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This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Yesterday, "Big" David Cameron announced some unfeasible, short-sighted plans to crack down on encrypted messaging services such as WhatsApp and Snapchat on the off-chance that terrorists might use them to plan domestic attacks. "Are we going to allow a means of communications which it simply isn't possible to read?" he said yesterday. "My answer to that question is: 'No, we must not.'" Not really sure terror cells are planning attacks by snapchatting pictures of themselves with a Santa beard and a caption like "lol fancy doing a nailbomb" but I'll be honest: I've never planned any sort of large-scale terrorist attack.

Anyway, yesterday we asked you to send us your Snapchat messages for David Cameron. Obviously we had tons of videos which we couldn't screenshot (but I'll try to draw a picture in your mind: they were mostly six seconds of someone saying "FUCK OFF"), but here's the best of the rest.

If you want to send any Snapchats of your own to us/David Cameron, do it via the handle shoutatcameron.

FIZZ ISN'T HAPPY

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Big props for using your cat to get your message across. Much more pleasant to look at on a cold Wednesday morning than someone's actual hairy balls.

THREE-PRONGED ATTACK

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You've got three central messages going on here: the "thumbs down," traditional NVC indicating negativity; the words "Naughty Cameron," which sort of sounds like the Prime Minister is being judged by Santa; and then you've got, scrawled in blood red, "U CAN'T CENSOR US." Take that, Davey C.

STRAIGHT-TO-THE-POINT

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On the other side of the nuanced Snapchat political messaging spectrum, we've got this: a cheerily blunt middle-fingering.

AND ANOTHER!

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Slightly less cheery, this one. Quite menacing, actually. Weird thing going on with the thumb. Wouldn't want to be in David Cameron's shoes when he sees this.

YOU WHAT

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In a way, this is my favorite: the classic "You what, mate" coupled with the I'll-fight-you-in-a-pub-car-park-mate-I-don't-give-a-shit-about-my-parole expression makes me suspect the sender would literally batter David Cameron to save Snapchat. If I ever have to start a brawl in a pool hall, I want this dude on my side.

THE SOAPBOX

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An interesting effort—strong messaging on a completely different topic to the one we were asking for your hot takes on. But then maybe there is something there: maybe David Cameron could figure out a way to enforce encryption laws only on those dolts who send rambling, minute-long Snapchats about their fucking walk to the bus stop and leave everyone who sends decent content the hell alone.

A FUNNY JOKE

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This actually made me laugh because if you imagine every picture from Nick Clegg Looking Sad is taken directly after he's seen a harrowing dickpic then it gives the whole Tumblr an extra layer of humor. A very thin layer, but a layer nonetheless.

FISH EGG

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I don't know what the word "egg" is doing in there.

EMOJI COUPLE

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These days, in Scotland, "Enough of your pish, David" is a strong enough motto to actually launch a political campaign on, guys. (I am assuming these people are Scottish because "pish" and facial hair.) The Thumbs-Down Cat Emoji Leopard-Print Onesie Party are guaranteed to have my vote.

ART DICK

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This would actually make an incredible neon sign.

Follow Joel onTwitter.

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The Charlie Hebdo offices after being firebombed in 2011. Photo by Pierre-Yves Beaudouin via Wikimedia Commons

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Unlike recent jihadi hits in the West, where lone—or, as Max Abrahms perhaps more accurately calls them, "loon"—wolves have carried out terrorist attacks in a bid for death and martyrdom, the attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo last week was a hit-and-run, not a suicide mission. A hit-and-run where the emphasis was on the killing, not the dying.

The two gunmen— brothers Saïd and Chérif Kouachi—may have gone out in a hail of police bullets. But martyrdom didn't seem to be their intention on Wednesday morning; it appeared that they wanted to escape.

The attack also isn't without parallel or precedent. The magazine's offices were firebombed in 2011, after printing a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad. Many commentators have noted too that it is a continuation of, as Geoffrey Goldberg puts it, the "brittle, peevish, and often-violent campaign to defend the honor of Allah and his prophet" that began in 1989 with the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. But the more salient reference point for thinking about last Wednesday's attack and the possible motives behind it may be the murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh on an Amsterdam street in 2004.

Van Gogh's killer, a Moroccan-Dutchman named Mohammad Bouyeri, acted alone, shooting Van Gogh several times as he rode his bicycle to work. Following the attack, he made no attempt to flee the murder scene, slouching off instead to a nearby park, where he readied himself for more violence.

Bouyeri's plan, as he made clear at his court trial in 2005, was to die as a martyr to his faith in a shootout with the Dutch police. It ultimately didn't work out that way; instead, he took a bullet in the leg—not the fatal shot he'd hoped for. Minutes later he was apprehended, very much alive and un-martyred.

At his trial, Bouyeri explained that "the law compels me to chop off the head of anyone who insults Allah and the prophet." He then elaborated further, directly addressing Van Gogh's mother: "I don't feel your pain," he told her. "I don't have any sympathy for you. I can't feel for you because I think you're a non-believer. I did what I did purely out of my beliefs. I want you to know that I acted out of conviction and not that I took his life because he was Dutch or because I was Moroccan and felt insulted. If I ever get free, I would do it again."

Van Gogh was first and foremost a provocateur, and was known in the Netherlands less for his films than for his outrageous remarks about almost everything. He was also notorious for calling Muslims "goat fuckers." However, his most serious offense—as Bouyeri saw it—was to have insulted the honor of God by making, with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born political activist and former Muslim, a blasphemous film about Islam.

This controversial film, entitled Submission, was broadcast on Dutch television in 2004 and featured lines from the Qur'an, detailing a man's right to beat his wife, projected onto the naked bodies of several young women. For this act of sacrilege, Van Gogh would have to pay. Bouyeri was not only adamant that the divinely mandated punishment for blasphemy is death, but that it was his own personal religious duty to carry it out.

The killers who struck on Wednesday were clearly in a different league from the hapless Bouyeri, but their motives may prove strikingly similar. Wednesday's attack was a primarily faith-based initiative, a sacramental act intended to please God, in much the same way that Van Gogh's death was a sacrificial gift to God from Bouyeri.

This raises the issue of Islamic jurisprudence on blasphemy and the permissive way in which jihadis interpret it. In his expert evidence at Bouyeri's trial, Professor Rudolph Peters—a renowned Dutch scholar of Islamic law—testified that Bouyeri had been strongly influenced by a text called The Obligation, authored by the classical Islamic thinker Ibn Taymiyya.

This text was interpreted by Bouyeri to mean that it is mandatory for Muslims to kill anyone who insults the Prophet. But this, as Peters observed, was a serious misreading on Bouyeri's part. Taymiyya had stipulated that only after a trial and the proper substantiation of the facts could a person guilty of blasphemy be put to death.

"Bouyeri," Peters wrote in a paper on the Van Gogh murder, "misunderstood this and took it as an obligation for individual Muslims to take the law into their own hands." It may well be that the killers on Wednesday were laboring under the same misapprehensions as Bouyeri about the nature of their religious obligations.

§

As we try to take in and understand the events of last week, one issue up for discussion is Islam and its possible connection to murderous violence.

On one side, there are those who claim that the shootings had nothing to do with "true" Islam, and that they were in fact a monstrous distortion of an essentially peaceful and humane religion. On the other, there are those who insist with equal vehemence that the attack was everything to do with Islam, and that it was in fact a logical or direct manifestation of what is an essentially illiberal and despotic religion.

Only, both sides are mistaken, ignoring that Islam—like any religion—isn't a fixed entity that exists over and above the people who interpret and practice it. Whether Islam, however the religion is defined or understood, promotes or inhibits violence isn't the point. The point, rather, is that there are a growing number of people who believe that "true" Islam does permit the killing of those who, in their judgment, are guilty of blasphemy and apostasy.

If we're to take away anything constructive from this tragedy, it should be this: It is imperative to demonstrate that these people are wrong, not according to an imagined pristine Islam, but by the lights of fundamental moral values which all societies share—and, more immediately, to punish their crimes and stop them from committing future outrages.

Simon Cottee is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Kent University. He is a member of the editorial board of Studies in Conflict and Terrorism. His book The Apostates: When Muslims Leave Islam is out in February, published by Hurst & Co.

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People follow Jackson Eaton's photos online with the same intensity they usually devote to HBO serial dramas. His images let you in on the most intimate moments in his life—you about learn his relationships, meet everybody close to him, and track the development of his facial hair. OK, I know that sounds boring, but it really isn't. In his latest project, Melfies 2, he reverse-searches his body parts on Google Images and works the results into collage. It's less immediate fodder for those obsessed with his life, but it's just as close of a look inside his head.

VICE: So when did you decide to use Google in this way?
Jackson Eaton: Google image searching is something I've always been fascinated by as a potential tool for making artwork. Obviously the first thing you do is drag an image of yourself in there to see what comes up. This year I started my master's in fine art at Monash [a university in Melbourne] and was looking at self-portraiture in a contemporary context; I'd already done that project Melfies 1. Melfies 2 was just one of those ideas that came about.

Have you ever encountered copyright issues where someone's been like, "Hey, that's my face"?
No. I mean my level of reach probably doesn't warrant that, but maybe if I'm Richard Prince and printing out giant pictures of people's Instagrams and putting it in the Gagosian, then I'll have an issue.

Beyond selfies, what are you trying to explore with the project?
Obviously, part of it is looking at this phenomenon and how the images we post online are supposedly some way of communicating our individual experience. But what happens is those forms become really repetitive—the same kinds of selfies pop up. I wanted to explore that failure to present our individuality.

I remember seeing your earlier work and feeling like I was looking into somebody's personal diary—it was very intimate. These photos are a lot less diaristic—did you intentionally take a break from documenting your personal life?
It's not that I took a break from it, it's just a different direction. I do sort of talk about the personal here. It almost thwarts the attempts to actually expose our personal lives, which is what we think about when we think about people using Instagram. It's a sort of window into their lives but you're looking at how constructed that is.

Would you ever take this work to a gallery or is it something you think should just exist online?
It's a question I'm wrestling with at the moment. I want Instagram to be the primary form of presentation of this work, to reinsert the work into that same form which it critiques or mocks. But if the opportunity comes up I will think about how to adapt that work for a different context.

Have you ever had to pull yourself back from posting things because it allowed your internet persona to collide with your in-real-life self too closely?
Of course, those are the kinds of questions that we ask ourselves all the time, and that stuff resonates with me. There are lots of questions about expanded presentation context and how we think about our true selves or natural/biological self. That's a part of the Melfies, that kind of masking of the natural body and my identity and such.

Jackson was interviewed by Emma Do. Follow her on Twitter.

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Ratchet Regi strips in her living room. Photos by Stacy Kranitz. For more photos of Regi, see our complete gallery of pictures of the Sausage Castle

As a native Floridian, I have met tons of wild young women, but I have never met a girl quite like Ratchet Regi, the self-proclaimed "most ratchet stripper in Orlando." She plays with snakes, squirts chocolate out of her vagina, climbs poles at outdoor strip clubs, and teaches girls how to twerk, all while wearing librarian glasses. The Kansas native is also the queen of the Sausage Castle, the pay-to-party house in Central Florida that specializes in throwing Bacchanalian bashes and is run by Gary Busey's oddball nephew, Mike Busey.

I first encountered Regi last summer at the Gathering of the Juggalos, when I spotted her giving a 500-pound man a "lap-band dance." Da Mafia 6ix's DJ Paul posted a video of the smutty affair that went viral thanks to pickup from TMZ, MTV, and a bunch of other media outlets.

No one who knows Regi was surprised by that video or the fact that it was shared all over the internet. When I visited her and Mike at the Sausage Castle in October, numerous residents extolled her indecency to me—and these were people who were used to a certain amount of raunch. I heard stories in which her ratchetness reached mythic proportions—like the time she let her lesbian Sausage Castle roommate Kace fuck her with a Bud Light bottle during a Livestream broadcast as bait to ramp up their traffic.

But despite the salacious reputation, Regi describes her life as "very chill. There's not always super crazy things happening [at the Sausage Castle]." She spends a lot of time watching TV with her housemates and lounging in boxers in her bedroom, which boasts a giant painting of an Illuminati eye.

"Regi sold her soul to the Illuminati," Mike said. "That's why she's so viral right now."

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Regi watches TV in her bedroom.

Regi's first introduction to the Sausage Castle happened two years ago. A couple of her guy friends invited her to one of Mike's events. "'Regi, it's such a party house!'" she said her friends told her. "'You're gonna get fucked! Mike's gonna try and fuck you!'"

She walked into the house thinking, I'm not falling asleep here. I'm not staying with any of these bitches. Then she went upstairs to meet Mike in his office, and he introduced her to Kace, a lesbian who waits on tables at Chili's and has lived at the Sausage Castle for several years. She lives here? Regi thought. She's so pretty! Does she get raped? Then she realized the Sausage Castle favors girls over men—Mike doesn't even like guys.

"I'm a diva about random dudes," Mike said to me while I was at the house. "I tell the girls, 'Cock-block the shit out of them. Don't give them anything they deserve because it's all about a reward system here.'"

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Regi with a snake and torch outside the Sausage Castle

Regi never intended to move into the Sausage Castle. She just wanted to party. But the Castle has a gravitational pull for freaks like her. She became one of the house's permanent attractions after another of Mike's raging parties. After the event, she had plans to go home with a drunk clown and have sloppy Juggalo sex—but the guy crashed his car and broke his back down the road from the Castle. Regi stumbled out of the car and, with nowhere else to go, walked back down the street back to the Sausage Castle. She's been there ever since.

"That bitch is a vampire stripper," Mike said. "She will never die. Cigarettes, dicks, and cars with clowns can't kill her."

Since she moved in, she's become the star of the Sausage Castle's performances and Mike's unofficial ratchet sidekick. But she isn't the first "Busey Beauty" to steal the show. Around 2009 and 2010, Mike relied on a wild hillbilly lass named Buck-50 to draw degenerate partygoers to the Castle. Buck rose to the challenge by inventing the Sausage Castle's infamous "ass omelette," which involves shooting an egg into someone's butthole.

"She was the most ratchetness I-don'-give-a-fuck girl from Tennessee," Mike said. But when 12 Pack from VH1's I Love New York moved in, he got Buck-50 pregnant and she left with him to raise their child.

Although Regi has given the Sausage Castle more attention and publicity than even Buck-50, she credits Mike for running the show, though others say she's important in her own way.

"If you think about the dynamic of the house, as a whole, you have Mike, who's like the dad of the whole thing," Kace explained. "Then you have Regi, the ratchet bitch who pretty much just does whatever the fuck she wants with her vagina."

Unlike most people, Regi never stops working. Her main gig is stripping at a high-end club near the Orlando airport. But even on her time off, she enjoys doing crazy sex stuff. When I lived in the Castle for three days, she would just spontaneously start stripping for no reason at all. The most ratchet instance of her many unplanned strip sessions started as a pretty innocuous dance-off between her and a guy named Gay Aaron, who stays at the house occasionally to detox.

Someone put on Britney Spears's "I'm a Slave 4 U" and Regi's dancing got more intense. I'm not entirely sure where it came from, but all of a sudden she was brandishing a live snake. She started to peel off her clothes, one by one, until she was butt-ass naked with the snake. And then a prospective Busey Beauty named Liz, who had come over to the Castle, started dancing and stripping too.

Like most alternative families, the Sausage Castle family is generally suspicious of newcomers. So Regi took her downstairs to the living room, where there's a large stage with stripper poles, to have a strip-off to see if Liz could hang with the crew. The rest of the Sausage Castle watched from the surrounding church pews as Regi taught Liz how to shake her ass on the stage.

"One and two and three and four," Regi shouted. "I'll be here all day! Ratchet Regi, teaching you how to twerk through the night!"

Then the two girls started writhing up and down the stripper poles together. Liz humped the bottom of the pole as the family chanted, "Fuck the pole! Fuck the pole!" Then, taking this freak scene to its most logical conclusion, Mike told Regi to eat Liz's ass. Liz obliged. She bent over, with her ass in the air. And Regi stuck out her pink tongue and shoved it right into Liz's brown eye.

It was clear to me in this moment that Regi was in her element. An impromptu rim job in front of a crowd of howling degenerates is Regi's raison d'être.

"Mike always empowers me to embrace my ratchetness every fuckin' day," she said.

Follow Mitchell Sunderland on Twitter.

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I finally dropped the coin for Amazon Prime last year, just in time for Christmas, and I won't lie to you—the damn thing changed my life. I get packages seemingly every day, delivered in a timely fashion. Plus, I never have to talk to another human being when I buy things. I'm just a little arrow on a screen now, and I feel liberated. Did you know that you can purchase a 50-pack of paper towels and get it delivered to your house the next day? Why risk the shame, embarrassment, and familial dishonor of being seen at the store with a four-pack of "Pussy Energy Drink"? With Amazon, only your credit card company (and whichever government agency is spying on you that week) needs to know.

Yes, we are truly in some sort of golden age of laziness where anything you can dream of is "eligible for free delivery." That includes items purchased on Amazon Marketplace, the system that allows the average Joe or Jane the ability to sell goods through Amazon.com and make use of Amazon's state-of-the-art wish fulfillment services. And as a recent article from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) points out, a lot of racist Joes and Janes are using Marketplace to sell some pretty nasty things.

This is a free country. If I want to buy White Power by George Lincoln Rockwell, why shouldn't I be able to? After all, the "last and most powerful book written by the founder of the American Nazi Party" is both "hard-hitting" and "easy to read" according to the product description.

Of course, the question isn't whether I should be able to buy T-shirts with big ole swastikas on them—that's what the First Amendment is for—the question is what they're doing for sale on Marketplace, which according to Wired is becoming a larger and larger portion of Amazon's business model. The SPLC blog post quotes an Amazon representative as stating that "Listings for items that Amazon deems offensive are prohibited on Amazon.com." Some examples of offensive products include "Products that promote or glorify hatred, violence, racial, sexual or religious intolerance or promote organizations with such views." You also can't sell human body parts, products retrieved from a disaster or tragedy site (which doesn't explain why Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector is still available for purchase), and crime scene and autopsy photos.

Amazon seems to be doing a great job preventing me from purchasing a severed head from Ground Zero, but are lacking when it comes to the Nazi and white power memorabilia that remains for sale. It may be that it's impossible to police an open marketplace the size of Amazon.com, just in the same way that it's pointless for me to try to prevent people from saying nasty things about me in the comments below this article. But Amazon isn't some fly-by-night deep web site, it's a major retailer. Does it have a responsibility to make sure it's not at all involved in selling paraphernalia of hate? (Through a spokesperson, Amazon declined to comment for this story.)

That's the grand dilemma of our tech-obsessed, constantly connected society. We can order paper towels online and dream of the day when a remote-controlled drone is able to deliver an industrial-sized box of condoms to our doorstep at the push of a button—but we also are now privy to all manner of nasty thoughts, unpleasant news stories, and verbal abuse at the hands of complete strangers. More and more, people are made aware of the dark side of humanity through the magical powers of instant global communication. It makes us angrier and more indignant. We demand corporations like Amazon create policies banning that which we find objectionable, but is that even possible?

Free speech is on all of our minds after the Charlie Hebdo attack, and I fear that these sorts of incidents, where people are murdered for their opinions, are only going to become more common in the future. The internet is giving us more and more opportunities to express ourselves, and the more we speak, the more likely it is we'll offend someone, possibly to the point of rage. If I drew Adolf Hilter 69ing Albert Einstein while Fidel Castro watched and posted it to Facebook, there are at least a few hundred people who would see it. Maybe they would share it. Maybe someone would see it and get upset at my shabby attempt at art. Or take the real-world case of the Canadian college students who had a supposedly "private" Facebook group where they joked about "hate fucking" their female classmates and are now in serious trouble as a result.

I don't want some racist asshole selling Nazi flags through Amazon, because I don't want that guy to have that platform—but that's not an opinion I'm particularly proud of. I would like to live in a world where I'm able to say what I want and express myself. I guess George Lincoln Rockwell did too.

Follow Dave Schilling on Twitter.

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Of all the things I could have expected from the balmy nothingness of August—besides being coerced into muggy drinks cramped onto a pavement with all the dickheads from work—a free-to-play demo rocking the foundations of my gaming world was not one of them.

Yet as I sat hunched on my lunch break, watching as the screen filled up with increasingly hyperbolic accolades and gushing praise from members of the internet's once-voted second-bitchiest forum, I knew there'd be something pretty special waiting for me on PSN when I got home.

I made a conscious effort to avoid spoilers, and came away from the thread with three pieces of pertinent information.

One: It was only a teaser, not a full game, and was created by Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima and Pan's Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro.

Two: It was called P.T. and was tangentially related to the Silent Hill franchise.

Three: At worst, this was going to scare me. At best, it was going to absolutely terrify me.

I began foaming at the mouth more or less immediately, set the game downloading ahead of time and waited until the sky had turned from Calippo-orange to very, very, very dark, before pulling up my manky old burgundy sofa bed, cranking up the volume, and letting the games begin.

It's worth noting at this point that, having played (and adored) Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Outlast, Condemned, and other so-called Scariest Games Ever, but been left disillusioned by recent entries in the Silent Hill canon, I went into my first P.T. experience feeling excited but ultimately skeptical: it couldn't possibly be that scary, right?

If only I fucking knew.

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When the game loads, a black and white slide quietly appears and asks a cryptic, skin-prickling question: "Watch out. The gap in the door... it's a separate reality. The only me is me. Are you sure the only you is you?"

A cockroach scuttles across the cold concrete floor, a wooden door creaks open in front of you, your character gets up and you push the analog stick, moving towards a frighteningly lifelike and jaundiced domestic corridor. One of the first things to hit you is that the arms race for photorealism in video games is over—we're already there.

There are paintings on the walls, eerie photos of a frumpy newlywed couple on the dresser, a hanging lantern screeches back and forth, and a digital alarm clock has stopped at 11:59. Rain taps gently at the windows.

Besides this and your own weighty footsteps, the only other sound is a news broadcast playing through an old radio, echoing around the empty space.

Through crackles and static, the newsreader relays information pertaining to a brutal case of domestic homicide. A father apparently shot his pregnant wife and six-year-old daughter, and was found by the police in his car days later, chanting a sequence of numbers over and over again.

You enter the open door at the end of the L-shaped corridor and are right back where you started.

It's the same corridor. The same photos stare back at you from their frames. The rain still taps at the same windows. The same clock is stopped at the same fucking time, and the same lantern howls from the ceiling. This time, however, there's no radio broadcast playing and the "exit" door is closed firmly shut. You wander over and attempt to leave, and that's when shit starts to go down.

It's absolutely no exaggeration to say that what follows is one of the starkest, most surreal, feverish, and relentlessly terrifying 60 minutes of gaming I've ever experienced.

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How to describe the horror of what followed? Think the Lady in the Radiator from Eraserhead, the dog-man scene in The Shining, the visions of Jacob Singer, liberate tuteme ex inferis, the Conet Project on a candlelit night, the Babadook's voice, or a fully interactive House of Leaves, and you're in the right neck of the woods. Besides one PewDiePie-baiting jump scare, Kojima and del Toro have created a sense of deranged, circling, disorientating hell that lasts for the entire duration.

At times, the game doesn't even feel like it was created by human beings, instead coming off like some demonic transmission from another plane of existence, goading you into taking one more trip through that horrible fucking door.

Why is that thing standing there? Why is there a low-pitch voice talking in Swedish on the radio, a talking paper bag, a fetus in the sink? Why is he telling me not to touch a dial? Which dial? Why does he keep repeating those numbers? Where even is this house? Why are the lights changing color? Do I really have to look behind me? P.T. invites a lot of questioning from players, but is just as stingy with the answers.

And you'll keep trying to find them, while a synthetic spirit voice sobs horribly and hopelessly into your headphones, a traumatized baby screams from the confines of a blood-soaked refrigerator, the deeply ominous silence of the balcony leers at you from above, and the constant threat of her appearing keeps your heart palpitating.

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After ten or so increasingly demented variations on the L-shaped corridor, the game walks you into its biggest puzzle: an inescapable loop. You'll go round and round trying to find your way into the next "version," to no avail. At this point you'll inevitably chase down a walkthrough online, and it's there that you'll come into contact with the game's rabid community of theorists, all equally as clarity-famished as you are. When you finally solve the puzzle, a phone will ring, triggering a typically cryptic voice message that segues beautifully into the trailer for 2016's Silent Hills. It's over.

Now, P.T. is a remarkable achievement for three main reasons.

Firstly, it's totally bare-bones gameplay-wise. You just move around, occasionally clicking in the right thumbstick to zoom in on parts of the corridor.

Secondly, it's an exceptional piece of marketing. Word-of-mouth alone saw the download tally hit one million shortly after it hit PSN for free.

Finally, it's a serious contender for the scariest game ever made. When it finished I felt depressed, haunted, and genuinely rattled. Played in the dark with headphones up to full crank, it'll have your thumb quivering over the home button before you can say 204863. And if the truly horrifying TGS 2014 trailer is anything to go by, we're in for more of the same, only worse, when the full Silent Hills game makes its rumored appearance in 2016.

In a year that hosted sequels to both Dark Souls and Bayonetta, the fact that P.T. ended up claiming my 2014 top spot—and that of several other writers and gamers—is a miracle in itself. But it was impossible not to put it there—games have just never conjured up an atmosphere of dread like this before. Sure, Amnesia is pretty intense, but does it have a glitching, vomit-soaked, one-eyed apparition ogling you from the outside rain?

P.T. is an hour in the company of an omnipotent wickedness, conspiring to scramble your brain and leave you feeling alone, hunted, hopeless, lost in psychological turmoil, and whispering "please go away please go away" over and over again in your panicking, frightened little head.

Just like summer drinks with work, then.

Follow Jonathan on Twitter.

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Screenshot via

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Over the last few weeks, newspapers have been handing out grim tidings about the steep rise of the powerful prescription drug oxycodone in Britain. Better known by its brand name OxyContin, Oxy, or Hillbilly Heroin, the opioid painkiller that has devastated America is about to reap narco-havoc here too, according to the Times and the Daily Mail.

What the papers did was to dutifully repeat a warning—issued by the consistently clueless Tory think-tank the Center for Social Justice (CSJ)—that rising oxycodone prescriptions in the UK could well lead to "a middle-class heroin crisis." I'm sorry to disappoint all those entrepreneurial Scouse and Pakistani heroin trafficking outfits out there already drooling over the latest copy of Super Motors magazine, but this is gold-plated baloney.

And here's why.

First, the figures: As the CSJ points out, oxycodone was prescribed more than a million times in England last year—an increase of more than a third since 2010. Questions over the rise of this drug in Britain, now being used by an estimated 100,000 people, go to the heart of how we manage pain, and what pain actually is.

In 1979, a respected group of health experts known as the International Association for the Study of Pain met up to decide what the medical definition of "pain" was. The result—a guiding light for health services around the world—was published in their in-house journal, Pain.

"An unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage," it said. It wasn't just saying pain is the physical yelp you get when you drop a brick on your toe. It's also about emotion. What's more, it accepted that a medic's understanding of pain can be reliant on a patient's description.

The industry of pain is huge. And if there is a land of pain, look no further than the richest country on earth and the world's keenest consumer of corporatized opium: America. In 2013, 207 million prescriptions were handed out for opioid painkillers such as oxycodone.

What opioids such as morphine, codeine, oxycodone, and fentanyl are meant to treat is physical pain, such as backache, cancer-related pain, and post-operative pain. But aggressive marketing and propaganda aimed at patients and doctors—chiefly at the hands of Purdue Pharma, the makers of OxyContin—led to massive over-prescribing, especially in rural areas where some doctors turned to painkillers as a cure for all, which is how it gets its Hillbilly nickname.

Purdue promised America it had invented the first non-addictive opioid painkiller. The same had been said of heroin by its German inventors a century ago. Instead, people discovered that, by scraping away the waxy coating with a razor, you could crush and snort it and get a heroin-like high. Available from your local doctor—who was probably being paid a bonus for handing out Oxy scripts—it became the most popular recreational drug in America after weed. It became massive.

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Philip Seymour Hoffman—for whom OxyContin became part of a daily and ultimately fatal cocktail of opioids. Image via Flickr user Justin Hoch

By 2010, half a million Americans were abusing OxyContin and 16,000 were dying each year of opioid painkiller overdoses. Its clean-cut image and easy availability made it the favored tipple of celebrities like Courtney Love, Winona Rider, Heath Ledger, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Michael Jackson. By this time, Purdue had already agreed to pay out $600 million—one of the biggest ever lawsuits in America—for misleading the public about OxyContin's addictive potential.

When the American government got a hold of the runaway Oxy train, restricted prescriptions and pressurized Purdue to make a tamper-proof pill, many of those who had become addicted to Oxy moved over to street heroin, which by 2012 had become cheaper. Hence the rise in heroin use in America and fear in the UK that oxycodone begets heroin.

Per head, consumption of opioids in the UK is currently similar to that of the USA ten years ago. So are we heading for an oxycodone-fuelled heroin epidemic, as the CSJ and British media speculate?

I put the question to the UK's expert on painkillers, Dr. Cathy Stannard, a consultant at Frenchay Hospital in Bristol. She wasn't having any of it. "To infer that an increase in oxycodone prescribing in the UK will lead to an increase in heroin use makes three or four utterly fallacious assumptions. It's a massive leap of very tenuous logic."

She explained that Britain's medical system and its drug scene are very different to America's. Over here, doctors and patients are far less exposed to the pressures of Big Pharma and prescribing is better managed. Despite falling in recent years in Britain and rising in the US, heroin use remains much more prevalent over here.

America has five times the general population of Britain, but only twice the number of heroin addicts. The prices reflect this, with the average price of a gram of heroin being $60-90 in Britain compared to $200-450 in the US. With the added presence of free methadone for drug users in treatment and the wide availability of low-cost street valium pills, there is nowhere near the kind of demand by British drug users for opioid painkillers as there is in the US. With the exception of Tramadol, opioid painkillers are very low down the list of abused street drugs in the UK.

Oscar D'Agnone, medical director at CRI, the UK's biggest drug charity which treats 17,000 drug users, says oxycodone doesn't register high on his radar.

"Very few of our clients are on Oxy—probably less than 1 percent," he says. "We sometimes get people referred to our services who were initially put on this drug for pain management but who then started using it to keep their emotional pain in the background, to keep their emotions stable, in the same way people use valium. A much bigger problem with us is Tramadol and codeine."

"To infer that an increase in oxycodone prescribing in the UK will lead to an increase in heroin use makes three or four utterly fallacious assumptions. It's a massive leap of very tenuous logic" – Dr. Cathy Stannard

In 2012 there were 31 deaths in the UK linked to oxycodone, a fraction of the thousands who die as a result of the drug in the US each year and far less than deaths from Tramadol.

Dr. Stannard's concern over a rise in oxycodone prescribing in the UK is not about Britain mirroring the US—rather, it's to do with how a drug is being use to numb people without actually curing them.

"Most of the rise in opioid prescribing here is for long-term chronic pain, such as back pain, which is part of the human condition. Many people have it. Sadly, however, opioids are neither an easy nor necessarily effective solution to the problem. The failure rate for the treatment of long-term back pain with opioids is about 100 percent."

Dr. Stannard told me that prescription opioids such as oxycodone could lead patients "down a one-way street" of using the drugs as an emotional buffer, regardless of whether they are alleviating physical pain. She says the patients most at risk of opioid-related harms are those with mental health or substance use disorders who have greater odds of both being prescribed opioids and getting them in harmful high doses.

"People may feel better taking these drugs because they temporarily relieve pain, but they can end up using them to deal with difficult thoughts and emotions. They find oxycodone can make life less painful, emotionally," she continues. "Perception of pain is influenced by thoughts and emotions. For some people, as the pain from their original injury becomes a minor problem, opioids will distance people from unpleasant thoughts and experiences. But as a result they become more remote from their feelings."

So what do these drugs feel like? Why do they drag people in? Because they all are derived from the same plant as heroin—the opium poppy—opioid painkillers have the renowned "cotton wool" effect on the user, of dulling physical and emotional pain. Opium, sometimes called God's Own Medicine, has been used in this way since the dawn of civilization.

The root cause of the prescription drug epidemic, especially in the US, was perhaps not back ache or neck pains, but the need to avoid or mollify bad feelings. The drive to become medicalized is not just about opioid painkillers.

Cathryn Kemp ran into a wall of opioid painkillers when she was diagnosed with pancreatitis in 2004. After a series of operations she was prescribed morphine, then oxycodone for three years and, finally, fentanyl. "[These things] saved my life because I was in so much pain I was on the brink of suicide. But while they temporarily relieved my pain, I became dependent on them.

"It was such a relief not to feel pain. The oxycodone made me feel relaxed, like sinking into a warm bath. Because your body is good at metabolizing opioids, you need more of them to get the same effect. So my dose went up, but the pain never actually went away. It made my life bearable.

"Painkillers for me was all about feeling normal, to feel like everything is OK with the world, have a warm glow. I was relaxed in a way I'd never been before. It was a feeling of being in touch with the divine."

Are we sleepwalking into a fuzzy oblivion? Is the pain industry beast medicalizing citizens to such an extent that people are gravitating to a state of swapping real life for being comfortably numb?

"We thought the big problem with these drugs was addiction. Now we realize the problem is with patients who take them and basically opt out of life," one medical expert told the New York Times reporter Barry Meier, who has written two books on America's OxyContin disaster.

Meier found that, "while opioid painkillers do work for some patients, when workers are treated with high doses of opioid drugs fairly soon after these injuries, it's the leading predictor for them not coming back to work for long periods of time, or ever. These drugs are not just blocking pain receptors so you don't feel pain. These drugs are depleting people of energy."

The root cause of the prescription drug epidemic, especially in the US, was perhaps not back ache or neck pains, but the need to avoid or mollify bad feelings. The drive to become medicalized is not just about opioid painkillers. In Britain, these are dwarfed by the use of anti-depressants, of which 53 million prescriptions were dispensed last year.

In short, none of the conditions exist in the UK—in terms of healthcare and the existing illegal drugs market—for the OxyContin epidemic to occur here among either middle-class or seasoned drug addicts. With no OxyContin epidemic, there is no heroin epidemic.

Perhaps, as a society, by expecting our emotional or physical pain to be numbed on demand, we have lost our ability to cope without the use of drugs. In 1974, the Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich, a massive critic of Western medicine, warned of what he called society's " medical nemesis."

"It now seems rational to flee pain rather than to face it, even at the cost of addiction," said Illich. "It also seems reasonable to eliminate pain, even at the cost of health. It can be argued that the total pain anesthetized in a society is greater than the totality of pain newly generated. Only the recovery of the will and ability to suffer can restore health into pain."

Follow Narcomania on Twitter.

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Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, only one capital city in the world remains divided in two. Forty years after escalating ethnic tensions and inter-communal violence across Cyprus prompted an Athens-orchestrated coup d'état—followed, five days later, by a retaliatory invasion by the Turkish army—the Cypriot capital of Nicosia is still riddled with the physical and mental scars of the West's longest-running diplomatic dispute.

At its slimmest, the "Green Line"—the UN-controlled buffer zone that snakes through Nicosia, keeping the de facto TRNC, or "Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus" (unrecognized by any nation, save Turkey), and the Republic of Cyprus at arm's length—is no wider than the hulking ramparts of the old Venetian walled city, intimate enough for Turkish-Cypriot youths peering through mesh fences and razor wire to pelt occasional marches of the Cypriot far-right with stones. At its widest, on the city's western fringes, it swallows an abandoned airport.

For the most part, the Buffer Zone is a Call of Duty screenshot, a post-apocalyptic sliver of abandoned, crumbling, bullet-specked buildings dotted with spindly UN observation towers and concrete foxholes framed by oil drums and sandbags. Yawning soldiers in Cambridge blue berets watch Greek Cypriots watching Turkish Cypriots, all with a half-hearted eye on intrusive tourist lenses. It's a city with bad feng shui, a place of dead ends and otherness, a marriage soured by interfering parents in which neither party is inclined to admit their culpability in the tetchy bickering that slid into all-out bloody war.

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Where the division of Berlin was overnight and relatively simple to reverse, Nicosia's schism—setting down its roots slowly and organically on either side of independence from Britain in 1960—is a far more entrenched, entangled, and complex affair to unravel. While Greek-Cypriot nationalists calling for enosis ("union") with Mother Greece mixed ambushes on British troops with sporadic acts of violence against the Turkish-Cypriot minority, the latter began to speak of taksim ("partition") as they retreated into barricaded enclaves across the city. Indeed, the "Green Line" was named after the wax crayon used by the commander-in-chief of the British peacekeeping forces in 1963 to draw a ceasefire line through the capital.

Throughout the countryside, mixed villages and relatively harmonious co-existence remained common, yet the tumult of 1974 saw the cracks become a chasm as busloads of people abandoned their homes in panicked mass internal migration, and the definitive separation of the population ensued.

Cyprus has since stewed in decades of mutual suspicion, with few olive branches held out. The closest the island has come to reunification was in 2004, a week prior to Cyprus joining the EU, when a blueprint for settlement drafted by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan went to referendum on both sides. The "Annan Plan" was accepted by 65 percent of Turkish Cypriots, but rejected by 76 percent of Greek Cypriots.

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Thereafter has been a tale of frosty stalemate and diminishing hope, yet talks resumed earlier this year, the catalyst being Cyprus's recent discovery of vast offshore reserves of gas and oil and a potential convergence of economic interest. By far the cheapest way to get the hydrocarbons to market would be through a pipeline to the Turkish coast, and with the US looking to diversify its energy supply and lessen dependence on Russia, experts felt that Washington would finally bring some pressure to bear on Turkey, a key NATO ally in the Middle East and a partner who has been hitherto indulged. Instead, Ankara sent a gunboat into the Cypriot "Exclusive Economic Zone" and belligerent rhetoric into the air, scuppering another pathway to peace.

The fracturing of the island's common history has not only created these acrimonious and seemingly intractable barriers to reintegration—any political resolution and process of transitional justice must bring closure to the everyday traumas of war, particularly the question of missing persons, as well as address Turkish demilitarization and the incredibly complex issue of property reparation—but also asymmetrical development either side of the border.

If not quite the pickled cabbage versus Coca-Cola of Good Bye, Lenin!, the contrast between the two sides of old Nicosia is palpable. While not without its drab quarters, south Nicosia has all the neon-lit amenities of a modern city, its portion of the old north-south drag a pedestrianized commercial everytown with its Starbucks and McDonald's. Walk 65 feet through the Lidras Street crossing, amid the "genuine fakes" of those brands in abundance to the south, and it feels as ramshackle and hand-to-mouth as a Middle Eastern bazaar.

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When the border, closed for 29 years, was first opened in 2003 at the Ledra Palace Hotel—a once-opulent six-story sandstone structure a grenade's throw from the old city, now pockmarked with the acne of gunfire and serving as a barracks for UN forces—it was, for those who could remember living together, like a mass sign-up to Friends Reunited.

Ahmet, 70 years old and part of a steady trickle of Turkish Cypriots crossing each day to sample the West and its consumer palliatives, tells me that, despite returning to his village after 30 years to find his father's grave at the bottom of a newly formed reservoir, his only desire is for the Turkish army to leave, "so that us Cypriots can sort our problems out."

Nevertheless, approaching the Ledra Palace checkpoint from the south provides a jarring reminder of the way in which the trauma of division is thrust into Nicosia's everyday lived experience, for there you pass two large laminated posters of cousins killed brutally in the Buffer Zone in August of 1996. Tassos Isaak was beaten to death by Turkish fascists after becoming entangled in barbed wire at the end of a biker rally protesting the partition, while Solomos Solomou was shot dead at the memorial three days later while attempting to shimmy up a flagpole to lower the Turkish flag. Clocking the CCTV, I ask whether I can take a photo of "the portraits," to which the border policeman—misunderstanding, while making sure I'm not misunderstanding—replies, "They're not portraits, they're real."

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Many Greek Cypriots refuse to cross the border, resentful of having to show passports to an occupying force in order to move freely around the island and visit their old homes, scornful of compatriots who do pop over to gamble in the North's casinos. (Mavros, a 37-year-old hotel receptionist, has never been over, despite working a five-minute stroll from the Lidras Street crossing, blanking out the existence of the other side just as the Cypriot Tourist Board's maps omit street names from the shaded area marked only "Area Under Turkish Occupation since 1974.")

Meanwhile, crossing in the opposite direction—past the twin flags of parent state and illegitimate child, past the banner proclaiming, in English, the "Turkish Republic of North Cyprus FOREVER"—is a journey that many inhabitants in the North cannot make, for the ever-growing numbers of Turkish settlers aren't issued with Cypriot ID cards and are thus barred from entry to the South.

Rare is the public building in the North—mosque, bank, school—that doesn't fly the Turkish and TRNC banners. With November's anniversary of the declaration of the TRNC, the city is aflutter with flags, each a cipher of belonging, each a reminder of otherness.

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Members of ELAM, far-right sister party of Golden Dawn, stage a protest march, flourishing the blue-and-white Greek flag while alternating between anti-Turkish and pro-Hellenic chants—all forefathers, blood, and death. In the evening, it's AKEL, the opposition communist party, who hold a rally, raising Cypriot and party flags only. As their General Secretary addresses a crowd of around 500 in front of a backdrop proclaiming "No to the pseudo-state," young activists follow the speech on their phones and, at pre-arranged intervals, strike up chants, including, in Turkish: "The Turkish of Cyprus are not our enemy, they are our brother."

The largest flag of all— eight football fields in size—has been hewn into the southern face of the Pentadaktylos Range. Equally proud and provocative, serving simultaneously to unite and alienate, it is visible from any elevated position in the old city alongside the similarly vast inscription: Ne mutlu Türküm diyene ("How proud is the one who says 'I am a Turk'").

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However, beyond the ubiquitous reminders of segregation—beyond the sound and fury of political deadlock—the desire for rapprochement can still be heard in the conversation that mingles with the muezzin's call to prayer in cafes daubed with antifascist murals a short walk south of the Lidras Street checkpoint; in forums such as Cyprus Academic Dialogue and The Cypriot Puzzle, who are resisting the dead-end of Them/Us thinking, and calling out the cheap demagogic potshots; and, most hearteningly of all, at the Home for Cooperation, which—since 2011—has been the base for a clutch of NGOs working to build "empathy and critical thinking" on both sides—the original being the Association for Historical Dialogue and Research, a group of formerly nomadic schoolteachers who would meet in restaurants to discuss how to teach Cyprus's turbulent history in a sensitive manner, a small yet crucial part of the immense labor of reconciliation that this people must undergo.

Sitting opposite Ledra Palace, incongruously pristine amid the general ruination of the Buffer Zone, H4C's neutral location is important both symbolically and practically, allowing everyone on the island, whatever those political or emotional obstacles, to come along and interact in a more informal context: in the café, education rooms, or even fringe theater. Amid the general strife and trauma, it's a heartwarming grass-roots attempt to transcend the mistrust and rancor, to erode the psychological barriers, to move on.

And yet the weight of history hangs heavy in the air here. For many, the "other lot" will always be demons, "barbarians," responsible—their scars are too deep, their animosity too visceral. If, as Churchill said, Russia is "a riddle, wrapped in an enigma, surrounded by a mystery" then, thanks to its labyrinthine political and ethno-national intricacies, its disproportionate geostrategic importance, Cyprus is all that boxed in a puzzle, buried in a conundrum.

If the puzzle is solved, the ancient husk of Nicosia could be a pearl of the Mediterranean, a walled city to rank with Valetta, Dubrovnik, Rhodes, or Ibiza towns. Instead it sits, slightly forlornly, as a blighted, fascinating, charming, grisly spectacle of division, a touristic curio of two half-cities standing back-to-back while peering over their shoulders at the frayed bunting of nationhood atop those ruined buildings, and, beyond that, almost always, at the deepest blue sky.

Follow Scott Oliver on Twitter.

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Toxic waste is burned off in the Lago Agrio oil pits in Ecuador. All photos via Lou Dematteis' "Crude Reflections"

Two decades. Seven countries. Hundreds of lawyers. Scores of public relations specialists. Billions of dollars. Tens of thousands of barrels of oil.

That's the scorecard of the Lago Agrio case.

In what may well be one of the world's more complex and far-reaching lawsuits, the legal battle between 47 Ecuadorians, represented by their dogged American lawyer, and one of the world's biggest oil companies has stretched into its second decade. And the venue for one of its most important showdown is, surprisingly, Canada.

What's left in the middle of this battle is the environmental disaster known as the "Amazon Chernobyl."

A consortium made in heaven
The story begins in 1964, when Ecuador's military junta decided to get into the oil-drilling business. Looking to boost a flagging economy, they partnered with American-based Texaco Petroleum to develop the Lago Agrio region of the Amazon.

They set up a consortium—state-owned Petroecuador would own two thirds of the partnership, and Texaco, which would later be acquired by Chevron, controlled the rest. Texaco was chiefly responsible for the dirty work of extracting the oil and doing away with the toxic wastewater.

They developed the area over 30 years, drilling hundreds of wells and filling nearly 1,000 pits full of toxic waste in an area that is, otherwise, largely untouched. In the process, they spilled roughly 17 million gallons of crude oil, thanks to pipeline ruptures. The return on the project has been some $25 billion.

The consortium's contract was up in 1992, and Petroecuador bought out Texaco's one-third stake in the company. Texaco agreed to clean up a third of the wells and pits it had helped create.

A Texaco report says it remediated 161 of the 430 oilfield pits and seven oil spill areas for which it was responsible: "a proportion that was equal to their share in the consortium." The whole package ran the company about $40 million.

By way of comparison, a ruptured line in Michigan, which unloaded less than 900,000 gallons (roughly five percent of the size of the Lago Agrio spills), had a price tag of $1 billion.

Nevertheless, Petroecuador signed off on the deal and released Texaco from liability.

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One of hundreds of toxic pits of wastewater, a byproduct of oil development.

"It's really almost apocalyptic to look at."
Environmentalists allege that Texaco didn't live up to its pledge. Not even close. They point to a 2006 report from the Ecuadorian government that found 85 percent of the pits Texaco claims to have cleaned up are still dangerously toxic.

"These pits continue to pollute the environment, contaminating the water table and polluting the rivers and streams that 30,000 people depend on for drinking, cooking, bathing, and fishing," reads a report for AmazonWatch, an environmentalist NGO which has followed development in the region.

Peer-reviewed studies have also found significantly elevated cancer rates in the area. Chevron has its own studies disputing those findings.

"It's really almost apocalyptic to look at," lawyer Steven Donziger says of the area. He began his work as a journalist, reporting on the Lago Agrio fields, before getting involved in the legal side of the story. Now he represents the Ecuadorians in their fight against Chevron.

He argues that Texaco deliberately cut corners in order to reduce costs, like choosing to burn off the chemicals from the pits, rather than remediate them responsibly. "This was a deliberate engineering project to externalize the cost of production to some of the most vulnerable people in the world," he told VICE.

Chevron doesn't dispute that there might be some problems in the area, but contests that it's not their fault.

"Petroecuador has been slow to remediate its majority share of pre-1992 impacts and has amassed a poor environmental record since that time," reads a statement on a Chevron website. "All remaining environmental conditions in the region are the sole legal responsibility of Petroecuador."

The Ecuadorians disagree, and say that signing a waiver with the company doesn't absolve Chevron of its, supposedly, shoddy work.

So, in 1993, 47 Ecuadorians filed a class-action lawsuit in a New York City court, on behalf of the 30,000 who they say have been affected by the contamination. The legal history that ensued is fraught and complicated—Texaco, which was acquired by Chevron in 2001, argued that the case should be heard in Ecuador, not America. When they finally won, and the case restarted in Ecuador, they continued trying to have it thrown out.

The 2011, an Ecuadorian court found that the contract that waived Texaco's responsibility for the cleanup didn't protect the company from litigation, as it was signed with Petroecuador, not the government itself. The court found Chevron liable for $8.6 billion, and ordered the sum to be doubled if the company didn't apologize within 15 days.

Chevron tried to throw a wrench into the machine: they went to an international trade arbitration panel in the Hague to declare the judgement void, because it violated a trade agreement between the United States and Ecuador. An Ecuadorian appeal court and the country's Supreme Court ignored the tribunal and subsequently upheld the ruling, albeit cutting the judgment from the initial $17 billion to $9.5 billion.

What may have seemed like a victory for the Ecuadorians was really just a small step forward. They now faced the gargantuan task of trying to collect the money. Since Chevron had no significant assets left in Ecuador left to seize, that left one option: go abroad.

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Residents who live in the area say oil has seeped into the water they use for drinking and bathing.

"And then we'll fight it out on the ice."
Since 2011, when the Ecuadorian court ordered Chevron to pay the nearly $10 billion damages, Donziger and company have been going to foreign courts to try and enforce the ruling. Brazil, Argentina and Canada—three countries where Chevron has significant assets—were the prime targets. Chevron has been with them every step of the way.

Speaking to Newsweek in 2008, one Chevron lobbyist swore: "we're going to fight this until hell freezes over—and then we'll fight it out on the ice."

That prediction has, ironically, come true.

The American courts were forbidden from hearing the case, after an American judge sided with Chevron in finding that Donziger and his associates ran the gambit of shady legal practises in order to obtain a favourable judgement in the initial Ecuador ruling, everything from bribing judges to ghostwriting experts' reports.

Donziger rejects those claims and says Chevron is merely continuing its drawn-out attempts to destroy his credibility. He points out that the judgement was reviewed and upheld by two subsequent courts. Donziger is appealing that case in a New York court.

The cases in Brazil and Argentina, meanwhile, have been moving at a glacial pace. Donziger and his team don't exactly have time on their side—Chevron has aggressively pursued its financial backers, most of whom are based in Gibraltar, accusing them of funding a shakedown operation. It's succeeded against some, and scared off others. That's left the Ecuadorian side cash-strapped.

That leaves the Canadian courts. Chevron moved to have the case thrown out from the get-go, arguing that the Great White North has no jurisdiction to hear the case. A lower court sided with Chevron, while an appeal court found that the Ecuadorians did, indeed, have standing.

That leaves the Supreme Court to play the role of tiebreaker.

On a frigid day in Ottawa, with 20 centimetres of fresh snow on the ground, Canadian lawyers for both sides jousted before the nine justices of the Canadian Supreme Court. Chevron, and its Canadian subsidiary, argued that Ecuador and America, where Chevron is based, are the only two appropriate forums for the lawsuit. Donziger's Canadian counterparts rebutted that Canada has an obligation under international law to enforce Ecuador's ruling.

There is a litany of legal issues here. The Ecuadorians' lawyers are asking the Canadian court to enforce a judgment that has been declared illegal in both an international tribunal and an American court. Beyond that, Chevron doesn't actually have a penny in Canada—everything is owned by its Canadian subsidiary, which runs a sizeable operation in Alberta's oil sands. Under Canadian law, companies can't be held liable for the actions of their subsidiaries. In theory, the principle should also work in reverse.

Chevron Canada, however, sends billions back to its American parent every year. If the Ecuadorians win the case, even if they are forbidden from sending repo guys to seize Chevron's equipment in Alberta, they might be able to seize the cross-border profit before it reaches Chevron's hands.

The Supreme Court could issue its ruling anytime in 2015. The justices, during the hearing, seemed inclined to let it go forward. If they do, the case will begin in earnest and the fight will just be getting started.

Follow Justin on Twitter.

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Dutch teenagers in Amsterdam. Photo via Flickr user Michael Coghlan

On January 5, volunteers in the Netherlands launched the Dutch Radicalization Hotline. Serving as a resource for the parents and relatives of those whose allegiance might be drifting toward militant groups like the Islamic State, the hotline connects callers with social and religious services in an effort help stymie the radicalization of young Muslims, which is widely seen as a major problem in Western Europe. One might say the need is especially urgent after the attack on Charlie Hebdo, which occurred two days after the hotline launched and was perpetrated by two young men who were " born, raised, and radicalized in Paris."

It is believed that since 2011, at least 2,000 (mostly young) Europeans have gone to war in Syria alone. While the largest absolute numbers of Western fighters (about 700) come from France, the roughly 500 militants that have emerged from Belgium and the Netherlands are perhaps more noteworthy given the size of their Muslim populations.

The youths' radicalization and flight are commonly credited to problems they have identifying with either mainstream European or immigrant culture, leading to confusion and a search for new ideologies. Experts note that the Islamic State has been especially active on social media , with unusually effective propaganda, and that flights to the Middle East have become cheap, simple, and plentiful. But can these hotlines actually help rein in kids flirting with disaster before it's too late?

The Dutch hotline is not the first of its kind. Since 2010, the German government has operated similar lines, referring callers to local community services or the authorities as needed. Toward the end of 2014, the Austrian government followed suit, as did the French last spring. Smaller, community-operated hotlines also exist in the United Kingdom and are in the works in Canada, among other places.

But the Dutch line is relatively unique because it's run from within the community it aims to serve—the Moroccan Dutch community, the largest Muslim contingent in the Netherlands. The hotline receives no government funding, and focuses on resources for parents rather than self-reporting and rehabilitation by jihadists returning from Iraq and Syria, which many of its foreign counterparts stress. This may help the Dutch hotline overcome shortcomings that have stymied such plans elsewhere.

According to Lorenzo Vidino—a specialist on European Islamic and political violence who has been affiliated with the Center for Security Studies, the RAND Corporation, the US Institute of Peace, and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government—these counter-radicalization hotlines were launched after European governments found them to be effective at de-radicalizing neo-Nazis.

"They had a lot of people calling them," Vidino tells VICE, "and a substantial number of those who called got out [of neo-Nazi communities]."

These precursor hotlines provided effective ideological and material support to skinheads.

"In terms of ideological [support]," Vidino explains, "it was [about] talking to former neo-Nazis themselves, who explain why the ideology's flawed. It does help to talk to people who went through what you were going through yourself. In many cases, for the neo-Nazis, they help to provide relocation. It's common to a lot of radicalization—a lot of it has to do with the environment you're in. Maybe you want to get out, but if you live in a small [community], these are your friends, this is your social environment. It's difficult to get out. You move to a new city. You make new friends."

Despite the success with skinheads, Vidino notes that, although we don't have great data on the results of various counter-radicalization initiatives, hotlines don't seem to work as well with Islamic communities.

"My understanding is that the person who's supposed to pick up the phone there is... quite bored," Vidino says. "The phone is not ringing off the hook."

This stems in part from a mistrust of unknown actors, especially government institutions. Such wariness is informed by immigrants' previous experiences with authoritarian regimes and by European governments' institution of harsh measures parallel to the hotlines such as searches, deportations, and detentions. These crackdowns make Muslim groups feel antagonized and perpetuate fear that the security apparatus might scoop up troubled but innocent individuals.

Some defend such programs as necessary and reasonable. But measures like a recent proposal in the UK that would require preschool teachers to report on children exhibiting jihadist tendencies seem excessive, and likely to torpedo the chance that a family member would pick up the phone and spill their fears to a relative stranger they have no rapport with or knowledge of.

Softer programs have sprung up in Europe over the past decade to foster trust and initiate conversations with community interlocutors. Pioneered by the British and perhaps most successful in Denmark, these comprehensive and centrally organized programs fund and interface with local community and religious leaders, youth engagement programs, and projects aimed at addressing the social and economic roots of radicalization.

Still, tales of radicalized teenagers and growing unease with Muslim communities have led many Europeans to assert that such programs have failed, paving the way for dramatic cuts in funding.

"It's understandable [as a gut reaction]," Vidino says,"but we don't have all the facts to make a judgment call on what works and what doesn't."

Despite all the ink spilled over radicalization and Islam and rampant assertions that we know who's going off the deep end and why, a European Parliament report on counter-radicalization programs that came out last year found that we're still pretty clueless about this stuff. Effectively targeting de-radicalization efforts, or measuring the often-invisible successes or failures of hotlines and the wider outreach programs they contribute to, remains tricky at best.

Vidino suspects that the new Dutch hotline's origins among local workers with an intimate knowledge of the community and no ties to the government might help them overcome these barriers.

"Having government support doesn't necessarily taint you and make you illegitimate in the eyes of the community," he stresses. "But not having the ties, you run fewer risks of being seen as the long arm of the secret services and so on."

He believes we should continue to fund other hotlines and outreach programs as well, whether or not we can get a good read on their effectiveness.

"Unless they have [clearly] abysmal success rates, they provide a good complement to hard counter-terror measures," Vidino says. "If the alternative is just not doing anything, I think [they're] useful."

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

At first, when considering the possible presidential candidacies of Republicans Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney, you might think, "How could these patrician white scions of political families be any more alike?" When you think the word "could," the tone of your voice should bend upward, like a lady in a black-and-white film from the 1950s.

So you might be surprised to find out that, in fact, there are several ways in which Bush and Romney—neither of whom have officially confirmed they are running, by the way—are actually quite different from one another. And, if they do decide to run for the Oval Office, these differences will play a major role in determining which becomes the favored choice of all the other patrician white men in the country. Because make no mistake: if the GOP voting bloc is a pie, then Bush and Romney are competing for the exact same slice.

FAMILY
As the Republican primary campaign shapes up, both Bush and Romney appear to be the legacy choices available to voters with a mind for the history of our beautiful, bizarre nation. The legacies they represent, though, differ significantly. Mitt's father, George, was elected governor in Michigan three times, by increasingly large margins. That's an improvement on Mitt, who gave up on being governor of Massachusetts after just one term. He left office in 2007 to focus on the first of his (so far) two unsuccessful presidential bids.

On the presidential level, Romney made it further than his old man. Though Mitt and George share the same number of failed White House runs, George never won the Republican nomination. He briefly challenged Barry Goldwater in the 1964 primary before withdrawing, then got thrashed by Nixon in 1968, after attributing his previous support for the Vietnam War to "brainwashing."

Jeb's family looks a little different. Aside from his father's 1992 re-election campaign, the Bush men have dominated their attempts to hold elected office, both as governors and presidents, a stark contrast with the Romneys. If there's a more dynastic family in the United States than the Bush clan, there are being very quiet about it.

RELIGION
As you know—and if you don't, congratulations on just learning how to walk—Mitt Romney is a Mormon. This does appear to have played a role in voters' conceptions of him; a Pew research poll in 2011 said a remarkable one out of four voters would be less likely to vote for a Mormon candidate.

Although you might assume that, like his older brother W., Jeb is a card-carrying evangelical booster, that isn't true. He's actually a Catholic, having converted to his wife's religion two decades ago. This could come in handy appealing to Hispanics, a demo that Republicans have had their eye on for a while, and it will also likely increase his appeal with the evangelical cohort that tends to make up a large percentage of Republican voters. Because Jeb's Catholicism hasn't hurt his social-conservative bonafides—as governor of Florida, he opposed stem-cell research and abortion rights, and famously stepped in to intervene in the 2003 Terri Schiavo case—all of which will make him an acceptable candidate for the far right, even if he isn't Mike Huckabee or Rick Santorum.

CONSERVATIVE BONAFIDES
On that note, the big question for both Bush and Romney is whether either is conservative enough to win the Republican nomination. Twice previously, Romney has proven he can twist and warp himself to be palatable enough for his party's conservative base, but not without serious effort and grumbling from the right-wing. In 2008, the man who'd brought socialized healthcare to Massachusetts ran as the party's conservative option, suggesting that he had switched sides on both abortion rights and healthcare, and that he had also championed the war in Iraq. As the Atlantic's David Graham points out, Romney knew he couldn't get to the right of the Tea Party in 2012, so he, focusing on a promise to turn around the country's economy. Graham suggests that Romney's ID in 2016 will be "Compassionate Conservative Champion of the Poor," which, considering his 47 percent speech in 2012, is sort of like Ted Turner going vegetarian.

Meanwhile, Bush's positions on social issues may be party-approved, but he has two huge red flags to address. The first is his position on immigration reform, a stance that has become more progressive since leaving the governor's office, particularly in his support for a "pathway to citizenship" for undocumented immigrants. The second is his championing of the Common Core education system, which conservatives hate. Like really, really hate. Nate Silver claims this won't be as big a deal as we might think, but the Breitbarts of the world beg to differ, and if Bush is going to carry his support into the nomination, he'll need to talk the GOP into it.

PRIVATE INTERESTS
Thanks to his long career in private equity, Mitt Romney is rich as hell. He's so rich that, in 2012, when he declared a net worth of between $190 and $250 million—Forbes pegged it at $230 million—some suggested he might be worth even more, like closer to $400 million. That's not as rich as Ross Perot, but it still makes Romney one of the richest men ever to run for president. And as saw in 2012, being rich can be a big problem for Mitt, leading him to say things like, "I have some friends who are NASCAR team owners," and "I like being able to fire people," among other gems.

In terms of wealth, Bush doesn't even come close. BusinessWeek published a long piece in December about how the younger Bush brother has spent the last seven years trying to improve on the $1.3 million net worth he had at the end of his gubernatorial stint. His business dealings appear to have snagged him another few mil, but he's still one Paul Cézanne away from matching Mitt. And, if he does make official his run, he'll have to extricate himself from those business interests.

SO, WHO'S BETTER?
That, my fair voter, is up to you to decide. But as far as the GOP is concerned, Bush presents a name-brand legacy Republican who should play to the Establishment and moderate core while being susceptible to potshots from the right. Romney is the known quantity, and a bet on Democratic weakness: If he's the candidate, it's because the Republicans don't think Jeb can overcome his family, and, most likely, couldn't reconcile his stance on immigration with the party line in the primaries. Because that's the thing about Romney: At this point, the only mystery left is seeing how he'll package himself. Everyone else already knows how they feel.

Follow Kevin on Twitter

The tudung-wearing girls were living out a teenage fantasy .One held hands with a white-clad idol as she backed up on her tiptoes, seemingly overwhelmed with joy. Another girl, draped in a red headscarf, was pulled into an embrace and then sent on her way off-stage with a pat on the back. A third alternately covered her face with her hands and fanned herself as if to stave off collapse before being brought in for a hug. The luckiest was serenaded with "Happy Birthday" in English before a member of the Korean pop group B1A4 planted a kiss on her forehead.

All this happened last Saturday, at a B1A4 performance in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Such meet-and-greets are fairly routine for boy bands, but when the video was later posted to YouTube days later, it drew a harsh reaction from Muslims within the country, and now the religious authorities are seeking to prosecute the teenaged fans.

Malaysia is a Muslim-majority country with sharia courts that run parallel to its secular ones; police can enforce fatwas issued by Muslim clerics. In such a climate, a video of young women being publicly wooed by singers is bound to cause a bit of a stir, though it seemed to have made the Federal Territory Islamic Religious Department (JAWI) and its director, Paimuzi Yahya, particularly furious. Yahya's given the girls a week to show themselves.

"The JAWI enforcement division has opened an investigation under Section 29 of the Syariah Criminal Offenses (Federal Territories) Act 1977 (Act 599 Indecent Acts in Public Places," Yahya told the Star newspaper in a statement. "Those who are involved are asked to come forward."

Apparently the girls face up to six months in prison and a fine if they don't cooperate, although the JAWI did not respond to inquiries from VICE as to whether the girls have since turned themselves in.

The concert first came to the JAWI's attention after Sukan Star TV posted a video on Facebook. The description of the video claims the girls were "molested," drawing angry reactions from Muslim commenters. Subsequently, it went viral and currently has more than 2 million views.

B1A4 was put together by WM Entertainment in 2011. WM Entertainment is one of the entertainment powerhouses in Korea that forms pop groups with military efficiency and pours millions of dollars worth of resources into each of their members. The company did not immediately respond to request for comment.

Other officials in Malaysia had objection about the video that weren't religious. Youth and Sports Minister Khairy Jamaluddin tweeted that the members of B1A4 weren't masculine enough to receive the massive female adulation they get.

"Ladies, look for tall, dark and handsome men instead of pale, skinny and pretty men," he wrote. "That's not a real man."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

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I have what my tailor referred to delicately as a "large seat," a protruding belly from my love of drink, and soft, chubby cheeks that make me look five years younger than I should. In short, I'm a mess. Thankfully, the healing hand of science never stops fiddling around with the human form, so I could look like Jaden Smith for the right price.

What was once a significantly invasive, life-altering choice is slowly becoming something more accessible and less threatening. And yet, there remains a social sin attached to cosmetic procedures. All you need to do is look back at the furor over Renee Zellweger's "new face" to see that drastic changes to a person's appearance are still frowned upon by a judgmental public that simultaneously requires youthful faces of their anointed celebrities and, increasingly, themselves.

A 2013 report from the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery claimed that "33 percent of surgeons have seen an increase in requests for plastic surgery as a result of patients being more self-aware of their looks because of social media." It should come as no surprise that the proliferation of platforms designed to propagate one's image to hundreds, thousands, or millions of people at a time would create a rush to correct perceived flaws.

This, despite the fact that photo sharing tools like Instagram are developing more tools to doctor and manipulate digital images. And social media continues to dominate more and more of the cultural discourse, which could lead to an even bigger demand for artificial enhancements to the human body. The future of beauty might not be as sci-fi freaky as Tyra Banks predicted in the summer of 2014, but it's certainly moving toward accessibility and ease of use.

According to the American Society of Plastic Surgery Professionals, there were 15.1 million cosmetic procedures done in this country in 2013. Of those, 6.3 million were Botox injections. Only 1.6 million of those were surgical in nature. The gap between surgery and non-invasive procedures like Botox injections is two-fold. Surgery is expensive and not typically covered by health insurance. ASPS says that the average breast augmentation costs $3,678, and that doesn't include anesthesia, facility fees, or "other related expenses."

There's also the stigma and risk of invasive surgery. Plastic surgery takes weeks or months to recover from, which has led to the proliferation of recovery spas for the wealthy to unwind and deal with the emotional stress of having an augmented appearance. It could also go horribly wrong, and as anyone in Los Angeles can tell you that happens more often than you'd think. The report that an Ecuadorian beauty queen died from complications related to a botched liposuction only makes the fear of going under the knife more prevalent. This is leading doctors across the country to pursue more and more non-invasive methods of offering prospective patients beauty enhancement.

A medical tech start-up called NanoLipo is developing a method for zapping unwanted fat from the human body without all those pesky incisions. NanoLipo is yet another entry in the epic procession of potentially life-changing treatments that promise to help you lose weight without doing a damn thing like " Vanquish," which claims to burn fat cells through the use of radio frequency waves. The radio waves are supposed to heat up fat and melt it away while you sit on your keister flipping through magazines.

NanoLipo similarly burns fat cells, but uses an injection of gold nanoparticles into fat cells to better target problem areas. A laser heats up the particles, melting the excess fat. Before medical professionals started using gold nanoparticles for making people thinner, they were employed in the effort to cure cancer. Those efforts seem to have stalled for the moment, but NanoLipo is moving full steam ahead toward marketing their procedure to the public, sending out press releases touting new hires and bragging about the potential of their product.

Another up-and-coming non-invasive technique is called the "vampire facelift," so called because it involves the extraction of blood from the patient. That blood is then run through a centrifuge to extract platelet-rich plasma. That plasma is injected back into the face with a syringe. For an extra fee, the treatment also includes an injection of a facial filler like Juvederm, a gel made from hyaluronic acid that is used to fill wrinkles in conjunction with Botox injections or to enhance the fullness of lips. Like Botox, the vampire facelift is popular with those looking for a quick "freshening up" without the high cost or risk that come with the knife. But it also claims to have an advantage over Botox because it comes without the stigma of injecting botulism into your head and doesn't freeze your face into an unmoving rictus grin. Still, the vampire facelift is not without its drawbacks.

In February of 2014, 45-year-old Sandra Perez Gonzalez was arrested in Long Beach in connection with the death of Hamilet Suarez. Gonzalez, a massage therapist, was performing bootleg vampire facelifts out of her studio in the back of a hair salon. Vampire facelifts require no special certification to perform and centrifuges can be purchased easily online. When I last spoke to the Long Beach coroner who handled Suarez's body, I was told all records of her cause of death were being withheld by the authorities. Dr. Marc Darrow , a local practitioner of the vampire facelift, swore that the procedure is not dangerous. He asked me, "Who wants something invasive when you can have something that's simple, where you can walk out the door and you're safe?" I was able to sit in on a demonstration, and besides the obvious gross-out factor of observing a large needle being poked into a person's face near the eyelid, it looked fairly unobtrusive. The patient, an employee of Dr. Darrow, raved about how "fresh" she felt. "It's kind of like having some gum in your cheek," she said.

The controversy surrounding vampire facelifts mostly stems from who should profit from it. Dr. Charles Runels, a formerly board certified physician in Alabama, quickly pounced on the marketing cache of the term and trademarked it. Now, he offers "training courses" and licenses the trademark to doctors around the country for a $47 monthly fee.

As with many elective cosmetic procedure, the brand is as important as the results. Kim Kardashian received a vampire facelift on her reality show, which led to numerous trend pieces about how "hot" the technique is with the rich and famous. Dueling studies performed in the last few years contradict each other on whether or not platelet-rich plasma treatments actually work in rejuvenating cells, but that hasn't stopped people from swearing by the injections.

Dr. Runels even seems to think that plasma can improve the human sexual response, as he is also marketing the " O-Shot," which is a platelet infusion into the genitals to stimulate more intense orgasms. Slap a catchy, trademarked name and a celebrity endorsement onto a relatively easy product and off you go. The Botox trend started in a similar fashion, going from the elite down to the rank-and-file of Los Angeles and other major cities. Whether or not nanoliposuction, vampire facelifts, or other new-wave procedures takes off is less up to the doctors and more to the marketing professionals who peddle their wares.

Follow Dave Schilling on Twitter.

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Look at Alex Schubert's Instagram and blog, and buy his books.

Depending on who you ask, garage rock is either the deadest horse in all of the land or the New Big Thing. Hundreds of bands come along and they all sound the same, but the special ones know their place and work well within their limits. Austin-based Spray Paint pull this off in their new video, "Do Less Thing."

The video is a pastiche of old VHS recordings from the 80s and 90s, and the whole thing is the visual equivalent to the kid you grew up with who got all the cool hand-me-down clothes from his older brother, who was named Rex and spent his summers drinking in the quarry just outside of town. Last you heard Rex had a steady gig at the IHOP and a kid, so he's doing OK. Anyway, check this out.

Listen to the band's new album here.

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This post originally appeared on VICE Poland.

Pawn shops never really caught my attention. I always regarded them as just another element of the urban landscape—like hair salons and knockoff electronics stores. But walking around one of Wroclaw's poorest neighborhoods one day, I realized the only buildings messing up the mundane gray of the housing projects were basically 24-hour liquor stores and pawn shops.

Struck by this picture, I walked into one of those pawn shops and got to chatting with Marek, who works there. He painted a picture of Poland I'd rather not have seen.

VICE: Did you ever think you'd end up working in a pawn shop?
Marek: It's a job. I'm not sure anyone dreams of working in a pawn shop. But looking at the chances of having any job in Poland, I think my situation could be much worse.

Do you have to have any specific skills to work behind a pawn-shop counter?
First of all, you have to be trained in gold—being able to validate the authenticity of any piece and quote an appropriate price for it is crucial. Training takes three days and you start working straight afterward. Besides that, you also have to deal with bureaucracy—everything requires a lot of paperwork.

I've certainly seen the number of pawn shops in Poland increase in the last couple of years. Why do you think that is?
People are poor. People earn as little as PLN 2,000 [$500] per month—they simply cannot make a living between paydays. A lot of people have their expenditures carefully planned so the problems begin when they come across unexpected costs—having to buy new shoes, fix a car battery, send your kid on a school trip... Unfortunately, we earn money mostly thanks to those who don't have any money.

How does it all work exactly?
The people turning to us are the kind of people who don't want to borrow money from their family members or friends, or take a bank loan. They know what interest they have to pay and they are sure they will get their goods back. That interest rate, however, is huge—in one month it can approximately reach a quarter of the loan.

An additional advantage for us is that that earned interest is not taxable. The biggest pawn shop chains could even start with ten new subsidiaries, even in towns with a population of a couple of thousand. But that doesn't only happen in Poland—I recently traveled to England and saw it is also stuffed with pawn shops. We are talking about a global pauperization of Western society. The middle class is fast becoming the lower middle class.

How many contracts do you sign on daily basis?
It depends on the shop's location. As I said, the best place to open a pawn shop is where poor people live. People earning the lowest salary allowed by law are the best customers—in most cases they return after getting their paycheck to buy back their goods, only to pop them again some weeks after.

Do you have regular customers?
Most of our customers are regulars. I recognize the majority of their faces. Recently, a woman who had pawned a ring in December 2012, came in. She paid much more than it was worth—that's the price you pay for sentiment. However, we usually try to meet such cases halfway.

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What is your average customer like?
The average age of the customers is 20–35 years. These people are not afraid of pawn shops—it's the older generation who think of pawnbrokers as criminals. The youth people need the cash fast—to go out in the weekend or buy weed or cigarettes. One of my clients comes every Friday after work, buys back a bracelet he wears on nights out, and pawns it again on Monday.

Do thieves ever bring in stolen goods?
Sometimes you can tell when something has been stolen. Once, a pal brought in a gold chain that had been broken and had blond hair tangled in it. But what can I do? It's not my job to prosecute him. Often, I'll get visits from guys directly asking if I need something in particular—they steal on demand.

Have you ever been assaulted by a client?
Not really, I work in a peaceful location. I often get called names, but it's never escalated into something dangerous. The plexiglass around my window is thick, and I also have CCTV and wiretaps installed so the chances of having the store broken into are rather low.

Do you cooperate with the police at all?
We don't like each other. Policemen come to my pawn shop in order to snoop around. Sometimes they confiscate something, the proceedings last up to one year, and we never see it again.

What kind of objects do you put in hock?
There aren't really any rules. People will pawn anything—from micr SD cards to their whole flats. However, I am not entitled to sign huge agreements—my boss has to do that. The most precious thing I ever took was a golden chain for PNL 4,000 [$1,100]. But I heard that someone tried to pawn a dog at another pawn shop once.

How often do people try to deceive you?
Very often. I am burdened with financial responsibility so I have to be cautious. We have an intranet, so news of smartasses trying to fool us spread fast around pawn shops. But it happened to me once to take a ring which was supposed to be made of white gold but turned out to be a fake. I only lost PLN 112 [$30] so it was not a big deal. I was mostly pissed off by the fact that someone fooled me.

What can you tell about Polish society by standing behind the pawnshop counter?
In the course of recent years, the number of Polish millionaires expanded but so did the working class. The Polish working class is saturated with penury, uses horrible language, lacks teeth, and its existence is reduced to mere existing.

No one pawns their possessions to buy books, but many do so to buy a flask of vodka and cigarettes. It is a sad summary, but people's IQ decreases in the vestibule of my pawnshop.