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A coalition bomb strike on Kobane, an Islamic State stronghold in Syria. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

As Canadian airstrikes pound Islamic State targets in northern Iraq, the media wing of the embattled terrorist organization, is busy threatening Canada with more lone-wolf attacks.

The same IS spokesperson who incited attacks on western targets in September renewed calls for Muslims in the West to "target the crusaders in their own lands."

The Islamic State's in-house media department—al-Hayat Media—released a nine-minute audio recording of chief spokesperson Abu Mohammed al-Adnani. His latest recording is entitled "Die In Your Rage."

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There's no main character in Stinking Heaven. Instead, the characters of the micro-budget narrative stumble in and out of the main story arc, which involves them recovering from their various addictions in a self-run sober living home that sells kombucha out of a van. The film reeks of honest cynicism and features visceral performances from its intergenerational cast. Especially affecting are the scenes in which the characters re-enact their lowest moments in videotaped living-room therapy sessions.

The film's director and co-writer is Nathan Silver, who talks rapidly and has a cheshire cat like grin. His energy is somewhere between hyper and psychotic. I knew what to expect before I met him, though, because he's performed as fitful characters in his in filmsUncertain Terms and Exit Elena.It was no surprise to me that he described his need to make movies as "compulsive." He's already made five features in the past six years, and tells me he has three more on the way, including one ominously titled The Perverts and another that is being shot in Denver later this year.

Silver and I talked about ashrams and the impending doom of the end of the world before he made his way to the Rotterdam Film Festival for Stinking Heaven's premiere.

VICE: Like some of your other films, this is about unconventional domestic situations. What makes you interested in people living together?
Nathan Silver: Hell is other people. I think that's something that I'm constantly thinking about. But on the other hand, I can't be out of the city for longer than a week without going crazy. There's just something about being in tight spaces with people. I'm an extremely anxious person and it grates on my nerves, but I need it.

What made you interested in the communal-style living that's in this film?
There's a whole side of my family that was involved in an ashram for 30 years or so. They were involved in communes beforehand and then they ended up on this ashram. Two uncles were there, along with their families and it was sort of a messy affair. I'd heard stories, and I visited the ashram a couple of times when I was younger. It was so bizarre to me.

Where was it?
Upstate New York. My uncle was the president of the ashram until a few years ago. Now he's just a grandfather. The ashram is much more corporate now. It got taken over by these young sharks.

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What were your impressions when you visited as a kid?
My mother always hated it and blamed it for a lot of disasters that occurred in the family. I remember thinking, It's nice. These people believe they can all live together in harmony. When it's obvious there was all this hatred and tensions and people fucking each other over in the name of spirituality. It was a mess.

When I was younger and I'd have a terrible time at Christmas, I'd think, You can't choose your family. But then you get older and you do choose your loved ones and who is essentially your family and, as it turns out, they are also petty and angsty.
In the end, everyone's terrible—in a glorious way. You choose people you can hopefully fight with, and survive those fights. It's funny because making films is like having a family for a time. I started off as a poet and I went into playwriting and I just got so sick of being holed up in my apartment writing. I like the whole aspect of being forced to be around other people. And now I think my whole social life comes from being involved with films. I have no life outside of films. It's this weird thing where you are constantly being surrounded by people.

And I heard you filmed this all living in the house that it's set. Did it ever parallel the dramas that happen in the film?
It was actually the least stressful shoot I'd had in a while. Of course there were minor dynamics that I think came from everyone being together. But it didn't turn into anything that it does in the movie, where people are screaming at each other.

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Where did you get the idea for the re-enactment therapy that the house members do in the film, acting out their lowest moment?
I don't remember exactly, but I talked to some of the actors who had been through some strange forms of psychotherapy. The scene with Kevin's reenactment was the first one we shot. He had done some psychotherapy stuff in the past. He said he had an idea, so we just shot. What's in the movie was basically the first take and it was a rehearsal take. It was kind of crazy. He burst through that door and it was like, What the fuck is going on? I was just laughing my head off. When something clicks like that, you can't write that. I don't know what that is.

You use a lot of improvisation, right? And, you work quite collaboratively?
Yeah. [The actors] Keith Poulson, Deragh Campbell, and Hannah Gross spent a lot of time in the beginning meeting up and talking about what this would be. And that set the groundwork. Then I wrote the story with Jack, who I met at the New School when I screened a film there.

On this one, there was tons of improvisation. No one in the cast had seen the entire outline so they would show up to set and I would hand them a sheet of scenes we were shooting that day. We would talk about it a bit and then I would let them just go for it. Eventually we would find things that worked, and if they weren't working, I would go and talk to jack about story things that were perhaps not clicking. It was great to have him on set.

So the actors didn't know the end of the story for their characters?
Yeah. We actually ended up putting what was supposed to be the end—that lake scene—at the beginning of the movie. It's funny how these things occur and that can only happen when you know its not locked down in any way. I didn't want people to think of this text as something holier than thou. I think thats just bullshit. A script should be something you use to wipe your ass. It's just to get people involved and some sort of insurance.

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So there a few actors who show up over and over again in your film, like the grocery store clerk in this one.
That's my mother.

Does she like to be in your movies?
No, I force her into them. But she was really pissed off that she had no lines in this one. So she hates being in them. But I think she secretly likes it. She's a pain in the ass to work with but she's going to be the narrator of my next movie.

She's been the narrator in your head your whole life, I'm sure.
Exactly. It only makes sense.

What did you shoot this one on?
We shot on a Ikegami—a news camera that I think was used in the early 80s. We tested out a bunch of different beta cams, but what this one does with light is so beautiful. I just loved it. I just needed to escape from HD. I usually try to fuck it up in post because the cleanliness drives me out of my mind. I just want to kill myself when I see it.

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What made you set the film in 1990?
I was watching all of these documentaries and any clips I could find on YouTube from the late 80s and early 90s. I just remember that time in my life as one of being full of this constant anxiety and dread. I was a very anxious child and I was always worried about being kidnapped or the end of the world. And again last year, I started feeling this way. So I started thinking about this time period and I think that really informed the movie. This was trying to capture that feeling of anxiety through the textures that I associate with the 90s.

Was it cathartic to get rid of some of that anxiety?
No, because I think if you are a sane-thinking human being, the world is a disaster and you're constantly trying to come to grips with that. All you can do is choose what to focus on. I like making movies—just to be able to focus on the characters in my movies, rather than the disaster that is life.

Follow Whitney on Twitter.

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Photo via Wikimedia Commons user E. von Muench

On Thursday of last week, a court in Düsseldorf, Germany, ruled in favor of a male rental tenant who was suing to get his $3,490 deposit back after a landlord accused him of ruining the marble floor with his pee splashes. The judge agreed that it was uric acid that had discolored the beautiful marble floor, but remained convinced that the urinator wasn't liable for the damage. The legal takeaway of the suit is that property owners can't force male tenants to pee sitting down.

The DPA, Germany's national news agency, published the statement by the judge in the case, Stefan Hank, and it's kinda hard to relate to if you're not German:

Despite the increasing domestication of men in this area, urinating while standing up is indeed still common practice...Someone who still practices this previously dominant custom is regularly confronted with significant disputes, particularly with female cohabitants. However normally he must not reckon with damage to the marble floor of a bathroom or guest toilet.

In other words, in Germany, peeing while standing up is viewed as an outdated custom that some people still practice, like calling all women "ma'am" or smoking cigarettes indoors. Thus the hilarity of comedy sketches like this one, which is in German, but you'll get the gist:

Desperately in need of context, I asked the CEO of the International Paruresis Association, Dr. Steven Soifer, to help me understand. Soifer, whom I have interviewed before, works to help men get over their pee-shyness problems, and he often goes to Germany, where pissing is a complex issue.

"There are some cultural issues that we simply can't understand, just like there are some cultural issues that Europeans can't understand about us," he said, pointing me to examples not just in Germany but in Sweden and Norway where laws have been proposed that would segregate standing and sitting pee stations rather than dividing bathrooms based on gender. Some of those stories have been misconstrued by conservative bloggers in the US to make it sound like raging feminists are out to cut European men's dicks off if they stand to pee.

But it's not all exaggeration. In 2006, a schoolmistress in Norway who was sick of wiping up piss accidentally stirred up shit when she sent a letter home to parents asking them to teach their boys to pee in the civilized manner, a.k.a. by sitting down. Then there are gadgets that some Europeans put on their toilets to shame Stehpinklers (those who pee standing) into becoming Sitzpinklers (those who sit to pee).

But it isn't just about tidiness. According to Soifer, "Physiologically it is easier to urinate sitting down than standing up," he said. "The muscles work better. They're not as tense, so some men prefer to urinate sitting down rather than stand. In fact, myself, when I get up at night, when I'm half asleep and I've got bad vision, I urinate sitting down."

Some men with pee-shyness, Soifer said, have an easier time peeing seated when they're in public thanks to the privacy of a stall, though he was quick to mention that with "hardcore cases of paruresis, that doesn't work. The fact that there are other people in the restroom shuts the muscles so tight that they can't go."

The news out of Germany is a breath of fresh ammonia-smelling air for men like the Telegraph's Jake Wallis Simons, who wrote a year ago about the decline of proper masculine urination posture, not just in Europe but in Taiwan and Japan, where 30 percent of men sit down to pee. In response to news of men voluntarily sitting down, and a small handful of legal proposals involving unisex public toilets, Wallis wrote, "There are many ways to remove a man's dignity. One of the foremost, however, has got to be forcing him to urinate sitting down." Despite Wallis's one-man outcry, most men's dignity can probably survive an occasional seated bladder evacuation when in public.

The German legal ruling, on the other hand, defended a man's right to pee standing up in his own home, surely a right worth defending. But it doesn't appear that this is a debate poised to cross the Atlantic anytime soon.

"Unisex toilets are more common [in Europe] than they are in the States," said Soifer. "You can imagine how that would go here in the US."

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

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Artwork by Dan Evans

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Becoming a dad is like having a chubby, drooling dwarf march in and steal your life. You know that carefree existence you had before, where you could go out drinking, see a film in the evening, or go to a restaurant on a whim? That's gone. Now you get excited if you manage to catch a five-minute YouTube clip before the banshee scream erupts in the other room.

No one really tells you how much everything changes when you have a baby. Or maybe they do, but you're too bored to really take it in because, you know, new parents suck. But listen to me now and understand these words.

It's been seven months since my kid was born, and I'm still reeling at the shock of it. Because, when you've ingested the life lessons of the Replacements and Holden Caulfield, the concept of fatherhood seems utterly alien. You've built your world around adolescent concerns, not responsibility and the future. I thought that my experience as an uncle and knowing all the lyrics to "The Living Years" by Mike and the Mechanics would help, but it didn't.

The first jolt of fatherhood is the realization that you are completely irrelevant, because, for the first few months, the baby doesn't really interact with you. It's all about the relationship with his or her mom—you are there to support them while they do the dance of mother and child. This means cooking, cleaning, and generally being the dependable one. There's no time to sulk, indulge in any type of hedonism, or make dumb jokes about boobs. I found this leap from comic-collecting "sperm donor" to stand up "father" quite a challenge.

Here are a few things that will happen to you when you become a father. Spoiler: Life pretty much revolves around shit now.

FEELING 'READY' IS IMPOSSIBLE
When you come from a dysfunctional family, the rose-tinted glasses of parenthood are more like Mr. Magoo's enormous bottle bottoms: You see everything a bit too clearly. The first issue surrounding parenthood for me was how my mother reminded me and my sister throughout childhood that having kids was a total waste of time. "Having children is a DEAD LOSS," she'd parrot repeatedly, often around our birthdays. It's these things you remember as you embark on the journey yourself.

The second and most important issue was how severely immature my generation is. I am. We're all adult babies without any real intellect in the way of, you know, actually being adults. We're freelance renters who can't commit to either driving lessons or a gym membership. We teeter constantly on the edge of our overdrafts. We don't know how to feed ourselves properly. Some of us go out far too much, clinging to the idea that we're in our second year of college for much, much longer than we should.

The lack of security month to month was enough to make me balk at the idea of bringing a child into the world. But it happened. We decided to have a baby. And then, two months before his birth, I got laid off. Bastards. Which made me feel even more Peter Pan–ish and unready.

TRY TO DRESS LIKE A GROWN-UP FOR GROWN-UP APPOINTMENTS
I've dressed like a tinpot Interpol roadie for ten sad years. The New Rock Revolution is my purview. As a father-to-be, this suddenly felt significant, like a demarcation of my immaturity. Perhaps it began at our first birth class, where I turned up wearing a leather jacket, a Black Lips T-shirt, and ripped jeans. I cannot begin to tell you how compromised you feel practicing various active birth positions when you're scared your nutsack has fallen out of your ripped crotch.

I had one reoccurring thought that day: If the clothes maketh the man, I am very much a eunuch. A eunuch who looks like he shops at Topman. Suddenly, clothes that had previously made me feel cool made me feel wafer-thin and desperate. Obviously not as ridiculous as the olde tyme Victorian goth couple who turned up in full bowler-hat-wearing splendor, though.

Later on, I wore a Breeders T-shirt around the postnatal unit and experienced all manner of withering looks from nurses. So yeah, if you want to be taken seriously as a dad-to-be, maybe don't turn up to important appointments dressed like you're going to a gig that happened in 2002.

YOU DON'T HAVE TO PRETEND TO NOT BE MISERABLE AND TERRIFIED
My default mode in life is cynical and pessimistic. Attempting to parlay that with the "PARENTHOOD IS MAGICAL" mafia who apparently run the whole having-a-kid experience is difficult. Navigating your way through the vast expanse of mushy Cath Kidston brain food that is dribbled your way both pre- and post-birth is a hard task. Everyone is pretending that everything is great and fine when, actually, they're choking up inside and losing themselves. If you're anything like me, you'll be the lone voice in the cooing cacophony that says, "Aaaaaahhhaaa fucksake, this is so fucking intense, why didn't anyone tell me?"

But it's fine to be that person. Everyone feels the same—it's just about who is the best at pretending. The white-hot fear does pass, eventually. Drinking helps. As does a refusal to acknowledge anyone wearing polka dots as a real live human.

Your head will roll when you recall your halcyon days, as your energy drops lower than you've ever known and your body feels like a dirty, creaky shed. You were not tired then, my friend. You'd never been properly introduced to 'tired.'

ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ON THIS EARTH CAN PREPARE YOU FOR YOUR BABY'S ENTRANCE
We all have an idea of what having a baby is like, right? Maybe a bit like that scene in Knocked Up or something off One Born Every Minute. But what becomes apparent, very quickly, is that each birth experience is unique and that you don't know anything at all. No birth scene in any movie will give you even a sliver of insight. Ours, it turned out, was a bit shitty. After nine months of a sickness-free pregnancy, when it came time for the baby to say "HIYA!" things took a turn for the worse. It was like a plot line from Casualty. After spending days "laboring" in the birth ward (where I learned that your new best friends go by the names "TENS Machine" and "Pethidine"), our baby began to lose oxygen at a rapid rate.

The emergency alarm went off, a red light was flashing, and my wife was rushed into the emergency room. It was all, suddenly, too real. Too loud. She lay on the operating table under a harsh light with about eight doctors around her. I was speechless, utterly terrified and convinced they'd both die. A nurse took my hand and led me to a tiny cupboard and told me to put on some scrubs. I grabbed the first thing that I could get my hands on: an XXL set of bright blue scrubs. I looked like a child in a man's scrubs—a fitting visual metaphor, really. Before my wife was put under the anesthetic, she was comforting me. There is, I thought to myself, something wrong with this picture.

YOU WILL FEEL LIKE YOU HAVE THE WORST HANGOVER ALL THE TIME
Remember that time you pulled the all-nighter, had to get up at 7AM to go to work for that training day that involved It's A Knockout–style team-bonding challenges? By God, how you'll laugh now. Your head will roll when you recall your halcyon days, as your energy drops lower than you've ever known and your body feels like a dirty, creaky shed. You were not tired then, my friend. You'd never been properly introduced to "tired."

Once you become a dad, you start saying things like, "It was great, I got three hours last night," to other walking zombies. You end up acting like someone in Requiem for A Dream—slurring, staggering, and hallucinating. You find yourself using lots of malaprops (one day, I literally forgot the word for, um, cheese), which are not as bad as the endless, half-finished conversations that trail off into the ether. You talk about dreams that, for some reason, you think everyone is privy to (they're not). Everything that comes out of your trap sounds like a bizarre haiku. And let's not even start on the paranoia...

YOU GET USED TO LOOKING LIKE A WALKING COMPOST HEAP
Sounding deranged is one thing, but new parenthood also makes you look terrible very quickly. Sartorial standards stoop somewhere between felon-on-day-release and weird-uncle-who-lives-in-a-caravan-and-always-smells-like-damp-and-Wotsits. You become the Normcore Bob of your suburban nightmares who genuinely looks forward to escaping to Crate & Barrel on the weekend. You're constantly covered in ominous stains and, probably, smelling like milky gastric juices. Every day, you edge ever closer to dressing head-to-toe in SuperDry.

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YOU HAVE SHIT ON YOUR MIND CONSTANTLY
If you didn't talk much about excrement before, your life is about to take a seismic shit, I mean, shift. You will obsess over the texture of shit, the color of it (my mental cache of shit hues is like a Farrow & Ball catalogue), how frequently it comes, and how it smells. You might even start to enjoy the smell. This is your life now. The very idea of squeamishness is a far, forgotten memory, like the time when you didn't want to go to bed at 7 PM every night. Remember when you used to talk about the heteronormative conspiracy in Michael Bay films? REMEMBER? Nah, you probably don't, because you can't even remember what was said five minutes ago.

IT'S ALL OK, THOUGH, REALLY
Because, in the middle of this tornado of shit and tears, there is your baby. Someone who may steal your sanity and sleep, but whose cuteness does, by quite sickening Darwinism, make it OK, somehow. Even in the depths of 3:57 AM madness, his beauty transcends the situation. Fatherhood is the weirdest, most psychedelic trip you will ever take. It's like being hit by lightning, every day.

The one baby cliché that actually rings true is that you will have previously never known a capacity for love like you do now—a pure, terrifying kind of love that actually makes your bones hurt. A love that makes everything you've ever done in your life feel insignificant when you look at the tiny eyes staring up at you that you actually made. Eyes that were once just sex. Even in the mundane moments of routines, like changing a heavy, hot diaper, or fixing the car seat, there's a purity in the situation that just makes it... all right. Even when you are being pissed on, like I am, right now.

Follow Priya on Twitter.

A couple of days before last night's election, VICE Greece asked four people living at the outskirts of Greek society if they believed that a new left-wing government would be able to show them better days.

Here's what they said.

NIKOS PAPADOPOULOS, 61 YEARS OLD

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"I was diagnosed with cancer in 2006. Treatment proved to be extremely expensive and within two years, I had lost everything. Without realizing it, I found myself knee-deep in debt. Some friends helped me out at the beginning but as the austerity worsened, I had to stop depending on those around me.

"Today, I am homeless. I worked as a nurse before I was diagnosed, but I don't qualify for a pension. At the moment, I have no income. For the first time in my life, I am helpless. For the past two months, I've been staying in a hostel in the center of the city and I eat in soup kitchens.

"Most political parties have let me down but I will still be voting in Sunday's elections. Mine won't be a protest vote—there is something fundamental motivating me. The thing is, whatever difficulties come one's way, deep inside there is always hope that something will change for the better. This kind of hope is not egotistical—besides, I've had my share of good and bad times. But I strongly believe that we need to change things—that life in Greece can't go on like this.

"Austerity has destroyed us. I will go to the polls hoping that in the future no one will have to go through what I went through."


KOSTAS KARAHALIOS, 69 YEARS OLD

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"I am Greek Roma—I was born and raised in Thebes. I don't believe these elections will have any real effect on my life and the way Greek society works. I grew into an old man listening to promises—promises that were simply lies.

"I live in a Roma camp like an animal; four times a week the police come over and drag us to the police station for random checks. They say we have to leave our tents because they are next to the Olympic buildings. Leave and go where? I have children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren—where are we supposed to go with no help from the state? Find my people somewhere decent to resettle and we'll leave that place immediately.

"I've been working since I was a small kid; I went to the army, then I had a family—I paid my dues to the country. Now all I want is peace and quiet. In the previous elections, I voted for Antonis Samaras but now I will be voting for Syriza. My entire family will vote for him and we'll see if things get better."

MACHI BASTIANOU, 44

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"I've been receiving psychological support from a healthcare facility for a few years now. I am not fit to work so my family help me get by. In the past, I worked for a food company, but I've also waited on tables and cleaned houses and once I worked as a security guard. Last time I earned a wage was in 2006.

"Do I expect anything to change? I don't believe in politics—I believe in people and their intentions. What I would like, however, is for the next government to help those who somehow found themselves living on the outskirts of society to re-integrate. Minorities don't require charity—they need education, jobs, and prospects. Unfortunately, I never received an education.

"I don't know who I'll be voting for yet. I was thinking about voting for [Syriza leader and new Prime Minister Alexis] Tsipras, but I don't like that he's an atheist. I strongly believe in God—He's all I've got left."

Spyros Zafeiratos, 64

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"I've spent most of my life working on ships—I've travelled all over the world. I learned foreign languages and walked in beautiful, exotic places. The last time I worked as a captain was in 2002. Since then, I have worked occasionally but it hasn't been that easy to find employment ashore.

"Today, I live off unemployment benefits—that comes down to 360 euro [$400] per month. I can't afford to pay rent, so I live in a housing complex run by a local NGO. I don't expect anything from the new government—whatever it looks like. I'm afraid that no matter how good their intentions might be, in the end things will only go as far as the powers that be will allow."

Photos by Dimitris Michalakis

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

The far-right campaign group Support the Calais Truckers (SCT) mounted a second attempt to blockade the port of Dover yesterday, but spent most of the day being hassled and attacked by anti-fascists as cops tried to get in between the warring sides.

Ostensibly, the SCT exist to demonstrate against rules that mean truckers can be fined when an illegal immigrant tries to smuggle themselves into the UK in the back of their lorries. But what they really do is serve as a platform for far-right idiots, neo-Nazis, and fascists. In the build up to yesterday's demo, they said they were looking forward to "more support" than they got at their last demo. Instead, fewer people turned up. They managed to bring half a road to a standstill for about 30 minutes.

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In October, the group tried and failed to block the A20, a road going towards the docks and Calais, annoying many of the truckers whose rights they claim to be fighting for. Sunday was much the same, except this time Nick Griffin didn't show up to make a weird speech comparing the protesters to latter-day ancient Celts defending the island from Romans.

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Upon arriving at the Castle Pub, where the far-right was gathering, it became clear that it wasn't going to be plain sailing for them. At first all I could see were police and the anti-fascist demonstrators. There were so many police vans, a woman who lived up the road said she thought it was a police convention. At one point some of the fascists took refuge on the pub's roof, outnumbered by anti-fascists.

An old man called Mike, standing by the door of the pub, was happy to talk to me about why he was there. Mike told me he's an organizer for the National Front—a far-right organization that has a white-only membership policy. "There's a huge influx of people invading the country," he told me. "They have lots of weasel words, calling them asylum seekers, immigrants, Muslims. What they are is invaders." He had a Werther's Originals voice but talked like Rudolph Hess.

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After a while, Mike's mates filed out of the pub and into the street. There was a long stand-off between the fascists and anti-fascists that got eerily quiet every now and then, when people weren't shouting insults at each other. The police stood between the two groups. "Nice example of the master race, aren't you? We've got nothing to worry about if you're defending us," an anti-fascist shouted across the police line.

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The staring and swearing match was broken when two guys from opposing sides started going at each other and the police got in between them.

I wasn't having much luck with the anti-fascists, who didn't want to talk to journalists, until I met "D," a sunglasses-wearing guy who explained that their demos are simply a reaction to the fascist ones. "If there was none of them, there wouldn't be any of us," he said. "You can fight fascism with a pen. There are plenty of people doing it online with a pen, we need some people doing it here with the sword."

The solution, D says, is to do away with borders completely. "Just free movement within Europe," he added. "The British seem to be able to go anywhere in the world because they're liked, because they're white."

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There was another standoff soon after the march started, with anti-fascists linking arms to block it. This was followed by a spell of stone throwing. The result was that one side of the A20 was blocked—the side that leads out of the country and presumably the road SCT wants immigrants to take.

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The two sides then got into a scuffle on the promenade, while confused locals looked on in their waterproofs. One fascist was knocked to the floor and anti-fascists gave him a kicking until his mates picked him up and the police jumped in.

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The chase continued towards the docks. Cars and lorries coming into the country being greeted by what looked like a really violent amateur parkour club, as people vaulted traffic barriers.

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The chase continued until the anti-fascists tried running at the fascists through this really long grass in the middle of the road, the cops giving chase.

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The police managed to hold up them up there, allowing the fascists to carry out their march.

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Then they did their photo-op thing with flags by a roundabout.

Later on, anti-fascists staged their own photo-op. You won't often see anti-fascists posing with a fascist banner, but they managed to steal one from an EDL splinter group, the South East Alliance, that was in attendance, along with some air horns. Since the far-right love flags so much, capturing one of theirs is a pretty big diss, and an apt way to wrap up a crappy day for England's fascists.

Photos by Jack Pasco. Follow Ben Jackson on Twitter.

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All photos are courtesy of the East London Strippers Collective. Photo by Anslem Burnette

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

We are remarkably dishonest when it comes to the sex industry. And as much as conversational objections to nakedness-for-cash can blur into vague, emotive statements with very little actual meaning, so too does legislation.

"Farcical" and "dangerous" are two of the words I heard used last week to describe the UK's licensing of sexual entertainment, and those words are absolutely accurate: The situation is a mess.

The reason the issue has been hurled back into the spotlight is because Scotland have been holding parliamentary debates on whether to bring in a single policy to regulate sexual entertainment venues (SEVs). Currently, live sexual entertainment in Scotland isn't licensed in its own category—instead, it falls under the Licensing Act 2005, which regulates alcohol licenses.

Now, it seems likely that strip clubs are going to be slapped with some new legislation. The question is, what form should this take?

If you're searching for a model of SEV legislation that isn't working, you don't have to look further than England and Wales. Here, in a nutshell, any venue offering lap dancing, pole dancing, or striptease is classified as a "sex encounter venue." Local councils have the power to veto licenses for SEVs and, if they wish, declare a "nil" policy, meaning no SEVs whatsoever on their turf.

In reality, this translates to councils up and down the country granting or denying licenses inconsistently. They're given and revoked for no apparent reason, licensing fees are topsy-turvy and, in some authorities, restrictive policy is such that councils are effectively trying to ban what is a lawful activity.

Moral objections to SEVs—if, for instance, you think the industry is gross, ungodly or degrading to women—should not, legally, be used as grounds for refusing a license. Instead, councils must argue that a venue will cause a public nuisance.

Of course, this creates problems in itself, as definitions in this realm can be very subjective. In its draft Sexual Entertainment Venue Policy, Tower Hamlets suggested that SEVs are not appropriate in "parts of the borough associated with commerce, family, retail, and entrepreneurship... residential areas or areas frequented by families and children." So, nowhere, then.

In neighboring Hackney, a nil limit was imposed, despite more than two-thirds of local respondents to the council's consultation being against the policy. Nil limit has been imposed by a raft of councils across the country.

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Photo by Vera Rodriguez

Lack of clarity means that silliness happens all the time. Last year, Oxford strip club The Lodge failed to get its license renewed. The club simply reopened by classing its acts as so-much-more-palatable burlesque dancers.

Meanwhile, even the widely used term "lap dancing" is confused.

"The definition of a lap dance is a contact dance, grinding in someone's lap, which is against the law and the licensing conditions," says stripper Edie Lamort, a member of campaign group the East London Strippers Collective. "But of course it goes on, and we all know clubs that turn a blind eye to it. So the law defines us as lap dancers, but then contradicts itself, as lap dancing is illegal in the UK. Clearly the law was drafted by people who know nothing."

Professor Phil Hubbard of the University of Kent, an expert in sex work legislation, was part of the parliamentary panel in Scotland last week. His message to MSPs was, to paraphrase: Legislation in England and Wales is bullshit; please avoid repeating.

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Photo by Anslem Burnette

"I'm not fan of regulation, but if it's inevitable it needs to be fair and proportionate, and apply to all local authorities, not just some," Hubbard tells me. "I have suggested ways in which Scotland's legislation can be improved: no nil limits, clearer definitions, mandatory licensing and a much clearer sense as to what are valid grounds of refusal. In England and Wales, the law allows councils to be illogical."

While moral objections to strip clubs can't be used as grounds for license refusal, it's hard to suggest they don't play a part. The most vigorous campaigns have come from feminist groups who usually couch the argument in terms of female objectification. More salient reasons, such as the suggestion that strip clubs make the area dangerous for women, have not been backed up by evidence. A much quoted report linking strip clubs to rape was debunked by Brooke Magnanti, while a study led by Hubbard found that only 3 percent of respondents felt strip clubs were a source of public nuisance—a figure much lower than those recorded for pubs, nightclubs or takeaways.

This isn't to say that all is peachy within the industry. There are excessive house fees, unfair fines, sub-standard facilities, over-staffed shifts, and bullying mangers. So sort this out, say the dancers, but don't use it to erase SEVs from the map. "It's frustrating," says Lamort. "Every wrong thing is simply used as ammunition to close down the entire industry."

Lamort says the climate of fear around licensing is allowing badly run clubs to proliferate. "We've been silenced by this climate of moral panic," she tells me. "We can't call out bad managers because it will result in the whole pub getting closed down."

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Photo by Vera Rodriguez

Punitive licensing never increases safety. Our unwillingness to confront the realities of the sexual entertainment industry causes real harm. As with strip clubs, so with sex work, for which bizarre laws mean that women are not allowed to work together, despite the fact this would clearly increase safety.

"In the UK, sex work falls under a gray and murky area," says Jet of the Sex Worker Open University, an organization seeking to empower the sex worker community. "Paying for sex isn't illegal, but most things around it are open to interpretation and prosecution. This puts anyone working within the sex industries in a precarious position, whether from the state, local authorities, the police, violent clients, immigration officers, or exploitative employers."

The renewal of debate around SEV licensing is a chance to look again at how illogical the wider legal framework is for sex work. Hubbard thinks the SEV category should be extended to include brothels, meaning women working together would no longer be illegal.

"We have massage parlors up and down the country, some of which offer sexual services," he says. "These are brothels in a legal sense, but regulators ignore this as they say they are licensing these spaces for massage only, and any other activities are private transactions between individuals. The premise manager must deny knowledge that sex is being sold on premise. It's a farce. Why not recognize these are spaces where sex is sold, license them as what they are and ensure they are good working environments?"

All these categories of dishonesty: "lap dancing" clubs where you mustn't touch laps; massage parlors and saunas that sell sex, except we all have to pretend they don't; legal sex work that nevertheless makes it nearly impossible for anyone to run a safe, functioning business.

This legislation seems to rank the preservation of an illusion above the betterment of a reality. It's sex work in Wonderland. But you know what? The industry is a reality, and as long as laws are set up to favor the myths over women's safety and decent working conditions, our legislation deserves to be called a farce.

Follow Frankie Mullin on Twitter.

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Image via Wikimedia Commons

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

Religion can provide many with strength in a world characterized by both catastrophe and struggle. But through technology, materialism, and social reform, the UK has become increasingly secular. In 2001, only 14.8 percent of Britons said they had no religion. By 2013, this had almost doubled to 25 percent. This wane comes from our youth—in 2013, only 12 percent of young people said they were governed by a religious leader.

We hear so much of disenfranchised young people clinging to the old towers of religions that claim to speak for them, factions that empower them to transpose their anger to hateful misdeeds. But they're not the only disenfranchised youths quaking within their flimsy notions of identity, looking for some support.

Young LGBT people have more publicity than ever. Same-sex marriage is now available to them from age 18. With this added attention, though, comes antagonism. As with most social reforms, two steps forward come with one step back and, for every conversation surrounding the acknowledgement of homosexuality, there's another reminding us that so many still believe it's inherently wrong.

It's in everything from Maurice Mills, an honored politician who believed a gay-pride march caused Hurricane Katrina, to the suicide of Leelah Alcorn, a 17-year-old trans woman whose parents were so adamant that her gender identity was a mistake that they sent her for "gay cure" therapy.

Stability and purpose—two imperative blocks of all major religions—are exactly what young LGBT people need. But with our dogmatic assumptions of religion, that logic doesn't fit. How can a young person be religious and LGBT? How can you reconcile two parts of your identity like that?

It all seems to depend on who wants you to be religious, and why.

Becca Scott is 23 and identifies as queer. Though raised Christian, she rejected the idea "at a young age," and her mom wasn't too bothered. "It's kind of hard to have a good relationship with a person who doesn't think you deserve to be afforded the same rights as your straight equivalents," she says. "Let alone a god. I do think Christianity is becoming more 'tolerant' of the LGBT community," she adds. "But I've never seen 'tolerance' as a great thing."

Louis,* who is 21, gay, and Catholic, relies more heavily on tolerance. "I'm basically out to the whole world except my family. The main reason I'm not coming out is fear of rejection—not religion." Still, he is waiting. Not necessarily for Catholicism to become more accepting, even though he believes it will. He's waiting because he wants to be able to get out should things go wrong. "I will [come out] when I'm financially independent," he says. "So if I get kicked out, at least I'll be able to support myself."

Finding LGBT youths reconciling themselves with a religion isn't easy. As I discovered, most interviewees won't be named. One potential interviewee (someone I didn't meet in the end) was a gay Muslim twentysomething who is only "out" to his gay sports team. He said he would only meet me after dark, on the condition that I wouldn't bring any recording equipment in case he could later be identified by his voice. It struck me that there could be thousands of LGBT people from religious families who are struggling to self-identify, but no outreach organizations I contacted would grant access to individuals for interviews, either—reasoning that they are too "vulnerable."

For some people, the idea of coming out to a religious family might come with many layers of fear. If you are from a poor family, there is more at stake than just not being accepted, since without money, being thrown out of home could leave you utterly destitute. As one Slate writer put it: "For LGBT youths, escape usually hinges on two all-important factors: good grades and money."

Socioeconomic factors of religious groups might be much more important to acceptance of sexuality than religion.

"The combination of continuous money worries adds an element of tension that I imagine a middle-class family wouldn't have to worry about while coming to terms with the sexual or gender identity of a family member," James*, a gay 22-year-old Pentecostal Christian told me. Sometimes, denouncing your religion first is easier. For Emma,* 28, this was very much the case—she left the Jehovah's Witnesses before she even came out to herself. "Growing up, I knew what the consequences of coming out as gay would do to my family and congregation, so I guess I chose the coward's way out and packed my bags and didn't look back."

"It was only then that I allowed myself to think about the possibility of acting on my impure thoughts. But on renouncing my faith, I lost all the friends I had grown up with. I haven't had a conversation with my sister for more than six years and only speak with my dad at family funerals," she says. "He does now allow my mom to write me the occasional letter and make the odd phone call, though, which is an improvement."

It's tricky to tell if Emma left her religion because she knew she was gay and wouldn't be tolerated, or because she was sick of her religion's intolerance. But just as assumptions about people based on their sexuality is stupid, so is assuming a religious group is bigoted.

In 2009, a Gallup poll of Muslim and non-Muslim people in Europe said that British Muslims had a 100 percent intolerance of homosexuality. This excited Tommy English, the leader of the EDL's LGBT division, whom I interviewed in 2013: "For a long time, the EDL leadership held their meetings in gay bars, because they knew they would not be spied on by Muslims," he said then.

The EDL is, thankfully, not a religion, but it carries an ideology and reveals the dangerous influence of this survey, which showed British Muslims to be morally conservative in so many spheres (only 3 percent said that sex outside marriage was acceptable, compared with 48 percent of French Muslims and 27 percent of German Muslims). However, results were perhaps skewed by the fact that, as one co-author put it, "The British Muslim community is disproportionately unemployed."

Again, it seems that socioeconomic factors of religious groups might be much more important to acceptance of sexuality than religion.

Yasmin,* 25, identifies as both a "revert" Muslim—"just rediscovering and learning stuff for myself"—and bisexual. Apart from one sister she confides in, discussion of her sexuality with her family is nonexistent. "You don't discuss your spouse, so you wouldn't discuss your sexuality." Ironically, she says it's other lesbians or "hetero" people she has to explain herself to, because they "automatically associate religion with rules and assume there's some kind of 'no homosexuality' rule," which, of course, there isn't.

James's experiences echo this. "A gay bar I went to recently had an act saying, 'Fuck you, God,' saying that he's homophobic. I understand it, but I perceive my God to be the one I'm closest to in life, and I felt as alienated in the gay bar as I do in the church."

In the bigger picture, the church often seems to have 'problems' with LGBT people and their lives and loves, but on the ground it is much more positive.

While Yasmin happens upon scriptures in support of her sexuality – "Islam is all about tolerance and peace. When it speaks of 'love' it's assumed to be between a man and a woman, but what it means in those hadiths is that being kind and tolerant fosters companionship and growth." James likes to "cherry-pick" parts of the scriptures that accept his sexuality. Both these individuals' beliefs and orientations are different, but both are looking for something similar, a root system, in returning to study their parents' respective religions.

Professor Gregory M. Herek's 1987 paper "Religious Orientation And Prejudice: A Comparison of Racial and Sexual Values" showed that if a religion teaches tolerance, those who are "extrinsic" in their religion—i.e. the ones who "use" it—are more likely to be bigoted than the "intrinsics," who are more likely to "live" religion. In simple terms, if you say you're religious, you're more likely to be bigoted than if you do religion.

Church of England canon Jeremy Pemberton came out at 50. But last year, at 58, he had his job as a priest in Nottinghamshire revoked. His crime? Marrying his same-sex partner. Jeremy agrees with the say/do theory. "I really felt like I reconciled faith and life for the first time only when I came out," he says.

"Coming out to myself and God—as if God didn't already know!—was a massive spiritual, as well as emotional, experience." He is keen to suggest, again, that the belief held by a few isn't indicative of the church's stance as a whole. "In the bigger picture, the church often seems to have 'problems' with LGBT people and their lives and loves," he says. "But on the ground it is much more positive."

Tara Hewitt, a 29-year-old Catholic trans woman, agrees with this sentiment. She began her conversion after finding the church to be a "beacon of light" at a time when media attention and all its ensuing hassles were wearing her down. "When people say they hate the Catholic Church, they're often hating what they think is the Catholic Church, not actually what the teaching is. When I started going to church, they weren't trying to convert me to being Catholic—they were extremely loving and caring people. I just felt very welcome."

In the same way that Islam is, currently, getting a wrongfully bad reputation because of the behavior of an extremist minority, perhaps many religious people's attitudes towards the LGBT community are misperceived because the tiny few (the sayers) are heard too loudly over the rest (the doers).

We'll never know how Elizabeth Lowe's Christian parents would have reacted if had she come out, because the 14-year-old, who thought she might be a lesbian, committed suicide before doing so. After her death, her father said, "It would have been no surprise at all. We would have been very supportive."

Religion is by no means the answer for anyone who doesn't want to be governed by its influence. But luckily, in this ever-changing world, hopes, promises of self-improvement, good will—all the things that help people get through days of insecurity—are no longer confined to the strict boundaries of religion. Kieran Moloney is a 23-year-old trans man with no major religious affiliation. That said, he seems to have created his very own belief system built upon his transition.

As a bodybuilder, Moloney spends solitary time focusing on his goals and studiously typing out aphorisms of encouragement to send to his 7,000 Instagram followers, who call him an "inspiration." He's not a messiah—nor does he act like one, regularly showing followers his embarrassing "before" shots—but his bio reads: "INSPIRE and HELP that's all I wanna do."

"Changing the world won't make it a better place," he tells me. "Strengthening the minds of our youth will. After all, the mind is the most powerful thing you will ever own." Of course, he's not the only one out there. Behind #ItGetsBetter and beyond, millions of LGBT people are giving other, younger people faith through information silently divined around the world. People who would have previously existed within confused and parochial lives can be comforted by echoes of their existence. And if that's not spirituality in action, then lord knows what is.

* Names have been changed.

Follow Sophie Wilkinson on Twitter.

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Follow Gilbert Hernandez on Twitter and buy his books from Fantagraphics and Drawn And Quarterly.

(We're putting the second season of our Emmy-winning HBO show online. Watch all the episodes that have gone online here.)

In the seventh episode of our second season, VICE heads to Delhi to meet Sampat Pal, an Indian woman who's formed the Gulabi Gang, or Pink Gang, to help women band together to combat the many cases of sexual assault tainting their country. Then, host Thomas Morton goes to a radiation-plagued nuclear testing site in Kazakhstan where a doctor has tried to implement a mandatory "genetic passport."

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Photo by David Fitt

If you caught the excerpt we ran last November from Sarah Gerard's debut novel, Binary Star, you are already aware of her ability to take the cosmic aspects of a human body and bring them down into your hands. Using a stop-start style that folds its energy into and onto itself over and again to disburse its narrative, the grander scheme of the novel is an exploration into the depths of several varieties of contemporary personal torment. Gerard explores everything from body dysmorphia and bulimia, to onslaught of ads and social media and desire for consumption, to damaging relationships and phobias and trepidation over the future, to simply wanting more from life.

What's most satisfying about the novel, though, is Gerard's ability to wield such a familiar range of personal terror in a vibrant, addictive display of prose. More than just a relentless confession amidst the narrator's sprawl into emotive depths, Gerard enacts a nearly Kathy Acker-esque intensity to her dictation, invoking styles at times clipped and maniacal, like Artaud, other times siren-shriekingly transcendent or trauma-shocked-out calm. There's no sense of varnish to her realism, and no mode in which the feeling slips out of the frame of being led on through a personal hell so meticulously considered, it feels as much like science as it does the wider product of great pain.

I got in touch with Sarah to talk with her about her approach to the book's creation, how its writing changed her, the question of personal experience in fiction, her veganism, and more.

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VICE: I didn't want to assume at first that Binary Star was based on your life; but then I read a note somewhere that said it was an autobiographical account. Is that correct?
Sarah Gerard: The book is not a strictly autobiographical account at all—I drew from my life about as much as the next person, but I suspect the question of autobiography is important with this kind of story because anorexia is something a lot of people are curious about. Honestly, I didn't give much thought to how I toed the line between fiction and experience while I was writing the book, maybe because I was more concerned with landing in a place that was emotionally accurate and because I felt instinctively that I was fictionalizing enough of the story to protect the innocent, if there are any. True, I went on a road trip with a boyfriend. And true, I spent many years struggling with anorexia and bulimia. I was student teaching during the worst of it. But otherwise, everything is fictional. I would even argue that the entire book is fictional because the narrator is fictional.

With that said, I'm also an essayist and have written about my own life enough to have to consider how it will affect others. I haven't always made the best choices in this regard—this is the "onslaught" you refer to—but I do my best to be even-handed and I change or omit names where necessary. I can't always portray people in the most flattering light, though, if the light I'm using is fair. But that's their fault, not mine.

The novel opens with a sequence of brief passages that seem to act like intense flashes of energy, as if preparing the reader for the following, larger sections of the book, which you refer to as "dredge-ups." I assume that's a reference to the way the book was composed?
Beginning the book, I actually thought that I could write it all the way through in the style of the prologue, and I do think I might have been able to do that. But the dredge-ups lent the book a sense of order, and also literalized the link between the protagonist and stars; that she was literally a star dredging up this core material, undergoing a three-act change in her physical state and her color. So, you're right that "dredge-up" is a reference to the way I wrote the book, but it's also a stage in the evolution of a star—the passages that begin the sections describe the events comprising each of these stages. There are two or three before a star becomes a carbon star, depending on its mass, unless it undergoes some other kind of change in the meantime, like a supernova. Of course, the actual writing of Binary Star was also very difficult, as I think writing a book always is. A writer can't help but be changed by the end.

One of the things I loved about the feel of the book was its ability to shift through styles while maintaining a kind of emotional fervency all throughout. Were there any other writers you were reading or thinking about that were integral to your approach?
I can't say she's a major influence, but someone whose work I think is very interesting and very important, and whom I often think about when I consider what I was trying to do with Binary Star, is the Guatemalan performance artist Regina José Galindo. She's unafraid to make her body the center of her work, a site to make social and political injustice visible and tangible, with the idea that the body is always the place where violence occurs. For the same reason, Elaine Scarry's work has become very important to me, especially her book On Beauty and Being Just. Scarry has written extensively on torture and its world-destroying power, but On Beauty and Being Just is the counterpoint to her ideas about torture. In her mind, beauty is world-creating; it's the opposite of torture; beauty is linked to altruism, which helps us to address issues of injustice as we see them. Beauty helps us to care, and because we care, we care-take. Lastly, Binary Star opens with an epigraph from Raoul Vaneigem's book The Revolution of Everyday Life, which people have described as a somewhat more poetic version of the Situationist text The Society of the Spectacle, by Guy Debord. I was reading it while I wrote Binary Star, so inevitably some of its ideas made their way into the book. Less specifically, my training in music and dance—neither of which I've practiced seriously for many years, but which I practiced every day for many years as a younger person—helped me a lot in writing Binary Star. I wanted the book to feel like it was composed of complicated rhythms that could be felt in the body. An accelerated heartbeat, tapping of the foot, hands moving in circular motions.

Since this is your first published novel, I wondered if the visceral approach that produced it is something that came to you after trying to approach other, perhaps less volatile, subjects and not finding what you wanted, or if this is the kind of book you always knew you would have to write?
I've been trying to write a book since I was a little kid. Binary Star is actually the second book I've completed, though I'd never dream of showing the first book to a wider audience. The first is called Elephant Tracks—a title I still like, actually—and it's about a couple that goes train-hopping up the east coast and gets seriously hurt jumping off a train. It's also autobiographical, though more so than Binary Star; I actually did go train-hopping with an ex, and it ended badly. So, I suppose I've always wanted to write about difficult subjects. I've just never been able to do it well until now.

My father is also a writer and was talking to an editor when I finished Elephant Tracks. I showed the editor the book and he basically told me I needed to take writing classes and left it at that. I was heartbroken, having worked on the book every day for a year. But I learned a lot from the sheer effort of writing it: how to make a scene, how to keep a writing schedule, how to say no when people try to distract you from your schedule, how to write dialogue. I don't mean to say that I did any of these things well at the end, but I was certainly improved.

When I wrote the version of Binary Star that exists in bookstores today, I was working with a metaphor I had carried over from another attempt at writing the book, which I didn't complete. In that form, it was about two girls in the summer after they graduate high school. I think best friendships can be extremely powerful, but this relationship wasn't working for me. I was only able to finish Binary Star once I went for blood—that being my own.

In what way did writing this book change you?
When I went down to Florida, I had been eating meat for about three years since starting again in 2010. Vegetarianism and veganism have been lifelong core values to me. I was raised vegetarian and have gone vegan a few times, and was vegan when I went to eating disorder rehab. In the past, I've told people I started eating meat again because I was recovering from anorexia and didn't want to restrict my food in any way, but that's actually not true for a few reasons. First, I was vegan for the whole two months I was in rehab, and was working closely with a nutritionist to make sure I got all of the nutrients I needed and was gaining healthy weight, and I continued living a vegan lifestyle for a few years after leaving rehab. Second, I don't think of a vegan diet as a restrictive one at all: the idea is to get all of the nutrients the body needs without harming other living things—in that way, it can actually be quite nutritive, in a physical and spiritual sense.

Finally, I started eating meat again because I was still a very sick person in the sense that my identity was very unclear to me and I was looking around desperately for anything that might help me define myself. I've always had a very punk rock sensibility but at the time I was clinging to punk rock in a way that I see now was very dishonest and unhealthy—I'm not sure how else to put it. In the past, I've used romantic connection to feel stabilized and this has manifested in promiscuous or adulterous ways. I started sleeping with a friend of mine whom I eventually started dating, and dated for several years. He was a carnivore, and because I was completely out of touch with my own values, I started eating meat with him.

When I decided to include veganarchism in Binary Star, I was forced to refamiliarize myself with a belief system that, at one time, had meant a lot to me. I don't necessarily subscribe to every aspect of veganarchist ideology, but as I was writing, I felt all these areas of my core belief system reawakening, with the foundational belief being that no living thing should be forced to live in oppressive—and in the case of factory farming, world-destroying—conditions. I realized that compromising my values in this way had led to a total compromise of my identity as a nonviolent person. Every day, I was contributing to the useless torture of countless animals, and the rape of the planet, and thus had severed my humanity—I was basically living adrift, and had been harboring years of guilt. In short, by the time I left Florida, I was vegan again, and I continue to live vegan.

Binary Star is available now from Two Dollar Radio.

Follow Blake Butler on Twitter.

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Bob Perry using his "bone finder." All photos courtesy of Bob Perry

Accurate figures are hard to come by, but the number of cemeteries in the United States has been estimated at upward of 100,000. As the demand to create digital cemetery maps inevitably increases, so will the need to locate unmarked or forgotten graves. Since many cemeteries have been around for centuries and often have incomplete records, locating graves that are unaccounted for is not an easy task.

That's where Bob Perry comes in. Perry and the company he works for use ground-penetrating radar (GPR) to locate unmarked vaults, graves, and sometimes even unknown mass-burial sites. His company logo is a skull and crossbones with the words "Bone Finder" above it and "Tracking the Dead" below. Bob's equipment was described in a 2013 Washington Post article as "a heavy duty baby stroller hooked to ground-penetrating radar." But don't be fooled by its unassuming appearance: GPR devices cost tens of thousands of dollars and only a handful of manufacturers produce them. Bob scans each property on foot by rolling the GPR over acres of land for days or weeks at a time. Since 2000, he's located more than 30,000 unmarked burial sites while working with more than 500 cemeteries across the country.

The winter is Bob's offseason, so he recently sat down with me over Skype and told me what it's like to roam centuries accompanied only by his giant GPR.

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VICE: How long has GPR technology been around?
Bob Perry: My first experience was back in Vietnam. One time we stopped in this Korean outpost, and I could see these guys pulling around this box on the ground. Of course, I had no idea what it was. They were all in civilian clothes, and it turned out to be ground-penetrating radar. Technically, GPR was invented during the Vietnam conflict.

They were using it to find bodies or graves?
No, they were using it to find enemy cells. In Vietnam, you'd have a sniper come up out of the ground and fire at you and then come up 40 feet, 50 feet away because they had a tunnel system beneath the ground. That's how they fought the war, and that's what GPR was invented for—so it could scan the ground and find these tunnels.

When did you start using GPR to locate unmarked graves?
My original business is cemetery mapping. When I first started, one of my customers wanted to know if I could probe the ground because they had a burial they had to put in and they didn't know if anyone [else] was buried there. So I [thought] that might be a good opportunity to take a look at this new equipment that's out there, which I didn't realize I had experienced years before. So I invested in the equipment. It turned out that I was the only one doing it, so I decided to make it my focus. I also do GPS mapping when I'm on site at the cemeteries. That was probably around 2000.

Can you briefly explain what ground penetrating radar is and how it works?
When the TV portrays someone scanning on the ground, they show up with this computer image of an outline of a person lying on the ground like how they are at movie crime scenes. That's not the situation. What you're looking at is hyperbolas in the ground—I call it an upside-down smiley face. The radar is measuring soil disturbance. For example, if it's flattened off, you can tell it's a vault. You can even measure the width of the walls on the vault. I have a six-point process that I go through on every burial to determine if it is in fact a human grave. I refer to it as a high probability. Unless you actually dig it, you're not gonna know. A lot of the sites I work on they do excavate the areas. So my accuracy rate is pretty good.

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Bob Perry in action

So the value you bring is basically to tell people where to dig. I imagine digging is time-consuming and people want to avoid doing it unnecessarily.
Exactly. And sometimes you can't find anything. I got areas at old cemeteries that I can't find anything no matter how much I scan.

Is part of the value also finding empty space that cemeteries can use for new arrivals?
Yes. A lot of the time when people move into a cemetery and they see an area that has no headstones, they automatically think it's available for burials—and it's not. Once, I located about 200 buried headstones. Around New England, they have a lot of wolf stones in the cemeteries. A wolf stone is a stone that lays flat on the ground—basically, it prevents animals and wolves from digging up the carcass.

Do you find remains that were weren't buried in graves?
I did find two mass-burial sites. I discovered them by accident. I got a call by the diocese of Savannah to scan the property just to find an urn that was in the ground. During that process they wanted me to take a look at this old Civil War site. In the meantime, when I was scanning the area I did find a mass burial site. Back in the 1800s there was a yellow fever epidemic that hit the city of Savannah. There were 800 people who perished. A lot of those people were in fact buried in the cemetery, but they buried them in a group. So I found two actual mass-burial sites.

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A group of graves

Is this a common thing?
I come across mass burial sites all the time. It sounds unique, but you'd be surprised how many times back then they used to bury people all together in a grave. It looks like a bunch of scrambled eggs when you're looking at the radar.

Are there places where outside factors make it harder for the radar to function smoothly?
Washington, DC, is a very unique environment. You've got radio waves all over the place. I can't go ten feet without needing to recalibrate the equipment. Meaning you got to shut it off and turn it back on. Radar is affected by all sorts of elements. You've got Obama flying around in the helicopters, and it's funny: When he goes by, everything goes dead. The machine just flatlines. You've got sirens. Cell phones will actually affect the radar. Compared with working in Georgia, for example, when I'm out in a rural area and I haven't seen anyone for three days, the GPRing is beautiful.

Over the years, have you counted how many unmarked graves you've found?
I'm in the 30,000 range. I've worked in well over 500 cemeteries across the country, so I've got quite a few cemeteries under my belt. DC's Historic Congressional Cemetery is my biggest [project] to date. I found 2,750 so far. I'm projecting maybe 4,500 unmarked graves there [upon completion].

What has been your favorite project so far?
My favorite project is the one I did in Sudbury, Massachusetts. That's an actual Revolutionary War cemetery. The last burial they had there was 1840, I think. Back about 1910, 1920, they put in a stone wall around the cemetery portion of it. Well, after I scanned the whole area I started scanning along the wall, then on the other side, on the walkways, and even where they park their cars, and I was finding burials out there too. I let 'em know about it in the report. It's their information. What they want to do with it is just totally up to them. They don't want to open up a can of worms and move the whole parking lot because there's burials out there.

Follow Simon Davis on Twitter.

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Jaimie Warren, "Self-portrait as Bulls fan in La Jeunesse de Bacchus by William-Adolphe Bouguereau/Michael Jordan basketball painting by dosysod of the Independents"

Art is often described with words like subversive or challenging or thought-provoking or even disturbing, but work hardly ever gets referred to as "funny." Sometimes a piece is commended for using humor to make whatever point there is to be made: a piece of bronze turned into a cardboard box or some ironically-placed grassy knoll. But we rarely laugh. If Glenn Lowry walks into a bar, it is to drink or to network; he does not bring a rabbi with him.

So when a legitimately funny person comes along, I often want to follow them everywhere out of sheer gratitude. Those people include: Grossmalerman [Guy Richards Smit], who skewers the art world through a sitcom and stand-up performances; Dynasty Handbag [Jibz Cameron], who does grating and queerified impressions of mainstream culture; and Jaimie Warren, who remixes celebrity photos and co-runs the amazing project Whoop Dee Doo, a bizarre traveling community variety show for kids (featuring a mix of guts, poop, color guard, drag queens, members of the National Guard, hardcore rock bands, often for middle America). If the art world had its own Mr. Show, these people would write it.

And for people who most often appear in public sweating, screaming, or doing Gallagher impersonations, they're the most pleasant, un-self-promoting artists you'll ever meet. Recently, a bowl of chips and hummus in Jibz's cozy Brooklyn apartment, we discussed art humor, humor, bombing, hecklers, and taking risks in front of uptight audiences. And poop.

VICE: When you started making art, what was your concept of art? How did you start thinking about art and what it could be?
Guy Richards Smit: I was born and raised in New York City, my dad was an art historian. For me, it was really old school—I got really into 30s radicalism, murals, and just the idea of pamphleteering. But I was never very interested in [contemporary] studio art, people being so locked in a world of aesthetics. I liked the idea of commentary, satire, a certain meanness, a certain kind of anger...

Like directed at the art world?
No, I liked art that had a certain kind of meanness—not in an elitist way, but kind of an anger that was direct in a way that was not compliant.

I was in grad school at Rutgers, and I saw Mike Smith's work, an early video artist. He did this character, "Mike." He's this everyday loser. There's this video, " Go for It, Mike," and it's the saddest, most amazing celebration of averageness that's ever been made. I saw that and realized this is what I want to do.

It was so direct and so full of pathos, and you couldn't stop laughing. And then he has a character called " Baby Ikki"...he's a 60-year-old man now, and he gets into a big diaper, and he looks like a baby from the 50s or something. It's the stupidest fucking thing you've ever seen, but you're riveted; he does this thing where he'll offer someone a Snickers bar or a banana, and they'll say "No thank you"—and then he'll take it back and kind of smush it and offer it to them again. Then he'll throw it at the person, but he does the mimicry of the baby's movements so perfectly that you're completely... it's like a play. There are no words spoken, it's just this stupid thing.

[vimeo src='//player.vimeo.com/video/117576668' width='640' height='360']

And visually, he's just a funny-looking guy, with a permanent five o'clock shadow.

So I knew that what I wanted was different, and I didn't know how to do it. I kept making pretentious attempts...

Like what?
I had a "sad terrorist" character. I remember making this video that was really long, I was getting into these jump cuts, and didn't really land.

I was at Rutgers, and there's this longstanding [conceptual] performance history there. And the idea of performing without acknowledging the audience in some way and what their needs might be... it just seemed lazy, quite frankly. There was never any planning ahead, and it was also slightly spiteful of the audience in some way.

I mean, I understand working with the audience in that way. I've done tons of performances where I fail miserably and there's complete discomfort in the audience, and it's supposed to be like that. I did a performance as a Dutch performance artist who comes to America (this was at Performa a couple of years ago)... a big, exciting night! And I brought a European plug for my boom box. And everyone on stage knew they weren't allowed to help me. I have tons of equipment, and it takes forever to set it up, and the boom box won't work with the music, and it was so sad, and I was sweating, and people were trying to figure out how to help. And this thing took at least seven minutes, maybe, tops.

One thing American popular culture has figured out is how to squeeze maximum pathos out of the minimum amount of time. Those are useful tools, I think.

[vimeo src='//player.vimeo.com/video/80333768' width='620' height='349']

Jibz, how did you think about art when you started making art?
Jibz Cameron: Well, I was a theater kid– I was really into performing and I thought I was going to be an actor, I loved dance. But as soon as I hit adolescence, I went downhill fast. I dropped out of high school, and I ended up becoming a sort of an angsty punk. I left home really early, and then I wasn't going to be an actor because I was hanging out with my queer little artist friends who were playing music and whatever.

And then when I was 20, I started to feel like I had missed out on a lot—everyone I knew had gone to college. I was making a lot of these sad but funny comics, and one of my friends at the San Francisco Art Institute was like you could totally get into this school with these. He convinced me. And I got in.

But when I got there, I had such a bad attitude about fine art. I didn't understand it, and I felt threatened by it. I wanted everything to be funny, and if I wasn't funny I thought it suuucked. It was lame.

[body_image width='739' height='557' path='images/content-images/2015/01/21/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/21/' filename='how-to-be-funny-in-an-art-way-body-image-1421859508.jpg' id='20024']Left: Dynasty Handbag poster. Right: Jibz Cameron, Map from "Soggy Glasses: A Homo's Odyssey"

Later I kind of figured out video work... This was the early 90s, so we had Tony Labat, Kathy Acker was there for a minute, all these cool people... and it started to make sense to me that I needed to make videos. All of a sudden it all exploded into one thing. But now I think that I have a little bit of a hard time defining categories... performance, comedy, musicals, theater, activism, all kinds of things. I feel like it's so relative.

Guy: I never have any idea what [job] box to check when I apply for grants. Like, what do you need me to be?

Jibz: PS, I like art now.

Jaimie?
Jaimie Warren: I'm still trying to figure it out, but mostly for many years I've basically been an organizer of sorts. When I was young, my thing was always organizing people to do stuff like giant capture the flag games or haunted houses or stuff like that. And I've been in the Midwest till last year, so it's always been about making your own entertainment.

When I had by first image published in a magazine in VICE in 2001, it was for an article called "Ode to the Fat Friend," and I submitted an image of myself. It was a funny self-portrait, and they asked for more. I said I didn't have any more, but then I looked through my photos and realized I had hundreds of them, I was doing it constantly for my own entertainment.

So it's still this process and I'm still figuring it out, and I'm also obsessed with celebrity. I'm really stuck in the 80s and 90s, too. I'd say that's about 90 percent of the music I listen to. I don't feel like it's being nostalgic, it's just what I like. And shows that I grew up with... So it's really focusing on stuff from pop culture. I'm not amazing with art history... I appreciate it but it's not necessarily my expertise.

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Jaimie Warren, "Self-portrait as naked lady in the Syndics of the Amsterdam Drapers' Guild by Rembrandt/Gentlemens Club by Mundo"

But you've been making art historical murals.
I know... I pull from it, but if I have Missy Elliot in a painting, I know more about Missy Elliot than I know about Fra Angelico. [Laughs]

Jibz—have you ever been in front of an audience that you felt was the wrong audience for you? And bombed?
Jibz: Yeaaahhh... I've done regular stand-up, and that's a totally different world. If you perform in front of an art audience, they know that they're looking for many things. When when I do stand-up, it's very clear when things are not going very well. The costuming [of Dynasty Handbag] gives it this other dimension where I can just go into Weirdotown when I want to, which is good.

Guy: One thing I would say that art still offers more than any other place—if you walk into a gallery, anything is possible. If someone stands in front of you, anything is possible.

Jibz: Yeah, in art, you have to be, you know, open... but stand-up, there's one thing you have to do, and that's be funny. That's it. It doesn't matter what your message is.

As far as bombing goes, I've performed so many times in so many different situations, and I have had so many terrible shows. So yeah. It happens. I was booed off the stage once in Paris. I was at my show, doing my thing, and these fucking French hoes were like, "Fuck yooou beech get of the stage you suuck you sink you areah Peacheeez!" This was more what I was doing more music in my set, and it was early in my solo stuff, so I didn't have the nuts to deal with it gracefully. I got so upset. I was like, "You wanna do it?? Fine, come up, get on stage, you do it. And I handed this girl the microphone and stomped off."

Jaimie: She took it?

Jibz: There were like, high, and I dunno. I would never deal with it in that way now. I would just join in with them and be like, "I weesh I wiz Peeacheezz!" Or something, you know.

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Jaimie: Being able to handle hecklers is a big part of being a comedian, right? You could be a master at it.

Jibz: For sure, you've gotta take it and not get mad. That's the worst, when you see someone crack from that. It's really sad. It's intense. The main thing for me is to go for it joyfully, imagine that everyone is there because they wanna have fun, they're not going because they hate you. Nobody's like, "I'm gonna go out and I'm gonna have a TERRIBLE night!" Plus, you can always be like, "I know, I do suck. This is pathetic, I know, I'm sorry, blaahh." Or you just ignore it or whatever. But if I'm too much in my own head onstage, it's not going to be a good show.

What about you, Guy and Jaimie? Have you bombed, and was it because of the audience?
Guy: Yeah it was because of them! [laughs] No, I first started doing Grossmalerman in '96. And I was doing it live a lot. And he started off very antagonistic. He'd show up sweaty...

He's always kinda sweaty.
Well yeah that's his whole thing. Basically, when I first invented him, he was kind of this Julian Schnabel character. Everything I hated about painters. I love painting, but I've never been, like, a tech head. I've never cared about brushes. Being like that is somewhat laughable to me. And so I'd come out and do these things, and some of them I would do so well that people were offended by my jokes.

Because he was such an asshole?
Yeah, he was an asshole, he was this sexist jerk. This is in the mid 90s. Art school was really different. There was alternative comedy, but I feel like you can get away with a lot more now. People would be really angry.

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Painting by Grossmalerman

I was living in Greenpoint at the time, and I was in this building full of alcoholic artists. I'm probably a lot older now than they were then, but I was 25 and they were just ancient to me. There were all bitter, male, they wanted to be [Richard] Diebenkorn, they wanted to walk around in Carhartts. I hated them. I had no sympathy for them. And now Grossmalerman is a slightly more sympathetic character. I remember it was Deborah Kass who defended me, got up in front of this bunch of kids who were going off on my work, and she was like...

At Skowhegan, the artist residency?
Yeah, she was there... and Martha Rosler has defended the work to kids, too. But it was literally at a time when the work had to be defended.

Were you in character during the whole residency?
No, no, not at all! Which was probably, actually, worse because I'd show these videos and people would be like, Why do you want to make these... Why do you want to make the world a little worse? Who's this shitty person, and why do we have to watch him?

But one of the reasons I made them as videos is because I was terrified to do them live. In the first videos there would be no laugh track, just these awkward pauses. And I'd be alone in the room doing this stand-up, like Stand Up in Defense of Painting. And the funny moment actually happens in the pause, you're just like luhhhuguugh.

Jaimie, have you ever bombed?
Jaimie: Well, um, performance stuff is still pretty new to me–in that it's something I lead and do myself. I think I've done it a dozen times or so. I can't watch video of myself, still. I'm just starting to be OK with it. I still have to drink a little bit.

So what I did with Jibz a year and a half ago...

I was terrified and very nervous, and I can't really see the audience when I was doing this. I did a performance as Little Richard, who transformed into GG Allin and then... first, I was a head on a plate of food and then everyone would eat the food, and then I would bust out of this table with all this food on it and underneath there was a piano with Little Richard, and then I'd rip off all my clothes and underneath I was naked GG Allin. I wasn't naked, I had a nudie suit on.

Guy: The little G-string he used to wear?

Jaimie: No, just tighty whities with poop stains all around. Fake poop. And a fake little tiny pee-pee.

Jibz: The Little Richard costume was so incredible. That's the thing about your work, it's just like the dedication to the aesthetic is so fuckin' fantastic.

Jaimie: Well, that was made by Lee Heinemann.

Jibz: Yeah, but you brought all this shit with you from Kansas City, and it was just a four-day tour.

Jaimie: Yeah I brought a lot of stuff.

There was one time when I was curating a performance series, and Jaimie had me pop up from the audience as the girl from The Exorcist. Jaimie had a full makeup kit for me. She was teaching me how to put blood on my face, and she was like, "Well you wanna put on this red face paint and then you get some Vaseline to make the blood really stand out." I was only standing up for five seconds, in the pitch black.
Jaimie: In case someone takes a picture!!

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Self-portrait as Pinhead from Hellraiser in Homere et son Guide by William-Adolphe Bouguereau/Renaissance Meets Horror by D502

My last question is if you could sum up one inspiration or humor thing that encapsulates what you find funny, what would that be?
Jibz: This is always such a hard question for me, about the influences. It's all in there. All those people, all those books, all that music, all those films, all the celebrities.

Jaimie: Roseanne Barr singing the National Anthem in 1990.To me, that's the greatest moment in history.

Jibz: [Laughing] That is fucking incredible, Jaimie Warren.

See Jaimie Warren's Horrorfest 2015 from this month's VICE magazine

Follow art critic Whitney Kimball on Twitter.

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This is a photo Obi took of himself wearing a plastic pasta strainer.

As religious extremists constantly flood the news cycle with various acts of terror, it can be hard to notice the smaller, more weirder faiths popping up around the world. I shot this photo series to give room to a slightly more humble religion. It features an unusual minister, Obi Canuel, a Pastafarian who started believing that a Flying Spaghetti Monster created the Universe, after being "touched by his noodley appendage" in Surrey, BC.

Canuel, 37, is a charismatic amateur mechanic and video-game collector with a major in philosophy. I met him a few times around Christmas to spend time with him, photograph his daily activities, and to talk about his beliefs. He says he "gradually came over to the Spaghetti in the last few years" and is now an ordained minister of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (Church of the FSM). Part of his belief entails wearing a holy pasta strainer on his head so that the "water can go through, while the noodles remain." Obi considers a colander his religious headgear and he recently applied for a new driver's license while wearing it in his photo, but ICBC (BC's driver's license issuer) didn't consider it as acceptable, so they have yet to issue his license.

Obi, who seemed very patient and polite, persistently and unsuccessfully requested his license over the past few months and even sought out a lawyer to assist in getting his photo approved, so far without luck. Because Pastafarianism is a relatively new religion (although pirates allegedly carried it out for hundreds of years, according to the Church of FSM), many bureaucrats are having a hard time understanding what it means, or taking it seriously.

The Church of the FSM came into the mainstream in 2005, after a dismayed father wrote an American school board a criticism on the teachings of Creationism. Pastafarianism is a real religion which often attracts atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers, although there are Buddhist, Christian and Muslim members too. Canuel and other Pastafarians say they "are not anti-religion, but anti-crazy nonsense done in the name of religion."

Some outsiders, due to the drunken imagery Pastafarianism embraces, see the Church of FSM as satire. A typical Pastafarian retort is, "elements of our religion are often described as satire and there are many members who do not literally believe our scripture, but this isn't unusual in religion. A lot of Christians, for example, don't believe the Bible is literally true—but that doesn't mean they aren't true Christians."

Canuel, whose words are quick, and who copes well with criticism, continues to wait for his driver's license, explaining that he has a "right to religious expression." Meanwhile he's continuing on with his daily business while persistently reminding ICBC that "religious rights weren't put in place for the familiar status quo religions, [but] rather for cases that are unusual." He hopes that "if someone would like to present themselves in a certain way, pertaining to a certain set of beliefs, they should be encouraged to do so within the limits prescribed by law."

The courts will make a decision in a matter of months (the timeline is unclear) as to whether or not they will allow Canuel's FSM headgear to remain in the photo. And in the meantime, ICBC says it cannot disclose a list of which religions it recognizes.

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"I tell you that it makes me feel better and I don't have to take narcotics and I can sleep at night. Who are you to tell me I can't use it? It burns me up."

-Perry Parks, US Army helicopter pilot, Vietnam War

As a country that engages in a fair amount of war, you'd think that the least America can do is offer some level of comfort to veterans once they return. Unfortunately, that's not as simple as providing traditional benefits. A sizable chunk of veterans from the past four major US international interventions (Vietnam, Iraq, Iraq II, and Afghanistan) return with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and afterward endure flashbacks to horrific events, severe mood instability, and debilitating sleeplessness, among other problems.

PTSD causes a vast and complex set of symptoms that demand a solution, and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)—which is charged with providing medical care for veterans— fights PTSD with a multi-pronged approach that involves psychotherapy and a tightly scheduled cocktail of benzodiazipenes, opiates, antidepressants, and mood enhancers. Each of these addresses a fraction of the total symptoms but comes with a host of side effects, including sleep disturbance, anxiety, and suicidal tendencies—some of the same effects of PTSD the cocktail aims to treat.

Could marijuana be the solution America's vets have been waiting for, and if so, why does the federal government continues to stand in the way?

"I fully admit that I participated in this for years, pummeling these veterans with all kinds of FDA-approved meds," Dr. Suzanne Sisley, a PTSD researcher, told me over the phone. Last year, the University of Arizona fired Sisley just after she received federal approval to study the effects of cannabis on PTSD, and she recently re-established the pursuit with funding from the state of Colorado, where recreational marijuana is legal. Sisley sees great promise in pot as a PTSD treatment, even if she once employed conventional pharmaceutical remedies.

"I'd have them on ten to 12 different meds, each to treat one of these active target symptoms," she said. "These veterans would be completely useless because they were so riddled with side effects and drug interactions. The notion that there could be a single plant that could manage the entire myriad of PTSD symptoms... Well, that would be an incredible breakthrough."

Sisley doesn't smoke pot, nor does she seem eager to try. Her enthusiasm for cannabis stems purely from what she sees as its potential to revolutionize PTSD treatments. Thus far, the evidence in favor is at least somewhat encouraging. Sisley was inspired by a 2014 study conducted for New Mexico's medical cannabis program that found cannabis reduced PTSD symptoms in 80 veteran subjects by an average of 75 percent. Her new study seeks to test the positive clinical response established by Dr. Raphael Mechoulam, an Israeli cannabis research pioneer credited as the first to isolate THC. Mechoulam discovered an effect of cannabis called memory extinction, which diminishes the link between triggers and the bad memories they invoke. That's the premise most modern cannabis PTSD treatment hypotheses are based upon. His home country Israel currently has a progressive stance on medical cannabis for soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces. IDF reserve troops who hold a medical marijuana prescription are allowed to use it even while on active duty, a policy in line with Israel's efforts to liberalize medical marijuana in light of new research.

Mechoulam's 2014 THC/PTSD study included ten human subjects, five of whom had experienced war-related trauma, and his team recorded significant reductions in nightmares, flashbacks, and an improvement in sleep quality. Such findings are finally being established scientifically, but anecdotal evidence has existed for decades; in fact some of the strongest proof of the medical efficacy of cannabis comes from the veterans themselves.

"When the war is over for the day you sit around in a little circle and pass a joint," Perry Parks told me. As a helicopter pilot in the Vietnam War, Parks saw his share of death and tragedy, and pot provided him reprieve.

"Other than the actual effect, the whole act of smoking is what gave me relief," he said. "At the end of each day, it was kind of like the war went away."

Weed was abundant and cheap in Vietnam at the time, and many soldiers smoked it recreationally, both during the war and afterward in the US. Parks stopped using pot after Vietnam and remained in the military until 2003, a year after he was diagnosed with PTSD. When he retired, he was on a heavy regimen of prescription narcotics and antidepressants. After trying cannabis, he found that he could sleep soundly, uninterrupted by nightmares.

"The first thing I did was throw out all my sleeping pills," he said. It incensed Parks that a potentially effective remedy for combat-related PTSD was completely excluded from care provided by the VA and motivated him to become an activist for the cause. At the time, he could have lost his access to prescription drugs if he tested positive for marijuana. That didn't personally matter all that much to Parks, who shifted his regimen to exclude pills, but many veterans (including those in Mechoulam's study) find the best results using cannabis in conjunction with their prescription drugs.

The VA began easing their restrictions on medical marijuana for veterans in 2011, after pressure from veterans advocacy groups. Historically, the VA has reserved the right to deny patients pain medicine if they violate the terms of their Opioid Pain Care Agreement by testing positive for marijuana. Furthermore, VA doctors have generally been severely discouraged from recommending medical marijuana to patients even in states where it is legal. A 2008 internal memo from the VA's general counsel said that doctors could have their licenses revoked and face criminal charges. As a federal department, the VA and all its employees are required to follow federal law, which places marijuana in the most dangerous category of drugs—"schedule I"—and states that it has no potential medical applications. Veterans with PTSD are victims of a bureaucratic discrepancy between state and federal law on cannabis—or at least they were until they took the issue into their own hands.

In 2010, disabled Air Force veteran Michael Krawitz and his advocacy group, Veterans for Medical Marijuana, publicly campaigned to change the VA's marijuana policy. Reforming federal law was a virtual impossibility in the short run, but Krawitz sought to work with the VA to establish a middle ground that would allow veterans to use cannabis in conjunction with prescriptions and keep doctors on the right side of federal law. The VA responded by issuing a new directive that explicitly prevented doctors from cutting state-level medical marijuana patients off from prescription drugs, and instead requires monitoring of all cannabis consumption. Doctors are still barred from recommending or prescribing cannabis, but within the bounds of the law, this is pretty much the best the VA can do.

"The VA has done as much as they can to accommodate us" Krawitz said. "They've tried to give us as much space as possible to use marijuana under medical orders."

Though they're barred from expressing it publicly, VA doctors are by no means all ideologically aligned with the restrictions dictated by federal law. Dr. Michael Hill-Jackson, a physician at the VA of Palo Alto, California, told me, "We've actually embraced lot of holistic approaches, but unfortunately marijuana is not part of that yet, until a federal law passes... Once things change, I think it will really change the way we treat PTSD, but until then, there's nothing we can do."

Another doctor at the Palo Alto VA, Dr. Marcel Bonn-Miller, is more skeptical of the impact pot might have on PTSD sufferers. "In terms of the science behind marijuana and PTSD, there's not enough evidence at this point for anybody to make an informed decision about prescribing it anywhere," he said. Still, Bonn-Miller acknowledges the benefit of the VA's (relatively) marijuana-friendly policy and follows its guidelines.

On the spectrum of federal treatment of marijuana, the VA's cooperation is remarkable. The DEA has fiercely pursued state-legal medical marijuana as part of the War on Drugs, at least until Congress moved to defund those operations in December. The Supreme Court upheld the federal prohibition of medical marijuana the last time it crossed their desk in 2001. The DOJ has been ineffective in implementing marijuana banking guidelines. And last year, the House of Representatives rejected a measure that would have allowed VA doctors to recommend medical marijuana to patients. That bill's sponsor, California Democrat Dana Rohrabacher, presented a similar measure in November called the Veterans Equal Access Act. Its passage is a tall order considering the Republican takeover of Congress.

For now, veterans with PTSD who have a medical marijuana prescription can balance their pharmaceutical drugs with cannabis self-medication. But that still leaves those who live in medical marijuana states that don't include PTSD as an "approved condition" for cannabis treatment, along with vets in the 27 states that still prohibit cannabis completely. That's thousands of people who will continue to be prescribed a host of pills and all the side effects that come with them rather than a plant that offers the prospect of at least some relief. Marijuana policy in America is on a clear path to liberation these days, but the painfully slow movement in the bureaucracy that looks after its military veterans is stark reminder of what remains to be done.

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