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Illustration by Stephen Maurice Graham

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

To quote from Refused's The Shape of Punk to Come: "They say the classics never go out of style / But they do, they do." But somehow, baby, I never thought that Shadow of the Colossus would be such a game.

Earlier in 2015, I wrote about how right now could be a genuine golden age for video games, if only we can open our wallets to the select creators successfully realizing the amazing potential of the medium. We don't have to settle for linear shooters with waist-high cover around every corner, or open-world affairs full of meaningless collectibles, only there to infuriate/inspire gamers with their hearts and pride set on 100 percent completion. I wrote that yesterday's so-called classics don't cut it today. GoldenEye 007 was an easy example of being brilliant then and kinda crappy experienced today—but there are thousands more.

The Sony-published, Japan Studio-developed Shadow of the Colossus burned brightly against that argument, though. It's only ten years old in 2015, but was released for the PlayStation 2, a system now two console generations behind us. It looks ugly seen beside today's HD displays, but my memory of playing it on its original hardware was wholly positive. One of only two games directed by the enigmatic Fumito Ueda—which is the way it may always be, unless The Last Guardian is ever completed—Shadow is routinely wheeled out as an example of video games as art, its varied landscapes largely absent of life, its world soundtracked by the wind, the hooves of a horse, the sometime screech of an eagle. You, as Wander, can explore its world, the Forbidden Lands, for hours and, battling the giants of its title aside, find absolutely nothing to do.

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Concept art for the game's first colossus

Shadow stands in absolute opposition to so many of today's comparably free-roam affairs, which, to quote Dragon Age: Inquisition's creative director Mike Laidlaw, "fill each area to the extent where you always [have] something to do, every couple of minutes." For his game, a critical hit of 2014, he wanted "a little something special in every corner."

Poke your avatar's nose into a corner in Shadow and you'll just give him a headache. There are white-tailed lizards to shoot and collect (eat, maybe?) for endurance perks, and fruit here and there to provide a health bar boost; but Ueda's design on Shadow is terrifically streamlined. There's nothing extra added simply because it can be. It's a game of immense negative space, gigantic expanses of nothingness; of dust and dirt and grass, but nobody to converse with, to trade with, to just speak to for five minute to prevent you going fully senile as you stab your way through 16 generously difficulty-curved colossi.

In so many ways, Shadow earned its classic status. It's received several awards and is regarded as one of the most unique games of its generation. And with its reputation, and my previous experience of the game nagging away at me, a palpable emotional resonance, I thought I'd upgrade and buy the HD remaster, released for PlayStation 3 in 2011. I wanted to live it again, and to hell with my steadfast statements regarding aging tech limiting today's enjoyment of past-gen accomplishments.

Part of me wishes I'd not bothered. It's painful to say so given that Shadow has so much going right for it, even today—a narrative ambiguousness that's open to personal interpretation; a legitimate strangeness to its creature design that nonetheless suits where each colossus resides perfectly; the rare feeling that every "heroic" step your character takes is actually another towards villainy—but this isn't a game without myriad faults, which only reveal themselves once those memories are rewritten by contemporary immersion.

In no particular order, then, but beginning with the biggest bugbear of all: the horse. I appreciate that Horses in Video Games are often awkward animals—during a recent hands-on preview of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, I witnessed Geralt's not-so-trusty steed Roach trap herself between environmental assets; and even Link's Epona required some careful carrot management to get her moving. But Shadow's horse, Agro, is such a dick. This horse, loyal though she may be to our ever-withering protagonist, will run into trees, into rocks, into brick walls. She will respond to your inputs with resistance—or, sometimes, over-enthusiastically, unless that's just the weight of my thumb on the pad, increased out of sheer frustration at this nag's inconsistent behavior.

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Wander and Agro here, in happier times

But this is known: reviewers of 2005 were mixed in their appreciation of Agro's role, and the HD remaster is possibly right to keep this quirk present and "correct." What's more annoying than getting up from your work four times in an hour to the same cold-caller hawking PPI reclamation, though, is getting on the blasted beast.

Wander will mount Agro with the press of the triangle button, while beside her; but the success rate of this actually coming off, rather than prompting him to leap vertically like a salmon, is perhaps one in three in my experience. The problem comes with nudging the movement stick at the same time, which is an inevitability as you approach Agro at pace, needing to either chase down your quarry (colossus 13, Phalanx, must be "boarded" from horseback), or avoid becoming lunch (colossus ten, Dirge, is lightning quick and hits, hard, with a wide-open maw).

Maybe it's an unfair, ultimately minor criticism, but come on: when you see other remasters tweaking controls to better compare with modern titles— Grim Fandango being a current case in point—surely it's not asking too much that Wander just GETS ON HIS HORSE when in close proximity to haunches, flank, withers, whatever. Drives a man mad—by which I mean it drives a man to swear in front of his young children, encouraging the wrath of his wife. Or was that your malevolent intent all along, Ueda-san: to wedge this game between otherwise happy families and cause a rift as wide as those criss-crossing the Forbidden Lands?

I have more. Colossus five, Avion, takes me an hour to drop. The time attack target for this flying adversary is five and a half minutes. But here's me, not even on a first playthrough, taking several times that. Am I bad, or is this bad design? You tell me. I know what to do—I wait for it to swoop, I leap atop its wing, I edge towards its vulnerable sigils and I make with the stabbing. But time and again, Wander's grip would fail me. I could go and eat some lizards, but I went far further than this on the PS2 without snacking. A GameFaqs forum post by "Aluevius_E" of November, 2011 asks if Wander's endurance is compromised in HD, and other users second the impression.

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The fifth colossus

Writes user "trapspringer": "When I played this on the PS2, I took that first Colossus down with ease on my first attempt. On the PS3, I found myself stumbling like a drunk... and actually died a few times."

I didn't die on the first colossus—or the fifth, for that matter (the first of these titans to manage that, this playthrough, was the 11th—and only because I got myself stuck between a wall and a sharp place). But I sure noticed Wander exhibiting a more prominent wobble from the first battle onwards. Controlling him while he's clinging to the climbable colossi also appears cack-handed, leading to exasperating falls that simply never happened on the PS2. Or: maybe they did, and the singular thrills of that initial playthrough have successfully clouded out the irritations.

Yet onwards I press, because this is Shadow of the Colossus: a game-changer, a one-off, unprecedented, and inimitable. It's coding with soul and a palpitating heartbeat, impossible not to become moved by as it unwinds its denouement. In so many ways it is a classic, truly; but bloody hell, doesn't it do a terrific job of antagonizing its audience on the way to that status.

Which, perhaps, warrants readdressing through present-day context. This isn't the game you may remember it being years ago. It has its cracks, its complications, and it's feeling a bit creaky—more a product of a gaming silver age than a gold-gilded evergreen. If it's art, it suffers for gaming's technological progression, HD pin-sharpness stripping it of muddy mystery. It's entirely out of time and style. But then again, wasn't it always? Happy tenth anniversary, you freak of a game, and may your delayed spiritual successor finally, one day, stand proudly beside your shadow.

Follow Mike on Twitter.

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Somewhere on Berlin's U3 line, a metro train stops for a matter of minutes, allowing five graffiti writers to paint an entire car before it moves along to the next station. They scamper off down the tracks as soon they finish, leaving their work to circulate the city for the next 48 hours, before it's buffed and disappears forever.

The guys "bombing" the train in the video above—which was posted to Facebook recently and viewed hundreds of thousands of times in just a couple of hours—are maintaining a method that's always been at the apex of street art.

Nowadays, you don't see painted train cars all that often—presumably because New York enforces heavy fines and potential jail time—but painting trains remains pretty much the pinnacle achievement for most graffiti writers elsewhere, considering the precision, skill, and speed you have to apply in the face of heightened danger.

I spoke to "Grisal" (not his real name), one of the writers in the video above, about how to graffiti-bomb a train.

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All images courtesy of the interviewee

VICE: Hey, man. So for those who don't know, how does bombing a train differ from other street art?
Grisal: Bombing trains is its own form of street art. It's much more dangerous. It's not some council-commissioned wall; if you get caught or misjudge your timing, you're fucked.

First of all, you need balls for it; second, you need a high degree of skill and efficiency because you're working against the clock; thirdly, your piece is usually traveling through the city for 48 hours. It's a mobile gallery, and you own the city's visual space for that period of time. Of course I would love to see the panel on the train riding through the city forever, but it's the memory that keeps me happy. It's addictive.

I bet. So tell me what's going on in this video, then.
You can see a couple of guys are at a metro station in Berlin. They pull the emergency break so the train stops. The driver always has to come out of his cabin and switch off the emergency break outside the train to keep the train running. This usually takes up to three or four minutes. That gave us the time to paint.

The style and sketch for the piece is done quite easily. You can't bomb a train with the craziest wild-style piece in that space of time, so you go with simple blocks and let the action speak.

What's involved in the planning stages?
First we scouted the location. Most important are the escape routes, where the cameras were, how many people were there at what time and where to hide in case it fluffs up. We studied the train plan and planned our escape route. Sometimes you have to cut holes in fences so you have somewhere to run. This time I had a key to the train station and all the gatekeeper halls, so we didn't bother.

It's always tricky to do a panel bombing in the station and not in the tunnel, because it's more risky and you've only got minutes until the cops arrive. Style-wise, the piece isn't that difficult: simple blocks, an outline, chrome filling, and highlights.

Did everything go to plan?
We've been doing this for quite a while, so everyone knows his place, function and duty. But we did actually go over time by one minute, which could have been costly—that's quite a lot of time in the scheme of things.

I know the cops arrived 30 seconds after the train bombing was done. You normally hide all the cans, gloves, masks, and, more important, take out the memory chips from the cameras and hide them somewhere. Then you come back a day later—if everything works out and you're not in a cell—and collect all your gear.

Are some stations better than others?
For sure. That's a big part of it. Some will have cameras that only record in one direction; others will have 360-degree cameras. An outside metro station not in the tunnel is usually better because you've got more escape routes, not just the two regular exits. You always have to think, Where are the cops going to come in from? Where will they stop you?

How did the passengers on the train react?
Most stayed calm. It took them a while to realize what was happening—as you can see in the video, a couple of passengers opened the doors to see what was up. A few were complaining about the hold-up, which took five minutes in total, but the rest seemed to be pretty relaxed about it.

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Were any impressed?
Some of them, for sure.

What happens if you get caught for something like this?
Well, you'd be taken under arrest. They take your address and finger prints, etc, check if you've done it before. Than you'll be charged with heavy criminal damage and fined $11,000 to $22,000 [in the UK, you can be fined up to $7,500 if the damage you have caused is under that amount; if it's more, the case will be referred to the Crown Court, which can give out harsher punishments].

It's rare it gets violent with cops—it's the train drivers and passengers who flare up.

Have you had any close calls in the past?
One time we were rooftop bombing and five cops and two German Shepherds ambushed us. Me and the other writer escaped down the tracks, and the police didn't follow because a train was arriving. I mean, why would you risk your life chasing after two writers?

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Was anyone close to getting caught?
They stopped one guy who was lookout, but they let him go because they couldn't connect him with anything. Besides that, no one's been caught. Carrying any footage with you directly after the action is extremely dangerous because cops usually stop and search everyone in the area right after the action.

What's the reaction been to the video?
It's not that the video was done to randomly destroy things. It's a form of art that goes hand in hand with the music being played. A lifestyle far away from the consumption-oriented system we are saturated by.

OK. Finally, what's the attraction to bombing trains?
It's the adrenaline. The rush. You get addicted to the respect.

Thanks, man.

Last week a vegan restauranteur in Canberra, Australia, said he had refused to kill the cockroaches infesting his kitchen because doing so would have involved "killing little insects" and violating his beliefs. He violated the food safety code instead, and wound up being fined about $12,000.

Kingsland Vegetarian Restaurant owner Khanh Hoang went to court on Thursday over eight health code violations uncovered in a 2013 raid. Live and dead roaches had been spotted in the kitchen, but there were plenty of other problems. "Parts of the walls and floors had not been cleaned for a considerable period and had a thick accumulation of grease, dirt, and other material," reported the Brisbane Times. "Surfaces and equipment—such as stove top and dirty pots, pans and trays—had been left uncleansed, and covered in dirt, food waste and debris."

Hoang clearly had more problems than an aversion to slaughtering bugs, but for people who try not to kill animals, the question of what to do about roaches depends on which animal rights activist you ask. There's Animal Liberation author Peter Singer, who was asked by the New York Times' Nicholas Kristof in 2009 how much he worried about the ethics of killing a cockroach and unexpectedly said "not much." PETA, as you might expect, has a more hardline stance. According to the activist organization's site, "All animals have feelings and have a right to live free from unnecessary suffering—regardless of whether they are considered 'pests' or 'ugly.'" That page also offers some alternatives to roach genocide:

If cockroaches have moved in, place whole bay leaves in several locations around the infested rooms, including inside kitchen cabinets. Bay leaves smell like dirty socks to cockroaches!

According to Richard Kaee, professor of pest management at California Polytechnic University, the bay leaf method is probably unreliable, and "might be a bunch of crap." In an interview, he explained that one of Australia's invasive roach species, the German cockroach in particular, "has such a high reproductive capacity that some of the so-called natural techniques just don't work." His explanation sounded reminiscent of every Raid commercial I've ever seen. "If you've got one female, and she lays all her eggs, and that goes on for two or three months, you're into the hundreds of thousands," he said.

What if you have to deal with a Joe's Apartment–style insect army of that sort? PETA offers some guidance:

For a serious infestation, you may need to resort to an insect growth regulator, called Gentrol, which nips the cockroach reproductive cycle in the bud (cockroaches exposed to it produce sterile offspring).

"That could work, but it depends on the species," said Kaee. The chemical in Gentrol, hydroprene, can tamp down an infestation of beetles or moths, but could it handle a serious job? "You would never control the German roach with Gentrol," he said.

The professor of pest management offered a caveat, however: Having roaches in your kitchen may not be as bad as people think. "It's never really been proven that cockroaches are a vector for disease," he said. "The diseases health departments are worried about could be transmitted by human hands, or with knives," just as easily as they could be carried on a roach's carapace. "But they're a health hazard, yes," he hastened to add.

In any case, by the time he got to court, Hoang had lawyered up and gotten his shit together. He brought in photos of his roach-free kitchen, which the judge called "immaculate," and said that he now called for regular visits from pest control. According to the Brisbane Times, his lawyer described Hoang as having "passionate vegan values," but now realized "in hindsight, that his morals had been misguided." It's also worth noting that customers love Kingsland Vegetarian Restaurant, and speak highly of its well-seasoned meat substitutes.

Maybe someday we'll invent a roach spray that compels the little guys to march out of our kitchens and move into nice compost piles around the corner to live out the rest of their days in happy exile. But until then, even vegetarians like me will have to deal with the roach blood on our hands, preferably by washing them.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

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All photos by Magnus Arrevad

Photographer Magnus Arrevad spent the past four years traveling around the world, creating a comprehensive photographic study of the world of "male performance"—a catch-all genre that includes burlesque, go-go dancing, porn, and circus.

The series,Boy Story, has been embraced by the performance underground (the New York Times used it to illustrate a feature on "The Real Hedwigs"), but what's most interesting about Arrevad's work is its formalism. While you could say that the subject matter lends itself to a more colorfully vibrant approach, Arrevad's treatment of male performance scene lies more in the classical. In fact, it's derived more from the kind of composition and lighting you'd find in a Rembrandt painting rather than in the garishness of a Baz Luhrmann film or a David LaChapelle shoot.

I called Magnus up for a chat.

VICE: Boy Story has taken four years of your life. That's an impressive personal investment, particularly for someone with no intrinsic link to that world. What attracted you to the world of male burlesque?
Magnus Arrevad: If by "no intrinsic link" you mean I was never part of that world, that's absolutely true. It all started quite by accident in a basement in Copenhagen the night of a Gay Pride parade, which I was photographing in a completely different context.

What attracts me to the subject is that it provides a beautiful and rare glimpse of people putting themselves on. Usually we imagine that makeup is used to hide something—but in this case, it was obvious to me from the start that the performers only become the men they truly are after the makeup is applied.

I think that applies to everyone to some extent—that we believe there's some hidden, real "us." These guys are being that person. But it''s not that "true self" that fascinates me, but the process of becoming it.

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Obviously, your work was mostly taken at what appear to be some fairly wild nights. But the formal qualities of the series shows this is not simply reportage. Were the circumstances a challenge?
No—quite the opposite. I'd be lying if I said I didn't have the time of my life. To be a part of that world, which was necessary to achieve many of the shots I ended up with, I had to do it properly. That meant a lot of drinks and a lot of flirting with bar staff. There's no point in doing what I do if you don't enjoy it. But I don't enjoy creating work unless I believe it matters. That balance is essential.

How many of the images were staged, and how many were spontaneous?
It was all spontaneous. There's a couple of images in which the performers are playing up because they could see a camera in the room. But I certainly never choreographed any of it.

There also seems to be a lot of traveling involved. I recognized Paris, New York, Berlin, and London in the shots. Did you ever arrive somewhere on the off-chance you'd get something worthwhile?
Yes and no. I went to events that I thought would have interesting performers or scenes, and my instincts prove to be generally good. But you are half-right: what I find oddest and most magical about it all is that I travel halfway around the world for a picture, then once I'm there it's entirely instinctive.

I let my hand and eye do the thinking, and I just try to stay out of the way. The whole work is shot on a medium-format film camera, which means that unlike digital, I did not know whether I had something worthwhile until the film was developed.

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The final project consists of 112 pictures. How many images did you take altogether. Were there many that didn't make the final cut?
I took somewhere around 4,000 shots. Many, if not most, of these photographs depict performers when they're not quite yet their character but in the process of becoming it through makeup and dress.

Were the performers ever reluctant to let you in what must be a very vulnerable time for them—as they get ready to perform?
Astonishingly, they were fine with it. Of course, there was a huge amount of trust involved, and that had be earned—that is one of the reasons why the project took four years to complete. But all of the subjects recognized that I was doing something more, or at least different, than simply being voyeuristic and that the work I was producing was anything but exploitative.

But to get people to relax—which is to perform—in front of the camera, I had to perform behind it, so I was generally prancing about in knee high-boots and a top hat.

What's your relationship with the performers now? And how do they feel about Boy Story?
They've been universally supportive. If it were not for those guys and their invitations to sleep on their floors and couches, a lot of the photos would have been much harder to achieve. Many have become very dear friends. Sadly, I'm hard at work on a new series now, so I don't get a chance to attend their shows as much as I would like.

Back in the 1980s, David Leventhal ran a small business renting out his robot to perform at parties around Los Angeles. The robot, Casanova, was a crass womanizer and an LA scenester. Today, Casanova is rusting away in Agua Dulce, an isolated town north of Los Angeles.

We traveled with host Max Landis to visit the resting place of the party bot, hear stories of Casanova, and revisit the days when the party machine entertained Hollywood's star-filled soirees before becoming sadly obsolete.

Genre rock is kind of like genre fiction. It's boring and paint-by-numbers, but there will always be a market for it because people hate surprises. You can be a successful garage rock band or romance author, but nobody is going to shower you in posthumous accolades or erect bronze statues of you in public parks. Those rewards are for the artists who try to do something different, and either force the scene forward or crash and burn heroically. New York four-piece Leapling is trying for something new, and the results are fantastic.

The band's new album, "Vacant Page," has pieces of psychedelic rock, dream pop, krautrock, and even some funk, but they synthesize the influences into something greater than the sum of the parts. The album is tastefully weird and complex, but manages to stay unpretentious. It's a nice reminder that you can still experiment without sounding shitty and indulgent. Leapling doesn't have a statue in a park yet, but they deserve one after making this. A plaque, at the very least.

Preorder Vacant Page here.

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This post originally appeared on VICE Alps.

PEGIDA, or Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Continent, is a far-right organization founded in Dresden in late 2014. Initially it seemed like the group would stay put in Germany—the federal state of Saxony has become synonymous with the rise of the new far-right in the country. But it soon became obvious that, like any other form of bigotry, Islamophobia also spreads.

Last night, PEGIDA officially arrived in Austria, holding their first-ever march in the old town center of Vienna. Two Facebook groups, "PEGIDA Austria" and "PEGIDA Vienna," joined forces to mobilize a right-wing crowd for a "promenade," as they called it. About 300 PEGIDA sympathizers turned up.

Among them were various far-right protesters as well as some dedicated neo-Nazis. A group of masked protesters we talked to flashed us with a Nazi salute, accompanied with a round of "Heil Hitlers" (both are illegal in Austria, FYI). The same group eventually threatened the VICE Alps production team, as well as various other local journalists, saying, "I'd happily go to jail for kicking your ass." All in all, Vienna was not all about the good vibes last night.

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All photos by Grant Pardee

Sadness is the most mistreated, most shameful emotion—it's seen as weak, vaguely feminine, something that needs to be concealed or ignored or simply wiped out. It doesn't have the nobility attached to rage or grief or love, and hardly anyone ever goes to bat for it as being essential to our humanity. Other than funerals or Nicholas Sparks films, there aren't many spaces that welcome sadness. It's not OK to share your tender, sad feelings on a date. Don't you dare start crying at work. No one wants to deal with your weepiness at a party.

Unless, of course, you're at a party with Mike O'Connell, a Los Angeles–based comedian and musician who recently threw his first annual "crying party." The event description got pretty deep: "As humans, we long to bask in laughter and happiness when this is, in fact, only part of human experience. We ignore the part that makes the happy possible—the sad. And so, on Saturday, we shall embrace the sadness and stare it directly in its tearful face."

From the event invite alone, I wasn't totally sure how earnest this was all supposed to be. A comedian was putting it together, after all. Was this a big joke? Then again, comedians are some of the saddest people in existence. Perhaps O'Connell was aiming to be one of those rare comedians who can display genuine vulnerability.

The event took place at an art space in Hollywood called Schkapf, which I avoided trying to pronounce out loud all night. There were three different rooms, each set up as a separate exhibit. I walked into the first one and was greeted by free pizza, which did not at all make me want to cry. Already this party was a failure! In the center of the room was the "Lawrence Welk Museum of Dolls in Sad Situations." White cards said that some dolls supposedly had horrific drug problems and others had lost their loved ones in tragic ways—which was, all told, pretty funny.

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A sign on the wall informed visitors of the museum rules: "No stealing. No touching. No joy. Only Sadness." Again, this was funny. Knowing there were still more rooms to visit, I concluded that this room was perhaps just an introductory room. Sadness foreplay, if you will. This doll museum was meant to ease me into the sadder next room, which will then ease me to the even sadder one after that. By the time I get to the last room, I would reach my emotional climax and sob into the arms of a stranger. For some reason, this reminded me of a lot of first dates I'd been on.

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Next was the "Room of Regret." Random chests, desks, writing tools, and books inhabited this space; the floor was covered in fake snow, because art. One wall had large pieces of paper taped to it for visitors to write down their regrets. Some took this wall seriously and wrote down things like, "I regret being paralyzed by fear," and "I regret taking 20 years to begin following my heart and dreams."

Most, however, were decidedly humorous: "I regret not banging that girl when I had the chance." I thought about writing down one of my own sincere regrets, but felt uncomfortable doing so in front of everyone—it's hard to be heartfelt in a roomful of strangers, and much easier to make a joke.

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The final room was the "Crying Booth." It was here that people could sit alone in a chair and be recorded as they cried. I sat in this room and tried to remember the last time I had really cried. I'm not talking about those empathetic few tears I get from ASPCA commercials, or watching Stepmom alone in my room at 2 AM. I'm talking about one of those heart-rending, snot-inducing sobs. The kind that shortens your breath and turns your face warm and red. I think the last time that happened to me was when my apartment got robbed more than five years ago. It's strange how, as we get older, those cries are reserved for especially traumatic or dismal events. Toddlers cry like that when they can't have a toy they want; babies do it simply because they're hungry, or bored. The ability to turn on the sob switch in mere seconds fades away as age, which we typically view as a good thing. It means that we've matured and know how to make a sandwich for ourselves. This booth, however, was asking grown adults to revert back to their less publicly aware selves and turn the sob switch on again. An onion was placed next to the chair for those who needed help.

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Two women walked in. The first didn't need the onion to bring on her tears, but she did need a few minutes, naturally. When she got up to leave I asked her what she thought about to finally make herself do so. "Some sad stuff in my life. Also, the movie Up." The other woman sat down after her. She was not able to cry real tears (I'm guessing she has yet to see Up). Instead, she peeled it until fake—or at least emotion-free—tears started rolling down her face.

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At this point, it was time for the "saddest variety show in the history of the world." The theater was small but full. We were greeted by a host, who asked the audience if they were sad. Everyone cheered. He tried to make us sadder by reminding us that puppies die, and so did Robin Williams. Laughter ensued. He then went on to lament how fat he is. More laughter.

After this, he brought on the first act: clowns. Like the host, these clowns were trying very hard to be funny. One paraded around the room making joyful, humorous faces while the other clown glared at him for not taking this seriously. Then they put on a puppet show. It definitely wasn't their intention, but at this point I was feeling all kinds of sad.

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After the clowns, a poet took to the stage. She started off by saying, "I'm super fucking sad, you guys. For real." After that, she read a few poems, none of which were hers. The first poem was, as she put it, "written by a sad white man." It was about his harrowing journey to get better at oral sex. She read some more poems after that, the only truly sad one being about a dead goat. Later, Mike O'Connell himself took to the stage to read a love letter written by a Cabbage Patch Doll named Darnell. The letter was addressed to his former lover, Raggedy Anne. Obviously, this was mostly a joke, but even so it had some touching moments about the pain of love. Then there were those goddamn clowns again.

The grand finale of the show was O'Connell and a piano player singing original songs. It seemed as though O'Connell wanted this performance to be serious about its sorrow, but his piano player was too seriously drunk to play the songs correctly. O'Connell resorted to making jokes about this. This was indeed the saddest variety show in the history of the world, but for all the wrong reasons.

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After the variety show, the party was pretty much over. People stood around, drank some free liquor, and talked about whatever people talk about. I was unsure whether this sadness party was a success or not. Aside from the clowns, I didn't have a horrible time. I didn't feel any real sadness either, but I'm pretty sure that I wasn't supposed to. O'Connell must have known better than I did that celebrating sadness is close to impossible. In fact, this party felt more like it was bullying sadness, and ridiculing how absurd it is to be upset.

During my drive home, I thought about how dumb of me it was to think that I might actually cry during the party. I felt foolish for previously theorizing that this event was going to reveal something exceptionally deep about the importance of sadness. It was a party, put on by a comedian. Whether it was O'Connell's intention or not, I did end up taking away one lesson: Sadness, as necessary as it is, shouldn't be planned.

Follow Alison Stevenson on Twitter.

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A solitary protester aboard a Qantas flight yesterday successfully prevented the transfer and possible deportation of a Tamil asylum seeker. Jasmine Pilbrow, a 21-year-old refugee advocate, bought a ticket for the flight when she discovered the 25-year-old Tamil man was to be transferred on it, and refused to take her seat until he was removed. Pilbrow later left the flight voluntarily along with the asylum seeker.

It seems two other passengers also joined the protest after an advocate group distributed fliers to those on the flight. All three passengers were taken off the plane with the asylum seeker and didn't return. The Tamil Refugee Council has confirmed with VICE that the man has been told he will not be transferred for the time being at least.

Aran Mylvaganam, the group's spokesperson, told VICE that the Department of Immigration regularly transports asylum seekers to the Northern Territory capital of Darwin first before deporting them, which has happened to hundreds of Tamils already. The group is concerned the man will face persecution if he is returned to Sri Lanka due to his previous encounters with that country's army. "If he is deported back he will be tortured by the Sri Lankan army," Mylvaganam says. "He has records with them."

It is believed the asylum seeker has been living in Australia since 2012 on a bridging visa after fleeing Sri Lanka by boat, but was recently denied refugee status by the Refugee Review Tribunal. The asylum seeker said many Tamil men in Sri Lanka are "routinely taken away by security forces in 'white vans' to jail and torture." He believes his name is still on army records after he was arrested and questioned in 2011. "Sri Lankan intelligence never forgets you," the man told the Refugee Action Collective. "If I'm sent back, there's every chance I will be tortured."

The protest began on Sunday night when Mylvaganam caught wind of the plans to transfer an asylum seeker from the Maribyrnong Detention Centre in Melbourne to Darwin and organized for about 14 people to camp outside the facility. After police dispersed the protesters at 4:30 AM on Monday, the group followed authorities to Tullamarine Airport and searched for three hours before finding his flight.

They then gave out fliers to other passengers on the flight, describing the situation and urging them to take action to prevent the transfer. "If passengers on the flight insist that they consider the flight unsafe and are not willing to travel with the asylum seeker on board, this will stop the deportation," the flier read. Pilbrow, a member of the group, eventually bought a ticket for the flight and boarded it along with the Tamil man.

"Once everyone was seated on the plane I stood up, and when they asked me to sit down I spoke to the other passengers and encouraged them to also take a stand," Pilbrow says. She says two passengers joined in with the protest, and many other offered their encouragement. When members of the Australian Federal Police were called onto the flight 50 minutes later, Pilbrow said she would leave voluntarily if the asylum seeker was also taken away.

This appears to be what happened, and the Refugee Action Collective is now running a crowd funding campaign to pay for the tickets of the passengers who chose to leave the flight. Pilbrow is an asylum seeker advocate who regularly visits detention centres in Victoria, and said she is "freaked out" about the prospect of Tamil asylum seekers being sent back to Sri Lanka.

This isn't the first time a planned asylum seeker transfer has been prevented by protests, in 2014 eight passengers on board an Air China flight refused to sit down until a handcuffed Chinese asylum seeker was removed. The man, Wei Lin, remains in the country and is living in Villawood Detention Centre.

The Tamil Refugee Council is now considering legal options and other avenues to prevent the deportation of the man. "He has been informed that he will not be transferred for the time being, but we are keeping an eye on him," Mylvaganam explains. "We now have more time."

"It was a happy ending, it was a very successful demonstration," he says of the protest. "It shows how caring the people of Australia are."

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Prime Minister Stephen Harper hugs Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird as he resigns. Photo via Prime Minister's Office

Amid a war in Iraq and Cold War-esque tensions in Ukraine, Canada's foreign affairs minister has packed up his desk.

Word dropped Monday night that John Baird would be resigning his post as Canada's chief diplomat and quitting his job as a federal Member of Parliament, effective immediately.

Baird is, without doubt, the highest-profile Minister to quit the Harper cabinet since the Conservatives took office in 2006.

Speculation in Ottawa was rife that the Ottawan had left because of a rift between himself and Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

It wasn't much of a secret around Parliament Hill that Baird and Harper butted heads on some files, especially the crisis in Ukraine. Some reports suggested Baird was looking for stricter sanctions on the Russian regime, but was overruled by Harper, who preferred military and diplomatic sanctions over economic penalties that would potentially hobble Canadian businesses.

But if there was a divide Tuesday between the boss and his exiting lieutenant, it didn't show. Baird's Tuesday morning resignation speech in the House of Commons didn't hint at any issues, and even went to great lengths to compliment and talk up the prime minister.

In a statement on Baird's resignation, Harper called him "one of the finest ministers that I have had the privilege of working with," saying that "Parliament was better for his presence, the country better for his service."

Baird's tenure in the foreign affairs gig garnered as many accolades from his political opponents as it did full-throated opposition.

The minister was bombastic and aggressive, and he became known as much for his loud heckling in the House of Commons as his extensive work on the world stage.

Baird often applied that loud-mouth in the job, aggressively putting down anti-gay politicians from Uganda and breaking with his American counterparts to chastise newly elected Iranian President Hassan Rouhani.

Critics said Baird's was counter-productive, turning off allies and burning bridges with developing states.

Baird's office, however, always bragged about its good relations with the Arab world and Canada's newfound standing internationally as a country punching above its weight.

Opposition MPs, while willing to note Baird's shortcomings, acknowledge the work behind-the-scenes to help out on constituency files. More than one of Baird's colleagues across the aisle can tell stories about receiving a phone call from Baird himself, offering to help get an LGBT refugee into the country, or to pitch in and help on a constituent's passport troubles.

Baird's NDP critic, Paul Dewar, calls that mixture of arrogance and sensitivity "the dichotomy of John Baird."

His Liberal counterpart, Marc Garneau, says it came down to the politician's love of the game.

"My sense is that John Baird really, really enjoyed politics," Garneau said. "He really enjoyed the cut and thrust of it."

One file that's been more difficult for Baird, however, has been the detention of Mohamed Fahmy, the Al Jazeera journalist held in a Cairo jail. Baird maintained a lobbying effort to get the dual Canadian-Egyptian citizen released, though he had little progress to show as Fahmy's detention stretches into day 400.

However, news broke on Monday that Peter Greste, one of Fahmy's colleagues held in Cairo, was released. Reports indicate that Fahmy's release will come in a matter of days. Given that Baird put a lot of political capital in securing Fahmy's freedom, even meeting one-on-one with President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi to discuss the situation, timing his departure with jailbreaking Fahmy makes a lot of sense if that indeed occurs.

In terms of legacy, Baird's four-year tenure in the job makes him one of the longest-serving foreign affairs ministers in modern Canadian history. While previous occupiers of the post concerned themselves with advancing Canada as an "honest broker"—a belief that Canada can negotiate peace between enemies like Israel and Palestine—Baird carved out a role for Canada that became more interested in unilateral and bilateral action, as opposed to broad international cooperation governed by the United Nations.

For some, that meant Canada suddenly became a more outspoken advocate for human rights and democracy, advancing the cause of religious and sexual minorities in the global south who preferred to fund and work with grassroots activists movements instead of playing nice with despots and war criminals.

For others, Baird's reign in the job was rife with hypocrisy—bad-mouthing developing countries and picking on insignificant regimes, all the while continuing to cooperate with some of the world's most depraved states, like Saudi Arabia and Egypt. They also point to questionable things like his government's track record of opposing international climate change accords, torpedoing United Nations treaties, and pumping up cozy relationships with Israel even in the midst of the controversial war in Gaza last summer.

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Five month old wolf pup on British Columbia's coast. Photo via Ian McAllister

It's been argued that man is the only species in history to make the transition from prey to predator. Unfortunately for grey wolves inhabiting the Pacific Northwest, they're proving capable of achieving the opposite: these apex predators are now the ones being hunted.

"There are helicopters taking off every single morning," conservationist Ian McAllister told VICE. "They're targeting packs of wolves that the government has identified as expendable. They're being shot from the air. We don't know how many every day—or exactly where—but it's happening right now."

A highly divisive wolf cull is being carried out quietly, yet systematically, in British Columbia's Peace and Selkirk Regions—along the border with Washington State and Idaho. Government officials concede as many as 184 wolves, comprising two separate packs, have been marked for death in an effort to save the province's dwindling woodland caribou population. But those numbers are conservative, to say the least.

"They plan on continuing this for at least 20 years," McAllister, director and co-founder of conservation organization Pacific Wild, pointed out. "Unless we stop this cull now, thousands of wolves will be killed in order to protect caribou that don't have a fighting chance of survival in the absence of habitat protection."

Caribou, as a species, are not necessarily endangered. But certain subpopulations in Canada and the United States are struggling to survive. Mountain and boreal caribou—collectively referred to as woodland caribou—are on an inevitable and irreversible slide to extinction.

The Selkirk Region's lone herd has just 18 caribou left—down from 46 in 2009. They fare considerably better in the South Peace Region, which boasts seven herds totaling roughly 950 caribou. Still, government officials want to see that number flourish to a population of more than 1200 within two decades.

"[Caribou] populations are decreasing, and wolves are a key factor," Greig Bethel, spokesperson for British Columbia's Ministry of Forests, Lands, and Natural Resource Operations told VICE. "There are those that will be strongly opposed to wolf control, but for these declining herds it's the only remaining option with any likelihood of success."

Polarizing as the debate over a long-term, sustainable solution to their slow demise may be, the catalyst of the caribou's plight is virtually universally agreed upon. Habitat destruction and human encroachment—from oil and gas companies, mining and logging, seismic testing, and even recreational activity—have pushed these ancient ungulates to the brink of extinction. The same terrain which once offered caribou refuge from its predators now renders them exposed, vulnerable and defenceless.

"Wolves just don't operate well in deep snow, they're at a disability," McAllister explained. "But every time a snowmobile goes zooming into critical caribou habitat, they leave a perfect highway for a pack of wolves to access previously inaccessible herds. And they don't stand a chance."

Conservationists point to decades of government inaction—not wolves—as the culprit. Many maintain that, had road construction, snowmobile operators, and mining prospectors simply been banned from forested areas during winter months, woodland caribou would be faring reasonably well today. Instead, permits were routinely issued to all of these industries, among others—and it's resulted in what critics view as a stopgap solution that's scapegoating wolves.

"The truth is, wolf populations can rebound—even after heavy persecution," Chris Darimont, a conservation scientist who teaches at the University of Victoria, said to VICE. "But that's not the point. You could use aerial gunning to 'cull' fifty percent of people named Chris—and people named Chris would eventually rebound at the population level. But we'd never consider imposing suffering and death in this context. Why would we consider it for animals, who are just as capable as feeling pain as we are?"

Much like its distant cousin, the domestic dog, the wolf is a highly intuitive and social creature—only with an ancestry rooted much deeper in history. Scientists estimate the first grey wolf (also referred to as the timber wolf or western wolf) appeared in Eurasia more than a million years ago; some 250,000 years later, it migrated to North America.

By nature, wolves are fiercely territorial animals. They typically move in packs with a social fabric not dissimilar to that of humans: most consist of a pair of adult wolves accompanied by their pups and older offspring. In some cases, depending on the size of a pack, its territory can span 1,300 square kilometers—or, roughly 260,000 football fields. But in spite of—or, perhaps, because of—their impenetrable reign in the wild, wolves have been historically targeted by humans.

"The bottom line is that decades of unbridled development has created a 'caribou debt' that we are asking wolves to pay for with their lives," Darimont said. "If society seriously wants caribou to survive, we need immediate and drastic changes to oil and gas activity."

Wolves aren't the only canines paying the ultimate price for manmade conundrums. Across North America, coyotes are increasingly showing up in metropolitan areas—like New York City—as their natural habitat is irreversibly encroached upon. Many eventually end up displaced or destroyed—casualties of a modern day phenomenon transforming wild animals into urban refugees and public enemies.

"It wasn't long ago that we had guns mounted on the front of coast guard vessels that were killing whales, sea lions and seagulls—all because we thought they were the cause of the decline in salmon," McAllister recalled. "There are countless examples of humans trying to take out one species to support another, and none of them have produced the results that we hoped. They've caused huge imbalances."

Indeed, similar culls in both Canada and the United states have proved largely ineffective. A seven-year cull in northwestern Alberta—beginning in 2007 and ending in 2012—eliminated 841 grey wolves by way of poisoning or gunfire, but did little to bolster the caribou's population. In America, upwards of 3,000 grey wolves have been slaughtered in the lower 48 states since 2011—the year they were suddenly stripped of federal protection under the Endangered Species Act.

"Killing wolves is not a one time solution," biologist Paul Paquet told VICE. Paquet—a senior scientist at Raincoast Conservation Foundation who has dedicated more than four decades to behavioural research on wolves and bears—says culls rarely work as intended, but often leave devastating ecological damage in their wake. "Wolf culls involve killing hundreds of wolves, and, over the longer term, likely thousands of wolves."

Critics call the cull an exhaustive, cruel and fruitless attempt to sacrifice one species in favour of another. And conservations stress that—while the process itself will be over in a matter of months—the aerial gunning process in which individual wolves are selected and slaughtered is by no means swift, or without suffering.

"Shooting moving animals from a flying helicopter—which moves and vibrates in all directions—cannot possibly kill quickly," Darimont mused. "If it's anything but a bloodbath, I would be surprised."

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On Monday, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie made the unenviable error of wading in on what is unambiguously the wrong side of the anti-vaccination debate. While on a trade trip in the United Kingdom the likely 2016 presidential candidate was asked by reporters to respond to the ongoing measles outbreak in the United States.

"Mary Pat and I have had our children vaccinated, and we think that it's an important part of being sure we protect their health and the public health," he said, before adding, "I also understand that parents need to have some measure of choice in things as well, so that's the balance that the government has to decide." Then he went even further, making the bizarre medical assessment that "not every vaccine is created equal, and not every disease type is as great a public health threat as others."

It was probably only a matter of time before the question of whether parents should be made to vaccinate their children creeped its way into 2016 presidential politics. Anti-vaxxers have been hovering around the fringes of American elections for years, occupying the dark corners of the partisan imagination alongside homeschoolers, chemtrails conspiracy theorists, and people who want the government to stop putting fluoride in the drinking water. Usually, this passionate group of parents can be safely ignored, but when more than 100 kids catch the measles at Disneyland, their views on inoculation start to seem alarmingly relevant, not to mention dangerous. In an interview with NBC that aired Monday, President Barack Obama urged parents to get their kids vaccinated, saying that the "science is pretty indisputable."

"We've looked at this again and again," he said. "There is every reason to get vaccinated, but there aren't reasons to not."

Christie's more expansive position, meanwhile, predictably set off a partisan powder keg. The governor's office tried to walk back his remarks in a statement Monday afternoon, but the damage was already done, as Democratic oppo researchers gleefully scrambled to pin down other likely Republican presidential contenders as anti-vaxxer sympathizers. They didn't have to wait long, thanks to Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, who went on cable news to talk about vaccines as an issue of "personal freedom," jumping much, much further down the anti-vaxxer rabbit hole.

"I've heard of many tragic cases of walking, talking normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines," Paul said in an interview with CNBC Monday. "I'm not arguing vaccines are a bad idea. I think they're a good thing. But I think parents should have some input. The state doesn't own your children, parents own the children, and it is an issue of freedom and public health."

Paul's comments underscore how easy it is for Democrats to tie anti-vaxxers to the more extreme characterizations of right-wing politicians, namely that they are anti-science and that their distrust of the government—and dogmatic championing of individual choice and freedoms—is borderline dangerous when applied to real-life issues like public health. The tendency among liberals is to assume that anti-vaxxers, like their political allies, are driven by some kind of conservative religious zealotry and/or hatred of the government.

There are plenty of examples to illustrate their point. The widely debunked idea that vaccinations can cause tragic health problems in otherwise healthy children last entered the political debate during the 2012 election, when Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann attacked Texas Governor Rick Perry for signing an executive order mandating HPV vaccinations for preteen girls, recounting the story of a woman who said that her daughter had suffered "mental retardation" after receiving the vaccine.

The more libertarian view that the government shouldn't dictate how parents care for their children was espoused frequently by Paul's father, former Congressman Ron Paul, who won over the anti-vaxxer set with his vocal opposition to the swine flu vaccine. And as Bloomberg's David Weigel notes, a recent Ohio State University study has found that confidence in government played a role in how people felt about the swine flu vaccine. "It's not that Republicans reject vaccination because of their conservative views or exposure to certain media," OSU sociology professor Kent Schwirian, one of the authors of the study, wrote in a statement. "It was their lack of confidence in the government to deal with the swine flu crisis that was driving their anti-vaccination views."

But evidence suggests that the politics of vaccinations are a little more nuanced. Other research has shown that there really isn't much of a correlation between people's political affiliation and their views on vaccinations. A study released last week found that the vast majority of Americans believe that the benefits of vaccines outweigh the risks, although liberals are a little more likely to be skeptical of the value of vaccines. More interesting, a 2013 study found that while conservatives may be more likely to reject scientific findings on issues that affect regulations—like climate change—that doesn't necessarily apply to vaccinations. On that front, the biggest contributing factor is not political ideology but having a "conspiratorial mind-set"—and that exists on both the right and the left.

The numbers bear this out. According to CDC data compiled by RealClearScience, of the five states with the lowest vaccination rates in the US, four went for Obama in the last election and the state with the lowest vaccination rate was Oregon—hardly a bastion of Tea Party extremism. Conversely, of the eight states with the highest vaccination rates, five are solid Republican strongholds that went for Mitt Romney in 2012. It's also worth noting that the most recent measles outbreak started in California, which is basically ground zero for the liberal anti-vaxxer movement—this is where you'll find parents who take their kids to homeopathic pediatricians and don't let them eat Cheetos. So while it might be easy to dismiss anti-vaxxers as another act in the Tea Party circus, the truth is that the phenomenon's actually a rare instance where crazy crosses party lines.

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It took 47 minutes and four seconds of official North Dakota House Judiciary Committee time to decide that underage members of the military shouldn't be allowed to drink alcohol on base, or anywhere else for that matter.

Quentin Wangler is surely pissed.

A few years ago at the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, Wangler was eating at Applebee's when he encountered a group of military men and women waiting for a plane to take them to Afghanistan. Wangler, being the appreciative North Dakotan that he is, decided he'd like to buy them a beer to thank them for their service.

"I'm sorry, sir, we appreciate that," the soldiers told Wangler, according to his official testimony in support of the bill at the committee's hearing in Bismarck last Monday. "But I'm only 20 years old and I'm not allowed to have a beer."

"And I sat back and I said, 'There's absolutely something wrong with this scenario,'" Wangler said after House Bill 1225 was introduced.

The bill was sponsored by Andrew Maragos, a Republican from Minot, after Wangler brought the issue to his attention. I spoke to Maragos over the phone, who consistently pointed to Wangler as the driving force behind the effort to make it legal for young soldiers to get sloshed.

"I would not have brought that issue by myself," he told me, arguing that if the situation Wangler recalled in Texas had occurred when Maragos was serving in Vietnam, there would have been an uproar.

Maragos isn't the only legislator who's fight for the right of troops of all ages to imbibe. In 2011, a Georgia lawmaker took the issue straight to the top. In a hearing on Capitol Hill, US Representative Jack Kingston told Secretary of Defense Robert Gates that it "greatly disturbs" the congressman that troops under the age of 21 can't join their peers in enjoying alcohol, in the process summing up the case against America's drinking age being so high.

"You can buy a house. You can go to jail. You can get married. You can go to Afghanistan and Iraq and kill somebody. But when you come back, you can't have a drink in a bar. You can't buy beer," Kingston said.

Maragos's thinking was also in line with that of the higher-ups at Fort Bliss in Texas. There, underage service members were allowed to drink on base until 2008, when the practice was banned under new leadership in a decision that cited car crashes, arrests, and fights.

"I just made it so that if a commanding officer thought it was in the best interest of morale and unit cohesion, that he could allow service members to enjoy libations, but only on the base," Maragos said of the original bill, which was amended at Wangler's suggestion to support drinking at all establishments in the state.

"That was just too big of a leap," Maragos admitted.

Wangler didn't think so.

"When it comes time for their vote, they're responsible," he told the committee, offering up what many of us can agree is a something of a glaring contradiction between soliciting votes from members of the military but not allowing them to drink. "When it comes time for them to walk into a bar and buy a beer, all of a sudden they are not responsible."

Wangler argued that members of the military are "the most responsible young people on the face of the earth."

Never mind that bit of hyperbole and you're faced with some hard truths that prevented this bill from getting off the ground. (It was tagged with a "do-not-pass" recommendation in a 10-3 vote the same day it was introduced, and formally killed by the House on Friday.) First, there's the issue of constitutionality: You can't exempt a group of people from laws for sentimental reasons, even if they are fighting (or about to fight) in a war.

"I'm just wondering—if you single out a group like this—whether you would thereby be violating the United States and North Dakota constitutions dealing with equal rights," Lawrence Klemin, a Republican from Bismarck, pointed out at the hearing.

Beyond that, there are arguably some safety issues raised by letting anyone over the age of 18 who wears a uniform get hammered. Wangler, in his comments to the committee, brushed those concerns aside.

"You can go online and find ten studies that say traffic fatalities go up when you lower [the drinking age]. If I went online I'd probably find 12 studies that say it doesn't have any effect on traffic fatalities," he told the committee. "That's not the point. Remember the people that we're talking about. These are 18-, 19-, and 20-year-old responsible young men and women who are serving in our military."

Their service may make them more responsible in the eyes of Wangler, but a study released by the state's Department of Human Services (DHS) in 2012 paints a problematic picture of alcohol use in North Dakota.

"Compared to the nation and other US states, alcohol use and abuse is the biggest substance-related problem that faces the state," the study's authors wrote. "North Dakota ranks near the bottom among US states regarding the percentage of persons who perceive great harm associated with consuming five or more drinks at a time once or twice a week. This finding assists in understanding why binge drinking rates are so high in North Dakota: Many perceive little or no physical, mental, or societal harm associated with this behavior."

Maragos argues that North Dakota's harsh climate is partly to blame for what he called a "high percentage" of alcohol abuse.

"We're a small state with not a lot to do in the wintertime, so maybe that's why we think about it a little differently," he told me.

Pam Sagness of the state health department noted that veterans in particular are having problems with alcohol.

"We see a higher proportion of veterans that are seeking services for alcohol versus other substances or drugs," she said in sober tone at the bill's hearing.

That's in line with national trends, which since 2008 have shown slightly increased rates of alcohol use and abuse among veterans, especially those returning from combat zones. The New York Times, in a 2008 piece on former soldiers with drinking problems, summed it up this way:

Increasingly, these troubled veterans are spilling into the criminal justice system. A small fraction wind up in prison for homicides or other major crimes. Far more, though, are involved in drunken bar fights, reckless driving and alcohol-fueled domestic violence. Whatever the particulars, their stories often spool out in unwitting victims, ruptured families, lost jobs and crushing debt.

Wangler did not seem to be concerned with the gravity of the issues brought up by Sagness and Connie Sprynczynatyk of the North Dakota Cares Coalition, which serves the state's 57,000 veterans and focuses on behavioral health.

"I would suggest that, although [this bill] is well intentioned, there may be other significant ways that we honor the service and sacrifice of all of those people who sign up for military service in the state of North Dakota," Sprynczynatyk said at the hearing before the bill went down.

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