officers from the courthouse unit, Captain Oskar Ali Akbar, decided to entertain everyone with some singing. Like the young Peshmerga on my ride in the back of the truck to Jalawla, he led a traditional Kurdish call-out song in which the group blurted out personal names of people in the unit, or their hometowns, to give the song's familiar tune a comic edge. The raucous laughter ended when Captain Akbar began singing a second song, an exotic and hypnotizing melody, known as a hairi. He pushed one hand against his face and tilted his head as if he were a club DJ holding one side of a headset against his ear while spinning tunes. He sang a cappella, but the nasal resonance of his voice made it seem as if he had instrumental accompaniment. The soldiers were transfixed, most of them recording the performance with their phones, videos that I later watched them play back over and over.

At one point, I left to walk around the outpost with the courthouse unit's commander, Major Omar Abdul Rachman, a bald, wiry man with a gray mustache and a small pair of binoculars hanging from his neck. He took us to the judge's chambers, where we saw that the building had been ransacked by the Islamic State before the Peshmerga pushed them out.

Furniture was overturned, papers were scattered everywhere, and, perhaps in a statement about their views on the secular rule of law, one of them had apparently taken a shit in the middle of what had been a small library. I was confident that there were similar expressions of contempt in the other territories they had conquered and still held.

When we left, everyone in the main compound seemed in good spirits, but on our return we found the room had become silent. A few of the men were wiping their eyes or covering their faces with their hands. They just found out that a popular 28-year-old Peshmerga fighter named Zuhair Jumma had been killed the night before, shot in the head by a sniper. He was one of the three Peshmerga dead and 11 injured in the most recent battle. The young men were devastated.

But within 45 minutes of the news, the mood reversed itself when a text came through that Jumma was actually still alive. Several of the men who had just been choking up now cried tears of relief.

At nightfall, the general disappeared with some of the other officers. But with nothing happening yet, many of the Peshmerga, exhausted from the emotional roller coaster and tired of drinking tea and smoking cigarettes, tried to sleep on the couches or chairs where they had been waiting most of the day and into the night.

Then one of the soldiers received another text message. He shook his head as he thumbed through it. Jumma really was dead. I looked around the room. No one had any tears left.

Peshmerga soldiers use the Sharook Middle School in Jalawla as a makeshift military base.

At 4 AM the sound of artillery and machine guns jolted us awake. I ran outside with my cameras to see the rockets streaking toward the Islamic State positions. Commandos, possibly from the Peshmerga special forces, were going from house to house with RPGs, clearing any place that might be a remaining sniper location. I watched as white smoke plumes rose from houses into the night sky.

The fighting continued all night, but it was impossible to make out what was happening until daybreak. Small arms fire erupted around the compound. I climbed cement stairs that led to a western rampart where a dozen Peshmerga had taken cover behind a long stone wall, sporadically firing into the distance where the black flag still flew. They pointed excitedly, saying, "Daesh, Daesh," trying to show me whom they were shooting at, supposedly an Islamic State fighter hiding in a nearby ravine. Brush was burning in another part of the field where an artillery round had landed.

But I lost interest in their part of the fight when I heard a thunderous explosion only a hundred yards from where I was standing. I ran in the direction of the compound's northern wall, climbing the berm that led to the top, and peered over. Two Russian-made T-52 tanks had been driven up from Khanaqin and were firing into Tejneid. Their earthshaking concussions reminded me of the only other time I had seen tanks in action, during the second Battle of Fallujah in November 2004. I watched US Army M1A1 tanks shoot their main guns down alleyways to blow up vehicles that may have been booby-trapped by insurgents. The US and its Iraqi allies had taken back Fallujah after one of the biggest and bloodiest fights of the war. Now, ten years later, the town was part of the Islamic State's new caliphate.

While the Kurdish tanks fired, two Peshmerga cradled a wounded comrade in a chair-carry between them, moving him away from the front lines. But despite the momentum of all this firepower, something strange happened. Everyone stayed put. The Peshmerga just held their positions and didn't advance any closer to assault the Islamic State's stronghold in Tejneid.

The fighting lasted until around 8 AM, but still no advance. A half hour later General Sherzad gathered his men and told them they were heading back to the school, in the opposite direction of the Islamic State stronghold. We left the courthouse outpost by foot, threading through the streets of Jalawla back to Sharook Middle School.

On the way, we saw there had been a buildup of forces in the rear, more men and machines, replacements, poised for action, but also not moving forward.

When we reached the school I sat down with the general in the principal's office. He looked weary and subdued. I asked him whether the operation had gone as he had hoped.

"We've had success here and we lost some people, but I don't feel like I was able to do fully what I wanted," he said. "We hoped from our commanders to bring the fight to all parts of the city, especially to Tejneid. But that hasn't happened yet."

Despite all the new forces and equipment, the advance never happened, not that day or the next. The next day, I left the school with the general and his men as they returned back to their base in Khanaqin and were replaced by another unit in their normal week-on, week-off rotation.

A few weeks later, after I left Kurdistan and returned home, I learned that the Peshmerga never did get control of Tejneid. In fact, the Islamic State had mounted an August counteroffensive in Jalawla and taken control of most of the city.

The front lines of Iraq's newest old war had shifted once again. Captain Abdul Khadir, I'm sure, was pissed, but the US and its allies knew they couldn't afford to betray the Kurds again. The next time he'd face them, Khadir would have a new sniper rifle.

(Note: This article has been edited to remove an error in which the Americans, rather than the Kurds, were described as having little reason to stay.)

​By now, you are probably aware that Democrats got crushed in last night's midterm elections. As expected, ​Republicans won back control of the Senate, pulling through in nearly every tight race across the country, including swing states like Colorado, Iowa, and North Carolina, and expanded their majority in the House of Representatives. Any doubt as to whether this year's midterms would be a "wave" election for the GOP came crashing down around midnight, when it became clear that Democrats were going to fare even worse in 2014 than they did in the Tea Party storm surge of 2010.

It was even worse in the states, where the GOP won key governor's posts and expanded on legislative majorities the party has been building since 2010. Incumbent Republican governors pulled through in virtually every contested race (with the exception of Pennsylvania), beating back aggressive Democratic challenges in key swing states like Florida, Wisconsin, and Michigan. The GOP even pulled off upsets in Maryland, Illinois, and Massachusetts—deep blue states where the GOP has no business winning. After last night, Republicans control 31 of 50 governor's positions in the country, as well as 64 out of 98 state legislative chambers—an unprecedented number not seen since the Great Depression.

On Wednesday, the finger pointing had already begun, with most of the blame falling squarely on President Barack Obama and the White House. That makes sense. Republicans had always tried to make the 2014 midterms a referendum on the president, and in the end, they succeeded. The administration did little to counter the GOP's narrative, ricocheting from crisis to crisis—the botched Obamacare website, the VA scandal, the border crisis, ISIS, Ebola—while Obama's approval ratings sunk lower and lower.

"The White House failed to define any agenda for voters in 2014," the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, a leading liberal group, said in a statement after the election. ""Elizabeth Warren was the most popular campaigner in 2014 for a reason: Her clear economic-populist message of reforming Wall Street, reducing student debt, and expanding Social Security benefits is popular everywhere. Red, purple, and blue states."

Even Obama seemed a little remorseful Wednesday. "As president I have a unique responsibility to make this town work," he said in a press appearance. "So, to all of those that voted, I hear you. To the two-thirds of voters that chose not to participate in the process yesterday, I hear you, too."

But while Obama certainly didn't help his party, a closer look at the midterm results shows that Democrats' problems are much bigger than a lame-duck president with one foot out the door. For one thing, Republicans seemed to have gotten their shit together. Unlike in 2010, when the Tea Party uprising took the Establishment GOP by surprise, the party was very much in control of its midterm races in 2014. In a shift from recent elections, Republican leaders rallied early and aggressively to beat back primary challenges, protect embattled incumbents, and weed out fringey candidates who might fuck up their Senate chances by saying weird things about rape or poor people. 

The efforts paid off: Instead of wild-eyed wingnuts, the party wound up with a pool of presentable candidates that while all very conservative, were also, crucially, not lunatics. And in the process, the GOP managed to loosen the shackles of the Tea Party, and soften its message to appeal to a broader swath of voters outside of its conservative base.

In the meantime, ​Democrats struggled to resonate with voters, falling back on its previously effective strategy of casting its Republican opponents as extremist whackjobs who want to wage war on women on poor people. But in the absence of conservative caricatures like Mitt Romney and Todd Akin, the arguments backfired. In Colorado, for example, incumbent Democratic Senator Mark Udall lost to his Republican challenger after spending most of the campaign talking about abortion. Iowa Democrat Bruce Braley's attempts to color his opponent Joni Ernst as the next Sarah Palin came off as supercilious, and only made Ernst more folksy and sympathetic.

Nowhere was Democratic hubris more apparent than in Texas' gubernatorial race, where liberal darling Wendy Davis lost in a landslide Tuesday, after running a remarkably terrible campaign focused mostly on abortion and other social issues. Davis was always a long shot, but the magnitude of her defeat—she lost among women, as well as Hispanic men—effectively killed the liberal fantasy of taking over Texas, and further proved that calling your Republican opponent crazy is not a campaign strategy unless it's true.

Democrats have taken heart in the fact that voters who turned out for the midterm election were generally older and whiter, while the coalition of young, urban, and minority voters that elected Obama mostly stayed home. The hope, of course, is that these liberal voters will show up again to vote for Democrats in 2016. But as races in Texas and other states showed on Tuesday, Republicans are making baby steps in their outreach to minorities, particularly Hispanic voters. And Democrats has yet to figure out a way to turn out Obama's coalition when the man himself is not on the ticket.

All of this underscores fundamental weaknesses for the left going into 2016. Without Obama or Republican fuckups to fall back on, Democratic candidates, and the party's liberal message, collapsed. With the 2016 presidential campaign officially underway as of Wednesday, the party is going to have to figure out a new message fast—a prospect that will become increasingly difficult as Republicans use their new power to tarnish and weaken their opponents. 

Follow Grace on ​Twitter

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The group Food Not Bombs feeds the homeless in Sarasota, Florida, in 2007. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

South Florida's year-round warm weather makes it a destination for our country's homeless. Not having to contend with snow or the freezing cold makes the unfortunate situation of not having a roof slightly more bearable. But residents of Fort Lauderdale apparently don't like their town's reputation as a paradise for the nation's transients. Since this past May, city officials have passed ordinances against panhandling, the storage of personal property on sidewalks, and camping in public spaces—effectively criminalizing homelessness.

That led to Food Not Bombs members being forced​​ out of a city park on Friday and threatened with arrest. It also led to Arnold Abbott, a 90-year-old who runs a charity called Love Thy Neighbor, getting detained by cops who went on to confiscate trays of hot food and boxes of donuts with which he was feeding the homeless. Two clergymen were also arrested (the trio face 60 days in jail), and the whol​e thing was captured on camera.

"I fed three out of the 200 people in line and as I went to serve the fourth plate, I felt an arm on my arm," Abbott told me. "[The cop's] command was, 'Drop that plate right now!' as if it were a weapon I was holding." The activist, who dropped out of a Ivy League pre-med program to serve in World War II, was then led away and written a citation for setting up a food-sharing site without providing portable toilets.

"Fort Lauderdale is a very wealthy area," he explained. "We have lots of the mega-rich and lots of powerful people who live here and they don't want any homeless spoiling the view for the tourists."

Jeff Weinberger runs the Broward Homeless Campaign, a Facebook group that shares information about the homeless community. "There's absolutely no question that Fort Lauderdale is the worst place in America to be homeless right now," he told me. "They've passed five ordinances in the past six months that criminalize homelessness and that is unprecedented. They're basically thinking that if they pass all of these laws that in some way it would get rid of homeless people but that has never at any time or any place proven to be valid."

The advocate added that arresting homeless people gives them a criminal record—just another hurdle to overcome when seeking employment.

But while Fort Lauderdale's city commission might be acting callously, the National Coalition for the Homeless says they're not alone in passing these sorts of laws. According to an October 20 report, over 30 cities have tried to int​roduce similar food-sharing bans in the past two years.

But Abbott says the portable toilet rule is unique to South Florida —a prohibitively expensive requirement for someone who's already doling out the cash to feed 200 mouths. When I spoke to him he said he plans break the rule again by feeding the homeless on Fort Lauderdale Beach, as he's done every week since 1991.

"They're waiting for me, and I will definitely be arrested this time," he told me.

"I'm not worried about jail," he added. "I fought the KKK in Civil Rights times. I'm only concerned if the food will get to the mouths of the hungry. The fight will go on, I promise you that."

Follow Allie Conti on ​Twitter.

Screengrabs from the Memory Hole collection via their YouTube channel

The Memory Hole is a place of horror and wonder. When you're inside the Hole it's easy for minutes to turn into hours, hours into days, days into weeks, weeks into years. It's a place where you can ​find a man blasting baloney with a homemade flamethrower, satan vacuuming the rug with his tongue, and a guy ​shooting a stack of pumpkins with a cannon. Also, ​toast.

MCd by the weirdos behind Everything Is Terrible, Memory Hole is more amateur, more intimate, bordering on voyeuristic. We called up Commodore Gilgamesh, one of the editors behind the series, to ask him where he's finding these clips, what makes a video viral material, and the importance of "fluid ownership."

VICE: Could you describe Memory Hole?
Commodore Gilgamesh: It's kind of a crazy thing that we can't believe is happening, to be honest with you. We're pretty sure it will stop happening at any moment. So I haven't wrapped my brain around it. It's like... we travel in found footage circles, and as you can imagine we've met people who have been doing it for a long time, longer than us, and they all keep saying that we have the "keys to the mansion," is the quote. The sacred mansion, The Holy Grail. Basically, we were given access to the world's largest collection of home videos. And they're all very, very nicely organized and we can do whatever we want with them. Which is insane.

Whoa! Who gave you access to this?
They're the folks who run the longest-running primetime television program in history, I think. I can't say their names directly, but you can infer it based on the information I give you. Anyone who lives in this country and has watched television in the last 30 years knows who has every single home movie that is at all noteworthy. 

I think I know which show you mean...
You've watched the television program, so you know what that consists of, but you can imagine what they haven't used. It's some of the most scary, darkest, fucked up shit you can imagine. It's cool, because I've found home videos plenty of times at thrift stores, and that feels really invasive and weird and I've never felt comfortable with it, but this is something that the creator was so proud of that he or she mailed it in with hopes of the world seeing it. So it's their decision, which is really, really awesome.

Have you ever found anything so disturbing you wouldn't release it?
In this collection, not yet, no. I've been talking to them and trying to figure out if they'd had, like, snuff films, or anything sent to them that they've had to turn over to the cops, but I haven't heard any specific stories of that. All of this has already been processed by them, so it's been through a lot of channels. I think the really fucked up shit would never make it to us.

It's weird, even the stuff that they have aired, if you remove the zany voiceover and the dorky music and the laugh track and everything, it's horrifying. Our home life is dirty and weird and funny and terrifying. 

How do you feel about television these days?
We're in Los Angeles, so we're kind of in "that world" now, and we're figuring it out. We're fairly new to it. We've only been at it for a few years with television people. We're definitely going to continue—I mean, that's where the stupid amounts of money exist. We're not going to stop trying [to get a TV show]. 

Do you ever worry about litigation?
No, but we used to worry about it. I think once we made Doggy Woggiez, Poochie Woochiez we kind of stopped worrying about it, because that was so heavily Disney that we were just certain we were gonna get sued, but when that didn't happen... Also, I think the tone has changed, the internet has kind of pushed people in a way to understand ownership in a fluid way, which we're very big fans of, and I think we've been pushing. Yeah, we get phone calls and emails and we're respectful and take stuff down when people ask us to, but we still include it in our movies and live shows and stuff because that's a totally different monster.  

How does it feel when a video or a YouTube channel you have is taken down?
That's been a huge bummer and a really big obstacle for us, just as far as connecting and maintaining our fan base. It's really hurt us, I think. We've had over a million subscribers, lost them, and then regained them. Now we probably have 40 different homes for our videos.  We actually had a meeting with YouTube the other day and it was very funny. We were like, "Do you guys know how bad you screwed us over?" And they were, of course, like, "Nope, we're different people." It was funny.

I noticed Memory Hole is a little bit more digestible than Everything Is Terrible. Is there a reason for that?
I think that's the way we've been going generally. I mean, Everything Is Terrible is hard because we have such a format that has existed for seven years, so we kind of try to stick to it, but I know personally I've wanted to make everything under a minute for a while. I think it's more of what the footage is telling us to do.

We're definitely going to do some long form work with them, like our feature movies. We're going to make more heavily effected and edited versions of the Memory Hole. I think making them digestible in that way is important for online consumption. It's what people want.

Do you have any tips on what makes a good viral video or how to edit videos to make them more internet friendly?
You know what's funny? I think we're really bad at it. [ Laughs] One of the members of EIT works at BuzzFeed. The [executive vice president of video at] BuzzFeed, Ze Frank, is responsible for some of the most popular YouTube videos of all time. He doesn't get us at all. He's always pretty much saying we do the exact opposite of what you're supposed to do to make a viral video. So if I were to give advice, it would be, "Do the opposite of Everything Is Terrible," which is to make everyone feel really good, make them think the culture and the world they're in is working great. 

But that's the thing—if you're not doing that, if you're not just propping up everything as wonderful, you really need to be clear and ham-fisted with your politics. You know, like Upworthy shit is very viral and we don't do that either. We leave a lot of room for interpretation and the gray areas of life. So that's why Everything Is Terrible does not make good viral videos. 

Are there any plans to go on tour with Memory Hole?
Yes, which is pretty exciting. I can't wait to tour around and show people this crazy stuff. 

When can we expect another Memory Hole video?
​ Every Friday until the end of time, I guess.

Anything else?
I don't really have much else to say about Memory Hole because I don't really understand it.  

Follow Troy Farah on Twitter.

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​Trudeau acted quickly and decisively yesterday. Photo ​via WikiMedia Commons.

​​​Justin Trudeau booted two members of his party yesterday, to the surprise of everyone—including the accused, and accusers.

The Wednesday-morning shitstorm was created after news broke that Trudeau was kicking out Scott Andrews and Massimo Pacetti over sexual harassment allegations, brought to him by two NDP MPs the week prior.

Here's what we know so far: An MP approached Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau on October 28, about sexual harassment directed at her from one of his Liberal MPs. Trudeau pulled in party whip (yes that's a real job title in Canadian politics) Judy Foote, and the two contacted Nycole Turmel, the NDP whip. Somewhere in-between, a second MP came forward to make allegations about sexual harassment coming from another Liberal MP. Four of them—the whips, and the two accusing the harassment—held a meeting on October 30.

A week later—yesterday—Trudeau told his MPs he was suspending Andrews and Pacetti from caucus and cancelling their nominations to run again. Trudeau wouldn't confirm additional details, simply calling it "serious misconduct." Neither MP was present for the announcement, and both have maintained that they haven't been confronted with the details of the allegations against them. They, of course, maintain their innocence.

Trudeau's swift housecleaning was carried out unbeknownst to the two NDP MPs who brought their complaints to Trudeau in private. The Liberals did inform the New Democrats of the plan in advance.

The NDP lashed out at Trudeau last night, with Turmel accusing him of "re-victimizing" the two MPs. The two women in question were reportedly not at all pleased with his decision.

Now, the issue will be looked at by the top secret Board of Internal Economy. That committee, staffed by MPs from the three main parties, meets in secret and is sworn to confidentiality. They'll be tasked with figuring out what to do next.

Making all this painfully more complex is that nobody really knows how workplace harassment laws apply to Parliament—a fact allegedly conveyed to one parliamentary intern by a Liberal MP who had rubbed his cro​tch against her.

In a 2005 case before the Supreme Court—Canada v​. Vaid—the justices on the top bench decided that members of Parliament enjoy immunity from lawsuits, if they're doing their job, but that employees can file workplace grievances in some cases.

So while the Court opened the door for a hypothetical sexual harassment lawsuit, it's not exactly clear-cut.

One of the most amazing things is how long it's taken for a case like this to come forward.

Just about every staffer, MP, and journalist on Parliament Hill has a story about sexual harassment. Grabbed asses, catcalls, unrequested advances—par for the course.

Personally, I've seen every manner of cringe-worthy smooth talk coming from middle-aged male MPs—from all parties—levied at 20-something female staffers and journalists. Usually it's just talk, but sometimes the flirting gets touchy-feely.

According to sources on the Hill, a common justification for why the harassment isn't reported is that no female MP, journalist, or staffer—the harassment is almost always against females—wants to be "that girl." Coming forward is equated with a sign of weakness, and nobody on the Hill wants to look weak, as if they can't handle the pressures of Parliament.

To that end, some MPs deal with it themselves—"street justice"—or lodge complaints internally. The whips of each caucus are responsible for internal party disputes.

But the power imbalance between staffers and politicians is pretty rank. It means that harassment from MPs often goes unreported as women gawk at what appears to be an inconceivable task—that is, trying to bring a sexual harassment complaint against the guys who run the country. Either that, or they grit their teeth and bear the unwanted attention, out of fear that reporting it would jeopardize their career. One factor in the calculation is also that accepting an MP's unwanted advances could ultimately help young staffers' careers.

One Hill denizen says she's seen her fair share of innocuous, run-of-the-mill flirtation that she can put up with—but cites about five cases where things went too far, and crossed the line into serious harassment.

Either way, the culture of chauvinism on the Hill has been around for a while, and it doesn't seem to be improving.

In the backdrop of yesterday's events was the ongoing saga of Jian Ghomeshi. Many of the women who have come forward about the former CBC host's alleged sexual violence said they were afraid of speaking publicly, as it could jeopardize their careers, or that they may become the subject of media attacks.

Not unlike the culture in Ottawa.

Depending on how the investigation proceeds, Pacetti and Andrews could find themselves kicked out of not just the Liberal Party, but out of Parliament itself.

On top of all this, for the past few days, Parliament has been figuring out what to do with Dean Del Mastro: the guy who has been charged and found guilty of flagrantly bypassing election-spending caps. He was kicked out of the Conservative Party in 2013—opting to call himself an "Independent Conservative"—but was allowed to keep his seat until a judge ruled on his case.

He was found guilty last week, so the House of Commons—the NDP and Liberals at first, with the Conservatives joining the cause later on—moved to suspend him.

Del Mastro beat them to the punch yesterday, amid the chaos around the sexual harassment allegations, and delivered a tearful goodbye as he resigned his seat.

For those keeping score at home, that leaves the House of Commons with seven independent MPs.

​
​​@justin_ling

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Photos by Jack Pasco

This post originally appeared on VICE UK

​ Anonymous, which takes its rebellious politics and iconography from internet memes and V for Vendetta, has used the Fifth of November as a day of action for the past few years. Guy Fawkes Night this year was no different, but there was an added plot twist. With the reincarnation of Occupy's London branch getting ​kicked out of Parliament Square just over a week ago, Anonymous was determined to take it back. The police had made it clear that they would not allow this to happen, which Anonymous took as a challenge.

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"This tiny square [Parliament Square] represents all of our liberties," I was told by an Anon as I reached Trafalgar Square, the starting point for the march. "It's our right to be here, and we will take it for our own." While the event wasn't quite living up to its "Million Mask March" title, the first thing I was struck by was the sheer number of people present; estimates put the figure at several thousand, a number that included ​Russell Brand. The second thing was the overpowering aroma of weed.

"I'm here because my rights are being taken away. Data is recorded, and they're intruding into my private life," said 17-year-old Ali, who had donned a suit for the occasion. He'd come along with a group of friends, making it their third protest together, having also taken a stand on Palestine and the environment in recent weeks. The guys told me they'd "stay until the end, until [their] voices had been heard." Then one pointed out it was a school night and they'd need to be home by 11:30.

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By Nelson's Column, a blue-bibbed Police Liaison Officer was being surrounded by a crowd and generally goaded while fireworks were set off. I went over to two of his colleagues, PC Keith Leahy and PC Lincoln, to see how they were feeling. I was told that blue-bibs were worn because they weren't real police. "What if you saw someone doing something naughty, would you nick them?" a guy behind me shouted. "I wouldn't, no," Keith explained, handcuffs ready at his belt.

They handed me a list of rules: no music, climbing on buildings or monuments, fireworks, disruption, or graffiti. Surrounded by people doing most of those things, I got the impression that it had turned into a bucket list for almost everyone there.

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By around 7:00 PM thousands of people were in Trafalgar Square. Climbing on the lion statues, I found Jimmy, who had come down from Stoke-on-Trent for the occasion (although he made it clear that he'd leave Stoke-on-Trent for any occasion). We talked about how shit the government is, and why we need a revolution, but the conversation quickly went a bit ​David Icke.

I'd heard the 9/11 truther spiel before, but Jimmy took it up a notch, saying that the census ("I mean, they just know everything about you if you tell them"), and moon landings ("they found something on the dark side, a base, and they were told to leave and never come back") were part of the Illuminati's conspiracy to control the world, too.

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Before I could ponder this for too long, we were setting off, marching down Whitehall.

I spoke to John Rooney, a 23-year-old Dubliner who appeared to be taking a power nap beneath a National Grid van, much to the dismay of the guy driving it. It's all been kicking off in Ireland recently, and John had decided to take the struggle international. "I know the Irish government is being pressured by the IMF, and the UK is part of that." He didn't seem too keen on moving when the cops asked him to. "I was​ dragged across the street by Irish coppers recently, and spent six days in the hospital, and had 20 seizures."

Seventeen-year-old Jess told me she came down for the night to learn, and now knew "that everyone hates the feds like I do." Others told me they were there to fight against austerity, people getting killed in police custody, and for a free Palestine. ​

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Arriving at the Palace of Westminster, the obligatory stand-off with the cops began. Barriers were shaken, chants were screamed, and people tussled with the police a bit before running off, breaking through the police lines.

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Nobody seemed terribly bothered about taking Parliament Square, which I'd thought was the whole point, and we were quickly off to the next destination on our revolutionary walking tour, which turned out to be Buckingham Palace. As chants of "burn it down" and "God fuck the queen" echoed around, we made our way to the palace. When a group of tourists from Hong Kong joined in, I assumed they'd come to link up protests there. Turned out they thought the crowds were for Prince Charles.

Fireworks flew at the Palace and a few metal barriers flew at the police, who got their sticks out again.

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Then it was off down Piccadilly. The shutters of the Ritz flew down as we passed; the hotel must be getting really bored of being emblematic of the largesse of the rich. Next to a branch of Costa, a homeless guy was sitting down, looking a bit bemused at the protesters. "Everyone, give dough to this guy!" someone shouted. And so they did. "I've lived on the streets for two and a half years, but this is fantastic. These are the kindest people I've ever met," said the homeless guy.

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We headed down Regent Street, and it felt like the cops were being outflanked. Road signs were smashed, trash bags went flying, one copper even got a Pot Noodle in his face. By the time we got to BBC HQ (the Anons see the BBC as some sort of propaganda broadcaster) the Met had caught up, but the cat and mouse game carried on past Selfridges, down toward Park Lane.

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Sitting down on the road outside the Hilton on Mayfair, I spoke to a 20-year-old named Felix, who was doing wheelies on a Barclays Bike around the police cordon. I asked if he was disappointed that Parliament Square wasn't a new tent city, but he didn't seem too upset. "That's not the point. It's not very organized, but there are a lot of young people here. We've got nothing to do." He wasn't at all pissed off that the tarpaulin revolution didn't pan out as the ​call-out video had described. He just wanted to show his discontent.

To be honest, I found the night a bit weird. What had started as a targeted attack on the government ended for me on the corners of Hyde Park, with a guy playing the guitar and some Catherine wheels being set off. But I guess it was never really about Parliament Square, so much as generalized outbursts about notions of inequality, unfairness, and  ​GCHQ clandestinely checking up on you when you're browsing the web. Obviously the number of conspiracy theorists is always a concern at these things, but there seemed to be a shared understanding that this was the howl of a generation that has more debt, less privacy, and fewer prospects than its parents. ​

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Follow Mike on ​Twitter.

I love an acting career comeback, especially for someone as deserving as Jake Gyllenhaal. His role as a creepy Los Angeles crime videographer in Nightcrawler, following his tattooed detective in Prisoners last year, signals a career revival that could be the next McConaissance.

Jake's career is clearly going in a different direction than it was just a few years ago. He's moving away from Prince of Persia, towards nuanced roles as neo-noir detectives and creeps. The new trajectory can trace its beginnings back to the Los Angeles cop drama, End of Watch, directed by Fury director David Ayers, where Jake was able to start shaping real characters again. He displayed some of his natural charm and wit in the car conversations with Michael Pena, conversations that are the anti-True Detective car scenes—the men talk about life issues and tell jokes instead of discussing Frederich Nietzsche and yellow kings.

In End of Watch and Prisoners, Jake played his characters of the night with specificity and veracity. He brings that same quality to Nightcrawler, where he portrays a slimy loner in the mold of Travis Bickle who becomes the premier documenter of Los Angeles crime.

His new roles, when presented together, show that Gyllenhaal is indeed back and he has no qualms about crawling in the dirt for his characters. He is no longer interested in pretty-boy commercial silliness. His choice of roles is precise, unconventional, and daring. 

So what's so good about the character he plays in Nightcrawler? First, Jake lost the weight. He looks so thin and hunched he's like something out of Nosferatu, with a wicked grin always ready to curl up. Second, the hair—it's long, but not so long that it can be put into a regular ponytail. The best he can do is a pathetic little samurai tail, something he does when he wants to get down to serious business.

The isolation is part of the character, and it defines him. He has no meaningful relationships, so the work becomes his only concern. He is obsessed with work because it is the one thing that he can do well. He has no one else in his life he cares for, unless you count Rene Russo's character, the television producer who buys his material.

His skills as a crime videographer empowers him in ways that nothing else can. The shocking news footage he captures on video are the best of their kind, partly because he manipulates crime scenes and goes into places he's not supposed to. 

His work is reality television's revenge on the movie business. The tools of the entertainment industry are taken out at night and used for a different kind of entertainment. We want to watch horror when it's on a screen, regardless of it being fact or fiction. And it's more interesting when it's real.

This is the movie that captures the psyche of the paparazzo dorks who stalk stars—subterranean hunters who, armed with their precious cameras, turn citizens into prey. It shows how easy it is to dehumanize your subject when you're looking at them from the other side of a lens.

This movie also captures our desire to look. We want to look at the car accidents, to rubberneck. Like porn stars who aren't given mainstream credit, even though so many people watch porn, Jake's nightcrawler creature exists because the demand is there. He's going to keep crawling though all our nasty business because we keep watching. 

​The Sapphire Gentlemen's club in Las Vegas claims to be the world's largest night club. While that may or may not be true, it's undoubtedly a behemoth. The place is 71,000 square feet and employs approximately 6,600 performers. But while Sapphire is raking in the cash, none of the women who work there are paid by the club.

Soon, that will change. Back in 2009, strippers from the Sapphire filed a class action lawsuit, claiming that tips weren't cutting it. They wanted at least minimum wage tacked onto their incomes, arguing that they were full-fledged employees rather than independent contractors. Even though they were free to work elsewhere on the side and had artistic license regarding their performances, they still had to adhere to certain house rules, like making sure their heels weren't too short and their costumes weren't too skimpy.

Although a Clark County judge originally threw out the suit, the dancers appealed. On October 30, they finally secured a victory from the Nevada Supreme Court. It's a huge case that could have wide implications in Sin City and beyond. By politically mobilizing, exotic dancers are able to secure better wages and benefits like health insurance, as well as gaining a bit of job security. When they become official employees, they can't be fired or taken off the schedule for no reason.

Damienne is a dancer who worked at Sapphire on its opening night and in clubs all over the world for 17 years before pursuing a master's degree at the London School of Economics. She says that the push within the industry for employee rights is more controversial than it sounds. She remembers the couple of summers she spent working at a club in Alaska, and that the girls there were pushing for unionization. She was against it. After all, it could fuck with her income, and she wasn't there during the non-tourist months, when some of the full-timers would contend with nights so slow that they would pay to perform and end up at a deficit. What's more, she worried about what would happen to her income if the club decided that, since their strippers were getting wages, private dances should be given for free.

But of course organization among employees has many upsides. Damienne remembers working a club in California with rotting staircase—a recipe for disaster when combined with stilettos. "If a dancer broke her leg," she told me, "they'd be out of work for months with no recourse." Damienne has had her own brush with injury. In another club, she caught her shoe on a carpet snag and plowed into the corner of a wooden bench. "It literally took my skin off down to the bone," she said. "Luckily it didn't get infected, because I didn't have health insurance at the time." Today, she's one of hundreds of beneficiaries to a number of strip-club-related class action suits.

But even though strippers are conflicted about whether they want to be considered employees, the trend toward that distinction is growing. It all started with Johanna Breyer, who began her career as a dancer in San Francisco in 1990. Two years into her side job (she was also a student at Berkeley, studying social welfare), one of her employers introduced a $10 stage fee. When the tithe was arbitrarily raised to $20, she and another dancer, Dawn Passar, formed the Exotic Dancer's Alliance. About 35 of their co-workers at Market Street Cinema met at a nearby restaurant one day to raise concerns about the club's labor practices, such as the need to tip the DJ to make sure one was put on the schedule again.

After the meeting, the women sent a certified letter to the management, voicing their requests. They wanted the stage fee to cover certain improvements. When they got no response, the EDA started holding regular meetings and filing complaints with the State Labor Commission. They wanted to unionize, but with the exception of the Lusty Lady in San Francisco, all strippers across the country were still considered independent contractors.

Eventually, the labor commission ruled that the women were employees. Although the club appealed and won, a movement had begun. A class action suit was filed against another local spot, Mitchell Brothers O'Farrell Theatre, in 1994, and eventually resulted in a $2.85 million settlement.

Since then, a number of judges in states like Georgia, New York, and California have all agreed that strippers deserve wages, and cases are currently kicking around in Illinois, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina concerning the same issue.

Leon Greenberg, an attorney at the overtime wage and collection center in Vegas, says that there have actually been 10-20 decisions about strippers' employment statuses in the past five years. The lawyer says it's a serious issue that people don't take seriously given the nature of the plaintiff's profession.

"They're a hard demographic to represent," he told me. "The girls who are into it are making a lot of money, so it's easy to say, 'Oh, we're getting $500 or $1,000 or a couple of thousand dollars for a day or night's work.' Even though these girls are taking a lot of abuse and not getting the legal protection they clearly deserve, they're afraid to rock the boat."

But the six plaintiffs in the Sapphire suit took the risk, and they'll now be making $8.25 an hour on top of whatever cash they bring home, although the decision doesn't say when that will go into effect. "The consideration of these sex workers as employees is a huge step forward in giving them a voice within the context of where they work" Damienne says. "Is it a movement that's inevitable? I don't know, but I'd like to think that the idea of workers' voices' being heard is a movement that's very much needed."

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This post originally appeared in VICE UK

When ​the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, and the rest of the British press pack published a story yesterday about the TV series Breaking Bad sparking a crystal meth craze in Britain, my bullshit detectors went into overdrive.

The story had the whiff of pure, unfiltered bullshit. In fact, it's a specimen of the "double bullshit" news story: one load of bullshit used to prop up a second load of bullshit.

Firstly, there is no "shocking" rise of crystal meth use in Britain.

The articles quote the number of seizures of the drug as having risen by 400 percent in the last year. They paint a picture of drug operatives working through the night, rushing from meth den to meth den in a desperate attempt to crack down on the real life Heisenbergs. Except that the number of seizures has only risen from 61 to 252. This would be a lot if we were talking about brain seizures. But compared to the 16,825 seizures of cocaine and nearly 150,000 of cannabis during the same year, it's a drop in the ocean.

The story expressed horror that 17,000 people had used crystal meth in the last year. Yet next to the 2.6 million people using other drugs, it's negligible. It also said that Breaking Bad could be responsible for a dramatic 50 percent rise in the use of the drug in Germany. Compelling as the show is, I'm not sure it's compelling in a way that will make people actually want to do crystal meth. More likely is that the part of Germany seeing a rise in use, Bavaria, borders the Czech Republic, the biggest consumer and producer of methamphetamine in Europe.

The notion that Breaking Bad has been responsible for this tiny rise in meth use comes from Ellis Cashmore, a professor of media, culture, and sport at Staffordshire University. This is what he says: "Showing the horrendous impact of crystal meth can have a boomerang effect and cause curiosity among some viewers who might think 'that must be good'... I'm not surprised following the success of Breaking Bad that we have news of a surge in the use of methamphetamine. The fact millions of people have watched the show and been entertained by it almost instantly glamorizes its subject matter, whether deliberate or not."

Cashmore suggests that because its co-star Aaron Paul, who plays a meth addict, is sexy, good-looking, and a Hollywood A-lister, we will probably want to take meth too.

Now, I'm no professor of media, culture, and sport, but to me this sounds iffy, mainly because this guy provides no evidence to back up his hunch. Are we really a bunch of automatons who blindly copy what we see on TV?

If he's onto something, why hasn't Mad Men quadrupled the number of cigarette smokers? Why aren't we all street hustlers after watching The Wire? Surely the nation is awash with sword-wielding knights after four seasons of Games of Thrones? Luckily, the human brain, after the age of about ten, doesn't work like this. Drug use is more influenced by your immediate surroundings than what you see on TV.

For the last decade the media has been declaring a crystal meth epidemic in the UK almost non-stop. For example, in 2006 the Independent ​published a front page declaring "Crystal Meth: Britain's Deadliest Drug Problem," despite the fact the drug was only a faint blip on police and drug use statistics and that there had been no deaths attributed to the drug that year. When a Sun journalist was asked why he was printing yet another false dawn crystal meth story in 2011, he ​replied that readers liked the "before and after" images of American crystal meth addicts.

Apart from its use in some ​gay party scenes, particularly in London, crystal meth has never caught on in Britain. Arrests and convictions for crystal meth are extremely rare in the UK. They always have been. A Freedom of Information request made in May by the Brighton Argus into the extent of crystal meth in Sussex ​found the number of arrests for the drug has been falling for the last five years. Last year, Sussex police arrested a jail-busting five people for crystal meth.

There is a logical reason—which has nothing to do with TV—for why crystal meth is not popular here: we have no need for it. This small, well-networked country is one of Europe's major drug distribution hubs, and we have stimulant drugs such as cocaine and MDMA coming out of our ears. It is no coincidence that crystal meth, a DIY drug, is most popular in parts of the world where stimulant drugs are scarce and expensive, such as the rural American Midwest, New Zealand, and Australia.

But for some newspapers, which still presume we follow America's lead on drug trends (actually the Yanks now follow us, but that's another story), the temptation to dabble in a bit of crystal myth is too tempting to ignore.

​Follow Max Daly on ​Twitter

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Photo of Phil Rudd via Wikimedia Commons

He tried to get a "dirty deed done dirt cheap," but instead of getting a "big gun" to "shoot to thrill," Phill Rudd, the drummer for legendary rock band AC/DC, appears to be on the "highway to hell," or at least prison.

The occasion for all of these puns is Rudd's alleged hiring of a hitman to assassinate two unknown men. Police raide​d the 60-year-old's home at 7 AM yesterday and he appeared in court that same morning dressed in a grey sweater and jeans. Rudd was also charged with possession of meth and weed. He won't enter a plea until November 27, but fac​es up to ten years in prison if convicted. It's unclear, ahem, "who phoned the law."

OK, we'll stop now.

AC/DC, the band that got Rudd into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame in 2003, is releasing a new album called Rock or Bust on December 2 and touring in support of that record, and the other band members plan to go on with those plans. "We've only become aware of Phil's arrest as the news was breaking," AC/DC said in a statement that showed a fair bit of "stiff upper lip" (sorry). "Phil's absence will not affect the release of our new album Rock or Bust and upcoming tour next year."

As the drummer for AC/DC from 1972 to 1983 and 1994 to today, Rudd's considered an integral part of the group, not to mention its only Australian member. (Founder and rhythm guitarist Malcolm Young had to leave the band this year and is reportedly seek​ing treatment for dementia in Sydney. It has been a bad year for the band.) Like most people who are in rock bands with "edgy" images, Rudd has had trouble with the law—in 2010 his lawyer g​ot a pot possession conviction suppressed on the grounds that it would prevent him from touring with AC/DC in places like Japan, Canada, and the US—but he's never gotten into the sort of almost made-for-TV situation he finds himself in now.

As their favorite band falling apart at the seams, panicked fan​s are already hypothesizing online about who will replace Rudd. But it seems like there's been a rift between the band and its drummer for a while: Rudd ​was absent from two video shoots in October, and later that month an official p​hoto was released without him in it.

The charges will presumably officially end Rudd's tenure with AC/DC no matter how this case plays out. The rocker, who came out with a solo record titled Head Job in August, was released on bail and  ​picked up from court by a blonde woman in a silver Merce​des.

Follow Allie Conti on Tw​itter.

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The men behind the internet's most popular piracy hub, The Pirate Bay, have had a particularly bad week; which is not too out of the ordinary for a group of hackers and disruptors who are acutely aware of law enforcement troubles, international manhunts, prison time, solitary confinement, and telling Hollywood to go fuck itself.

First there was the  ​Halloween sentencing of one of The Pirate Bay's co-founders, 30 year-old Gottfrid Svartholm-Warg, who was sentenced to three-and-a-half years behind bars in Denmark. He was found guilty of hacking into the Danish wing of a company called the Computer Sciences Corporation. CSC is also in the news right now for allegedly developing billing fraud schemes, alongside the City of New York itself, that may have defrauded New York State's Me​dicaid system. Across the pond, Svartholm was accused of hacking into CSC's Danish databases, which a court in Copenhagen found to have included "criminal records and drive​rs' license records."

Svartholm-Warg had been previously hiding out in Cambodia, but was extradited to Sweden, where he was held in solitary confin​ement before facing trial in Denmark. Svartholm-Warg was running from a one-year prison sentence the Swedes hammered down on him for his role in founding The Pirate Bay. Those original Pirate Bay-related charges sparked a massive protest movement in Sweden.

I spoke to Rickard Falkvinge, the founder of the Pirate Party, about the legal nightmare of the Pirate Bay crew. On the subject of Svartholm-Warg's extradition from Cambodia, he told me: "For some reason [the authorities] were throwing everything they had at a computer repair guy out in the rural parts of Cambodia, and it certainly had nothing to do with an extra 59.4 million US dollars in foreign aid from Sweden to Cambodia that was handed over at the same time."

At the time, his extradition to Sweden caused plenty of undesirable attention for both the Swedes and the Cambodians. Within Wikileaks' extensive documentation pertaining to Svartholm-Warg's case, the Swedish Foreign Ministry's press director is quoted as writ​ing: "We are getting a lot of questions from all four corners of the earth regarding [Svartholm-Warg]. Many journalists are personally involved, is my impression. I think the pressure on the embassy [in Cambodia] will diminish now that he's coming to Sweden."

In Sweden, Svartholm-Warg faced similar hacking charges to the ones he was recently convicted for in Denmark. He was accused of both hacking into a Swedish bank called Nordea, and Logica, an IT firm. Only the charges pertaining to Logica stuck, but Svartholm-Warg has maintained his innocence throughout, stating that someone nefarious had accessed his computer remotely to carry out the hacks. Svartholm-Warg was then deported to Denmark, despite his b​es​t efforts, arguing that he was being tried for the same crimes twice. This is a perplexing argument given that the Danish charges pertained to his alleged hack of CSC, not Logica or Nordea, for which the Swedes went after him.

In Denmark, Svartholm-Warg used the same defense, namely that he was framed and his computer was hacked. The prosecution dismissed this argument, but Svartholm-Warg's legal team called in Jacob Applebaum, noted computer security researcher and Tor developer who testified to the contrary. His ​lawyers also presented "an antivirus scan of his computer showing that 545 threats had been found on it, some of which were capable of providing a hacker with remote control of the computer."

Svartholm-Warg's argument is plausible, in that he has certainly made plenty of powerful enemies simply from running The Pirate Bay. Wikileaks has also pointed out that he played a role in the infamous "Collateral Murder" project, wherein Wikileaks released previously classified video footage of an American Apache helicopter mistakenly bombing ​jo​urnalists.

As if Svartholm-Warg's multinational, convoluted legal woes weren't enough, one of the other Pirate Bay founders, Fredrik Neij, who had fled to Asia after being charged in Sweden, was arrested in Thailand earlier th​is week. According to Falkvinge, "Fredrik had been one of the tech guys running the site, and according to clips from the movie TP​B AFK, he was basically planning to wait out the statute of limitations in the wonderful climate."

Neij had been living in Laos, and reportedly was a frequent tra​veler to Thailand. While he has not yet been sent to Sweden to serve time for his copyright infringement charges, it's expected that will be happening sooner than later. Neij was the last remaining Pirate Bay founder to evade incarceration.

The third founder of the Pirate Bay is Peter Sunde, a man Rickard Falkvinge describes as "mediagenic." Sunde expects to be released from prison this month. Falkvinge told me Sunde's role in The Pirate Bay was very minor, in a length​y statement written for Falkvinge's blog published after his plea, he states his conviction came about after "having sent an invoice for advertising on The Pirate Bay once in April 2006 (almost a year after the events on trial started)."

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He also claims he was advised by police to get a cheap lawyer, discusses how Stockholm Police's "lead interrogator" on his case took a job with Warner Brothers during the trial, and how he once felt as if he were "the most hated person in the power corridors of Hollywood."

Sunde is likely to take on new entrepreneurial projects upon his release. I spoke to him in July 2013, about an enc​rypted message app he was working on before being imprisoned that would combine the security of encryption with the beautiful graphic interface of, say, the iPhone.

The Guardian caught up​ with Sunde recently, where he discussed his newfound friendship with a cocaine smuggler who bakes vegan muffins, the poor treatment he receives in jail outside of said muffins, and how he was able to encrypt all of his computer systems through a keystroke on his smartphone at the moment of his arrest, which understandably infuriated his arresting officer.

Despite having its three most prominent organizers in custody (along with a fourth man—the supposed financier Carl Lundström, who currently sports an electronic ankle bracelet in Switzerland) The Pirate Bay is alive and well. 

At the time of this writing, The Pirate Bay's own statistics—which are published on its homepage—shows that the torrent tracker has over 48 million connected users, sharing nearly 7 million torrents. In his post-plea statement from 2012, Sunde bragged that "The Pirate Bay was back online [immediately after the initial raid]. It's an easy service to copy, and with no advanced functionality. That was one of the major features with the underlying technology, being smart and easily maintained to that level. It was so easy to maintain, nobody had practically touched it for a year at the time of the raid."

According to Falkvinge, the four men's "real crime was talking back at Hollywood monopolists, which embarrassed the Swedish establishment at the time."

In the face of international pressure, The Pirate Bay is infamous for its clever maneuvers that keep it online. At one point, the site's administrators were considering placing its servers onto drones that would floa​t above international waters to curve anti-copyright legislation written in pesky landlocked nations. And, just recently, the site began using its a​dvertising space to promote a free VPN, which allow users in countries like Iceland (which have recently banned access to the Pirate Bay outright) to access the site safely.

​Follow Patrick on Twitter.